The perils and potential of "going viral"

"Going viral" — Be careful what you wish for.

One year ago this month, Microsoft Advertising released a study exploring consumers’ shrinking attention spans. In it were details of how social media and mobile device addiction were re-shaping how our brains work — how we’re able to pay attention (or not) in the face of proliferating media and consumer technology. Brainsights ran a big portion of that research for Microsoft, measuring the brain activity of more than 100 adults as they performed a range of tasks and consumed a range of content across various screens. The press picked up on a specific point that you may have read or heard at some point since: “Human attention spans are now shorter than those of goldfish.”

The study went viral.

Time, the Daily Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, the Independent, the National Post, USA Today, and many others picked it up. It even made it into Chelsea Handler’s Netflix show “Chelsea Does” (the Silicon Valley episode).

It taught us a lot about the power of the media in creating an idea, and what it takes to ‘go viral’ (more on that later).

For us — a young company, this was incredible to experience. Until it wasn’t.

It was awesome to be involved with what we believed was a vital piece of research, and associated with such a recognizable brand name in Microsoft.

But two things about this story’s reach weren’t so great.

The first was that most people didn’t know Brainsights was even involved. Their reaction to learning that we were a huge part of that research was: Really? I didn’t know that. (In fairness, few of these same people linked Microsoft to the research either.)

This probably had much to do with the second unfortunate thing about the coverage: the headline. It lodged a notion in the collective psyche that was overly simplistic and perpetuated misconceptions. Plainly, it just wasn’t true.

Web media is incented to sell page views, and so produced a devilish headline it thought would drive clicks.

It did.

The trouble was, no one read the research. Not even the folks writing about it.
If they had, they’d have known that this headline doesn’t even come close to reflecting what’s inside. Inside are nuance, texture, and rich insight that advances human understanding and prepares businesses to better serve consumers.But the headline was everything. It framed the content, for better or for worse.

Virality is a double-edged sword — you may get reach and spark a conversation, but will you get the desired impact?

We’ve learned a lot since that research.

To start, it taught us about some ingredients for virality.

1. Take a concept that a lot of people can relate to. In our example: we all feel a diminished ability to pay attention or focus.

2. Couch it in a way that people can a) access instantly, b) want to believe (the goldfish comparison), and c) in a contrarian way to prevailing belief (technology is all good/technology is not all good).

3. Inject it with the force, authority, celebrity and reach of a brand with a stake in the argument — Microsoft — and let it loose.

The second thing it showed us was the power in communication of emotion over logic. It’s something we insist our clients consider, as it’s what drives decision-making. Indeed, the emotional and non-conscious power of communication is fundamentally what Brainsights evaluates.

But lessons are best learned when experienced, and this was as good a lesson as a research and technology firm like us could gain at our age. We experienced first hand the power of our underlying philosophy — an emotion-tapping headline that rapidly hardened a perception.

Finally, it taught us that virality is a double-edged sword.

You may get reach and spark a conversation, but will you get the desired impact? Will your message even get across?

Riskier still: there’s no guarantee that the message that does get across is the one you intended. This is what happened with the Microsoft Attention Span study: rich insights on the human condition were superseded by a headline that half of us desperately wanted to be true, and half of us desperately wanted to be false. The details inside were secondary.

The lessons we learned were reinforced once more in the intervening year.

By strange coincidence, one of the ads we used in the Microsoft study was Chipotle’s Back to the Start. With Willie Nelson covering Coldplay’s The Scientist, the spot told the story of Chipotle’s mission to return to simpler times of food production, away from the factory farms and mass processing found in today’s fast food industry.

Chipotle’s spots have chalked up millions of YouTube views — they’ve ‘gone viral’. But what about the spots actually connected with people?

By measuring peoples’ brain activity as they viewed the spot (and more than 2 hours of other content), we pinpointed the precise moments that resonated at a deep, non-conscious level. We knew exactly what would be lodged deep in the minds of consumers.

For Chipotle, it wasn’t the green pastures of free-roaming pigs. It wasn’t the happy farmers. It wasn’t the local farms and the organic produce and meat.

The single moment that towered over all others was when the transport trucks were pulling cubed meat out of factories and, critically, precisely when factory discharge poured into rivers (from 1:03 in the video).

