"Deconstructing Viral" Keynote by @todmaffin

Let's get started this morning. To help us introduce our next speaker, I want to bring out the Vice President of National Convenience for InComm, Alan Pressler. Come on out, Alan. Hey David, how you doing? Good, good, good morning. InComm, leader in the industry, a lot going on. What's the latest and greatest? Well, we're getting ready. We're about 2 weeks away from our Partner Alliance event, and we're working feverishly to get everything ready for it. Great. Now, Partner Alliance is down in Miami, and Partner Alliance means— Partner Alliance is an event where ENCOM brings its retail partners and product providers together to sit down on one-on-one meetings to kind of work out business plans for 2012, 2013, and emerging technologies. Great. Well, let's get started this morning. If you want to introduce our first keynote speaker, that'd be great. Absolutely. As a former CEO, Tod Maffin approaches social media from a business point of view. He is a— using his Assured ROI methodology, he'll show you how to ensure measurable, real bottom-line results from social media strategies. He is one of the internet's first webmasters. He created a site ranked 8th in the world. He beat out such heavyweights as Sony, AT&T, and Microsoft. Please welcome Tod Maffin. Tod Maffin. Nice job. Thank you. Thanks a lot. You bet. Welcome. Thank you. Good morning. I'm from Canada. It is like 1:00 in the morning where I'm from, so I have to have coffee with me at all times. I will move the birds away, otherwise I will get angry. First, a brief confession about the introduction that you heard, the 8th best website in the world award. That is true. I won that in 1995 when there were in fact only 9 websites in the world, so— reasonably easy target to hit. Um, how many of you are Twitterers in the room? Twitterers? Tweeters? It's okay, don't be shy. All right, so this is my Twitter handle. Uh, it's easy. It's my name. I made it that way. And I'm gonna have a URL up at the top where you can download the slides. We're gonna be talking a lot about viral marketing around this, obviously. In the kind of work that you do is not— maybe it is an extension, obviously, of the kind of digital marketing that you've expected and seen other big-eared nerds like me. My nerd background goes back to Alpha Geek level, which to us is a status symbol, I might add. And so I want to show you a lot of really interesting viral videos. Viral, not just video, viral campaigns in your industry as well. Some of the stuff that's been done in Canada that's remarkably doing really well, and one particularly gross campaign. Which converted phenomenal. But I want to walk you through that in sort of a flow, because I know that sometimes you go to these events and it sort of kind of seems like, you know, we're not really kind of making any headway. So I've broken this up into 6 areas. But let me, as a way of kind of getting into it, when I was about 14 years old— see, I need the coffee already. I did ask for a drip, you know, the intravenous thing, but they apparently that's illegal down here. When I was 14 years old, two things happened in my life that really changed a lot of the way that I am. One is that my fashion choices took a serious decline. I don't know why blood splatter was appropriate back then as a topic. I look more like Dexter. But more importantly, for those of you who are nerds among the audience, and I will not ask any of you to out yourselves, That was when the Commodore 64 came out. All right! My people! Where are you? I can hear the nerds! Don't get them to raise their arms, though, because they'll, uh— so the Commodore 64, great computer, came after the VIC-20. I had the Timex Sinclair ZX81 prior to that. That's just a little bit of nerd cred. Here's the cool thing about this computer. In my circle of nerds, and in any circle of nerds, even the ones that are running your IT systems, running all the HR, you know, all sorts of stuff, stuff that you've got running computers, there are these sub-pockets of us, right? And my particular sub-pocket of nerdism was one that was known as crackers. You would know this today as hackers. And crackers would take a game that was released, and we would strip apart all the elements of this game. So all of the copyright, all of the software that was preventing you from copying it. Our job was— now, this was illegal, of course, as it is today. Our job was to strip all that, and the way you did it We're not, like, videotaping this or anything, are we? All right. The way you did it was you reverse engineered everything. So you started at the end and you kind of pulled the pieces apart, and what you were left with, with 5 or 6 kind of elements of how the software went together, and then you used that to build forward. It is today how they reverse engineer really anything. If they reverse engineer plane crashes, for instance, they will start with as much as they can and kind of pull their way back. So this idea of reverse engineering things, or doing things kind of backwards has always had this element for me that I've used in later life, which went on obviously to enter the technology world. And so we would try to figure out these little software things. Sometimes they were called Easter eggs as well. These were things that were built into the code that only a cracker could find. They were specifically left there for you to find. In one version of Microsoft Excel, and I think it's Excel '95, they had— Microsoft had actually, I kid you not, programmed an entire Flight Simulator into Excel. And you had to know how to get to it. You hold down the Shift key and all that kind of thing. So those were the nerdy things that we did. So when viral marketing, digital marketing started coming on scene, I started doing digital marketing since the days before you could change web page background colors. Today you can make them any color. There were no colors on the web, literally. It was kind of like 1950s TV. It was actually like that. There were no colors. So I started a long time ago in the world of that. And when all this viral marketing got just massively accelerated. I thought, you know, maybe if I take those same sort of principles that I learned about reverse engineering technology and applied that to the marketing campaigns, maybe I could see what elements were common. Maybe no elements were common and I just wasted a whole bunch of time. But as it turns out, there were. So over the last 18 months, I've been reverse engineering 50 of the world's most successful viral campaigns. Some of these are big corporate campaigns, like Blendtec, do a great job as well with their— they'll put anything in a blender, don't get near those guys. With, and some of these are just, they're not corporate at all. Some of them like Double Rainbow are just kind of one-offs, and we'll walk you through a couple of why that. But I like picking them apart that way. And sometimes, you know, I always, people will say, you know, what we've been trying for, Goodness sakes, our marketing department's been trying to work on something. We want our store to go viral. So my cousin created an internet thing, and they put it on YouTube, and now it's not viral. What did you do wrong? And they say it's like being struck by lightning. But there are things you can do to increase your chance of being struck by lightning. Lightning is not random. It's more random than some things, but it's not entirely random. This is a fellow named Roy Sullivan. Over his 35-year career as a park ranger in Virginia, Roy was struck by lightning not once, not twice, but 7 times. Oh, and lived. I should have— maybe I should have noted that at the beginning. 