K atie c ouric

Sharing Leads to Sales and Direct Actions
The irony is that the less you try to sell the more you will sell. When you
focus on creating 
value
for people instead of gaining customers, it drives
sales and direct actions. Erick Brownstein of Shareability agrees that
creating content that’s share-worthy is essential. Shareability’s team are
masters at generating shareable content. Their top twenty videos of 2017
generated 10.5 million shares compared to the top 200 campaigns on
AdAge’s viral video leaderboards, which only generated 6.4 million shares
on Facebook and YouTube in aggregate! And AdAge includes the best
videos from Apple, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Budweiser, and more than
a hundred other brands. Overall, Shareability has generated more than 3.5
billion views and forty million shares for the world’s largest brands.
Brownstein’s team uses the Ayzenberg’s earned media value index
1
to
calculate earned media, which means putting a dollar value to likes,
comments, shares, and organic views. Brownstein disclosed that according
to the Ayzenberg’s Q3 2017 earned media value index, the Cricket Wireless
campaign, “John Cena Loves the Internet,” drove $122 million in earned
media value. And the 2017 music video “New Rules” that they created as
an award-winning campaign for Hyatt with the artist Dua Lipa had, as of
writing this book, a crazy $200+ million earned video value (with tens of
millions of organic views still coming in). The Hyatt campaign has
generated a massive ROI in terms of earned media, significantly more than
a hundred to one. Fundamentally, these incredible results were driven by the
creation and distribution of highly shareable content.
The key is giving your audience value without asking for anything in
return. Then, once the video has performed well, you can later retarget the
people who engaged with your videos and ask them to take a direct action.

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But first always warm them up with good content that provides value before
following up with a traditional advertisement.
Brownstein’s team at Shareability uses a “full-funnel activation”
strategy. First, they start with big, viral, shareable content; then they move
on to content that causes additional engagement, but still doesn’t push a
strong call to action; and last, they push content to people that engaged with
the first two pieces of content, asking them to take an action related to their
clients’ goals.
On the Cricket Wireless campaign, they started with “The Unexpected
John Cena Prank” video back in 2015, where John Cena surprises fans who
think they are auditioning to be in a Cricket Wireless commercial. When
they go to introduce John Cena, he actually burst through a poster of
himself. The fans’ reactions are priceless—you can see them here:
http://bit.ly/UnexpectedCena-Shareability
. Shareability launched this video
twice on Facebook and generated more than eighty million views overall. In
2017 they produced a second, follow-up video, “John Cena Reacts,” which
was part of a bigger campaign that Shareability launched called “John Cena
Loves the Internet.” “John Cena Reacts” was the reverse of the original
“Unexpected John Cena.” In the second video, fans surprised John instead
of John surprising the fans. John was opening fan mail thanking him for his
“never-give-up” motto that helped them bounce back from injuries and
heartache. Then, as the video progresses, John gets emotional watching a
clip of a young boy thanking him for helping his mother battle cancer. After
the clip finishes, the son surprises Cena by coming through the same poster
from the first video with his mother to thank John in person. John gets
extremely emotional and we see a beautiful exchange of gratitude between
all involved.
One of the reasons these campaigns were highly successful was because
they didn’t ask for anything—their only purpose was to provide value to the
audience, from making them laugh in the first Cena video to touching their
hearts in the second. The second video became the most shared ad in the
world in 2017 and was number three on YouTube’s trending videos. On
Facebook it drove more than 2.5 million shares and 110 million views on
the original upload and more than 160 million total views, including
audience reuploads. The entire “John Cena Loves the Internet” campaign
gained well over two million total shares across platforms.

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After the success of the first two videos, Shareability’s team continued
to bring value to the campaign by creating ads to retarget the people who
had engaged with the content. They followed up with messages like, “Hey
everybody, it’s John Cena here. Why don’t you go to the store and buy that
phone?” These viewers typically already feel a strong connection to John
(and by extension Cricket) because the original content was emotional and
engaging. Fans are more likely to take action when they feel an authentic
connection.