The Infamous Pink Sauce and its 158M, Organic Viewers

The Infamous Pink Sauce and its 158M, Organic Viewers

Hey everyone, welcome to the lab, today we will be dissecting the infamous founder @chef.pii on Tik Tok. The pink sauce took Tik Tok by storm and has gotten 158M views within less than a year on the app. Let’s take a look at 2 top performing videos and why they went viral!

Top Video Stats: 

Video 1: 486K likes, 13.2M Views, 8.5K comments, 9.6K shares 7 seconds long

Video 2: 267K likes, 9.4M Views, 4.8K comments, 3.8K shares 12 seconds

Standout video elements in video 1:

-2 frames within 1 second

-opening frame has garlic in a blender and the founder pouring a lot of oil

-Text on screen

-”pink sauce” being poured (ASMR)

-”I’m here” lines up with the pink sauce stock

-Human element at the end of her making the business logo

-a reference to astrology

-video easter eggs (accidental)

-Commentable

Standout video elements in video 2:

-”stretches” the virality of video 1 by doing a video response

-show don’t tell

-straight to the point

-mukbang/Asmr concept added

These, my friends, were the 2 videos that kicked off chef.pii’s pink sauce condiment company. Today her company has landed a brand deal with Dave’s gourmet sauces and is now sold commercially across the nation. Part of what made this brand take off is all of the hate the founder got for selling and sending a food product through the mail. Many accused her of poor food precautions since as you can tell in the video she had no gloves, mask, or hair net while making the sauce.

This led to a lot of criticism, and video 1 got a lot of poor stitch reactions putting down the pink sauce and its founder. One video, in particular, accused the founder of making sauces that were getting people sick, this video got a lot of attention and brought even more spotlight to the brand. On the other hand, people were also solely buying the sauce just to make videos of eating it in their daily meals. This is because videos of people eating the sauce they ordered got millions of views and thousands of followers for her customers, which led to even more people buying it just to make videos and get Tik Tok fame.

Some things to Unpack:

-The founder was able to make the pink sauce a social symbol that gained people followers: the “Viral Tik Tok product” is a status every brand needs. What I think about when trying to achieve this for my clients is “How can I make a drastic before and after change throughout the video that comes from direct use of the product, so that the results would be different for everyone”, this leads viewers to want to try the product and make a video showing their results and or experience.

-Video 1’s virality was stretched: she did this by responding to a top comment with video 2 which answered the question by showing and not telling. She didn’t talk at all in the video and allowed the response to take form in a mukbang / ASMR type of way where everything is quiet and the focus is on the sound and look of the food.

-Throughout the video there are commentable easter eggs:

Did you notice the container with mayo? How about the large amount of oil in the beginning? The garlic in the blender? Maybe the last 2 you noticed due to me pointing it out earlier, but these are what I call video easter eggs. This tactic is basically adding things throughout a video that only really detailed people see. This usually leads to the detailed viewer seeing it and commenting to see if anyone else saw it. This results in the person who reads the comment realizing they had missed something, so they go back and watch the video again to see if they can find it. In this case, the video was only 7 seconds long and moved really fast, so viewers likely watched it over and over multiple times just to spot what people were commenting on.

If you take anything away from this letter, attack multiple video easter eggs into your videos that people can comment on. Also if you can take some hate, get a little controversial! It also makes your brand seem more human and raw which is the contact of the Tik Tok platform.

This was quite a long one, although worth it! @chef.pii is a great marketer, and I’m happy she got a brand deal where she can distribute her sauces in a proper manner!!