Why MrBeast’s search for a head of viral marketing matters to marketers

The job description makes that explicit.

Whoever gets it will oversee launches, customer acquisition, conversion, retention and marketing efficiency across Beast Industries’ expanding portfolio, spanning snacks, fintech, telecom and retail. They will own the performance behind those businesses – return on marketing spend, funnel efficiency and repeat usage – while also building a senior bench of marketers that can operate at scale without leaning on the founder. 

In practice, the head of viral marketing functions as a central growth operations role, connecting culture, distribution, commerce and data to turn attention into predictable demand rather than one-off spikes. 

And if that wasn’t enough, the company wants more than ten years of senior marketing leadership, a record of converting cultural relevance into revenue, fluency in social mechanics and the ability to build systems that work at speed.

In other words, Beast Industries isn’t just searching for a marketer. It wants a unicorn. And plenty of people think they are it. In the seven days since the role went live on LinkedIn, more than 100 candidates have already applied. 

“While “going viral” was once viewed as an art form, it has evolved into a technical skill that now dictates a business’s workflow, acquisition strategy, and data analysis,” said Tim Mitchell, co-founder of influencer marketing platform CreatorOS.

MrBeast is not alone on this though. Over the past few years, plenty of brands have bolted on creator and influencer leads inside social, PR or growth teams. But those roles ostensibly optimized campaigns. They rarely built systems as creator marketing became funded, visible and widespread — but not foundational. 

Which is what makes this new role worth watching. With multiple consumer businesses to support and more categories still to come, Beast Industries needs repeatable growth mechanics that operate independent of its founder. 

“MrBeast hiring a head of viral marketing isn’t an admission that he’s lost his edge as I think some people think, or that he needs help with his instinct,” said James Kirkham, founder of marketing consultancy Iconic77. “It’s an admission that one brain can’t carry a machine of that size forever, the myth is that true viral talent should be able to do everything themselves, but In reality, the smartest founders know when to get out of their own way.”

The same logic is now showing up inside the world’s largest companies. Unilever, L’Oréal and Rockstar have been quietly building internal creator infrastructure – data systems, specialist teams and formal operating models – as CEOs begin to treat creator-led growth as core business infrastructure rather than an experimental one. It’s not widespread, to be clear. But it is growing. 

“That’s where modern marketing power now sits and if the world’s most successful viral creator is formalising virality, everyone else should take note because attention at scale is no longer accidental, but totally deliberate and planned and smartly engineered,” said Kirkham. 

Leila Fataar saw an early version of this shift inside Diageo in 2015, when it created a head of culture and entertainment role to discipline how cultural relevance translated into commercial outcomes. Viral marketing was part of that remit but it was positioned inside a broader system. 

“I have an issue with the word ‘viral’ as it has been co-opted by our industry to mean something different to what I read in this job description,” said Fataar, who has since founded her own brand consultancy Platform13.

To her, ‘social-first’ here is not volume of social assets, but rather the ability to do repeatable culturally relevant brand activity that is so impactful that people care to share it. 

Right now, that sharing happens across the communications channel of the era – social – and at scale, she added.

“But, channels change and evolve, so putting all your eggs in one basket is a risk,” she continued. “A modern brand needs to be adaptable as the comms ecosystem flexes. And it’s already on the move.”

Naturally, there will be copycats. MrBeast has become the creator economy’s Unilever – a bellwether whose internal moves tend to be followed. Even so, this hire is more than a template. It is another marker of how far viral marketing has moved from the Oreo “dunk in the dark” era of chance moments toward an industrialized growth discipline. 

“In this era of culture-led brands, hopefully it’s finally time to evolve both the brand playbook and 20th century organisational structures,” said Fataar.