Viral Karma, It Goes Around

While advertisers are still trying to figure out how to gain stock points with online video, the folks over at the Advertising Council are trying to earn karma points. In a new ad campaign launched this week, the Ad Council, in association with the Federal Voting Assistance Program, hopes to get that apathetic demographic of 18- to 24-year-olds to get away from their TVs, computers, and cell phones and go out and do something for the world.

Beyond TV, radio, print, and outdoor ads, the campaign includes online videos (embedded below, with locusts, so watch out) and an interactive website.

While the PR reps uploading these videos have yet to master the artistry in naming viral video hits (the embedded video’s official title is “Man get person swarm of locust because of bad karma”), the production values of the videos and website are high and the clips appeal to YouTube’s appreciation of absurdist humor.

The interactive game lets you meander a vibrant cartoon world doing good or bad and consequently winning or losing karma points (instead of a “loading” symbol between levels you are told “The universe shines on the civically active”). The Ad Council has come a long way from “Loose lips sink ships.”

The “Get Good Karma” campaign was conceived by Atlanta-based advertising giant WestWayne, Inc. The Ad Council has been polishing its YouTube chops, and the Karma ads are perfectly suited for online video in their length and tone. The organization has been posting its ads to YouTube since March of 2006, according to Ellyn Fisher, Director of Corporate Communications at the Ad Council.

Fisher says, via email, “Our target audience is interacting online and downloading videos and we see these sites as an ideal way to get them to visit GetGoodKarma.org and become more civically engaged.”

The Ad Council has had a very successful history of injecting its ads into the media zeitgeist, with many of its campaigns creating parodies in their wakes.

That kind of call-and-response advertising doesn’t always end up with positive portrayals of the originator of the ad. But then again, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and nowhere else is the cliché “what goes around comes around” truer than the world of YouTube.

The Ad Council claims a bevy of statistics documenting positive social change due to its ads. I have to wonder what statistical analysis it will use to justify the number crunching behind a claim of a measurable increase in young people’s good karma.