When the video went viral, we knew we only had a short window before the buzz would die down. However rather than just wait it out, we decided to amplify the buzz and turn the story into a positive one.

Our idea was to join the conversation in real-time and show the human side of the brand, owning the mistake but doing everything we could to make it right again.

We decided to take our ‘happiness squad’ to Matias and put a smile on his face again by providing him with a personalised, happy experience.

But first we had to find Matias.

We executed a real-time marketing campaign by posting our intention to find Matias and his father on our own Facebook and Twitter pages and instantly our followers started to share the post with their networks.

We invested a small amount of money in promoting our own post and used our influencers, selected for their ability to help us spread the word of our search rather than any kind of celebrity status, to build scale beyond our immediate network.

As the story took hold on social media, news media coverage of the campaign followed. It took 2 days of frenzied media before we finally found Matias in the state of Sonora.

We sent out a team of Paleta Payaso ‘clown-doctors’ to put a smile on Matias’ face again and recorded a video to share not only the experience, but also our promise of spreading smiles.

In just 2 days, we turned a potential crisis in a positive outcome.

The video of ‘happy Matias’ went viral receiving 6,729,714 views in 3 days. Sad Matias video got around 3 million views, our post got around 15,429 likes, 17,500 shares, 3,800 comments on Facebook.

We increased our social channel fans & followers by 10%, adding almost 34,000 Facebook fans and 1,200 Twitter followers. Matias was a national trending topic on Twitter for 9 hours, generating 130,208 conversations.

More than 200 publishers covered this in their main news, including Mexico´s top TV news stations as well as news in Peru, Colombia, U.S (Hispanic market) and Ecuador, generating an estimated $500,000 in earned media coverage, far outweighing the $12,000 media spend.

Sales for the period increased 19% versus the same period the previous year.

But most importantly, we brought joy and happiness to a six-year old boy and restored his love for Paleta Payaso.