How a campaign goes viral: the Douwe Egberts example [Infographic]

Can we make this go viral? If you want to make anyone in a decent digital agency cringe, ask them that question.

They hate it so much because, in all honesty, there’s no guaranteed way you can make a product or a campaign goes viral. There are however a few things you can do, once you’ve got a good, compelling piece of content to make sure that the right eyeballs end up seeing it.

To give you an idea of what the right steps to take might be, it’s worth taking a look at a campaign that got a lot of positive attention. You might recall the Douwe Egberts yawn powered coffee machine we featured on the site recently. The campaign saw international coffee-house Douwe Egberts set up a vending machine capable of picking up on facial movements and recognising a yawn — prompting it to fill up a cup for you.

The coffee machine was set up at the airport’s international arrivals terminal. A few foreigners arriving in the country, and some locals returning to South Africa, must have been pleasantly surprised to discover a machine that realised they needed a quick pick me up.

As it turns out, the campaign did pretty well, eventually being picked up the likes of Time Magazine, Huffington Post and Gawker, generating hundreds of thousands of YouTube views along the way.

It was a cool campaign but, as this infographic shows, it probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did without the right kind of seeding making sure that it had eyeballs on it from the start.

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