In the movie, Wayne’s World, the idea of drive-thru window pranks was first popularized with this famous scene. Now that creating a video is as simple as using your cell phone camera, numerous high school and college students have posted videos to YouTube documenting the fun they’ve had at the drive-thru. But recently this juvenile brand-badgering has evolved into an international YouTube trend and a crowd sourced, brand-friendly advertising campaign for McDonalds. All without McDonalds spending a single dollar.

The viral video that got YouTube’s attention was made by a musician/cover-artist in Spain named Xuso Jones. While he only received about 200K hits on one of his Justin Bieber cover videos, as of today he’s managed to get 2M hits on his McDonalds Drive-Thru song video. A second b-rate musician has gone big with this trend as well. Todrick Hall, a former semi-finalist on the TV show American Idol, released his own McDonald’s Drive-Thru song video right around the time he got voted off the show, and has since received 1.8M hits. Again, this far outshines all of his other popular videos, the best of which are in the 500k hit range. Obviously there’s something about these videos that is incredibly appealing to viewers, and understanding this secret could help other brands reap the benefits of a viral success.

With a music and video superstar like Lady Gaga, typically it is her multimillion dollar video that trickles down to fans who then make their own low budget versions at home. But in the case of the drive-thru videos, it was low quality amateur videos that caught the attention of higher profile artists. The key element to the drive-thru concept that compels others to “try this at home” is the accessibility. Anyone can go and repeat what happens in the video, and most viewers watch the video and think “I could do that.” The desire to not just copy the actions in the video, but improve upon them is the precise reason why the videos have gotten increasingly impressive over time and attracted the attention of more talented amateurs and semi-professionals.

If a brand can get customers and ad viewers to Like a video, comment on it, or share it with friends, the ad is a sweeping success. But if viewers turn around and create content of their own, the ad has obviously connected on a much deeper level. This transformation from passive participation to active participation is the holy grail of social media and community building. When Pepto-Bismol released a series of YouTube video ads for Cinco De Mayo, they used big time budgets to get professional stunts on camera. But for legal reasons, a very clear warning was made to viewers: do NOT try this at home. For this reason, viewers never had the chance to connect with the ad concept on a deeper level, and the videos never went viral.

Fortunately for McDonalds, the laughing-at-you tone of the original videos slowly evolved into a laughing-with-you tone, and finally into a I’m-not-laughing-I’m-just-loving-it tone. Gently steering this tone from afar is paramount to a video campaign like this being successful. Should the brand get too involved and make the video seem staged and too ad-like, users might not feel as willing to participate and create their own videos. And should the brand be completely uninvolved, the tone could potentially shift into the danger zone and make the entire video effort counter productive. The focus should be put on encouraging iterative development of the original concept. By promoting, rewarding, or otherwise encouraging the videos that are most on-brand, users will subconsciously internalize the values of the curator and create future content with the same qualities as those which were rewarded. This could be done by blogging about the video to drive hits, sending promotional items or coupons to the artist, or by quietly producing a slightly better video to continue the trend of optimization.

It’s possible that McDonald’s isn’t even aware of these videos. But if McDonald’s is paying attention, now could be the time to put some ad dollars behind the project, pay professional musicians to make new content, and push the drive-thru videos to another level. Whether this viral success was calculated or entirely organic, the lessons to learn from it are priceless.