Case Study: Going Viral With Stride Gum
Now that I have digested the wealth of information offered to me while attending the Affiliate Summit East in New York City, one particular video mentioned by keynote speaker Peter Shankman has stood out; the mention of Stride Chewing Gum’s viral marketing initiative. Large corporations pay millions to develop marketing campaigns that they hope will go viral, for the sole intention of making a particular piece of media go viral (with their brand name splattered across the entire campaign). Often the yield on the initiatives launched by most large corporations is not nearly equal to the cost of promoting the campaign.
Stride took a different approach to making their marketing campaign go viral. Peter Shankman said, “You can make something viral, but you can make something good.” That’s exactly what Stride did, instead of focusing on making the actual content go viral, they focused on producing really unique and interesting video content. Especially today, us humans love to share great things we find online; the people working for Stride knew this. So, Stride searched for a unique and inspirational video channel on YoutTube, figuring that YouTube is one of the most common launching platform for viral content. The result was choosing Matt Harding to travel, film, produce, and most importantly dance, all around the world with all types of people. Matt was chosen for his previous dancing video, and took the offer up from Stride, who allowed him to fulfill his dancing potential all around the world.
The production cost to Stride was minimal, simply covering all of Matt’s expenses while filming. The entire process took 14 months, from filming to publshing. Nearly 14 months later, the video has accumulated 23,000,000 views. Notice that Stride only reserved a small portion of advertising in the final seconds of the video, this was key to maintaining “good” content. In short, this viral video practically turned Stride into a popular gum choice for people across the globe very shortly.
If you haven’t already seen Matt dancing in “Where the Hell is Matt (2008)”, then I highly suggest you check it out. The movie is incredible, simply one of the best videos I have ever seen on the web-
