Break Through the Noise Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Nobody Cares

  Rule 1: Be Shareable

  Rule 2: Understand the Science

  Rule 3: Focus on Value

  Rule 4: Find Your Voice

  Rule 5: Crush the Headline

  Rule 6: Ride the Wave

  Rule 7: Flip the Script

  Rule 8: Know Your Platforms

  Rule 9: Test Before You Invest

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2019 by Tim Staples and Josh Young

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Staples, Tim (Marketing consultant), author. | Young, Josh (Joshua D.), author.

  Title: Break through the noise : the nine rules to capture global attention / Tim Staples and Josh Young.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018052171 (print) | LCCN 2018055028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328618603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328618566 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Internet advertising. | Internet videos. | Viral marketing. | Internet marketing.

  Classification: LCC HF6146.I58 (ebook) | LCC HF6146.I58 S73 2019 (print) | DDC 658.8/72—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052171

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Staples photograph © Daniel Saxlid

  Young photograph © Josh Young

  v1.0619

  “Curiosity” and “Shareability” from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Introduction

  Nobody Cares

  Nobody cares.

  It’s very important that you understand this.

  Nobody cares about that video you just posted, that photo you Instagrammed last night, and especially not that commercial that your brand just pushed out.

  Really, nobody cares.

  It’s nothing personal. It’s just the hard truth—with the explosion of social and digital media, millions of posts are launched every day. People are so bombarded by messaging that they tune out nearly all of it. So no matter how well-intentioned or beautifully designed your message is, it’s destined to be lost in an avalanche of noise, chaos, and distraction. This is the reality of the internet world.

  But viewers can be made to care. There is a way for major brands, small businesses, and even individuals to break through this wall of indifference and to make all the dominant social platforms—Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram—work for them. The secret to making people care lies in understanding and tapping into basic human emotions and in mastering the dynamics of how to tell stories on the internet.

  The process for doing this is not theoretical. Not at all. In fact, it’s a practical, usable approach, based on what actually works. You can find your place in the online storytelling revolution that is blowing up the $190 billion advertising industry and altering the media landscape.

  But first, an introduction. My company, Shareability (http://www.shareability.com), is a content and marketing firm that has cracked the code of how to break through the noise of the internet and get people to not only watch content, but share it—a highly powerful concept. Our wildly popular, typically offbeat videos are far more than just fodder for Likes. They are relatable stories designed to trigger the human urge to immediately share them with their friends, friends of their friends, and people they want to have as friends.

  What marketers have always known is that the most reliable way of selling something is also the most difficult to tap: word of mouth. Studies show that roughly 90 percent of people trust recommendations from family and friends, making the personal recommendation the elixir of marketing. For years, conventional marketing wisdom held that word of mouth was not scalable. Because of the rapid advances in technology and social media, that is no longer true. Through the way our company creates and distributes content, we have effectively figured out how to scale word of mouth.

  Here are a few numbers to show that our process works. Our videos have had over 5 billion organic views and 50 million shares, and have generated more than 100,000 articles for major brands like Pepsi, Adobe, Hyatt, and the Olympic Games. Many brands dream of catching “lightning in a bottle” and creating just one viral hit, yet we have done it over and over and have rebuffed all of the naysayers along the way.

  The interesting part is that, at their core, these videos are in fact marketing tools for brands small, medium, and large looking to find new customers and entice those customers to take action. By producing and distributing videos and posts that have maximum organic shareability, the Shareability team has tapped into a way to use Facebook and other social media platforms to push out our videos at a fraction of the cost that most major brands typically pay.

  The sharing of content online is now the single most effective way for brands to create meaningful relationships with their customers. Creating the most valuable content and building the most engaged community around that content can be worth thousands of views for some, millions of dollars for others. Today, creating this content and building a relationship with that community are cheaper and more effective than ever before—provided you understand how online storytelling actually works.

  Sounds great, but what if you don’t have a large marketing staff or deep-pocketed investors willing to let you experiment and learn? That’s not a problem. I didn’t have any of those things when I started out either.

  The reality is that you can still achieve success because there are universal principles that apply to building and pushing out your brand, whatever size it may be. You don’t need to know the latest and millionth change to the Facebook algorithm, because the fact is, tactical stuff in the online world doesn’t age well. Rather, you need to know the philosophy of why social platforms like Facebook were founded, how they work, and how they can work for you.

