Hey everybody, my name is Stephen. My name is Fritz and we are experts at doing stupid things. We’ve made videos with a quarter of a million sticky notes. We built a Coke and Mentos powered rocket car. We’ve spent hours finding ways to, strange ways to lace up your shoes and turn school supplies into puppets. We’ve made videos with companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, OfficeMax and Disney and repeatedly they’ve gone viral. So what’s that mean going viral? Well, going viral is about getting people sharing. It’s about getting people fired up enough so that they want to share your video with their friends. And that makes it different and that makes the techniques different from any form of moving picture ever made. It can have an astonishing impact. Our campaigns for Coca-Cola spiked sales of two liter bottles of Diet Coke in the US by five percent twice. And boosted Mentos sales in the US by 15 percent for three years straight. So that’s what can happen when you focus on sharing. So for 12 years our company, E.P. Bird Studios has been using our method to make videos that people want to share with their friends for global brands to help them move product. And then our friend Jody Struve with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Jody’s here somewhere today. I can’t see where she is. Came to us with a question. Can your methods be used by nonprofits? Can viral video be used to help spread messages for social good? Well, for the past year, over the past year we’ve made two test videos as part of a pilot project with the foundation to explore exactly that. And the results are really encouraging. So we made videos for Girl Trek in Washington, DC and for NASA in the National Association of School Nurses. And both these organizations have good followings on Facebook. But generally speaking, their messages weren’t going beyond a core fan base. So we wanted to see if these techniques could help them go beyond that. So Girl Trek’s goal is to get more black women out walking together in their communities. So we looked for fun ways to get people excited about lacing up their shoes and getting outside. So within 24 hours online, 19 dope ways to lace your shoes was Girl Trek’s number three video on Facebook. And the National Association of School Nurses’ goal was to let people see the cool and important and complex work that school nurses are doing these days in schools. So we recorded real audio of real school nurses talking about their work and real kids talking about school nurses. And we combined that with some audio with some fun puppets made from school supplies. So within 24 hours online, School Nurses are my superheroes was NASA’s number one video on Facebook. In eight days, each video had more views than each organization’s top 10 Facebook videos combined. And in the first month, NASA’s message reached about 69,000 people, which is the equivalent of six times their Facebook fan base. And Girl Trek’s message reached over a million people, the equivalent of over four times their Facebook fan base. So what we were excited to see was it not only were people watching, they were sharing these videos with their friends. So how does that work? How do you create contagious content, content that’s designed for people to share with their friends? How is it that you get people to share? And it can seem like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but it’s not magic. There are really clear, consistent patterns. Jonah Brugger and Catherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania have studied some of what makes people share content online. And one of the things they found is that we share things that get us fired up and make us feel good. So videos that make us feel sad, emotions that are passive and negative, are generally among the least contagious. Videos that make us feel passive and positive, emotions like contentment, are also not generally contagious. So content that makes us feel active, negative emotions, angry and afraid, that starts to be contagious. But the most contagious of all is content that stimulates active, positive emotions. So things that make us smile and things that amaze us. So to get people sharing, you want to get them engaged with strong, positive, active emotions. And our experiences in the trenches of viral video really bears this research out. To get people sharing, you want to create an emotional connection. So don’t just focus on your message. Focus on that connection. Get people smiling, get people laughing, get them going, wow, that can help carry your message to a lot more people. As we did the work that led to our book, the viral video manifesto, we found that to create contagious content, there are four core principles that are crucial to understand. First, be true. Don’t fake it. Just make it real. Second, don’t waste my time. Get down to business right away. Third, be unforgettable. Show us something that we have never seen before. And fourth, ultimately, it’s all about humanity. So let’s dig into these for a few minutes. Starting rule number one, be true. Show us real people having real reactions to real events. So what really happens when you send 250,000 super balls bouncing down the hills of San Francisco, as Sony Bravia did in their colorful bouncy balls video? What really happens when you surprise a bunch of drunk girls with puppies? As Buzzfeed did in their appropriately titled video, surprising drunk girls with puppies. Now there’s that active positive emotion. You see what you guys are feeling? That’s it. Yes, that’s it. This can be done candid camera style. So you can do it candid camera style as the ad council did for their amazing video, Love Has No Labels. Really beautiful stuff. Or it can be something that you’ve practiced over and over and finally managed to capture on video as we did in the Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos experiments. But notice whatever the technique, whatever the technique, these videos didn’t recreate anything. They just captured the real thing when it really happened. So a few years ago a video went up on YouTube with a description, a magical moment happens on Main Street USA when a young man proposes to his girlfriend at Disneyland, registered trademark, said that, resort. So this video has a lot going for it, but it was fake. There’s multiple camera angles. I think there’s a crane shot in there. Perfect sound, perfect lighting, and the perfect couple. This is a toothpaste commercial. But consider this, about the same time, on about the same subject another video went on YouTube that was true. You might even remember this one. This is called JK Wedding Entrance Dance. This was beautiful. My background is in the circus. So I’ve seen a lot of great handstands in my life. This is not one of them. But it’s beautiful. And these are not the best dancers, but they’re real. And we love them for that. Disney’s musical marriage proposal with all of Disney’s promotional muscle behind it got about 4 million views. It was great. But JK Wedding Entrance Dance with no promotional efforts whatsoever rocketed to over 70 million views. So trust the truth. Throw out your script. Just turn the camera on and capture something real. Our next rule is don’t