7 times and lived. This is an actual lightning strike from his hat. So why was Roy so incredibly unlucky? It's not Roy's fault. Think about the lack of randomness in what Roy does. Roy's a park ranger, so he works outside, right? Where do we work? Inside cubicles or inside offices that have the fluorescent light with the soul-destroying light backgrounds and everything, you know? He works outside. He works in Virginia, corridor states, right? Running up and down that corridor with a whole bunch of thunderstorm activity. He has a job that keeps him moving around in that space. The very things that he does makes it more likely for him to be struck by lightning. And of course these days, there's an app for that now. So I believe that after I sort of went through all of these 50 campaigns and tried to pull apart what was common among all of them, I found that there were 6 things, 6 items that were common to almost every viral campaign that went out there. And this worked across platform. This worked across industry. And I'm going to teach you those 6 right now. The first is what I call ACC matching. This stands for audience, content— audience, sorry, content, and call to action. And don't worry, if you want to take notes, feel free, or you can just download the slides. The top right is the address for downloading. Should say download at the end. So what this really is about is making sure that you've got the right matching along the way across all of it. So let me give you an example of what that means, because it's not It's not that we necessarily want to gain an audience online, right? I mean, that's fine. You can put signs in your store that say, "Like us on Facebook," or, "Do a review for us on Yelp." You know, sometimes you're going to get those whether you like them or not. It's not about that. It's about finding an audience that's willing to share. We'll talk about the psychology of sharing in just a moment. But here's an example of a campaign that is a very good example of ACC matching. Ronaldo, big soccer star. This is a Nike video, and what happened, I've cut off a little bit, he puts on these Nike gold shoes and now he's going to kick this ball 4 times. It's going to hit the crossbar 4 separate times. He's not going to touch the ball once with his hands. I hate this guy. Isn't that great? Great little video. It is, I am sad to say to you, the product of computer-generated animation. If you actually look really carefully between the second and third frames, you can see a ball roll out of the side. You're like, "Wait a minute." So, but it's still, it's really compelling. And at the beginning of the video, he puts on these gold shoes, right? So the idea, of course, that's created is what? Associate yourself with this brand and maybe you'll be as successful as this person. The similes are Similarities are pretty obvious there. So I don't want to get into a deconstruction of this one yet, because I first want to show you an example of bad audience-content-call-to-action matching. Hey, B, B, B! Yo, I found some nectar. DJ Honey Drop! Okay, any guesses as to what product this is? This is $100 cash. I will give this to the first person who can tell me what product this is. Oh, now everyone's paying attention. What? Honey? No. Shoes? No. No. Knee braces? No. Dude, $100! Gloves? Oh, who said backpacks? You stand up. No, not backpacks. Next? No? All right. Money goes away. Poor guy. "I, I, finally I win something." This is obviously the product in my mind. This is the product of what I like to call airline magazine syndrome. Sometimes you've seen this. It is an often middle-aged executive in their 60s who come off a plane And they go storming into their creative— this is an ad agency. They go storming into their creative meeting first thing in the morning. And the creative meeting is filled with nothing but 20-year-olds, right? And the guy comes in, he says, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it. Here's what we're going to do, OK? We're just going to put rap music in it. And it'll fix everything. Well, this is obviously not anything. It turns out it's a campaign for— Where my bees at? Häagen-Dazs. Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream. Häagen-Dazs had this campaign where the global population of honeybees is shrinking around the world. So if there's no honeybees out there, then lower quality fruit, lower quality pollen, lower quality ice cream, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So that was their campaign. If you donated money to the campaign, it went to this university who were doing some grants., and so on. Let's deconstruct though, 'cause I wanna keep you in that first of 6 steps, which is the ACC matching. Let's deconstruct the audience content matching across both of those. So we're gonna talk about the Nike one and Häagen-Dazs, and we'll see how this particular one falls apart. So here is how I reverse engineered the ACC variable, was by 3 metrics primarily. The first is the existing brand audience. So who currently buys what we sell? Who buys what we sell? Who comes into our stores? Where are we getting foot traffic from? Second one is, who are we trying to reach by producing or seeding a viral campaign? Doesn't have to be video, by the way. Videos are common, but doesn't have to be. And third is the campaign's call to action, or who is most likely to do what we're asking them to do. The call to action is very different than in many cases where the, the previous two, the audience and content, is. So you've got to make sure that all of them match. Here's an example of Häagen-Dazs. So who's the audience for Häagen-Dazs? You know, they're adults. They've got money. They care about natural foods. They care about the kind of things that they eat. But the creative targets, who was that ad aimed at? Not adults. Aimed at teenagers who, you know, eat things that are not meant to be eaten. And what was the audience? The audience on this print thing had nothing to do with either of those two. It wasn't buy ice cream. Right? It wasn't anything related to cheese. It was give money. It's three completely different matching. And when you have no match, you have no sharing. It simply doesn't occur. Now compare that to the Ronaldo Touch of Gold campaign, where all three matched. Who is the brand audience? Who is the creative most like— the target most likely to do things with? What are we asking them to do? What are they likely to do? They're likely to buy shoes. Who's likely to do that? Trainers, athletes, young