A praying mantis pedals a stationary unicycle. Beetles roll pingpong balls by walking on top of them. And one adventurous insect is fired from a tiny cannon through a burning ring of fire (and lands softly on cotton balls).

It’s not a sideshow attraction, but one of the most popular marketing videos of 2011.

“Bug Circus Generator” has garnered more than 2 million views online while promoting Snapdragon, a new microprocessor for cell phones from Qualcomm Inc. The video was produced by digital ad agency Denizen in Culver City.

Joel Jensen, co-founder of Denizen, said the agency hired a bug wrangler to coax the insects into cooperating and only utilized computer-aided animation for a few seconds of the minute-and-a-half show.

“All the bugs really interacted with the equipment,” he said. “With online content, you want to give people as much to talk about as you can, and filming it live action helped.”

The video’s goal is to show that Snapdragon microprocessors are so efficient with electricity that a few insects can power them. Consumers can’t buy a Snapdragon processor directly, but they can request mobile phone models that have Snapdragon technology when they purchase a phone. Jensen compared “Bug Circus” to the “Intel Inside” campaign several years ago, designed to stoke the desirability of that company’s computer processors.

So far, data on “Bug Circus” indicate that 98 percent of viewers like the video and most associate the show with Snapdragon. Follow-up questions show that “they made the connection that these processors are energy efficient,” Jensen said.

Lee Matthews, a reporter for Geek.com, posted the video on his site. He said the outlandish idea, combined with its apparently scientific setting, is what appealed to his audience of computer buffs. He’s not sure if viewers understood the message about energy efficiency, but at least they will remember the Snapdragon name.

“It’s one of those videos that sticks in your head until one day down the road you’re looking at a smartphone display,” Matthews said, “you see the Snapdragon text and you say, ‘Hey, that’s one of those phones you can charge with bugs.’ ”