They created a video—later discovered to be a hoax—that they posted on their YouTube channel. It features a Danish woman (an actress, as it turns out) holding a baby. She is talking to the baby’s father, a man she says met in a bar in Copenhagen and had a one-night stand with. She doesn’t want money or anything from him, she says, she just wants to find him and tell him about their son. Her final plea in the video is for him—or anyone who may know him—to get in touch with her.

According to a Danish news site, VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich had this to say in a press release: “We deeply apologise that the film has offended a lot of people—that certainly wasn’t the idea. The idea was to create a positive view of Denmark. In order not to continue offending people, we have removed the film from YouTube.”

I wasn’t offended by the video, but the explanation is a little offensive to anyone of average intelligence because the agency is not ‘fessing up about its goals. Rather than contributing to a positive view of Denmark, these marketers were trying to do something controversial to get people talking about Denmark and create some online publicity. Clearly, at some point they realized that any publicity is NOT good publicity.

Apparently overnight stays in the country are on the downswing—perhaps the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens are a tough sell—but still. Sending out a message to travelers that Denmark has attractive blondes who like one-night stands? I don’t think that strategy belongs in the marketing playbook.

Warning – this article features a number of linked images and campaigns that are, as the title implies, shocking and NSFW. Click through to the links accordingly.

Shock campaigns, including the use of gory, disturbing, and unsettling images and scenarios, work as an attention grabber. Whether it’s Volkswagen’s “safe happens” campaign of a few years back or the U.K’s “texting while driving” PSA, shock and awe messaging have been an institution in connecting with motorists since the “Red Asphalt” driver education films debuted in 1964.

Outside of the automotive realm of selling us safer cars and preventing us from taking driving too lightly, shock marketing has been put into action to keep us off drugs (Faces of Meth and the more recent Montana Meth project come to mind), as well as encouraging us to buy condoms and practice safe sex (see recent French and German ad campaigns depicting sex with disturbing partners ranging from giant scorpions to Hitler).

When the shock wears off

So what’s the point of these campaigns? If it’s to start a Facebook conversation on a topic, and your topic involves sex, drugs, or automotive gore, then the path to success arguably begins and ends with capitalizing on that innate human fascination with all things morbid and taboo. Rubbernecking by ad proxy, as it were.

But if you were to expand the shock message to include the patently absurd, thereby pulling in just about every viral and subversive campaign fit to be highlighted on industry sites (like Adrants) that cover this beat, as marketers, we are left with this question: “You have our attention, but so what?”

For sex, drugs, and cars, maybe the attention is enough. But how can you take the attraction to powerful images and concepts and translate that into more meaningful impressions around a consumer brand? How do you engage and retain the audience’s attention long after the initial shock has worn off?

The boldness of Benetton

For guidance, we can look to one of the pioneers of the genre, Luciano Benetton, and his eponymous clothing brand. His ad campaigns in the early 1980s with then-creative director Oliviero Toscani depicted disturbing but beautifully rendered images of race, poverty, religion, refugees, AIDs, capital punishment, war, and corruption.

His critics scoffed, citing Benetton and Toscani’s work as a shallow and sensational ploy for the sole purpose of raising eyebrows and causing a stir, but Benetton saw it differently. “The purpose of advertising is not to sell more,” he said. “It’s to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company’s values…” In this statement, Benetton made a striking observation that today’s marketers would be wise to heed. In essence, he points out that it’s obvious to the world that Benetton makes clothes, so if the purpose of advertising is to educate people about what a company has to offer, then telling them that you make clothing isn’t revealing much. On the other hand, using edgy and colorful images to show consumers that Benetton makes edgy and colorful clothes does more to communicate Benetton’s differentiated attribute—the core essence of its brand—than an ad laboriously detailing the breadth of its garments or their (assumedly) impeccable craftsmanship and quality.

Benetton described engaging his audience in an evolving exercise of painting the Benetton brand as one that thumbs its nose at the status quo, one that is self-aware and self-actualized in a turbulent and troubling world. In short, he clothed his brand in a character and gave it personality. In so doing, he pushed one-way media to its absolute limits in the pre-Internet age, creating dinner table and water-cooler conversations from glossy posters in a way that few of today’s YouTube and Facebook virals could ever hope to muster.

His ads were not mere billboards for hawking wares, but a mirror back into his company’s core values, designed to facilitate communication of those values with its intended audience. As Benetton summed up himself, “Communication should never be commissioned from outside the company, but conceived from within its heart.”

Nearly 30 years later, the Benetton brand still conjures up bright colors for a bright and worldly clientele. VW, by contrast, got its 15 minutes out of “safe happens,” but a few years later we’re already wondering this: Did VW’s campaign and the tremendous subsequent viral pickup reach within the heart of what VW stands for? Is VW perceived as any more or less safe than any other car brand today? Benetton took shock and owned it. He launched his brand with it and embraced it as an enduring and representative attribute of Benetton’s core values. Unlike VW and the preachy PSAs, Benetton grabbed us by our starched white collars, forced us to look, and then kept us looking and thinking about his company through that colorful and disturbing lens for decades.

We spoke with Hewlett-Packard Marketing Communications Manager Alex Flagg about the “HP Engineers Say It” viral video campaign he led last year. A longtime Tendo customer, HP conceived the series in response to aggressive competition from IBM. (Full disclosure: Tendo does produce video content but did not contribute to this series.) Learn how Alex combined a process with proof points to successfully execute a viral video series that did more than just entertain.