people, and so on. So it's a match. If you create the right space, virality happens. I don't know how many times I've been behind the desk with a client who has said, "You know, we said— we went on our Facebook page." I love this one. "And we even said the words, 'Please click and share this with your friends,' and it went nowhere." Think about really successful recruiting campaigns and why they work. A really good recruiting ad on TV doesn't actually say anything about the company itself. It talks about the spirit of the company. You've got to sell the spirit of your brand, not just the brand. It's more important that way. When you create that space, the virality happens. Luckily, we have tools. Tools are great. Facebook is great for viral. Twitter's OK. You know, you can retweet. Those— the foundation from a technology point exists. And most of my head is spent in technology through the business, through the kind of work that we do. But what we're talking about here is creating a space where it exists. And you do that by tapping into the psychology behind why people share. We know that sharing is based primarily on 3 derivatives, 3 pieces of psychology. The first is what— if anyone here, who I'm sure you all have at some point, shared something on the internet. I'm not talking necessarily even clicking share and getting a Facebook page and putting it in— distributing. If you've done that, great. If you've tweeted something, great. Maybe all you did was 5 years ago there was a funny mailing list that came around and you sent it off to a bunch of friends of yours. That's viral too, right? One of the world's first viral campaigns was that way. A guy named— it wasn't Borat, it was a Turkish bachelor named Mahir who looked just like Borat. One of the very first ones that went around. But there's 3 of these. The first is affinity. So it's based around the kind of things that I already use. Affinity is I already use this. The second element within it is advocacy, or this is something I vouch for. This is something I get behind. A lot of the campaigns, some of them I'll show you, Greenpeace, you know, Dove, some of the campaigns which were very advocacy-based are people saying this is something I support, I believe in. These are very strong if you're doing green initiatives, especially to the Gen Y The so-called Facebook generation, the 20-year-olds, you know, they want to believe in something, something that they can change the world. That advocacy drives. But most importantly, I felt something. Affinity, advocacy, and emotion are the 3 tools that create sharing. So you create a positive vibe, as it were, around the brand, and that actually begins to share. The psychology is one of those things that we could go into and spend 5 hours just around that. But if you understand that it's what we use, What we vouch for and what we feel, program those into any part of your campaign, and you will already have moved toward that, um, uh, that— the first of 6 keys. So once again, just really quickly, the ACC matching is audience. Make sure the audience, the call to action, and the actual content that is the creative of the ad campaign match. And when you do that, the product is sharing. This is one of the things that we've learned. You know, you can do it in email, YouTube, you can seed it a number of different ways. Facebook has incredible targeting. We were talking backstage about, you know, maybe a lot of companies like yours where your idea of a target is, you know, 14 to 39. That's not a demographic, that's a city. But this is the way that we think sometimes with marketing because we haven't really had the tools to target at the level that we can today. I can on Facebook, which is, you know, soon to go I can say I want specifically only people in Texas that are men to see this. And already people who have already indicated an interest in— the little hashtag up at the front means they're talking about it. So these are people who are already talking about convenience stores on Facebook. If they're not talking about convenience stores in the status updates that they post, on the pages that they like, if they're not talking, I don't want this in the ad campaign. Don't let them even see it. So you're not wasting your money on eyeballs that could couldn't care less. That targeting, even something as simple as morning coffee, people who are likely to buy the products that you're already selling, incredible targeting. You pay when they click. It's very different than a model buying a whole bunch of radio time or buying a newspaper ad where you pay for eyeballs there. Here you're only paying for clicks. You can target people on their birthday, give them a special coupon. And because Facebook is incredibly viral, and this is not a presentation on Facebook, I know you've heard, have, you know, lots of social media people talking already to you. I'm sure at your company. But it is incredibly viral. Everything you do on Facebook is reported. I used to work for Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC, which is sort of a combination between PBS and NPR and then no money. It's sort of the CBC. And I was an on-air quote-unquote personality. And so I signed up because I'm a nerd. When Facebook came out, you know, I put in all the information in there. And they wanted everything, right? It's like, where have you worked before? Okay. What gender do you like? What gender are you? What's your phone number? So I put all this stuff in. About 6 months later, someone at Ottawa, which is the headquarters of the CBC for human resources, calls and says, you know, we have a policy, eh? You cannot have anything with your personal information. They didn't actually speak that way. I just find it funnier to do it that way. They said, but you know, if you just remove all the information, take it all off your Facebook page, then you know, it's a zippity-click, then it's all done. So I started removing information. Well, unbeknownst to me, of course, when I was putting that information into Facebook, it was reporting that to all of my friends, the hundreds of Facebook friends that I had and colleagues and all sorts of people that I was connected to, every time I put something in and every time I took something out. When you comment on a page, when someone goes to the Facebook page of your store, whether or not you have a page, I might add, because Facebook creates pages for you.. You just have to exist as a business. You probably already have a page. If someone clicks like just because they're geo-targeted, they're already in the area, what's the first thing Facebook does now? Asks them for a recommendation. They haven't even walked in your store maybe, and they're like, "I don't know, looks okay to me." It shows up on their timeline, not only on their timeline, but right up at the top. It's pinned to the timeline. As they continue to post other stuff chronologically, this doesn't move. This person's crappy review of your store that they've never walked in is is going everywhere on the internet. So I was putting all this information in. It was reporting it to