Break Through the Noise Read online

  “Tim, turn on the TV!”

  There it was: “Snowboarding In The Clouds” featured on Good Morning America! We’ve had numerous videos that have rocketed to hundreds of millions of views, but this was the first time we’d ever been featured on GMA.

  After the celebrating died down, the entire experience reminded us of the most important lesson—good things happen when you simply crush the headline.

  3. Focus on Curb Appeal

  Curb appeal is closely connected to the “Get It” Factor, but more tactical in nature. It refers to how your audience views your overall presence as they’re scrolling through their social media.

  Much has been written and blogged about concerning what goes into an ideal online headline—which phrases work best, how many words to use, and whether you should include numbers. If you haven’t read these articles, it’s worth your time to Google “how to create a good video headline,” and spend some time learning what’s worked for other people, to see if it might work for you. These guidelines can certainly be helpful, but the fact is, they are a set of principles and guidelines that are flexible and ever evolving.

  A better way to approach this is to think about your headline and all that it entails (text, image, first few seconds of video, the feeling you want to convey) as the curb appeal of the house you’re trying to sell. Any realtor or home flipper knows that fixing up the front of the house, adding some colorful landscaping or painting the door an eye-popping color, can make the difference between a competitive and quick sale and a house that sits on the market for months, without being noticed.

  Think of your opening elements the same way. Your text is the description of the place. “Charming gem in heart of downtown,” for example. Your thumbnail is the impression from the curb, the freshly painted shutters, the red door, the well-manicured flowerbeds. Your first 3 to 7 seconds are what happens when you open the door, the open-living concept, the sweeping entryway staircase, or whatever enticing and inviting feature your home may have to offer.

  All of these components comprise your curb appeal in much the same way that your headline goes well beyond the title or descriptive text of your video. It’s a far more holistic approach.

  You also need to make sure that all these things play well together. You can’t have a front-door color that clashes with the color of your yard, or a kitchen painted vanilla with white-on-white appliances when your front door was promising a blue color scheme with stainless steel appliances. All the parts need to mesh so that they’re telling a single cohesive story.

  When we go crafting these headlines, we take a very tactical approach. We first focus on the purity of the concept, then match the other assets to the video we are creating. The text, thumbnail, and first 7 seconds must all reflect the key element of the video and resonate with the audience, who ultimately determines whether that idea is worthy of a look and a share.

  Sometimes this is a very straightforward exercise.

  Take for example our Spider-Man video. Although “Peter Parkour” was the journalistic angle, the YouTube headline needed to be far more tactical and direct. Our actual title for the video was “The Amazing Spider-Man Parkour.” (We likely would have titled it simply “Spider-Man Parkour” but “Amazing” was in the title of the film and Sony wanted us to include that.) The thumbnail for the video was an image of Spider-Man in the middle of an impressive parkour flip. The text exclaimed, “How does Spider-Man get around when he runs out of webs? Parkour!” The first 5 seconds of the video show Spider-Man executing a perfect parkour dive-roll over a brick wall. If you were surfing the web and ran into our video, you would know exactly what it is. And if you were a parkour fan, the curb appeal would be very high and would likely draw you in, especially if you also have an interest in Spider-Man.

  But with other videos, we needed to be more provocative.

  This was especially true when we worked with Prince Ea on his global hit about the public school system. Topics like school education can come off as boring to someone who is randomly searching the web, so for this video to pop we needed a title that really grabbed people. And Prince Ea delivered a brilliant one—“I Just Sued the School System!!!” With a headline like that, how can you not pay attention!*

  The statement incites intrigue and invites you to find out why he is taking such a bold action. The headline was paired with a thumbnail of Prince Ea in a suit, looking very much like a lawyer in a courtroom. The graphic copy read like it was straight off the legal docket: “The People vs. the School System.” And the opening scene was Prince Ea, standing in front of a judge and delivering his opening argument. All these elements combined for world-class curb appeal and, when paired with a unique and engaging video, resulted in one of the most successful PSAs in the history of the internet.

  If you’re going to go bold, just remember that there is a true difference between being provocative and being insensitive. One example that I always remember because it didn’t work was the headline “One-Armed Man Applauds the Kindness of Strangers.” Nothing will send people to the exit—or the swipe bar—faster than cringe-worthy, insensitive wordplay. There may be an inspirational story in there, but with this headline, most people won’t bother to look. Instead, they question the thoughtfulness of whoever posted it and move on—and that’s if they even take the time to understand it.

  You also need to be realistic in your headlines. “How to Make a Million Dollars a Day” is a great headline, if you can deliver on it. But since it’s so outrageous, it sounds like a charlatan peddling the latest get-rich-quick scheme. If that person does have a formula for making people lots of money, they need to be more specific—and a lot more more believable.

  So now that you understand the pieces of curb appeal, make sure that they all work together in harmony. Even we have been guilty of breaking this rule. Going back to our video about snowboarding in the clouds, we nailed the straightforward headline, which was simply “Snowboarding In The Clouds.” We had an amazing thumbnail, which was a stunning image of a snowboarder gliding amid a cloud-filled sky. Together, these made for a value proposition that was crystal-clear, and the click rate on the video was extremely high because of it.

