Contagious: Why Things Catch On (23 page)

What would help women realize that these ads were fake? That the images being shown didn’t reflect reality?

One night his girlfriend at the time was putting on makeup to go out when it hit him. He realized that girls needed to be exposed to the before
before
the after. What models look like before the makeup and hair styling and retouching and Photoshop swoop in to make them “perfect.”

So he created a short film.

Stephanie stares into the camera and nods her head to the crew that she is ready to begin. She is pretty, but not in a way that would make her stand out in a crowd. Her hair is dark blond, feathered, and relatively straight. Her skin is nice but a few blemishes mar it here and there. She looks as though she could be anyone—your neighbor, your friend, your daughter.

A bright light turns on, and the process begins. As we watch, makeup artists darken Stephanie’s eyes and highlight her lips with gloss. They apply foundation to her skin and blush to color her cheeks. They groom her eyebrows and lengthen her lashes. They curl and tease and style her hair.

Then the photographer appears with his camera. He takes dozens of photos. Fans are turned on so her hair appears naturally
tousled. Stephanie alternately smiles and stares provocatively at the camera. Finally, the photographer gets a shot he likes.

But getting the perfect snapshot is only the beginning. Next comes the Photoshopping. Stephanie’s image is fed into a computer, and begins to morph before our eyes. Her lips are inflated. Her neck is thinned and lengthened. Her eyes are enlarged. These are only a handful of the dozens of changes that are made.

You are now gazing at a snapshot of a supermodel. As the camera pans backward, you can see that the image has been placed on a billboard for a makeup campaign. The screen fades to black, and small words appear in white writing. “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”

Wow. This is a powerful clip. A great reminder of all that really goes on behind the scenes in the beauty industry.

But in addition to being a great conversation piece, it’s also a clever Trojan Horse for Dove products.

—————

The media in general, and the beauty industry in particular, tend to paint a skewed picture of women. Models are usually tall and skinny. Magazines show women with flawless complexions and perfect teeth. Ads scream that their products can transform you into a better you. Younger face, fuller lips, softer skin.

Not surprisingly, these messages have a hugely negative impact on how women see themselves. Only
2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful. More than two-thirds believe that the media has set an unrealistic standard of beauty that they’ll never be able to achieve. No matter how hard they try. This feeling of not living up to expectations even affects young girls. Dark-haired girls wish they were blond. Redheads hate their freckles.

Piper’s video, entitled “Evolution,” gives a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making the images we are bombarded with every day. It reminds people that these stunning-looking women are not real. They are fantasies, fictions only loosely based on actual people. Concocted using all the magic that digital editing can provide. The clip is as raw and shocking as it is thought provoking.

But the film wasn’t sponsored by concerned citizens or an industry watchdog group. Piper made the film in coordination with Dove, maker of health and beauty products, as part of its “Campaign for Real Beauty.” This was Dove’s effort to celebrate the natural physical variations we all have and then to inspire women to be confident and comfortable with themselves. Another ad for soap featured real women of all shapes and sizes, rather than the rail-thin models people are used to seeing.

Not surprisingly, the campaign sparked a great deal of discussion. What does it mean to be beautiful? How are the media shaping these perceptions? What can we do to make it better?

The campaign created more than just controversy. In addition to making the issue more Public, and giving people an excuse to talk about a topic that would have otherwise been private, the campaign also got them thinking, and talking, about Dove.

The company was commended for using real people in its campaigns and for getting people to talk about this complicated but important issue. And “Evolution,” which cost only a little over one hundred thousand dollars to make, got more than 16 million views. It netted the company hundreds of millions of dollars in exposure. The clip won numerous industry awards and more than tripled the website traffic the company received from Dove’s 2006 Super Bowl ad. Dove experienced
double-digit sales growth.

“Evolution” was widely shared because Dove latched onto something people already wanted to talk about: unrealistic beauty norms. It’s a highly emotional issue, but something so controversial that people might have been afraid to bring up otherwise. “Evolution” brought it out in the open. It let people air their grievances and think about solutions. And along the way the brand benefited. Dove got people talking by starting a conversation about beauty norms—but the brand was smuggled in as part of the discussion. By creating an emotional story, Dove created a vessel that carried its brand along for the ride.

And that brings us to the story of Ron Bensimhon.

MAKING VIRALITY VALUABLE

On August 16, 2004,
Canadian Ron Bensimhon carefully shed his warm-up pants and stepped to the edge of the three-meter springboard. He had attempted dives from this height many times before, but never during an event of this magnitude. It was the Athens Olympics. The world’s biggest stage for sport and the pinnacle of athletic competition. But Ron did not seem fazed. He shook off the jitters and raised his hands high above his head. As the crowd roared, he leapt off the end of the board and completed a full belly flop.

A belly flop? In the Olympics? Surely Ron must have been devastated. But as he emerged from the water he seemed calm, happy even. He swam around for a few moments, hamming it up for the audience and then slowly swam to the side of the pool, where he was met by a platoon of Olympic officials and security guards.

Ron had broken into the Olympics. He wasn’t actually on the Canadian swim team. In fact, he wasn’t an Olympic athlete
at all. He was the self-proclaimed most famous streaker in the world, and he had crashed the Olympics as
part of a publicity stunt.

—————

When Ron jumped off the springboard, he wasn’t naked, but he wasn’t wearing swim trunks either. He wore a blue tutu and white polka dot tights. And emblazoned across his chest was the name of an Internet casino,
GoldenPalace.com
.

