While it was originally reported that the jkwedding dance video (uploaded to Youtube mid July 2009) was real and not staged, it’s arguable that the viral effect was manufactured by Chris Brown and Sony’s marketing and public relations people.
According to the Official Google weblog, rather than blocking the use of their unlicensed intellectual property, Sony BMG used Youtube’s tracking tools to monetise this by driving music sales and also to polish Chris Brown’s tarnished reputation / career in the process.
The video was amusing and it used Chris Brown’s “Forever” song (which originally doubled both as a hit single and the new theme jingle for Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, with Brown admitting the song came from a 30-minute writing session to craft a sticky jingle). Instead of suing Youtube and issuing a take-down order, Sony’s PR department promoted it and added an overlay ad to enable viewers to purchase the single from Amazon or iTunes. 2 weeks after the video was uploaded, Brown’s song was in the top 5 of both the Amazon and iTunes singles charts. The Google blog reported that the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on Youtube, and the official “Forever” music video saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week of July. Wrigleys may have also benefited from this even though in early August they stated that they had ended a commercial deal with Brown due to his guilty plea on charges of assaulting former girlfriend and singer Rihanna. By promoting the video, they got the video past the first ‘tipping point’ of X thousand views, after which the video remained on the front page of YouTube (which gets about 30 million unique users in a day). Many people don’t look through the millions of videos on YouTube – they start with the ones listed as “most popular, top favorited, or most viewed.”
Then people continued to amplify the snowball effect — a process known as ‘social amplification’ — and passed it along to their friends via social media and email. Over 20 million views later, the rest is history…
