Going Viral Is A Moment.
Building A Viral Brand Is A System.
A viral brand isn't bought with ad spend. It's owned by its fans and niche communities — and fueled by raving-fan advocacy.
ViralBrand helps brands build creator-powered awareness and sales engines through creators, affiliates, ambassadors, advocates, and strategic amplification.
Your sales force is about to get exponentially bigger.
We don't build influencer campaigns. We build awareness & sales armies.
Most agencies focus on influencers. We help brands build creator-powered ecosystems designed to generate awareness, trust, user-generated content, referrals, affiliate sales, ambassador relationships, and long-term growth.
The result is a scalable growth engine that compounds over time — instead of a one-time campaign.
"We don't build influencer campaigns. We build creator-powered awareness and sales armies."
A fast spike of attention / a compounding long-term system / a social feed that never goes quiet
DTC, entertainment, retail, hospitality — any industry, targeting any niche community or online topic thread.
Creators are the best sales force
you'll ever have.
You don't want "influencer marketing." You want the outcome it's supposed to deliver.
Your sales team just got a whole lot bigger.
Going viral is a moment. Being a viral brand is a system.
Chick-fil-A, In-N-Out, Disney — these brands didn't get lucky. They're structurally designed to be powered by communities of fans who drive awareness, engagement, and sales every month.
Our approach is precise: a viral brand is built from the grassroots up — community by community. We start with the raving fans of your brand, extend into the niche communities they belong to, and activate the tastemakers who lead them. Not random creators. Your people, with reach.
That's the ViralBrand Methodology: a brand is built, not bought or advertised into existence. We build the engine. Then we run it.
Built for a moment? Or built to last?
Two ways to work with us — both powered by the same four-engine grassroots engine. One fires into a single window. One runs always-on and compounds. Most brands start with a Launch Campaign to prove the engine, then mature into the ongoing Program.
ViralBrand Launch Campaign
Fixed window, typically 2–8 weeks. Scoped and quoted per campaign.
A campaign built around a moment that matters: a product launch, a release, a season, or a relaunch or comeback. All four engines compressed and fired into a single window. The lower-commitment way to start — and the front door to the ongoing Program.
- The full four-engine system, focused into a 2–8 week window
- Grassroots Mobilization across niche-community creators
- Organic Collaborations — royalty-free creator content, included
- Tuned to one priority result, set with you at kickoff
- Full campaign reporting and tracked results
ViralBrand Creator-Affiliate Program
The four-engine system run continuously, month after month — compounding into reach, content, advocates, and revenue. Builds a viral brand from the grassroots up, community by community. The durable relationship a Launch Campaign matures into.
- Grassroots Mobilization & Organic Collaborations — always-on, included
- Paid Partnerships & Amplification — budgeted monthly with you
- Royalty-free UGC and advocates spun off every cycle
- Every cycle measured and refined against one priority result
- Real-time dashboard, bi-weekly calls, monthly reports
Founder-led. Five cities. Built human and machine.
ViralBrand runs as a hybrid operating system. Senior human strategists lead every client engagement. Our ViralBrand Intelligence™ agents handle the volume, speed, and precision work that no human team can match at scale. This is what "Human Influence. Machine Power." actually looks like in production.
Disney-trained, Oxford-educated brand strategist. Pioneered creator affiliate marketing in 2004 at Motive Entertainment — contributing to $2.4B+ in worldwide box office. Founded DBA West and PartnersHub in 2009, one of the first influencer platforms, later acquired by what became Gloo (now Nasdaq: GLOO). Designed the ViralBrand operating system.
Celebrity entrepreneur, author, producer, and host of Bloomberg TV's "Female Founders." Named "Master of Branding" and "Influencer of Influencers" by the media. Brings deep creator-side expertise to the ViralBrand model — the operator who built one of the most engaged personal brands in lifestyle and fashion.
From the MBS Media Campus in Silicon Beach. Across America.
Creator Lounge • Production Studio • Brand Operations — all from one of Hollywood’s most iconic production lots. Home to Avatar, The Mandalorian, and Marvel.
ViralBrand with Rick Schirmer.
Conversations about the creator economy, brand partnerships, and how viral brands actually get built. Filmed live at the ViralBrand Creator Studio on the MBS Studio Lot. Hosted by Rick Schirmer. New episodes weekly.
Real creators. Real influence. Real sales.
Built for brands ready to scale.
Whether you're launching a new product, growing an established consumer brand, expanding a franchise, releasing a film, promoting a streaming platform, or scaling an ecommerce business, ViralBrand helps create the awareness and advocacy required for sustainable growth.
The ViralBrand Growth Engine™
A viral brand is built from the grassroots up — community by community. The ViralBrand Growth Engine™ runs in four continuous steps. Run them consistently and they compound into a flywheel: self-reinforcing momentum that spins off every result a campaign is built for.
Every successful brand eventually builds an ecosystem of customers, creators, ambassadors, affiliates, and advocates. We help accelerate that process.
Identify The Community
We map the niche communities, fans, and tastemakers your brand already lives among — then pinpoint the creators who actually lead them.
Activate The Creators
We mobilize those creators through multi-channel outreach and organic collaborations — producing authentic content and royalty-free UGC at scale.
Amplify What Works
We put proven creator content behind paid media — extending the pieces already earning attention to more of the right communities.
