Megan Fox's Armani Ad Is a Lesson in What Not to Do in Web Video

It's not a surprise that Megan Fox's new ad for Armani is one of the most-watched commercial videos online this week. What is surprising is that it's the only ad featuring a mega-celebrity. The rest of them feature no-names or niche players, and are there due to their entertainment value, not because they offer a famous person in partial nudity.

If you look at the most-watched online videos of all time, most of them are music videos for huge stars: Michael Jackson, Beyonce, and so on. The temptation is to conclude that the way to make your video go massively viral is to hire a celebrity to appear in your ad. And, of course, celebs like Fox show up in ads all the time. Despite that, almost none of the videos in the 100 Million Club are ads for products, or even ads with celebrities advertising products. (For the sake of this argument, I'm not counting movie trailers and music videos as product ads. Those things are easy to advertise -- try getting an ad for food or packaged goods into the top 100.)

If, then, celebrities don't make commercials go viral on the web, what does? There's no magic formula, but if you look at this week's top 10 you can see some key ingredients:

1. The ad must be entertaining in its own right (i.e "Gymkhana Three" by DC Shoes).
2. It must reward repeat viewing (i.e. Ikea's "Herding Cats," if you like cats.)
3. It must be appropriate content that you could share with friends and family (i.e. Samsung's "Cute Girl Has a Catchy Dance.")
4. It must leave a question unanswered on first viewing that might prompt a viewer to search for it on YouTube (i.e. Tipp-Ex's "Hunter Shoots a Bear," in which viewers must write-in their own ending of the video.)
5. It must actually be on YouTube, properly indexed with the correct keywords.

A bunch of creative directors complained to Ad Age recently that the business wasn't fun anymore, and that big agencies aren't the most hospitable place for the creative mind. What on earth are they talking about? Stuff like the Old Spice Guy and Hunter Shoots a Bear (which is much funnier than you think it's going to be) are gold-standard, high-concept stuff.

These commercials are all pieces of entertainment where the hard-sell is entirely secondary. It's as if the glory years of the creative revolution -- which I'd argue came to its fullest fruition in the 1990s when computers became good enough to make special effects cheaply, ad budgets were large enough to fund extravagant projects, and there was still a massive TV audience in front of the main broadcast networks -- has been re-enacted on the web.

Related:

• Will a 3-Martini Lunch Make You More Creative at Work?
• How India Will Do to Advertising What It Did to Call Centers
• Why British Ads Are Better Than American Ones