Digital Media Design: Viral Ad
For this project I am to produce a Viral Advert for a company that produces a new equivalent to bottled water. Aquapax is an eco-friendly and aware company that produces drinking water sold in cartons that has been proven to resist any substances that could possibly pass through, plastics on the other hand can be contaminated. The water is from Hoher flaming spring in a german nature reserve and is better drinking water than both Evian and Volvic.
I have first begun by looking into what Viral Ads are and what they achieve.
" marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives"
When I think of Viral Ads what first comes to mind is videos on Youtube, amateur videos that have been bought by large companies and spread over Youtube and later appear on TV to gain high popularity and viewings. Here is an example I found of a Viral Ad:
This video has achieved over 4,000,000 hits, usually videos like this that are either funny or shocking tend to get attention. Here is another video of a viral ad however this one conveys a serious message:
These videos become virally popular as people spread these videos over YouTube and the more entertaining or shocking these videos are the more views the videos will recieve. It is the type of videos that are uploaded where people will comment saying "Is this video real?", these adverts are bought by companies and linked to their product to get plenty of attention.
I began first by thinking of ideas of how I could somehow relate a funny viral ad and the product, Aquapax. The carton is an alternative to the plastic bottle and is better than one in many ways. I though of using the plastic bottle as something that would make it look lower than the Aquapax or using the plastic bottle for something comical. I began to sketch out some ideas and came up with the idea of using plastic bottles as a "board" (see images below). This concept came about when I was exploring YouTube for inspiration, i saw some badly filmed footage of people riding on a small plastic bottle, and thought I could do better by actually making a board. The storyboard goes as follows: The rider is with friends, takes aquapax bottle and drinks, starts riding plastic bottle board, trips and falls off, friends run towards boarder laughing, caption appears. The caption I decided to go with in the end was "Plastic bottles are dangerous to the environment..." and as i fall off the next part of the caption fades in, "...and to yourself".
I enjoyed producing this piece of footage however I scrapped the idea as I wanted something that looked more appealing, I felt that it was slightly lacking so I went back to the drawing board..