Jaffe Juice

I get a lot of e-mails and a lot of pitches. Generally I ignore them (both categories) and so when I received this one from a Josh Warner, with the following text:

Never pretend.
Never be afraid.
Never give up.
Never Hide.
Now playing near you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-prfAENSh2k
The first among many.

...I did click and saw this:

I thought it was a cool video. I even showed one of my fellow crayonistas and we both tried to guess how it was done.

That's about it. I forget about it until I hear about a Ray-Ban viral sensation. I read this write-up in Adweek and realize that it's the same video I saw earlier. I read about Josh Warner, President of Feed Company, who is the same person who sent me the mail on 5/7 (look for it on the chart below)

Posts that contain Ray-Ban Viral per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Feed Company is the company that seeded the video, like crayon did with Sneaux Shoes' Human Skateboard. Congratulations to Feed Company btw....based on just under 1.9 million views, pretty damn impressive performance!

According to the Fabio Costa, Interactive Creative Director at Cutwater, the agency that created the video, "...we knew we had to make Ray-Ban part of the conversation again. We never hide the brand message from Ray-Ban"

I scratch my head. To my knowledge, there was absolutely no branding whatsoever. The subject of Josh's e-mail to me was in fact Ray-Ban, but I guess I never noticed or paid attention.

Which brings me to my point. Could it be that vomitous viral has peaked and/or entered the black hole of cluttered forgetfulness? I disagree with Fabio's contention - as evidenced by the Technorati chart - Ray-Ban did not become part of the conversation, but rather just a freaky viral video, remembered for the wrong reasons.

This is the reality of the two extremes of video today:

The 30-second TV spot sells too hard and the viral video doesn't sell hard enough.

I'm all ears btw if the folks over at Feed Company, Cutwater and/or Ray-Ban would like to chat about this. I'll even have you all on Across the Sound.