The Woolshed Company on Viral Video Success

You may have heard of Melbourne-based production company, The Woolshed Company, last week when they hit the news and announced that they were behind eight fake viral videos. You may even know some of their videos…

Since launching a year and a half ago and with a core team of just eight, The Woolshed is still fairly small but thanks to their ability to fool the world, they’ve captured the public’s attention and now firmly placed themselves as a multi-skilled and versatile production company with a strong hold on digital engagement. Don’t mistake them just for viral videos though, as they also dabble in TVCs, documentaries, programs, films and branded content.

Producer and writer Dave Christison speaks to shots about how the company works, why viral is the way forward and what’s next for The Woolshed.

How do you define viral success?

People define viral success using different metrics but it’s changed a lot in the past few years. It used to be reaching a few million in the first week that was the old mark. But I honestly couldn’t define what it means anymore especially following the emergence of Facebook and other social media platforms. They’ve changed the game completely.

Why did The Woolshed Company begin making viral videos?

It began as an evolutionary experiment for us two years ago. We didn’t have a brand behind us and we were just a bunch of young creatives, looking to start a production company. We wanted to see where the views would come from. The first video we ever released (below) received over 30 million and that was exclusively on YouTube alone; we couldn’t count engagement on Facebook then.

All credit has to go to Caspar Mazzotti as he’s the director of the entire series and he appeared in that first video. After the success of the shark attack video, we began dipping our toes in the viral water. We had whet our appetite as to what works and we wanted to experiment further. We were just experimenting with distribution methods and inputting our learnings from previous videos.

Do you think there’s a set formula for viral success and if so, what is it?

It’s the same formula that would be said to make a good ad; but anyone can get it right or wrong. We came away with a lot of learning about content creation and content ideation. The three biggest takeaways that we’ve learnt from this experiment are:

Treat it as entertainment;That means each video needs to have a story. It doesn’t matter how short it is, it needs to have a beginning, middle and end.

Even though it will live on social media, it needs to have a hook; You need to entice viewers to click and see what they’ve been promised in the link, so the image and description need to give a good teaser of what’s to come.

An element of debate; Although it’s not as crucial as the other requirements, an element of debate usually over the authenticity of the video, over the coincidence of it all or the production quality – whatever really that will encourage people to share it. They can attract a healthy comment section which is why the videos get propelled forward. With the amount of clues that we were dropping along the way, we weren’t pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. If you wanted to dig deeper, you always could.

How did The Woolshed Company operate when creating this series?

We’re all active online and watch a lot of uploaded videos. We throw around a lot of ideas and then decide what we could feasibly do in a semi-convincing way. We see this stuff everyday – it’s everywhere we look. I look at a lot of online videos very sceptically; if it’s got over 10 million views, I’ll watch it all the way through and find out what they did or how we could fake it.

Tell me about the production process behind some of your best known viral videos… how long does it take to create one?

It depends on the video really. With the tornado video, we had to create a tornado from scratch. It took us six weeks in total as it was completely fake. The lightning strike video on the other hand (below), was conceived, shot and released within 24 hours. We were inspired by a bunch of crazy storms that took over Sydney. They looked like they weren’t going to run out so it was an opportune moment; we didn’t have the time to sit around and dwell on it. We had the learnings and knowledge from previous videos, so it was quite easy to put it together and turn it around quickly.

Would you ever consider partnering with a brand in the future?

We’ve done a few client commission projects. The commercial side is fine but the more I’m asked this question, we actually came to realise that we’d love for non-profits to contact us to help them with message-based advertising. We’d love to be able to apply our knowledge and experimenting to the greater good. Take our Lion viral video for example (below); the video was obviously faked but after reading the comments, we realised that we’d helped to raise awareness of anti-poaching. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for us to think that maybe it’s ok to fool people if it’s to help raise awareness of a cause.