my friends. Tod Maffin is in Vancouver. Tod Maffin is a male. And as I was taking this all out, Facebook reported— because I'm pulling the information off— Tod Maffin no longer has a phone number. And then it says— and announces this to all of my Facebook friends— Tod Maffin is no longer interested in women. Well, the calls that I— no. There's a great chain of convenience stores in Canada called Maxx. They operate in the 7-Eleven kind of space as well, competitor to them. They had a campaign promoting one of their winter frosty type, and trying not to use the trademark Bloody zit. Now I had to decide whether I was going to show you the video to this. I have decided not to, but I'm going to— I'm going to shh. All right, I'll show you the video. I don't have the video. I will describe it. Here's what happens. It is 10 seconds. Girl, teenage girl, attractive. Teenage guy, face full of zits, right? They stare at each other for 5 or 6 seconds, which is an eternity in television, right? They just stare at each other. And she just goes, mm, touches his cheek in a very nice tender gesture. And then you notice blood starts— this is why I didn't show you the video— dripping down, and then she licks it. End of commercial. That was it. That was the whole ad. This is why I didn't show you that ad. But we know that time and time and time again, when you do When you look into what teenagers react to in retail, in this kind of marketing, whatever makes the parents most uncomfortable with responds the best to the teenager. This is true. This is actually drawn out by studies. So match your audience with your content with the call to action. Who cares that it made parents uncomfortable? That's the point, right? Forget that you're marketing to parents, because you're not in the case of that. Good luck if you have a bloody zid competitor. So the second key— remember, there are 6 of these. I'll move quickly through a couple of these as well because we're not here all the time. And that is a very simple, single concept. Successful viral campaigns are not 3-act structures. They revolve around a single idea. They're stripped down to their bare essentials. They don't try to develop characters. They don't have plots. They're just one simple idea. Think about the Nike soccer video. There's one thing going on here. A guy is kicking the ball. Double Rainbow, which I will show you shortly, one single simple moment and it spreads. We'll get into that in just a moment. The third is around sentiment. When I mention the psychology of sharing, we know that it is affinity, that is, these are the things that I already use. We know that it's emotion. This is— these are how I feel. But we also have to— and that's where sentiment comes in, right? And then the other one, of course, wrapping— and now I feel like the politician who can't remember the third thing. What was his name? I can't even remember the guy's name. How bad is that? One of the most successful campaigns that did around sentiment was produced by Ogilvy and Mather, a great campaign. It was an advocacy-based work, which was the thing I was trying to remember. It was advocacy-based work. And a very simple— I'll tell you about what happened to this ad in a moment. But this is 60 seconds. This campaign was seeded almost entirely online. Rarely, it was barely on TV at all. It was almost entirely done online. And yet this took home both the cyber and film awards in the Cannes Lions, which is advertising's pinnacle of award-taking. Very few films, very few campaigns have ever done that, where they've taken home in two different categories a single execution. But what made that really successful was that element of advocacy. This is something I vouch for. People want to identify with that, right? Also creates some emotion. I heard, I physically heard some of you when the Photoshop started moving the heads around a little bit like that, I heard people gasp. Gasping. You know, it's sort of like, "Oh, wow. Of course." So it doesn't have to be all that detailed, but it has to have some level of emotion in it. You can create that emotion through fear, you can create it through happiness, you can create it for exhaustion, you can create it for any levels, really. Rehab would be a good place to look. You know, any of these shows like Intervention. This is all they train people in rehabs for, is how to feel emotion. Tap into some of that kind of stuff, the feelings that are being extracted. I'm not— let me be clear— suggesting you physically take all of your marketing people and go into a treatment center. This is not what I'm recommending, but it is the same kind of stuff that drives people so fundamentally that we see reach out that way. I want to spend a bit more time, though, on the fourth element, which is all around incentivizing the sharing. A lot of people will put out a video where they'll put out a campaign and it'll kind of sit there and nothing happens. "That's kind of weird. I wonder why it didn't go anywhere." You— there are so many of these things out now, you have to go a couple of steps beyond. And the next two steps show you how to do that. The first is, as I mentioned, rewarding sharing. A product you're familiar with, Doritos. A couple of years ago, Doritos, um, they didn't really have a problem, but they had a— a situation where they had, you know, reasonable success in the category they were trying to go into. Obviously, every company wants to increase margin, mindshare, move more products. They came up with this idea: no flavor named on the bag, just a big dollar sign. And the idea was, if you buy this, eat it, tell us what flavor you think it is. Now, this is obviously with a generational divide, because I'm like, I'm not eating that. Tell me what you made it out of first, and then we'll talk. But the idea was do that and then create a 30-second TV ad for it, and the winner would get $25,000 in cash plus 1%— this is the winner of the best TV ad and the best name— plus 1% of global sales of this product forever. Forever. That's a lot of potential money. The way the vote worked for the contest was very simple. It was by vote-getting, right? So the top 5 vote-getting videos would be shortlisted, and then Doritos would pick from those 5. Which, as an aside, let me just talk a bit about that because I know there's been a lot of discussion already around contesting things. That's the right approach. That is the right approach, which is to shortlist, you decide the winner, let the internet do that, let the internet shortlist, but you must maintain control of your brand. Far too many times it goes off the rails. In an attempt, you know, well-meaning to be transparent, we're gonna put our brand out there, we're gonna let you take control of it. Don't let them do that. Don't let them do that. Here's an example of what happens. A couple years ago, Greenpeace wanted to stop the Japanese government's policy of killing whales. And one of the ways that they were gonna stop it was to, or at least bring attention to it, was that Greenpeace was going to put a tracking chip inside one of these humpback whales. So you'd be