  This book isn’t about which 84 buttons you push to cross-post on Facebook or how to hack the YouTube algorithm to make your video go viral. Rather, it’s focused on understandable concepts. Hacks change every day. Concepts don’t, and these are the ones that drove our business three years ago and will also work three years from now. You can’t be chasing the digital breadcrumbs of every nuance and change on the major platforms.

  So, that’s the straightforward stuff. Of course, there is plenty that is more complex. We are going to dive deep into the current dynamics of the internet and reveal ways to ensure your messaging breaks through the noise and chaos. Using the Nine Rules that are covered in the book, we will teach you how to master the powerful concept of shareability, what you need to know about the psychology behind why people share what they do, and ultimately how to use valuable content to launch a global brand at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

  By understanding these Nine Rules and adapting them to your message or your brand, you can make the internet work for you, rather than fighting your way through the electronic weeds. And any message—whether it’s from a community activist, a singer, or someone sitting at home with an offbeat idea that just might work—can be heard and seen by millions of people.

  In short, this is a book for anyone who seeks
to understand how to reach millions of people and to build an engaged and powerful brand. So whether you are an individual at a laptop trying to be heard, an entrepreneur courting investors, a small business owner trying to build your customer base, a YouTube star in the making, or the chief marketing officer for a Fortune 500 company, understanding and executing the Nine Rules of Shareability will help you break through the noise and take your brand further than you thought possible—and not be left to the worst fate of all: finding out that nobody cares.

  Rule 1

  Be Shareable

  I’d blown it.

  I was standing outside a hotel suite in the middle of winter in Madrid, and sweat was pouring down my face. On the other side of the door was Cristiano Ronaldo, the global soccer superstar and one of the most famous people in the world.

  And he had just kicked me out.

  My mind raced. Today was supposed to be one of the biggest days of my career, but it was quickly becoming my worst. As I sat in the dark hallway with the sounds of a loud conversation in Portuguese pouring through the door, only one thought was blazing through my head: had we pushed it too far?

  The year was 2015 and my company, Shareability, had already been behind some of the biggest viral hits of the past few years. With each new video, we had pushed the limits further and further, which gained us international attention and eventually led to meeting Ronaldo’s team and getting into business with him to launch a new brand.

  Hence, we were in Madrid for our first shoot with Ronaldo and his headphone brand, ROC. True to form, we were pushing the limits. Instead of merely shooting a routine commercial, we had sold him and his team on a crazy, real-world stunt, where we would dress him up as a homeless man and have him beg for money in the middle of one of the busiest plazas in Spain. A plaza, mind you, that—because of his instant recognizability—he couldn’t normally walk into because he would be mobbed. Most superstars with Ronaldo’s level of fame wouldn’t dare such a stunt, but Ronaldo’s manager, a brilliant guy named Ricardo, understands what it takes to make his friend and client stand out from the crowd of celebrities.

  But when Ronaldo arrived on set, something changed. Maybe it was seeing the stony faces of the six ex-Mossad agents that we had hired to secure the plaza in the event something went wrong. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. But for whatever reason, he was now having serious second thoughts about the whole thing, and I was stuck in a hallway, struggling to keep my composure as I wiped my forehead every eight seconds.

  This went on for several minutes that felt like hours. Then finally, the door swung open, and the man known around the world as CR7 stepped out. He looked at me, gave me a simple thumbs-up, and headed down the hall to wardrobe.

  The shoot was on.

  The resulting video, “Ronaldo in Disguise,” became an immediate viral sensation. It was the fastest branded video to reach 30 million views in the history of the internet, and it went on to accrue well over 100 million views. The video ended up being the most-shared celebrity ad in the world that year, surpassing global brands like Apple, Samsung, and Pepsi—all for a brand that nobody had ever even heard of the night before the video was launched.

  And, in the process, we brought the concept of shareability to worldwide attention with one of the biggest stars in the world.

  Shareability is how and why content is shared online. It is a concept at the heart of creating meaningful success on the internet and one that I believe in so strongly, I named my company after it. This book will teach you how to embrace the power of shareability and use it to drive massive results. But to truly understand it, we must first look at how we got here and face the reality of the world that we live in.

  The One-Way Conversation

  Thirty years ago, long before the internet, we lived in a much different world. Television was the dominant medium, and things that we take for granted today, like creating and sharing content on our phones, seemed like a concept straight out of a science fiction novel. In 1989, if you wanted to spread a message or market a product to a national or international audience, you basically had one option—hire an expensive production company to create an even more expensive commercial, and then spend millions of dollars in television or radio ads to push that message out to an audience defined only by which television channel they happened to be tuned in to.

