by Tim Staples
Here’s how we broke it down:
Surprise number one would be John’s acknowledgment that the meme existed, something he hadn’t done before.
Surprise number two was that a major celebrity such as John would embrace an internet trend and bring it to life, especially when many perceived the trend itself as making fun of his persona.
Surprise number three would have to come from the video itself and how we would bring the meme to life. Because we were doing “Unexpected John Cena IRL (In Real Life),” we would have to utilize John in some totally unexpected and surprising way.
The fourth and fifth surprises both had to come from the people in the video, the ones who were actually surprised by John. They would add our fourth layer of surprise in a moment of adrenaline-fueled shock, as John jumped out or appeared in some other unexpected way. This would be followed by a fifth layer of surprise—we would make sure to cast huge fans of our star, people who would be starstruck and go nuts seeing him in person.
Now that we knew the shareable emotion and the parameters, we could work backward to create the actual idea. As always, the simplest ideas are the best, and in this we could not have made it more obvious: We would get a bunch of John Cena fans to audition for a fake role as Cricket Ambassadors for the new John Cena Store on Cricket Wireless. They would be asked to read a WWE-style introduction to a poster of John, and at the right moment, John himself would rip through the poster and appear in real life.
Setting the video in a Cricket store meant the brand was naturally integrated, with branding everywhere, something that drove Cricket’s appreciation as the video racked up over 220 million views and 4 million engagements.
The video was so successful that even after Cricket’s deal with John ended and the official video had been taken down, nearly 7,000 ripped uploads still existed, and the video is still spreading. As of this writing, more than two years after the initial launch, 76 new copies have just been found over the past 30 days.
However, the most important statistic comes directly from the client, Cricket Wireless. They told us that the conversion rates on the actual John Cena Store that came from traffic generated by our video was 300 percent more effective than any other advertising asset they had in the market. That’s real, measurable bottom-line impact through the simple power of surprise.
Other Emotions That Enter the Equation
There are obviously many other emotions that trigger someone to share internet content. Joy, gratitude, admiration, hope, and pride are clear contenders. One of the strongest emotions that can trigger sharing is anger. Though the data regularly shows that positive content is more widely shared than negative content, tapping into anger can increase sharing on a large scale in a hurry—but in truth, it’s very difficult to make anger work in a positive manner for a brand.
Anger is a high-arousal emotion that makes people take action, both in everyday life and in their online sharing, but most brands don’t want to make people angry. In fact, we don’t use anger in our campaigns because driving people from anger to a positive action is exceedingly tricky.
Of course, anger can be a powerful tool for a cause if you’re trying to move people to action and to cause positive change. This is often the case in tragic events, such as the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which claimed the lives of 17 innocent kids and staff. Several videos were posted and heavily shared in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many taking a stand on gun-related issues. Many people who saw the videos were angry and wanted to do something about it, and as a result the movement to introduce meaningful gun legislation has become bigger and stronger than ever before.
While the videos may have provoked powerful emotions and resulted in millions of shares, this is not a reliable route for brands because anger often results in shares derived from news events that can be polarizing. Brands, of course, want to be inclusive. They would like to sell their wares to people on both sides of any aisle.
Sadness is another common reaction to seeing content online, but sadness on its own is not a shareable emotion. It actually decreases sharing because compared to anger, it is considered a low-arousal emotion. When you watch something sad, you shut down. People are not in a sharing mood when they are sad, as no one wants to share their sadness. However, if you take an inherently sad story and turn that sadness into pride or hope, then it becomes shareable. This is evident in our Adobe video about photo restoration.
These five core shareable emotions—happiness, awe, empathy, curiosity, and surprise—are the primary drivers of positive sharing for brands. Understanding and mastering these emotions will bring results. The next time you share something, test yourself and see if one of these elements is the reason. If nothing else, it will help make you feel less selfish.
Rule 3
Focus on Value
Three strangers walked through the door of a Cricket Wireless store in South Central Los Angeles—and into one of the craziest videos that we had ever dreamed up.
You know the setup of this one already—an open casting call for superfans of WWE superstar John Cena to audition to be Cricket Ambassadors for the John Cena Store on Cricket Wireless. Little did they know that their hero was just a few feet away, on the other side of a paper-thin tear-away wall, listening to every word they said.
I was playing the role of director, calling the fans up one by one and asking them questions about their love for Cena. I would then have them passionately introduce the poster wall behind them (with a life-size image of Cena) as if the legend was actually there.
With each group, I would go through the same process. I would ask them to introduce themselves and then ask questions about what they liked or admired about John Cena. I would build up their energy to the point where they were screaming with excitement as they made their introductions. And then, just as that excitement reached fever pitch, John Cena would burst through the wall and give them the surprise of a lifetime. It was a day that I’ll never forget.
