Jet2 Holidays: A viral jingle 🎶
Why a budget airline's jingle became 6.6 million videos
Hello hello!.
I have had the Jet2 jingle stuck in my head for about three weeks, and I have never once been on a Jet2 flight. I am not even sure I could find their terminal. And yet there it is, lodged between my own phone number and the chorus of a song I hate, this relentlessly cheerful little voice promising me that nothing beats a Jet2 holiday and that right now I can save fifty quid a person.
Sit with how strange that is for a second. A regional British package-holiday company, with a marketing budget I’d guess is smaller than a single Coca-Cola super-bowl spot, has colonized the brain of an American who will almost certainly never buy the product. And it did it because last summer roughly 6.6 million people voluntarily made videos using its ad, for free, on their own time, with their own footage. If you put a dollar value on that earned media you get a number that would get a CMO promoted twice.
So every founder and marketer looks at this and asks the same question, and it is the wrong one: how do we go viral too. Wrong question. The right one, the one almost nobody asks, is why this jingle and not the ten thousand others that just sit there being ignored. Because once you answer that, the whole thing stops looking like weather and starts looking like a thing you can build on purpose.
Here is the answer, and it is the only thing I really need you to take from this email: a viral asset is an unfinished joke. Jet2 wrote the setup and left the punchline blank, and the internet physically could not stop itself from finishing it.
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THE UNFINISHED JOKE
My working rule for whether anything spreads is dead simple. Can a stranger finish it?
Most jingles fail this instantly, because most jingles are statements. A brand name on a tune. A vibe. A warm feeling about laundry. You cannot finish a feeling. You cannot remix a mood. There is nothing for a human to do with a statement except nod at it, and nobody on earth has ever filmed themselves nodding.
A setup is the opposite. “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” makes a confident, falsifiable claim about reality and then just stops, leaving a blank where the punchline goes. And a confident claim with a blank after it is almost unbearable to leave alone. Every person who has had a flight delayed, a hotel flooded, or a seagull steal their chips already owns the punchline. It’s sitting in their camera roll. So they supply it. The chirpy voice insists nothing beats a Jet2 holiday, and underneath it a camel is chasing a screaming tourist down a beach. That gap is the joke, and the crowd writes it, millions of times, for nothing.
The asset isn’t the jingle. The asset is the blank.
THE SPECSAVERS PROOF
If Jet2 were the only example I’d call it a fluke and we’d all move on with our lives. It is not the only example. There is a brand that figured this out on purpose two decades ago and has been quietly compounding it ever since, and it is the single best proof that “leave the punchline blank” is a strategy and not a lightning strike: Specsavers.
In 2002 the British eyewear chain landed on “Should’ve gone to Specsavers.” The guy who wrote it has said the previous line got killed because it could have belonged to any brand. This one couldn’t, and not because it was witty. Because it’s a setup. Every ad shows somebody humiliating themselves because they can’t see, and the line lands like a verdict. Blunder is the setup. Slogan is the punchline. And because the joke is about making a dumb, universal mistake, the public never runs out of ways to finish it. Brits say it to each other in real life now. It’s in the dictionary of how the country talks. When a footballer bit an opponent at the World Cup, Specsavers fired off a one-liner about mixing a man up with a piece of pasta and got retweeted tens of thousands of times.
Twenty-plus years of free national media off one structural decision. Their own creatives have said the quiet part out loud: we’ve all gotten on the wrong bus or waved at a stranger, so the joke belongs to everyone. That is not a happy accident they noticed later. That is the spec they built to, on purpose, twenty years before Jet2 fell into the identical machine by accident. Same machine. The plan and the accident produced the same result, which is exactly how you know the result was never about the accident.
THE OCEAN SPRAY MIRAGE
Now the most expensive misunderstanding in the business, and the reason half of you are about to waste a quarter’s budget.
Everyone studies Ocean Spray and draws precisely the wrong lesson. In 2020 a guy in Idaho named Nathan Apodaca filmed himself longboarding to work, swigging Ocean Spray from the bottle, lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” because his car had died. Tens of millions of views. A 1977 song shoved back onto the charts. Ocean Spray gave him a truck. Gorgeous moment. Everyone wants one.
But look closely, because it is not an unfinished joke. “Dreams” doesn’t claim anything you can prove wrong. There is no blank to fill. This spread on a completely different engine: a feeling people wanted to perform, a ritual simple enough to copy, and a stranger so likeable the whole thing felt true. A mood, a ritual, a human.
And this is the part that should change your roadmap: you cannot build that engine. Ocean Spray did not make it happen and could not have. It required one specific man’s car to die on one specific morning and for him to be exactly that charming on camera. No agency can summon that. You can react fast and warm when lightning hits, which Ocean Spray genuinely nailed. You cannot order the lightning. Anyone pitching you a plan to “engineer an Ocean Spray moment” is selling you a scratchcard and billing you for strategy.