Scale Through Ambassadors & Affiliates
Top performers convert into long-term ambassadors and affiliates — compounding reach, advocacy, and revenue month over month.
brand
The Flywheel spins off awareness, reach, engagement, royalty-free UGC, advocates, and attributable intake — outputs of a well-run machine, never steps. The best advocates feed back into the steps, and the wheel turns faster.
Built native to every major platform creators live on.
The future belongs to creator-powered brands.
Advertising alone is becoming more expensive and less trusted. Today's fastest-growing brands combine paid media, creators, affiliates, ambassadors, user-generated content, and community-driven advocacy to create momentum. We help brands build and scale those systems.
Every brand should own an Awareness Army and a Sales Army.
The strongest brands build both.
The brands going viral right now aren't lucky. They activated the right networks of real humans.
Campaigns that compounded into viral brands.
TikTok hired us as their official partner and agency of record for the U.S. launch of TikTok Shop, beginning in 2022. We mobilized our affiliate network of 20,000+ grassroots creators and ran online trainings to teach them how to use TikTok Shop — helping creators turn the platform into a livelihood during harsh winters and hard seasons, and accelerating early seller adoption across the country. TikTok Shop is now a category-defining commerce platform.
Agency of Record
We activated a grassroots army of beauty creators already aligned with the brand — turning product seeding into an always-on affiliate engine. Creators drove sales. UGC compounded. The algorithm did the rest.
on TikTok Shop
We built and run The Chosen's affiliate network of 10,000+ grassroots creators and pro creators — the largest fan-fueled activation engine of its kind in entertainment. The result: #1 on Prime Video, one of the top TV shows in the world, and an unprecedented theatrical run no other TV series has ever matched.
#1 on Prime Video
As a long-standing creator and social marketing partner, we supported Chick-fil-A's growth from under $1B to nearly $25B in annual revenue over two decades. We were there when the brand became #1 for kids and family, #3 overall in America, and crossed its first million Facebook fans during the early social era. Today it's a category-defining viral brand — beating McDonald's for the #1 spot for the first time in 50 years.
#1 in America
Long before "influencer marketing" had a name, we built a grassroots activation engine that mobilized thousands of community leaders to drive record-breaking attendance. The playbook we built here became the foundation for every modern affiliate creator campaign.
Box Office
We built and run the affiliate creator network for House of David — 5,000+ grassroots creators and pro creators activated across faith, family, and entertainment. The show reached #1 on Prime Video in the U.S., captivated 44M+ viewers worldwide in 240+ countries, and became the flagship launch title for Wonder Project, the new $8.99/mo Prime Video subscription that hit 500,000 subscribers in its first three weeks.
#1 on Prime Video
We launched KeVita through an affiliate campaign network of LA-based yoga, wellness, and lifestyle creators — activating grassroots creators and pro creators who were already living the brand. The authentic advocacy compounded into category dominance, and the brand went on to become one of the most successful wellness beverage exits of its era.
Category-Defining Exit
Nobody expected The Purge to do well. Industry forecasts had opening weekend under $10M. We designed a viral influencer and blogger campaign that blurred the line between fiction and reality — even standing up a fake Washington D.C. political action committee to get bloggers, creators, and commentators debating whether "The Purge" was a real proposed policy. The film opened at $34M, grossed $89M worldwide on a $3M budget, and became a five-film franchise and TV series now totaling $500M+.
From a $3M Film
We didn't wait for this category. We helped build it.
Long before "influencer marketing" had a name — before TikTok, before Instagram, before the word "creator" meant what it means today — ViralBrand was quietly pioneering the playbook now used across every major brand activation in the world.
The next chapter of viral brands is being written right now. Let's write yours.
Book A Strategy Call →Two decades of building viral brands.
Three ways to be part of what we're building.
Build Your Viral Brand
Build a creator-powered growth engine — awareness, UGC, affiliates, and ambassadors — run as one always-on system, built from the grassroots up.
Book A Strategy Call →Get Certified. Get Collabs.
ViralBrand Certified Creators get training, priority access to brand campaigns, invitations to studio events, and a credential that elevates their career.
Become a ViralBrand Certified Creator →License The Methodology
ViralBrand Certified Strategists learn our system and deliver it to their own clients with our credential and methodology behind them.
Become a ViralBrand Certified Strategist →A real studio. A real stage. A real home for creators.
The ViralBrand Creator Studio & Lounge is our physical home on the MBS Studio Lot in Silicon Beach — the production home of Avatar, The Mandalorian, and Marvel's biggest shows. We designed it to be Creator Central: a working LED stage, a hospitality-forward lounge, and a gathering place for the grassroots creators, pro creators, and brand partners we work with every day.
Creators come here to shoot podcasts, short-form, branded content, and episodes of ViralBrand with Rick Schirmer. Brand partners come here to meet creators, host activations, and watch their campaigns come to life. It's where Hollywood meets Silicon Beach. Where traditional entertainment meets the creator era. Where viral brands get built.
1600 Rosecrans Avenue
MBS Media Campus
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Not sure where to start?
Whether you're looking to launch a creator campaign, build an ambassador program, develop an affiliate system, generate UGC, or create a complete creator-powered growth engine, our team can help you identify the right strategy.
Schedule A Discovery Call →Let's make your brand go viral.
Book a strategy call and we'll map the creator-powered growth engine for your brand — the Launch Campaign that proves it, and the always-on Program it grows into.
Book A Strategy Call →