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Rule One: Be True

Don't fake it. Keep it real. Show us real people having real reactions to real events. Focus on giving us the feeling that we are there, experiencing something true.

Blog Archives: Be True

by Fritz Grobe

A few days ago, I watched an online video that blew me away and I immediately wanted to share it with my friends. But I didn’t. How did it move so quickly from being a video I couldn’t wait to tell people about to being a video I didn’t share at all?

Here’s what happened.

On March 8, Justin Fox at Zen Garage, posted the following video with a short summary of the backstory:

Marina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again.

At her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show, where she shared a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing and this is what happened.

On March 12, according to a follow-up post by Justin Fox on Spamventdocument.com, in just four days, 5.7 million people had seen the Zen Garage post on Facebook and almost 46,000 people had shared the link. Zen Garage saw a record 300,000 visitors to their web site in one day. And the video now has over 1.5 million views on YouTube.

When I first watched the video after a couple of my friends shared it on Facebook, it jumped out to me as an amazing example of how strong, positive emotion is a trigger for sharing (one of the key principles of The Viral Video Manifesto). There may be a reluctance to share a video that makes you cry — after all, is it nice to make your friends cry, too? But the overall impact here is positive — the swirling emotions of this unexpected reunion of two profoundly connected people is, ultimately, uplifting. That emotion will get people sharing.

Looking at the four rules for viral video, the video scores well: it’s relatively simple and raw (Be True), it’s not overly long (Don’t Waste My Time), the key moment is a great payoff (Be Unforgettable), and pure, unfiltered humanity is the centerpiece of the video (Ultimately, It’s All About Humanity).

So this is a video that was ready to go viral, and Zen Garage gave it just the right set up to get people sharing. I will admit that I am one of the people who teared up watching it, and I was about to share the video with my friends.

But I didn’t.

As I looked further into the story behind the video, I found, for me, a problem.

While the emotion is real, the setup here is… incomplete.

Looking to learn more about Abramovic and Ulay, I found an interview with the curator of the 2010 exhibit.

Apparently, the last time Abramovic and Ulay had seen each other was not, as the Zen Garage story makes you think, decades before. It was, in fact, earlier that same day. When asked when the two artists had seen each other most recently, the curator replied:

Marina and Ulay have been in contact sporadically over the years. This past summer, they saw each other for the first time in several years on the occasion of an interview. They met and talked the morning of the opening.

While they didn’t know if Ulay would sit and face Abramovic as part of the performance at the opening, Ulay was a guest of honor there. This was not the complete surprise encounter I thought it was.

So, the way I see it, the story on Zen Garage isn’t true. Discovering that break with Rule One: Be True meant that I wasn’t about to share the video. The artists’ emotion is still beautiful. The moment they share is still powerful. But, after learning the true story, I went from being ready to share to feeling misled. Even though the video is still, in so many ways, amazing, I didn’t want to spread a deception.

The feel-good post on Zen Garage will continue to spread, and it may continue to spread faster than the word that it is misleading. Longterm, will that be good for Zen Garage? Will the surge in traffic be worth a certain level of mistrust?

Looking through the comments on Zen Garage, you can see how many people love this video. And for those who learn the truth, you can see a range of disappointment:

“Wow, that’s sooo not as cool then. I took this as the article suggested-that this was the first time they’d seen each other in decades. Darn.” – Rachel

“It’s a little annoying when folks misrepresent.” – Ruth

“well that’s a big lie.” – David

“I saw this post on Zen Garage and could not share.” – Visions of Arcadia

What was your reaction? Were you ready to share the video after watching it? And are you going to share it now? Where do you draw this line?

This is how fragile the truth can be. And this is how fragile the contagiousness of a video can be. One slight difference, even in how the video is presented, can stop someone from sharing a video. I saw, in myself, the switch get thrown from, “I have to tell my friends about this!” to “What video should I watch next?”

