Dumb ways to die is a viral video which has earned it's online success as a song to promote rail safety.
This screenshot above shows the style and tone of the video, the popularity (expressed by the amount of views) and the creator/uploader of the video.
The subject of the video focuses around endearing characters which each harm them selves, by acts which would kill a person, and then dance around foolishly. The video is supposed to have a light hearted and sensitive feel as it is aimed around young children, the music playing shows this.
The video concludes by showing four more ways to die which involve rail ways and how they can be perilous in an everyday situation. This is where the informative side strays away from the purely entertainments basis.
As the video runs, it leaps from purely ridiculous ways to die that everyone, even children wouldn't attempt, to rails ways which children could be unsure about, in a shocking conclusion for someone who wasn't aware.
This video is based around a concept of how obvious something can be and how people are already in the know, to show how something not so obvious can be just as bad.
I have an issue with this video in that if the viewer wasn't to watch the final 15 seconds of the video, they would never know it was focussing around trail and rail safety, which could lose clarity of the message, if the viewer wasn't engaged enough.
I also feel the entertainment factor and how the soft music and endearing characters draw the audience in slightly takes away from the message, and is the reason why it is so popular, purely for the comedic values behind it.
I do enjoy the video and can see how it can be successful, if shown directly to a school of young children perhaps, but I feel the only reason why it has so many hits virally is for the entertainment purpose, and that perhaps only 10% of viewers actually took the informative message away with them.
This shows that a campaign's success shouldn't be judged on the amount of hits or viewers, but more directly on how it benefitted the audience in an active way.
