Tod Maffin explains why most marketing campaigns fail to go viral. He uses Roy Sullivan, a park ranger struck by lightning seven times, to show that viral success isn't random but follows patterns. The first of six elements he identifies is ACC matching: aligning your audience, content, and call to action.
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And sometimes, you know, I always— people will say, you know, well, we've been trying for goodness sakes. 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? And they say it's like being struck by lightning. But there are things you can do to increase your chance of being struck by lightning. It's not— 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.
