5 Best Viral Marketing Campaigns Of 2014

Check out which viral sen­sa­tions got con­sumers shar­ing and talk­ing in 2014.

Danny Goodwin By Danny Goodwin from Momentology. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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.

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?

Danny Goodwin

Written by Danny Goodwin

Managing Editor, Momentology

Danny Goodwin is the former Managing Editor of Momentology. Previously, he was the editor of Search Engine Watch, where he was in charge of editing, content strategy, and writing about search industry news.

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