able to follow the whale around the world. So to personify the campaign, Greenpeace had come up with these— they decided they would hold an internet contest to name this whale. This was the contest. Come up with the name. And they had suggested, to kind of get the ball rolling, right, some culturally appropriate names. This is a Farsi word for immortal. This means divine power of the ocean in a Polynesian language. But then the internet started swirling around a name of its own: Mr. Splashypants. And this name, true to what every 12-year-old inside you just did, started going everywhere, right? Popular sites like Boing Boing, Fark, and Reddit, which is actually the first site that pointed its members to it. Reddit became so enamored of the contest and of hijacking the contest, which is really what this was about, that they actually changed their logo for a period of time just to kind of get it going. And when it started, MrSplashypants was a distant competitor in the race. Just a couple of weeks in, MrSplashypants had captured 70% of the votes. So I will let the founder of Reddit pick up the story from here. Which is pretty impressive, right? We won. MrSplashypants won. Mr. Splashypants was chosen. Just kidding. Okay, so Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it because they wanted one of their more thoughtful names to win. So they said, "No, no, we're just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting." Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy. And the Reddit community really— and the rest of the internet, rather— really got behind this. Facebook groups were getting created. Facebook applications were getting created. The idea was, vote your conscience, vote for Mr. Splashypants. And people were putting No signs in the real world about this whale. And this is the final vote. When all was cleared, 78% of the votes— and to give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in 3. OK? So there was a clear lesson here. And that was that the internet loves Mr. Splashypants, which is obvious. It's a great name. Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say Mr. Splashypants. I think that's what helped drive this. I would. I'd give any amount of money for that. So as it turns out, someone, thank goodness, Somebody at Greenpeace finally got a sense of humor and they embraced it. They didn't have much choice because the viral campaign kind of took off against them. But it worked in their favor. Today you can buy Greenpeace— excuse me, Mr. Splashypants mouse pads and mugs and t-shirts. But most importantly, when you think about the amount of attention it actually drew to their campaign through the back door, as it were, it actually— the Japanese government actually relented. The campaign actually worked. So just a side warning, if you will, that if you're going to let— if you're going to run a contest, give very serious consideration to whether or not you let the public make the final decision because there's always a 12-year-old nephew somewhere in his pajamas in his parents' basement who wants to screw with your contest. Ignore all the advice you hear from other folks like me who will come up after, you know, maybe years down the line and say, "Let everyone have your brand." Don't do it. There was a campaign that Snickers did a while ago. I remember where— no, I'm sorry, it wasn't Snickers. It was— they look like M&M's but they're fruity Skittles. And they decided that they are going to change their homepage. And so instead of it just going to skittles.com when you went there, it was now a live search of Twitter. Anytime anyone mentioned the word Skittles, it was a live search, which for the first couple of minutes was kind of cool because now Skittles.com shows all of these great things people are talking about Skittles. And then people started cluing in, "Wait a minute, anything I say now about Skittles goes to the homepage of Skittles.com?" And I will let you imagine where that went. So, back to Doritos. The first time they did this, they got a couple of contests Here is the winning 30-second entry from this campaign where the food, the taste was not identified. Which of you here has the answer to number 3? X equals 75 and a third. Did you get that memo I sent you? Excuse me, do you know where 5th Street is? Hey, I like your hair. Do you party? Anyone know where the nonfiction section is? This is a really great movie. Make a left! How was your date, sweetheart? I really think we should see other people! New Doritos Scream Cheese. What are you screaming about? I almost forgot. Happy birthday! So, great little ad. Scream Cheese. It's a great name, right? You know, this guy who was a film student in Montreal got $25,000 and 1% of product sales of Scream Cheese forever. I don't think he's surfing off of it yet, but I mean, it still still looks pretty good. So next year came around, and Doritos was thinking about this a little bit more. Now this time, the accountants have taken them to task. They no longer offer the 1% of global sales deal. Instead, they offer up to a quarter of a million dollars. But here's where they did something clever. Remember, just so that you're in the whole scope of things, we're at position 5, which is rewarding sharing, one of the ways to make something go viral. And the way that they incentivized sharing was rather than just a points-based system where you simply got a vote every time someone voted for you, You got a different value of vote for how important the share was. In Social Network, one tweet is worth, you know, a significant amount of something. But one share on Facebook might be worth more. It might have reached more people. Back in the day when they were doing it, Digg was very popular. Digg's not worth that much anymore for one of those things. But these sites kind of come and go. So you can see how they incentivize people to share. And even though if you got huge points points for being the most, the biggest, you know? If you could actually be the number one position in the search engine— you can't really even get that anymore because of the way that all these social networks are combining data. But Doritos had engaged the firm that developed this algorithm, and it became very successful. All the top videos and their live point statuses were online, so at any time you could see how your video was doing. The lesson here is that people want to share the video, right? But you've— it's not good enough to just have a funny video. If your campaign, again, is video-based, it's not good enough to just get a funny video. There are websites that is all they do is make funny videos, like funnyordie.com. That's the entire crack.com, cracktuh. That's all they do. They make funny videos. You will never compete if your goal is just to do that. If you want your campaign to go viral, you must reward, incentivize sharing. And it doesn't have to be as mathematical as that. Not everyone's got that kind of talent behind them. Not everyone's got that kind of investment of time and investment of resources. It can be something very simple. Wheat Thins, a product that many