There’s a lot to love about Wednesdays. You can get two cinema tickets for the price of one in the UK, for starters, plus it means the end of the working week is in sight. We’re halfway
through the weekly grind, or ‘over the hump’ as our American cousins would say. You can almost taste the weekend.
But US insurance company Geico has a very special reason to
celebrate Wednesday. Their ad ‘Hump Day’ has enjoyed extraordinary success since its launch on May 22, attracting more than 1.62 million shares and 5.3 million views –
a very high share rate of around 17%.
Geico has had huge success before with a campaign featuring Dikembe Mutombo, and its Piggy commercial, so it’s hardly surprising that a
talking camel celebrating the halfway point of the working week would attract a lot of interest. But what’s most surprising about this campaign, created by The Martin Agency, is when these
shares occurred.
The average social video usually attracts most of its shares within the first few days. In fact, according to Unruly's Q2 report, the most successful ads attract a quarter of their shares in the first three days, and sharing increases as the week goes on. This pattern is so firm, you can
usually predict whether a video is going to be a success or not by how it performs in its first week.
Not Geico’s “Hump
Day.” Unlike the vast majority of branded videos, which usually peak on Day 2 and experience a rapid social decay in the weeks that follow, the ad has attracted a huge spike in sharing
activity on every Wednesday since launch, continuing to spread Geico's brand message week after week.
Amazingly, more than 67% of the “Hump Day” shares since the
commercial debuted have happened on Wednesday. (Stranger still, the line chart tracking the number of shares resembles a series of camel humps.)
Pretty cool stuff, right? But has it
ever happened before? We can only think of two videos which have also attracted such significant peaks and troughs consistently on a particular day.
The first, and I am sorry to bring
this up, is Rebecca Black’s annoyingly-catchy music video “Friday,” which you will not be surprised to learn
has enjoyed a burst of sharing activity at the end of the working week ever since its launch in September 2011 (talk about starting your weekend on a low note). It’s been seen over 55
million times on YouTube.
The other is Budweiser’s 9/11 tribute ad from the 2002 Super
Bowl, which trends around the same date every year. So what does this mean for advertisers? Can we now expect a flurry of ads named after and celebrating the remaining days of the week in the
hope of sustaining their ‘shareability’ beyond the normal early viral peak? If they are anything like "Friday," I sincerely hope not!
David Waterhouse is the head of
content and PR for London-based Unruly, a video technology firm. MediaPost Online Daily blogger P.J. Bednarski is on vacation and will return Aug. 7.