AI video by family-run shop drives 22 million views

Target Audience

Family businesses, small food retailers, SMEs that want to experiment with video marketing

Challenge

The Original Tamale Company, a small family-run tamale shop in Los Angeles, needed to expand its customer base and drive foot traffic to the store. Traditional marketing was expensive and didn't resonate with younger audiences. The family lacked video production skills and budget for professional content creation.

Solution Approach

In 2024, marketing manager Christian Ortega used ChatGPT to write video narration and edited a 46-second meme-style video using accessible tools in just 10 minutes total. The video featured a person falling from the sky and crash-landing at their shop—funny, unexpected, and tied back to their food. The timing aligned with cultural trends, maximizing virality potential.

Value Add

The video achieved over 22 million views and more than 1.2 million likes in just three weeks. More importantly, it drove significant foot traffic to the store and expanded their customer base beyond their traditional audience. The 10-minute investment using free AI tools delivered marketing reach that would have cost hundreds of thousands through traditional advertising.

How to Apply This

Latest generative AI tools for video generation have reached a good quality level. Further, they are great tools for creative people who want to realize ideas with little budget. While this use case here shows how such videos can create viral successes for small family business, larger SMEs face further needs. For example, you might have a well-defined corporate branding which needs to be reflected in the images and videos that AI creates for you. Alternatively, you can think of promoting your products with AI-generated videos, and you want to make sure that the products look exactly like the real ones (and not just similar). In any case, knowing how these technologies work, where their limitations are and how you can tweak them towards good results is a great start for exploring them yourself.

Want to explore AI video generators yourself, but lack the foundational knowledge? Then my introductory book 'Making Sense of Generative AI' might be worth a look.