In the last chapter, we talked about the surprise elements of this video and particularly the reactions of the people who were surprised in real life. Their reactions were pure internet gold. There is something magical about capturing surprise and unadulterated excitement in raw form. However, if you take a step back and look at the core philosophy of Shareability that made this Cena video into such a massive hit, surprise is only part of the story.
Surprise may have been the key emotion, but much like happiness, awe, empathy, or curiosity, any emotion that you apply fits under a much larger umbrella, and it’s one that speaks volumes about the true chasm between traditional advertising and the modern age. In short, there was one simple philosophical mindset that made this video stand out:
Value.
We offered value to the viewer.
It’s a very simple concept, but one that many marketers don’t fully understand. Traditional TV advertising was designed to be interruptive. It was shoved into the middle of your favorite show and felt very much like the price you had to pay to access the content that you really wanted. Our approach flips that model on its head. We create brand messaging that’s inherently valuable, content that the audience actually wants to watch. And that value generates a massive response.
The reason for this is simple human nature. If a well-dressed stranger comes up to you on the street and flat out asks you for a dollar, you will likely be weirded out and back away, and you most certainly won’t give him a dollar. If a colleague comes up to you the next day and she calls out to let you know you dropped your car keys, or puts a quarter in your parking meter or does something else that is selfless and valuable to you, you will immediately be more sympathetic to her. Because of this connection, you would have a much easier time striking up a conversation, perhaps recognizing that you have some common interests and maybe even start to form a quick little bond right there on the sidewalk. Then, when she realizes she’s a buck short for her morning latte, how would you feel abou
t offering her that dollar in your pocket?
Sure, you’d chip in for her latte. Or, at the very least, you would be far more inclined to. After all, she was nice and helpful to you first. She led with value.
The woman in this scenario may have worked a lot harder than the well-dressed stranger to separate you from your dollar, but in the end, she was successful. And he wasn’t.
Our videos work the same way. We offer value without asking for anything up front. We walk up to strangers on the internet and say: “Hey, you a fan of John Cena? Have you seen this video where he pops out of a wall and surprises his biggest fans? You’d love it. Check it out!”
Once they’ve watched our content, this opens a dialogue and allows us to come back to them with other valuable content. We then identify the people who interact the most and are the most engaged, and only then, far down the funnel, do we ask them to part with their hard-earned dollars.
And they do. Because we led with value.
In Chapter 2, we talked about how the act of sharing is actually a selfish act. We showed that in most cases people share not out of the goodness of their heart, but rather for how it makes them look or feel. This connects to value and forms a hugely important lesson, one that should fundamentally change your entire strategy about how you create content.
Put simply: If you want people to share your content, it has to be about them, not about you.
This is a concept that has been proven time and time again over the past ten years. In fact, it is at the core of what has made my company successful, and the reason we have been able to produce over 60 viral hits over the past few years.
Yet 99 percent of brands don’t use it.
How can that be?
Well, the simple explanation is that it runs counter to the traditional core premise of advertising that has been ingrained in marketers for the past 80 years.
The Concept of Advertising:
A Walk Down Memory Lane
People often talk about how much simpler things were in the “good old days.” In some cases, that may be just a case of selective memory, but in the world of advertising, it is most certainly true.
Before television was invented, radio was the prevalent electronic medium in the United States, and it had the country’s full attention. Back in the 1930s and 40s, popular radio shows would reach tens of millions of listeners every week. Brands could “advertise,” and put their message in front of all of those attentive listeners, just by writing a check to the radio station.
Take, for example, when General Mills, the cereal company, started sponsoring the popular radio show The Lone Ranger in 1941. At its peak, The Lone Ranger radio broadcast had 20 million weekly listeners, all of whom gathered around their radios three times a week to listen to the show. For a brand, this was as good as it gets, a highly attentive audience who had no other option but to listen to your advertising as the price of admission to the show they were passionate about. Brands were even positioned as the heroes in this equation. The voice of God would announce that this program was made possible by Cheerios cereal, so remember: kids, eat your Cheerios! That’s about the best advertisement a brand can hope for.
The strength of advertising continued with the advent of television. In the early days of television, continuing all the way into the 1980s, only three major networks showed full-time, high-quality programming, and they were all funded by advertising. If you were watching TV and a commercial came on, you basically had three choices:
Sit and watch it.
Change the channel—likely to another commercial, because networks synchronized their breaks.
Turn off the TV and go do something else.
This era is often noted as the golden age of advertising, when television held the nation’s attention, networks thrived, and brands with deep pockets reaped the benefits of increased sales and a growing customer base.
