10 Viral Marketing Examples That Broke the Internet
What do Barbie, slime, and chicken sandwiches have in common?
They all exploded online thanks to some of the smartest, wildest viral marketing campaigns we’ve seen in recent years.
These days, in an attention-driven world where 5.17 billion people use social media worldwide, that kind of visibility is a goldmine.
In this blog post, we’re unpacking 10 viral campaigns that didn’t just go big; they redefined what “viral” even means.
We’ll look at the creative spark behind each one, the platforms that fueled their growth, and the takeaways you can actually use to build campaigns that hit hard. Let’s break it down.
TL;DR
Short on time? Here's what you need to know:
Viral marketing is effective because it sparks emotions, feels authentic, and is easy to share.
Timing and platform choice can easily share a campaign.
UGC outperforms brand-made content in terms of trust and engagement.
The most successful viral campaigns look effortless, not manufactured.
Flexibility is key; brands that adapt fast when momentum builds see the biggest wins.
Small teams and indie creators prove you don’t need huge budgets to go viral.
Know your audience better than the competition.
What Makes a Campaign Go Viral?
When a campaign “goes viral,” it feels like magic. But there’s a clear set of triggers behind it: emotions, timing, shareability, and the right distribution engines.
Let’s break it down:
Core Ingredients of Virality
People don’t share content because it’s perfectly branded. They share it because it makes them feel something. Emotion is the fuel, and it usually comes in three flavors: surprise, humor, and relatability.
Relatability is especially powerful. When people see themselves reflected in content (their struggles, humor, or everyday quirks), they feel recognized.
That connection sparks a stronger reaction than any polished ad could. And it doesn’t stop at engagement: they want to share it, so others can see themselves in it too.
This is where simplicity and timing multiply the effect. A message that’s easy to understand in seconds, paired with the right cultural moment, turns a relatable idea into something people can’t resist passing along.
The most viral ideas are instantly clear and land at the exact right cultural moment. That’s the viral trifecta: emotional punch, stickiness, and perfect timing.
And here’s the best part: user-generated content (UGC) embodies all of these. It’s relatable, authentic, and effortless to consume, which makes it inherently shareable.
No surprise then that 86% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand that shares UGC, compared to just 12% who would purchase a product promoted by influencers.
And it’s not just about trust. According to Social Media Today, 60% of consumers view UGC as the most authentic form of content, three times more than brand-created ads.
The Role of Platforms and Amplifiers
Even the smartest idea can fall flat without the right platform. Social media is the distribution engine of virality, and today’s users are spread thin: the average person uses 6.8 different platforms a month and spends nearly 19 hours a week on them.
That means you need to tailor the content to where it lives. And different platforms cater to different types of content:
TikTok rewards raw, playful, trend-driven content.
Twitter/X thrives on fast reactions and cultural commentary.
YouTube gives campaigns a longer shelf life with storytelling and depth.
Instagram works best for visually polished, aspirational content.
Add in influencers and paid boosts, and you’ve got the accelerators that take a strong idea from 100k views to 10 million. Influencers, in particular, are powerful amplifiers because they bring built-in trust and distribution through authentic digital interactions with their audiences.
Even the smallest of influencers with niche audiences can help nudge a post towards virality. After all, nano-influencers have the highest engagement of all.
But don’t just chase influencers or algorithms. Build content people want to share with each other. That’s what gives campaigns true viral lift.
P.S. Virality spreads fast, but it only sticks if people know what your brand stands for. This guide on brand positioning shows you how to nail that foundation.
10 Viral Marketing Examples That Broke the Internet
What does viral marketing look like in action? Let’s take a look at some campaigns that completely took over the internet.
1. Duolingo “Kills” Its Mascot
Most language apps aren’t known for being funny, but Duolingo flipped that script.
On TikTok, their giant green owl mascot went from harmless to unhinged, starring in skits that poked fun at the app’s reputation for pushy notifications.
Their boldest stunt? Pretending the owl died. Videos of “funeral” scenes and tongue-in-cheek jokes about the mascot’s fate spread fast, sparking millions of views and endless duets from fans. It was absurd, irreverent, and perfectly in sync with TikTok humor.
The payoff was that Duolingo’s TikTok account skyrocketed to over 7 million followers.
On February 11, 2025, the day the brand announced Duo’s death on social media, those mentions spiked by about 25,560%.
