Yankee Candle’s world headquarters is a few miles up the road from me. Today’s paper had a short article about recruiting people to dance in one of their commercials, to be filmed in the flagship store, in an attempt to go viral and be shared around thousands of times on YouTube.
The company is modeling the attempt after the very popular series of videos of performances appearing to erupt spontaneously in public places, such as the massive dance rendition of Do Re Me in the Antwerp, Belgium central train station, which has accumulated 18,245,307 views since March 2009 (an average of 1,140,332 views per month).
But I think the company fails to grasp something important: you can’t force social media, and it’s very hard to deliberately get a commercial to go viral. The ones that do, like Honda’s “The Cog” video, are innately interesting and only secondarily promoting a product or brand.
Interestingly, even that famous example has only had 759,774 views, 11 months after it was posted. I’d have expected several million at least. This was a commercial that must have cost a fortune to engineer and set up, and who knows how many takes to get everything in the two-minute sequence working perfectly. Yet only an average of 69,070 people are seeing it in a typical month. hen you consider that several million probably watched it as it aired on TV, that’s rather pathetic, ultimately.
Of course, I haven’t seen Yankee Candle’s commercial yet; it’s still being filmed. But I doubt it will have anything like the power of the Antwerp dance.