of you carry in your own stores, had a great campaign. It's kind of the extreme end of this. And here's a way that they rewarded people who shared. This one's hilarious. Ah, I'm out of Wheat Thins. "Ah, I'm out of Wheat Thins. My life is officially over." Kind of dramatic. Tabitha. Yes? Okay, do you recall tweeting, "Ah, I'm out of Wheat Thins. My life is officially over"? Yeah. We got a hold of that. We just want you to be sure that you're aware that we have plenty of Wheat Thins. And that's for you. That's just a gift. That is a lot of Wheat Thins. Oh, my gosh. Everybody in the van. Let's go. In the truck. You take care, all right? "Come on, boys. Who's next?" So that is exactly how it played out. That person was not an actor. That's exactly— that is, they literally just dumped a whole bunch of Wheat Thins right there for her. So what does that say about the brand? Just to bring it back to business for a moment. That says a few things, really. First of all, it says something that's critically important in many of the products and the product positioning that you're trying to do, which is we don't take ourselves too seriously. Think about the brands that are in your store. Coca-Colas of the world, Pepsicos, you know, that have multiple sub-brands which are trying to project an image of, you know, "We like to have fun." That's the first thing. The second thing is, "We love our customers." Who— what other brand would drive a car up and just give you, out of the blue, one of these things? And third, perhaps most importantly when it comes to this rewarding sharing idea, maybe if you send out a tweet talking about Weet-Fix, maybe we'll come and do this for you as well. I have another one. You want to see one more of these? All right. Same campaign, different person. Does anyone else have to turn up the volume when they eat Wheat Thins? Someone needs to invent crunch-proof headphones. He will be surprised. Let's go. Tim Parker, do you remember when you tweeted, "Does anyone else have to turn up the volume when they eat Wheat Thins? Someone needs to invent crunch-proof headphones." Yes. All right, well, guess what, pal? Straight from Wheat Thins. No way. We're going to try this. Ready? I love how he's playing along, too. That's a success. Let's roll. Let's go, boys. Let's move. Don't I have to sign something? OK, let's see. Next up. What do we got next? Reward. Sharing, even if it's something simple like this, and people will share it. The fifth of six elements is around the unofficials. The unofficials are the people who love your brand already and do something to support your brand because they love it so much. And so many organizations, just because of the way that they're structured, just because they're large organizations, tend to throw the book at them or so on. One of the things— how many of you are familiar with the Diet Coke and Mentos viral videos. So there's a peculiar chemical occurrence that happens when you take a Mentos, the candy, and you drop it into a 2-liter canister of Diet Coke. And that is that it completely, in about 3 or 4 seconds, empties that bottle, that 2-liter bottle. Just wham! It goes up 30 feet in the air. It's really quite spectacular to see. And it's a very popular viral video. I'll show it to you in a second. It was started in 2002 by a science teacher who had kind of a Bill Nye Science Guy kind of thing going on. Once a week he would— oh, blank stares. Bill Nye the Science Guy? Yes? OK, good. Phew. My head is like, oh, that must be a Canadian reference. Anyways, and I think he's from Seattle. Anyway, so this is what happened, right? You put that in and it would just go enormous. So he had this once a week little science column on the local TV news. And he did this for an anchor. And they put this video up on the news website for a little while. This was in 2002. And then nothing happened. For years, nothing happened with that video. This is one of the dirty secrets of viral videos online is you can put all the money you want into a campaign and sometimes it's going to pick up legs and sometimes it's not. And then one day, somebody notices it. And that's where it— and that's where that pick begins. This is case in point. Whoa, that's a full rainbow. All the way. Double rainbow. Oh my God. It's a double rainbow all the way. Whoa, that's so intense. Double rainbow was uploaded a couple of years ago, January 8th, a couple of years ago, and no one even noticed it until Jimmy Kimmel tweeted it 6 months after this guy posted it, and then it went viral. Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Woo! So obviously that needs some explanation for those of you who have never seen it. It's just a guy who lives out in the forest, and he just loves this double rainbow. And it goes on for seemingly hours of him. He starts crying over it, and it's just a very funny video. But these things pick up very popular. You know the Numa Numa guy? Who is this poor fellow? Just really likes this song. So he videotapes himself singing to it. And he takes the video and he sends it to a couple of friends who put it on YouTube. And from there it went viral. Millions of people saw it and so on. Gary got booked on CNN, VH1, the Today Show. He even had a character at South Park after him. But you've got to— if you're going to do this, if you're going to do what a lot of companies do is they take an unofficial, right? They take someone who's had lots of success on the internet and then they bring them on board as a way— almost a spokesperson. Kind of like think about what happened with Subway and the Jared character. Real person, real story, and they hired him. They brought him on board and they made that character. You've got to do You've got to bring more to the game. You cannot just simply hire the talent and have them do the same thing. It simply doesn't work. Some company did this to this guy, and I'm going to show you this unfortunate fruit that it bore and see if you can spot the corporate reference. Now, this is the video "Follow" from Numa Numa. Do you see it? The gecko in the background? So why didn't this work? Because it's basically the same concept, right? The gecko brought nothing to the table. That doesn't mean you can't take something that was very popular and then move it into your own. It just means that you've got to amp it up. You've got to bring more to it. That is one way to really incentivize sharers, people who already like your brand. So let me show you an example of what you should do then, because this is obviously an example of what what you shouldn't, which is just take them and have them do exactly the same thing for your brand. Probably the first viral video that I was aware of was Chocolate Rain. This is a guy who was a Minneapolis college student, had incredibly, in fact peculiarly, odd deep voice. And he sings this song that he wrote called Chocolate Rain. It is a horrible song. It has no chorus. I'm going to let you hear just a bit of it. <LYRICS>Will die before the same chocolate ring. The school books say it can't be here again. Chocolate ring.