Commentary

Mother's Day Video Campaigns Bow To Power Of Rihanna

  • by , Op-Ed Contributor, June 26, 2015
Mother’s Day advertising campaigns typically garner significant levels of interest. This May, nine brands launched their Mother’s Day campaigns only to have audience attentions drawn to a campaign featuring Rihanna in something of a historic turn. While the M-day campaigns represented more than 61% of the month’s total video viewership, few had significant viewership on their own and none of the campaigns made it to the top five for the month.

Self-proclaimed “Bad Girl” RiRi garnered May’s number-one viewership spot (26.1 million views) for Dior’s “Secret Garden IV” campaign, in which she was the first black woman to be a spokesperson for the brand. In the ad, a glamorously dressed Rihanna walks through Versailles at night as her new song “Only If For A Night” plays in the background.  

This campaign beat out Sprint’s “Life Hacks” (17.1 million views), AT&T and Plenti’s “Plenti Points Come Easy” (14.1 million views), KFC’s “The Colonel” (12.1 million views), and Samsung’s “Iron Man Limited Edition” (11.7 million views) for the most-viewed spot.  Dior’s campaign also secured the most social interactions in May — over 470,000, which includes shares, Facebook likes, Facebook shares, Facebook comments, as well as comments and ratings from other public sources.


Historically, campaigns with celebrities typically generate more buzz online since they have their built-in fan bases providing justification for Dior’s beaingt out other May campaigns for social interactions by a high margin, with State Farm’s "Jake From Planet State Farm" only garnering 217,000 social interactions, followed by Gatorade’s "The Formula to Unleash" with 153,000, Sauza 901’s "No Limes Needed" at 140,000, and McDonald’s "The Bandit is Back" at 124,000.

Although Dior captured the top spot in May, the apparel & accessories category fell to third in the list of top verticals for the month. Electronics was the most-viewed vertical in May, due largely to new campaigns from Samsung. For the month overall, new campaign releases also increased by 44% since the previous month. Not surprisingly, we saw a drop in year-over-year campaign releases by 7%, due to last year’s World Cup ad campaigns, which were launched in May 2014. Additionally, Facebook continued to rise in importance in branded video this month, with two of the top five campaigns being posted only to Facebook and not YouTube.  

With branded video seeing a serious uptick in May, the question we’re looking to answer right now is, will brands continue to push out new campaigns in the summer months — and, more importantly, will viewership rise with it?  For now, the trends appear to be mirroring Rihanna’s stardom; headed up and to the right.

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