Most of the successful virals that we’re familiar with have relatively short running lengths, normally ranging from 0:30 to 1:30 minutes. These bite sized snacks are easily digested, and are normally well received.

The longer videos that we stumble across rarely fit the bill of a viral. However, I think that the following clip from 4th Estate is an exception. 

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Although it is a bit long, and not very punchy, I do think that the clip has a couple of elements that will help it in jumping from screen to screen. Firstly, it’s very serene and soothing in terms of both imagery and music. When you’re caught up in the daily rat-race at the office, clips like this can be life-savers and are happily received.

Secondly, the fact that the content is of a high quality will increase its chances of being published by bloggers. Needless to say, quality content goes a distance in branding a blog (or any other medium), and posting good clips is a budget way of getting good content up.

However, I do have an issue with the landing page. Although the video does a good job of creating a fantasy world of books that one wants to explore and heightens the chances of viewers clicking through to the site, the site itself is a bit of a letdown. It’s nice enough from a design perspective, but it is very light in content and there are a couple of links that led me to error pages.

Still, with all of the above, the video has been up for over two months and has only garnered a few thousand views. I guess that this goes to show, that no matter how good your content, every campaign still needs a viral push to reach a stage where it can grow organically.