‘I felt so bad I cried and bought him’: How viral posts have become the hottest new marketing tool

Spotify Wrapped

  It’s easy to forget that music is a product. Many people use the streaming app Spotify to listen to all their tunes, which is easy to do when the platform boasts over 100 million songs. At the end of the year, the streaming platform gathers up all your data on which songs you’ve listened to and when, and creates a “wrapped” for each person. These have been quite popular, spawning endless memes and jokes about cultural touchstones. 

  Everyone wants to think they have the best, coolest, most interesting taste in music. So, Spotify Wrapped has become the new way to show off just how cool you really are. Using actual data, you can show off the top five songs you were dancing to all year. People can post Instagram stories showing off the top artists they listened to, knowing that their crushes, best friends, and acquaintances will all see it. This form of digital marketing has become the new band tee shirt, allowing everyone around you to know exactly what you’re rocking out to. 

Photo via @flIckerrush

Photo via @justboyslaughin

Photo via @necksdeeplive 

Wicked

 While talking about viral online marketing, we must include the movie with an incredible amount of online hype: Wicked. The 2024 movie made more than $392 million at the box office in just the United States alone. While the movie had a massive budget, a wave of online memes also placed the movie front and center for anyone using social media. 

 After the hype of 2023’s “Barbenheimer,” the internet was just waiting for the next big movie to grab everyone’s attention. The Barbie and Oppenheimer movies opened on the same weekend and got the meme treatment on social media. The marketing teams tried to make “Glicked” happen (Wicked plus Gladiator 2 were released on the same weekend), but instead, other memes caught on like “Babyratu.” Wicked is a beloved musical that has a huge fan base, not to mention the star power that Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, and Jeff Goldblum bring to the table. So if you were online in 2024 and had any opinions about Wicked, its cast members, the music, or the state of movies in general, Wicked was the perfect topic to talk about. 
 

Photo via @michaelcollado 

Photo via @kbyefornow

Photo via @jzux

  The movie had viral moments throughout the year. One of the biggest examples was the “holding space for Wicked” interview. In a super-awkward interview that took the internet by storm a new meme was born. An interviewer for Out, Tracy E. Gilchrist, told Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo that people online were, “taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that.” The actors' reactions were each different and hilarious, and they even had a separate interview talking about it and its memeification. 

  While it’s easy to say that online chatter doesn’t always turn into box office sales, these memes and discussions have definitely helped sway people into seeing the film. About 91% of young people trust online reviews just as much as they’d trust a personal recommendation, which makes sense, because a majority of teens use social media constantly. If they’re seeing the same product promoted over and over again on TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, or Facebook, they might start to buy into the hype. If all their friends are talking about it too, consumers can decide that they also like this specific product: That’s called “social proofing,” and it makes people want to go along with whatever the popular crowd is doing in order to gain “acceptance and validation” from others—a very natural human reaction. 

Photo via @irish_goodbi

 These are just a few examples of the power of online marketing. Whether it’s driving hoards of people to buy a random gingerbread toy, or filling up theater seats at movie theaters across the globe, there’s no limit to the power of worldwide viral online marketing campaigns. You don’t have to have the big budgets of major movies or a huge streaming platform. As the saga of the gingerbread toy highlights, anyone with access to social media can sway the tide of public opinion—they just have to be viral enough to get everyone online to join the hype.