Okay, picture this. It's June 2023. You're on
your couch. Maybe it's a Tuesday night, long
day. You pull out your phone. You get that blue
light on your face and you just start scrolling.
The classic doom scroll. The classic doom scroll.
You're on TikTok, maybe Instagram Reels. You're
just minding your own business, you know, looking
for a good lasagna recipe or maybe one of those
oddly satisfying power washing videos. Oh, I
love those. So soothing. Right. The algorithm.
Usually knows what you need. Usually. But then
all of a sudden it throws you this massive curveball.
You see a teenager and they're holding this bright
purple milkshake. Super vibrant, like almost
radioactive purple. Exactly. They look at the
camera. They give that classic innocent social
media smile. They take a sip and they go, happy
birthday, Grimace. And that's when it all goes
wrong. The music just cuts. The camera starts
shaking like crazy. And the next shot is something
straight out of a found footage horror movie.
Like, think the Blair Witch Project. Yeah, a
total tunnel shift. That same teenager is now
lying on the ground. Maybe they're, I don't know,
draped over a park bench in a playground at night
or slumped in some grimy alleyway. And they are
just... Absolutely drenched. Drenched in this
purple goo. It looks like a crime scene. A very,
very purple crime scene. It really does. They're
pretending to be dead or like possessed. Some
of them are foaming at the mouth with this purple
sludge. The whole vibe is that something terrible,
something supernatural just happened to them.
All from a fast food milkshake. All because of
the milkshake. Yeah. And this was the grimmest
shake trend. And it wasn't just a few weird art
kids doing this. This was a tidal wave. It was
absolutely everywhere. Millions and millions
of views. People were basically creating these
little high production mini horror films where
the main villain was a McDonald's beverage. Which
is, I mean, it's a bizarre image to start with,
I totally admit. It sounds like a total fever
dream. Right. But it's actually the perfect,
and I mean perfect, entry point for this whole
stack of research we have on the desk today.
Because here's the kicker about that whole purple
goo incident that you really have to understand.
What's that? McDonald's didn't pitch that. No.
Right. They didn't have a marketing team sit
in a boardroom in Chicago looking at a PowerPoint
and say, hey, got a great idea. Yeah. Let's have
our customers pretend our new product just killed
them. Exactly. I mean, can you imagine if an
ad agency actually pitched that? They'd be fired
on the spot. Come drink our new shake. It's fatal.
Yeah. It's a. That's traditionally considered
a PR nightmare. It's the opposite of good PR.
It's the exact opposite of what you want. You
want people to drink the shake and smile, not
drink the shake and start convulsing on the pavement.
And yet, look at what happened. This is the whole
paradox we're digging into today. McDonald's
completely inadvertently benefited from it. Massively.
Sales shot up. Sales were boosted in a huge way.
And they stayed high right up until the promotion
ended on June 29th. The company even had to acknowledge
it eventually. What did they say? They posted
on Twitter as the character Grimace and said,
me pretending I don't see the Grimace shape trend.
They just sort of leaned into the chaos. And
that right there, that's it. That's the beautiful,
chaotic, and let's be honest, sometimes terrifying
world of viral marketing. It's totally unpredictable.
It's messy. And when it works. Boy, does it work
better than almost anything else. It really does.
So for this deep dive, we're going to unpack
exactly what that mechanism is. We're not just
looking at funny videos or memes today. No, we're
looking at the purple goo of the marketing world.
We're going to look at the psychology behind
why we share this stuff, the history of where
this whole idea even came from. And spoiler alert,
it involves the 90s and... Failed Australian
pop stars. I can't wait to get to that. And the
actual nuts and bolts mechanics of how an idea
can infect an entire population. I love that
word you used in the notes there. Infect. Because
that's really at the core of the whole definition,
isn't it? It sounds a little clinical for something
that involves, you know, cat videos and milkshakes.
Oh, it is clinical. The terminology is borrowed
literally from epidemiology. If we're going to
define viral marketing strictly, you know. Based
on the literature we've got here, we're talking
about a business strategy that uses existing
social networks to promote a product. Okay. But
the name is literal. It refers to how consumers
spread information about a product to other people
in the exact same way that a biological virus
spreads from one host to another. So wait, in
this analogy, the product, the milkshake, the
funny video, whatever it is, that's the pathogen.
