Case Study: Evian "Roller Babies" and "Baby Inside"

Evian: Live Young

Two years after unveiling their remarkably successful “Roller Babies” video, Evian has released a  new video made to go viral. “Baby Inside”, released on April 14^th 2011, has so far received 1.3 million views. Both are part of the broader "Live Young" campaign. 

However, will this new video repeat the success of the first “Roller Babies” campaign?

Lets recap the first “Roller Babies” campaign:

-Based around this video: 

-First posted to Youtube in 2009, and went viral soon after.

-The international version alone has received more than 42 million hits, a total of all language versions is more than 100 million hits.

This new campaign again features the theme of "Live Young". 

The campaign is also attempting to be as interactive as possible. On their website "Lets Baby Dance", you can be a part of the video with the use of a webcam.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the success of the first video can be replicated, and here are the reasons why:

-The video is not as creative as the first, nor is it as funny.

Viral videos need to inflict strong emotion for the viewer; it does not matter whether that emotion is positive or negative. We have seen plenty of terrible vides (for example, Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ music video) get attention just for being REALLY terrible. The original ‘Roller Babies’ got attention because the concept of babies dancing to hip-hop music is comical and absurd. The new video is also cute, but also very forgettable. Forgettable things do not go viral.

-The website is cumbersome and annoying.

The makers of a website must consider how accessible it is to consumers, and it seems Evian overlooked how people with slower computers and internet connections will view the website. When you log onto the page, it immediately begins to load a long video, which crashed my browser twice. Even when I decided to use a different browser, I still had to wait several minutes for the content to load. I will not visit the website again, nor will I link to it for my friends for this reason alone.

-Evian is marketing the video too much.

Videos are called “Viral” when they behave, essentially, like a virus. The creators make the video, and then stand back and let it spread itself through social-networking and word-of-mouth. The spread of the video must seem organic, and not strongly "pushed" by commercial interests.