When you create and post your own videos, be aware of just how quickly and easily the contagiousness can be destroyed.

TNT Benelux (Belgium/Netherlands/Luxembourg) hit it big with A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square (43 million views), which was a featured case study in The Viral Video Manifesto  and our pick for the best branded viral video of 2012. Now, TNT Benelux is back with A Dramatic Surprise on an Ice-Cold Day, and unfortunately, it misses the mark in a few important ways. While it still has many things going for it, and it’s generated 6.8 million views, it fails to capture what was so special about its predecessor.

Here are the two videos:

The original
The sequel

An Ice-Cold Day makes many of the same mistakes T-Mobile made with The T-Mobile Welcome Back (13 million views). Although Welcome Back also had its strengths, it failed to score as high as their previous effort, The T-Mobile Dance (37 million views), because of over-production and subtle aggression toward passersby. For an in-depth case study of The T-Mobile Welcome Back, check out our book, The Viral Video Manifesto.

Now, let’s look at how An Ice-Cold Day compares to A Quiet Square on the four rules.

Rule One: Be True.

Like A Quiet Square, this video is classic Candid Camera. Both videos stage an elaborate scenario to, ideally, delight the people who wander into their traps. While both videos are a bit overproduced, A Quiet Square has fewer camera angles that feel more like hidden cameras, whereas An Ice-Cold Day has cameras that zoom around and make this feel more like a TV commercial. For viral video, simpler is better.

An Ice-Cold Day also has many video effects, like slow-motion and blurred circular frames (as if we’re looking through a gunsight), that, again, makes this more produced and less true. Key to the success of A Quiet Square was that it was TV drama stereotypes recreated in real life with a filming style that remained (mostly) true and unobtrusive. An Ice-Cold Day has TV drama stereotypes seen through a filter of…TV production stereotypes. This overproduction distances us from the action and makes it less involving and consequently less contagious.

Rule Two: Don’t Waste My Time.

No problems here. Like it’s predecessor, it has minimum set up, maximum payoff. It introduces the concept and gets right down to business.

Rule Three: Be Unforgettable.

Here, the video is directly competing with its predecessor. As with all sequels, the pressure is on to top what’s been done before. In general, An Ice-Cold Day is louder but not more satisfying. It has plenty of guns and explosions, but more interesting are the clever twists like the guy descending on wires from above and an Elvis impersonator showing up, guns blazing. Those kinds of surprises are what make both videos unforgettable, and it would have helped if this video had delivered a few more of them.

Rule Four: It’s All About Humanity.

This is where the video falls short in an interesting way. Candid Camera-style videos are at their best when showing us joyful human reactions. It’s active, positive emotions, after all, that are most contagious. But this video is consistently more aggressive and less fun for the participants than the previous video. There’s an important rule in theater: if you get a volunteer up on stage, always treat him or her well. The audience sees the volunteer as their representative. If you are mean to your volunteer, it doesn’t build positive emotion and trust with your audience.

An Ice-Cold Day isn’t so nice to its volunteers.

Sometimes subtle, sometimes not, this is a pervasive and critical failing of the video. It begins by literally putting the volunteers in the crosshairs of a gunsight. That’s representative of the attitude throughout.

The first thing that happens after they choose yellow or blue is someone getting shot right next to them. In A Quiet Square, gunfire doesn’t erupt until 1:09, when everyone is ready for something like that, and even then, it’s less graphic and farther away.

Next, the volunteer is dragged into a van and driven away at top speed. Some people may be okay with that, but it’s a violent thing to do to someone. We wouldn’t blame someone for reacting quite violently in response, and the mere possibility of that violence erodes the trust between the video creators and the audience.

Quite simply, if we are worried about people’s safety, if they look scared, or if we’re wondering why they aren’t freaking out, we’re not smiling. And to get us sharing, you want to get us smiling. This video will make some people smile, but it makes us subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) uncomfortable.

