Break Through the Noise

by Tim Staples

  The best way we’ve found to measure how well content is being received—and therefore how valuable it is—is called the Engagement Rate. This is the standard by which we measure the meaningful impact that a social media page can have. It measures every consumer who directly interacted with a brand’s content and expresses that as a percentage of how many people were exposed to it. This is an extremely valuable data point. Let’s take a look at why it is so important.

  In the golden age of television, brands would spend tens of millions of dollars on television advertising, yet most would attain very limited feedback on how that advertising was received. Let’s say 10 million people watched an episode of a popular show like NBC’s Friends, during which a brand ran an advertisement. Of those 10 million people, how many actually watched that commercial? There is no way of knowing or measuring that. Perhaps half of them instead went to the bathroom, grabbed a drink, or made a phone call—or DVRed through all of the ads. The truth is, the brand sponsor will never really know. Though Nielsen does limited ad testing, for the people who did actually watch the commercial, how impactful was it in terms of getting them to gravitate toward that brand over the long term and buy its products?

  So how is digital advertising different?

  For starters, most everything on digital media is measurable. The social networks have endless amounts of data, information on countless people, all updated in real time by billions and billions of active users. They follow us around everywhere we go. Every time someone clicks a button, it’s recorded. Every time someone skips an ad, or stops their feed to look at something, or swipes up to make it disappear, all of those actions are logged and recorded by a vast array of servers powered by an ever-changing and evolving network of artificial intelligence, also known as the algorithm.

  Sounds sci-fi and scary? Ask your iPhone, and Siri will probably give you a very clever answer. She is an algorithm too.

  In fact, there is an argument to be made that we are all algorithms. Or at least we can be interpreted as such. In other words, if you have enough data points on anyone, you can actually predict their behavior better than their friends, their families, or even themselves.

  Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University have developed a computer model that can judge someone’s personality down to a very eerie level of accuracy, using nothing but the subject’s Facebook activity. When they compared the results against friends and family, the patterns were startling: The algorithm predicted a person’s personality traits better than any of the human participants.

  The. Computer. Was. Better.

  In fact, it was so much better that it needed only 10 Likes on Facebook to beat a work colleague, 70 to beat a roommate, and 150 to beat a parent or sibling. And to defeat a spouse, the one person who arguably knows you better than anyone in the world? To do that, the computer needed only 300 of your Likes on Facebook.

  This means computers will replace humans in terms of practical personality analysis.

  At Shareability, we’ve been living in this reality for years. Facebook is particularly apt at knowing people better than they know themselves, and because people have chosen to give that data up, Facebook can offer it up for those users who haven’t diligently followed the privacy locks to anyone who wants to interpret it.

  So back to the engagement rate. We believe it to be the simplest and the most readily available data point measuring valuable content. The engagement rate is a direct measure of how many times someone interacted with a piece of content they were exposed to.

  Here’s how it breaks down:

  One person swipes right past your ad and doesn’t stop to look at it—0 points.

  One person stops for 3 seconds or more—1 view point.

  One person reacts with a Like, a frown or other emoji, or comments on or shares the ad—1 engagement point.

  To determine the engagement rate, you divide the number of engagement points by the number of view points. For example, if 100 people watch a video and 2 people engage with it, the engagement rate is 2/100, that is, 0.02, or 2 percent.

  As you can see, just racking up views doesn’t really mean much in and of itself. A lot of those views will always be people who stuck around for only 3 seconds and then moved on, and that’s not going to have any real impact on your bottom line.

  But those people who really leaned in to engage with your content, those who liked, commented on, or shared it, those people are valuable. People tend not to interact with content before they’ve had a chance to watch it for a period of time, and even then, they interact only if what they were watching prompted a real emotional response—if they actually felt something. That feeling is your invitation to a relationship. It’s the door through which you are allowed to enter and ultimately approach them for conversion.

  All this being said, here’s a surprising but essential rule of thumb: A really good engagement rate for a brand is around 1 percent.

  That sounds like a low number, but remember, we are talking about people who actively leaned in and chose to engage with a commercial. That’s a big ask. How many Honda commercials on TV have made you want to reach out to Honda and say, “Good job”? How many have made you want to send those Honda ads to all of your friends so that they can see it too?

  The 1 percent engagement rate rule of thumb is not made up out of thin air. It is measured and calculated from best-in-class performance. The leading benchmark of digital advertising work is done by Ad Age, a magazine born in Chicago in 1930, which is now a global media brand, publishing analysis, news, and data on marketing and media. They publish the Ad Age Viral Leaderboard, which lists the top performers in online content monthly.

  The median engagement rate for the Ad Age Viral Leaderboard in 2017 was 0.87 percent. That means if an ad was seen by 1 million people, about 8,700 of them cared enough to like, share, or comment.

  That’s best in class. It’s Toyota, Coca-Cola, Ford, and other corporate behemoths spending millions and millions to drive these results.

