There’s no doubt a good viral video can lead a company or startups to success. But the process of producing a viral video is still not clear to almost all advertising companies.
So it’s not a surprise that some would try to clone a successful video.
You would expect clones would popup when the video is easy to copy, here’s some cases of how to copy a viral video.
To be clear, copying a viral video is any way, gives no guarantee that the video will go viral, actually no video would go viral without proper viral marketing.
Copy the viral video style:
When the video is simple like the Mac VS. PC, it’s easy to copy the style, in this case, you can simply get 2 people, one will talk about your product awesomeness and the other about the inferiority of a popular competitor …
But again, you will need to let a viral marketing team handle this, or at least handle the marketing, otherwise your video is going nowhere.
Mac VS. PC ads:
The simple copy approach might work when the video is simple, but when you have a more complex video, it’s hard to simply copy the style.
Get inspired from a Viral Video:
Being inspired by a viral video to produce a video means you follow a similar approach, for example use a specific tone, funny sarcasm and try to produce a similar emotional scenario, let’s take the case of Dollar shave club & Super meat. Even though you might end up with a great video, without marketing it correctly and creating buzz around it, even the best videos won’t go viral!
Dollar Shave Club
Now check this Video: Super Meat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSD0_I1MwqU
Without being a clone or a direct copy, a good observer would notice that the super meat video was heavily inspired by the dollar shave club. They included a nice explainer video , which is a plus.
Re-purpose a viral video:
This is probably the cheapest and laziest way to copy a viral video, usually you take the original video, and you remix it (this won’t offer any value to commercial products), or in other cases, take a viral clip in a foreign language and subtitle it in a creative and funny way. PS: the subtitles are not a real translation of what is said. A couple examples the hitler viral videos and the spanish laughing guy.
The Hitler viral videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkDxF2kn1I
The Spanish laughing guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhqJfcNa3I