Meanwhile, the hashtag #ripduo was used more than 45,000 times.
The brand went from “a boring study app” to a pop culture icon with a Gen Z audience that now sees the owl as part of internet culture.
2. Coca-Cola – Share a Coke
Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign is a textbook case of personalization done right. The idea was simple: swap out the logo with popular first names on bottles and cans. Suddenly, Coke was more personal.
Consumers didn’t just buy Coke; they hunted for their names, snapped photos, and shared them online. The hashtag #ShareaCoke exploded on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, turning every bottle into a piece of viral content.
The campaign first launched in Australia in 2011 and quickly spread worldwide. In the U.S. alone, Coca-Cola sold more than 250 million named bottles in the first summer. Sales among young adults increased by 7%, reversing a decade-long decline in consumption.
Share a Coke is making a timely comeback in 2025 as Gen Z seeks authentic connections in an increasingly digital world. It’s an amazing reminder that all it takes to spark a connection is a simple act of sharing.
Key takeaway: Three out of four, or 74% of consumers, say representation in marketing is important to them for the brands they engage and buy from.
3. Barbenheimer
Few cultural clashes have ever captured the internet like “Barbenheimer.” In July 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer (two wildly different movies) were released on the same day. Instead of splitting audiences, the contrast became a meme-fueled phenomenon.
Memes about dressing in pink for Barbie and black for Oppenheimer spread across Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. The audience, beyond sharing jokes, created an entire movement. People planned double-feature screenings, merch started popping up, and brands jumped in on the fun.
The numbers said it all: Barbie movie hit $1.4 billion worldwide, and Oppenheimer crossed $900 million, making it Christopher Nolan’s third-highest-grossing film ever. The meme war essentially gave both films free global promotion, driven by the audience, not the studios.
4. Candy Funhouse
Jamal Hejazi, the founder of Candy Funhouse, turned his Canadian candy store into a global sensation by leaning into TikTok.
The magic moment? A simple packing video showing a customer’s order being prepared. That clip alone brought in 30,000 followers almost overnight.
But the real growth came from UGC. Fans started reviewing Candy Funhouse on TikTok, creating viral content that sent huge waves of traffic to the site. As Jamal Hejazi, CEO of Candy Funhouse put it:
“The first time we went viral as a company was through a fan’s user-generated content, doing a review of our company. We had a surge of visitors to the website and didn’t know where it was coming from.”
Candy Funhouse doubled down by actively social listening and creating playful, community-driven content. Today, their TikTok’s account has 3.4 million followers, with many of its top-selling products directly tied to TikTok virality.
5. Peachy BBs Slime
Slime accounts are everywhere on TikTok, but Peachy BBs turned the trend into a full-blown business empire. Founded by Andrea O., the brand posts videos of slime-making, Q&As, and playful experiments with textures and scents.
The content is addictive and satisfying to watch. That stickiness helped Peachy BBs TikTok account grow to 6.5 million followers, plus another 151K followers on a side account. By the way, new drops sell out in minutes.
The viral boost got even bigger when Kim and North Kardashian shared Peachy BBs slime on Instagram. That kind of earned PR is nearly impossible to buy, and it cemented the brand’s credibility with both hardcore slime fans and casual browsers.
6. Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Twitter Battle
In 2019, Popeyes launched its chicken sandwich. The food was good, but what made it legendary was a single tweet. Chick-fil-A posted a subtle flex about its sandwich, and Popeyes quote-tweeted with a simple: “…y’all good?”
Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the ❤️ for the original. pic.twitter.com/qBAIIxZx5v
— Chick-fil-A, Inc. (@ChickfilA) August 19, 2019
That three-word response lit Twitter on fire. Memes, debates, and taste tests followed. Demand spiked so hard that Popeyes sold out of sandwiches nationwide within two weeks.
The frenzy even made the evening news, with lines wrapping around blocks and some stores reporting triple-digit sales increases.
The campaign cost almost nothing in media spend, just the confidence to lean into the moment. Popeyes reaped $65 million in equivalent media value as a result of the Chicken Sandwich Wars.
7. CeraVe x Michael Cera
In early 2024, CeraVe pulled off one of the smartest celebrity-brand crossovers in recent memory. The campaign started with rumors and paparazzi shots suggesting that actor Michael Cera was secretly behind the skincare brand.