Yes, the product is the pathogen. And you, the
listener, and me, and everyone scrolling on their
phones, we are the pathogen. As a host. As a
host. Okay, that makes me feel a little bit used,
but I get it. Well, it's all about something
called propagativity. Propagativity. That is
a mouthful. It's the technical term. It measures
how easily consumers can redistribute content.
See, the goal isn't to just broadcast a message
to a million people from one central tower, like
a Super Bowl ad. Right. The goal is to create
a message that appeals to individuals who have
high social networking potential. They call it
SMP. SMP. Okay. Break that down for me. High
social networking potential. So this just means
people who talk to a lot of other people, people
with a lot of friends. Exactly. You want to infect
the people who are most likely to infect other
people. You're basically outsourcing your entire
distribution network to the audience. You are
making them do the work for you. For free. For
free. Which sounds incredible for the company's
balance sheet. For sure. You don't have to pay
for the airtime if I'm putting it on my Instagram
story for nothing. Precisely. But there's a catch,
and it's a big one. When you outsource your distribution
to the audience, you also outsource the narrative.
And that's when the audience decides your product
is a lethal popel sludge. That's the risk, the
mutation of the virus. But as we're going to
see, that high risk often leads to an incredibly
high reward. Okay, so before we get into the
psychology of why on earth we behave like this,
let's rewind a bit. Because while the Grimace
Shake feels very... Yeah, you know, very Gen
Z, very 2023. Very TikTok. Very TikTok. But the
actual concept of viral marketing didn't start
there. It has roots that go back a few decades.
Oh, yeah, it does. To really understand the theory,
you have to go back to the 1990s. This was the
era where this field of medics was really peaking
in popularity. Medics? Okay. This is Richard
Dawkins, right? From the book The Selfish Gene.
That's the one. Dawkins actually coined the term
meme. Way back in the 70s, but it was in the
90s that it really caught fire as a way to understand
culture. The theory is that ideas themselves,
memes, behave like living organisms. Okay. They
compete for survival in our brains and in our
conversations, just like genes compete in the
process of evolution. So like a catchy jingle
is a strong gene. It survives because it's good
at replicating itself? Exactly that. It creates
a copy of itself in your brain. You start humming
it. Then you hum it near a friend. Now, boom,
it's in their brain. It has successfully reproduced.
It's basically survival of the fittest, but for
cash phrases and fashion trends and ideas. And
of course, marketers looked at this and just
saw dollar signs. Of course they did. In 1996,
a guy named Jeffrey Rayport wrote a huge article
for Fast Company called The Virus of Marketing.
You had media critics like Douglas Rushkoff writing
about media viruses. They were literally looking
at biology textbooks and saying, hey, how can
we do this in a magazine ad? They wanted to engineer
a contagion. That's pretty much it. Yeah. They
wanted to create something that was self -replicating.
And if you want a really early and kind of weird
example of this in the real world, this is before
the Internet really got its hooks into us. Yeah.
We have to talk about a guy named Marcus Montana.
Marcus Montana. The name sounds like a movie
star or maybe a character from an Australian
soap opera like Neighbors or Home and Away. Well,
he was an Australian pop singer or he tried to
be. This is a great. Case study and just generating
noise with kind of no substance behind it. In
early 1989, people in Sydney started seeing these
posters everywhere. Thousands of them. And all
they said was, Marcus is coming. Marcus is coming.
No picture of him. No buy his new album. No date.
Absolutely no context at all. Just that phrase,
Marcus is coming. That sounds almost ominous.
Yeah. A little threatening. It does. And because
we, as humans, are naturally curious creatures,
we'd hate an information vacuum. It worked. It
generated massive media interest. The whole community
was talking about it at bus stops. Radio DJs
were on the air asking, who is Marcus? What is
coming? It was this huge mystery. It's that classic
teaser campaign. It creates an information gap
that your brain... is just desperate to close.
You just have to know the answer. It is. And
it was successful in a way. It made his musical
debut a major talking point. When he finally
arrived, everyone in Sydney knew his name. But,
and here's the punchline and the big lesson,
his music career was a complete and total failure.
