by Tim Staples
Yet, ironically, it seems that for many agencies and traditional content creators, the headline of a video is nothing more than an afterthought. In my opinion, they could learn a thing or two from newspapers. In short, I’m here to tell you that if your headline is an afterthought, then your video will be an afterthought as well.
In a world where people are bombarded on a daily basis by thousands of channels and millions of messages, only the most pointed messages break through. To be noticed at all, you need to command attention. Sure, you need to be unique and memorable, but most important, your message must be easy to understand. If it takes more than one sentence or phrase to grab people’s attention, they will have already moved on.
When you’re scrolling through social media, your initial attention span is a matter of milliseconds. That’s why videos work so well in general, because they move as you swipe past them. The movement itself causes your brain to focus. It’s a simple animal instinct. We are genetically predisposed to notice movement, because anything that moves can be a threat, or food. Our brains gravitate toward the moving object or image, lingering longer than they would for anything that is static; as a creator, that buys you a few precious moments when people will pay attention and watch.
Now, to get someone to actually stop and watch a video beyond those first few seconds, two things need to happen simultaneously—the concept needs to grab their attention AND they need to understand it immediately.
If it doesn’t grab their attention, they will simply be on to the next post.
If they don’t immediately understand what it is, they will give up and move on.
Through this lens, the best idea in the world is completely worthless without the right packaging, and again, the headline is the key to packaging content on social platforms.
In this context, the concept of a headline is twofold: Philosophical and Tactical. In this chapter, we’ll cover both concepts, starting with the four-step process of how Shareability thinks about headlines. The first two are more philosophical, the second two more tactical. Master them all, and you too can crush your headlines.
1. Nail the “Get It” Factor
I’m going to talk about the “Get It” Factor first, because I think this mindset is the most important. This is the “understand it immediately” part that I mentioned above. For a video to be successful on social media, the viewer must “get it” in the first few seconds. The video must state its purpose immediately.
If you start on a slow fade into a lovely landscape and some elegant imagery of trees with a flaring orange sun setting in the background, I have no idea what I’m watching. It could be a documentary about Cardiff or a Honda commercial. Because the first few seconds don’t tell me what I’m watching, it is very unlikely that I’m going to stick around to find out. I have better things to do, like checking out the cute otter in the next video—which is juggling rocks! Look at that guy go . . .
And just like that, your video is gone. I may have stuck around for 3.1 seconds, just long enough to count as a view on Facebook, but that’s not going to help you in the long run. You didn’t hook me, and I still have no idea what your video was about. I didn’t get it, so I won’t be liking or sharing your video.
This is why the “Get It” Factor is so important. It’s a combination of the actual headline, the thumbnail (if I’m not set to autoplay), and the first few seconds of the video, all working in full concert to tell a crystal-clear story. With the din of constant noise coming from all corners of the internet, the reality is that people aren’t going to watch something that doesn’t strike a chord with them in a matter of seconds. And if they don’t get it, they won’t care.
When one of our creatives pitches an idea to the team, my first question is always the same: “What’s the headline?” This is not a literal question. I’m not asking them to outline the actual copy that will be placed next to the video when it is launched. I’m asking: “What is the core shareable concept of the video?” I’m asking them to sum up that concept in one short sentence, just like a headline. If it takes three sentences to explain the idea, I shake my head and tell them to go back to the drawing board, because they don’t have a shareable idea.
This simple insight has had as great an impact on our success as any other.
A clear example of this that we touched on earlier was when we were looking for a shareable concept to help promote the Olympic Channel. The Olympic Games are on everyone’s mind for a few short weeks every other year, when the Winter and Summer Games are in full swing. But between the games, the public is focusing on other things, and only the real hard-core Olympic junkies are following the ins and outs of the various sports and the athletes’ progress. The Olympic Channel is built to bridge that gap as the home for all things Olympic in between the games and to remind people of the wonderful memories of those games, which live forever.
As we started exploring different themes and concepts for the Olympic Games, we had a number of worthy and compelling ideas. There was a concept for a spoken-word piece centered on the athletes’ grueling training regimens. There was a humor piece about superstar athletes who were not good at everyday things like cooking or yard work. And we also had an idea for a global anthem being performed by big-name musicians.
But in the end, there was one simple idea that everyone jumped on because it was by far the simplest and most impactful of all: Baby Olympics.*
Here’s the one-line pitch: “What if babies competed in the Olympic Games?”
Now that’s a great headline! The concept was easy to grasp and visualize. Plus it came with a baked-in “Get It” Factor. There was no way you would ever scroll past this and not get it. This is why the headline tested so high in our internal vetting and why we were so confident it would be imminently shareable.
Of course, it took a few rounds to convince the Olympic Channel that this was the idea they should endorse. It was certainly uncharted territory for them, as they tended to focus on the games as a celebration of human athletic excellence. Now, hundreds of millions of views later, it has become one of the most successful promotions they’ve ever done—all because of the inherent “Get It” Factor of the headline.
