Break Through the Noise

by Tim Staples

  But unfortunately, that’s where their research stopped. The internet, always at the ready, quickly dug a little deeper and found that the full story, memorialized in book form by Colonel Sanders’s daughter, Margaret, was that Claudia was hired by her father to help his first wife with housework and to satisfy his “libido, which required a healthy, willing partner.” Oops.†

  From disingenuous and lazy, we then go back in time to flat-out tone deaf and downright moronic. The worst attempt in recent memory to ride this wave comes from the frozen-pizza company DiGiorno. In 2014, there was a movement for women to talk about why they had remained in abusive relationships under #WhyIStayed. DiGiorno tweeted out: “#WhyIStayed You Had Pizza.” Really?*

  Whatever you do—don’t be a kook.

  Hang Ten

  Hanging ten is a very difficult surfing maneuver where the rider steps to the very front, riding with all ten toes poking over the nose of the board. The analogy here is that you must ride with style. You need to add a flourish and help contribute to the conversation. You need to use your own unique voice to add value.

  Consider “Fuck Jerry,” which is one of the biggest meme sites on the internet. When memes first started going crazy, a creative fellow named Elliot Tebele came up with a simple idea to ride the wave and give it a new spin. In 2013, he launched a tumblr account and started aggregating memes that others had created, sharing them on various platforms. He gave his site an edgy name, a snarky counterculture reference to Seinfeld, and the site quickly became a clearing-house for memes and a place to generally amuse yourself with hijinks found on the internet.

  Even though you could argue that the meat and potatoes of this enterprise is largely to collect and repackage the work of others, the way that it’s all wrapped up and repackaged makes the concept unique enough to be a hit. In its success, Elliot’s site has also become more and more original over time. By catching the meme wave early and riding it in a unique way, Tebele has created a small media empire. His followers have crested 14 million, and he’s earning serious money. He sells a party game for adults called “What Do You Meme?,” he runs a consulting and production studio called Jerry’s World, he sells T-shirts and merchandise, and he even has his own brand of tequila.

  What’s the Bottom Line with Riding Waves?

  In sum, if you are trying to push a message out to the world and you are not riding the wave, your odds might be 1 in 2 million. But if you can ride a wave, and do it authentically, your odds jump up immediately to 1 in 2,000. Riding the wave dramatically levels the playing field. It’s all about how you tie in to a trending topic so that people will be more likely to click on and interact with your content, rather than reject you for being an opportunistic boor. If done right, it’s also an effective way to tap into a new audience that you haven’t yet engaged with.

  But what if everyone is riding the same wave and doing it well? What if the wave is such low-hanging fruit that it looks like the world surfing championships, where everyone is on their game, catching the wave, being authentic about it, and adding value? What if it feels so crowded that even your best material won’t be noticed?

  Don’t fret. There’s yet another path to take. That’s what the next chapter is about.

  Rule 7

  Flip the Script

  The counterpoint to “ride the wave” is a principle we call “flip the script,” meaning to reverse the standard procedure. That is, to do something unexpected or revolutionary, to take trending topics or commonly accepted views and then flip them to the exact opposite.

  Being contrarian can be fun. Who doesn’t enjoy watching a monkey wrench being tossed into the tedious, monotonous mainstream? The internet loves when this happens—provided that it is clever and gives value in some way. And if it’s tinged with humor, all the better.

  Smart brands have been flipping the script since the early days of advertising. One of the early examples was the print ad from 1959 for the Volkswagen Beetle, also known as the Bug. In a postwar era when Americans were obsessed with “muscle cars” and “bigger is better,” the Beetle ad headline simply read “Think small,” accompanied, in the corner, by a tiny image of the car. The ad became so successful in “flipping the script” that Ad Age magazine named it the best advertising campaign of the 20th century.

  Or consider modern Super Bowl ads, the biggest, baddest, and most expensive TV spots in the world. They are typically loud and overproduced, and meant to catch media and online attention as much as the attention of viewers and consumers. Even today, when Super Bowl ads are often released online a week before the game to make sure they don’t drown in all the noise, the successful ones are still endlessly judged by people, written about in the press, rebroadcast on newscasts, and shared and commented on online. For many viewers, much of the fun and experience of the Super Bowl is focused more on seeing the creative ads and the glamorous halftime show, and less on the outcome of the actual football game. This kind of scenario makes the Super Bowl the perfect place to the flip the script, to go against the grain, to buck the trend, and to go small when everyone else is going big.

  Minimalist Super Bowl spots have long caught people’s attention and been highly effective because they are so contrarian. In 1998, FedEx produced a terrific ad that flipped the script, a commercial that was simply 30 seconds of a color-bar screen, the kind that networks default to when the TV picture goes out. Then, after about 10 seconds of this “attention grabbing nothingness,” a simple message came up on screen: “Next time use FedEx. When it absolutely, positively needs to get there.” Genius. Because all the other ads were so loud, what stood out was the opposite, an error screen, with a single statement that cut to the heart of the brand’s message.