The original video, A Quiet Square, has almost none of these concerns. It is far more considerate to people who press the button, which makes it more fun for people watching and, consequently, more contagious.

So in the end, while A Dramatic Surprise on an Ice-Cold Day has some great moments, its production techniques are more flashy TV-style and less simple Internet-style. That creates an emotional distance. Plus the video consistently has a more aggressive attitude toward the people who push the button. All of this, unfortunately, makes it less contagious than the original, A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square.

With fewer camera angles, simpler production values, and a more considerate attitude focused on bringing out joyful reactions from the people who push the button, A Dramatic Surprise on an Ice-Cold Day could have been a much bigger success.

Buzzfeed just posted a great article about the video Golden Eagle Snatches Kid (42 million views). Here’s our take on how this video got away with breaking the first rule of viral video: Be True.

Golden Eagle Snatches Kid is an unusual viral video because it’s fake. As we say in The Viral Video Manifesto, “Being true is a key part of forging a positive emotional connection with your audience, and that emotional connection helps make your video contagious.” So trying to fake us out is a dangerous game to play — and one that doesn’t work very often.

Fake videos apparently showing Kobe Bryant jumping over a moving car and David Beckham kicking soccer balls into trash cans from impossibly far away only mustered 5.2 million views and 1.8 million views, respectively, despite their impressive star power. The stunts looked fake, were unmasked as fakes, and once you know a video is fake, you’re not likely to share it. No one wants to look stupid in front of their friends by sharing something that’s fake.

So with 42 million views, Golden Eagle Snatches Kid has done exceptionally well for a fake.

Viral video is the twenty-first-century sideshow, and the sideshow does have a long tradition of trickery. But online, you’re trying to fake out the collective intelligence of the Internet. Sometimes, that may not seem like much of an obstacle, but the chances are very good that you’ll be found out, and found out quickly.

And indeed, Golden Eagle Snatches Kid was unmasked soon after it was posted. Certainly, when we first saw it, we thought, “that can’t be real.” A quick search turned up a lot of discussion that it must be fake, and soon after, it was clear: it was fake. Now the video’s YouTube description acknowledges that.

So what helped this unusual video go viral? Looking at how it scores on the four rules for contagious content from The Viral Video Manifesto, we find it does well on a couple of them.

On the first rule, Be True, obviously it strikes out. Although the game itself of, “Is it real or is it fake?” is compelling and jumpstarts many videos like this where it can be hard to know the answer at first glance, that game only works for a little while. Again, once a fake is revealed as a fake, the chances of sharing it with your friends go way down. The video does, however, do a good job of making you wonder, “Could this be real?”

On Rule Two: Don’t Waste My Time, the video does very well. At 59 seconds, it’s tight and efficient. It gives us minimum setup and maximum payoff: a few seconds of the eagle flying so we see what it is, and then bam – it swoops in for the grab. Eagle flies in, eagle grabs kid, guy runs over, kid is okay, slow-motion replay. And done. This is nothing but the money shots.

This video’s biggest strong point is Rule Three: Be Unforgettable. The image of a giant eagle grabbing a kid off the ground is unforgettable and taps into primal fears. And even when you know it’s a fake, it’s not like any other video out there. Whether you think it’s real or know it’s fake, this video definitely provokes the reaction, “I’ve never seen that before!” That’s a huge strength for going viral.

The video does fairly well on Rule Four: Ultimately, It’s All About Humanity. Shot in true viral style, in what looks like one unedited shot on a handheld camera, they did a great job of showing what look like real reactions, from “Oh, shit!” to the baby crying. Although they’re acting, which is a viral video sin (see Rule One: Be True), the reactions are engaging.

In the end, this is a rare exception, a fake video that took off online. It is helped by not being an ad like the Beckham/Pepsi stunt, but instead was made by students. Even when you know it’s a fake, you have to give the students at Centre NAD in Montreal props for making something so memorable.

