Investigating the Factors that Contributes most to the Virality of a Social Media Video advertisement

Abstract

YouTube has emerged as a very popular advertising medium in the past few years. Many marketers use this platform as a launch
pad for their branding campaign. However, success is not always guaranteed with some advertisements gaining major traction
whilst others’ effectiveness becomes questionable with poor traction. Thus, we are aware that social transmission is frequent and
important but researchers are not yet clear about why certain content is more viral than others (Berger and Milkman 2011). In this
research, we attempt to sift out the factors that contribute most to the ‘virality’ of any advertisement. We define virality as the
average of likes, comments, dislikes, shares and hits for the advertisement. Our research builds up further on other research such
as Berger and Milkman (2011) and Godes and Mayzlin (2009) within the Indian context by initially identifying 18 themes that
were most commonly found in the advertisements here. The sample for identifying the themes was obtained from Youtube and
was marked by 20 respondents on a scale of 1 to 7 based upon the degree of presence of the themes identified. Regression, factor
analysis and a confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to finally arrive at a list of 7 factors. Though the adjusted R-square
value was on the lower side as is the case in most such studies, our exploratory research is one of the first few such studies
conducted within the Indian context and adds to our knowledge on virality in online advertising.