It's Viral Season
No, I’m not talking about this year’s cold and flu season, though I am currently fighting off the sniffles and a sore throat. If you haven’t noticed the contagion of viral videos in your daily travels, you’re missing out on a fairly new wave of Internet video productions that many times receives millions of hits from people passing them on through email, blogs or instant messaging. With the proliferation of sites like YouTube, viral season is here to stay.
What started out as the average Joe shooting an amateur video of, well, just about anything to catch his five minutes of fame, has evolved into an effective new vehicle (viral ads) to market products and services, even something as mundane as lab equipment. Admit it…though you use these products every day, there wasn’t much that made this stuff “sexy.” Typical marketing campaigns in this industry include print and online advertising, so it’s a good thing that someone decided to shake things up. In this beat economy, a little humor and creativity go a long way in keeping the industry alive and profitable.
The first viral ad that I saw was emailed to me and our Science Group editors by a colleague back in July. Featured on Wired.com is a “We Are the World”-esque music video produced by Bio-Rad Laboratories about their PCR products. The video features several recording artists in a studio singing passionately about polymerase chain reaction, and at one point, passing around a PCR machine in all its glory. Hilarious.
The trend caught on. Eppendorf produced a sappy boy-band music video about the epMotion, which relieves painstaking pipetting. Applied Biosystems even produced a Japanese game-show-like spot about their Taqman SNP kit.
And by now, most of you should be familiar with thin layer chromatography guru Analtech’s new film promoting the Cyclograph, a centrifugally accelerated device that performs preparative thin layer radial separations of up to 4 g of sample. Or is it witchcraft? The Adventures of Ana L’Tech is “a perilous tale in chromatographic hilarity” that follows Ana’s quest to prove that she, the alchemist’s assistant, is in fact not a witch. It’s a wonderful and inventive story in the spirit of Monty Python that, according to Sales and Marketing Director Ken Grant, has received around 25,000 hits from the U.S. to Brazil to Finland so far. The folks at Analtech are thrilled to say the least…this will certainly glean countless more leads and sales than traditional advertising ever would.
I liken this new viral ad craze to the commercials run during the Superbowl. While this past Superbowl was the most exciting I’d ever seen (watching the Giants pummel the undefeated Patriots kept me at the edge of my couch), the commercials are just as entertaining. Now, humor has found a new home in the lab...deservedly so.