Crazy Catch by Ball Girl

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Crazy Catch by Ball Girl

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

There is currently a video circulating the internet of a Ball Girl making a crazy catch. In the slow-mo instant replay you see this girl make a 6 foot vertical leap up the wall to catch an otherwise instant double. Or is that just a little league rule? I don’t follow baseball. Here is the clip:

The video seems plausible and it has everyone debating whether it actually happened or not. If it was staged it was an excellent staging, like the moon landing. In all reality the girl did not make this stunt and the video is in fact fake. The production is a viral ad created for Gatorade by element 79 a viral video and marketing agency. I’m not sure how it ties to Gatorade. I’m sure the folks at element 79 do.

I’ve always wondered how these agencies ensure that a viral ad sticks. There has to be some formula and the select group of agencies that understand it are raking in cash from big brand companies. The one piece I missed is how this video ties to Gatorade. Once people discover it, Gatorade will get a lot of “word-of-mouth” press coverage. But does that help their already recognizable brand? What does this video sell?

Traditionally viral videos were placed on sites that had non-obvious links to the benefiting site or brand. For instance… I remember a site with a girl participating in a wet t-shirt contest, the headline read something like “I see your sister made it to spring break” and it had a “send to a friend” form on the side. The footer had a key word stuffed link to the site that was really benefiting. The basic premise was that you had a viral “host” page feeding PR, relevance and traffic to the “parasitic” beneficiary site. The beneficiary site was of course, the company paying for the ad.

Did YouTube and the other slew of online video sharing sites kill the benefits of viral marketing? Or is their other trickery involved? Maybe it’s more subtle… like Tyler Durden at work splicing images into the video. Watch it and then tell me if you’re thirsty.