How Mattel Created A Viral Hit With Its Crazy "Hot Wheels" Stunt

Karlee Weinmann and Kim Bhasin | Sep. 19, 2011, 12:36 PM | 138 |

Sometimes marketers just get everything right.

In case you missed it, on the 100th anniversary of the Indy 500, Mattel's brand team sponsored a record-breaking stunt, catapulting a life-size "Hot Wheels" vehicle off a jump and sending it the length of a football field. The stunt now has more than 6 million views on YouTube, and won Mattel 12,000 Facebook fans.

So why was it so overwhelmingly successful?

A pair of Mattel's minds that were behind the stunt shared how they did it in a presentation at BlogWell San Francisco (via SmartBlogs).

Mattel's marketing strategy was to "activate boys of all ages" by making Hot Wheels culturally relevant again, says Gretchen de Castellane, the company's senior manager for community and user experience.

It did just that, but it would never have gotten the traction it did without a way to share it to the world, and Mattel did it through a partnership with ABC, who broadcast the stunt. There's a big difference between a national broadcast and a YouTube video -- Mattel was able to reach not only a higher population, but a broader range of people as well.

"In a span of two minutes, those fans created more content than my entire organization could create in two months," says Betsy Burkett, Mattel's director of digital media and marketing.

Mattel chronicled the training process leading up to the stunt (the videos got a combined 2 million views), and also created a ton of hype by keeping the identity of the driver a secret until he had successfully landed the spectacular jump (it was top driver Tanner Foust).

And of course, the content of the stunt itself had to be engaging enough to get people talking about it.