March 11, 2013
Three’s relatively simple but innovative advert of a dancing pony, which hit our screens just over a week ago has rapidly gone viral on social media. The mobile provider has certainly succeeded in producing a viral marketing campaign with current YouTube hits reaching an incredible total of 4,734,872. In such a short space of time, the advert has also received an incredible 200,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter, really living up to its slogan ‘silly stuff, it matters’.
A specific strategy which helped drive social media engagement was the all important hashtag #danceponydance which has been mentioned in an unbelievable 32,000 tweets. The joy and hilarity the advert brings to many as it hits our screens during those long ad breaks, could explain its trending success on Twitter- with over 95% of these tweets being positive.
Just in case the advert hasn’t engaged with its audience enough as it is, the act of social sharing has also been inspired further by ‘ponymixer.com’, a web-based app hosted on YouTube. This allows people to actively get involved in the fun and create their own dancing pony, before sharing it with the rest of their friends. It’s a really great way to get an audience engaged and it certainly seems to be working, as it has currently reached 10,380 subscribers.
Could this be the funniest advert of the year? Its social success would suggest it might well be, and with a growing number of hits and tweets per day who’s to know if people will ever get bored of it.
Picture courtesy of Miles Wolstenholme, Shetland Pony on Belstone Common, under a Creative Commons attribution, 2.0 Generic Licence.