</LYRICS> Yeah, you get the idea, right? So then the people who are— and that is his singing voice— then the people who work inside the Diet Pepper— excuse me, the Dr Pepper category hired him to promote a version of Chocolate Rain that he did for them. But here's where it's different. Is that they upped the game. They brought in hip-hop stars and so on. Of course, he got on South Park as well. So remember, just as a side note there, kind of like the contesting warning, if you're going to bring someone in who's already done a viral video, make sure that you bring more to the table. Otherwise, honestly, don't bother. OK, sorry for that extension off into some neurons over here. Back to Mentos. So this is what it looks like. 4 years. 4 years. 2 years after the original newscast appearance on that local TV talk show, these guys from a website called eepybird used this technique to recreate the pattern that the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas do every half an hour. It is apparently a stream for stream recreation. And from there, of course, it went viral. What's important here, though, what's instructive about this is, remember, this is something that neither Diet Coke nor Mentos was aware of when it started. This is something that fans really took it on. They were unofficial. How do you respond in something like that? Well, traditionally, in fact, when it comes to trademark law, you are legally obligated to go after people to retain your copyright and your trademark. There are some legal liabilities involved when people are doing that, but there's got to be a better way. Mentos' reaction can be summarized as, this. I'm paraphrasing. This is an actual quote. Mentos spends about $20 million a year on advertising. They figure that they generated more than $10 million just as a result of viral videos that they didn't even have to produce. Now, how many of you would like to place bets on Coca-Cola's reaction? This is a direct quote: "We would hope people want to drink Diet Coke more than try experiments with it." My favorite quote, same person: "The craziness of Mentos doesn't fit with our brand personality." This enterprising and broke college student in Tempe, Arizona decided that he was going to make furniture. He was broke, right? So he's going to make furniture out of FedEx boxes. So what does this say? First of all, imagine that this is, as it may be the first time you're seeing this, What does this say about FedEx boxes? They're strong! They're sturdy! You can put people— you can physically put people on them, and FedEx sent him a cease and desist. You will never be able to control your brand online. You can embrace positive. So lift up, embrace the unofficials, and things will get better. Eventually, I should say, in Coca-Cola's defense, they did eventually join this craze. They cut a deal with the two guys. As for that science teacher, he went on. Time magazine ranked him the 19th most interesting person that year. He's got awards. He has an empire. He goes to conferences doing things. He has a deal with a cruise ship company, a deal with Pop Rocks, a deal with a publisher, a deal with the History Channel, a deal with speakers' bureaus. You get the idea. My favorite is he takes this 80-cent plastic tube, repackages it for $10, and sells it as a geyser tube. And through all that, he's still He still does this. Finally, the sixth step, and that is around successive rounds. It's not good enough anymore to just do this once. Once something picks up, you've got to deliver. Think about the way that boxing matches are won, right? Boxing matches are not won by— well, they are once in a while, and then you're usually bothered if you bought tickets to it, where one guy's like, plow, like, well, it's all over. A boxing round really are won by round after round after round. You wear the opponent down. Now, similar in a way, in the way that viral videos is, the really compelling ones are the ones that have a follow, the ones that have some narrative or some at least flow to it so that it's not just a really good campaign. This is a more traditional advertising campaign. I know I've spent a lot of time talking about viral videos, but I want to show you one that works outside of video per se, a more traditional campaign that really understood this idea of successive rounds. There is a great product up in Canada called Shreddies. It's very similar to your Shredded Wheat, but like everything Canadian, just a little bit smaller and not as good quality. Shreddies is a great little, you know, very popular. And they had a problem. Not a problem. Just kind of the same as Doritos. Just wanted more market share. What can we do? Nothing to write home about. Some decent product sales, but they wanted to just push it a little bit further. And that is when an intern at their ad agency came up with this idea. Freddy's is supposed to be square. Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? New Diamond Shreddies cereal. Same 100% whole grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. Genius, am I right? Genius. Now, I have given this presentation a number of times. There's always some guy who doesn't get it. All right? I'm not saying it's you. Maybe the guy that's hungover 2 rows back from you. OK, but just so we're all clear on this joke, there are no Diamond Shreddies. They're just square ones that have been rotated in packaging. True to form, you could actually go to stores in Canada and buy a box of Diamond Shreddies. Anywhere. They actually followed this through right all the way to the end. This ad campaign on billboards was very popular for a while. Exciting print campaign. Again, this is the packaging. You could add— there were shreddies and diamond shreddies on the— you could pick which one you wanted to. The media started getting into it. And this is where it gets really good. Some of them started playing along, doing taste tests between the two versions, which I want to stress again were identical. So great first round. This would have been a great campaign if they'd have just left it alone. But because they delivered successive rounds, And because they kept doing it, it became better. Enter round number 2. This is web only. What you're about to hear are real emails that came into Nabisco's customer service department. Hello, Canada. I'm here to talk to you about Shreddies cereal, in particular the launch of Diamond Shreddies. Consumer satisfaction is important to us, so I'd like to address some of the comments made by consumers. Consumers. I'd like to know how much money your firm actually paid someone to produce a diamond shreddies. A square on its side? How stupid can you be? Thanks for your questions. We don't disclose our advertising budgets, but let me assure you, a square on its side is still merely a square. And next. Notice how the production values decline here. I can't believe you went and spent all that money on these stupid Diamond Shreddy ads. What a waste. I predict record low sales. Thanks for your prediction. Though this graph clearly shows the previously The flat growth rate of Shreddies cereal changed dramatically with the launch of Diamond