A question for Dr Brent Coker
WHEN Isaiah Mustafa became "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", Old Spice laid claim to one of the fastest-growing online viral videos (6.7 million views in the first 24 hours). Now University of Melbourne internet consumer psychologist Brent Coker has identified the holy grail of marketing: an algorithm to predict why some YouTube movies are so successful.
Define successful?
It's the number of views on YouTube within a certain period — 10,000 views in a week is viral … What's critical is the speed with which it spreads. That's one thing we discovered: the faster it can spread, the more likely it will survive.
How many videos have you analysed?
More than 130. But the study is not just about what makes a movie go viral. One going around at the moment is of this drunk guy singing that Seal song Kiss from a Rose to his cat — there's no brand attached to that video. We are interested in ones that have a brand attached.
Is a branded viral video any different from an ad?
If you professionally produce a video to make it look like it was happenstance that somebody filmed it, as soon as you put a brand up there, viewers think Ah, advertisement and switch off. There's no way they're going to share it. For a branded viral video to work is a challenge.
What is one that worked?
An early favourite of mine is of these kids walking down the street in London, past Buckingham Palace. One of them scales the fence, runs over and sprays graffiti on the side of the palace … The video is grainy and shaky.
How did the makers attach the brand?
It's in what the kid spray-painted on the palace. The viewer zooms in to try to make it out, ends up doing a Google search for it and arrives at the sponsor's website.
What's the formula for viral success?
There are three things: synergy, affinity and emotion.
Can you describe synergy?
Society is made up of networks of people connected in some way. It can be psychographically (through our values, attitudes and knowledge) or demographically (age, status or income maybe). For a viral to work, it has to be planted in a network, flood that network, then spill over to a new one.
For example?
Facebook started in a university … That spilled out of Harvard into other universities, then eventually into the domain of office workers who used to go to university, and so on.
Facebook was synergistic?
With the student population where it started, yes, because people related to it.
How about affinity?
What makes humans different from animals is we've got a prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain that enables us to put ourselves in other people's shoes … or simulate what's going to happen. I'm looking at an image here of a guy who's just done a huge jump on his bicycle — he's in the air but you can see there's no way he's going to land it. We feel a strong reaction when we see it, thinking, That's going to end badly. A strong reaction like this creates a motive to share.
And emotion?
It's about emotive strength. One thing a viral movie does is give us a psychological reward. It might make you feel lucky you're not the person in the video; it might be funny — and it has to be laugh-out-loud funny to go viral; or it might be about justice satisfaction — thinking, that guy deserved it. Remember that video in Australia of the school kid, a big guy, who got bullied by this smaller guy, and he snapped and fought back? This idea of rooting for the underdog is powerful. Nostalgia sometimes works; super-cute often works; super-interesting or super-clever are also strong contenders. But the secret to making a viral work is how emotions like these are combined.
What will you do next?
With the film school, we're making a viral movie to test the algorithm. The brand we plan to use in this movie is a not-for-profit organisation
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/why-do-some-videos-go-viral-on-youtube-20120709-21r3i.html
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