El Gaffney

This Is How You Do Viral

A few months back Absolut Vodka approached Zach Galifianakis to make an ad for them. He said, yes…as long as he could do whatever he wanted with no restrictions. Then they said (wait for it), yes!

There is a reason Absolut approached him in the first place. Likely they felt that his type of humor connected to their target of LDA-25. (That’s a guess, and LDA = Legal Drinking Age for anyone who has not worked with a liquor, spirits, alcohol company.) Sure there were definitely a few rules in place, such as: no underage drinking, binge drinking or death. But otherwise, AV gave him the creative freedom. They realized that there’s no worse way to lose authenticity and relevancy with your audience than to change (even subtly) his brand of comedy!

Zach enlisted Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Coincidentally or not (depending on Zach’s motive for bring those two in), the sign-off to their show is Tim’s father rich saying, “Abso…lutely” and their production company is called Absolutely. (Apologies followers for having to use the term awesome.) And as of now, the first in a series of I hope more than two has around 55K views on FoD, where it was first launched. Don’t let that (low?) number fool you, though. It has 280K on YouTube as well as 138K on MySpace. The second, which was added about two weeks ago, is at about a quarter of that total number. But even if it this number didn’t even reach that illusive 6-digits (the 100K view mark on YouTube I’d say is the metric lots of clients set), I’d call this a successful foray into the world of branded entertainment.

BONUS: As you’ll see, the comedians (I’m assuming) even came up with a great tag-line for the content: “In an Absolut world, friends would get together more often.”

Here’s Part 1:

And Part 2:

Tags: absolut, comedy, viral

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