K atie c ouric

Mastering Relevance
Finding the most relevant content for your audience must be discovered
through testing and trial and error. There’s no exact way to know what will
be most relevant to everyone’s lives, but Brownstein shares that one way
the team discovers ideas for what will resonate is by looking at trending
topics on the internet and by observing popular internet memes. Then his
team aligns those trending messages to the brands for which they’re
creating content.
A successful case of creating content based on a trending topic is
Shareability’s video campaign for Pizza Hut and Pepsi called “The Dangers
of Selfie Sticks.” The video is in the form of a goof public service
announcement about the dangers of using selfie sticks. Brownstein’s team
got the idea because selfie sticks were a trending topic; for example, selfie
sticks had just been banned from Disneyland. Pizza Hut was in the process
of launching a two-foot-long pizza, so they came up with the concept that
you would need a really long selfie stick to take a photo with this new,
unusually long pizza. By making that connection and creating a parody of
selfies in general, the video was very funny and went viral on YouTube. It
became the most shared ad in the world the month it launched partly due to
the relevancy of “selfie stick” in video search at the time.
To reach this level of shareability, Brownstein’s team goes through a
rigorous process of testing. It samples different formats and openings, and
collects data from big focus groups, which are most often conducted by

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running the content on Facebook and seeing which versions generate the
best response (basically, my system in a nutshell).
They analyze each aspect of the content to ensure that it will resonate
with the viewer. For example, when they cast videos they carefully select
people who are relatable. When creating the Dua Lipa music video that they
did for Hyatt, they made sure that the girls were not all supermodels. “If
you watch the ‘New Rules’ music video you’ll see that the girls are
attractive, but not super glammy,” Brownstein explained. “They are more
like Dua’s relatable girlfriends.” Shareability takes this level of care and
consideration in each and every decision related to the content. Even
seemingly insignificant details make a huge impact.
Don’t just take a shot in the dark when trying to create shareable
content. Do due diligence and research trends, pay attention to what’s
working, reverse engineer what other successful content creators are doing,
and then put together some low-cost proof of concepts to test. Tests help
you become certain about what works before you invest heavily in a single
direction for a piece of content. And if you don’t have the time, my team
can definitely help you in this process.