Each year, RuPaul’s Drag Race announces a new cast of Queens for regular seasons and All Stars seasons. On our shotlist, we always have longform interviews, shortform beauty, and BTS shortform as well. With emerging social platforms, we’re constantly on our toes on how to pivot to optimize our content. With all of our longform packages, how can we translate this creative to the recently popular shortform formats presented by TikTok and Reels? Predicting viral moments.
There is no real science to predicting a moment’s virality, but there are some factors to keep in mind. While filming interviews with Queens, social team pays close attention to quick-witted answers and what makes the crew laugh in real-time. From here, we can determine which moments pop naturally as they happened in the moment filming. It’s a risk, but a great place to start.
While the final footage comes in from longform interviews, we scrub to see what moments hit and see if that matches the same energy when we were filming. If the moment still hits, we’ll clip it out and hope that it works in other contexts. While filming promotional material for All Stars 6, we asked each Queen, “Who is the villain of the season?,” a question we know will generate an entertaining response, and we were right!
Contestant Scarlet Envy went on a dramatic rant questioning if she was in fact, the drama of the season. Her over-the-top, delusional, personality leant itself to a relatable viral moment where she questions her intentions and reflects in real-time if she was the villain of the season. Her high inflection when she says, “Is is it me?! Am I the drama? I don’t think so….Maybe I am?,” creates a whimsical audio where if used, the user can reflect on their own messiness. This first translated to pet TikToks, where pets were classically misbehaving to Scarlet’s audio.
We knew that this audio had even MORE potential, so when this queer-originated audio found its way to conservative actress Candace Cameron’s account, we resurfaced the audio to gain more traction, and it did just that as Lady Gaga found the audio as she prepared for the premiere of “Haus of Gucci!”
This viral audio has over 4,000 videos attached to it, and celebrities like Candace Cameron and Lady Gaga has all used the audio in the trend. It helped boost views on Scarlet’s Meet the Queens video by driving 15% of overall traffic to the video from TikTok. The video also has over 1.5M views on the RuPaul’s Drag Race TikTok account.
We really got mileage from her interview being able to post the longform across platforms and pulling this short clip for TikTok and Reels. Is Scarlet the drama? She is on TikTok!
