The Dallas Mavericks have a new approach to social media marketing through making parodies of viral videos. In the past month, the Mavs have been posting short, hysterical, parody videos to the Dallas Mavericks YouTube page. Paying attention to viral internet trends like popular music or videos, the Mavs have created a comical persona through social media.

To introduce some of the new players to the fans, the Mavs did a parody of the popular AT&T commercial “It’s not complicated.”

In 30-seconds you got a glimpse of the new players and head Coach Carlisle being silly and a sense of fan appreciation and loyalty. Also this was probably an inexpensive and not time consuming video production, that still appeals to the masses.

Speaking of inexpensive and not time consuming video production, the Shawn Marion’s “Starbucks Drake Hand” parody video created buzz when it was posted on the the Dallas Mavericks YouTube Page.  Originally a man attempted to woo a girl he met in Starbucks by sending her a video playing Drake’s music in the background, the odd video went viral worldwide and has had thousands of parodies made. Shawn Marion’s version is nothing spectacular but since it was posted while it was still relevant it generated a ton of media hits.

Recently, the Mavs did a parody of  “What Does the Fox Say” music video. The bizarre and catchy lyrics with a Grammy-award worthy music video production made this an instant viral video. Of course, the Mavs jumped in by creating “What The Mavs Say.” Their video has players wearing animal headbands, behind a green screen and attempting to sing the ridiculous lyrics. Vince Carter tried really hard to get the Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff down, while Shane Larkin wowed us with his dancing moves in a pink furry outfit. The video received 262,000 views within a week and over 162 media hits.

Although, this is not from a viral video the Mavericks posted a Spongebob Squarepants parody which features Mark Cuban as the captain. The catchy lyrics “who rules all of basketball in the Big D, ” and animated versions of the players again. The video had 95,000 views in 3 days. It may hard to believe but Spongebob is actually pretty relevant. SpongeBob SquarePants’ attracts 56.1 million monthly viewers, media-tracker Nielsen found 13.3 million 9- to 14-year-olds and 18.6 million in the 18-to-49 category.

As the season continues, the Dallas Mavericks will hopefully continue to surprise us with these hysterical videos. The use of viral videos could potentially become a marketing and branding tool we may see more of in the future.