How To Go Massively Viral And Hack The Media In 2015 – Obama Style

So the deadline is looming for signing up to healthcare.gov which is a pretty big deal in America. The government needs to get everybody to go online and put their personal details into a website. Something that would normally take a massive media campaign stretching the nation involving TV and outdoor. Not exactly a sexy or easy brief. I think what they've done shows the very best practice in online marketing though and although I'm only speculating at how this campaign worked here is what I think happened...

Step 1 - Grant Buzzfeed exclusive access to the president in a video interview. Give them some great soundbites and have them show off about the interview to their 200 million visitors.

Step 2 - Make a video with Obama that references huge trends like selfie sticks and YOLO so as online media and blogs lap it up.

Step 3 - Release the video not on YouTube but on Facebook because of the explosive virality that Facebook are giving to videos 4 Million views in first 2 hours alone.

Step 4 - Include a link so as 10s of millions of people can head to the sign up page while on their laptops or mobile devices. Minimum friction and a sense of urgency.

Step 5 - Let the internet do it's own thing for 24 hours creating memes, GIFs and everything else young people do.

Now the chances are you don't have Obama at your beck and call to make a video but the example above highlights how you can take a boring brief "promoting sign-ups for a government site" and make it go massively viral online. The video is on track for 100 million views or more which means 100 million people seeing that link. An early candidate for the best campaign in 2015 of any sort if you ask me.

If you are interested in media you'll like this post about Irish media from yesterday.