Good work travels when people can pass it on
JibJab's most famous video spread by email without any advertising. Its makers had also spent five years getting good enough to make it.
If you make something good and put it out there, people will pass it along.
Gregg Spiridellis and his brother Evan founded JibJab in 1999, making short animated films for the web. In the summer of 2004 they released This Land, a cartoon in which the two presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry, insulted each other to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s song. It cost very little to make. People emailed it to friends, who emailed it on, and within weeks it had been watched tens of millions of times and the brothers were being interviewed on network television. Spiridellis made this remark in one of those interviews, explaining why even political campaigns were starting to copy the approach.
The line holds for a specific kind of thing. Short, funny or surprising media that can be shared in one click, and that makes the sender look good for sharing it, will spread if it is good enough. There was no marketing budget behind This Land. The quality and the timing did the work. Even the legal threat from the company that controlled the song’s copyright helped: the dispute was reported widely, it ended with the video staying online, and each news story sent more people to watch it.
It takes several things for granted. The first is the timing: the video arrived in the middle of an election campaign that everyone was already talking about. The second is the channel. Passing along a video by email was easy in 2004, and a product that cannot be shared as easily, such as accounting software, a service for dentists or a mortgage, does not travel that way no matter how good it is. People recommend those products slowly, one conversation at a time.
The third is the years before. JibJab had been making films for five years when This Land spread, and many earlier ones had gone largely unnoticed. “Make something good” concealed a long apprenticeship in learning what good meant for that audience.
There is also the question of what happens afterwards. Being passed along brings attention, not revenue. JibJab has since built a business selling personalized animated greeting cards by subscription, which is a different product from the free video that made its name. For a founder, the line is a reason to invest in quality and to make sharing easy. It is not a distribution plan on its own.