Ouch. So the virus spread, everyone caught the
fever, but then the actual... disease was just
like a mild cold the virus killed the host the
marketing worked perfectly the product didn't
and that's a really early crucial lesson in viral
marketing you can get everyone talking about
you you can spread the name but if the underlying
host the product itself isn't strong the fame
doesn't last it just evaporates it's like being
famous for being famous but then you have nothing
to say when they finally hand you the microphone
That's a perfect way to put it. It was a holovirus.
But then, a few years later, we get the blueprint.
The one that actually worked. The one that every
venture capitalist still dreams about today.
We get Hotmail. Ah, yes. Hotmail. The OG of email
services. I think I still have an old Hotmail
account somewhere, probably just filled with
newsletters I never read and some deeply embarrassing
emails from high school. I think we all do. I
have to remember, back in 96, 97, web -based
email was revolutionary. Before Hotmail, your
email was tied to your ISP. If you had AOL, you
had an AOL address. If you changed your internet
provider... You lost your email address. It was
like your phone number being tied to your actual
house. If you moved, you lost the number. Exactly.
Hotmail was the first time you could take it
with you. It was free. It was accessible from
anywhere. But they were a startup. They didn't
have a massive budget to tell everyone about
this. They couldn't buy Super Bowl ads. So what
was the strategy? How did they grow? Their growth
strategy was, well, it was pure genius in its
simplicity. It was actually defined by Tim Draper
and Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalists
who were backing them. They realized they didn't
need to buy billboards or TV ads. So what did
they do? They just added a little tagline to
the bottom of every single email sent by a Hotmail
user. Oh, I remember this. Get your free email
at Hotmail. That's it. So simple. Clickable.
Every single time you sent an email to a friend
or a colleague, you were advertising Hotmail
to them. You became the salesperson. And because
it came from a friend, you trusted it more. It
wasn't spam. It wasn't a cold call. It was just
there, part of the message. Correct. And the
numbers, I mean, they're just staggering. In
18 months, they signed up 12 million users. 12
million in the late 90s. In the late 90s, Internet,
that's basically the entire population of the
web at the time. At its peak, they were getting
270 ,000 new accounts a day. That's just wild.
And the cost to acquire each new customer must
have been, I mean, pennies. Almost zero. That
is the virus at work. The users are the carriers.
Every single email sent was like a sneeze just
spreading the infection to a new person. Okay,
that analogy is a little gross, but it's very
accurate. So if that's the mechanism. Using people
to carry the message for you, we have to ask
the bigger question, why? Why do we do it? What
is happening in our lizard brains that makes
us click share? And this is where we get into
the psychology of it all, which is, to me, the
most fascinating part. There's actually a biological
component to this. It's not just a social habit.
It's physiological. Biological. You mean like
a physical reaction in your body? Yes. There's
a concept called frisson. Frisson. Okay, that's
a fancy word. It sounds French. Break that down
for us. It is French. It means shiver. It's that
primitive feeling of excitement. You know, the
chills, your heart rate increases. You get that
full body shiver. Professor Brent Coker from
the University of Melbourne describes it as a
primitive response that immerses the viewer on
a much deeper level. Is that like ASMR or that
feeling you get when you hear a really great
key change in a song or when the beat drops in
a dance track? That's exactly it. Or the jump
scare in a horror movie. Or seeing an incredible
athlete do something that seems impossible. It's
a moment of high arousal and viral marketing
taps directly into that. How so? If a piece of
content can trigger that physical response, that
little jolt of adrenaline or awe, you are so
much more likely to share it. It completely bypasses
your logical brain and hits you right in the
emotional core. So it's almost like the content
is hacking our nervous system. Yeah. It creates
a feeling and then we want someone else to feel
it too. I felt this. Now you need to feel this.
In a way, yes. We share to process the emotion.
We want someone else to validate that feeling
we just had. And to break down exactly how to
hack that system, we have to look at the work
of Jonah Berger. He's a professor at the Wharton
School, wrote a book called Contagious, and he
developed a model called STEPPS. STEPPS. S -T
-E -P -S. An acronym. An acronym for the six
key drivers of virality. Okay, let's unpack STEPPS.
What's the first S? The first S is for social
currency. And this basically asks one question.
