While we addressed going viral briefly in our social media strategy blog post a couple of months ago, the topic comes up a lot. So, we decided a deeper dive would be in order.
Going Viral is a Risky and Costly Strategy.
To be clear, this isn’t for content creators, personal brands, or solo professionals whose business depends entirely on reach. Their math is different.
We’re talking about B2B and B2C brands. Companies that need to drive sales, build pipeline, and grow predictably.
For those brands, virality is not a strategy. It’s a lottery ticket.
Viral Is Not a Low-Cost Growth Hack
Let’s start with the most common misconception. Going viral is not a low-cost growth hack.
But a lot of people we talk to about the subject still think it is. Make a video that hits. Watch it spread. Free reach, free awareness, free sales. Unfortunately, it’s like assuming fame and fortune is just a bus ride to Hollywood away.
Brands that commit to a viral-first strategy spend month after month making content that doesn’t hit. They burn agency hours, internal time, and creative budget cycling through formats, hooks, and trends, waiting for one of them to land. Those are just the hard costs.
Then there’s the soft cost. While time and money are spent chasing virality, the sales and learnings that could have been earned through paid media are being lost.
So a brand can spend a year trying to “crack” viral. They have a few decent posts and a folder full of misses. Meanwhile, we’ve seen sales lag, internal frustrations peak, and entire markets move on while the brand misses its moment.
You can’t plan to go viral.
You can study what tends to go viral. Humor. Emotion. Edu-tainment. Controversy. A well-timed take on a cultural moment. There are frameworks for what’s worked before.
None of them predict what works next.
Take McDonald’s. In February, their CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a 30-second Instagram video of himself trying the new Big Arch burger. He took a comically small bite. Called the burger a “product” four times. The internet roasted him. The clip pulled 4.5 million views. Burger King and Wendy’s piled on within days with videos of their own CEOs taking healthy bites of their burgers.
McDonald’s reported the Big Arch beat sales expectations. So viral worked, right?
Here’s the part that gets missed.
Kempczinski has been posting on Instagram since 2019. Most of his posts don’t go viral. The one that did, did because an Irish comedian named Garron Noone decided to roast it three weeks after it was posted. McDonald’s didn’t engineer the moment. They got handed one.
Sara Wilson, who runs digital strategy firm SW Projects, said it best to Axios: “Virality is a product of putting a lot of shots on goal.” Kempczinski had been showing up day after day, year after year. The “viral moment” was a byproduct of consistent work. Not the strategy itself.
One more thing. This is McDonald’s. $25B in US sales. The biggest paid media machine in QSR. They had the brand equity and the infrastructure to absorb a viral moment the second attention arrived.
Most brands don’t.
Or look at the most-referenced viral marketing moment in the last 15 years. Super Bowl XLVII, February 2013. A 34-minute power outage hit during the third quarter. Oreo’s social team, sitting in a war room they’d set up for the night, posted “You can still dunk in the dark” within minutes. It picked up 15,000 retweets in 24 hours and won a Silver and a Bronze Cannes Lion.
The numbers everyone cites:
- 525 million earned media impressions
- Instagram followers grew from 2,000 to 36,000
- 8,000 new Twitter followers
- Cannes Lions and Clio awards
- “One of the most successful and brilliant acts of branding” of that year’s Super Bowl (Digiday)
Now the part nobody cites.
Sales attribution was never proven. Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks asked Mondelez directly. The company couldn’t link the tweet to cookie sales. Oreo’s annual sales growth did jump from the low double digits to 20%+ around that period, but analysts attributed that to expansion into Asian markets. Not the tweet.
And it wasn’t free. Jerry Daykin worked at Mondelez at the time. He wrote a LinkedIn piece a few years later calling out the industry myth. His line: “Not only was it far from a free initiative (all together it was a substantial slice of the brand’s annual budget), it also didn’t really hijack the moment to mainstream audiences.”
The war room had reps from 360i, Wieden+Kennedy, Mediavest, and Weber Shandwick. Oreo was also a paid Super Bowl sponsor running a TV spot that night. The “free tweet” sat on top of millions in paid placement.
