Given the current state of the world, it feels something of a welcome throwback to have a breakfast cereal go viral with a well placed Tweet.

We’ve also seen a lot of commentary that organic isn’t dead or a waste of time. To which the obvious answer is mnhmmmmnamyyyyeahbutnobutyeah. Both sides of this argument are probably right.

At the risk of overthinking what is, after all, a picture of Weetabix with baked beans on top, it’s worth going back a few steps to unpick how a breakfast cereal made national news with a Tweet.

To do that, we need to look at social media marketing in 2021, where organic reach is often as rare as hen’s teeth and successes are notable for their infrequency (which in itself should give some clue as to why Weetabix achieved a level of cut through).

It's not 2009 anymore

Even in the early days of ‘free’ reach, very few brands had the followers or the clout to simply make a post and watch the results roll in. Fewer still can do this in 2021. Those that can are the equivalent of a John Lewis TV ad: the mere fact it exists is enough to generate media impressions.

John Lewis also benefits heavily from earned reach. The PR on their adverts alone is enough to cover most of the UK that still consumes some form of media.

Social does not have quite the cadence of a John Lewis advert. But it operates along similar lines: those that find a way to amplify their work through either paid or earned media can usually point to better effectiveness than the social work that struggles to cut through (and this accounts for a lot online, including those with substantial paid budgets).

And so, Weetabix. It was an excellent piece of work, but this wasn’t social. This was the genius of Frank, a PR agency (disclaimer: I’ve worked with Frank in the past as a client and have a very positive view of them. They know their onions. Or, in this case, breakfasts).

The baked beans on Weetabix Tweet was designed with a clear aim: to drive earned media.

Once that’s your brief, it’s over to the creative team to do their job. In this case, hit upon a comfortably familiar product and combine with an idea so polarising, the brain instantly forms an opinion.

It’s a simple idea, but simple is hard to execute well.

A few other elements that worked in Weetabix’s favour. Firstly, the brand and product are widely known, even if you don’t buy Weetabix.

A similar product or comms from an unknown brand would have, most likely, bombed. Audiences need that frame of reference to be able to form the opinion in the first placed.

In other words, the ability of the average person to make the leaps required to be certain that baked beans on a breakfast cereal is wrong, requires a level of brand familiarity that some companies could never achieve.

To make your brand famous, it somewhat helps if you’re already somewhat famous in the first place.

Secondly, the sector and the brand play a huge part in this success. Weetabix isn’t a brand that takes itself too seriously and established FMCG goods generally have wider cultural impact.

Try to imagine a brand like Kellogg’s Sustain, or an unknown granola product, or a financial service company making the same impact with a similar Tweet.

It may achieve a higher than normal response and reach, but it’s unlikely to achieve the same level of virality (interestingly, plenty of these type of brands could ride the coattails of the original Tweet a little).

Finally, Frank didn’t just know the brand; they also understood the audience and the nature of the channels they were working with.

Social media is not the be-all and end-all of advertising, but if this is your tactical choice, it helps having a specialist who understands how the channel works organically. And, I can say from some experience, that this is an area Frank are very good at.

The result has been a very clever and entertaining piece of PR - all of which is designed to get maximum reach for minimal cost (even if this isn’t free, as some people have claimed. There’s still agency fees and fixed costs to factor in).

And reach in itself isn’t the real goal. The goal is to get a large number of people, especially those who haven’t eaten Weetabix in many years, to remember the brand exists when they’re doing their weekly shop. To misquote Bryon Sharp, nobody can buy from you if they don’t know who you are.

Even a couple of weeks of light buyers adding the cereal to their basket will make a significant difference. Possibly enough to make Frank’s fee a very economical investment.

Virality is nothing without creativity

But it’s not just Weetabix being Weetabix that enabled success. Creative plays a part as well.

Think how many bland, meaningless branded Tweets or social posts are sent into the void. And how many actually garner anything more than just a handful of interactions.

Now think of what brief Frank were given - or invented. And think of what would be needed to get there.

Engagement is often an unnecessary vanity metric, but in this case, it was crucial. Without engagement, there would be no vitality. More importantly, it had to be something people would want to engage with or instantly have an opinion on.

It also needed an ability to look towards the end objective: in Frank’s case, what headlines did they want to see if this was successful.

From there, you’ve got the ingredients for somebody creative who inherently understands the medium they’re working with (much like Adam&Eve’s Chilli Marmite OOH execution, which also got the marketing community quite excited last week).

Achieving virality is as strategic as it is tactical

At this point, there may be a thousand brand managers about to fire off an email to their agency or social team with the words “I want to go viral like Weetabix or Marmite.” They’d be well advised to pause hitting the send button and taking a moment to think about strategy.

Yes, strategy.

Because organic social and aiming to go viral isn’t really a strategy - or if it is, it’s a risky and potentially very expensive one to explain to your CMO or CFO.

Weetabix’s Tweet was a tactical execution - potentially opportunistic, potentially part of a wider messaging strategy around unlikely combinations. It makes a degree of sense once you start to look at other recent Weetabix activity.

In some respects, it's a similar successor to Oreo's Dunk In The Dark. Not because of the virality, but because of how the PR outweighed the initial impact and reach.

Jerry Daykin, who worked at Mondelez (Cadbury's owner) has a very good behind-the-scenes breakdown of how Dunk In The Dark was good, but not as good as the industry thinks it is, and why having a good paid strategy to amplify content tends to have better cut through.

Daykin's analysis is an essential read, but the elements of earned PR to follow up on Oreo's initial reactive Tweet and the Tweet's reach versus the actual reach of Oreo within the US apply here.

Weetabix's initial Tweet got 22,100+ replies and 106,000 retweets. That's good, but it's only a fraction of the number of people who buy Weetabix products in the supermarket each week. It does, however, give the brand a little more cultural relevancy and if it gives the cereal a boost at the checkout in the following week, then it'll be job done.

But these are both FMCG brands with large brand recognition and a consistent brand platform. Social media virality is an excellent result but there are other channels that are just as important, if not more so.

It's why we get the annual ‘Superbowl ad costs $x, here's how many digital impressions that could buy’ thought pieces that appear every year; overlooking that they're different channels, probably have different objectives according to the strategy, and a good campaign will probably do both.

On the other hand, some brands may look at their target audience and hone a strategy that is entirely around harnessing earned media, including organic. For some brands, especially startups, without big media budgets, that's probably a necessity. But then they probably need to reach fewer people to be effective than Weetabix does. 

What Weetabix achieved was a wonderful, fun piece of creative that was a reminder that social media brand comms can still be entertaining, and that making it look effortless is actually quite hard.

Frank PR played a blinder, and they've all probably created a lot of problems for marketers trying to explain that a) organic doesn't necessarily mean free; b) the orthopaedic sock report or exclusive shots of a new car door handle probably aren't going to go viral; and c) it'd be far better spending time on developing and executing a well-thought-through strategy, that may or may not include organic social, than trying to shoehorn a bad photoshop of some baked beans next to some anti-fungal cream so you can send a witty response to Weetabix and Heinz three weeks later - after it's been approved by multiple layers of sign off and compliance.

So yes, this is probably more thought than necessary about a tweet involving canned pulses and a popular breakfast cereal, but it's also striking how much this could have been written any time in the last decade.

Organic social was never dead, it's just that very few brands are really good at it and many more brands spend far too much money being very bad at it.

And those that are good probably also know how to allocate their budgets properly.

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