The internet ran wild with it: memes, TikToks, Reddit threads. Then came the punchline: a Super Bowl ad officially revealing the collaboration.
Cera leaned into the joke, playing it awkward and deadpan, perfectly matching CeraVe’s clean-but-quirky identity.
The campaign was proof that leaning into internet humor (and letting the audience wonder) can drive exponential exposure.
8. Lala Hijabs
Sana and Will Saleh never set out to build a viral brand. They started tie-dyeing hijabs during the pandemic, shared a video on TikTok, and suddenly had 50,000 followers and a million views overnight.
The couple leaned into the momentum, launching Lala Hijabs with their savings and treating TikTok as their main marketing engine. Today, they post tutorials, behind-the-scenes content, and product drops, keeping the brand personal and relatable.
The results were amazing. Over 148.3K followers and 4.4M likes on TikTok, with 60% of sales coming directly from the platform.
The Salehs built a business from scratch by showing up authentically and building trust with a global audience.
9. Spotify Wrapped
Every December, Spotify doesn’t just give users their listening stats. They also hand them a shareable badge of identity. Spotify Wrapped transforms raw data into colorful, personalized stories people want to post on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
This annual ritual is viral by design. It taps into pride (“look how unique my taste is”), humor (“yes, I did listen to 10,000 minutes of Taylor Swift”), and FOMO (“why doesn’t Apple Music do this?”), when they didn’t have a similar option.
The results are massive: each year, Wrapped generates millions of social posts and global media coverage, driving app downloads and re-engagement. It’s one of the clearest examples of turning analytics into social currency.
10. Dove Real Beauty Sketches
Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign is a masterclass in emotional storytelling. The premise is simple: women describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist, then strangers describe those same women. The difference was that the stranger’s sketches came out more flattering.
The video highlighted the gap between self-perception and how others see us, tying it to Dove’s “Real Beauty” positioning. The emotional weight was undeniable; viewers cried, shared, debated, and celebrated it across social platforms.
The campaign became one of the most viewed video ads of all time, with over 114 million total views in the first month. It also won the Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix.
Takeaways: What These Viral Marketing Campaigns Teach Us
Looking across all 10 examples, the same patterns keep showing up, and they’re the lessons performance marketers and e-commerce brands can actually apply:
Emotion drives sharing: Humor (Duolingo), pride (Spotify Wrapped), or inspiration (Dove)--every viral hit made people feel something powerful enough to share.
Authenticity beats polish: As Social Media Today stated in their article, user-generated content is trusted 3x more than brand-made ads. That’s why Candy Funhouse and Lala Hijabs grew faster through raw, relatable clips than they ever could with big-budget ads.
Personalization fuels engagement: Share a Coke and Spotify Wrapped worked because they gave people something personal to claim and show off.
Simple and sticky ideas win: The best campaigns can be summed up in one line. “Michael Cera founded CeraVe” or “pink vs. black double feature” were easy to grasp and impossible to ignore.
Timing + culture = virality: Barbenheimer and the Popeyes chicken sandwich war prove that riding the right cultural wave multiplies reach far beyond paid ads.
Design for the platform: TikTok thrives on chaos and humor, Twitter on speed and wit, Instagram on aesthetics. Don’t recycle the same ad everywhere, just adapt it.
Community is the amplifier: Viral campaigns don’t spread alone. They take off when audiences remix, parody, and co-create. The smartest brands leave room for that.
Virality can be engineered (sometimes): Campaigns like Spotify Wrapped show you can design with virality in mind. But forcing it without authentic value almost always backfires.
The best viral campaigns aren’t lucky accidents. Instead, they’re built on emotional hooks, simple ideas, cultural timing, and platform-native execution. At the same time, they leave just enough space for the audience to take ownership.
How to Create a Campaign With Viral Potential
Virality isn’t a formula you can guarantee, but you can stack the odds in your favor. Here’s how to design campaigns that actually have a shot at breaking through:
Know Your Platform
Not every idea works everywhere. TikTok is a great place for humor, chaos, and trend-hopping. X is more about sharp, quick reactions. Instagram needs strong visuals and aesthetics. LinkedIn favors thought leadership and professional storytelling.
For example, TikTok alone has over 1 billion global active users. Choosing the right platform can determine whether your campaign succeeds or fails.
