First Kiss

Submission 14,875

About

First Kiss is a viral video produced by director Tatia Pilieva for the fashion label Wren, featuring 20 actors and models who are filmed under the premise that they are kissing a stranger for the very first time.

Origin

On March 10th, 2014, Pilieva uploaded a video titled "First Kiss" to her YouTube channel, in which 20 people are shown kissing each other with the song "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow" by Soko playing in the background (shown below). Within the first four days, the video gained over 47.1 million views and 28,000 comments.

Spread

The same day on March 10th, 2014, Redditor tehWKD submitted the video to the /r/videos^[1] subreddit, where it accumulated more than 29,500 up votes and 3,800 comments in the next four days. On March 11th, several news sites highlighted the video, including Gawker,^[2] Mashable^[3] and People Magazine.^[4] The same day, Slate^[5] reported that the cast of the video consisted of actors and models. On March 12th, YouTuber Pimms Girl uploaded a parody titled "First Handjob," in which people fake being manually masturbated by various strangers (shown below). The same day, the Bosh YouTube channel uploaded a video titled "First Sniff," in which various dogs are filmed sniffing each other (shown below, right). Within 48 hours, the videos garnered upwards of 3.08 million and 295,000 views respectively.

On March 13th, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon released a parody titled "First Lick," featuring dogs and cats licking and playing with one another (shown below).

[This video has been removed]

On March 14th, the New York Times^[6] reported that the song "We Might Be Dead Tomorrow" sold 10,000 copies within 48 hours of the video's release and quoted Wren founder Melissa Coker's claim that the company's online store saw a "significant bump" in sales after the video began circulating online.