The unfinished-joke engine is the opposite of a miracle. It is almost boring how buildable it is. Write a setup, make it universal, repeat it until everyone knows the words. No lightning. A decision and some patience.
THE EARWORM TRAP
Third category, and it’s where most brand sounds go to die. The earworm. The Go Compare opera guy. The We Buy Any Car loop. Engineered to be catchy, and they succeed at being catchy, and they generate roughly zero participation, because there’s no joke to finish and no feeling to perform, just a tune jackhammered into your skull.
This is the confusion that costs the most money: memorable and spreadable are not the same property. An earworm is a statement you can’t forget. It is still a statement. It still leaves no blank. You can spend seven figures making a sound everyone knows and nobody touches.
YOU DON’T OWN THE PUNCHLINE
One honest catch, because I’m not going to sell you the upside without the bill. When you leave the punchline blank, you don’t get to pick who fills it in.
Last summer the same audio kept getting bolted onto clips the brand would never have chosen in a hundred years, including political and other content miles away from anything about holidays. Jess Glynne, who wrote the song, publicly condemned one of the uglier uses of it. The same setup that sold cheap family trips got finished with stuff the brand hated, and there was nothing Jet2 could do but stay quiet, which they did, and which only worked because they had never claimed the joke as theirs. The thing that made it spread, that it belonged to everyone, is the same thing that made it impossible to steer. That’s the trade. Build a setup good enough to travel and you are signing up for the fact that some of the punchlines will be ones you can’t stand.
WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO
Seven steps. One of them matters ten times more than the other six.
Mine the claims
Run the Stranger Test (the gate)
Produce it too loud
Saturate, especially the boring places
Listen for the spark
Crack one door, then leave
Pre-write the guardrails
1. Mine the claims
Get the team in a room and bang out 20 to 30 candidate setups. One rule on the whiteboard → claims, not vibes. A setup is a confident, falsifiable claim about something everyone has lived through.
The prompt that unlocks it → what does our brand say with a straight face that reality keeps making look ridiculous?
“The joy of travel” is a feeling. Nobody finishes a feeling.
“Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” is a setup. That’s the job.
2. Run the Stranger Test (the gate, and the whole ballgame)
Take your best eight → put each in front of real strangers → one instruction: finish this. If a stranger can’t finish it, the internet won’t either. Full stop.
Run it for almost nothing:
a Tally or Typeform poll to your list
a post in the right subreddit or Discord asking people to complete the line
a few hundred dollars of TikTok Spark and Meta on the raw setup, then read the comments and stitches
Measuring one thing → do strangers instantly supply a punchline, and is it funny?
The trap that kills most brands → passing an idea because the room loves it. The room is not the signal. Strangers finishing it is. Blank stares → back to step 1.
3. Produce it too loud
Build the winner. Push the delivery past the point where it feels comfortable. The spread lives in the gap between your certainty and reality → a polite, reasonable read leaves no gap to play in.
You nailed it when a teammate who knows the plan still winces at how earnest it sounds. That wince is the asset working.
4. Saturate, especially the boring places
Run it everywhere, for years. Pay the most attention to the unglamorous surfaces nobody fights you for:
hold music
packaging
the checkout screen
the boarding announcement
the confirmation email
Familiarity is the multiplier → people can only finish a setup they already know cold. Jet2 made it the boarding music. Specsavers ran the line for twenty years.
And for the love of God, stop refreshing the creative every quarter. Every refresh sets the clock back to zero. The boring consistency is the moat.
5. Listen for the spark
You can’t predict the moment, but you can catch it early. Put someone on the asset itself, not just your brand name:
track the sound or phrase in TikTok Creative Center
stand up Brand24 or Brandwatch, plus a Google Alert
keep saved searches running on TikTok, Instagram, and X
The tell → strangers using it without tagging you, especially to dunk on your whole category. Climbing week over week → you’re live.
6. Crack one door, then leave
When it catches, the hardest thing you will do is resist the budget. Do exactly one small thing:
a single post that nods at the joke and hands people a slightly better version to play with
maybe a light contest
Then stop. The joke only spreads while the brand is the target, not the author → roll a giant campaign on top and you kill it. Jet2’s entire move was one employee lip-sync and a voucher. The restraint was the play, not the video.
7. Pre-write the guardrails
You don’t own the punchline, so decide before anything blows up:
what you engage
what you ignore
what makes you go silent
The worst possible time to figure that out is live at 11pm. One page → an escalation path plus clear “we say nothing” criteria. The most valuable line in that doc is the one that tells your team when not to post.
If you take one thing from all of this, take the gate. Almost every brand falls in love with its own idea and ships it without ever checking whether a stranger can finish it, and that one test will save you more money than everything else here combined. The rest is patience and nerve. So stop trying to go viral and start trying to be finishable. Going viral is something other people do to your asset. Your only job is to build something worth finishing, and then get out of the way.
Tom & Al
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