Celebrating four years of creating digital campaigns that have attracted local and international attention, helped their clients increase market share and won several awards, creative strategist Mike Sharman and digital entrepreneur Murray Legg from digital marketing agency Retroviral are celebrating four years of crafting, producing, sharing, tagging and seeding remarkable client campaigns.
Mike and Murray’s approach is a simple one: They help brands tell their stories in a captivating and artful way, using a combination of video content and social influencers to spread the news. “In a world dominated by clicks and hashtags, we produce remarkable content to ensure our brands clients rise above the online noise and clutter,” says Mike.
“Retroviral was created when Mike and I realised that even though digital communication was growing and evolving as a channel in South Africa in early 2010, the principles of telling stories were still very traditional,” adds Murray.
“Even though the media was changing from conventional print and online news to blogging and microblogging with the rise of social media, it remained true that a good story, well told, would be told again and again by people who were passionate about its message. And so, Retroviral began,” elaborates Mike
One of the first social media communities that Retroviral managed, was Miller Rock the Boat in 2010 in conjunction with Ogilvy Interactive JHB. Its Facebook page attracted 10,000 fans (and sparked numerous cases of FOMO) in just one month, the cruise was a sell-out, and it was quoted as one of the best parties of that year. This campaign set the bar for Retroviral to create subsequent online promotions that – in coming years – would entertain local and international audiences alike.
Remember when Julius Malema threatened to close down Twitter in 2012? Nando’s responded with its ‘WTF, Juju, LOL’ poster – and, by means of online word of mouth, Retroviral made sure that the rest of South Africa laughed out loud too.
Retroviral also set a benchmark in South African influencer marketing with Black River FC / Nando’s legendary Last Dictator Standing campaign. The agency effectively showed that clever content seeding delivers remarkable results: This campaign achieved one million views in six days, a 2012 Cannes Media Lion award, and led to the meal promoted by the campaign being the best selling in Nando’s 25 year history.
International seeding of a brand’s message was achieved when Douwe Egberts, a global premium coffee brand, tasked Joe Public Agency with creating a unique vending machine for the brand that would reward yawns with free coffee. Retroviral seeded the yawn-activated coffee machine video both locally and internationally in 2013 (with no media budget!) and it exploded on international websites.
Design Taxi , Buzzfeed Partner, Trend Hunter, Yahoo News, Digg, Huffington Post and Perez Hilton (collectively with a following of over 11.5m Twitter followers) were all seeded with the campaign, and either blogged it, retweeted or commented on it, expanding its reach and awareness well beyond South Africa’s borders.
In addition, Marklives.com rated the campaign in its top ten best South African ads for 2013, and Retroviral received the 2014 Gold PRISA PRISM award in the Social Media for Public Relations category.
Other celebrated campaigns over the years include work for 5Gum, Castle Lager, the Put Foot Foundation and Kreepy Krauly.
Looking to the future, Murray is excited that, like the brands they have worked on, word-of-mouth and social media discussions of Retroviral’s campaigns are having a positive impact on the agency’s growth.
“Retroviral is now a strong team of eight consultants, and our next chapter will see the brand growing into Africa,” says Murray. “It’s been an incredible journey over the last four years. We’ve been privileged to work closely with really great brands who we view as both our clients and friends.”
“Retroviral’s focus is on offering great work to its clients under four pillars: strategy, content creation, content dissemination through digital public relations and influencer marketing, and reporting,” adds Mike. “We’re sticking to our principles on these pillars, as we continue with our growth. We have always said that we never want to be the biggest agency on the digital marketing scene, but we constantly strive to be the best.”
