I hate to add yet another marketing  fad to my vocabulary, but I loved this AdAge story on using “social video marketing.”

Screenshot from Samsung's "social video" marketing spot.

The story focused on a viral video Samsung shot –using their new cell phone’s HD camcorder – and posted to YouTube. The video concludes with an optical illusion and a challenge: figure out how they did it. Naturally, watching the video again in high definition helps.  

So far, 1 million people have watched the video on YouTube alone, and 2,000 people posted comments. According to AdAge, the average viewing time was actually more than the run time, indicating that people paused, rewound, and rewatched the clip over and over again. I can’t remember the last television ad I watched even once (thank you, TiVo), much less twice!

A few weeks later, Samsung posted another video, revealing the secret of the trick. Note how the “secret” perfectly supports the product attributes of the HD camera phone. Also note how many people invested a lot of time looking for clues … noticing details like sock color and garden gnome position.

Very, very cool.

Video: The Samsung HD challenge

Video: The “secret” revealed!