Does sharing this make me look good? Ah, the
vanity metric. Look how smart I am. Look how
funny I am. Look how cool I am. It is vanity,
but it's also about status. We share things that
make us look like insiders. If I share a secret
menu item at a cool restaurant or a bit of breaking
news before anyone else has seen it, I gain social
currency. I'm the person who knows the cool thing.
I have value to my tribe because I have valuable
information. Right. Look at me. I'm a tastemaker.
It feeds the ego. If I share a hilarious meme,
I get the credit for being funny, even though
I didn't actually make it. Exactly. You're curating
your own identity. Okay, so next up is T. T is
for? Triggers. This is all about being top of
mind. As Berger puts it, top of mind means tip
of tongue. Okay, give me an example of a trigger.
Peanut butter. Jelly. Exactly. You didn't even
have to think about it. Peanut butter is a trigger
for jelly. If your product can be linked to a
common environmental trigger, people will think
of it more often and they'll talk about it more
often. Think about the classic Kit Kat and coffee
campaign. Oh, right. Have a break. Have a Kit
Kat. Precisely. They linked their candy bar to
the very concept of taking a break or having
a cup of coffee. So now every time you take a
coffee break, your brain quietly whispers Kit
Kat in the background. You don't even realize
it's happening. The environment itself is advertising
the product to you. That is. incredibly manipulative
and also brilliant so you want to attach your
brand to something people already do every single
day yes if you can attach your brand to waking
up or lunch time or even rainy days you win okay
next is e e has to be for emotion emotion and
this is a huge one the key phrase here is when
people care they share But, and this is important,
not all emotions are created equal in the sharing
economy. What do you mean? Berger found that
high arousal emotions work best. And interestingly,
positive emotions like joy, happiness, awe, excitement,
they tend to share much better than negative
ones. That's actually kind of comforting that
we prefer spreading joy over misery. Generally.
Generally, yeah. Now, high arousal negative emotions
like anger or anxiety can work too. Think about
political outrage or content that makes you furious
that stuff spreads like wildfire. But sadness,
not so much. Why not sadness? Sadness is a low
arousal emotion. It makes you want to withdraw,
curl up in a blanket, and be alone. It doesn't
make you want to jump on Facebook and tell everyone.
That makes total sense. Sad ads just make me
want to change the channel. Or look away. I don't
immediately run to tell my friends about the
sad puppy commercial. You mute it. Exactly. OK,
so we have S -T -E. Now, the first P. First P.
Public. This is the idea that imitation requires
visibility. The easier something is to see, the
more likely people are to imitate it. The perfect
example is the white Apple iPod headphones from
the early 2000s. Oh, iconic. Yeah. You knew someone
had an iPod just from the white cords, even if
the actual device was deep in their pocket. Exactly.
Most headphones back then were black. By making
them white, Apple made the private act of listening
to music a public statement. They turned every
single user into a walking billboard for their
product. If your product is invisible, it can't
go viral. You have to find a way to make the
private public. So if I have a great software
product but nobody can see me using it, it just
dies. Basically, yeah. Okay, second P. Second
P. Practical value. Is it actually useful? People
love to help other people. If you send me a link
to an article on top 10 ways to save money on
your taxes or a video on how to peel garlic in
10 seconds, I'm very likely to share that because
I want to be helpful to my friends. That one
ties back into social currency a bit, doesn't
it? Being the helpful friend is a status thing.
They absolutely overlap. Look how useful this
information is that I found for you. It makes
me look like a good, valuable resource. And finally.
The last S stories. The narrative. The Trojan
horse. You don't just share a fact. You share
a story that carries the message inside it. Facts
are boring. Stories are sticky. The story of
the Grimace Shake isn't McDonald's has a new
purple drink. The story is this drink is killing
people in hilarious ways. The product is just
along for the ride inside that narrative. So
if you can hit all of those, social currency,
triggers, emotion, public. practical value in
stories, you've got yourself a viral hit. You've
got much, much higher probability of one. But
there's another layer to the psychology here,
which is this idea of social proof and psychological
safety. Safety. Like, I feel safe sharing this.
I'm not going to get canceled for it. Sort of,
yeah. Researchers Fernandez and Sega found something
really interesting. They found that consumers
don't really care that much about product features.
