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5 Designing for Spreadability
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195 The May 2010 issue of Fast Company profiled the creative agency Mekanism (Borden 2010), the group responsible for such successful online promotions as the double-entendre-laden Axe body wash campaign “Clean Your Balls.” Claiming the company can guarantee “viral success,” Mekanism proclaims that the language of sharing gifts with its brand communities is too soft for a client-services-driven world (quoted in Borden 2010). In other words, it can make more deals if it claims to be able to infect the world with content. But the agency sometimes falls victim to its own language, admitting that clients say, “You’re the viral guys, push a button and make it go viral. Isn’t that why we hired you?” In actuality, rather than having some magic formula, Mekanism deeply understands the U.S. youth market and uses this knowledge to better engage that audience. The agency’s staff keep their ears attuned to the needs and wants of those they are courting for the companies that pay them. They seed content aimed at particular audiences and deliver material that provides those audiences something unique to share within their communities. Mekanism deploys various quantitative tools to model how and why their media is spreading, creating metrics for success. The notion that the agency generates “virality” may be a stretch, but Mekanism puts significant effort into understanding audiences and creating texts which resonate with desired audiences. As they say, “post and pray” is not an option. Through our arguments so far, we hope to have convinced readers that the spread of all forms of media relies as much (or more) on their DESIGNING FOR SPREADABILITY DESIGNING FOR SPREADABILITY 5 5 Designing for Spreadability 196 circulation by the audience as it does on their commercial distribution, that spreadability is determined by processes of social appraisal rather than technical or creative wizardry and on the active participation of engaged audiences. In this chapter, we explore the creation of material designed to be spread. Content creators do not work magic, nor are they powerless. Creators don’t design viruses, nor do they simply wait for something to happen. Successful creators understand the strategic and technical aspects they need to master in order to create content more likely to spread, and they think about what motivates participants to share information and to build relationships with the communities shaping its circulation. They cannot fully predict whether audiences will embrace what they have designed, but a creator—whether professional or amateur—can place better bets through the listening processes discussed in chapter 4. In addition , creators consider elements of media texts which make them more likely to spread. This chapter explores the strategies, technical aspects, audience motivations, and content characteristics which creators might keep in mind in order to create content with a higher potential for spreadability. Many of our examples here are from marketing initiatives. However, as we will explore later in the chapter, these principles apply to civic groups, nonprofits, and independent media makers, among others. The Uncertainty Principle The creative industries have had a long struggle with predicting and measuring their products’ success. Economist Richard Caves (2000) argues that uncertainty of demand is an everyday reality within the creative industries. These questions are exponentially harder to answer in today’s spreadable media landscape, where many longstanding models for understanding media audiences no longer apply. However, there are a few sets of considerations which can help producers better create content that might resonate with audiences. These include longstanding processes the entertainment industry has used to minimize this uncertainty, technical and strategic considerations that ensure content is made available in forms that audiences will most likely find [54.197.64.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 08:57 GMT) Designing for Spreadability 197 useful, and approaches for understanding what motivates audiences to circulate content. First, entertainment companies have long used models of overproduction and formatting to address this uncertainty. As Amanda D. Lotz, a communication studies professor at the University of Michigan , discusses in our enhanced book, these traditional strategies for responding to this unpredictability carry over to a spreadable media environment. Key to understanding the “entertainment-based media industries,” she writes, is recognizing the degree to which success is unpredictable. The primary response has been overproduction, writes Lotz: Television, film, and recording industry executives all work in a universe in which they know full well that more than 80 percent of what they develop and create will fail commercially. The key problem is that...