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Welcome back!

Hope you all had a great weekend and are ready to take your marketing strategies to the next level with today’s topic: virality.

Going viral is great (usually), but how can you manufacture a viral post or campaign? If it were easy, wouldn’t everyone be going viral all the time? We’ll get more into it below.

In the news this week we have: the latest on the Tiktok ban, AI voice synthesis being used for evil, and a successful IPO.

Let’s dive in! 🔥

News

Tools + Productivity

Strategy

In today’s creator economy, the ability to go viral is like being able to turn lead into gold. The few social media stars and marketing agencies that are able to create viral content are rewarded handsomely for their unique abilities.

There are countless influencers who have been able to make a career off of virality, but from a business standpoint, not all of these strategies to go viral are able to be adopted.

Going viral frequently requires some degree of shock and awe, but if you are a business, you have to be careful about the things you say. If you try too hard to say the most outlandish thing possible, your credibility will deteriorate over time.

Why Go Viral?
It’s been estimated that successful viral campaigns can have 500x-1000x more impact than a regular ad campaign.

Although it may cost more to execute on the creativity budget, successful campaigns will drastically outperform and out-earn non-viral ads.

In this high risk / high reward game, let’s take a look at some of the successful standouts and what they did right.

Pringles Holster
Crocs and Pringles recently partnered up to create the holster for Pringles attached to the Croc shoe.

If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is…

Although it is clearly an attempt to go viral, the companies tried to deliver the joke with a straight face.

They released an official press release in PRNewsWire, followed by numerous influencer partnerships to make it seem like these preposterous shoes were actually worth buying+wearing:

What Did They Do Right?
Well, Pringles and Crocs aren’t necessarily known for their over-the-top marketing performances. They are generally tame consumer companies that let their product innovation drive customer traffic (i.e., new creative flavors of chips, new shoe colors and styles).

This time, however, the companies stepped into unmarked territory, and since they didn’t want this limited-release to overshadow their respectable and mature brand images, they made sure to do it in a very classy manner.

They took an outlandish concept - an ankle holster for your chips - and made it seem like a legitimate product.

The internet loves pointing out when things look “off” or crazy. If Pringles/Crocs rolled out this product by saying “look how silly this thing we made looks!” then the internet wouldn’t have anything to point out.

By rolling out as if it were a legitimate addition to the product line, social media thought it was the first to notice that the shoe was an outlandish concept, and that resulted in the virality of the campaign. Everyone on the internet had a chance to send it to someone else and say, “what were those guys thinking? this is absurd!”

Leeching Virality
Another tactic that many brands have adopted to increase their reach is engaging with viral content in hopes that their name will be associated with it.

A recent example of this occurred with multimedia influencer Davis Clarke. The guy ran the Boston Marathon and instantly posted a video where he wanted to express how hard he worked to earn the time he achieved.

In his exhausted stupor, Davis said, “I gave it everything I had for the people. 2:56. I sh*t myself like crazy…”

Sorry - what??

Aside from the impressive time, people couldn’t help but be intrigued by the fact that the guy literally crapped himself while running a marathon. Naturally, the clip went viral, and if you scroll through the comments, you will stumble across an extremely common new phenomenon.

A number of consumer-focused brands fill Davis’s comment section with funny one-liners that hope to express their brand’s values, affiliate themselves with Davis, drive traffic to their own page, and pay absolutely nothing for the free press.

Take a look at Dude Wipes, a company that sells wet wipes for the unfortunate circumstance where the average dude has a Davis-like situation.

They got over 30k likes on that comment alone, which means they received roughly double the impressions and translates to thousands of new customers finding out who they are and what they do.

Capitalizing off of virality doesn’t always mean creating your own viral content. Often, it means knowing what else is going viral and figuring out how you can associate yourself with it.

Looking Ahead
That’s a wrap on this month’s theme on Advertising 101. As with each new month, be sure to drop any suggestions you have in the survey here. If your suggestion gets selected, we will send over some custom B95 merch!

For a recap of the month, check below:

Advertising 101
Week 1: Advertising Metrics
Week 2: Audience Targeting
Week 3: Types of Ads
Week 4: Creating Your Ads
Week 5: Virality (This Week)

Click here to read any of the previous editions.

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