In Praise of the Kony 2012 Viral Video
Howard Lake | 12 March 2012 | Blogs
Last week I was one of the seventy million people who apparently viewed the Kony 2012 video. Probably as good an example of viral marketing as it is possible to get.
Putting aside for a moment some of the wider debates currently raging about the validity or not of the claims contained in the video and the over-simplification of the issues, there were a few things about it that struck me whilst watching it.
Firstly the link was forwarded onto me by my fourteen-year-old son who then also put it on his Facebook page. While he is (mostly) a good lad with a strong sense of right and wrong this is the first time I had seen him choose to engage with an issue like this in detail, and to want to tell others about it, and to find out more about the Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army.
I clicked on the link and my heart sank when I saw it was half an hour long – ‘too busy, too busy’ my inner voice kept repeating, but guess what – I watched all 29 minutes of it in one go. In some small part this was due to obligation – I didn’t want my son to think I’d just ignored his invitation, but once I’d watched the first two or three minutes I knew I would have watched all the way through anyway. That was unusual in itself as the only other time I’ve ever watched half an hour of video on the internet is on iPlayer – but for a YouTube video – never.
Viral videos
And let’s be clear that a viral video success is not common, not by any means. Especially if you consider that every minute another two days worth of content is added to YouTube – that is nearly eight years worth of video content per day. To distinguish yourself from this vast black hole of user generated content is incredible, simply astonishing in itself.
For a charity video, it is quite brilliantly put together. While it may be criticised for over simplifying things, it is undoubtedly a terrific story first and foremost rather than the usual worthy, but often ultimately dull tale of the charity. In fact the charity plays quite a small part in it really and critically you soon forget about this element as you are drawn into the tale it tells. The whole approach and juxtaposition of the happy lifestyle of filmmakers’ small son and that of their ‘friend’, the Ugandan boy Jacob offers as good and clever a contrast of emotions as I’ve seen for a long time.
Then there is the call to action – a huge, ambitious, powerful call to action. One that stirs the heart and appeals to the head, and even has a tinge of naughtiness about it. An action you can imagine and visualise the impact of before it happens both in your own town and globally. An action absolutely anyone and everyone can get involved in. Not only that it is very smart in linking the action to the cause – for a specific moment in time you know you will get to feel part of something unique that is also significant and important.
Eloquence
I was also struck by the footage of the speakers talking to audiences about their campaign – no dry, dusty PowerPoint presentations here, instead confident, eloquent presenters with persuasive and engaging content that was clearly designed to be emotive, inspiring and memorable.
And there were the fundraising basics in spades too. A clearly communicated need, a simple action / solution, a deadline and a clear demonstration of impact. And they’ve been quite bold too – selecting a date and a “succeed or fail in 2012” message is brave and risky, but hugely increases the appeal of the campaign. It may ultimately mean they come up short, but it gives their message an urgency and vitality that they could never have generated otherwise.
Of course there are flaws in the content and the delivery, and I’ve seen some of the criticisms of the ‘Hollywood’ style production values, but at a very basic level you might argue that this seems a small price to pay for the awareness and money raised with nearly 75 million viewings and 692,000 ‘Likes’ on Facebook, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of tweets. And we would surely be blinkered to blithely dismiss it for these failings, because it is not as if the cause was an obvious one. Uganda, the LRA, Joseph Kony – they are probably not what most people would select as the obvious content for a 30 minute video to go viral in such an astonishing way.
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What can we learn?
So I think we should all be asking ourselves what it is we can learn from this incredible success because personally, I’ve never seen a UK charity attempt something quite so powerful or ambitious, and certainly I’m unaware of one achieving a fraction of the impact or momentum that the Kony 2012 video has.
Of course, one of the key questions is what the charity Invisible Children do next. They probably never dreamed of this level of awareness, attention and impact. I hope they have something planned to keep up the momentum… time will tell.
Watched it yet?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.