How do video ads become viral?
​An emotional arousal approach

Inspired by my passion for social media and visual storytelling I set out to discover what makes video ads go viral.
The current research studies the interaction between emotional arousal and source of distribution with sharing on Facebook as dependent variable.

Research method

I conducted an online experiment on a convenience sample of 201 participants. It has shown a significant effect of arousal (p = .070) and source (p = .011) on sharing, but no interaction between the two independent variables. This suggests that emotionally arousing ads shared by friends are most likely to become viral.

Conclusions

  • Awe and admiration inducing videos are more likely to be shared than relaxing or anger inducing videos.
  • The effects of emotional arousal are short lived, which means that organisations advertising should have a clear call to action. The user journey should also take the viewer to a website that scores high on emotional arousal in order for the conversion funnel to be successfully completed
  • Network nodes, important leaders of opinion should be reached first to ensure that the diffusion of the video will then occur smoothly, rather than exposing the video to random or peripheral members of a social network.

Some of the video ads used in the research

Picture
Innocent Drinks ad
Picture
KLM ad
Picture
John Lewis Christmas ad