  But that’s where things went wrong.

  In the beginning of the video, it took us a whopping 25 seconds before we reached the part where we actually see Wildman snowboarding in the sky. Before then, we show him walking up the mountain and being picked up by a helicopter. In other words, our beginning looks like the beginning of hundreds of other snowboard videos and doesn’t deliver on the headline’s promise of snowboarding in the clouds. So although we interested people with a compelling headline, and then hooked them with a stunning visual, once they began watching, we didn’t deliver on what we had promised. And because we didn’t deliver, our curb appeal took a hit. The video still did well, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this delay in getting to the action caused us to lose millions of viewers who left the video in the first 10–15 seconds.

  4. Give Up the Goat

  The term “give up the goat” has multiple meanings (both slang and biblical), but when we use it at Shareability, we are referring to something very specific. To us, giving up the goat means to give away the best part of the video in the first 7 seconds.

  This is a completely counterintuitive mindset. Traditional storytelling teaches you to build slowly to a climax that happens at the end of the second act. In a feature film, you would never give away how the story ends in the opening credits. It makes no sense, and you’d have an angry audience. But the internet is the complete opposite. With online content, if you don’t give people a big payoff in the first few seconds, they are off to the next thing and will never watch the rest of your video. You have to “give up the goat” up front. In the snowboarding video, we should have started by immediately sending Wildman up into the clouds to hook people in right away.

  We’ve found that this strategy is basically guaranteed to put us at odds with any new
client. They have been trained through years of traditional advertising to do things in a certain way and are often not accustomed to the rhythm of the internet. A perfect example of this is, well, any surprise-based hidden-camera video we’ve ever made. I can virtually guarantee that if we are working with a new client who is not accustomed to our standards and practices, and we are creating a surprise video for them, it doesn’t matter how many times we tell them that the video will start with a tease opening that gives away the entire premise—they will still object when they see the first cut.

  “You cannot have John Cena pop out of the wall at the beginning of the video! That’s supposed to be the surprise that happens later!”

  Well, if you don’t stick that surprise at the top, no one will be there to see it by the time it happens.

  This argument comes to a peak in hidden-camera-surprise videos because the objection feels so logical. It’s so ingrained in our storytelling sensibilities that if we are crafting a surprise, we can’t reveal it up front. It’s like telling a joke by delivering the punch line first. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  But in digital marketing, it makes all the sense in the world.

  One way to think about it—which makes it more palpable to many—is to consider the opening tease as a mini-trailer for the video you are about to watch. It’s a quick sugar hit, an instant rush of emotion to make the brain focus and snap into what you’re showing before the rest of the story unfolds.

  In reality television this is already common practice. Reality shows have been doing this for years, often in the form of what’s known as a Super Tease. This is the 2–4 minute trailer for the show that plays at the beginning and shows you exactly what drama and intrigue you are in for over the next hour. Some cooking shows have taken this to extremes and made the opening tease the entire first act. Others have gone even further and actually crafted entire episodes out of this concept, so-called pre-episodes or casting specials, in which they showcase the process of reaching the starting line of the actual show over several hours of television, all cut and crafted as a massive tease for the actual show.

  For us and our online work, this tease usually lasts 3–15 seconds. It’s the hook that entices people to stick around to see how things will play out. It’s the video part of the headline exercise.

  Putting the big reveal first sounds backward, but it’s part of our contract with the audience, our way of telling them, “Stick around. This is worth your time.” You are acknowledging up front that they are going to click on the video, see that it’s a full 3 minutes long, and mumble to themselves that they don’t really want to watch for 3 minutes. But by putting the visual narrative in the headline—the killer image first—we are telling the audience that this video is going to be worth their while and that they should watch it.

  For surprise videos, this is simple—play the best moments from your big surprise and then rewind back into a setup to explain what’s going on. For other categories it can be more challenging. It can take the form of a provocative question on screen, a statement that encapsulates the thematic of the piece you are about to watch and makes it seem intriguing, makes the audience lean in and want more.

  In other words, you have to give up the goat.

  Rule 6

  Ride the Wave

  Selfie sticks used to be all the rage. Whether at the beach, the amusement park, or the mall, these narcissistic extension poles were everywhere, and they were getting longer. For much of 2015, there seemed to be an unofficial competition online to post the most ridiculous selfie-stick selfie, using the longest, most obnoxious arm.

  The extending arm with a phone attached was also turning selfie sticks into a major nuisance. You’d be walking down the street, and everywhere you look, there’d be another pack of nylon-belt-bag tourists posing for a picture, their ring leader in the middle, holding a selfie stick that extended several feet in front of his face, swinging it side to side, making everyone smile so he could pull the trigger.

  Things grew so out of control that Disney World officially banned selfie sticks out of safety concerns, after one park-goer tangled up his selfie stick in the car of a roller coaster, causing the ride to be shut down for an hour. Park officials declared that the long selfie sticks were a safety hazard to park-goers, especially to excited children who were running around and not looking out for them.

