New Unruly Tool Measures An Ad’s Virality Before It Even Hits YouTube

What makes a great viral ad? This question has driven many recent marketing trends; Old Spice-esque absurdity and heavy use of dubstep are now exceedingly common in ads. Still, it is still nigh-impossible to guarantee which ads will go viral and achieve millions of YouTube views.

Our pals at Unruly want to change that. They have introduced the Unruly ShareRank, which adds a precognitive flavor to the social media marketing agency’s  analytic arsenal. In other words, ShareRank is the Minority Report of advertising tools. “We are currently tracking over 2 million video shares each day,” said Unruly co-founder Matt Cooke, “We have mapped this data to viewer responses to train the Unruly ShareRank algorithm, which is the only metric on the market to predict the shareability of a video based on seven years’ worth of video sharing data. Scrutinizing views is not enough – in a digital world, brands need to understand what drives consumers to engage with their content.”

To develop ShareRank, Unruly worked with statisticians and academics, turning viral predictions from a guessing game to a science. “A wildly successful video ad is usually seen as a black swan, an outlier that’s unpredictable and unrepeatable,” said Sarah Wood, another co-founder of Unruly. For leading brand marketers, discovering how to create and distribute highly shareable content, repeatedly and at scale, is at the top of their wish list. Unruly ShareRank does precisely this.”

ShareRank is now available at the Unruly Social Video Lab. While you’re checking out the site, be sure to check out the Original Channels Viral Video Chart. We hear those Tubefilter guys are pretty cool.