They care about emotional experiences. And when
we see lots of other people engaging with content,
it creates what they call a snowball effect.
Monkey see, monkey do. Pretty much. It validates
our own behavior. It reduces the perceived risk
of joining in. If everyone else is doing the
brim -a -shake trend. I feel safe doing it, too.
I won't look stupid. I look like I'm part of
the group if I'm the only person doing it. You
look insane. You look totally insane. It's just
a fundamental human need for belonging. We just
want to belong. We don't want to be the weirdo
standing all alone. We really do. And that deep
need for belonging is an incredibly powerful
engine for marketing. It drives the whole challenge
culture we see on TikTok. Everyone doing the
same dance is just a mass signal of. I belong
to this group right now. Okay, so we know the
history. We've got the psychology down. Now let's
get into the nuts and bolts, the actual mechanics.
How do you build the machine? If I have a product,
I can't just cross my fingers and hope for a
free song. No, you can't. I can't just hope people
start hallucinating purple monsters when they
drink my smoothie. No, you need a strategy. And
Kaplan and Heinlein, two marketing professors,
they break it down into three basic criteria.
If you want viral marketing to work, you need...
The right messenger, the right message, and the
right environment. Let's start with the messenger.
It's not just about getting anyone to share it,
right? My grandma sharing my post is very nice
of her. She's very sweet. But it's probably not
going to break the internet. No offense to your
grandma, but probably not. Unless your grandma
was Betty White. rest her soul you need specific
types of connectors and this draws really heavily
on malcolm gladwell's work in the tipping point
they identify three main types of messengers
first you have the market mavens the mavens okay
so these are the experts The nerds. They are
the information specialists. They have their
finger on the pulse of the market. They're the
ones who read the trade journals. They know all
the specs. They are the first to know about the
new gadget or the hot new band. They're the ones
who transmit the message to their immediate niche
network. They actually read the ingredients label.
Okay. But they usually have pretty small niche
circles. So who spreads it next? Then you get
the social hubs. These are the connectors. These
are the people with thousands of friends. They
bridge the gap between all these different subcultures.
They know the surfers and they know the bankers
and they know the artists. They take what the
maven found and they broadcast it far and wide.
So the maven says, hey, this thing is good. And
the hub says, hey, everyone, look at this thing.
Exactly. And then you have the third type. The
salespeople. The salespeople. These are the amplifiers.
They are the ones who make the message persuasive.
They explain why it matters. They're the charismatic
ones who convince you that you need it. So the
maven finds it, the salesperson hypes it up,
and the hub spreads it out. It's like a little
relay race. You need all three legs of that race
to actually win. Exactly. If you just have the
hub, they might be spreading bad information.
If you just have the maven, nobody hears about
it. Then, of course, you have the message. It
has to be memorable, and it needs to have a must
-see. element. It needs to be interesting enough
to be passed on. And finally, the environment.
Context and timing. Small environmental changes
can yield huge results. If Oreo had tweeted their
famous dunk in the dark tweet two days after
the Super Bowl blackout, nobody would have cared.
And we will get to that Oreo story in detail
later. But the point is, the environment was
the blackout itself. Yes. They capitalized on
that specific moment. Timing is absolutely everything.
You cannot force a viral moment to happen in
a dead environment. And to get even more granular
with this, there's a framework called the seven
eyes by Piriwatt and Tripopsicle. That's a lot
of eyes. It is a lot of eyes, but they are really
comprehensive. Let's just run through them quickly
because they show how much nuance there really
is here. Okay. All right. First up. Invisibility.
Invisibility. That sounds really counterintuitive
for marketing. Don't you want to be visible?
Well, ideally, it shouldn't feel like an ad.
The more distant it feels from traditional advertising,
the more likely people are to trust it and share
it. If it screams, buy me now, people just tune
out. It needs to fly under the radar as pure
entertainment. Ah, so it's masking its true nature.
A bit sneaky. Exactly. Next is identity. It has
to match the sharer's desired self -image. Yeah.
Again, this goes back to social currency. Does
sharing this fit the person I want to be online?
