Viral Videos Can Harm Brands That Advertise Their Products Along With Misaligned Content, Study Shows

It is every brand marketer and content creator’s dream to somehow end up going viral because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up putting them on the radar and giving their career the kind of boost that it truly needed. The platforms that these creators post their content on stand to gain a lot as well since viral content gives them a huge amount of traction and can contribute quite a bit to allowing the platform in question to get a firm grip over its user base and potentially end up attracting a large number of other users as well.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that viral content might not be good for everyone associated with it. For example, if a brand were to find itself next to a form of viral content that is somewhat unseemly to a certain extent, this could harm the brand’s image with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Not all viral content is going to be wholesome and family friendly after all, and if a brand were to advertise next to, for example, a pimple popping video then this could end up making consumers associate the brand with that. The sight of an ad in the midst of such content can also be really jarring and can result in widespread ridicule of the brand which is not the kind of publicity that any type of brand is ever going to end up wanting.

Research conducted by CF has revealed just how harmful it can be for a brand to have any kind of relationship to certain kinds of viral content. While it is true that viral content can sometimes be a great way for brands to get their name out there, usually the kind of people that frequent these types of videos are not going to be interested in what ads are being shown which means that brands would potentially waste a fairly large proportion of their advertising budget on something that might not have been all that necessary at all.

The truly terrible thing about mismatched content is that customer retention of the ads they see can go up to 41% which is 9 points higher than the 32% that is usually seen with regular content. This means that users will remember the association with the rather negative viral content and this could hurt brands in the long run in a way that might be rather difficult for them to recover from.

This shows the interesting parallels between digital advertising and the kind of content that it can be seen against. This is something that deserves a lot more attention due to the reason that it can have a widespread impact on the industry, and it shows just how many factors are at play here that can influence businesses on a really large scale. Brands work really hard to generate any kind of trust in their customers and losing this trust because of an unfortunate ad placement is not something that they are going to be alright with especially because of how preventable such a thing can be.
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