  Just FYI: The Shareability median over the same time period was a 2.09 percent engagement rate—a 240 percent increase over the Ad Age Viral Leaderboard.

  If you break all of this down even further and look at what we consider to be the holy grail of digital marketing, the number of shares, our 2017 campaigns were shared 550 percent more than all the other top 200 best-in-class videos from the Ad Age Viral Leaderboard.

  Not bad for a little upstart based in an industrial garage.

  Giving People Something to Smile About

  Over the past few years, we’ve worked with dozens of major brands on creating shareable content that is valuable to their audiences, with some brand categories being easier to work with than others. One of the toughest we’ve faced is the wireless category—it seems that just about everybody dislikes their mobile-phone provider. So we knew that we had quite the challenge when we got our first assignment from Cricket Wireless.

  Cricket had done research that showed a clear pattern. When consumers truly enjoyed a positive image of their brand, those consumers were much more likely to buy wireless plans from them. Our assignment from them was simple: Create content that makes Cricket more likable. Now that was a concept that excited us! Cricket had even created a tag line for their new approach: giving their customers “Something to Smile About.”

  This tag line is a perfect example of the value-based approach. As we know, social media can be a very negative place. Our experience and internal research show that when faced with constant negativity, people favor fun, lighthearted content that makes them smile. If a brand can deliver that smile, then they have not only triggered the shareable emotion of happiness, but they have also given the audience something of value. Because this piece of content brightened their day, they are now more likely to view the brand in a favorable light, therefore increasing the odds that they will prefer that brand over the competition.

  So by focusing on shareable “smile” emotions
like joy, gratitude, and admiration, we went to work.

  We planned our first campaign for Cricket Wireless around Mother’s Day, 2016. We wanted to create a hero video that paid homage to moms, but did so in an entertaining and amusing way that their kids would also enjoy. Our brain trust generated a hilarious idea that was a sendup on a hot topic of that moment—photobombing, where people would unexpectedly jump in and “bomb” the back of someone else’s photo. From this, we created “PhotoMombing,” a spoof video where moms who were feeling left out of their kids’ lives took back their rightful place in their children’s pictures. Because we focused on value, the video struck a chord with moms and kids alike, went on to accumulate over 10 million views, and increased Cricket’s Facebook engagement by more than a factor of ten in one month. And that was just the beginning.

  The next campaign featured John Cena, the one where he burst through the thin wall. This campaign was so successful that it became the first brand video in the history of YouTube to be on YouTube Ad Leaderboard three months in a row (after debuting at number one). In total, the video has driven over 80 million views and, more important, pushed their social channels to a 2.42 percent engagement rate.

  Since then, we have created and launched 12 additional campaigns for Cricket that ranged from Santa giving Christmas gifts to underprivileged kids, to celebrating Hispanic heritage, to a smash sequel to the original John Cena video, which became the most shared ad in the world—all gathered under the creative thematic of “Something to Smile About.” Again, it’s all about giving value to the viewer.

  These campaigns have completely transformed Cricket’s status in the telecom industry. After the hit videos, the Google searches of Cricket Wireless soared over 700 percent, brand lift (an increase of interaction with customers) jumped over 500 percent, and their conversion rate to sale was over 300 percent higher from the videos than their normal web traffic. Over the past three years their engagement rate went from last place in the industry to first place—results that were truly something to smile about.

  All because we focused on value.

  Rule 4

  Find Your Voice

  Now that you understand value, the next step is to find your unique voice to communicate that value. Sometimes that can be a winding road.

  When my partners and I founded Shareability in 2014, it wasn’t called Shareability. We had originally named the company Contagious. Everyone who worked here loved that name. It had a certain swagger and was very much of the moment for an upstart. At that time, viral videos were all the rage, and we were making videos that were the most “contagious” on the internet, like little video viruses that spread across the web. We started receiving laudatory press for our work, and we thought we were going to take over the online world.

  Then one day I was opening the mail. One curious-looking envelope turned out to be a lawsuit being served from a UK company. The issue was that they were named Contagious as well, and they demanded we change our name immediately—or they were taking us to court.

  At first, we were outraged. Their business was nothing like ours. How dare they ask us to change our name?

  Then we vowed to fight it. That lasted all of about four hours, when our lawyer informed us that not only would we would lose the lawsuit, we would lose a lot of money in the process.

  We were crushed. It sounds silly now, but at the time it felt like our company was going to end. We sat around for days, talking about trying to find a new name, not knowing what to do. We were so desperate to cling to our edgy brand name that at one point we actually considered changing the spelling of Contagious to end with a “z.”

  Finally, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would have to come up with a name—and that’s when something interesting happened. When we started to whiteboard what our company represented, we realized that the name Contagious was actually somewhat limiting. Sure, it sounded cool, but it also carried some negative connotations, namely that of carrying something that would infect others. Also, it was directly related to the term “viral,” which had been the buzzword in the marketing world for the prior two years, but was starting to feel a little tired. How would it look a year or two down the road?

