• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 5, 2013

Taking a page from the People’s Choice Awards and updating it to fit the technology it deals in, Unruly Media will unspool its own Video Sharing Awards, via  Twitter on Dec. 10 at 11 am EST, honoring the most shared advertising videos and ads in a few other categories, like most shared meme-jackings.

And you’ve already voted, because Unruly’s been counting all those shares for the past year, so I give nothing at all away by disclosing that the people behind Dove’s beauty bar are, well, sitting pretty. 

Previously, Unruly said it was the most shared ad during 2013, (shared 4.24 million times) though it made its determination of the top 20 on Nov. 21, well before the year was over.  (May I add the obligatory... I’m just sayin’.) 

The entire list of nominees, and the various categories—like the most shared prankvert video and the aforementioned overly shared memejack—are right here.

There, you can also observe a drawing of the the VSA award, which looks very much like an Oscar, but with a cute kittie reaching for the globe. It’s quite clever. (A golden ball of yarn, instead of a globe would have added even some more verisimilitude-- but truly, everybody’s a critic.)    

Trying to make the most of its position as the lead proselytizer for the value of sharing, Unruly has produced a really handy graphic, called the Viral Spiral, that compares and contrast the sharing business  since 2006, when Unruly got in the business.  It’s the kind of chart you’ll refer to, certainly for the Super Bowl, when all of this sharing business becomes top-of-mind even for people who aren’t in the digital advertising field.

 It’s in that chart you come to realize that sharing has increased about fifty-fold over the last eight years. And it’s through that chart that you see sharing  become a real statistical thing. Unruly now says it is tracking 500,000 shares of branded content every day. Sharing has created a kind of brazen branding few would have thought of way back...in 2006.  Then, the average length of a shared video was 35 seconds. Now, it’s one minute and 36 seconds. (And now it’s native advertising, certainly a development helped in large part by the realization that consumers would stick around for, and pass around, entertaining/informative messaging.)     

All of that seems to be helping the general view-worthiness of ads. People share ads like boys used to trade baseball cards. Indeed, the top 10 ads generated 28.8 million shares, up 52.1% from 2012. The quest for virality is what must be behind the trend away from Super Bowl ads being unveiled for the first time during the game telecast and instead sprinkled into circulation days and weeks before.  

Other stats suggest shared ads tend to lead to purchases more often, which is where some of this share glorification loses me—though, I know, my pathetic buying habits don’t mean much to any marketer. But take your VW sales in this country. While that 2011 Darth Vader ad for VW’s Passat remains the most shared ad of all time and helped VW sales then, that car brand is still an also ran now, suggesting that some ads have more staying power than the product they’re selling.

pj@mediapost.com