Despite the success of this video, it’s still a better bet not to try to fake out the Internet. Most viral videos spread because of active, positive emotions like laughter and amazement, and feeling tricked shuts that down.

What is different won’t necessarily catch on, but what will catch on is necessarily different.  And this is different.

The latest example of viral video as the 21st century sideshow is the Harlem Shake.  This meme has gone wild these last couple of weeks.  It began with a bizarre video from Dizasta Music (11 million views) but a second video from TheSunnyCoastSkate (12 million views) gave the craze shape:

Now tens of thousands of people have followed the same simple formula:

• With a single, fixed camera, shoot a 30-second video to the song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer.

• For the first fifteen seconds, one person dances, perhaps wearing a strange helmet or mask, surrounded by other, seemingly disinterested people.

• At the fifteen second mark, the music kicks up and chaos ensues with a cut to everyone wearing wild costumes and going crazy dancing.

As of Valentine’s Day, YouTube reported that there were about 40,000 Harlem Shake videos, with more being posted every day.  And altogether, they’ve been viewed over 175 million times.

They range from the Matt and Kim Edition
(7.7 million views):
To the UGA Men’s Swim and Dive Harlem Shake
(19.2 million views):
And even the Norwegian Army got involved (18 million views):

What makes this phenomenon so contagious?

First, it’s a simple, effective formula, so it’s easy for people to join in and make their own.  Second, it scores very well on all four of our rules for creating viral videos.  Let’s break that down.

Rule One: Be True.  High marks here.  Each of these videos is documenting a real event with a single, fixed camera and only one edit.  That’s sticking to simple, strong Internet production techniques that keep it true and make it contagious.

Rule Two: Don’t Waste My Time.  Yes, some may argue that the whole phenomenon is a waste of time.  But all these videos are quick and get right down to business.  The same dancing would wear thin if the videos were even a minute long, but at thirty seconds, they are great bite-sized videos that you (or your kids) can devour like candy.

Rule Three: Be Unforgettable.  Again, contagious content has to be different, and this phenomenon is exactly that.  It’s downright bizarre.

Rule Four: It’s All About Humanity.  Great marks here as well, and this rule is crucial to the success of the phenomenon.  Each video gives us a glimpse of who these people are.  It’s a chance to express yourself.  What’s your crazy costume?  What’s your silly dance?  This formula, like Where the Hell is Matt? 2008 (45 million views), gives a simple way to see how different people make the same idea their own and reveal something of themselves in the process.  The humanity revealed is what makes it fun to see the Grandma Edition (4.1 million views) or the Maker Studios Office Edition (16.8 million views).

Following Maker Studios lead, a few brands have made Harlem Shake videos, with companies like Buzzfeed (800,000 views) and College Humor (2.6 million views) making their own office editions.

Most interestingly, Pepsi has posted two Harlem Shake videos:*

The first is a computer-generated can dancing and lacks all the truth and humanity of the phenomenon. It tries to exploit a popular meme for a blatant commercial. That’s simply not contagious.

The second video, on the other hand, stays true to the formula.  It’s the Jeff Gordon Edition, and there’s blatant branding, but it’s much stronger.  It trusts the truth and just points the camera at people dancing.  One minor quibble: there are two puzzling video effects thrown in at 0:20 and 0:21 where the video shakes and flashes.  That is a strange departure from the simple, low-tech formula and they don’t gain anything by using the effects.  But overall, this second video does a good job of staying true and embracing the phenomenon.

How are these two videos doing?  As of this writing, the first, overly-branded, CG video has 136,822 views and the second video that sticks more to the true formula has 1.9 million views.  That makes sense: the second is much better for the Internet.  It’s much more contagious.