Right. Makes sense. Then innovation. It has to
surprise or use humor. It has to deviate from
the norm. It has to be weird, like the purple
goo. Yeah, if it's normal, it's just invisible
in the bad way. Insight. This one's interesting.
It has to confirm the viewer's emotions. It needs
to elicit a feeling that makes the viewer go,
yes, that is exactly how I feel. Relatability.
It's funny because it's true feeling. Exactly.
Then instantaneity. We talked about this. Tying
into current trends. Timeliness. Being in the
moment. Yeah, the Oreo tweet. Integration. This
one is super important for the business side.
It has to feed consumers into other marketing
avenues. You don't just want views on TikTok.
You want engagement that leads somewhere else.
A follow. A click. Don't just get the click,
get the customer. And finally, interactivity,
closing that gap between the brand and the viewer.
It needs to feel like a dialogue, not a monologue.
You know, that interactivity piece feels like
the thing that has changed the most in recent
years, because now we're not just talking about
companies talking to people. We're talking about
people talking to people. We're talking about
the influencer economy. Oh, this is a massive
shift. I mean, the data is clear. people prefer
interacting with humans over interacting with
logos. Well, yeah, that makes sense. I'd much
rather have a conversation with a person than
with a corporate signboard. A logo doesn't have
feelings. A logo doesn't have a skincare routine
I can copy. Exactly. And something like 69 %
of marketing departments are now working with
celebrities or influencers. But the very definition
of celebrity has completely changed. It's not
just movie stars and athletes anymore. Not at
all. We're seeing this huge shift away from traditional
celebs, actors, singers, and towards social media
stars. People like the YouTuber Zoella or the
Instagrammer Amy Song. So why the shift? Is it
just because they're cheaper to hire than, say,
Brad Pitt? Cost is definitely part of it, for
sure. But trust is the much bigger factor. It's
that whole... parasocial relationship thing.
You feel like you know them because you see them
in their bedroom. You see them without makeup
on. You see them walking their dog. It feels
authentic. And that value exchange is huge on
all sides. For companies, they get instant high
credibility. Look at Coca -Cola's Share a Coke
campaign. Oh, yeah, where they put all the names
on the bottles. Yes. That single campaign. totally
changed the perception of Coke among millennials.
Before that, Coke was seen as a parent's drink.
It was what your dad drank at a barbecue. By
making it personal and shareable, they increased
sales by 11 % and their market share by 1 .6%.
Just by letting people find their own name on
a bottle, it personalized a completely mass -produced
product. And for the influencers, it is huge
business. Amy Song was reportedly earning $500
,000 a month with Laura Mercier. Wait, wait,
back up. Half a million dollars a month. That
was the report. Yes. OK, I am definitely in the
wrong line of work. I need to start posting some
outfit of the day pictures immediately. It's
incredibly lucrative. And for us, the consumers,
influencers help solve the paradox of choice.
We are just overwhelmed with options for everything.
There are a thousand types of face cream. There
are a million video games to play. Decision fatigue
is real. It is. And influencers act as filters.
We outsource our decision making to them to reduce
that fatigue and the perceived risk. It's like,
well, if Amy's song likes it, it must be good.
It's a mental shortcut for our brains. I trust
her, so I'll trust the product. It just reduces
the cognitive load of having to shop. Precisely.
We're lazy and influencers do the homework for
us. All right. Let's get into the Hall of Fame.
We've mentioned a few of these already, but I
want to really dive into some of the absolute
best, most legendary examples of viral marketing.
The ones that really set the standard. You mentioned
Hotmail earlier, but let's talk about Dollar
Shave Club. Oh, a total classic. 2012. This video
is legendary in marketing circles. I remember
this video so vividly. The founder, Michael Dubin,
just walking through this warehouse. It was so
funny, so irreverent. He's hacking through packing
tape with a machete. There's a guy in a bear
suit dancing in the background. missing a putt
on a putting green. And it was so cheap. That
video cost only $4 ,500 to make. $4 ,500. That
is nothing in advertising budget terms. You can't
even buy a catered lunch for a big ad agency
for that kind of money. It's pocket change. Yeah.
