Jordan Watson: Behind the scenes of viral success

When it comes to ‘going viral’, Kiwi content creator Jordan Watson may just have the greatest success story of them all.

One quiet Auckland Sunday afternoon back in 2015 Watson filmed his baby daughter Alba in some funny poses for a short video and uploaded it to Facebook.

To Watson’s astonishment this brief joke clip, fronted by himself as an archetypal deadpan Kiwi bloke and entitled “How To Hold a Baby”, went viral - and in the process completely changed his life.

That can best be measured by the fact that today Watson is a full-time comical parenting guru whose videos have topped 172 million video views on YouTube and 300 million views on Facebook, and a recognised celebrity figure with subscribers in 150 countries.

For a quintessentially “Kiwi Dad take” on how to change a nappy, how to hold a baby, how to burp a baby, or how to stop a baby from crying, Watson is your man.

“It’s so strange,” Watson reflected on the latest Between Two Beers Podcast. “There’s never been a blue book or a manual on how to be an internet video guy.”

But Watson’s first-hand experience in unexpectedly emerging as an internet sensation hints at how random and unpredictable the process can be.

“I always get asked was there a big plan behind it?” Watson said. “There wasn’t straight off the gate, there was no big plan of ‘this is a video that’s going to change my life - I’m going to make a viral video today’.

“I had two kids at the time, a 4-month-old and a 2-year-old. My wife went out with the 2-year-old... and I was left home with a 4-month old and just a little bit bored.

“And I knew that a good friend Sam Smith, had a baby on the way. So I thought, I shall make a funny video for Sam.”

Watson set up his camera and then thought it would be funny to assume a rough Kiwi mumbling persona in illustrating the various ways of holding a baby, from the “rugby ball hold”, right through to the “need-to-pick-something-up chin standard shoulder hold”.

Less than two minutes long, he loaded it onto his personal YouTube channel and put the link on his Facebook page.

“I don’t even think I told my wife that I made a video... and then woke up and my phone was just full of these notifications. I heard from YouTube like, ‘Congratulations, your videos had 1000 views’, 10,000 views, 500,000 views... Overnight, or in a couple of days I had a million views and I was like ‘wow’.

“And that’s where I just rode this endorphin-high of like two days of fame - five seconds of fame on the Paul Henry Show.”

Watson, who himself had a low-key background in TV production, started attracting media inquiries, where they naturally asked what he did for a job.

“I said, ‘Aaah, I do a bit of landscaping’. I think I just went with it.”

Watson had actually once worked as a landscaper but was concerned that if he revealed he worked in the world of television production it would have been dismissed as just a skit for satirical news and entertainment show, Jono and Ben (where he was employed as floor manager at the time).

“And that got published and kind of went into other articles. And then I kind of got stuck with it.”

Looking back, Watson said the internet was already flooded with serious parenting advice videos - but there hadn’t been one with a dad taking the mickey with their baby.

“I think it was just a first... a perfect storm came together for it to go viral.”

Then Watson did nothing for six months, thinking he’s had his two days of fame. But then at the urging of friends and family, at the start of 2016 he made a “How to Dad” Facebook page and YouTube channel and began making a video every weekend, never missing for five years.

His most watched video on Facebook has been “How to Put a Baby to Sleep”. Watson always expected this would be a goodie - simply because his daughter never went to bed easily. But the opposite proved to be the case in front of the camera.

“I just said the intro-to-camera and she just dropped, like she just dropped in the cot and like put her thumb in and almost fell asleep. And what you don’t see in the edit is I crack up laughing... She’s only like eight months old.

“I think she clicked in her head that Dad liked that. So then I’d go through all these dad stereotypes that I come up with, like the hypnotised dad or the hop-into-the-cot dad. But every time I said ‘sleep’, she just kept doing that.”

Watson feared that because Alba just kept going to sleep instead of cavorting about as normal, the video was not relatable.

“She has not jumped around at all. And my wife watching over my shoulder goes: ‘That’s cute’. And I was like, I’m not looking for cute. I’m looking for funny.”

But what soon became evident was his daughter had prodigious comedic timing, and when it was posted there were 20 million views in the first week.”

Not long after came a $1000 invitation from Destination Rotorua to make a video, which led to an equally successful clip about how to travel with a baby.

" We’ve travelled, I’ve edited this video. And another 20 million views.”

Not that Watson was instantly rich. A million views on YouTube translated to just $980. But from there the gig invitations and associated income accrued, an agent was hired, and in 2017 Watson resigned from his job to do his dad videos full time.

“It’s been eight years of just winging it and making it up and seeing how it goes. And there’s been a tonne of pinch-yourself moments like some really cool opportunities have come from it.”

The latest element of the “How to Dad” journey is a new podcast, The Parenting Hangover, with the fourth episode now out. In it Watson talks about issues such as circumcision, childbirth, kids stories, bringing humour and insight.

The aim is to normalise the parenting journey.

“We talk about that everyday stuff and just how’s things are going. How’s life? What’s happened this week? And then we usually have a good topic that we kind of chunk into and it’s always with a bit of fun and entertainment.

“We’re not there to give you advice because we’re not that we’re not we don’t have a degree in how to raise a kid.

Watson has since also created Kiwi jandal production company, “Golden”, after being continually frustrated at “premature blow-outs” with his jandals.

“Why don’t we make the plug bit bigger?” Watson asked, as the very basic consumer premise to the company.

As to his earlier work, Watson started his television career in 2007, as a runner for Greenstone Pictures.

But in the podcast co-host Seamus Marten succinctly describes Watson as “the Forrest Gump of New Zealand media” with backstage or front-row connections to iconic comedic programmes such as Eating Media Lunch, The Unauthorised History of New Zealand and the equally unconventional Birdland.

Though Watson identified a sharp contrast with Gump. “All the shows that I worked on, the series ended up being cancelled. So I think I was the bad one coming along.”