The secret to making your marketing go viral

We’re about three minutes into an interview on social media, and, specifically, how to create a viral marketing campaign, and Robert Palmer and Corey Evans are already laughing.

“I’m sorry,” says Palmer, spokesman for Calgary-based WestJet Airlines. “You’ve called it a campaign three times now, but it isn’t a campaign. It was never intended to be a campaign. The viral nature of it has given everyone the impression that it was.”

The “it”, in this case, is WestJet’s wildly successful Christmas Miracle video. You know the one where weary passengers travelling from Toronto and Hamilton tell a virtual Santa installed at the airport what they want for Christmas and then find themselves treated to very gifts they asked for (everything from flat screen TVs to a pair of socks) after landing in Calgary.

Hands up who’s seen it. The better question might be, ‘Who hasn’t?’

The Christmas Miracle launched on YouTube Dec. 9 and immediately went viral. To date, it’s garnered more than 35 million views world-wide and was hands-down the most-watched and shared viral marketing video in Canada last year though it had less than a month to make the list.

Evans, Westjet’s manager of sponsorship and community investment and among the creative team behind the video, has since often been asked to share the “secret sauce”, as he calls it, that will guarantee viral success.

He says it boils down to a few key ingredients: a good story that is well-told, well-executed and, above all, authentic.

Of course, if it was that simple, everyone would do it.

Finding the magic – that perfect storm of whimsy or wistfulness that prompts viewers to want to watch and share a marketing video – is a little harder to manufacture

“You’ve got to be looked as interesting or fun, something that will provide value to your friends,” says Aaron Starkman, a partner and creative director at Rethink, the Toronto-based marketing agency behind Molson Canadian’s return to relevance among a generation of hipster craft-beer devotees.

“It has got to compete with Jimmy Kimmel doing jokes on Rob Ford … and if we don’t give you the ammunition to do that, it won`t happen.”

Molson’s  “Beer Fridge” and “The Canadians” both found their way into the country’s top five viral ads of 2013 based on the number of shares and views they earned on social media.  A third installment in the campaign, Molson Indonesia, is already well set to ride that same wave of popularity into 2014. The video (which, according to Starkman “cost almost nothing to do”) has garnered more than 5.5-million views and is expected to climb well into the double-digits.

The campaign plays off our powerful sense of Canadian pride and a world-class reputation for partying hard.

The ads all follow Rethink’s basic winning recipe in that they merge a brand with an event or idea being talked about in the world, whether on the news, on a blog or on Twitter. 

“And then,” says Starkman, “you try and do something fucking amazing.”

In the instance of WestJet’s Christmas Miracle, which was shot in real time with the help of production company Studio M, the amazing part is easy to identify but hard to pull off: there was no script and the emotions captured on video by both passengers and staff sound and feel disarmingly genuine.

“I find a lot of people set out to make a video to make it go viral. We set out to make a great experience, then that video went viral,” says Evans. “And at no point in any of our planning did we ever sit around and say, ‘We are going to make this video and more people will book WestJet’.”

What is clear is that the company managed to reach a global audience in a way most can only dream of.

“We heard so many people say, `That`s WestJet` and that told us that we had hit the mark,” says Palmer, summing up his final piece of advice.

“It has got to be real. You can’t create and experience that is not a reflection of your culture and hope that anyone is going to look at it and not see through it. It can`t be fake.”