There’s a handful of standard goals to set when building an effective social media campaign: lower the barrier to participation; create compelling content that drives engagement; use rewards and other incentives to encourage sharing. A campaign produced by Perrier has done these 3 things and more in an unbelievably effective social campaign that has entirely reinvented viral video. They made some brilliant decisions and packaged it all into a wildly creative concept.

The Concept – Perrier produced a series of the same video that each get increasingly hot; the more the video gets viewed and shared, hotter versions of the movie clip get shown. The content of the movie gets hotter in terms of sexual appeal, but the real win is that it also gets hotter in terms of temperature, leading the characters to drink more Perrier. Let’s look closer at the campaign to see what great choices were made.

Lower the Barrier – By deciding to use YouTube, Perrier picked a platform that allows millions of people to jump right in and intuitively interact with it’s content. No special software needs to get downloaded or installed. The video is viewable from any mobile device. There’s nothing new to learn before participating; you simply press play like you would with any YouTube video.

Create Compelling Content – The story follows an attractive young woman into an exclusive night-life lifestyle. The music is cool. The people in the video are hot. And the story draws you in. Deciding to unlock additional versions of the video with even more details of the story was simply brilliant.

Encourage Sharing – Seeing a glimpse of a steamy, upscale club scene is not something most people get to do. Once it is understood that simply Liking or sharing the video will give you more access, it’s impossible to resist getting a second, closer look. The cost of clicking a button is minimal in comparison to the buzz you feel when your social access gets upgraded.

Just how successful was the campaign? It got 100K views in the first day it launched. In less than two weeks, the count is now over 4M. With this much success, there’s no question that future campaigns will follow in the footsteps of this instant hit.