It’s the marketing story of the year:
A random guy, Nathan Apodaca, posts a Tik Tok video of himself riding a skateboard, lip-synching to a Fleetwood Mac song, “Dreams”, chugging from an Ocean Spray cranberry juice bottle.
The video goes viral. Millions of views. Next thing you know, downloads of “Dreams” are up 800%, and people making copycat videos of skateboarders drinking Ocean Spray give the latter literally millions of dollars of free advertising.
Then, naturally, the Ocean Spray brand team moves in and give Apodaca a free pickup truck filled to the brim with Ocean Spray products, video cameras rolling, hoping to continue on the good karma their new skateboarding friend had created for them.
It’s a nice win for Ocean Spray and their new skateboarding friend, but of course, it was random. Apodaca could’ve been drinking anything that day, it’s just that Ocean Spray lucked out.
That being said, the team at Ocean Spray saw the opportunity the viral created and jumped on it. They were “Viral Ready”, as it were.
And that’s the thing. Like the Internet itself, life is pretty random these days. So brands need to be “viral ready”, and making them so is a huge opportunity for agencies and the creative class in general. That’s our world now.
But there is one more thing to consider; when you are designing your organization’s culture, you don’t exactly know what will work, what will resonate more than something else, and it is perfectly okay to play until you land on those things that make people go ‘hell yeah’. People neglect the connection between societal culture and organizational culture when they are much the same.
PS. Yes, we know “Viral Ready” sounds like one of those awful marketing buzzwords. But, like the Brits say, “It does exactly what it says on the tin”.