waste my time. So a viral video can be 12 seconds long or it can be 12 minutes long. But either way our mantra always is nothing but the money shots. If you’ve got a baby monkey writing backwards on a pig, show us that right away. It’s easy to get bogged down in extraneous material. For example, this is a video we made called the Extreme Sticky Note Experience. Experiments rather. And we had over a quarter of a million sticky notes to show. But it starts with an office scene and then there’s a girl watching. She’s the one watching our video, our old video, our last video. And then the boss comes out. He’s kind of a jerk. And then finally he leaves. And then we see this guy who’s not really working. And then there’s these guys who are… This is an extreme waste of time. In that video it’s an agonizing 58 seconds before we get to the 250,000 sticky notes we have waiting in the wings. Now we eventually got to them and got to show some of the fun stuff. And the video did well. It got several million views and won some nice industry awards. But we always knew it could have been so much more. So what got in the way? Well, story got in the way. And it turns out that unlike almost all other forms of film and video, viral video is not about story. Advertisers, filmmakers, communicators, we’re used to thinking of everything as a story. Because indeed, as we’ve heard, these stories are incredibly powerful tools for grabbing and holding people’s attention. But surprisingly in viral video, story is a waste of time. Viral video is the 21st century sideshow. So it’s all about a quick setup and a big payoff. If you have a sword swallower, show her swallowing swords, don’t tell us her life story. Good things happen when you focus on setup and punch. Just about a year ago, someone posted a bootlegged, edited version of our sticky note video, someone from Azerbaijan, Doles, on their Facebook page. And what did they edit out? All that story. And this version got 6 million views in a month. And if you look at all the top videos on YouTube, they’re not telling stories. These are music videos and novelty songs and crazy dances and a kid biting his brother’s finger and a sneezing panda. There’s no story in there. So as important as stories that most other forms of communication and stories really sticky for this where you want something to be contagious, don’t be tempted by story. Just get to the unforgettable content that you’ve got. So like a sideshow act, every viral video has a hook. Something that provokes that reaction. I’ve never seen that before. And that brings us to rule number three, be unforgettable. Your goal is to create something that would have a great carnival Barker’s pitch. So step right up, step right up, watch a baby monkey riding backwards on a pig. We were not making that one up. See what happens when you put an iPhone in a blender. Watch Jean-Claude Van Damme do an epic split between two moving trucks and watch tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. None of these videos are telling stories, but every single one has a great unforgettable hook. What you want is something no one’s ever seen before. So how do you get that? Well our key strategy is to start with something different and then take it further than anyone else ever has. So a Coquimento’s Geyser, if you’ve ever done one, is pretty fun. But it was a hundred of them choreographed the music spinning in the air in the woods of Maine that became something so unforgettable that it went viral around the world. What you want to do is take whatever it is you’re exploring and keep at it until you own it. So OK Go owned dancing on treadmills in their classic Here It Goes Again. Cleary and Harding owned dancing with their hands in Winospeak, Americano. Each of these videos took something very simple and pushed it until it became something no one had ever seen before. As a result, got millions of people going, oh my god you’ve got to see this. So not every video has the budget for Jean-Claude Van Damme, but for instance for 19 dope ways to lace your shoes. What it took was a bunch of time sitting down and coming up with as many fun, crazy, weird cool ways to lace up your shoes as we possibly could. So people often come up to us and say, you know what my favorite moment in your videos is? So we’re thinking is it, all those geysers go all at once and they sort of spin in the air like that? Is it maybe 40,000 sticky notes falling like a giant paper waterfall from the sky? Is it maybe when Fritz goes shooting down the Oxford County Speedway on a Coke Zero powered rocket car? Nope. It’s none of those. Those are all really important. Those are our hooks. That’s our unforgettable content. But everyone’s favorite moment pretty much is all the same. It’s at the end and we just do this. And that’s our final rule in action. Ultimately it’s all about humanity. No matter what crazy stunt we’ve just done, we throw our arms up like that and we really are celebrating because my god it finally worked. Audience gets to share a little bit in our crazy accomplishment. And we’re convinced that including that authentic moment of celebration has been key to the success of our videos because neuroscientists have found that emotion all by itself is contagious. So when you see us having that really great moment, the true moment of celebration, you actually feel a little bit of what we feel. And that’s the emotional connection that you’re trying to create. So when you guys work on your stuff, in addition to your unforgettable content, make sure to include your moment of triumph or real human reactions. So at least one real emotional moment to relate to. From JK wedding entrance dance to Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a capsule from the edge of space. There’s those arms up. Wait for it, wait for it. There’s more celebration. From Chewbacca mom laughing uncontrollably to drunk girls getting surprised with puppies. And 19 dope ways to lace your shoes. All these videos show us images of real people and real emotion. And that raw humanity helps create the active positive emotion that makes us want to share that experience with our friends. So the bottom line is this viral video creating contagious content. It’s about connecting with people. And the ways to do that haven’t changed for thousands of years. Be honest with what you do. Don’t waste time. Go something we’ve never seen before. And let us see who you really are. So to help with all this, we put together the viral video toolkit for nonprofits. A step by step look at the entire process. And thanks to support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It’s available online as a free download starting today. And thanks. Thanks to the foundation for sure. We have some hard copies are down in the lounge. So feel free to pick it up. I think it’s about 80, 85 pages. It’s a very detailed step by step guide. And we’re doing a session tomorrow morning in this hip cinema downstairs for those of you who want to explore this more specifically with the projects that you’re working on. So the tools are in your hands. So go out and capture moments of simple unforgettable humanity. Now go out and start your own epidemics to change the world. Thank you so much. Thank you guys.