Jedi Kittens Strike Back

If Wharton is trying to figure out what makes ads go viral…shouldn’t you?

It was an eye opener to learn that business professors and statisticians, at one of the most prestigious business schools in the United States, are trying to distill a formula that guarantees online viral success. Although I have a fundamental problem with trying to define creativity in quantitative terms, the fact that they are even attempting this signals that achieving “viral” status has moved beyond the boardroom table and into the classroom. As educators begin to incorporate this challenge into curricula, “bottling” creativity as a series of basic principles to be instilled in the next generation of marketers is well underway. I won’t get into the tedious details of their research methodology, the controls, the scoring, etc., but for what it’s worth, their findings suggest that there are 4 common denominators that characterize successful viral videos. They must be: creative, surprising, emotional, and of course cute. In the end, are the results really that surprising? In fact, the first 3 characteristics could describe probably all of the great advertising campaigns of the last 25 years. So for a creative person, there isn’t much here that is new. Cute, on the other hand, is another story…Cue the cat video.

Tomorrow: How traditional television networks are leveraging social media

peter g