When you can combine that “Get It” Factor with one of the shareable emotions—happiness, awe, empathy, curiosity, or surprise—all sorts of interesting things happen. It’s traditional wisdom that when you see a video online, watch the full video, and enjoy it enough, you will feel compelled to share it with your friends. Our linear way of thinking would have all of these things happen in that order, but in the real world, this is not the progression. We have found a fascinating phenomenon in our research that most people aren’t aware of: As soon as the “Get It” Factor hits a shareable emotion, people will immediately share the video, even if they are only 15 or 30 seconds in. People don’t even wait for, or even need to watch, the rest of the video before they share. They blast it to all their friends and followers right there and then, meaning that a substantial percentage of people share videos before they’ve even watched them. If that’s not the most compelling reason to nail the “Get It” Factor, I don’t know what is.
2. Think Like a Journalist
When we first started Shareability in 2014 (when it was still called Contagious), we specialized in brand videos going viral on YouTube. At the time, there was far less content and noise on the platform than there is today, but even so, the odds of reaching a large audience and “going viral” were very heavily stacked against you. What we learned early on is that there was no quicker way to rise up the YouTube algorithm than to receive coverage of your video in prominent digital news outlets and blogs. Journalists would write articles about newsworthy (meaning shareable) videos, and these articles would in turn drive tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers to your video in rapid fashion. The more articles written about you, the faster your video rose.
This was basically the ultimate hack to rocket up the video charts, in some cases all the way
to the front page of YouTube. And we became really proficient at it. If you look at our early hits, you’ll see that they have large numbers of digital articles. Our video featuring “The Apparently Kid” for Freshpet generated dozens of articles. “The Dangers of Selfie Stick Abuse” for Pepsi and Pizza Hut had hundreds. And when we distributed the “Kobe vs. Messi” ad (created by Crispin Porter) in 2014 for Turkish Airlines, we secured over 2,000 articles.
The reason that we were so successful at having our videos covered is that we learned to think like journalists. This took two distinct forms: First, we considered videos that were either topical or of the moment in some way. (I’ll go into much more depth on this thought process in the next chapter.) Second, and every bit as important, we considered the idea of the headline from a journalistic point of view. I’m not trying to imply that we ever engaged in actual journalism; rather, we took the time to try to understand how the journalists writing about our campaigns might think. We actively put ourselves into the shoes of the people writing these articles and asked the key question from their perspective: “What do I want out of this?”
Remember, everyone is selfish. They are focused on what benefits them, not you.
So what does a journalist for an outlet like Mashable or the Huffington Post want? It’s pretty simple. They want an article that is going to be clicked on as many times as possible and widely read, which helps raise their own profile (and earning potential) as a writer and in turn attracts more readers to Mashable and the Huff Po, which ultimately sells more advertising.
If we can deliver a story that becomes an article that is attention grabbing and something that the people surfing the internet would want to read about, then the journalist is far more likely to write an article about our video. We are providing value, and they are receiving value in return. But journalists see hundreds or even thousands of potential stories every day, so why are they going to pick yours? Because you’ve done the hard work for them by delivering a shareable story on a silver platter that they can run with right away.
Let me give you an example. In 2014, we were approached by Sony Studios to help promote their upcoming film Spider-Man 2. This was one of the most successful movie franchises of all time, but the Spider-Man brand had started losing resonance with a younger audience. We were brought in to make the brand more relevant, particularly through our YouTube expertise.
It was a dream assignment for us to work on one of the biggest movies of the year, but it also presented a unique challenge. The Spider-Man brand is extremely well known throughout the world, and the studio was going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to market the film globally. Our YouTube campaign was nothing more than a rounding error in the budget of this tsunami of global promotion. Because of this massive marketing push, the film was destined to be a force at the box office, meaning it was already going to be covered in essentially every entertainment outlet in the world, from every angle. How could our little campaign break through all that noise and actually make a difference?
We knew that we needed to craft a narrative that would be written up in the right places to catch the eye of the internet, a truly new and fresh angle that people who are tired of standard movie marketing would gravitate toward, something that felt of the moment, of the internet. In order to execute that, we needed a journalist-friendly headline around a pop-culture conversation driven by young people on social media.
Tall order.
At the time, parkour was all the rage online. Parkour is the art of moving rapidly through an area, negotiating obstacles by running, jumping, and climbing, often using urban elements such as walls, railings, and rooftops to help create a sense of fluid movement. It’s a mix of gymnastics, acrobatics, and street art, named after the French parcours, meaning “route” or “course.” Parkour videos were blowing up on YouTube, with daredevils running, jumping, and flipping their way off of buildings, cars, and anything else as they flew through city streets.
