Top Five Creative Viral Campaigns

Here are my top 5 viral campaigns that have generated significant word of mouth exposure for their brands due to being highly creative.

Kit Kat And Jesus 

Probably one of the most creative viral campaigns that ticks all the boxes.  

In 2009 there were three separate sightings of Jesus that occurred throughout Europe. Kit Kat picked up on this and planned to leverage this phenomenon by planning their own Jesus sighting.  A day before Easter in 2010 Kit Kat sent an email to the two largest Dutch news sites from a fictitious person, who claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in his Kit Kat, after taking a bite. As proof of his story he attached two pictures. The Dutch news site published the story immediately. After four days more than 150.000 sites published the story.  This then promoted a wave of word of mouth social media comments that promoted the brand, such as’ ‘have a break, have a Jesus Kit Kat’, even JC needs a break’.

Oreo At The Super Bowl 

Oreo's social media team worked quickly during the third quarter of the 2013 Super Bowl when a power outage at the Raven’s versus 49ers game at the Superdome caused the lights to go out for 34minutes. 

Wasting no time and thinking creatively they jumped into action and tweeted an ad with this caption “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark?"

Since then, it’s been retweeted more than 14,000 times and Facebook has received more than 20,000 likes. This a hugely powerful bit of marketing not only because of the brand equity it built, but because it occurred during the advertising industry’s most expensive day – all for free. 

Lipton Milk Tea And Chinese New Year

This campaign is a great example of what happens with something goes viral in China.  In  2010 to celebrate Chinese New Year, AKQA and Lipton Milk Tea created a viral campaign that they launched on China’s biggest IM and social networking site QQ.

The campaign featured a website where people would select one of three videos (shot in first person) they were able to personalise their selected video and then send to a friend along with adding a special Chinese New Year greeting. The message was received in a red box which made is even more special when the recipient opened the online message.  When opened the box revealed a hot steaming cup of Lipton Milk Tea that then revealed a special message. The results were enormous with over 100 million people sending or watching the videos.  Shows what you can do with a bit of creativity and deep customer insight!

Vail Ski Resort And EpicMix

Vail Resort wanted to combine the outdoor lifestyle experience of skiing with social networking.  They did this through launching EpicMix, a one-of-a-kind online and mobile app that connected skiers with their friends and family on the mountain, allowing them to share stories, pictures and their achievements while they were out for the day skiing.

EpicMix enabled to generate strong word of mouth for Vail Resort in three ways. RFID technology embedded into the season passes and lift passes allowed passive check-ins so riders could learn about their skiing travels, i.e.  how many vertical feet they travelled, how far and where they actually travelled. Second, by allowing riders to earn 'pins' for a variety of achievements, EpicMix became a game that motivated and challenged riders in a fun and interactive way. Finally EpicMix being a free web and mobile application enabled riders to share their days experiences and photos easily.  Users could log on or use a smartphone to access their account, see their status, add friends from Facebook, create an EpicMix family, send messages and see where friends or family was on the mountain.

EpicMix went live in December 2010 and since then over 100,000 guests have activated an account.  As well EpicMix has generated more than 35million social impressions.

Age-o-matic campaign

Online games work to build strong brand impressions. The Age-o-matic campaign was created by CareerBuilder to show people how staying in the wrong job would age them.  They created a clever tool called ‘The Age-o-Matic” and launched it virally - targeting people who hated their jobs. 

The Age-o-matic online game invited people to upload a photo and then asked them to answer a number of questions to highlight how much they hated their job.  The Age-o-matic aged the picture to show how that person would look if they stayed in their job.

The online game cost US$200,000 to build and nothing to promote it as it was promoted all through word of mouth online activity.  It garnered 50 million media impressions in one month and enjoyed 2 million unique visitors, who spend 4 minutes on average with the tool.

Coming next

How to avoid negative word of mouth