Make Sharing Easy
People share content when it feels like a reflection of themselves: funny, useful, or identity-driven. That’s why 65% of people say they feel an emotional connection with a brand, and why the most engaged customers spend 2x more annually than “satisfied” ones.
Here are some practical ways to boost shareability:
Tap into humor, surprise, or emotional resonance.
Use formats that audiences already engage with (memes, challenges, duet-friendly clips).
Keep the concept simple so it’s instantly clear.
Plan for the Unexpected
Even the smartest campaign can take an unexpected turn. The key is building in flexibility so you can amplify momentum if something starts catching fire.
Case in point: Popeyes didn’t plan for a chicken sandwich war, but when the internet ran with it, they leaned in hard and gained $65 million in earned media.
A rigid campaign plan can strangle opportunities. A flexible one can turn a spark into a wildfire.
The Biggest Mistake Brands Make When Trying to Go Viral
The temptation is real: chase trends, copy a meme, and hope it sticks. But here’s the hard truth: most viral “fails” come from brands trying too hard to manufacture virality instead of creating genuine value.
Campaigns flop when they:
Force themselves into a trend that doesn’t fit their brand voice.
Miss the cultural moment by showing up late.
Prioritize algorithms over audience connection.
Think of all the awkward brand tweets that jumped on trending hashtags with zero relevance. Instead of sparking engagement, they triggered eye-rolls.
Another common trap? Overpolished and inauthentic campaigns. If your campaign screams “ad,” it’s unlikely to get shared.
How to Avoid This Trap
Start with your audience, not the algorithm. Ask: Would they actually share this?
Move fast, but stay relevant. Virality has an expiration date measured in hours, not weeks.
Don’t fake authenticity, invite it. Encourage fans, influencers, or communities to co-create.
Treat virality as a byproduct of a strong strategy, not the entire goal.
Remember: People share experiences, emotions, and content that feels like it belongs to them.
Ready to Spark Your Own Viral Moment?
As you can see, virality isn’t luck, at least not all the time. In reality, it’s more of a strategy and some luck meeting at the right moment.
The campaigns we’ve covered prove that the biggest wins come from simple ideas and emotional resonance. They also show the power of creating content designed to thrive on the platforms where people actually spend their time.
Each example shows that when your audience sees themselves in your content, they love it and they spread it. That’s the multiplier effect every marketer is chasing.
You can’t force virality, but you can design for it. Build campaigns that feel authentic, create space for your community to join in, and move fast when the spark catches.
Want to dig deeper into strategies that fuel this kind of growth? Check out how to create a viral lead magnet.
FAQ
What is viral marketing, exactly?
Viral marketing is when content spreads rapidly across social networks because people choose to share it. The “viral” part is exponential growth fueled by audiences, not just paid media. It’s a marketing strategy built on emotions, social sharing, and network-driven growth that maximizes brand exposure.
How is viral marketing different from traditional marketing?
Traditional campaigns rely on paid placements and controlled distribution. Viral campaigns, on the other hand, thrive on organic word of mouth, community participation, and cultural momentum. Paid ad campaigns or viral advertising can help amplify them. But the engine is audience-driven and built around customer engagement rather than rigid brand guidelines.
Can a small business really create a viral campaign?
Absolutely. Many of the strongest social media campaigns (like Candy Funhouse or Lala Hijabs) came from small teams with limited budgets. The secret was authenticity, strong consumer insights, and creating visual content that their customer base wanted to share.
When small brands lean into personal connections with their community and tap into specific customer segments, they can hit viral momentum without big budgets.
How long does it usually take for a campaign to go viral?
When it happens, it’s fast. Viral videos can blow up in hours or days. The flip side: they can also fade quickly if the brand doesn’t keep feeding momentum with new content or engagement from their social team. Smart use of ad targeting can extend the life of a viral hit and keep the buzz alive.
What platforms are best for viral marketing?
TikTok is currently the top platform for virality thanks to its algorithm and culture of sharing. But Twitter (X), Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts also drive viral loops through network effects. The best social media platforms depend on your audience insights and where your customer base spends time. A good social media analytics tool can help you track this.
Is it better to plan for virality or let it happen organically?
The smartest brands do both. You can build campaigns with viral mechanics (simplicity, emotional punch, shareability), but you also need to leave space for organic growth.
The moment your community takes ownership, you gain social proof and unlock the real social networking potential of virality. This is also where growth marketing overlaps with brand building.