Shreddies cereal. And finally, the— and even if they'd have stopped there, it would have been and had been a brilliant campaign, but they rolled these out very— you know, once they kind of got the win, they took it to the next level. They delivered another round. And so round 3 was for the people who couldn't decide between Shreddies and Diamond Shreddies, and again, this is a product you could go into the supermarket and buy yourself, they actually produced the combo pack. So delivering successive rounds. So just to recap, after reverse engineering 50 of the world's most successful viral campaigns, I found that almost all of them had 6 key elements. Those elements again were matching the audience with the content— that is sometimes known in business as the creative— with the call to action. Secondly, it's got to be a single concept, something very simple, no one-act, no multiple-act structures. Don't try to develop characters. The sentiment factor's got to be in there. By the 3 S's, I mean either silly, serious, or stunning are the ones that work really well. You must reward sharing. You have to incentivize people to share if you expect them to. Embrace the unofficials. Don't hate them. Don't send lawyers letters after them if you can help it. And finally, deliver successive rounds. I have a trademark called Assured ROI. And like all speakers, we try to come up with clever acronyms to make it all work out. And I tried to, but I couldn't find a seventh. It just says "ass red." And not really happy about it, but whatever. It works. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of your conference. I know we have time for questions. Tod, we just have time for 1 to 2 questions. Maddy, there's a question in the front. Hi, my name's Bruce Earhart. I'm with Handy Mart in Pittsburgh. And just curious, with a Facebook marketing campaign, how often should we mention our brand? Daily, weekly, biweekly? How often? Well, the real answer is as frequently as possible until you realize people start leaving your page because of doing it. That's the true answer. How you get there is a different matter, is trying to figure it out. We always tell our brands is the engagement That's part of the reason we called our company EngageQ, was because it's all about capturing the engagement. It doesn't matter to me how many Facebook fans that your store has or that your brand has. What matters is how frequently you're interacting with them. Facebook has an algorithm known as EdgeRank. EdgeRank is what determines what gets on the homepage, which is the newsfeed. This is the page, if you're familiar with Facebook, the main page that everyone wastes their time on. It's called the homepage or the homefeed sometimes. Facebook determines who gets on that through this system called EdgeRank. So it doesn't sometimes matter how many times. You could be posting 10 times a day. If people aren't interacting with your comment— content, Facebook realizes that and says, even though they're a fan of that store, we're just not gonna show them that store that frequently. Otherwise, it'd be a huge long list, kind of like Twitter. So the trick is less about likes and less about how many times you post and much more about how you engage people. So encourage them to, uh, to say things. So instead of just saying, you know, what's your favorite time of day? Or instead of just saying, we have breakfast when we open the doors at 4:30 in the morning, you can say, we have breakfast when we open the doors at 4:30. Tell us about your best early morning memory, or whatever. To be perfectly frank, the question doesn't really matter. The fact that you're engaging with people and they have some contact with your brand on Facebook tells Facebook's database, oh, these two have an affinity with each other, and your brand will show up more frequently. It's just about the newsfeed. That's all you should care care about. Sorry, that was a long answer to a very simple question. Tod, we have a question on your left. You got into depth about Facebook data capture. What about Twitter? Did you overlook that for a reason? I don't think Twitter has the same level of virality. And obviously, this is a topic around viral marketing. Facebook has incredible customer service. Potential. Think about just your— put off your hats as a moment of someone who is an owner of a business or a brand, and think about you as a consumer of a product. If you go to— let's say you fly somewhere and you go to Continental Airlines and, you know, they lose your bag or something happens. Pick any airline, it doesn't matter. 5 years ago, what you'd have done is gone to this big long web form that would have wanted every detail about you, and you filled it out, and whether or not you got a response, you don't know. Because you can't see what they're doing behind this email. You don't know if it actually went to a human being. Today, Twitter, smart brands are getting on there so that at least it's kind of out in the public channel and people can tell whether or not they're using that as a way of good customer service. So, now, does absolutely every convenience store in the world need a Twitter account? No, I don't think so. But I don't think it hurts. What will hurt you is having any presence in these channels and you don't use them. That's what hurts. Inactivity is worse than activity. Tod, we have your last question on the right. I'm the guy with the backpacks. Michael. You talk about all the videos and things like that. How about direct campaigns through YouTube? I mean, what is the value of that? I know in conjunction with Facebook, but more of a direct campaign with YouTube. Yeah, well, part of the challenge is to end up in a conversion that requires a— that requires a foot traffic visit. What you're trying to do is sell product, right? You're not trying to promote videos. So the gap is whatever the video does that can help move in that direction. Did it get dark in here? Was that just the coffee? Because suddenly it all went black, and I'm thinking, "Okay, you know when you've had enough." So you want to create something that will get people eventually over to the store, but you've got to create that interest first. So if it's just on a YouTube channel, if it's something that's a one-off, maybe two videos, Unless you find something in the psychology of sharing, those three elements, that motivates people to share, it's not— you know, you're not going to have a huge chunk of positive out of it. You could do something like Blendtec does, which is very successful, and they do regular. So it's always— you subscribe to their channel, and they're always feeding you content and information. So it depends on the kind of things that you do. Sometimes you just have a wacky character. You know, if there's an employee— if you're working with an actual independent store, store, and they happen to have an employee that would just be great on camera, that could be a one-hit wonder as well. So they exist out there, but they're fewer and far between for sure. All right, thank you very much, and have a great rest of the conference. Thank you.