February 20, 2024

3.3 Million Views

We launched our viral video “Crazy Wingsuit Flight – Man lands on water without a parachute” on October 8th 2013 from a Starbucks in Bristol. Since then, the video has been viewed over 3.3 million times and has been on news channels across the world.

Being a tiny mens grooming company with a TV ad spend of zero, we decided the viral thing was for us – we needed mass exposure and needed it quick!

So with that in mind and a few beers down, we liked the idea of claiming a “World’s First”… it sounded cool, and was potentially something that could gain some serious media traction.

The idea?

To fake the “World’s First” wingsuit water landing in Lake Garda, Italy. We created a fictional action sports character, Raphael Dumont (who was actually an English actor) who effortlessly jumps off a cliff in a wing suit and lands on the water without pulling his parachute. Crazy right?

After researching a load of successful viral videos, the formula for our video appeared to match other successful viral vids:

1) Provoke an emotion and someone will share it.
This emotion can either be laughter (but you’ve got to make them laugh real hard), sadness, shock, repulsion, inspiration, the list goes on….what ever it makes you feel, it must push your emotion to the extreme. If this is achieved, people will naturally share it with their peers.

2) Divide public opinion. Real or fake?
We deliberately went for amateur GoPro footage and this type of filming created a huge public debate (is it real or fake?) spreading like wild fire across Twitter, Facebook (32,000 shares on the first day) and the discussion even went as far as international news channels.

So you decide which bits are real and which bits are fake! All we know is Raphael Dumont and his Wingsuit helped put our little brand on the map!