But the result, 12 ,000 signups in the first
48 hours. By 2015, that video had 21 million
views. And eventually, Unilever bought the company
for a billion dollars. From a forty five hundred
dollar video to a billion dollar acquisition,
that is the definition of leverage. So why did
it work so well? Humor and that out of nowhere
quality was innovative. It didn't look or feel
like a razor commercial. Usually razor commercials
are these slow motion shots of water splashing
on a perfectly chiseled face with futuristic
graphics of blades cutting hairs. And a deep,
serious voice saying the closest shave ever.
Right. This is just a funny guy making jokes
in a dusty warehouse. It completely broke the
pattern. It felt authentic. It felt like a real
person talking to you, not a corporation. It
respected your intelligence by making you laugh
instead of just shouting features at you. Then
we have the Oreo power outage that we touched
on earlier. Super Bowl 2013. Okay, set the scene
for us. It is the Super Bowl. The Baltimore Ravens
versus the San Francisco 49ers. It is the biggest
advertising stage in the entire world. Companies
are paying millions of dollars for a 30 -second
TV spot. And then suddenly, the power goes out
at the Mercedes -Benz Stadium. The lights just
go down. The game stops for 34 minutes. Everyone
is freaking out. The broadcasters are scrambling
to fill time. The players are just on the field
stretching. And Oreo's social media team is ready.
They had what they called a war room set up,
a whole team of copywriters and artists ready
to react to the game in real time. And within
minutes of the blackout, they tweet an image.
What was it? It was a single Oreo cookie. lit
by a spotlight in the dark with the simple caption,
you can still dunk in the dark. Newsjacking.
That's the term for it. They hijacked the entire
news cycle and it proved that instantaneity and
cleverness can beat a high budget plan any day
of the week. While other brands were just waiting
for their $5 million TV spots to air, Oreo won
the entire night with a tweet that cost them
$0 to post. And it was retweeted, what, 15 ,000
times almost instantly? It became the story of
the Super Bowl that year, more than the game
itself. And then there's the one that's become
an annual tradition. It's practically a holiday
at this point. Spotify -wrapped. This is just
a data masterpiece. Every year, usually late
November or early December, Spotify releases
this compilation of your personal listening.
Yeah, you listened to this song 400 times this
year. You are in the top 0 .01 % of listeners
for this artist. And people go nuts for it. In
2021, 120 million users accessed their apps.
So why do we love sharing our data so much in
this one instance? Usually, we're terrified of
big tech tracking us. We put tape over our webcams.
We install ad blockers. But for Spotify, we literally
post our own surveillance data on Instagram for
the whole world to see. Because Spotify brilliantly
turns that data. into social currency they take
your listening habits they turn them into a colorful
shareable badge of identity look how cool and
unique my taste is or on the other side look
how embarrassing my taste is isn't that funny
it allows users to define themselves publicly
it's the ultimate ego boost or ego check i am
a sad girl pop listener or i am a viking metal
enthusiast And it's so brilliant because the
users are doing all the advertising. Every single
Instagram story with a Spotify -wrapped graphic
is a free ad for Spotify. And it triggers massive
FOMO fear of missing out. Right. If you use Apple
Music or Amazon Music, you don't get wrapped.
You feel left out of the conversation. You feel
like you're not part of the cultural moment.
It's so powerful. It makes the product incredibly
sticky. Okay, I want to talk about one that's
a bit weirder, a bit more niche. The Ghostface
real estate listing. This one just cracked me
up when I read about it. This is such a great
example of local viral marketing. This was back
in 2019 in Lansing, Michigan. A realtor decides
to get a little creative with a listing. A realtor
named James Pyle is trying to sell this century
-old home. It's a nice house, but the market's
a bit slow. He wants to do something fun for
the Halloween season, so he hires a photographer
to take pictures of him dressed as Ghostface.
The killer from the Scream movies. In the actual
real estate listing photos. In the actual listing
photos. But he's not, you know, killing anyone.
He's just doing chores around the house. He's
raking leaves in the backyard. He's carving pumpkins
in the kitchen. He's peeking out from behind
the curtains. In one, he's holding a sold sign.
That is absolutely hilarious. Sir Gull was pretty
modest. He told reporters he was hoping for maybe
a thousand views. A normal listing in his area
gets under 150. And what happened? It goes up
on Zillow and Realtor .com. And within a few
days, it had over 1 million views. A million
views for a house listing in Lansing, Michigan.
