A man named Nathan Apodaca filmed himself skateboarding down a highway shoulder drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice while Fleetwood Mac played, and within a week a song from 1977 was back on the charts and Ocean Spray had handed him a truck full of juice.
It is the best piece of marketing of the fall, and Ocean Spray did not make it.
Every brand team in the country watched that clip and asked the same question in some form: how do we get one of those. I have sat in that meeting. I have been the person asked. The honest answer, which nobody wants at eleven on a Monday, is that you cannot buy it and you should not build a plan around trying.
Virality is a distribution event and brand is an accumulation, and most of the operating decisions that make one likely make the other harder.
The argument comes in three parts. One, virality rewards novelty and brand rewards repetition. A voice people already know cannot surprise them, which is the entire point of a voice people already know. Two, virality is unowned. Ocean Spray did not commission that moment, cannot repeat it, and will not get another one on schedule. Three, the metrics that catch virality, impressions and shares and spikes, are terrible at seeing the slow variable that actually matters, which is whether more people would be mildly sad if you disappeared.
Look at who came out of this year holding something durable. Oatly did not go viral. Oatly wrote the same strange carton copy for a decade until the strangeness became the asset. Liquid Death is loud, but the loudness is a fixed position held consistently, not a stunt hunt. Duolingo has been the same nagging owl for years.
What separated the brands that grew from the brands that trended was not creativity. It was whether the thing that got attention was the thing they already were.
Ocean Spray got lucky, and then did the one correct thing available to them. They showed up warm, gave the man a truck, did not try to own the moment, and let it stay his. That is not a virality strategy. That is a brand with enough settled self-knowledge to know how to behave when a stranger points a camera at it.
What separated the brands that grew from the brands that trended was not creativity.
The karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March. The host who calls everyone baby. The floor that was always sticky in the same spot. That room never worked because of one great performance. It worked because it was the same room every other Tuesday, and everyone knew exactly what it was. Show up on the same floor long enough and people start counting on you. That is the whole job, and it does not trend.