At first glance, the following video on popular Chinese video sharing website Youku appears to be very popular, having accumulated nearly 500k views one day after being uploaded…
From Youku:
A woman with house and talent, you can’t handle it
My name is Zhang Xinyi, and I am a wall and ground painter.
With the help of a friend, I painted a 3D room,
where every person who lives in it can breathe in refreshing air!
Come and give it a try!
Comments on Youku:
monkeychaos:
If it weren’t an advertisement, I could ding it!!
喧哗番长:
This kind of domestic brainless garbage advertisement is a copy of Hewlett-Packard. You can instantly tell it shanzhais several aspects. Such pretenders/fakers. [As if this was] such a great ideal.
audding:
The advertisement is very successful, O(∩_∩)O~ It was easy to accept [not very blatant].
smile9songhot:
An advertisement???
sebastian0427:
This advertisement isn’t bad, what’s the background music? It sounds really nice.
win80df:
You call yourself talented, that’s a little arrogant, be humble, and also your 3D effect isn’t very clear/effective, continue working on it.
蹦达兔子:
This really is just an advertisement… everyone don’t take it too seriously.
夏日梨:
Yet another advertisement… Why must you give it such a loathsome title?
RusoVo:
The first half was very exciting, but one I saw the logo/trademark in the last half, I immediately knew what this was really about.
lwjef:
Fuck, so its an advertisement.
离开视线:
I don’t get it [the message of the advertisement].
lwnisdtc:
This is seriously misleading viewers. What we should do is not use formaldehyde releasing furniture/house paint rather than using seriously polluting paint and then clean it afterward. This is a matter of principle/underlying issue. Haier is blurring the truth here, thinking it can use a young beautiful artist to make itself look like it is very environmentally friend, very youthful. The essence of a business is to earn your money. It is only because people buy environmentally friendly things that they are using this gimmick, don’t be deceived.
This is a fucking keng die advertisement. You can tell just from the title. [This] is being hyped/promoted by some marketing team, who knows how much money Haier spent on this.
tiamoruru:
No wonder it was made so professionally, it was an advertisement, fuck.
linyizs:
Oh! So that means no one should hire her to paint, because her paints are poisonous, are polluting, and waste electricity.
The “friend” mentioned in the video’s description is the Haier air conditioning unit that viewers can see later in the video that is placed in the middle of the “room” she paints on the ground. The air conditioner “helped” her by filtering the formaldehyde odor that is released from her paints.
There were over 200 comments on this video, but a majority of the comments (and likely views and upvotes as well) were made by “fake” user accounts probably belonging to some marketing and promotions group hired to help make this commercial “viral” on Youku. One clue is that their comments seem to blindly praise how great the video is and then when you visit these “commenters'” profile pages, they suspiciously feature very little information or very similar videos. For example, many of them feature similar videos of people promoting various drinks including Minute Maid orange juice or Coca Cola.
The title for this video also can be said to be deceptive, intentionally used to trick people into clicking on it to view what the video may be about. Many netizens will react to this title thinking it is about a woman who is controversially saying something like she cannot be “hurt” because she has both a house and is talented/capable (so she doesn’t need a man). In reality, the video is really just an advertisement for Haier air conditioning appliances.
These tactics have helped this Haier video reach the top of Youku’s most viewed charts, which can be useful for attracting more potential viewers and views. Such methods are not uncommon although the most successful viral advertisements must themselves be very interesting. This video appears to have failed to impress most real netizens.
What do you think? About the advertisement’s effectiveness for promoting Haier’s brand and product? About the attempt to make this a “viral” advertisement?
Update: This Hyundai Sonata promotional video on Youku is another example of marketing and promotions teams being used to inflate the number of views and comments on a video. Videos like this typically do not have so many views, and many of the commenters are actually quite similar to the commenters in the above Haier video.