Screenshot from Chipotle - “Back To The Start”

"Going viral" — Be careful what you wish for.

One year ago this month, Microsoft Advertising released a study exploring consumers’ shrinking attention spans. In it were details of how social media and mobile device addiction were re-shaping how our brains work — how we’re able to pay attention (or not) in the face of proliferating media and consumer technology. Brainsights ran a big portion of that research for Microsoft, measuring the brain activity of more than 100 adults as they performed a range of tasks and consumed a range of content across various screens. The press picked up on a specific point that you may have read or heard at some point since: “Human attention spans are now shorter than those of goldfish.”

The study went viral.

Time, the Daily Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, the Independent, the National Post, USA Today, and many others picked it up. It even made it into Chelsea Handler’s Netflix show “Chelsea Does” (the Silicon Valley episode).

It taught us a lot about the power of the media in creating an idea, and what it takes to ‘go viral’ (more on that later).

For us — a young company, this was incredible to experience. Until it wasn’t.

It was awesome to be involved with what we believed was a vital piece of research, and associated with such a recognizable brand name in Microsoft.

But two things about this story’s reach weren’t so great.

The first was that most people didn’t know Brainsights was even involved. Their reaction to learning that we were a huge part of that research was: Really? I didn’t know that. (In fairness, few of these same people linked Microsoft to the research either.)

This probably had much to do with the second unfortunate thing about the coverage: the headline. It lodged a notion in the collective psyche that was overly simplistic and perpetuated misconceptions. Plainly, it just wasn’t true.

Web media is incented to sell page views, and so produced a devilish headline it thought would drive clicks.

It did.

The trouble was, no one read the research. Not even the folks writing about it.
If they had, they’d have known that this headline doesn’t even come close to reflecting what’s inside. Inside are nuance, texture, and rich insight that advances human understanding and prepares businesses to better serve consumers.But the headline was everything. It framed the content, for better or for worse.

Virality is a double-edged sword — you may get reach and spark a conversation, but will you get the desired impact?

We’ve learned a lot since that research.

To start, it taught us about some ingredients for virality.

1. Take a concept that a lot of people can relate to. In our example: we all feel a diminished ability to pay attention or focus.

2. Couch it in a way that people can a) access instantly, b) want to believe (the goldfish comparison), and c) in a contrarian way to prevailing belief (technology is all good/technology is not all good).

3. Inject it with the force, authority, celebrity and reach of a brand with a stake in the argument — Microsoft — and let it loose.

The second thing it showed us was the power in communication of emotion over logic. It’s something we insist our clients consider, as it’s what drives decision-making. Indeed, the emotional and non-conscious power of communication is fundamentally what Brainsights evaluates.

But lessons are best learned when experienced, and this was as good a lesson as a research and technology firm like us could gain at our age. We experienced first hand the power of our underlying philosophy — an emotion-tapping headline that rapidly hardened a perception.

Finally, it taught us that virality is a double-edged sword.

You may get reach and spark a conversation, but will you get the desired impact? Will your message even get across?

Riskier still: there’s no guarantee that the message that does get across is the one you intended. This is what happened with the Microsoft Attention Span study: rich insights on the human condition were superseded by a headline that half of us desperately wanted to be true, and half of us desperately wanted to be false. The details inside were secondary.

The lessons we learned were reinforced once more in the intervening year.

By strange coincidence, one of the ads we used in the Microsoft study was Chipotle’s Back to the Start. With Willie Nelson covering Coldplay’s The Scientist, the spot told the story of Chipotle’s mission to return to simpler times of food production, away from the factory farms and mass processing found in today’s fast food industry.

Chipotle’s spots have chalked up millions of YouTube views — they’ve ‘gone viral’. But what about the spots actually connected with people?

By measuring peoples’ brain activity as they viewed the spot (and more than 2 hours of other content), we pinpointed the precise moments that resonated at a deep, non-conscious level. We knew exactly what would be lodged deep in the minds of consumers.

For Chipotle, it wasn’t the green pastures of free-roaming pigs. It wasn’t the happy farmers. It wasn’t the local farms and the organic produce and meat.

The single moment that towered over all others was when the transport trucks were pulling cubed meat out of factories and, critically, precisely when factory discharge poured into rivers (from 1:03 in the video).