It also wasn’t really a viral strategy. Sarah Hofstetter, then CEO of 360i, told Digiday: “Oreo got the muscle memory because of Daily Twist, the campaign to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Oreo.” Daily Twist was a 100-day planned content campaign that ran in 2012. The “spontaneous” tweet was the byproduct of a year of disciplined content work and a heavily staffed real-time response capability.
Not a viral strategy. A brand strategy that produced a viral moment.
Even Oreo couldn’t replicate it. The following Super Bowl, Oreo announced they were “going dark.” They knew lightning wouldn’t strike twice.
And the mass-audience recognition? Overstated. Daykin again: “Go ask some random Americans on the streets, who don’t work in advertising, about the Dunk in the Dark tweet and you’ll be doing well to find anyone who knows what you’re talking about.”
It’s not targetable.
Even when something does go viral, the question becomes: viral with whom?
Going viral means your content gets pushed past your followers and into the broader feed. The algorithm decides who sees it. Not you.
That’s fine if you’re chasing reach for reach’s sake. It’s a problem if you sell a $400 enterprise software product, a regional grocery item, or anything that needs to land with a specific buyer. You can rack up six million views and not move a single customer.
And here’s the kicker.
A misaligned viral hit can actually make things worse.
When you pull in a flood of people who aren’t your audience, the algorithm reinterprets who your content is “for.” Your future posts get served to those new followers, who don’t engage. Engagement drops. Reach to your actual target shrinks.
So you don’t just fail to convert the viral moment. You may have just made every post after it perform worse.
It’s not scalable.
Quick test. Name the last brand whose viral video made you a repeat customer.
Most people can’t.
Even massive marketing monsters like Oreo and McDonald’s couldn’t scale their viral hits. The follow-up rarely lands. Viral content tends to be a moment, not a movement. Once the spike passes, every next post gets compared to it and underperforms. The internal pressure to “do it again” is exactly what produces forced, off-brand work.
A viral hit, when it happens, is a peak. Not a foundation.
You’re selling product. You’re not building the brand.
Most brands chasing viral are chasing sales. They pick topics and formats based on what might spike, not on what makes their brand recognizable over time.
It gets worse when creators are part of the plan. Creators bring their voice, their tone, their personality. That’s the whole reason they have an audience. So when a brand hands the content to a creator and crosses its fingers for virality, the post sounds like the creator. Not the brand.
The audience remembers the creator. They forget who paid for it. You sponsored someone else’s growth.
Real brand-building requires consistency. A point of view that shows up the same way across every channel, every campaign, every quarter. Virality rewards novelty. Brand-building rewards repetition. They pull in opposite directions.
Timing isn’t in your control.
Even when everything else lines up, the news cycle can erase your post overnight. A major story, a celebrity moment, a platform outage, any of those can swallow the feed and your video with it.
There’s no setting for “run my content when nothing else is happening.”
You don’t choose when or where your content lands. That’s the whole premise of organic.
You’re not learning.
So a funny post goes viral after 25 don’t. What did you learn from that one success and the other failures? You weren’t able to A/B test the creative, the targeting, the post copy, or the geography. So you don’t know what you should leverage moving forward. This is where a number of viral hits fail to find repeat successes.
If you’re putting ad dollars against content, you can test all of those elements. So, even when an ad underperforms, there are learnings from it that can be applied to the next round.
Bottom line.
We’re not saying virality is bad. If it happens to a brand we work with, we celebrate it, capture it, and look for ways to extend it.
We’re saying don’t make it the plan. Don’t make it the primary initiative. Don’t even make it the secondary one. Virality is an occasional outcome of doing good work. It’s not a growth strategy.
The brands that win on social build around what they can control. Targeting, message, frequency, creative testing, brand consistency. They use paid social to push the right message to the right audience. Organic to build community with the audience they already have. Creators to extend reach with credibility, not as a Hail Mary.
When a viral moment shows up in that mix, great. We’ll take it. But we’re not betting the business on a lottery ticket.
Is this disrupting your strategy? If so, let’s book a time and discuss.
0 Comments