by Tim Staples
I’ll never forget the first time I saw and heard the 2012 video for the Red Bull Stratos Project:
“Medical systems green.” Pause. “There’s the release.”
Cautious applause scatters across the control room as a helium balloon is launched into space, carrying daredevil Felix Baumgartner.
“Successful rise . . . Felix current altitude 25,300 feet and climbing.”
“We are at 108,000 feet . . . there’s an issue with heat in the face plate . . . mission continuing . . . the decision has been made. Felix will jump.”
Felix opened the capsule door. On the large screen in the control room came his POV: Earth.
“. . . jumper away . . .”
Out he went into the stratosphere.
“. . . speed 650 mph . . . speed 725 . . . speed 729 . . . Felix at a stable descent . . .”
Then came what seemed like an eternity.
“Chute deployed . . . Felix is back to earth safely.”
Applause rang out as everyone in the control room watched the image of Felix safely back on the ground. Felix maneuvered himself to his knees and then bowed.
While Chuck Yeager was the first man to reach supersonic speed in an aircraft, Felix Baumgartner had just become the first man to reach supersonic speed—without an airplane. Falling to earth in nothing but a spacesuit, he hit a speed of 1,357 kilometers per hour (843.6 mph, or Mach 1.25) and broke the world free-fall record.
This type of awe was the stock-in-trade of early YouTube videos. In the first days of Shareability, we worked with a young filmmaker turned YouTuber by the name of devinsupertramp. He was the king of “Wow!” His videos would feature young people doing adventurous things that didn’t seem possible (or wise) and having a blast doing it. One of his earliest hits showed Devin and his friends (including Shareability cofounder Cameron Manwaring) building a giant rope swing under a massive rock arch in Utah. In beautiful cinematic style, the video showed Devin’s team attaching the rope and then proceeding to launch off the side of a cliff, naturally with views from the GoPro cameras on their bodies, for promotional impact. You can check it out at https://youtu.be/4B36Lr0Unp4. It has been ten years since the video launched, and it still elicits a “Wow!”
Using this type of awe can be very powerful, but the truth is, it’s no longer a guarantee for success. In the early days of online video, any time you made a video that made people say “Wow!” your share rate would go through the roof and you’d have a hit on your hands. With each passing year, as more and more content floods the internet and the competition for eyeballs gets more and more intense, it becomes more and more difficult to pull it off.
When devinsupertramp started jumping off cliffs with his friends in 2011, he was the only guy doing it (or at least doing it well). Today, there are hundreds of thousands of channels on all kinds of social media platforms, all fighting to break through and deliver the biggest and most impressive awe video of the week. There are large media companies specializing in scraping the internet for every piece of impressive cellphone footage showing people performing daring, crazy, jaw-dropping acts and licensing them in bulk. If you want to compete, just having a bunch of good-looking young people jump off a cliff doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, you need to really stand out in order to break through the noise.
So how do you do that? Well, for us, we moved away from the physical “shock and awe” and into the more emotionally impressive. Don’t get me wrong, we still blow stuff up or pull off amazing feats of physical engineering from time to time, but as the world has become more and more noisy and everyone is yelling for attention, we have become quieter. We have stopped throwing people out of helicopters and started tapping into a completely different level of “Wow.”
This approach, of course, swings to the opposite end of the spectrum. It doesn’t rely on being cinematic or physically impressive at all, but rather on showing that People Are Awesome through what they can do for others and the positive impact they can have. How many times have you seen videos where students do something awesome for their teacher? Or videos of people dedicating their lives to rescuing the coral reefs, living with an endangered species, or building musical instruments for underprivileged children? If this sounds like stuff that shows up in your social feeds, congratulations, you are just like other humans and you enjoy watching people doing wonderful, selfless acts to help others.
The insight to lean our client companies in new directions like this, to buck the common trends and to find a new niche to explore, comes from a combination of factors, chiefly our obsessive monitoring of the internet and the smart young people we employ. But you don’t need a staff or an office full of clever people in order to do this for yourself.
The insight that drove this new version of awe came from our lead creative, Joel Bergvall, when he was simply looking inside himself to see what moved him. Specifically, he was revisiting the Lord of the Rings trilogy with his wife and kids. You may be familiar with the moment at the climax of the third movie, when the entire fellowship stands at the gates of Mordor, with Frodo and Sam on the inside, fighting their way to the mountain to destroy the Ring. They know that they need to draw Sauron’s eye away from his own lands, but they are outnumbered and any action is a complete suicide mission. Aragorn turns to the rest of the crew and says, “For Frodo.” With that, they rush their unbeatable enemy with all their might, the tiny hobbits leading the pack, racing into certain death to give their friend even the smallest and most fleeting of chances.
