A beautiful ad, kept very much in the tradition of a peaceful Christmas, was released by Stella Artois yesterday. I am not sure if we will see the ad on TV here in Australia, but since there are no lyrics, the ad is inherently internationalised.

The ad is fundamentally a TV ad, but Stella have created a beautiful microsite to accompany the video and share it online. The site is not very interactive or enables the building of a community, but it has a “send email” option.

This combined TV/microsite approach is in fact the typical way of publishing video advertising at the moment. It is a cautious way of venturing online, without taking the plunge to fully exploit its potential.

We believe this video is on the verge of going viral – and could go viral on a much larger scale if Stella ventured into the social Web space just a little further. It is a beautiful ad that people just like to point each other at.

There are currently 6 copies of it on YouTube, none of which was uploaded by Stella. The ad already enjoys more than 2,000 views just one day after the upload. There is one copy on Dailymotion. There is no copy yet on MySpace.tv or on any of the other social video networks.

Stella have an impressive Facebook account with 58,951 subscribed fans. The video is not uploaded there, which is a shame considering the huge potential. Also, a MySpace account is not set up for Stella Artois – another missed opportunity since the many fans are flocking to other fans’ “Stella Artois” sites.

6 fans twittered about the ad at this point in time – this is certainly just a start. All viral advertising blogs that we follow have written about the ad and given it very good comments and ratings.

We will continue to watch the performance of the ad in the social space and provide statistics on this blog.

UPDATE (7/1/09): Christmas is over, and so is the time for Christmas ads. Here is how the ad performed on YouTube.

Achieving only about 10,000 views certainly doesn’t make this ad viral. But it had a good increase in views in the first two weeks (uploads were all made on the 3rd December), after which the curve tapers off. With a bit of social networking effort, a lot more could have been achieved.