Viral Agency's Emotional Targeting
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A story about how Chris Quigley's ad agency achieved an incredibly high viral video success rate by working backwards from emotions.
"I learned this from a guy named Chris Quigley. He came to town in San Francisco from the UK and had an ad agency. His agency did one specific thing - they would make videos go viral. I asked him what's your hit rate, out of every 100 videos how many go viral? 1, 2, 3 videos?
He said 'No, if we do 10 videos, 8 or 9 will go viral.'
This was for two reasons. First, they had a large blog audience so they could guarantee the first 100,000 views - it would get seen, it wouldn't just get lost in the abyss of internet content.
But that doesn't make it go viral, that just makes sure it gets a chance. The second thing is we always work backwards from an emotion. He had categories like 'LOL', 'WTF', 'OMG', something cute, heartwarming - there were like 7 or 8 emotions you could tap into. They wouldn't write a script until they first picked the emotion they were going for - wow or wtf outrage. He even created a search engine tool internally where they could search by emotion and it would show them YouTube videos targeting that emotion. They would use it when they would brainstorm."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.