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Quickly, say aloud the first viral campaign that comes to your mind when reading this. Go!

Do you have one in mind? If so, which one did you think of and why?

Many successful viral campaigns are able to use effective placement and targeted humor to drive consumers to disseminate their work for them.

One example of an excellent viral campaign is Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” (MIMW). On April 16, 2007, Dos Equis launched the “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign to guide “premium beer and spirits drinkers in their quest to live more interesting lives, reinforced by the catchphrase: ‘Stay thirsty my friends.’” The most interesting man, played by Peter Gammons, is a figure that is meant to stand as a humorous reverential icon when consumers think of Dos Equis.

Location, location, location…

The campaign covers TV, print, interactive online, radio and event promotions. Videos and ads were posted on YouTube as well as a number of other sites with the intent of having consumers appreciate the humor and send it to one another. In addition to its humorousness, the videos are meant to drive consumers to the website via a URL on the end frame. Once on the website, visitors are welcomed into an appealing online community featuring games, amusing online web forms, an online competition for Dos Equis goodies, send-to-a-friend incentives and partner sponsorships. The site is very well put together, intriguing, and always remains within the vein of the tongue-in-cheek humor of the brand.

Arm Wrestling Mao Zedong on Dos Equis's Site

Humoring a Viral Icon

As mentioned above, the most successful viral campaigns try and tap into a community via humor or a special offer. Burger King, for example, has done a very good job with viral campaigns over the past several years as seen with the “angry whopper.” People will want to share your content if it happens to be cool, or if it can be of use to you or someone else. Dos Equis decided to make its iconic interesting man appeal to its audience via comedy, a-la the Chuck Norris jokes that have recently been a huge success. The campaign was able to identify the popularity of Norris-style humor and leverage it to craft their work. For example:

Most Interesting Man Line: His charm is so contagious, vaccines have been created for it.

Chuck Norris Line: When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he doesn’t push himself up, he pushes the world down.

As the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and the campaign was able to recognize and take advantage of an extremely popular comedic movement. Maybe Chuck Norris really does have super powers…

Good Placement and Humor Pack a Powerful Punch

Dos Equis was able to take an extremely popular form of humor, amend it to fit their particular brand, and through targeted placement get its users to send it around the web. The campaign has been extremely successful and according to market research by Millward Brown, the TV ad is in the top five percent of most enjoyable ads in U.S. research history, thus positioning the Most Interesting Man to become pop culture’s next brand-recognized advertising icon. The Dos Equis campaign has accomplished much, but there is always room for improvement.

In one of our recent postings, “8 Advantages and Disadvantages of being a YouTube Partner,” we discussed the advantages of Overlay Ads. After viewing the Dos Equis ads on YouTube, Dos Equis should evolve the campaign to take advantage of Overlay Ads to increase traffic to the website.

I admit to being such a big fan of this campaign, that I recently went out of my way to buy a couple Dos Equis six-packs to experiment… guilty as charged. I also wanted to add that, like Gammons, my blood smells like cologne too.