  One of the most recent hilarious examples is what Old Milwaukee beer did for the Super Bowl in 2011. The company created an ad with funnyman Will Ferrell. Using a celebrity is helpful to gain attention, but it has also become commonplace for Super Bowl spots, so on its own, having a comedian doesn’t really move the needle. But it was the distinctly clever placement of the Old Milwaukee commercial that drove the narrative on Super Bowl Sunday.

  The Super Bowl is known as having the biggest advertising audience in the country, and every year the press buzzes about the extravagant cost of purchasing a 30-second commercial in the game, with the current price tag running just north of $5 million. In any event, in 2011, Old Milwaukee bought a Super Bowl spot, but to be aired only on the local network of the town of North Platte, Nebraska, population about 23,000.

  Not only was airing the ad in one small town a total flip of the Super Bowl script of the national audience, but the ad itself was homey and decidedly lacking in any flashiness. Ferrell, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, is seen hoofing it through a field of waist-high wildflowers, to the sounds of serious orchestral music. When he reaches the camera, he is thrown a can of beer. He catches it, pops the tab, and the beer fizzes. And just as he begins his sales pitch with “Old Milwaukee . . .” he is suddenly cut off, and the ad ends.*

  Not surprisingly, the “smallness” of the commercial soon became the subject of major internet chatter. A few people in North Platte, Nebraska, used their phones to record the ad, and then they posted the video online. The ad spread like wildfire once people realized that no other towns in America were seeing the ad. People loved the anti–Super Bowl nature of the ad, and because Old Milwaukee was pretending that it didn’t want people to see the ad, the internet wanted it even more. Do you think the people recording the ad and posting it online were in any way affiliated with the marketing effort behind it? If that was our campaign, we would have made sure of it.

  Even though you aren’t likely to be running a Super Bowl ad, even a localized single-town version, there are lessons to be learned from what major brands with seemingly unlimited ad-spending capability have done on the most crowded, noisy day of advertising of the year—flipping the script by taking something that is supposed to be big, and then going small with it. This i
s the right idea, no matter the trend. If you buck it and come up with a creative way to go in the opposite direction, and you can make sure it fits your brand message, then you too can flip the script and use that momentum to stand out.

  Programming a Counter-Narrative

  While you could argue that everything we do flips the script on marketing, let’s look at a specific example, especially as it pertains to the idea of trends. One of the key components of both riding the wave and flipping the script is to find out what is trending. You can attach yourself to a trending topic to ride the wave, or to flip the script by finding a trending topic to turn it on its head. You are looking to program with—or counter to—the latest conversation or trend.

  A few years ago, the concept of pet shaming was trending like crazy. People love their pets, so animal topics tend to gain steam online fairly quickly, particularly when they’re funny. Pet shaming was born when people began putting a sign around their pet’s neck or next to its bed or food bowl whenever the pet did something bad, and then taking a picture or video of the animal looking sheepish. The signs said things like “I ate the sofa,” “I pooped on my Mom’s favorite pillow,” or “I ate the baby’s shoe.” It was sort of like a dunce cap for the animal.

  At the time, we had just begun working with Pets Add Life, a committee that advocates for pets and how they enhance people’s lives. We’ve had a lot of success with animal videos and knew how powerful they can be, but we were also aware of the seemingly endless supply of pet videos that already exist across the web. We needed something unique and different to help us break through. As our brain trust was going through the process, they found the trend on pet shaming and realized all we had to do was flip the script—instead of humans shaming pets, what if we had the pets shaming the humans?

  Done. Best idea ever. At least on paper.

  We went down a million different roads trying to figure out how to crack this seemingly obvious idea. Should we have animals taking pictures of humans in embarrassing situations? How would they do that? Did we need to see them holding the camera? Were the humans aware they were being photographed? Were they asleep? If so, how did the pets re-create the moment?

  The concept was great, but what was the actual video?

  Eventually, we landed on a winner. We created a campaign called “Attention All Humans!!! | Stop Pet Shaming.”* It opens with a dog talking to the camera. Yes, literally talking to the camera. The mouth was animated and the voice, after several attempts by various high-caliber actors, was one of our favorite writers, Dave Ackerman. I don’t know if it’s the beard or his jovial nature, and I mean this in the most loving way possible, but he sounds exactly like what a dog speaking English should sound like.

  “Hey, human. Stop scrolling for a second, I gotta talk to you,” the dog says, staring into the camera. “You think you are so funny, turning us into an internet meme, putting all of our weakest moments on your phone for the whole world to see. You and your phones . . . And you have the nerve to call us your best friend. How would you like it if the tables were turned?”

  The pets then turn the tables, and we see the humans doing things they would not want posted on social media and being called out by their pets. While cuddling on the couch and watching TV with her boyfriend, a woman passes gas.

  She quickly accuses her dog, who is sleeping at her feet. We pan down next to the dog to a sign that reads: “That was you and you know it.” The guy, knowing it was her, wrinkles his nose and looks at the girl, who shakes her head, contining to deny it was her. Cut to the dog’s next sign: “Yes it was. You have IBS and it’s a problem.”

