Study Claims Humor May No Longer be the Ticket to Viral Success

Here's some interesting news from video technology company Unruly. A recent study the firm conducted found humor just might not be the ticket to viral success any longer as consumers have become numb to the many attempts by brands to employ humor in their video and social media efforts. That is not to say that humor does not work. According to Unruly, "brands need to be extremely funny" to succeed virally.

The study, entitled Science of Sharing, limited its research to 12 commercials which aired during this year's Super Bowl.

Other findings from the study include:

- Wednesday is the best day to launch a campaign. This is based on two factors: 1. On average, half (48.3%) of the weekly video shares occur between Wednesday and Friday, with the peak of shares occurring on a Friday and the lowest point being the weekend. 2. A quarter of a video's total shares on average occur in the first three days of launch.

- Ads must also give viewers a strong reason to share - and ideally more than one emotional trigger - to generate earned shares and views. Ads that offered weak social motivations, even when paired with strong psychological responses from viewers, had very low share rates.

- Year-on-year sharing of Super Bowl ads grew by 118% from 2012 to 2013, with Super Bowl teasers and ads generating 7,739,917 shares in 2013, up from 3,546,560 shares in 2012.

The report was compiled using 2,699 survey responses, plus data from the Unruly Viral Video Chart, which has been tracking videos on the web since 2006, Unruly Analytics, Unruly MEME (Media Engagement and Measurement Engine), Unruly's cloud-hosted platform for social video distribution & tracking and Unruly ShareRank, which analyzes over 329 billion video views and over 10,000 data points to predict the social impact of video content. Unruly says the Super Bowl 2013 ads were used to provide a level playing field of campaigns launched around the same time and aired on the same day.