• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 10, 2012

It’s really important to share, we always learned, and Unruly Media today announced its top ten list of shared video brands in 2012.

The topper is Google, largely based on its “Project Glass: Day One” campaign which features videos about the new Google Uber Alles world around the corner. That’s when we’ll be wearing glasses that will become mobile Google attachments. So they say.

 One ad, featuring a 20-something guy walking in New York guided by his Google specs has been seen (but not necessarily shared) over 18 million times. Altogether, Google ads on social media were shared 5,892,608 times, pushing Google’s share rate up nearly 197% from a year ago.

Nike comes next, then TNT, DC Shoes, Red Bull, and so on. Hip stuff.   Check the Unruly 2012 Social Video Share Index right here for facts and figures.

The Unruly list of the brands whose messages were spread via social media differs from Unruly’s list of the top individual ads shared via social, a separate list that Unruly unspooled last week rather, then, you know, sharing both of them at the same time. That list is here.

There was a time clever messaging was noted most broadly by trade publications and network “specials” usually thrown together to fill the gap left by some failed sitcom. The buzz around Super Bowl ads elevated over the years made memorable advertising an attribute that the world seemed ready to embrace. The Internet, Facebook, Twitter became the one-stop water cooler with an echo chamber—the place where the message was created, and then shared.

Unruly would like to make the claim that while it’s great to track how many times an ad is seen, the real proof of engagement is when you pass it on.

And, well, we are doing that, big time. 

It is really remarkable, when you think about it, that according to Unruly, the number of  “shares” of ad messages has risen from 16.8 million in 2011 to 28 million this year—that is 67% in one year--aided by the uptick in tablet and mobile ownership, and faster video streaming.

More amazing still: Unruly quotes a Cisco factoid that predicts users worldwide,will consume three trillion Internet video minutes per month within about three years, no doubt many of them shared.

This is a powerful argument to produce clever advertising. Pass it on. It is also a powerful indicator that people all around the world really, really do have a lot of idle time. Video advertising makes up just a fraction of all the video viewing the world is doing. But it’s still a relatively new industry. 

Unruly, based in UK, says it has “deliverer, tracked and audited 1.65 billion videos across more than 2,000 social video campaigns. And that’s just since 2006.

In an Unruly press release co-founder Sarah Wood notes that the index  is the definitive chart for measuring a commercial brand’s social video success as it’s based purely on sharing activity rather than views and subjective criteria. This is the content that people are choosing to share. Savvy brands are no longer creating content to merely watch their YouTube view counter tick up,. They’re measuring who's sharing the content, what they're saying, and how it's impacting brand metrics.”