The Wardman Wire

Yesterday (21st July) in the Independent Media Section, Claire Beale was very enthusiastic about a video advert designed by Ogilvy for Comfort the fabric conditioner, involving a Nudist who becomes infatuated with clothing.

In the Best in Show section of her Advertising Page, she included:

• The standard presentation of four screenshots in the printed Media Section of the paper.
• Instructions on how to find it, including details of the exact search to use on Youtube.

The article does not include a clickable link within the web page on the Independent website.

I’m taking an interest because the video has had a relatively small number of views, so it is an opportunity to examine the statistics in a bit more detail than we usually see.

The Comfort Advert with Nudists

Here’s the video. It is quite amusing, and worth a look - and only 90 seconds long. The plot is that a man finds his wife on sofa with another man, fully clothed and sniffing like dogs..

I’ve also added a copy to the Wardman Wire video feed on the front page of the blog.

Let’s now have a look at the number of people who have viewed the Comfort Nudist video.

How many viewed the Comfort Nudist Video?

This morning (7am 22nd July) I can find four copies of the video on Youtube, posted by:

• kidofpeace (Added 5 days ago - July 14th, 2972 views)
• adcruncher (Added 5 days ago - July 16, 2182 views)
• FNUTTENUTT (Added 5 days ago - July 16, 145 views)
• Berscha10 (Added 12 hours ago - July 21, 20 views)

Total views from these 3 copies of the video are around 5200.

As a first reaction, to me that doesn’t feel like very many for a video that has been up for a week, and with a strong recommendation in a national newspaper, and been featured as this week’s “Internet Question” in Campaign. It is not mentioned on the Campaign Blog, however.

I’m ready to accept that it may be my expectations that are wrong (i.e., too high), however - since this is the first time that I have had a detailed look at one of these.

The Wild Heather Campaign Blog

As highlighted in the Independent article, there is also a campaign blog (”Wild Heather“). There are about a dozen posts and two videos on the blog:

• Clothes Confessions 1 (Added 8 days ago - July 14th, 14 views).

• Tony Confessions (Added June 12th - 134 people).

Some Wardman Wire Numbers for Context

For comparison, if I publish a video on the blog here, it typically generates between several dozen and several hundred immediate views, depending on several factors:

• how “attractive” it seems,
• the subject,
• how effusively I recommend it,
• the traffic level that day,
• who else links to the post,
• how long it is kept as the top post on the front page.

A video will have several times as many viewers again over the next few months (70-80% of my traffic comes through the archive pages) - depending on how favoured the article is by inbound links and Google.

The Nick Clegg interview video I posted at 9am on Sunday (2 days ago) has received just under 100 views, although by my estimate more than half of those are likely to have come from Lib Dem Voice, where the video was cross-posted. The audience there is understandably more engaged with him than they are here.

At the other end of the scale the Safety Nut video about “Health and Safety when Crossing Your Drive” has had a lot more viewings - and a good number came from here. It helps that the Wardman Wire is now No 1 on Google for “Bonkers Conkers” and the third website from the top for “Health and Safety Gone Mad”.

In total the blog is currently receiving around 40-45,000 unique visitors a month, using a measuring approach very similar to that used by the national newspaper websites.

Wrapping Up

I have some further reflections about the campaign, but I will post those as a further article after seeing how the “Comfort Nudist” campaign develops.

Do these figures say something about the opportunity cost of newspapers not including links and videos in the body text on their websites? If the video had been embedded in Clare’s article, how many extra people would have viewed it?

In the meantime, I would welcome any debate here.

Tags: claire beale, comfort nudists, video statistics, viral video, wild heather