The video shoot itself was an intensely emotional experience. We had 17 pairs of people come in over the course of one day and we asked them all the same set of questions. We didn’t prepare them in advance at all. But we went deep right away and they went deep with us. The result is powerful and it surprised the participants more than anyone.

In two weeks, we had over a half-million views. But there was no time just to keep watching our Twitter feed — the phone was ringing. Interview requests were flooding in from over 50 media outlets around the world, including Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail in the UK. We got press mentions in Germany, Sweden and Japan. We hosted camera crews in the office, and Samantha appeared on Canada’s most-watched national breakfast talk show, Canada AM.

No question, the attention was pretty intoxicating. But it was smaller moments that meant the most: people from around the world emailed and called us to share how the video inspired them to tell their dads what they meant to them. One woman picked up the phone and called her dad — after not having spoken to him for 15 years. The task, again: Create a viral video for ourselves that spoke to our own brand purpose of emotional connection.

To top it all off, a week after our video aired, a fast-growing tech startup in Annapolis saw it, called us and requested a quote on a viral video for its own brand. Mission accomplished.