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By Charles Lee Mathews. Viral marketing is the holy grail of consumer branding. A local expert on seeding organic word-of-mouth reveals his ‘secret’ ingredients for capturing mind share in an attention age.

Mike Sharman, Retroviral‘s founder and chief creative officer has a recipe for virality. The magic formula, he says, starts with a universal truth that’s seeded to the right customers, using the right channel.

“Stand-up comedy is always the comparison. Your favourite comedian develops a ‘truth’. Comedians craft this truth to fine-tune the funny,” he says. In marketing that legitimacy comes from the big customer insight, he adds.

Viral marketing earns publicity points

Sharman and his team are master bakers at crafting viral content. In mid-August 2024, Retroviral played a key role in Showmax’s viral marketing stunt with football legend Eric Cantona, which earned over R35 million in PR value. The stunt sparked over 27,000 social media mentions and was named MarkLives’ #AdOfTheMonth for September 2024.

Retroviral’s #TheGranBoks campaign for Castle Lager also took home MarkLives’ #AdOfTheMonth for December 2023. The campaign’s authentic storytelling resonated with over 51 million South Africans and generated R4 million in earned media.

Other viral hits include the “Tinder Swindler” makeover for Checkers Sixty60 on Valentine’s Day 2022, when Retroviral capitalised on the global success of the Netflix documentary. The true-crime film racked up 45.8 million hours of viewing in its first week and ranked in Netflix’s top ten across 92 countries. Retroviral’s timely newsjacking helped Checkers generate R2.5 million in earned media within just seven days.

Connect with emotion

“You need to determine your client’s business objectives,” he says. Once that’s clear, the “creative becomes a layer to emotionally connect with as many target-market humans as possible. The greater the resonance, the greater the ‘forwarded many times’ potential and the ability to truly ‘cut through’.”

Sharman explains that in the Attention Economy, with so much content and clutter, emotional relevance is key to driving virality. “Something is relevant to you because it’s a premise or a truth that you can nod your head to. For me, resonance is a little different. Resonance suggests that there’s an internal vibration that shakes you. It is a vibe that correlates with the inner core, or your inner child, and makes you smile or makes you cry,” Sharman says.

“In today’s age, because we move at such an insane pace, so many of us constrict our feelings. We too often think of feelings as things that get in the way, so we park them. We have so much choice and so much access to dopamine and endorphins that are being released through all these social algorithms, but I think that we’re not authentically accessing our feelings. But, when we bake the right communication with the right humour, drama, visuals and the right mix of ingredients, it can shake that feeling free,” he says.

Feeling high awareness

Sharman’s method for creating content that circulates rapidly and that mushrooms through networks is about getting people in their ‘feels’. He says the recipe is “disruptively simple, but most agencies will never be able to execute this theory. That’s the defensible moat as our unique selling proposition.”

“Everyone can see that you need eggs, oil, water, and flour. But some people make a great cake. Others are shit at making eggs,” he explains. Exposing intellectual property isn’t a problem for Sharman because he believes experience, imagination, and pure passion are the real difference-makers. Resonance, he says, is the killer ingredient, and not all agencies get this.

“I guess if you drill down into it, the resonance is something that is like the oxygen in the equation.” Oxygen being the essential element of life, the chemical that nurtures a spark into a flame. “You can tell people the theory, but the impact comes from intuition, experience and execution. Resonance is the oxygen that exists when the content lands successfully. This is why I never have an issue talking about my models or approach because I think there’s a big difference between having a specific recipe and being able to bake a great cake that everyone wants to eat.”

The attention economy

Media fragmentation and the explosion of content have only made going viral harder. “We are all living in the multiverse — we are experiencing everything, everywhere, all at once. There used to be a statistic about your brand showing up seven times before it starts taking shape in your customers’ subconscious,” says Sharman.

But in a world that’s always on and ever-changing, he says, the frequency has ratcheted up. These days, you need to ensure people connect with your brand well over twenty times before you’re even a consideration. “In an age of doom-scrolling, your brand needs to balance an always-on brand-building approach with more grandiose ‘stunts’ that keep customers falling in love with you again, and again.”

Ask Sharman who he is outside of work and he’ll tell you: “I’m just a dude with a dominant inner child who has a photographic memory for people’s faces. And a penchant for remembering remarkable content, branded and otherwise.” While working in London from 2008 to 2010 when social media growth was exploding, Sharman became obsessed with the insights and analytics of a measurable, digital world.

Enduring relevance

“I saw a host of startup digital agencies popping up and bamboozling their way to bucks, and I wanted to be a customer champion that didn’t sell snake oil.” He started Retroviral as a challenger agency. “Our ‘holy trinity of marketing’ genesis of digital-PR-activation is as relevant today as it was nearly 15 years ago when we launched,” he says.

What are the biggest lessons Sharman has learned over the past 13 years? “Don’t let the fear of financial failure cripple your creativity. Like my wife champions — money is ‘just’ energy, so don’t let it steer you.” Another key insight: “Even when you think you’ve ’nailed the formula’, your headspace always needs to be in ‘beta’ or R&D.” Continual reinvention, staying humble and always learning are key to his success.

“Entrepreneurship is fucking tough. You have to be willing to squeeze a lot of lemons,” he sighs. The lemonade is born from the understanding that positioning as a viral agency means continually embracing risk. “‘Viral is a dream. It is not a tangible metric. Retroviral was borne out of the social commentary that ‘influencers’ with 1,000 followers were starting agencies as ‘thought leaders’. Our ‘retro’ was based on the fact that I had an academic background in communications and had the grounding of the ‘rules of marketing’ as a platform.” Sharman maintains that you can’t break the rules unless you know them.

Virality generates sales

“I know the rules and, together with my team, we continue to break them. We create tomorrow which doesn’t exist today.” For Retroviral, he says, baking virality is about capturing eyeballs (read: awareness) with impact (read: customer action).” Ultimately Sharman’s virality is about creating content and experiences that generate resonance and high emotion to rationally generate sales.

And customers like Checkers are laughing all the way to the bank. The ‘Tinder Swindler’ promotion netted the retailer more than a million rads in extra sales. And making Valentine’s Day the third-best sales day in Checkers Sixty60’s history.

Charles Lee Mathews is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.  

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