It’s arguably the emotional peak of the entire series, and in watching it unfold, and recognizing his emotional response to it, Joel realized that “people doing selfless things for others” was the core element at play. We have since taken this individual insight, coupled it with our social intelligence, and boiled it down to a category that fits squarely into the emotion of awe, which we can now tap into in order to create highly shareable videos.
One example of how we have implemented this is the video we did for Adobe that I mentioned in Chapter 1. Adobe came to us and said, “We want to promote our Photoshop software to students.” We took this very limited brief and looked at the audience they were trying to reach to see what type of content they might like and what emotion we might be able to tap into. It was very clear to us that awe was high on the list and that our People Are Awesome subcategory would be a perfect fit. With that, we landed on the idea of a group of students using the power of Photoshop to restore photographs that had been damaged in the still very recent Hurricane Harvey. We developed a structure where we would get to meet the affected people, see the students work on their photos, and then have the climax be the students bringing back the restored photographs, now printed and framed, to the people who thought the photos were lost forever.
The resulting video was an absolute tearjerker, to the point that when we show it in meetings, we still try not to look at the screen. Even though we have seen it hundreds of times, it still puts a lump in our throats. This emotion translated into a huge success for Adobe, which is now a recurring client of ours.
3. Empathy
The third shareable emotion is empathy. Many people confuse empathy with sympathy, but they are not the same. When you are sympathetic, you feel for someone’s situation even though you haven’t met them and may not know how they feel. Sympathy can be broad and impersonal, but empathy is specific and deeply personal, making it much more powerful. It’s the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to truly understand their feelings about a subject, and to experience those feelings yourself. When you empathize, you are having a feeling similar to the other person’s, making an emotional connection, and you can have this without even being sympathetic to their specific plight or opinion.
Empathy can be a tricky emotion to convey genuinely, but when it’s done right, empathy is a powerful sharing tool because people want to connect with other people in meaningful ways.
Here’s an example. Heineken set out to break down stereoty
pes and to put empathy to the test in its 2017 “Worlds Apart” campaign. The company embarked on the campaign with the help of Dr. Chris Brauer, director of innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, who specializes in the study of human behavior. Heineken wanted to find out if people with an entrenched point of view could become more receptive to an opposing point of view by interacting with someone who held that perspective. In other words, could they become more empathetic? Brauer’s research showed that if people first found common ground, then they would be more empathetic to someone who held an opposing belief.*
Heineken then shot a 4-minute video that starts out by asking, “Can two strangers with opposing views prove that there’s more that unites than divides us?” In the video, they paired six strangers in groups of two. The pairs knew nothing about each other, but viewers were shown clips of them taking staunchly opposing points of view on a topic. A man who calls feminism “man hating” is paired with a feminist. A climate change denier goes so far as to say that people who do believe in climate change should go work on credible problems that actually exist. That individual is, of course, introduced to a climate change activist. A transgender woman meets a man who sees the issue of gender identity in total black and white.
First, each pair is introduced and asked to follow provided instructions on how to build a stool. Next, they build stools together, then are told to sit down on the stools and describe themselves, using five adjectives. As they expand on the adjectives, they get to know each other and begin to open up about personal details, like the sometimes troubling circumstances in which they grew up. In short, they begin to converse and to empathize with a new friend. The pairs are then given another task to complete together, such as building a bar. Bit by bit, their budding friendship begins to grow.
Of course, the kicker comes when they are shown video clips, which viewers have already seen, in which the new friend espouses a strong opinion that is diametrically and dramatically opposed to their own. As they digest what they have just seen, the pairs are then given a choice: they can either leave . . . or they can discuss their differences over a beer. They all choose to stay and are shown talking and beginning to empathize even more.
This video, done in partnership with a nonprofit organization called The Human Library, which challenges stereotypes through conversations, was a huge hit precisely because it put unbridled empathy on display.
This core of human emotion can be channeled in many ways, but it often boils down to a sense of belonging. A story that creates a desire for belonging in the audience will resonate in a way that invites others to also belong. In the case of the Heineken ad, it’s not so much about subscribing to a particular point of view or set of beliefs, but rather about having a sense of human belonging.
By putting our differences on display and showing the human ability to look past the strongest prejudice or difference of opinion, the video tells us that we all belong to the same world, that we all share a human experience, and that it’s important to embrace that.
This all goes back to the teenage wall: People share because it represents how they would like to be perceived. They want to show that they too are inclusive, that they can look past differences and have a real dialogue, even with those individuals who have fundamentally different beliefs or values. This is a positive reflection on humankind, and sharing this content reflects positively on the sharer.