Parkour also had a very loyal following of young people, and a few athletes were emerging as full-blown YouTube stars. One of those athletes was Ronnie Shalvis, a young guy from Salt Lake City, Utah, whose parkour videos were landing millions of views. Our team came up with the idea of partnering with Shalvis and putting him in the Spider-Man suit to create an epic parkour video.*
In the beginning of the video, Spider-Man is chasing down a criminal when he suddenly loses the ability to shoot webs and therefore crashes to the ground. Does he give up? No! Instead of riding his webs, he uses the latest parkour techniques in a way that only Ronnie Shalvis could, all captured in a cinematic style that managed to feel authentic yet somewhat homespun. The video was filmed in a way that was consistent with the popular parkour films of the time, with limited narrative and a heavy focus on the various tricks and flips that Shalvis performed. Young viewers love this attention to detail and watch these films so that they can learn and replicate the parkour techniques. It ended, in keeping with the character, with the police arriving to find that the bad guy had already been apprehended and Spider-Man was off to his next mission of justice.
All of this made for a compelling video around a hot topic for young people, but the key element was in the headlines that the journalists would write. As we were honing the concept, the team crafted a fun headline: “It’s not Peter Parker, it’s Peter Parkour.” This was old-school wordplay with a modern twist that would have every journalist salivating, in effect doing half their work for them. It also happens to be the type of headline the internet would love—and it did. The video roared to the front page of YouTube, amassing over 15 million views on the main post and tens of millions more through rips and re-uploads across the web. It also drove hundreds of articles around the world, including our primary target, Mashable, where veteran journalist T. L. Stanley wrote “Can’t Wait for ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’? Check Out Peter Parkour.”
The story was simple, and Stanley’s article spells it out well: “What if Spider-Man runs out of the silky strong web that spits from his wrists? How will the high-flying superhero impress his girlfriend, thwart bad guys and save New York City? With his own two feet, obviously. He’s Peter Parker, after all. Or, rather, make that Peter Parkour.”
We couldn’t have written it better ourselves.
Another example is a video we did for Happy Socks, a Swedish company that makes colorful socks. We celebrated their out-of-the-box thinking by creating an out-of-the-box idea with a catchy headline title: “Snowboarding In The Clouds.”
What an amazing headline!
This idea came from Shareability’s founding partner Cameron Manwaring, who had been involved with a lot of the early devinsupertramp videos. The basic concept is exactly how it sounds: we were going to tow a snowboarder on a 200-foot line behind a helicopter and have him effortlessly glide on top of the clouds. Four years later, it still is one of the coolest and most ambitious ideas that we’ve ever dared to execute. We were extremely bullish on the concept, as the powerful simplicity and visual appeal of the headline made it a sure thing to break through the noise and soar up the YouTube charts. We even partnered with a millionaire daredevil by the name of Adrian “Wildman” Cenni to perform the stunt and also help bankroll the steep cost of making the video happen. Everything was in place.
Until we actually tried to execute the video.
This concept had never been attempted before, and we quickly found out why. It was difficult and expensive to the point of being nearly impossible. We had visualized the rider gliding effortlessly and cutting through soft, fluffy clouds like a knife through butter, but once we had Wildman in the air, we realized the sobering truth: We were filming a guy dangling helplessly from a rope, not a snowboarder gliding across the friendly skies.
The sheer physics made this idea a nightmare. The grace of snowboarding comes from the push and pull of gravity, the boarder’s body fighting the curve of the slope, the energy expelled through the legs, the powder flying—but up in the air, th
ere is none of that. Because clouds are just water vapor, there is no “push” and the only gravity at work is the “pull” on the rider on his harness, dangling at the end of the line like a dead weight.
Further complicating things, the dynamics of the helicopter and the force of the wind at high speed flung Wildman around like a rag doll, and the cold, harsh air made it nearly impossible for him to even pretend that he was gliding with any grace. Adding to that, the clouds up close don’t look anything like powdered snow because we were too close to actually see the shape of them, and by the time we were in position, everything was just a mushy soup. It took us several months and a host of contraptions to align the rope in the right way and build a harness that Wildman could use to create snowboard-like movements. Even then, it was a far cry from what we envisioned and, in the end, the final video was a creative disappointment for all of us.
Sure, we had some cool helicopter shots and a great soundtrack, but the overall aesthetic and “wow factor” fell far short of what we had dreamed up. At this point, we were well out of money and, frankly, out of ideas for how to make it better. We resigned ourselves to failure, preparing for the video to launch with a wet thud.
But then something happened.
The day the video dropped, several journalists reached out to us, asking questions about the video. Later that same day, a Gizmodo article popped up, with an enticing headline: “Snowboarding in the clouds is so much cooler than regular snowboarding.”
Then the avalanche started. A Dailymotion piece titled “He’s snowboarding in the clouds!” was followed by a Bleacher Report article that said, “Adrian Wildman Cenni Snowboards Through the Clouds Attached to a Helicopter.” The articles just kept on coming, and the topic gained more and more steam on the internet—which led to the biggest surprise the next morning, when I got a call from a friend.