We last wrote about Unruly back in January, when the social video advertising startup raised $25 million in venture financing. Recently, I caught up with founder and CEO Scott Button. As I had written, Unruly has been behind some of the hottest viral videos, such as the “Roller Babies” campaign, which Unruly created for Evian, which was No. 1 on YouTube and held the world record for most-viewed ad online.
In this interview, I ask Button to reveal some of his company’s secret sauce. Here’s some highlights:
1) Unruly typically creates teaser videos that precede the actual advertisement for its brand customer. The videos are distributed to 11,000 media partners around the globe, many of whom are bloggers.
2) Unruly pays bloggers to play the videos as though they were advertisements. The bloggers typically also write about the content, thereby providing added attention to the video, unlike typical video ads, which are generally ignored.
3) Only 20% of Unruly’s campaigns are designed to go viral. The majority of the campaigns have different objectives, such as drumming up more fans on Facebook.
4) Unruly’s competitive advantage over GoViral, which was acquired by AOL last year for nearly $100 million and venture-backed ebuzzing is that Unruly is able to execute multi-market campaigns across the globe.
5) Unruly tripled in revenue last year and plans to double headcount over the next 12 months.
