I recently attended a house-warming party. They didn’t serve tea, so I had to drink hard cider…

Martin Lindeskog & Laurry Ramirez

Photo by Laurry Ramirez.

Have you had raw tea or twisted tea?

From Christian Chensvold’s post, Smirnoff’s “Tea Partay” and the Birth of Viral Marketing Video:

Yahoo! Advertising Blog: “Tea Partay” is considered perhaps the first ad to be a huge hit on viral video sites.

Kevin Roddy: Yes, it was one of the first true experiments in this space. It used YouTube in a way it really hadn’t been used before. It hit a million people in three or four days, which was massive at the time. When we finished it, we wanted to control the distribution, but it somehow leaked out onto YouTube, and to this day I don’t know how. It wasn’t something we meant to do. Somebody posted it…I don’t who it was, and it just exploded.

YAB: So the viral aspect phenomenon wasn’t even planned?

KR: It was not. At the end of the spot, it says “Go to teapartay.com, playa,” and the website wasn’t even live. So all those millions of people who went to the site, there wasn’t even anything there yet. That’s how unprepared we were.

(http://www.yadvertisingblog.com/, September 9, 2010.)

Twisted Tea Partay