Is Virality Better Than Product Content?

Maybe some marketing or advertising blog-folk can tell me what’s up..

You may have seen me post this video a couple of time over the past week (on Google+/Twitter) . I’ve been curious to see whether or not this (old, from 2010) Subaru advertisement would gain “Likes” and “Engagement” on the YouTube end (going to YouTube to comment). While I was attempting to measure capability of video-seeding, I discovered an interesting fact.

I had no idea what the commercial was selling me. So, if you watch the video (no, I am not getting money if you watch the video, it’s a 2 year old commercial), you’ll see dogs driving a Subaru out to go camping. They get to the camping spot and after some funny hi-jinks, they hear a wolf howl and they lock themselves in their Subaru.

While the video was clever and “cute” – at the end of the video. I had no idea what I was to expect from a Subaru. I actually had come up with this thing “Wolf Protection” as a sort of satire of what the video was showing us – but really, as someone who is not familiar with Subaru’s products, I have no idea what car that is… and aside from learning about Subaru’s automatic locks – I don’t know anything about the car or the brand besides the fact that they have cute advertising ideas.

Instead of product content, it seems like they went for pure entertainment factor – and they hope that an interested party will do their own research. But think of how we interact with content nowadays. Are you really going to want to leave your YouTube screen – where you are watching cute/funny dog videos – to try and figure out exactly what SUV that was – and its safety specs? I feel like advertisements should contain – somewhere – enough information in one place to satisfy big questions. What is the name of that SUV?! for example. If you’ve managed to draw the attention of someone – you’re not going to have it for very long – don’t waste the opportunity.

So – is this type of advertising strategy useful? I mean, here I am talking about it – so, that’s saying something I guess. Is this video successful?