Tod MaffinCanadian Commentator, From Far and Wide · Emotional Support Canadian

"Deconstructing Viral" by @todmaffin (viral marketing keynote)

5 Feb 2013 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:21

In this keynote, the speaker argues that virality is not pure luck but can be engineered. He opens with a vivid analogy comparing attempts to go viral to being struck by lightning, noting that lightning, while seemingly random, follows predictable patterns. He illustrates this with the story of Roy Sullivan, a park ranger who was struck by lightning seven times because his job placed him repeatedly in high‑risk conditions—highlighting how context and behavior affect exposure. The speaker then explains that after analyzing 50 viral campaigns, he identified six common ingredients that appear across platforms and industries. He introduces the first ingredient, which he calls “ACC matching,” a framework that aligns Audience, Content, and Call to Action to increase the odds of a campaign going viral.

Chapters

Sometimes, people will say, "Well, we've been trying for goodness' sake. Our marketing department's been trying to work on something. We want our store to go viral, so my cousin created an internet thing and they put it on YouTube, but now it's not viral. What did you do wrong?" It's like being struck by lightning. But there are things you can do to increase your chance of being struck by lightning. Lightning is not random. It's more random than some things, but it's not entirely random. This is a fellow named Roy Sullivan. Over his 35-year career as a park ranger in Virginia, Roy was struck by lightning not once, not twice, but 7 times. Oh, and lived. I should have— maybe I should have noted that at the beginning. 7 times and lived. This is an actual lightning strike from his hat. So why was Roy so incredibly unlucky? It's not Roy's fault. Think about the lack of randomness in what Roy does. Roy's a park ranger, so he works outside, right? Where do we work? Inside cubicles or inside offices that have the fluorescent light with the soul-destroying light backgrounds and everything, you know? He works outside. He works in Virginia, corridor states, right? Running up and down that corridor with a whole bunch of thunderstorm activity. He has a job that keeps him moving around in that space, that the very things that he does makes it more likely for him to be struck by lightning. So, And of course these days, there's an app for that now. So I believe that after I sort of went through all of these 50 campaigns and tried to pull apart what was common among all of them, I found that there were 6 things, 6 items that were common to almost every viral campaign that went out there. And this worked across platform. This worked across industry. And I'm going to teach you those 6 right now. The first is what I call ACC matching. This stands for audience, content— audience, sorry— content, and call to action. And—