  This exercise allowed us to stop and think for the first time and really articulate what we stood for as a company. At the time, long before video on Facebook was widely used, the concept of “sharing” online was just starting to gain steam. Being “shareable” was similar to being contagious, but it was actually much truer to who we were. It carried a more positive connotation, and it spoke to an interconnected ecosystem on social media where people share content with their friends and family. What a powerful concept!

  Sharing was much more personal than the idea of some virus that was running loose across the web. It encapsulated how we wanted to build the company, everything from sharing risk with our brand partners that hired us to craft forward-looking campaigns to sharing the upside with our employees.

  There it was, right at the heart of our business philosophy. That new name became our voice: Shareability. A word that wasn’t even in the dictionary at the time. Today, most dictionaries do include the word and define it as how shareable something is, particularly in an online context.

  Fast-forward to four years later, and the term “viral” is so played out, it is almost like a dirty word in the online marketing space. Conversely, everyone is talking about building a shareable brand, and we are perfectly positioned for where the market is heading as we deliver shareability for some of the biggest brands and celebrities in the world. The celebrities themselves become brands, like individuals looking to create profiles online, as a brand is the accumulation of traits that distinguishes one company or individual from another.

  I never thought I’d say this, but I am grateful we were sued because it forced us to find our true voice.

  Going to School on Celebrities

  There are valuable lessons to be learned from working with people who are in a position of notoriety (even if that is not your aspiration), or learning about how they do what they do. If nothing else, that process will offer you some unique perspectives.

  Before I started Shareability, I worked with celebrities and athletes in branding. In my early days at The Marketing Arm in Dallas, a firm founded by entrepreneur Ray Clark, we represented over 100 professional athletes and negotiated their marketing deals—everyone from the Chicago Bulls’ Scottie Pippen to the Green Bay Packers’ Reggie White. When I founded my first company, called Converge, we worked with professional poker players, including World Series of Poker champions Chris Moneymaker and Johnny Chan. As the company evolved, we engineered a celebrity event model that led to us managing over 200 celebrity events with some of Hollywood’s biggest names, like Jamie Foxx, Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Miley Cyrus, and, yes, the Kardashians. At one point, we rented a $20 million beach house in Malibu for the summer and threw 40 celebrity events in 60 days. It was insane.

  Since then we’ve partnered with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio on building his foundation and Shawn Mendes on launching a new brand.

  From all of that exposure to celebrities, I learned two things. Number one, never play poker against someone who has the equivalent of your annual salary in his pocket (that’s a story for another time!). Number two, the celebrities with the most staying power all have one thing in common: they inherently understand their unique voice.

  This is a truth that is well known in Hollywood. To see it in action, look no further than the three Hollywood Toms—Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Tom Hiddleston. Despite having the same first name, there’s no risk of audience confusion. When you see one of these guys on a billboard, you know what you’re gonna get. Cruise will give you charm and action, Hanks will be a thought-provoking everyman, Hiddleston will be full of raffish mystery.

  These three celebrities have all crafted themselves into brands with their movies and have marketed themselves accordingly. They have found their voices and have stayed
true to who they are, and that allows them to break through the noise and to be bankable at the box office. The older two Toms have even managed to sway their brands as they have aged, shifting with the times to stay relevant to younger audiences.

  Compare this to the influx of several Chrises in Hollywood. In what Vanity Fair dubbed “The Chris-ening of Hollywood,” the business was invaded by handsome white actors named Chris that everyone kept confusing with one another—Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans. It went so far that when Pine took the stage on Saturday Night Live to promote Wonder Woman, he burst into song, trying to delineate which Chris he actually was, standing in front of a picture of all four of them, singing, “I’m not that Chris. I look just like him, but I’m not that Chris.” His star rose as he gave it voice, and people started to better tell the four apart.

  With the rise of social media, the power to establish your voice has been gradually removed from the hands of studio marketers, publicists, and journalists. Suddenly, celebrities had the power to communicate directly with their fans in a way they never had before. This gave them the opportunity to further craft their own voice and to grow their own influence.

  The celebrities who have done it best are the ones who clearly understand and deliver on their unique voice. Love her or loathe her, Kim Kardashian knows exactly who she is, and she delivers that “brand” to her followers every single day on social media. She walks the line of oozing sex and living the glamorous life of Hollywood royalty, while also coming across as a sweet mom and family girl who is quick to make fun of herself. It’s no wonder that she has over 220 million followers across social media.

  Or take Dwayne Johnson. The Rock is a real life superhero on Facebook and Instagram, posting insane workout videos, delivering inspirational messages, and showcasing wild adventures with his friends and fans. It is a nonstop fun experience that delivers positivity and community in a way that only the Rock can. As a result, he has become one of the top ten most-followed celebrities in the world.