What’s next for the phenomenon?  The tricky thing with a craze like this is seeing how fast it wears out its welcome.  What was unforgettable a week ago can now be old news and annoying. But this craze may last a bit longer, so long as people keep coming up with fresh variations like these:

Puppy Edition, 1.7 million views
Dryer Edition, 1.9 million views**

*Since this blog entry was posted, Pepsi has removed their computer-generated Harlem Shake video from YouTube, most likely due to its low number of views. Sorry to those of you who won’t get to see it, but it’s removal underlines a crucial point about branding which we often make here on ViralVideoManifesto.com: when it comes to product shots in a viral video, don’t overdo it! If people think of your video as just another commercial, they won’t share it.

**Looks like the Dryer Edition, with several million views, ran into some copyright issues and was also taken down. Here is what seems to be the original posting:

An interesting note on the copyright issue: the viral video that we first posted was taken down due to a copyright claim by YouTuber RediLataj, who seems to have combined footage from YouTuber Photonvids with music by Baauer. The combination is brilliant, but where does the copyright claim actually lie?

One of the hot viral videos this month is Rahat Hossain’s Drive Thru Invisible Driver Prank.  Let’s take a look and see how it does on the four rules from The Viral Video Manifesto.

Rule One: Be True

Rahat does a really good job here.  His intro sets things up perfectly. He’s out in a real parking lot somewhere, not a set, not a studio – it’s REAL.  Excellent!

Next, he shows you exactly how the prank works. He’s got the fake seat right there and shows us everything. This complete transparency really draws us in. He’s going to prank people, but from the start, we can tell that he’s authentic and he’s being really honest with us.

Then there’s the fake seat – it’s not very good! It’s a cardboard box covered with cloth and it looks like… a cardboard box covered with cloth. But it’s good enough, and that’s all you need, and he knows it.

In fact, the lack of polish in the fake seat is great. It’s one of the many things that our brain takes in that tells us – accurately – that what we’re seeing is real.

For the rest of the video, Rahat just shows us what Alan Funt, the creator of Candid Camera (and the guy who essentially invented this kind of entertainment back in the 1940’s), called “people in the act of being themselves.”

It’s just clip after clip of real people have real reactions to real events. And if the reactions are good, that’s money. And here, they’re great. High marks for this video on Be True.

Rule Two: Don’t Waste My Time.

Again, really good. It’s nothing but set up and punch lines. The rule for sideshow is: give us just enough explanation in the beginning so we understand what’s going on and then get to it. Here, Rahat explains exactly what’s going to happen, then he gets down to business immediately.

A word about the cuts here from one drive-thru reaction to the next: every cut, every edit, makes your video less true. Each cut removes the viewer a little bit from what it was like to actually be there when it all happened.

But cuts like Rahat uses, and like those we sometimes use in our videos, save time. And that’s all they do.  And that’s good. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice a little bit on Rule 1: Be True (where the ideal shot is a single, unedited one), in order to make sure you don’t run afoul of Rule 2: Don’t Waste My Time. That’s what Rahat does here, and it works.

Rule Three: Be Unforgettable. 

car-seat-halloween-costumeThis is usually the toughest and the most important of the four rules. Now, we’ve seen magicians pretending to be invisible before, and in fact, we’ve even seen a version of this stunt before, in a photo that went viral a while ago.

But still, this video has a memorable hook – an invisible driver prank is not a stunt most people have seen before.  And, in particular, what the video has that the photo doesn’t is the amazing reactions of the people working at the drive-thrus. That’s what really elevates this to unforgettable.

For them, it’s an unforgettable moment, and we get to see it. One woman says, “Am I tripping?!” It’s priceless. One after another, we see other people experience unforgettable moments, and that’s compelling. That’s where Invisible Drive Thru hits it out of the park, which brings us right into Rule Four:

Rule Four: Ultimately, It’s All About Humanity.

After the brief set up so that we understand what we’re seeing, it’s all about those great reactions: fun, funny, likeable human reactions, one after the other, until we’re almost overwhelmed. Like the best Candid Camera videos, it’s full of active, positive emotion. That’s contagious.

So, Invisible Drive Thru does really well on all four rules. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s had over 30 million views in just a couple of weeks.