The Holy Grail of Viral Video

I was recently told by an associate that finding the formula for a viral video hit is a kind of holy grail among mobile video producers. But he doubted it could be done.

I agreed with him. It would be like finding the formula for the world's funniest joke. If everybody had the formula, then one's joke would be just as funny as another's. There would be no funniest joke.

However people do go to movies expecting them to tell well-known stories, some of them entirely predictable, like a Jane Austen novel brought to the screen. Hollywood churns them out. Obviously being a successful entertainment conglomerate involves other strategies besides storytelling, such as creative distribution deals and marketing.

What are the formulas for viral videos?

It may be too soon to pronounce on that, but stories interesting to humans ranks high among them. What works on the big screen also works on the smallest screen. At the core is a finite set of he and she stories or heroic or anti-heroic adventures or mysteries. We all know these stories so well that we recognize them almost right away when they are portrayed in the briefest of formats: television commercials. Attractive female in cocktail dress knocks on good looking male neighbour's door. Can she borrow some coffee grounds?

You may recognize this as the Taster's Choice commercial that ran on television in North America and England between the late eighties and nineties. The series of commercials were enormously successful.

Commercials and viral videos share a common characteristic of brevity. They have to tell a story in 60 seconds or less. They have about three seconds to capture our interest before we rush away to the kitchen or the bus. Commercials try to live in those interstitial moments when we are forced to take a mental break from an engrossing game show, TV movie or reality show. Mobile viral videos try to find their niche in those moments when we are forced to wait, for the dentist or the next stop on the bus or train or when we are away from the LCD screen and simply bored.

The Taster's Choice commercial acquired its audience through the technique of serialization. It gradually unfolded the story of the neighbours in episodes, teasing the audience with the couple's flirtatious smiles and raised eyebrows. Holding the audience in perpetual suspense is a time-honoured story formula.

While serialization has been used a number of times in commercials, it remains a rarity because advertisers are reluctant to make long-time commitments to campaigns. If the first airing of the commercial flops, the subsequent episodes are canned. Indeed this is what happened with Taster's Choice. In the original storyline a group of five friends in their 40's gathered at a beach house where they failed at making a souffle. The commercial flopped and was quickly replaced by the he and she story. The he and she story written well rarely fails.

The impetus to produce serialized viral videos is the same as television serials, movie sequels or computer game franchises. Producing crowd pleasing content costs big bucks and cell phone content despite its brevity will some day have budgets as big as those for sixty second commercials. The reason? Finding a story and creating, modeling, rigging and animating a 3D character costs the same whether you are producing a half-hour show or a 30 second viral video. Even live action costs. Good videographers are a scarce resource, and good actors with box office appeal still demand big dollars to support their Hollywood lifestyles. So as audiences grow, and they certainly will as phones become portable entertainment devices, they will bring the same appetite for well written, well produced, well executed stories as television series and mega movies.

That's the reason why the mobile videos we are experimenting with right now are conceived as "pilots" for mobile series rather than one-shot videos. We're borrowing a premise used by major studios. One of our pilots will be more successful than the others and possibly lead to many more episodes, or even development as a television or print property. So the costs of producing ten pilots will be born by the most successful one. Or to put it another way, we are gambling that one success will recoup our losses on nine failures.

Recently MTV International helped legitimize the view that cell phone videos are a new and emerging medium by launching "its first animated series of made-for-mobile shorts, WULFFMORGENTHALER. A co-production between MTVNI and the "Danish Duo" Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler, the series of 20 short animations is inspired by the famous WULFFMORGENTHALER comic strips of the same name. The witty, compelling animations are the perfect "snack-size" for mobile users wanting more." (Press release July 9, 2006).

This was a refreshing announcement because so far the attempt has been to adapt television properties to the small screen. I believe innovation in this new medium will come from treating viral videos and their context (both social and technological) as unique. You will not discover how to create compelling content for mobile devices by trying to squeeze television or movie fare down into a 2 inch screen over a cranky and parsimonious network. The audience is in a very different place mentally as well as physically.

Another way to put this: Two people tell the same joke, word-for-word. One is funny, the other isn't. Obviously where and how a joke is told is important...it's context. Like the Seinfeld episode where Jerry tries to be unfunny...and fails. The mobile phone is just such a context. Some humour will not work in it, some humour will only work in its context.

This is the reason why I think that producing video content for cell phones that is played by the phone's video player is challenging and why Mobile Muse's support of our project as an innovative use of mobile technology is so much appreciated. The problem of creating compelling content for the phone involves knowledge of storytelling and knowledge of the medium itself. Innovation is the result of meeting these twin challenges.

So how is the small producer of mobile video going to find its audience? Or to put it around the other way, how is the audience going to find it? My guess is that the walled garden around most carrier mobile entertainment offerings will come down (as they have started to do in Europe) and people will access mobile content over the mobile Internet, downloading the latest episode of a viral video series after it is announced through text messaging.

So one of the techniques we are exploring right now is to build the viral video brand on the Internet by creating a web site for each of the series we have under development. The idea is that the first episode will be made freely available as a viral video with each subsequent episode made available on the website as a PayPal download.

We are also exploring the use of viral mobile movies as a sponsored ad. More on this development in future blogs.

Hollywood is nothing more than the business of making movies. The business of making short format content for the cell phone has yet to emerge. Pocketcine's current creative and publishing experiments are meant to help content creators get their head around the new medium creatively, technically, and as a business. Keep tuned. The first viral video published by Pocketcine is due in about a month...