How to make hits and be popular

Relax, this isn’t a Dale Carnegie-inspired manual for the socially inept. And I can't promise pop stardom either. But if you've ever wondered how ideas catch on, then read on. This is about how to find your audience and get noticed … for the right reasons.

As a copywriter, an editor and the producer at a polymath arts group, my enduring goal is to win people’s attention. From trying to write irresistible headlines to predicting the zeitgeist technologies of the future and agonising over the best way to package an unconventional project.

In the algorithm age, this should be easier to achieve. Data is abundant and real-time, which gives us clues as to where, why and how things happen. Want to know who is checking you out online and what they are most interested in? Then Google Analytics is still your best friend. By identifying popular searches and talking points, you could identify a hit before it happens. It could be your hit.

Netflix has famously used the viewing histories of customers to programme original content such as House of Cards, while Spotify is confident it already knows what we’ll be singing along to in six months’ time. (Leveraging this data as a record label could even be its path to profitability.) Even legacy companies such as Warner and CBS have been using "insight automation platform" SoundOut as their crystal ball for several years.

With so many clues flying about as data across industries and channels, there must be a formula for this kind of thing, right? If anyone knows, it is Derek Thompson, senior editor of The Atlantic. Last year he wrote a book called Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular.

It is a fascinating trawl through almost 200 years of media, technology and popular culture – told with acuity and good humour. We hear insightful stories about everything from Brahms, Bill Haley and Hero’s Journey mythologist Joseph Campbell, to Star Wars, Fifty Shades of Grey and the birth of brand Disney.

Thompson’s core thesis is that “familiarity beats novelty and distribution beats content.” In other words, the majority of us prefer familiar surprises because that inkling of recognition gives us a jolt of meaning. That’s point one. A good example is how writers try to catch the attention of film producers with high-concept pitches that have a certain level of “optimal newness”, as Thompson puts it. So Aliens is “Jaws in space” and Titanic is “Romeo & Juliet on a sinking ship”. This approach also applies to other industries. Think of Uber as “Airbnb for cars”. The "Uber for…" becomes the shorthand, and so on.

The chapter on repetition in the context of songwriting and speechwriting is very interesting, particularly for all you language students out there. Using famous examples of rhetorical devices such as epistrophe (repeating words at the end of a sentence as in Obama’s “Yes, we can”) and antimetabole (an inversion such as JFK’s “Ask not who your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”) he demonstrates how hooks hold power over us.

“There is good and bad in this,” Thompson cautions. “By turning arguments into spoken music – and making poetry out of policy – antimetabole and its cousins can make important and complicated ideas go down easily. But they can also wave a magic wand over frivolous and dubious ideas, turning something questionable into something catchy.”

Raymond Loewy is an important figure in the book. Thompson considers him to be perhaps the most significant commercial artist of the 20th Century, the man behind the Exxon logo, Lucky Strike pack, Greyhound bus, modern tractor, vacuum cleaner refrigerator… Loewy had a theory called MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), which again highlights that tension between the new and the familiar, or neophobia and neophilia in Loewy’s words.

Thompson’s second key point burns the illusion of "going viral". Word of mouth is still a highly influential factor in determining what becomes popular. Those one-to-one moments. But, using Fifty Shades of Grey as his example (a book that first made its mark on mini-network fanfiction.net), the real amplification effect kicks in when traditional media outlets such as the New York Times and NBC’s Today Show broadcast to tens of millions of people. “A real virus spreads only between people,” explains Thompson. “But a ‘viral’ idea can spread between broadcasts.”

For all his promising analysis, Thompson does cop out a bit. There is no magic formula, just a brutal truth – “culture is chaos”. Hit making is often about timing and luck. Take Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, for example. “Sometimes a rock song comes out on the radio in 1954, and tens of thousands of Americans hear it and don’t buy the record,” he writes. “Then in 1955 the song comes out again, for a slightly different audience in a new medium. The context shifts, a chain reaction of improbable events occurs, and [it] becomes the national anthem of rock and roll.”

Nonetheless, credit to the author for joining the dots with such authority and prime-time gusto. Thompson will have you jumping on to YouTube in seconds, unleashing a flood of ideas. One of them might just catch on.

A Snapchat story

It's not my go-to app but occasionally someone does something interesting with Snapchat. There is editor Yusuf Omar and his mobile team at the Hindustan Times, for example. They have covertly reported on the drugs problem in Punjab and discreetly given voice to sexual abuse victims. But student Trim Lamba's short film Cracked Screen has taken the social media tool into a whole new realm.

Chantelle Levene stars as a regular young woman sharing her everyday life with followers on Snapchat. She goes to the gym, goofs around with friends, dances in her bedroom to the likes of Nadia Rose and airs her frustrations about job hunting, among other filter-enhanced moments. When she suffers a horrific attack, the story becomes quite gripping … and disturbing.

Having read the synopsis, you expect the worst and wait for the shocking act. As Short of the Week's Chelsea Lupkin points out, "You’ll experience empathy for her injuries, the betrayal she feels by her followers, and a creeping guilt at being a voyeuristic spectator in her undoing." For me, it's the reactions of others, played out through her reactions on Snapchat, that are most affecting. How things can quickly turn nasty, and friend becomes foe. Her see-sawing emotions as the victim becomes increasingly insecure, unraveling in a series of images and messages.

Good news travels fast but bad news is almost instant. In the intemperate and often disheartening world of social media, people frequently bypass compassion and empathy, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. And they love to gang up on those under fire. It's the mob mentality that Jon Ronson wrote about so poignantly in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. 

The title Cracked Screen acknowledges the obsession with image and the power of myth-making in the age of social media. When that image is tarnished or shattered, what then? Where does that leave us? This is a bold and exciting use of the medium. Snapchat, an in-the-hand experience, definitely makes the narrative feel more intimate. And real. Chantelle's character could be your friend. You feel complicit.

The composite narrative – a sequence of moving image, stills, captions and doodles – adds tension and mystery to the story, not least because we only see the victim's reactions. The viewer's imagination then goes to work. Trim Lamba and his team have done a great job on this. It's exciting new ground for filmmaking and, as she says, challenges our conception of what we deem 'cinematic' — an idea that should intrigue and propel us all".