Gen Y Can Smell a Fake, or Why I’ve Watched Bike Hero 4 Times This Week and It’s Only Monday

By now, everyone’s seen the “Bike Hero” viral video on YouTube.  If you haven’t, please, please watch it now, or else none of this will make sense.  While you’re at it, watch the “Runaway Jeans” viral video too.

Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, the big “Watching Comprehension” question: Did you notice the big, underlying difference between the two?  No, it’s not that one is about biking at night to bad punk music and the other is about jeans rolling through San Francisco.

The big difference is that Jeans has been up since the end of July and has 234,000-ish views, and Bike Hero launched last week and has been seen about 1,338,000 times.  Namely, one is awesome; the other is Pollock in my California Roll.  The big question then becomes: why does one video manage to earn almost 6 times as many views as the other?

Both of these videos are viral ads aimed at a Gen Y audience (full disclosure, this includes me).  Both of them are for consumer products, involve weird stunts, and are starring people in my age group.  Both of them were seeded by Feed Company, and were made by uber-creative agencies (Cutwater and Droga5).  And finally, both of them have been all over the blogosphere (just a few: here, here, here, and here).

The big differentiator between the two, and a big rule to follow when trying to make live-action video go viral: members of Gen Y can see themselves doing the Bike Hero stunt, but there is no way that I can animate my jeans to walk on their own, no matter how hard I try, or how many witch-doctors I visited on my trip to Haiti last year.

Gen Y has grown up so thoroughly barraged by a world of advertising that our radar for “guerilla advertising” is pretty fine-tuned. But things like Bike Hero do exactly what viral videos are supposed to; they slip in under the wire. It does this by seeming completely plausible and relatable.

In fact, it’s not until you watch again and ask yourself why the kids would write out all of “Guitar Hero World Tour” on the intro, that the fact that it’s an ad sinks in and the wow-factor fades.  The mystery of Runaway Jeans lasts about 18 seconds (that’s when the jeans start to escape).

And now the over-arching, take-away from the blog post, if you’re trying to go viral, either make it real, or make it something so utterly bizarre and twisted that Lewis Carroll himself couldn’t dream it up without chemical help (read: Happiness Factory).  You’ve only got one try before Gen Y thinks, “this is awesome,” or just shrugs and says, “this is advertising.”