Celebri­ty self­ies, inti­mate strangers, and an unpre­dictable pen­chant for get­ting wet set new records for viral view­ing and shar­ing in 2014.

You can’t plan on hit­ting the viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign jack­pot, but you can hope to imple­ment some of its hall­marks. Take a look at the viral sen­sa­tions of 2014 – from a tweet heard round the world to a chain reac­tion that left every­one all wet, in a good way.

1. Samsung Values Ellen’s Oscar Selfie At $1 Billion

In March we saw the most retweet­ed tweet of all time. This tweet cap­tured all the cov­et­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics of viral social media: a celebri­ty tweet­er, the who’s-who of Hol­ly­wood celebri­ty pho­to, tied into a main­stream TV broad­cast, backed by big brand mar­ket­ing dol­lars.

The val­ue of Sam­sung’s celebri­ty-packed self­ie (and stealth prod­uct place­ment) snapped on stage at the Oscar’s by award show host Ellen DeGeneres was cal­cu­lat­ed to have been worth $1 bil­lion in ad dol­lars for the phone man­u­fac­tur­er, AdWeek reports. The pho­to was part of the cam­paign to adver­tise Sam­sung’s Galaxy Note 3.

If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best pho­to ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap — Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

The tweet was post­ed on March 2, and accord­ing to Mash­able, two days lat­er, it had 3.2 mil­lion retweets and near­ly 14,000 web pages had embed­ded the tweet, which at that time had been seen 32.8 mil­lion times.

The self­ie was orig­i­nal­ly planned as Ellen snap­ping a pic of her­self and Meryl Streep. But Sam­sung’s pol­i­cy is to stay flex­i­ble in its ad shoots with celebri­ties, find­ing that the will­ing­ness to give up some con­trol can deliv­er greater rewards, accord­ing to AdWeek. Mis­sion accom­plished!

2. When Strangers Kiss On Camera, The Video Goes Viral

In March, WREN Stu­dio’s “First Kiss” short film became the most viewed fash­ion film ever. It was­n’t imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent to view­ers stum­bling across the video on social media that it was an adver­tise­ment for clothes, or that the strangers were pro­fes­sion­al per­form­ers, actors, mod­els and musi­cians. But all those ele­ments almost cer­tain­ly helped.

The film’s direc­tor Tatia Pilie­va wrote about the back­sto­ry to the film on the Huff­in­g­ton Post. About the speed with which the unex­pect­ed viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign took off, she said:

“In the first hours, the film had a cou­ple hun­dred views. Melis­sa and I were hap­py that our friends and the kissers liked it. By lunchtime, we had about 30,000 views and by the time I was going to bed it had reached close to 600,000 and made the front page of Red­dit. The fol­low­ing morn­ing it had 5 mil­lion views and I was inter­viewed over Skype live on CNN.”

To date, the video has near­ly 100,000 views on YouTube.

3. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Warms America’s Heart

For sev­er­al weeks this sum­mer, dump­ing a buck­et of ice water over your head in the name of char­i­ty became the thing to do, and brands quick­ly got involved. The first Ice Buck­et Chal­lenge video ben­e­fit­ing the ALS Asso­ci­a­tion was post­ed July 15. A TIME Mag­a­zine arti­cle chron­i­cling the rise of this sum­mer’s run­away Ice Buck­et chal­lenge indi­cat­ed that the “ALS Asso­ci­a­tion says it start­ed see­ing an unex­plained uptick in dona­tions on July 29, and on Aug. 4, it was clear some­thing was real­ly tak­ing off.”

By Sep­tem­ber, Entre­pre­neur report­ed $100 mil­lion in dona­tions to ALS relat­ed char­i­ty orga­ni­za­tions, com­pared to $2.5 mil­lion dur­ing the same peri­od a year ear­li­er.

Mash­able has a col­lec­tion of 60 celebri­ty #Ice­Buck­etChal­lenge videos, from Oprah to Justin Tim­ber­lake to Steven Spiel­berg, and celebri­ty involve­ment in the event def­i­nite­ly played a role in its main­stream vis­i­bil­i­ty. Not on the list but a per­son­al favorite, Patrick Stew­art’s classy inter­pre­ta­tion of the Ice Buck­et Chal­lenge:

4. Greeting Card Company Says Moms Have #WorldsToughestJob

Hon­or­ing moth­ers as title hold­ers for the #World­sTought­estJob, card man­u­fac­tur­er Amer­i­can Greet­ings took out news­pa­per and online ads for fake job open­ings for a direc­tor of oper­a­tions with expe­ri­ence in solv­ing with “sticky sit­u­a­tions.” A video post­ed in April got 18 mil­lion views, and Mullen, the Boston ad agency behind the cam­paign, told the Boston Globe that Amer­i­can Greet­ings saw “sig­nif­i­cant year-over-year increas­es” in site traf­fic and card sales.

5. Humanitarian Crisis Hits Home With Powerful PSA

What if the con­flict in Syr­ia was hap­pen­ing in the UK? That was the sce­nario imag­ined in “Most Shock­ing Sec­ond a Day,” a video by Save the Chil­dren UK and film pro­duc­tion agency UNIT9. The hor­ror of civ­il war was brought home to view­ers in an art­ful and heart­break­ing 90-sec­ond video done in a sec­ond-a-day struc­ture, show­ing how one mid­dle-class girl’s life could fall apart in a sin­gle year, as has hap­pened for more than 5 mil­lion chil­dren in Syr­ia.

AdWeek reports the video went viral after pub­li­ca­tion on March 5, receiv­ing 21 mil­lion views in its first five days. Today the video has more than 43 mil­lion views on YouTube and has helped raise more than $100,000 for the cause.

Which viral mar­ket­ing cam­paigns from 2014 do you think were the best?