The Two Steps I'll Always Be Ahead Of You By - Avril Lavigne Bandaids: The Best Damn Av... - 0 views
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Mike Wesch on 19 Jul 08he Two Steps I'll Always Be Ahead Of You By Dear Media, I usually don't like to brag until after the war has officially been won, but some sites have already blown my cover, so I am without the luxury of waiting. On June 19th, Bandaids launched a YouTube Viewer with the intention of making Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend the Most Watched Video of all time on YouTube. In the time that the Viewer was running, it recorded 1.2 million loads of Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video page on YouTube. Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, TMF, and hundreds of other media outlets around the world picked up on the story resulting in quite the frenzy. Some praised the campaign saying, "It's the kind of view-gaming that advertisers would normally consider fraud - that is, if what the fans were doing wasn't better than the best advertising Lavigne and her label RCA could buy." Others... okay, the majority... just called us dirty old cheaters. But like a magician revealing the M.O. to a convincing trick, I have to admit that Bandaids' YouTube Campaign was nothing but misdirection. Bandaiders didn't cheat: the YouTube Viewer was a Hoax. All along, I knew that YouTube capped the number of views added to a video at 200 per IP address per day. As such, the only way to make Girlfriend the most watched video on YouTube the fast way was to increase our reach, not our views per person. And the best way to do that was to use viral marketing to tap into traditional news sources. So our members went about inflating the count on the YouTube Viewer and spreading the link around the net. In the mean time, the real end game of the campaign was unfolding nicely. As media outlets around the world began accusing Bandaids of cheating Avril's way into the record books, they drove thousands upon thousands of curious folks to watch Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video on YouTube (yes, even you Perez). This resulted in a much larger boost to Avril'
