• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, October 31, 2012

Hold your horses: OPI unleashed its first video less than week ago, and its flashy manicured thoroughbred is already causing a bit of a social stampede. 

The nail polish brand, beloved by its fans for its quirky color names, uses the horse-of-a-different color film to highlight four shades. The film is called Lady in Black, after an international best-seller marketed as Black Onyx in the U.S. In it, the manicured mare does a dance-off with four young women in four colors: Pink-ing of You, Red My Fortune Cookie, Need Sunglasses? and No Room for the Blues. Each hue gets it moment, both on dancers and the horse. (Those shades are neither new, nor the company’s bestseller, which is still, 12 years later, I’m Not Really A Waitress.)

An OPI spokesperson says that in the week since its release, the video has been viewed more than 2 million times.

“We are big believers in advertising, and haven’t pulled back,” Suzi Weiss-Fischmann, OPI and artistic director, tells Marketing Daily. “But we have to be realistic, and acknowledge that the way young women communicate is through digital media, and anything viral will do well for us. More than anything, we wanted something that would show the transformational power of color, and felt like this, so different than a typical beauty video, expresses individualism.”

It’s a smart move, Matt Fiorentino, director of marketing at Visible Measures, which tracks branded videos, tells Marketing Daily in an email. “It puts storytelling first by creating video content that young women will want to watch and share. Connecting the hoof color with the dancers and their nail polish integrates the OPI brand and product into the content.” 

What makes it work, of course, is a mighty gifted stunt horse, with the help of a little animation. “It's pretty long as an ad,” Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO of WatchMojo, tells Marketing Daily via email. “But that's the beauty of the Web. It gives OPI the opportunity to do something longer and unique.”

The trick, he says, is that while videos with a bit of buildup like this one might work well for a Michael Jackson video, “for a brand promoting a product, it can lead to a rapid loss of attention. Then again, the fact that we're even comparing it in any way to ‘Thriller’ is a good thing,” he says, pointing out that the horse does, in fact, moonwalk.

Weiss-Fischmann says it’s too soon to evaluate the video’s ROI, “but the reaction in the 10 countries we’ve showed it in, and blogger response, has already exceed my expectations.”