VW Finds Viral Force With Cute Ad, but So What?

Read more at: Adage

Having retired AdReview last spring I was at long last liberated to be an ordinary media consumer. But, of course, that means running across the ads openly released or leaked in advance. The big pre-game sensation this year: a charming, funny 60-second spot called “The Force.”

Like I said. A-dor-a-ble.

Others thought so, too. By game time Sunday, the spot had been viewed on YouTube in excess of 10 million times. That’s very viral, very fast. Now maybe those views were dwarfed by the broadcast audience of 100 million or so, but you get a lot of extra credit for being sought out.

Much more, actually, because Twitter and Facebook were in overdrive — not to mention actual, analog, carbon-based word-of-mouth, such as most marketers only dream of. In the Relationship Era, even the dearest remnant of the Old Model — the Super Bowl spot — puts the sponsor’s fate in the hands of the people.

But if we were VW, we wouldn’t be too triumphal too quickly. Another name for the Relationship Era is the Listenomics Age, and if you listen to what was being said, you’d notice that the vast majority of the Twitter traffic mentions the ad, and not the car.