  And the media loved every second of it. It seemed like every day there was a new story about the longest selfie stick or the latest corporate ban. Selfie-stick memes and jokes flooded the internet and became part of pop-culture conversation.

  During this time, Pizza Hut approached us to produce a video promoting their new 2-foot-long pizza. In hindsight, you can clearly see where this was going. As had become our normal process, we looked not only to the brand brief (the document that outlines the company’s goals for the project) for inspiration, but also to the internet. It didn’t take us long to connect the dots. An entertaining video based on the selfie-stick phenomenon was sure to be covered by major bloggers and online media outlets, and would be highly shared.

  This is what we call “riding the wave.” When you ride the wave, you catch the momentum of a pop-culture topic, put your own spin on it, and, most important, add new value to the topic in some way.

  One of the basic principles of shareability and breaking through the internet noise is that it is much easier to attach yourself to something that already has heat than to try to create that heat from scratch. Inserting your brand into trending topics can be one of the most effective ways to attract massive attention, but it can also backfire in a major way, so you have to be very calculated in your strategy.

  For Pizza Hut, we decided to reverse-engineer a campaign that would play right into this trend. We knew that the trend itself would lend us shareability, but how could we add value to the conversation? We needed to provide some pop-culture commentary. We needed to have a point of view.

  Did we love selfie sticks, or did we hate them? Were they fun, or a public nuisance?

  Think about how either of those positions would be received by the public. If you love selfie sticks, and a brand comes out with a video that mocks them, your inner troll would rise up, and armies of annoyed selfie lovers would take to crushing the video in the comments.

  On the other hand, what if you hate selfie sticks, and a brand comes out and tells you how much fun they are? You would eagerly dismiss that brand and call them out for callously riding the wave of a trending topic without a clue about what’s actually going on.

  This is the danger of riding a wave. You can quickly crash and burn. The bigger the wave, the harder the fall. You need to find a perfect line and maintain your balance.

  For us, we went through a rapid development phase where we created anything from fake documentary ideas to scripted comedy sketches, all while trying to find the right balance. At some far point, we were even thinking about crafting a fake-news story around homeless people using selfie sticks, to show just how far the trend had gone—it’s been said that there is no bad idea in development—but let’s just say we recognized pretty quickly that we were barking up the wrong tree!

  Where we landed was a perfect sweet spot—we decided not to focus on the love or hate relationship with the selfie stick, but rather to focus on the underlying theme, the actual selfie. We felt that it was perfectly safe for Pizza Hut to love selfies. And if you love selfies, it’s not a very big leap to understand that selfie sticks are both an allure and a danger. We love selfies and selfie sticks, but if people keep making them longer and longer, the world will no longer be safe. Consequently, we may not be allowed to have them, and that poses a danger to the coveted selfie itself!

  We felt that this approach was a comedic and circular argument that played to both sides, and it lent itself very naturally to a specific type of delivery, a mock public service announcement that hilariously presented the dangers of selfie-stick abuse. We cast a likable actress to play the role of a
concerned mother, narrating from a gallery littered with selfies, explaining the glories of selfie culture and how these “Vainglorious Van Goghs” were being threatened by the selfie stick.

  The video showed selfie-stick users in all kinds of ridiculous situations, from taking selfies in a bathroom stall to a cluster of people struggling to enter an elevator with their sticks at full extension, and a weightlifter extending one off the end of a barbell to capture his biceps at their most flattering angle.

  My favorite was the convertible VW Bug with 10-foot selfie sticks poking out everywhere, whizzing through a neighborhood and wiping out a lemonade stand.

  In the midst of all the madness, a Pizza Hut delivery man came on to talk about how bigger selfies led to bigger parties, which led to bigger pizzas. “This had better show up on Instagram,” he says.

  Until the end, when Pizza Hut’s logo came up over the final shot of the video, this very subtle integration was the only clue that the video was brought to you by a brand. It was all just pure entertainment, with zero hard sell. Even the end tag was delivered in line with the humor. As the logo comes on, our narrator calmly says: “Pizza Hut is a supporter of those suffering from selfie-stick abuse. Please selfie responsibly.”

  The campaign was viral gold, rocketing up the YouTube charts and becoming the most shared ad in the world that month, while generating hundreds of articles and widespread media coverage. Sure, the video was funny, but the reason it connected so well was because we found a line that both sides could laugh at, and we added something new to the conversation.

  Deciding Which Wave to Ride

  I live in Manhattan Beach, California, just a few blocks from the ocean. One of my favorite things to do is to go down to the beach right before sunset and sit in the sand, watching the waves roll in. There are a couple of surfing spots nearby, and I’ll often watch surfers as they head into the Pacific Ocean. I’ve noticed that these surfers have a few different methods of analyzing the ocean and choosing their waves. The most eager surfers hit the water straightaway, paddle straight out, and catch the first wave they can. Others will take a more patient approach, sitting in the surf to gauge the frequency and pattern of the waves, waiting for the biggest one they can find. Still others will stand on the beach and study the waves to see if they want to even bother going out at all. And then there are those who will sit at home and wait for one of their buddies to text them when the waves are going off.