Viral Video Award 2010: Political virals come out on top

The audience award went to the viral "Nice Game" by Tilman Egel. The short animation received by far the most and highest ratings in the online voting. The film deals with the topic of child soldiers and shows the two realities in which they find themselves: innocent play on the one hand and brutal violence on the other. A total of almost 20,000 users took part in the online voting.

Journalist Mario Sixtus ("Elektrischer Reporter", ZDF), TV presenter and author Petra Gute ("Stilbruch", RBB) and actor Daniel Zillmann ("NVA", "Schwarze Schafe") made up the expert jury for the 2010 award. They selected "Nestlé, no palm oil from virgin forest destruction!" by Greenpeace as the best viral. The jury's reasoning: Greenpeace's palm oil commercial was the video with the greatest impact and the highest virality. In addition, the film not only sensitized many people to the problem of palm oil production, but also achieved its goal. Nestlé had to respond to the criticism. With this film, the makers proved that virals can make a difference, the jury concluded.

The award for the best political viral on the topics of climate, democracy and justice, presented for the first time this year by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, went to "Polar Bear", which addresses the climate-damaging effects of air travel. According to the jury, the video by Daniel Kleinman conveys a clear message in a very short time without many words and with extremely strong images that stick.

The film "Ode to a Post-it Note" received an honorable mention for its original and touching thematization of the question of one's own origins in a mixture of animation, music and editing.

Daniel Kreuscher from Zucker.Kommunikation is convinced that the growing spread of social networks such as Facebook will also increase the importance of viral videos. Virals have proven to be an effective tool in political communication in particular. Political virals in particular were much discussed in online voting and received the best ratings. The example of Greenpeace/Nestlé also shows that virals can actually make a difference, Kreuscher concluded.

The 2010 Viral Video Awards were sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Berlin state initiative Projekt Zukunft and Ritter Sport. The prize money amounted to 1000 euros each.
The award received media support from the political blog Netzpolitik.org and the social bookmarking service Mister Wong, among others.