If you’re sick and tired of hearing “can we make this go viral?”, DO NOT share this with your boss.
One World Cup match. Two rival airlines. And a bold idea that would probably have been killed in any standard corporate committee.
Over two episodes of Marketing Corner, Eivind Hammer Myhre and Emilie Engedalen gave Casper and me a behind-the-scenes look at Norwegian’s viral World Cup logo bet with British Airways. It’s one of the most interesting conversations we’ve ever recorded.
The short answer for marketing leaders: the best marketing doesn’t come out of endless approval chains. It comes from giving your team the trust, autonomy and speed to take big, calculated risks when the moment strikes.
How did the idea take off?
It started with a three-minute phone call. From there, the team went from idea to pressing “post” in under an hour, with no massive strategy deck.
If you’re a B2B marketer who needs 12 approvals and three months to change a font, read that again.
Then the rest of the internet joined in. The team had to stay ahead of it and keep the momentum going, without knowing what would happen next.
How did they get British Airways to agree?
That’s the question we had to ask, and you’ll need to hear this one from them. It’s all in part 1 of the episode, along with the most important question of all: where DO you get a USB stick these days?
How far can a tiny budget go?
A long way, if the idea is good enough. Eivind and Emilie shared how a tiny travel budget turned into billions of impressions, coverage across thousands of media outlets and prime-time BBC coverage, all with zero paid ad spend.
That’s the part everyone wants to copy. It’s also the part you can’t get by asking for it in a brief.
What can go wrong at the last second?
Plenty. The team hit last-second glitches and hurdles that almost killed their post-game victory lap before it started. Viral moments look effortless from the outside. They rarely feel that way from the inside.
What’s the post-viral comedown?
Nobody talks about this enough. After a career-defining hit, your team has to go back to the standard content calendar. Keeping people motivated after that is a real leadership challenge.
There are weird side-effects too, from bizarre international phone calls to unexpected banter with religious accounts and rival airlines.
Did billions of impressions move the business?
That’s the question that matters, and it’s the one we put to them in part 2 of the episode. Go and listen, because it’s a much better story when you hear it from the people who did it.