Maytag: It’s Gonna Be Maytag

Every year, Maytag works to own the month of May with a creative retail promotion to drive sales of its appliances. Upon researching all things “May” to uncover a new creative direction, we discovered a meme that had been springing up on social media feeds every May since 2012 when NSYNC front man Justin Timberlake first famously pronounced the word “me” as “may” in his classic hit song and video “It’s Gonna Be Me.” And just like that, “It’s Gonna Be May” became a recurring meme to welcome the month, with Timberlake himself fueling its popularity with parody videos. It was the perfect meme for Maytag to hijack — and what better way than to replace the curly-haired boy band heartthrob with the square-jawed icon of dependability, The Maytag Man?

But we didn’t stop there. Maytag acquired the rights to NSYNC’s original “It’s Gonna Be Me,” and re-cut one of Maytag’s ads to the song, unleashing a fully integrated campaign to drive awareness that May was #ItsGonnaBeMaytag Month. Within hours, the campaign went viral. We secured 118 media stories generating 169M impressions, including 69 broadcast segments (Highlights: Fox News, PopCulture.com, Daily Dot, Alist Daily, USA Today, PRWeek, AdAge, CNN wire.) On social, the meme generated 4.2K mentions of #ItsGonnaBeMaytag, leading to 181x more mentions of The Maytag Man on Twitter.  Maytag Month 2019 was a record hit for the brand, producing an 8.9 point lift in consideration intent, 3.1 point lift in preference and 2.0 point lift in purchase intent.