Multi-Award Winning Viral Video – Case Study

Virals are a marketing technique where a video is spread across the internet via social networks. Virals capture the imagination, get people talking and create a user-generated buzz about a product brand or message. Virals often have only a tangential relationship to what they are promoting or a meaning that is ‘revealed’ after the initial buzz has been created.

Viral Overview:
From 26 March 2010, Kensington Palace was transformed into the Enchanted Palace – an exhibition mixing fashion, fairytale and theatre giving a dark gothic experience of the palace’s 300 year history.

The Historic Royal Palaces contacted us to help them engage a new younger audience with this exhibition – those who currently reject Kensington for not being ‘cool’. They had identified online/viral as the dominant medium for achieving this. In February the production commenced and the viral campaign was successfully seeded on 11 March 2010.

Viral Treatment and Production: 
A major part in promoting the installation was a blog created by the Historic Royal Palaces which would feature exclusive content and details of upcoming events. The blog was hosted by ‘Peter the Wild Boy’ – a real life feral child who lived at Kensington Palace in the 1700s. The idea was Peter had ‘returned’ in digital form as a guide to the Enchanted Palace.

Our job was to produce two viral videos that would set up the question ‘who is Peter the Wild Boy?’ and drive people to his blog to find out. To tie in with the rest of the media campaign, it was vital the viral videos didn’t give too much away. The first viral especially needed to look raw and have a sense of authenticity that would deliberately make the audience question what they had just seen. This video was presented as the unedited rushes taken from a reporter’s camera as he interviewed a security guard about some recent strange events at the palace.

The second viral video was shot as if from Peter’s point of view and offers an explanation of sorts about the mysterious goings on in the first video.

This campaign is multi-award winning.

Viral Seeding (Viralisation): 

The HRP wanted to create an online buzz ahead of the “Enchanted Palace” launch date. Alongside the two full length virals, we also produced four shorter ‘teasers’ (2 x 20 second, 2 x 30 second) to use as in-page advertising (MPU’s) on publisher sites such as Guardian Online, Telegraph, Metro, Channel 4 and 4OD pre-rolls.

The full length virals were seeded across all major video share sites with track back analytics and syndicated across hundreds of social networking platforms.

If you think a viral would work for you and you’d like our help to conceptualise, produce and syndicate it for you, please get in touch. We’d love to help!

Producer/Director Neil Garrett takes up the story: 

“This was a really interesting production to work on. There were a number of challenges to work around, not least the fact we were filming on the Queen’s property! All of Peter’s ‘handiwork’ – the decorated statues, the graffiti on the staircase – had to be done digitally as quite understandably HRP were a bit nervous about a film crew going anywhere near their priceless artifacts.

We were also filming ahead of the Enchanted Palace exhibition actually being installed, so we had to manipulate the existing palace environment and let our imaginations off the leash to create this dark, exciting and mysterious atmosphere. It was really good fun.”