Great Marketing Is Felt Before It’s...

I had a happy childhood. Loving parents. Safety. Stability. But to really understand me and my voice, there’s one part of my story that is inextricably linked to how I experience the world: My dad is blind.

This one life experience shapes how I myself experience the world and how I show up in this industry. It’s the experience that gave me my empathy—my ability to truly put myself in someone else’s shoes, to shift my perspective in the most radical ways. It was an early life lesson, one everyone should be taught: We are not all the same, and we do not all experience the world in the same way.

I choose to look at it not as what I’ve lost, but what I’ve gained. I learned to think more about the world beyond the visual. To notice sound. Texture. Emotion. To listen harder. To pay attention. To connect.

Marketers love to talk about “experiential.” But too often, we’re building toward the same tired version of it—shiny, fast, visual-first. We’re so focused on what catches the eye, we forget what moves the heart.

Throughout my career, my internal motivation has always remained the same: When we are building campaigns and creating messaging, how do we use all of this to connect with people beyond the surface—on a deep, human level?

And when you start paying attention, you can already see this deeper kind of connection in the wild.

Netflix’s Stranger Things: The Experience doesn’t just extend the show, it drops you into Hawkins. You feel the eeriness, walk the halls, crack clues with your friends. For a few minutes, you’re not watching the story, you’re living it.

Or take Disney. Before you even see the Castle, you’re hit with the warm scent of popcorn. The music shifts from one land to the next. There’s mist in the air as you enter Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s not just a theme park, it’s nostalgia, carefully crafted through every sensory detail.

Now I’m not saying we should all build theme parks. But I am saying this: At Viral Nation, we firmly believe that the best campaigns aren’t the flashiest ones people see. They’re the ones people feel, the ones that tie into your memory and build you into their community. 

Nielsen data backs this up. A study demonstrated that emotionally resonant ads lift sales by 23%. For the brands that ignore this insight, the contrast is stark: Ads that didn’t strike an emotional chord had 16% lower sales on average.

Creators happen to be a perfect conduit to build the feeling beneath the surface of a campaign. Take Khaby Lame; to me, he perfectly illustrates how a subtle yet radical shift in perspective can make all the difference. Like many creators, Lame is able to make his audience feel his content and his product endorsements. But what sets him apart is that he does this without saying a single word. Without relying on the “normal” or traditional way we hear each other, Lame creates an even deeper sense of connection that has led to an explosive social presence. His audience is loyal, fiercely engaged, and keeps coming back for more.

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