One day, your brand experiences a sudden surge in media coverage. Perhaps the story has significant political or economic implications, or it poses a major disruption to your industry. For some brands, this moment marks a sharp increase in their usual media presence. For others—such as DeepSeek’s rapid rise in late January—it’s a breakthrough from obscurity into the global public eye.
Whether this is a rare spike in coverage or your brand’s first moment in the spotlight, a viral media event presents two key challenges for PR professionals. First, it offers a critical opportunity to shape public perception while attention is at its peak. Second, it may require swift action to mitigate any unintended consequences of the sudden exposure.
The key takeaway? Speed is essential. These viral moments are fleeting, often lasting only a short time before coverage returns to normal levels or establishes a new baseline for brands emerging from obscurity. The ability to respond quickly and strategically can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived long after the media frenzy subsides.
DeepSeek’s Viral Moment – A Rise from Obscurity
In one viral moment, DeepSeek, the once little-known Chinese tech lab, disrupted the entire AI industry, sending ripples through Silicon Valley and around the world. The release of a high-performance AI model from one of the U.S.’s biggest technological and political competitors—seemingly capable of outperforming American tech powerhouses like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic—wholly stunned those industry giants and became an irresistible story for global media. Fueling this intrigue were reports that DeepSeek’s model was significantly cheaper to develop and ran on less-powerful chips than those used by industry leaders like Llama 3.1, GPT-4o, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, resulting in a true viral moment.
In the ensuing week, both traditional and social media have explored various angles of the story. A central discussion point has been the staggering costs heretofore associated with AI development and data centers, particularly for U.S. tech giants. From their standpoint, DeepSeek’s ability to rival top models at a fraction of the cost threatens the dominance of American AI firms and challenges the U.S.’s leadership in the field. Furthermore, concerns about political implications—such as a foreign company nefariously collecting user data—echo past controversies surrounding TikTok and have sparked calls for potential regulatory action.
Given the high political and economic stakes, DeepSeek dominated traditional media headlines and trended across social media. However, as with many viral moments, coverage quickly declined—more noticeably on social platforms—despite DeepSeek’s perceived lasting impact on the AI industry. While its influence on the tech landscape is far from over, traditional and social media now show only a fraction of the mentions seen on January 27–28. Indeed, the amount of mentions over the latter few days show what looks to be DeepSeek’s post-viral descension.
Note: Social data only includes a sample of the overall coverage – the numbers presented are not true amounts but represent the trend over time
Viral Events for Well-Known Brands – Important but Fleeting Moments
What we’re seeing here is the natural rhythm of the news cycle. Both traditional media and social media—the latter of which being where news organizations and individuals both drive discussions—have a limited attention span for any given story before something new takes center stage. In this case, DeepSeek’s moment in the spotlight was likely overshadowed by the buildup to Trump’s impending tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico, which were set to take effect on February 1.
But DeepSeek is far from the only entity to experience such a fleeting surge in interest. Let’s compare it to some well-known brands who receive media attention regularly but have experienced a recent immense spike in their coverage due to an impactful story to illustrate that a similar trend can be observed across industries. Take Formula 1, for example: one of the most viral stories of 2024 was Ferrari’s signing of Lewis Hamilton for the 2025 season. In a similar arc, Ferrari’s media coverage peaked dramatically on February 1, when the news broke, before beginning to decline the following day. By February 4, Ferrari’s coverage had returned to its typical baseline, just as we’re seeing with DeepSeek, who’s coverage declined to its new baseline by end of January.
Note: Social data only includes a sample of the overall coverage – the numbers presented are not true amounts but represent the trend over time
Another example happened recently in the airline industry
Air Canada’s media coverage spiked when the airline reached a tentative deal with its pilots’ union, averting a strike that could have had widespread consequences for both the airline industry and international travel. Despite the significance of this development, coverage quickly tapered off, mirroring the pattern seen with Ferrari and DeepSeek.
Note: Social data only includes a sample of the overall coverage – the numbers presented are not true amounts but represent the trend over time
The news hype cycle had a quantitatively different effect on DeepSeek—the upstart has now entered public consciousness and, so far, maintains a steady stream of coverage, which is a dream come true for a company that was virtually unknown just two weeks ago. Ferrari’s F1 team and Air Canada also experienced temporary post-viral spikes before returning to normal coverage levels.
