*supercollider

Great video. Been a while since I’ve seen a nice little branded viral like this.

Three reasons I think this works not only as a great concept and execution, but as something that is getting some viral spread:

1. It challenges you. For the same reason those Facebook movie trivia apps and reaction-testing games never fail to spread, this taps into our natural desire to see how we stack up.
2. It’s truly surprising and unexpected. Reminds me of the ad where during filming they discovered a ghost following the car that you need to look really closely to see (headphones required, and possibly a pacemaker).
3. The site experience is single-minded towards it’s goal of getting as many people as possible to watch the video. It shows the video, and provides shortcuts for the most common ways to share the video with your friends. And that’s it.

Nice. That’d be my favourite video since this one.

UPDATE: Gutted to learn from Faris that this is an almost identical rip-off of a video from 1999. As Faris also notes, this is however an unintentionally brilliant case study for how transparency brought about by the social web is fundamentally changing the game for all of us.

Seriously, I heard about this video from a colleague and not 10 minutes later I discovered through a separate channel that this is actually not original at all. And now I’m contributing to the spread of that information. The latency in bringing that transparency to bear is approaching zero, and we’re talking about a single piece of content that’s just been produced! Imagine the implications for businesses, corporations and individuals alike with decades worth of history to live up or down.

Getting away with things is getting a lot harder, but on the flip side, if you do well by people you’re more likely to be recognized and rewarded for it as well. Still, as usual, bad news travels furthest and fastest.