  The solution to the complex development questions turned out, as is so often the case, to be super simple. We would just have the pets display the signs that shame the humans. Did they write them? We don’t care, we didn’t see that part! It was a simple solution that kept the humor of the core idea without overcomplicating any of the execution.

  After the video shows a string of pets shaming humans, our dog narrator asks for reconciliation. “Look, we all do some pretty weird things in private,” the dog says, adding, “but those moments don’t define us. Being your best friend no matter what, that’s what we’re all about. That’s who we are.” He encourages humans to keep doing those weird things, and suggests, accompanied by images of a guy and his parrot bobbing to hip-hop, that pets might even join in. “Just remember,” he says, “we didn’t tell anyone about that time you . . . you know.”

  The video ends with the caption “Skip the shaming. Share this instead. #PetsAddLife.” And people did. It received over 5 million views and over 1,000 shares.

  Bring Something Different to the Party

  Flipping the script works for influencers as well, provided they are bringing something completely different to the table or providing a twist. More than a different point of view, like the conservative-versus-liberal debate in cable news, this requires looking at people who are already thought leaders in your space, to see how they are providing their commentary—and then creating something so original and different that it attracts the same audience they have already hooked, by offering them something new and fresh, a complementary counterpoint.

  In 2015, YouTube was full of engaging influencers with warm, positive personalities. Everywhere you clicked on YouTube, someone was motivating you, pushing you to be your best self, or waxing positive about their life. The rise of iJustine, a self-proclaimed “lifecaster,” and Rosanna Pansino, known for her bubbly baking videos, opened a door for a different, more irreverent voice to emerge.

  Enter Poppy. A young lady who looked downright weird, even by the internet’s loose standards of weird-dom. She came onto the scene so different, so counterculture, and so understated that it was almost impossible not to pay attention to her. She was the exact opposite of all the vloggers whose brands were all about being likable and spreading sunshine, and even more amazing, she had no message at all.*

  Poppy came about when 15-year-old Moriah Pereira, wanting to break into the entertainment business, moved from Nashville to Los Angeles. Her actual performance talent may have been singing, but like so many others with talent, she wasn’t going anywhere until she was noticed. She turned to the internet, studied the influencers whose sites were exploding, and saw what was missing: the opposite of what everyone else was doing.

  She adopted her nickname Poppy and began making abstract videos that were authentically her. Her director and producer, Titanic Sinclair, described them as a combination of “Andy Warhol’s pop accessibility, David Lynch’s creepiness and Tim Burton’s zany comedic tone.” Whether that’s an overstatement or not didn’t really matter, because people started watching and they didn’t stop.

  In her first breakout video, “Poppy Eats Cotton Candy,” she is dressed in a pink tutu, eating pink cotton candy. That’s all that happens for a minute and a half. The colors are muted, the contrast nonexistent; Poppy savors the cotton candy, licks the stick, and smiles at the camera at the end. That’s it.

  Another big hit took the concept of odd simplicity to a whole new level. In a childish monotone with varying inflections, she repeats “I’m Poppy” for 10 minutes straight. That’s right, 10 minutes of “I’m Poppy. I’m Poppy. I’m Poppy . . .”

  Both videos have an oddly transfixing quality, but more important, they were so far removed from all the other YouTubers trying to deliver a careful and poignant message to help people with their relationships or to bake muffins. Poppy touched a nerve in young people who were living online, always hunting for the next new thing, because it gave them a reprieve from anxiety, a break from always absorbing information about how to live their lives. Instead, these Poppy videos offered an opportunity to just enjoy something odd for a minute.

  Poppy rose to internet fame by flipping the script, an act that also helped her find her voice. The videos gained her some 50 million followers. Using the internet as her stage, her career took off. She signed a record deal with Island Records
and embarked on a tour to support her first album. She starred in a series of videos with the spot-on title “Internet Famous with Poppy” for Comedy Central, and even wrote a book titled The Gospel of Poppy, which, you guessed it, flips the script on biblical stories by parodying them.

  This is a young lady who understands how the internet works, that when a wave becomes too strong in one direction, it’s ripe to be disrupted with a 180-degree turnabout. The internet will gladly, and with open arms, embrace something totally the opposite of what’s popular, but hitting that nerve requires someone with a unique voice. If anyone has found her voice, it’s Poppy.

  Playing Against Type

  One way to flip the script without having to obsessively monitor trends is by simply taking an established personality or idea, and then turning it against type. It’s kind of like putting Robert De Niro in his first comedic role, casting against type. Everyone will pay attention to see if he can nail the part, and if he does, it simply adds another dimension to his career. Safe to say, De Niro has done that.

  This was the line of thinking we followed when we set out to launch a headphone company with one of the most famous people in the world: We flipped the script by making him anonymous.

  Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the most recognized stars on the planet, known by 86 percent of people in the world, according to Time. He has one of the largest social media footprints in the world, with over 250 million followers. He hails from Portugal but lives in Spain, where he is God-like famous. Every time people saw Ronaldo in an ad for Nike or Calvin Klein, he looked like a movie star: glamorous, glorious, and distant. He was perceived as an untouchable, Adonis-like superstar.