4. Curiosity
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it sure as hell has created a ton of internet candy. It is also responsible for much of human evolution, so there is no way to overstate the importance of this emotion. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “curiosity” as “a desire to know or learn.” This naturally bleeds into every video we make by the nature of needing to capture people’s attention. The job of the first frame of every video is to make people curious about the next frame. The first 3 seconds pull you in for the first 7, which gets you to 15, 30, and so on. Sparking curiosity is a natural part of storytelling because if you cannot do that, no one will want to hear your tale.
Capitalizing on curiosity in video starts with the headline (which we will cover in Rule 5: Crush the Headline). This is what captures people’s attention and makes them curious enough to lean in, click play, and take a look.
Next is understanding that much of our social media is “feed based,” meaning the video starts playing the moment you scroll to it. This is important: The first few seconds of the video had better spark some instant curiosity in your audience, or they will move on before they even notice you were there.
The same is true for your poster frame. That’s the still image that displays if you happen to be connecting from your phone but without Wi-Fi connection, and if your settings are tuned to “not autoplay videos” when you are using cellular data. That may seem like a level of specificity too technical, but it’s the kind of vital consideration that can make or break a video. This was always true on YouTube, where the thumbnail was key, and while it’s less important for feed-based platforms, it still remains a huge consideration.
So what about curiosity itself makes for good video content? Well, one big answer that may surprise you is education. Remember that curiosity is a strong desire to know or to learn something. And you thought education was boring!
As an example, let’s take a deeper look at a video we did with the spoken-word artist, poet, and filmmaker known as Prince Ea. He was the ambassador for an education program sponsored by the Finnish energy company Neste. Together we created what conventional wisdom dubbed an impossible video. It was a 6-minute PSA that took place in a single location and consisted of one person speaking on the current state of our educational system. Sounds riveting, right?
Well, 350 million views and 9 million shares later, the video titled “The People vs. the School System” is now the most shared PSA of all time, so clearly something was working. What was it? You guessed it: curiosity.
The video starts with a close-up of a goldfish and a quote from Albert Einstein (the attribution may be questionable, but that’s not the point). It then reveals the setting: a courtroom where Prince Ea is putting school on trial in front of a gallery of parents and a jury of kids. As Prince Ea speaks, he weaves a masterful tale of learning, and with every new line he delivers an unexpected and interesting point of view that makes you think. From the opening line on, every word he utters makes you lean in, curious as to what he might say next and what the overall conclusion might be. Through the subtle reveal of interesting details, and by gradually introducing all the players and including props and graphics, the piece builds to a powerful crescendo and a standing ovation.
The reason people watch the video is curiosity. They are initially curious about the goldfish, the words, the setting, the people . . . then they become even more curious about the points being made and what might come next. The fact that the dialogue is also informative causes you to lean in with more curiosity. Your brain is firing dopamine at you because the video makes you feel smart. It educates you, but it does so in a way that makes you feel like you are discovering key information, and that makes the human mind very excited.
You then go on to share the video because not only does it make you look smart, but it will also spark that same feeling of curiosity in others—and that means you are sharing something of real value, which also makes you feel good about yourself.
Not bad for a PSA about the state of education.
5. Surprise
Based on our track record, you could argue that surprise should be our number-one emotion, or at least the most obvious one.
In the digital world, there is nothing more powerful than a human reaction, and no reaction is more powerful than surprise.
It can come in the form of a revelation, a new understanding, from unexpected joy or a simple scare. The best videos combine more than one type of surprise for maximum impact.
Let’s take a look at the campaign that Shareability did for Cricket Wireless, “U
nexpected John Cena IRL (In Real Life),” as an example. This idea came through our brain trust and was based on the “Unexpected John Cena” meme made popular by the now defunct short-form video-hosting service Vine. The meme consisted of a video clip, followed by John Cena’s famous WWE entrance, complete with music.
The initial clip could be anything you could think of, ranging from old movies to cartoons and YouTube clips. These clips all had one thing in common: they all led to some form of introductory phrase or action. This ranged from Batman saying “I’m . . .” to an airline safety ad saying “the panels above you will open, revealing . . .” or simply a toddler fisherman being surprised by his catch clapping him in the face with its fin. These clips were then immediately followed by an abrupt cut to a WWE announcer screaming “John Cena!!,” coupled with John’s introductory music and visuals.
In other words, surprise was a key element of this meme. It was called “Unexpected John Cena” after all, the joke being that he would always seem to pop up and appear in the most unlikely places, such as at the tail end of any odd video clip you could imagine.
When Cricket came to us and said that we had four hours with John Cena to film the entire campaign, the meme had gone mainstream. We didn’t have the faintest idea what the video could be about yet. We did know, however, that if we could tap into that same element of surprise that fueled the meme itself, then we would have something shareable. And if we could somehow stage that surprise with real people in the real world, then we would be sure to have a hit.