While surfing aimlessly through YouTube back in May I came across a video that I found equally inspiring and unbelievable. A clip about a new sport started by Ulf Gartner that nurtures the idea of positive thinking and an undying passion to keep innovating, practicing and learning from failures. These guys were running on water and they weren’t named Chris Angel or Jesus. The sport was called Liquid Mountaineering. What I found out later created an appreciation of another type.

As I watched intently and listened to athlete Sabastian Vanderwerf speak about the evolution of the sport and techniques involved I was flooded with curiosity. Well written quotes like “if you don’t believe… it’s not going to happen for you.” and “people want you to think in a certain way and this sport allows you to push your horizons…. you’re moving past it all.” were inspiring and easily applied to any endeavor that requires hard work and determination. Then at 1:26, my skeptical marketing mind kicked in during a perfectly lit, different colored, label featuring, water-beading, close-up of a shoe accompanied with a eloquent verbal endorsement from Sabastian for Hi-Tec waterproof runners. Well played Hi-Tec you had me for a second, and with well over a million views to date, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

Check out the original video, the press release and more info below about this well executed viral campaign.

Simon Bonham, the Head of Marketing for Hi-Tec Group comments, “We wanted to create a piece of entertainment around our hydrophobic footwear and get people talking and thinking about the brand differently.” He added, “The idea was to take a traditional form of marketing and totally turn it around on its head, in the process capturing the fun spirited side of our brand. The reaction to the viral has surpassed all expectations; with people all over the world debating whether this could indeed be possible or not and even trying to do their own Liquid Mountaineering. We’ve even seen a number of entertaining attempts appear on YouTube and other places on the Web”

More information about the Liquid Mountaineering hoax can be found here. Below is a except taken from the blog created for the campaign. How are you getting people to talk about you?

The world of today is about working longer and faster to get ahead and the energy drink category has answered a huge calling. The popularity of Brands like Red Bull are based on a beverage with the ability to give you amazing energy boosts or “wings” as they call it. During a long drive in Quebec, entrepreneur Lino Fleury asked himself “What do people drink if they want to relax?”. The ability to wind down and relax the mind and body is essential to keeping ourselves healthy (mentally and physically) and to not burn out. Fleury says “I came to think that there is no beverage to help people slow down when they are stressed. Energy drinks are full of caffeine and they tend to increase anxiety, not reduce it”.

Introducing Slow Cow the drink that relaxes and helps in the improvement of concentration, memory and learning capacity without causing sleeplessness. Made up of 8 natural plants, amino acids and vitamins, this beverage promises many benefits including: relaxation, improved brain capacity and concentration, increase cerebral levels of dopamine, insomnia treatment, reducing nervousness and a decrease in fatigue during exercise.

The biggest and smartest aspect to Slow Cow is the brand strategy they have adopted to catapult them into the media. They have packaged and branded the drink to look like the calmer, little brother of Red Bull (right down to the use of bovine imagery in the logo and the 8 oz can). This mirrored, polar opposite strategy has created an opportunity for Slow Cow to be directly compared to Red Bull, instantly creating additional media attention and a new category within a category that is rapidly growing.

Every business and category out there has competitors. Sometimes it takes looking at everything that your competitors aren’t to see what it is you might need to become.