In what was one of the best marketing campaigns of 2012, TNT placed a large push button in “an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town” to celebrate the channel’s launch in Belgium. What happened next was filmed and adapted into an online and televised advertisement. To date, the Youtube version has attracted some 42 million viewers worldwide. While the firm admits that the ad was originally intended to gain awareness and attention in Belgium, the international exposure has certainly been a pleasant surprise. It is no easy task to create a viral video, and it appears that even the advertisement’s producers were surprised with its global success. This is something that I hope to learn more about in COMM 296: how can one video garner so much attention in such a short period of time? What was it about TNT’s advertisement that caught the eye of people all over the world? I will admit that it was a unique approach that I had not seen before, but with millions of video posts on online media websites each day, I am fascinated and eager to learn more about how businesses successfully cut through the noise and launch successful campaigns like TNT’s.

The advertisement’s success did not just raise awareness for the firm’s launch in the Benelux region, but it also helped TNT’s bottom line. This past December, only months after launching in the region, Dutch IPTV provider KPN signed an exclusive distribution deal with TNT for its Benelux channel. While a number of factors helped to make this deal a success, many news sources were quick to follow the details of the acquisition by mentionning that TNT’s launch in the region began after an extremely successful advertising campaign. I have no doubt that the viral video helped take TNT in Belgium to a level that made it an attractive takeover target.