Case study: Mentos & Diet Coke | Sector: FMCG | Format: Viral

A mint, a fizzy drink and a schoolboy prank taken to extremes. We must have watched this 50 times and still it gets a smile. These videos with quality production values and good direction tell a story that’s right in tone, length and format for the web today. Thanks to YouTube they’ll be around 10 years from now and still reinforcing the brand. But as a creative concept this wasn’t created by the brands; it grew from the street and wasn’t easy for the brands to accommodate at first. What many marketers forget is that for every firm there are brand adorers and brand vandals and there needs to be a strategy for dealing with both. Over the next 10 years the centre of gravity of the web will shift to social media and firms need to have these strategies in place before their brands and content start being used. Marketing in social media demands creating material people want to share. The principles of getting this right grew from the early days of viral marketing in the mid 90s and are closely related to PR. ‘Enjoy the film.