Dove Tops List of Most Shared Video Ads

Dove Beauty Sketches, created by agency Ogilvy Mather for Unilever, was not only the year’s most socially-shared video ad of the year, according to the Unruly Viral Video Chart. It was the most-viewed online video ad of all time.

The ad tells women, “You’re more beautiful than you think.” Always a nice message to share.

The list of the top 20 most-shared ads was based on the number of shares across Twitter, Facebook and blogs, rather than the number of views. Unruly did not include trailers for movies or TV shows.

Unruly offers three services: predicting the virality of a given piece of creative; recommending a paid media spend to increase earned media; and analyzing results in social media. Richard Kosinski, US president of Unruly, says these videos illustrate the motivators for consumers to share: eliciting strong emotion; showing how smart they are; utility; and relevance.

Geico nailed the relevance angle with its Hump Day spot: While sharing for most of the top 20 video ads peaked quickly and then dwindled, this one gets shared regularly every Wednesday. And Wednesday never stops coming.

Kosinski pointed out that there was little consistency in length among the top 10 most-shared ads. While Dove Real Beauty Sketches and Yalın Keyfi Yolunda, Aşkı Sonunda were longer than three minutes, two of the others are traditional 30-second spots, and PooPourri’s Girls Don’t Poop, #13, is just 2:16. This shows, according to Kosinski, if you have a powerful enough message, people will want to stay and watch it.

When marketers ask Unruly about the optimal length for shareability, Kosinski says, “Make it as short or as long as you want to make it, it’s not going to affect the receptivity of the message.”

Unruly has gathered together all of the top 20 most-shared videos on its YouTube page. Before you click, get out the Kleenex.