Recently, I've been noticing a new trend: some viral video advertising campaigns are no longer the typical 30-50sec long, funny spot. Instead, there are long-form ads that are more like short-films with a proper story. Interestingly, they are so well made that people share them across the Internet and actually watch them from start to finish.
Here are some key examples:
1. In September 2008, Pantene Thailand created a 4 min long and very touching film about a deaf girl that wants to learn to play the violin. There is no mention of Pantene other than at the end with "You can shine" as the message. The video comes across rather like a sponsored short film and is a pleasure to watch. It has attracted across its rougly a dozen copies on YouTube about 500K views.
2. In January 2009, Gatorade launched "The Quest for G" - a series of short videos that follow a warrior on a quest playing on a lot of topics including Monty Python and the Jabbawockeez. The full 7:34 min long series can be viewed below, but the most views are actually on the videos published by Gatorade on their whatsg channel: this video alone has more than 1.2M views.
3. Something very different comes out of Canada. The Purchase Brothers created a short film called "Escape from City 17'' about the Half Life computer game. It is 5:30 min long and has almost 2M viewers. While this was not a marketing campaign, Valve could have asked for no better publicity than this video created by independent filmmakers.
It seems that the old short-form requirement for video ads to go viral is no longer. We may enter a new era with an increasing amount of engaging, story-telling long-form ads. Or something still funny like this eBay/Backstreet Boy parody by Weird Al Yankovic.