How did you conceive the idea for the HP Engineers viral video series?
In April 2008, IBM began an aggressive competitive campaign claiming their Power6 products had superior performance on a smaller system over HP’s Superdome Integrity at 93% of the cost. So we organized an overall marketing strategy to come up with competitive proof points against their mainframe, such as superior power savings and superior TCO savings. But we don’t have the advertising dollars that IBM has to be able to blast out this message. We decided that we should do something humorous and aggressive using viral videos—if it gets noticed and gets out there, you get free media.

Was the viral video part of a larger campaign?
Yes, the overall campaign was called “Out-market IBM,” and the other elements included an offer to give NonStop hardware away for free for the first year to those migrating off of a mainframe. There was an internal employee contest that invited people to come up with alternative uses for IBM’s mainframe; the winning one used IBM’s mainframe as an ice fishing hut, which we used in posters for the sales force. We did lots of press outreach. We created leave-behinds for customers—there was a slide rule that calculated TCO of the mainframe vs. HP Integrity, which we used for direct marketing in the United States, and there were announcements at conferences.

What audience were you trying to reach?
The broadest audience was the press, analysts, and mainframe customers. To reach mainframe customers, we needed to rely on communication channels—such as viral video—since they may not be receiving installed-base communications. The second-level audience was current Integrity and NonStop customers—we wanted to be able to reinforce the value that we are giving to them. The last audience segment was HP employees and the sales channel. The sales team especially had to feel confident in our product line.

What other approaches did you consider for achieving your objective?
We discussed a “Myth Busters” idea. This would have been good because it captures the scientific-analysis vibe in HP’s data-driven engineering culture, but it required us to design a real experiment that we didn’t have time for. We needed to do these quickly.

The video concept we landed on was more of a process than a script. We held a casting call and invited every engineer in the Bay Area to audition. We got about 140 responses and invited 50 people to read, just to get the funniest engineers possible. The reason we wanted to use real HP engineers with no script was that we wanted to capture the HP culture. We wanted to get the offbeatness and social awkwardness of having engineers star in the videos.

What did they do during the casting call?
Each one played a character and read a script from the “MythBusters” idea, and we evaluated them based on their energy, their persona. From that, we chose 15 engineers to videotape.

We then came up with six simple proof points about the IBM mainframe, like “the IBM Mainframe z 10 uses 8,000 watts more than the HP Integrity Superdome.” We simplified it even further by telling the engineers the proof point and asking them to show how they’d demonstrate 8,000 watts in power and cooling savings. We gave them a week to write their own scene using whatever materials they wanted. We also asked them to send us their idea and tell us what they were planning on doing a few days before the shoot itself.

Did you give the HP engineers any incentive?
We gave them a small employee award if their video was one of the seven or eight that we selected.

What part of the process contributed most to the success of the videos?
Let’s first define success, because it was successful in some ways and not so in other ways.

It was very successful in capturing the HP culture blended with the TSG (Technology Solutions Group) look and feel, and also tying the videos back to actual proof points. A lot of viral videos forget that they’re marketing tools and tend to be more movies or entertainment. What’s the point of doing that?

Many of these tech viral videos go for entertainment over messaging, so you need to strike a balance between how viral and entertaining you want to make it and how much you tie it back to the business. If you go too far to the entertainment side you forget about the message. Putting the competitive message in the foreground was important. From that standpoint, the videos were successful.

They didn’t become million-view videos, but according to some metrics, seven of the eight videos achieved 20,000 views total over a period of four months. It’s not bad for corporate marketing videos in our category.

Another thing that we did right was have more videos rather than investing in a single video. It spreads the risk, and collectively you get more views because each one feeds off another.

We also tried a new measurement technology, working with an agency called Zocolo (a social media agency specializing in measurement methodology). We measured the height, the width and the depth of the digital footprint. The height is the volume of discussion around the videos on blogs, or how many views are being generated; the width is the overall scope of influence of the social content, measured by incoming and outgoing links to other networks and videos; and the depth is the level of messaging and tone toward the brand—whether it’s negative, neutral, or positive. They create indices for each one of these and then aggregate them to get a metric.

Where we were fairly successful was on messages. We put the videos on YouTube, HP’s video site and Viddler, and we created a microsite to host the videos. And we invited bloggers to check them out. But the most successful distribution vehicle was HP employees, their friends and their social networks.

Did the video series accomplish what you’d intended?
Overall, the videos were successful from an executional standpoint. We’ve been able to repurpose them and use them at conferences and in press articles. They were successful in taking our proof points, isolating them, and making them simple and accessible.

Rather than go for pure entertainment and have it be very light on marketing, we decided to go for something in between “Gatorade Girl” and a PowerPoint presentation. In doing so, we had a good volume of quality views within a targeted audience. It’s hard to tie them to a message and have them be wildly entertaining. We don’t have a product like Apple that’s naturally exciting—we’re talking about high-end servers and mainframes.

The most success we’ve had is gaining confidence from our HP sales force and employees, who say, “We should be doing more of this sort of thing.” It fires people up and makes them want to fight IBM.

How long did the whole process take, from conception to posting?
About a month and a half for the videos only. And then the website was about six to eight weeks.

Any other advice for corporate marketers experimenting with video content?

• Don’t be afraid to try it, but set your expectations low because there’s no formula to making corporate viral videos that tie back to your message.
• Don’t outsource your creation to a vendor and just rely on them to come back with the idea. If you do that you’ll get a slapstick video with no message and no content. Start with the marketing message and proof points you want to communicate.
• Make sure the viral video is a reflection of your brand. Because it’s so creative, it’s easy to have them go too far off brand.