Tearjerking Glasgow video cracks 6 million hits on YouTube
Get the words just right - and everyone will rally to your cause! That's the message of a tearjerking video which passed more than 6 million views on YouTube at the weekend. Other videos have told the same story - but the Glasgow rendering seem to have hit the spot with viewers.
The video was made for Glasgow online agency Purplefeather and shows a blind man sitting cross-legged with a begging can in front of him and a card reading, "I'm blind please help." The odd coin is dropped in by passers-by . . . but not many.
Then a young woman stops in front of the blind man, picks up the card and writes new words on the other side.
Soon the coins are flowing in, fast and furious. The young woman returns, the blind man identifies her by touching her shoes and asks her, 'What did you do to my sign?" She replies, "I wrote The same, just different words." We're not going to tell you what she wrote - watch it for yourself!
The video replicates the blind man theme of at least three earlier videos. David Ogilvy who died in 1999 may have been first to tell the story. This is how it appears online in 'Great Moments in Copywriting;
" During one of his morning walks to work in New York City, David Ogilvy encountered a man begging with a sign around his neck. The sign read: "I am blind," and, as evidenced by his nearly empty cup, the man was not doing very well. Ogilvy removed the man's sign from around his neck, pulled out a marker and changed the sign to read, "It is spring and I am blind." He hung the sign back around the beggar's neck and went on his way. On his way home he was pleased to notice the vagrant had a full cap."
We have not yet tracked down a video of this.
Nick Galanides points out that The Gate Films and himself won the Cream Grand Prix when they made this video in 2004.
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In 2008 came the Mexican film Historia de un letrero, The Story of a Sign by Alonso Alvarez Barreda, which the Scots say they pay homage to. The story line filmed in Glasgow by Redsnappa is the same as the Historia video with a female "hero" instead of a male.
None of the other videos has so far achieved the YouTube numbers of the Glasgow shoot. "Historia's" latest figure is 1,124,626
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px; line-height: 19.0px; font: 10.0px 'Trebuchet MS'; color: #333233}On her web page Andrea Gardner of Purplefeather writes that "a few well-chosen words can take you anywhere you want to go. "
The Glasgow video was originally uploaded in February last year but has been gathering pace since. It reached 5,631,712 views on Friday -poised for the six million. There have been 27,977 "likes" on YouTube and 301 people didn't like the video. Of 3519 comments, a number complained that the video was very much the same as earlier videos