It was trending on Facebook. It got picked up
by national news networks, Good Morning America,
Fox News. The combined views exceeded 5 million
in just five days. Okay, but did the house actually
sell? It sold in four days. Or a cash offer.
It became so popular they had to cancel the open
house because too many people were showing up
just to see the ghost face house. So he took
something incredibly boring, a house listing,
and he just injected innovation and humor into
it. He added an identity element, that fun, spooky
season vibe, and he made it incredibly public
and shareable. It just ticks all the boxes. He
took a commodity and he turned it into a story.
It's not always a success story like that, is
it? Sometimes you open that Pandora's box and
something pretty nasty comes out. Viral marketing
is incredibly risky. Once you release the virus,
you lose all control of it. You cannot dictate
how the host body, the public, is going to react
to it. Let's talk about the Blendtec example.
The Will It Blend series. This is a fascinating
case of viral butt. Blendtec released these videos
of their high -powered blender just destroying
everything. Marbles, iPhones, glow sticks, garden
rakes. Oh, I remember these. The host, Tom Dixon,
in his little white lab coat. Don't breathe this
smoke. The videos went massively viral, millions
and millions of views. They were super entertaining.
But when they actually analyzed the audience,
they found it was largely teenage boys who just
thought destruction was funny. And teenage boys
do not buy $500 blenders. They buy video games
and pizza rolls. Exactly. They were not the target
market. So you had all this noise, all this brand
awareness. But was it actually converting to
sales effectively? Or was it just free entertainment?
Virality without the right audience is just noise.
It's a vanity metric. That's the targeting trap.
Being famous isn't the same thing as being profitable.
And then there's the risk of negative word of
mouth. This is when people realize they're being
played, right? Yes. The stealth marketing backlash.
When people realize they are being marketed to
without their knowledge, they feel deceived.
The term viral marketing can actually become
a pejorative, a bad word. If I find out that
a funny viral video I loved was actually just
a secret ad for a car insurance company, I feel
betrayed. Yeah, we don't like feeling like we're
puppets. No. And there's also a structural risk.
A researcher named Duncan Watts did this work,
showing that influence chains are actually really
fragile. If a key influencer, that social hub
we were talking about, refuses to pass the message
along, the whole chain just breaks. It dies right
there. So you're essentially betting. your entire
campaign on these specific nodes in the network
saying yes. And sometimes you just get regional
mismatches. A video goes viral in a country where
you don't even sell the product. You've just
created a massive amount of demand that you have
absolutely no way to fulfill. And that just creates
frustration, not profit. Imagine 10 ,000 people
wanting your product in Brazil and you only ship
to Ohio. It's a real double -edged sword. When
it cuts the right way, you get 12 million users
in 18 months. When it cuts the wrong way, you
just get angry customers or a bunch of teenagers
laughing at your expensive blender. Precisely.
It requires this incredibly delicate balance
of psychology and mechanics and content. It's
not something you can just make happen. You can
only optimize the conditions for it. You can
build the pile of wood and pour the gasoline,
but you can't always control the spark. So what
does this all mean for us? You know, people just
scrolling through the feeds. We're not marketing
directors. We're just the people clicking like
and share. I think it means we just need to be
more aware. We need to understand that when we
feel that frisson, that jolt of excitement to
share something, we are often responding to a
very carefully engineered trigger. We're not
just acting on impulse. We're acting on design.
We are the unpaid employees for the brands we
love. We are. We are the distribution network.
We are the trucks delivering the goods to the
next town. But we're the ones paying for the
gas. So as we wrap up this deep dive into the
infection of ideas, I kind of want to leave you
with a final thought. We talked about those seven
I's. And one of the most important ones was invisibility.
The idea that the best marketing doesn't look
like marketing at all. That's the ultimate goal
for these campaigns. So as marketing gets better
and better at being invisible, at blending seamlessly
into our memes, our funny videos, our heartfelt
stories, how much of our daily culture is actually
just a commercial in disguise? That is the question,
isn't it? Are we sharing stories because they
genuinely matter to us or are we just helping
someone sell a milkshake? Something to think
about the next time you hit that share button.
Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll catch you
on the next wave.