Every food and drink brand wants a viral moment.
The frustrating bit? Some brands seem to stumble into them whilst others spend months planning campaigns that barely make a ripple.
When you look at the food and drink brands that have genuinely cut through over the past year or so, there is usually more going on than a clever social post or a big media budget. The campaigns people remember tend to give them a reason to care, laugh, share something with a mate, or join in themselves.
Take Moët & Chandon’s giant champagne cork hot air balloon. On paper, it sounds completely ridiculous, which is partly why it worked. The Formula 1 activation was impossible to ignore – you could picture it in a TikTok before you’d even seen the video. People weren’t sharing it because they desperately wanted champagne – they were sharing it because it was entertaining.
That entertainment factor keeps cropping up.
A lot of food and drink brands still treat social media like a digital billboard. Product shot. Product shot. Product shot. Then they wonder why nobody engages.
The brands getting attention tend to think more like content creators than advertisers.
Second Cup’s AI-powered April Fool’s stunt is a good example of this. The brand “launched” a series of bizarre AI-generated drinks that looked just believable enough to spark debate. People engaged with it because it was funny – the actual product came second.
Humour isn’t the only route though. Sometimes brands win because they tap into something people already care about.
When Mars brought back Milky Way Crispy Rolls, they weren’t introducing consumers to something new. They were reconnecting people with something they already had an emotional connection with. Nostalgia does a lot of the heavy lifting in food and drink marketing because everybody remembers a snack, drink or sweet they were obsessed with growing up.
We’ve seen this firsthand at Prohibition. Whilst working on the return of a well-known drink with an already loyal fanbase, some of the strongest reactions weren’t about the relaunch itself. They came from people sharing memories, tagging friends and reminiscing about drinking it years ago. The campaign tapped into something consumers already cared about, which made generating conversation far easier than starting from scratch.
That’s usually the power of nostalgia. The conversation is already there, brands are simply giving people a reason to start having it again.
Then there’s participation, which is where a lot of brands fall short. They create content people can look at, whilst the stronger campaigns give people something to do.
Doritos’ Triangle Tracker challenge worked because consumers became part of the campaign. Suddenly, people were spotting triangles everywhere and posting their own versions. That sort of engagement and buy-in spreads much further than a polished brand video, because every participant becomes a mini-media channel.
The same principle sits behind a lot of user-generated content and creator campaigns. Audiences trust other people more than they trust brands – that’s hardly groundbreaking. Yet plenty of food and drink brands still try to control every message, rather than giving customers room to join the conversation.
When you really look into the campaigns that ‘made it’, few of the successful ones are actually focused on the product itself.
Corona’s sunset billboard takeover wasn’t really about beer. It was about creating a moment people wanted to experience and talk about. The product became part of a larger story.
That’s the real lesson. Consumers don’t wake up hoping to engage with marketing. They’re looking for entertainment, connection, recommendations and things worth sharing. The food and drink brands that understand that tend to find themselves in people’s feeds, group chats and conversations far more often than the ones shouting about product features.
And that’s usually when people start calling them “viral”.
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