Viral video clip that was put on YouTube.com
StudiVZ is a social networking platform for students, in particular college and university students in Europe, based in Berlin, Germany. The network was launched in October 2005. The service is largely comparable to the services offered by its US-counterpart Facebook.
StudiVZ claims to be one of the biggest social networks in Europe, with reportedly about four million members as of August 2007, mostly in German-speaking countries Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In fall 2006, similar services have been launched in France (StudiQG), Italy (StudiLN), Spain (EstudiLN), and Poland (StudentIX).
Source: Alexa.com
To attract Polish university students to sign-up and become new members of StudentIX – the Polish language version of StudiVZ; to increase/build brand awareness and drive mainstream attention; to create buzz and build more traffic on the StudentIX landing page.
Polish social networking sites market was already fairly saturated. Apart from direct competitors, there were also communities targeted not particularly at students, but to the entire young generation (16-30) which all have millions of registered users (grono.net, nasza-klasa.pl and many others). And among them, there was a remarkable number of students as well.
Source: Alexa.com
At most Polish universities the ladies working at dean’s offices are commonly regarded by students as grim, unpleasant, disrespectful, abusing their power, and overly bureaucratic. Most of the students have had really nasty, and in some cases even traumatic, experiences with some of them.
Unfortunately, in order to fix any matters connected with their university studies, students need to visit the dean’s office quite often. And in order to get to the office they usually need to spend lots of time waiting in the queue. The typical feelings they experience are frustration and humiliation.
Another distinctive characteristic of ladies working at dean’s offices are their office hours that are convenient for no one except for them. All those factors combined create a very specific student experience that is hard to forget, even long after they have graduated.
Even though it’s usually negative, after a short time people are able to laugh at it. What’s important, this is quite common across virtually the country. There are stories being told among students and former students, there are jokes, but there has never been a song about a dean’s office.
Source: Alexa.com
We designed a campaign that was closely associated with the reality of student life. We wanted to create positive brand image – StudentIX understands the problems of university students and that the community is actually created and managed not only for but by the students themselves.
We decided that a song with an animated video clip is a good message carrier for this target group. It had to be suited to country-specific social and cultural conditions. We knew that in order to resonate with that target group our viral piece should be well-thought and insightful. It had to have credibility. And to be contagious and spread virally while delivering positive experience we knew it had to be ludicrous. We titled the song “The Dean’s Office”. The primary strength of the viral is the funny and insightful lyrics of the song, ear- and eye-catching, modern music (we picked up hip-hop) and animation.
The song and the accompanying animation tells a specific story and avoids being too general. The overall effect and primarily the final, call-to-action part of the video clip encourage the viewer to visit StudentIX landing page that was created for the purpose of the campaign (and from which you could download the video clip as well). The landing page, that was maintained by the Client for the duration of the campaign, then seamlessly led the visitor to signing up to StudentIX.
What’s important, due to the specific nature of the marketed website (social network only for university students) we were not interested in grabbing attention of non-target audiences.
The song itself tells a story of one of the frustrated students in need of getting to the dean’s office, occurrences he witnesses while waiting in the queue, and obstacles that get in his way. We wrote several versions of lyrics, did the research and picked up the best one.
The same went for the recording of the song. Having come up with the optimum, the stickiest and potentially most contagious version, that stood the best chance of being successful, we seeded the viral across multiple video websites, social networking sites, message boards, social news aggregators, social bookmarking sites – at all times focusing on our target audience.
Source: Alexa.com
- more than 120 thousand people have seen the viral video clip (approx. 100 thousand on YouTube alone); this number is still growing
- a few weeks after launching the campaign, the StudentIX website that had been in long stagnation for long months before, started to grow rapidly and move up the traffic ranks (see the screenshots from Alexa.com)
- StudentIX finally built a solid user base; the campaign proved to be a real tipping-point for StudentIX - after approx. 3 months from the campaign launch, StudentIX userbase passed 100.000 and has continued to grow
- users' comments on YouTube prove that the message carried by the viral has resonated more than well with the target audience, and most of the students identify themselves with the song's main character
- The video got on the YouTube videos webpage as the Most Viewed, Most Linked and Most Discussed absolutely for free - without any endorsements. It also hit the Wykop (Polish Digg-like site) main page
- the campaign generated 4.800 Google records - vast majority of them being very positive comments and discussions on various blogs and message boards