Marketing campaigns are designed to help brands reach specific, measurable goals. While good campaigns increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversions, great campaigns go viral.
Leap Group takes pride as a marketing company that creates unique, innovative, and effective marketing campaigns for our clients. We are constantly inspired by successful campaigns that elevate brands, redefine industries and inject creativity into the world of marketing. Here are five of Leap Group’s favorite viral marketing campaigns and why we love them.
1
Despite their heavy metal image and branding, Liquid Death is a humble water company. The brand has made a name for itself by putting a fun, irreverent, and youthful spin on health and sustainability.
Liquid Death launched its “Murder Your Thirst” campaign to flip the health food industry on its head, reach new audiences, and make its sustainable water products more exciting and accessible. Any opportunity to create engaging, distinctive content for such an inspiring brand is a marketing company’s dream, and Leap Group has loved watching Liquid Death grow both their following and their profits into the millions.
Why we love it: This campaign is truly rule-breaking and inventive. It capitalizes on the fact that this brand understands its young audience and has built a legitimate fandom and obsession for their products, all while promoting social responsibility and sustainability.
Instead of remaining inside the traditional box of the health food industry, “Murder Your Thirst” subverts advertising norms and grabs consumers’ attention with a bold aesthetic: black tallboy beer cans proudly stamped with gold skulls have children, teens, and adults clamoring to join the water revolution.
With social media taglines like “Murder your thirst and potential hangover,” this campaign makes something as simple as water feel exhilarating.
2
The household toy company Lego wanted to connect with an underserved demographic: visually impaired children. Because children often learn best through play, Lego is reimagining their beloved Lego bricks to help make learning Braille fun and accessible.
Originally launched in 2020, Braille bricks are studded with Braille codes and labeled with visual letters and numbers, so they are inclusive to all children. The inclusive design was created in collaboration with organizations that are experts in the field of visual impairments. The innovative bricks enable visually impaired and sighted children to play and learn together in a way that is accessible for everyone.
Lego also created activities and learning materials to donate to community organizations and educators who want or need to incorporate Braille into their teaching plans. Braille Bricks exist in 11 languages across 20 countries, and the company announced it is excited to expand into even more language markets in the future.
Why we love it: This campaign not only highlights a new, useful product, but it’s also educational, widely accessible to a variety of audiences and allows Lego to break into the underserved market of visual impairment. Because the “Braille Bricks” campaign also donates proceeds from Lego sales to supply Braille Bricks to children for free, consumers are enticed to purchase Lego and be a part of this charitable program.
3
When well-known vodka brand Absolut teamed up with the famous Heinz corporation to create a rich and creamy new pasta sauce, the results were delectable. The product was inspired by the Tik-Tok-viral vodka sauce pasta recipe created by model Gigi Hadid and the ads were a play on Absolut’s iconic print ad format. The two companies created a limited number of tomato vodka pasta sauces to be sold in major supermarkets across the United Kingdom.
Why we love it: The “Absolutely Pasta” campaign and product is extremely clever. The ads put a new spin on a classic product and connect with existing customers while defining a new market and capitalizing on social media trends.
Food collaborations are growing in popularity, in part because of the ever-growing number of social media platforms and users. These iconic brands leveraged their target audience data and insights extremely well to design a product tailor made for their consumers’ interests. They used their shared demographic of young adults who both consume vodka and follow food and drink social media accounts monthly.
Not only did Heinz and Absolut create a delicious new sauce, but they also released new recipes (including perfect cocktail pairings) to inspire consumers as they entertain friends or enjoy a quiet dinner at home.
4
The holy month of Ramadan in Islam, which ended April 20 this year, means fasting during the day and fast-breaking family dinners (called Iftar) after sunset. In their “Iftar Incoming” Ramadan campaign, Uber Eats displayed billboards across the United Kingdom that paired photos of popular Iftar dishes with a countdown to sunset, and subsequently, Iftar. The dynamic ads easily connected with Muslim communities and honored their traditions while also encouraging them to schedule Uber Eats deliveries just in time to break their fasts.
Why we love it: The “Iftar Incoming” ads were dynamic and lighthearted, with exact digital countdowns updated each day to reflect the exact time of sunset in the exact location the ad is displayed.
Because each ad featured a different signature Iftar dish, the campaign was also highly relevant, positioning Uber Eats as a brand that celebrates and respects the traditions of the Muslim and global Islamic communities.
Additionally, the billboard series addresses a culture that is frequently left out of advertising, effectively opening a new dialogue between the brand and a new consumer demographic while letting them know they are seen, respected, and included.
5
Millennials spend five hours per day consuming social media content, and they are also the driving demographic behind Airbnb’s rental success. So, in a brilliant repurposing of user-generated content, Airbnb leveraged the posts these Millennials produced to launch the two similar, back-to-back post-Covid ad campaigns of “Made Possible by Hosts” and “Strangers Aren’t That Strange” to further appeal to their audience.
One video from the “Made Possible by Hosts” campaign, called “Forever Young” was viewed over 7.5 million times online. The content was simple: both ads featured ordinary Airbnb customers enjoying a nice vacation together—nothing fancy, just real-life vacationing that’s accessible to all.
Why we love it: “Made Possible by Hosts” and “Strangers Aren’t That Strange” provided consumers with authentic, simple, and beautiful experiences that the world desperately craved following the Covid-19 pandemic. The global ads connected with viewers by employing user-generated content to evoke feelings of nostalgia and hope for the future.
Airbnb facilitated a moment of authentic feeling for their target audience. By identifying the overlapping demographic of Millennials who use social media and who book Airbnb rentals, Airbnb was able to successfully capitalize on the authenticity of real consumers’ past Airbnb experiences and use real content to share real customer stories. The secret to success here was grounding the brand in relatability, which goes a long way in building consumer trust and loyalty.
Is your brand in need of a seasoned marketing company that can help you create your own viral marketing moments? Leap Group offers an expert team that provides campaign strategies and insights for businesses of any industry or size that want to reach new audiences in exciting new ways.
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