  What if you didn’t have millions of dollars? Well, you were basically out of luck. All of the media “pipes” of the day, from television and radio to print and billboards, were controlled by major media corporations, and they demanded big dollars for anyone to access them. Even the equipment to produce television-quality content was far beyond the means of all but the biggest brands and the wealthiest individuals.

  This reality created a monopolistic marketplace for established brands that had the means to spend money on traditional advertising. In the 1980s and 90s, major brands were easily spending hundreds of millions a year, and Fortune 500 companies were collectively spending tens of billions on traditional advertising, almost all of which was going into television. In 2000, for example, General Mills spent 94 percent of its advertising dollars on television, Coca-Cola spent 87 percent, and Anheuser-Busch 86 percent.

  This system served to ward off innovation and brand competition, as the high cost of entry made it extremely difficult for new brands or ideas to break into the market. Simply put, there was no way for the little brand, let alone an individual, to be heard on a wide scale.

  Then new technology and the internet came along, and they changed everything. Ad blockers like TiVo began disrupting television advertising. A slow, steady decline in TV ratings occurred as people’s attention drifted online.

  In effect, the internet was the great equalizer. For the first time in human history, everyday people had the same access to the powerful “pipe” to spread their messaging to a national and even international audience.

  And then technology put a smartphone in the hands of millions of people. There was an explosion of mobile viewing. Millennials, in particular, were watching most content on their phones and flocking toward 3-minute videos instead of 30-minute television shows. The smartphone was basically a portable movie studio, capable of not only making professional-grade content but pushing it out to the new “pipes” of the internet, the burgeoning social platforms.

  For the old guard of advertising, this was chaos.

  Major brands found themselves dazed and confused by these rapid changes and ill-equipped to navigate this new world, from Facebook to YouTube to niche players like Hulu, Snapchat, and Thrillist. Without the full force of the trusted bullhorn of television advertising, the brand identities of Fortune 500 companies began to decline. Much of this was because they didn’t know how to connect with their consumers. For decades, they had been dumping billions of dollars into a one-way conversation, but they never touched the audience in the way that it now demanded.

  And where there is chaos, there is opportunity.

  For marketers, this was the biggest opportunity since the advent of television—engaging with people directly via the internet. The internet democratized content, opening up avenues for anyone to reach everyone.

  For a while, the new world order was really sweet. In the early days of internet content, there wasn’t much competition. When YouTube launched in 2005, the platform’s biggest problem was that there wasn’t anything to put on it. iPhones wouldn’t be invented for another two years. Facebook was still available only to college students, and the idea that brands (let alone regular people) would create and post their own content was still completely foreign. For that reason, most content available online at the time was either mundane or poorly produced. Consequently, when a brand or individual did create something that was unique, it would be widely shared and would garner a lot of attention.

  People would watch a video and share it with their friends, causing engagement to spike. This would in turn alert the YouTube algorithm to feature the content further, thereby
increasing the viewership and engagement. Once millions of people had watched the content, blogs and the digital press would jump on the bandwagon and “report” on the video as the latest trend or cool thing on the web, sending it even farther up the charts.

  It was a beautiful and simple cycle. The most unique videos would get shared across the web with such speed and force that a new term was created to describe what was happening—“going viral” was born.

  Going Viral

  There was a time when “viral” simply referred to, well, viruses. These tiny parasitic microbes would develop a superior ability not only to infect their hosts but, more important, to spread to new hosts. The idea that a creature so small could spread so quickly to so many people was very powerful, and when small videos started spreading like wildfire, the term was simply adopted, and it stuck. In the modern zeitgeist, this concept is so entrenched that when people hear “viral,” they often think of videos first and infectious diseases second.

  From around 2008 until 2015, as the internet gained users by the hundreds of millions, viral videos were all the rage. They sprung up from people emailing or texting their friends: “Wow! This is so cool! You gotta watch it!” The first person would then send it to the next person and so forth until it spread so quickly that it reached the point where if you hadn’t seen that kooky video of the dog jumping back and forth through a flaming Hula-Hoop, you just had to go online to check it out.

  The success of early YouTubers altered the branding landscape. As millennials raised on smartphones turned away from television to more original and outrageous content on the internet, a new generation of self-made media stars was born. This period was fueled by a sense of discovery—young people felt like they were uncovering new talent, rather than having it forced on them by out-of-touch media companies, and this created an audience that was far more vested in the talent’s success.