Going forward, DeepSeek’s media presence will almost surely dissolve to a new baseline, with any future viral moments triggering temporary surges before settling back into regular coverage, like Ferrari and Air Canada.
However, these examples highlight a broader reality: even impactful news stories struggle to sustain prolonged media attention as new events steadily take their place. For PR specialists, the key takeaway is clear—swift action is essential to capitalize on or mitigate a viral moment before the media cycle moves on.
Understanding Media Frenzy: How Brands Can Leverage Rapidly Fluctuating Attention
One key takeaway from these types of frenetic media patterns is that a brand’s media presence tends to remain relatively steady over time, except for incidental coverage surges (which could be due to a viral moment or a PR crisis). During these high-attention moments, news outlets large and small put your brand in front of their audiences, while content creators and influencers amplify your presence across social media. However, as we’ve seen, this window of heightened exposure is fleeting—often lasting just a day or two before attention shifts elsewhere.
Should Your Brand Harness the Media Hype Cycle? Absolutely—But Act Fast!
Media, as we know, has the unique ability to shape public perception. When your brand experiences a surge in coverage, you have a rare opportunity to control the narrative and maximize your reach. News outlets will actively seek your perspective, meaning your message can be amplified to a far greater audience than usual. However, the clarity of your communication is critical—unclear messaging can lead to misinterpretation, confusion or even offense, which could turn that attention into a full-blown crisis. In any event, once the hype cycle fades, it becomes difficult to impact the public’s perception.
The Importance of Timely Action
Whether your brand chooses to embrace the hype or mitigate its impact, timing is everything. If you fail to fully engage during this brief window, you’re letting the media control your brand’s narrative, and ultimately the public’s perception. Once public and media attention moves on to the next big story, shifting that perception becomes significantly harder. During that transient moment when you have the world’s attention, capitalizing on the momentum immediately is essential to ensuring your brand’s message takes hold in the public consciousness.
Is Your Brand Prepared for a Viral Moment?
That’s the tricky thing about going viral—it’s usually a complete surprise to everyone, including the attention-getters themselves. That’s not always true—it’s certainly reasonable to think you might get some extra eyeballs on you if you launch a high-performance AI model at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions. But that’s a pretty high threshold. For most of us, the only real way to be prepared is to see it coming—once it’s upon you, all you can do is react in real time. To see it coming, you need to be made aware at the moment your position in the news cycle changes. This won’t buy you a whole lot of time, but after the dust settles and your brand is just another company, you’ll realize how priceless every one of those pre-viral minutes was.
But let’s face it: for most businesses, achieving a viral moment is akin to winning the lottery—and you’re even luckier if your viral moment happens for the right reasons. The truth is, you don’t need to “go viral” to catapult your brand to success; you just need to make the most of every opportunity you get to make news and be prepared when you do get a moment in the sun. That’s where PR steps in, and with the right modern tools, can inject a little virality into every news story you pitch, and keep track of your movement across media to maximize all those micro-viral moments.
3 tips to optimize your news presence:
- Monitor trends in real-time: Using media monitoring intelligence tools like Agility allows you to track coverage of your brand in real time. Agility’s coverage alerts provide an automated solution, notifying you immediately when mentions of your brand surge—so you can act fast.
- Develop messaging before the peak hits: To make the most of sudden exposure, it’s crucial to have your brand’s messaging prepared in advance. Agility offers tools to help you shape the narrative, including a media database for direct journalist outreach and a newswire service to quickly disseminate your brand’s input. Additionally, Agility’s generative AI capabilities can streamline the process by crafting press releases with a simple prompt.
- Proactively engage with media & social conversations during the spike: Having a clear strategy to engage with both traditional and social media ensures you can maximize impact during a viral moment. Agility’s social listening tools provide real-time insights into discussions across platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and LinkedIn. These insights empower your communications team to craft timely, data-driven responses and effectively shape public perception.
This research was conducted by Agility PR Solutions’ team of media analysis experts.
