Tim Evans, digital strategy director of Ogilvy Group Melbourne, walks us through the staged Matt Moran blowup video. It demonstrates just how easy it is to go viral, if you do it right and have great content to work with.

Trying to find the V-spot is high risk, high reward.

If you set out to go viral and fail, you look stupid. But if you win, you join a select group of marketers who can legitimately point at the hit counter and say, “Yeah. I can totally harness the power of new media, such is my mastery of human behaviour and storytelling”.

The challenge comes when you consider that online culture moves faster than many of the traditional agency models. By the time a planner identifies the trend, creatives get the idea, producers plan the shoot and the client approves the concept, the meme has been posted to your Facebook page by your Grandma, and the Internet has moved on.

Enter a new industry trend that sees successful viral content being produced for brands by small teams of film-makers. The recent “Times Square Hacker” viral promo for the movie Limitless was made by a couple of film-makers who don’t even have an office. No siloed departments, no waterfall methodology – just agile creative output.

This model had some recent local success for Ozharvest (OH) with the infamous Matt Moran flipout video. For those of you that haven’t yet seen this clip, the Masterchef judge appears to go on a rampage after someone throws away a plate of uneaten food.

The idea was conceived by a collective of anonymous creatives known as MANUAL. The objective was to raise awareness of the new REAP initiative launched by OH. MANUAL worked with PR agency Liquid, who seeded the video through a single tweet.

The campaign worked its way through news feeds, blogs, and into mainstream media. The Age and Sydney Morning Herald dedicated their homepages to Moran’s madness, as well as several mainstream TV channels and radio stations. People tweeted. Mumbrella saw through it. The word spread like wildfire. Over 200,000 views in 48 hours.

Epic win.

Ozharvest and MANUAL took advantage of the Masterchef season launch and leveraged the Internet’s fascination with behind-the-scenes celebrity psychosis. And after speaking to MANUAL, I can confirm they did it with very little budget and hardly any time.

So to agency folk who are still working the waterfall – it’s time to pull a MANUAL, invest in rapid-response, in-house video teams and reach for that V-spot.

Because when you consider the rise and rise of online video, it’s low risk, high reward.