A Marketing Professor Said He’d Cancel the Final Exam If Any Student Went Viral on TikTok
It took only three days for a student to fulfill the challenge. Here’s how she did it.
Matthew Prince, director of marketing communications and PR at Taco Bell, and adjunct professor at Chapman University in California, gave a challenge on the first day of his influencer marketing class. “First to reach viral status on TikTok wins (Me versus the entire class). If you win, the final is canceled.” Chapman defined “viral” as 1 million views.
It took only three days for a student to win the challenge — with a six-second video about the challenge itself. And although there were some naysayers who insisted that posting a viral video on TikTok should not replace doing actual schoolwork, in fact Prince had taught a valuable lesson about how social media works in the real world. Here’s some of what the students — and every entrepreneur or business leader who uses social media for promotion — can learn from the exercise.
It pays to think fast and post fast.
Before Prince had even finished describing the challenge, a quick-reacting student named Sylvie Bastardo pulled out her smartphone and began recording. First, she zoomed in on the screen at the front of the room where the challenge was written. Then she panned over to a classmate whose mouth was wide open in astonishment.
This sequence took three seconds and Bastardo repeated it twice to create her viral TikTok video.
For audio, she used a sample of the John Phillips song “Bad Hair Day,” which itself is going viral on TikTok (along with an accompanying dance sequence). Bastardo later told the The New York Times, which reported the event, that she was savvy enough to know adding a song that’s popular on TikTok to her video would increase its chances of going viral.
She wrote a simple caption: “My professor said if our class got a tiktok to 1 million likes he would cancel the final!! Please like!!!” She added hashtags like #influencermarketing and #finalexam. And then she posted the video.
Strictly speaking, Prince had specified 1 million views, not likes. But Bastardo was smart enough to know that likes would lead to lots of views and that if she asked, people might be willing to help her out. And they were. By the next day, likes and comments were pouring in, and she had already exceeded 1 million views. The video has been seen 4.9 million times at this writing.
You don’t have to be a celebrity or even an influencer to get noticed on TikTok.
That was the whole point of the challenge, according to Prince. He told the Times he was trying to support some of what he would teach in his course, including “just how democratized virality and influence is within social media, specifically on TikTok, and that you really don’t have to be a celebrity to drive it.”
Indeed, prior to her video about the course, Bastardo was neither a celebrity nor an influencer. The video about the challenge was her first TikTok to reach anywhere near a million views; her prior most successful video got 66,000 views, and most didn’t reach 10,000.
But you do have to try.
One thing that may prevent people from reaching TikTok success is that they assume they can’t get there, and so they don’t try.
That’s a shame because, while there is certainly no guarantee that everyone who tries to go viral on TikTok will succeed, it’s relatively easy to give it a try. Most TikTok videos are extremely short and have very little editing or production work to them. Many of the videos that have gone viral over the past few years simply feature people sitting in their cars, talking to their smartphone cameras. Indeed, very brief videos with the raw immediacy of something that’s been shot on a smartphone and uploaded as is are often successful. This seems to be the video style TikTok’s audience prefers over the longer, more polished videos you might see on YouTube, for example.
Yet even people with a powerful incentive for going viral on TikTok don’t try it. That includes all of Bastardo’s classmates. After she won the challenge and Prince canceled the final, he asked the rest of the students if any of them had attempted to make a viral TikTok video. No one raised their hand.
If you’ve ever wondered how making TikTok videos would work for you or your business, don’t make the same mistake. You’ll never know whether your TikTok videos will go viral or not until you post some. It makes sense to at least give it a try.