Anyone who has ever watched Super Bowl commercials knows the secret to their success and popularity is that these commercials are produced with more humor and/or originality than most other commercials throughout the year. With the surge in popularity of YouTube, these entertaining commercials now live far beyond the football game itself, continuing to be viewed for weeks and months and gaining more fans and customers in the process. Because these commercials are so entertaining, each company is able to leverage YouTube as a platform of social media to attract even more attention to their service or product. While any video on YouTube has the potential to go viral, advertising that uses YouTube and is also entertaining is more likely to gain better attention than a basic product pitch.

Of course, a successful advertising campaign doesn’t have to be a repurposed, entertaining commercial that also is placed onto YouTube to be viewed by audiences again, and again. One of the most successful digital advertising campaigns started as a Super Bowl commercial, but gained the most traction when it became an interactive video campaign that used YouTube and other social media channels to respond to consumers. This is, of course, the Old Spice campaign from early 2010. The campaign had the social components components necessary to help make it viral, but it was the sheer entertaining nature of an extremely funny former NFL football player, in a towel, answering questions from Twitter and Facebook in a near-real time flash campaign that made this method of advertising successful. While Old Spice as a product was rarely promoted, the campaign increased brand recognition amongst a new demographic and increased sales.

When considering developing an entertaining campaign as a business using social media as a platform, you can design a campaign to attract attention to a specific product or your brand — but remember that the relevance of a campaign designed for a product will have a shorter viral lifespan than a general campaign about your product. For example, the E*Trade baby commercials are timeless in nature — an old commercial is just as relevant to the E*Trade brand as its newest commercial. This is not only because these commercials promote a general service, but also because they generally lack references to current events that can date the humor. To use social media for advertising by creating something entertaining, know your goals, your audience, and proceed appropriately.