In the late 1970s, cable channels started to pop up and gave viewers more options, but these were funded by advertisers as well, with the exception of then-rare subscription services like HBO. This created more channels to the TV lineup where brands could run their commercials.
The 1990s brought hundreds of channels and the invention of the commercial-blocking TiVo, a massive sign of the doom to come for the advertising trade. But the ad industry was still too busy enjoying the highlife and reaping huge fees to notice, and so it simply marched on like everything was status quo.
And then the internet happened. In the early days, there was a lot more hype than substance; as with any new medium, it took some time to find its footing. For the first decade of the internet, advertising on the internet was basically a messy collection of search traffic and overhyped banner ads. That all changed in 2005 when YouTube was launched. This marked the beginning of a massive shift in consumer behavior.
The internet gave people options that they never had before, and most important for brands, most of those options were not tied directly to advertising.
As a young man in the marketing field, this was an extremely exciting time for me and all of my colleagues. Nobody knew exactly how, but it was clear that the internet was going to change the way that brands interacted with their customers. Yet, to my surprise, not everyone seemed quite so thrilled.
In those days, senior people in the advertising world talked about the internet like it was some back-alley marketing sideshow, a kind of novelty or a fun little add-on to the “real world” of television advertising.
Here’s what they all missed: the internet fundamentally changed how people interact with content. The audience no longer had to sit back and watch whatever had been prescribed to them by some network executive at a time that’s been designated by a marketing department. Viewers could begin to want to watch what they wanted, when they wanted it, and as the technology advanced, on whatever damned screen they preferred. “Television” was now truly being delivered on demand.
This means the internet also changed the rules of advertising. Forever. This is happening in all kinds of complicated ways across screens big and small, but the core truth seems pretty simple to me. For starters: When people don’t have options, they will tolerate advertising. But when they do have options, they will try to avoid it. It’s not emotional, it’s just another self-serving decision. Simply put, who would watch advertising if they didn’t have to?
So if your strategy is to interrupt what people actually want to watch with something that they don’t want to watch, you will not be very successful. It’s that simple.
The Concept of Value
So how do we define the difference between advertising and this new online concept of value? In the simplest terms, an advertising approach involves trying to impart your message to an audience, regardless of whether they want to hear it or not. A value-based approach, on the other hand, is understanding what your audience wants and giving it to them.
Here’s a very practical example: Let’s say Home Depot posts content on YouTube, or sends content to existing customers that tells them how to make fixes around the house, like stopping a leaky faucet or cleaning dirt from the grout in a kitchen floor. It posts a detailed, step-by-step video guide to fixing all kinds of things that can save you money.
Home Depot hasn’t tried to sell you anything, but it has given you something of tangible value. Turns out that by watching the Home Depot video, you were able to fix that drip instead of spending $200 on a plumber. So now when you need a snow shovel, you will be more likely to go to Home Depot for it because you have an affinity for the brand that has already offered you value.
Remember, in the old days of television, the grand bargain with the audience was simple: If they wanted to watch a show, they had to watch the advertising along with it. That was the deal. The brand gave value in sponsoring the program, which essentially gave the audience “free” content.
Today, that deal has been torn to shreds. Yes, there are still plenty of places that show traditional advertising, but there are incr
easingly more that don’t, like HBO, Netflix, Hulu Plus . . . the list goes on. And the younger generation—those who grew up with subscription options and YouTube at their fingertips—they have zero patience for interruptive ads. Skip this ad in 3, 2, 1 . . . skipped.
The younger the viewer, the less tolerance for advertising interruption. I see this at home, as I have a son, Max, who is 10 and a daughter, Allie, who is 8. They’re growing up in the internet age. They were swiping an iPad at age 2 and have never known a world where they had to sit through traditional advertising to watch the shows that they wanted to see. If a commercial does come on, they just pull up another screen.
Imagine if your total sales message is contained in that commercial break. How effective do you think that will be?
So how do you make people watch your commercials? Well, you make the commercials inherently valuable. You make them into spots that people want to watch. That’s the new deal for the new era: If you want an audience to watch your message, you must give them value. That means the first question you should ask yourself is not “What do I want to say?” but rather “What does my audience want to watch?”
This boils down to three basic questions:
Who do you want to reach?
What would that audience consider to be hugely valuable?
How can you provide it to them?
If you can determine the answers to these questions, and deliver something of true value, the audience will love you for it. Then, maybe you can ask them for that dollar in their pocket . . .
Engaging People with Commercials They Would Normally Skip
To truly understand how to create valuable content, we must first learn how to distinguish it from others. So, how can we spot valuable content?