This wasn’t the first Golden Palace publicity stunt (though the company did say that Ron’s stunt was done without its knowledge). In 2004 it bid $28,000 on eBay for a grilled cheese sandwich that some people believed displayed an image of the Virgin Mary. In 2005 it gave a woman $15,000 to change her name to
GoldenPalace.com
. But the stunt with the “fool in the pool,” as Bensimhon has been called, was one of the biggest. Millions of people were watching, and the story got picked up by news outlets around the world. It also got a huge amount of word-of-mouth chatter. Someone crashing the Olympics and diving into a pool in a tutu? What a story. Pretty remarkable.

But as the days ticked by, people didn’t talk about the casino. Sure, some people who saw Bensimhon’s jump went to the website to try to figure out what was going on. But most people who shared the story talked about the stunt, not the website. They talked about whether the interruption threw off the Chinese divers, who flubbed their final dive right after the trick and lost the gold medal. They talked about security at the Olympics and how someone could slip through so easily at such a major event. And they talked about Bensimhon’s trial and whether he would serve jail time.

What they didn’t talk about was
GoldenPalace.com
. Why?

—————

Marketing experts talk about “the fool in the pool” as one of the worst guerrilla marketing failures of all time. Usually they deride it for having disrupted the competition and ruining the moment for athletes who had trained all their lives. They also point out that it led to Bensimhon being arrested and fined. These are all good reasons to consider Bensimhon’s belly flop, well, a flop.

But I’d like to add another one to the list. The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.

Yes, people talked about the stunt, but they didn’t talk about the casino. Polka dot tights, tutus, and breaking into the Olympics to dive into a pool are all great story material. That’s why people talked about them. So if the goal was to get people to think more about security at the Olympics or get attention for a new style of tights, the stunt succeeded.

But it had nothing to do with casinos. Not even in the slightest.

So people talked about the remarkable story but left the casino out because it was irrelevant. They might have mentioned that Bensimhon was sponsored by someone but didn’t mention the casino either because it was so irrelevant that they forgot, or because it didn’t make the story any better. It’s like building a magnificent Trojan Horse but forgetting to put anything inside.

—————

When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters:
what people are talking about.

That’s the problem with creating content that is unrelated to
the product or idea it is meant to promote. There’s a big difference between people talking about content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content.

Evian’s famous “Roller Babies” video had the same problem. The clip shows what appear to be diaper-wearing babies doing tricks on roller skates. They jump over one another, hop over fences, and do synchronized moves, all to the beat of the song “Rapper’s Delight.” The babies’ bodies are clearly animated, but their faces look real, making the video remarkable to watch. The video got more than 50 million views, and
Guinness World Records
declared it the
most viewed online advertisement in history.

But while you might think that all this attention would benefit the brand, it didn’t. That same year Evian lost market share and
sales dropped almost 25 percent.

The problem? Roller-skating babies are cute, but they have nothing to do with Evian. So people shared the clip, but that didn’t benefit the brand.

—————

The key, then, is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but
valuable virality.

Take Barclay Prime’s hundred-dollar cheesesteak that we talked about at the beginning of the book. Compared with dancing babies and bottled water, an expensive, high-end cheesesteak and an expensive, high-end steak restaurant are clearly more related. And the item wasn’t just a stunt, it was an actual option on Barclay’s menu. Further, it directly spoke to the inferences the restaurant wanted consumers to make about its food: high quality but not stuffy, lavish but creative.

Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is
integral
to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.

One of my favorite examples of valuable virality comes from the Egyptian dairy company Panda, which makes a variety of different cheese products.

The commercials always start innocuously: workers talking about what to have for lunch, or a hospital nurse checking in on a patient.
In one spot a father is grocery shopping with his son. “Dad, why don’t we get some Panda cheese?” the son asks as they walk by the dairy aisle. “Enough!” the father replies. “We have enough stuff in the cart already.”

Then the panda appears. Or rather, a man in a panda suit. There’s simply no way to describe adequately the ludicrousness of this moment. Yes, a giant panda is suddenly standing in the middle of a grocery store. Or in a different commercial, an office. Or in another, a medical clinic.

In the grocery-store video, the father and son stare at the panda, obviously dumbfounded. As a Buddy Holly tune plays, the boy and his father look at the Panda cheese on the shelf, then back to the panda. And back and forth again. The father gulps.

Then, pandemonium ensues (excuse the pun).

The panda slowly walks toward the shopping cart, calmly places both hands on its sides, and flips it over.

Food flies all over the aisle—pasta, canned goods, and liquids everywhere. The stare-down continues as the father and the panda stand on opposite ends of the cart. A long pause ensues. Then the panda kicks the overturned food for good measure. “Never say no to Panda,” a voice intones as a panda hand flashes the product on the screen.

The commercial and others like it are impeccably timed and utterly hilarious. I’ve shown them to everyone from college kids
to financial service executives and everyone laughs until their sides hurt.

But note that what makes these videos so great is not just that they’re funny. The commercial would have been just as funny if the guy was dressed in a chicken suit or if the tagline was, “Never say no to Jim’s used cars.” Someone dressed in an animal suit kicking groceries is funny regardless of which animal it is or what product it’s for.

They’re successful—and great examples of valuable virality—because the brand is an integral part of the stories. Mentioning the panda is a natural part of the conversation. In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard not to mention the panda and still have the story make sense (much less get people to understand why it’s funny). So the best part of the story and the brand name are perfectly intertwined. That increases the chance not only that people telling the story will talk about Panda the brand, but also that they will remember what product the commercial is for, days or even weeks later. Panda is part and parcel of the story. It’s an essential part of the narrative.