“I love magic.” – Harry Potter

Anyone in the business of digital media knows that the Holy Grail of content is creating something that goes “viral.” If you’ve ever created a video, an article or a brand campaign that’s taken off and been shared exponentially, it’s exhilarating.

It’s also very, very rare.

But brands often (or unknowingly) look past that, asking agencies and content creators to make the next viral video or take an already existing piece of content and “viral it up” - as if there were a secret potion (or an app) for that.

Here’s the truth: There is no magic formula to make a piece of content go viral. It’s a complex recipe that includes hard work, ingenuity, creativity, motivation, faith, money and a little bit of luck, and in each successful case study the recipe is different. This has caused a lot of misunderstanding of what actually drives viral success.

Here are five common myths of viral content – and what you should do instead:

There’s just one week to go until The Festival of Media LatAm Awards 2014 when the industry will come together in a celebration of innovation and creativity in Latin America.

We’ve been frantically pulling together all the case studies and have been particularly impressed with the standard of work carried out in the region over the last year. You can check out some of the great work here on Cream.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Gala Dinner Ceremony on Friday 3^rd October at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach as The Festival of Media LatAm 2014 draws to a close for another year – if you want to see what's in store on this year's agenda at the festival, click here.

Good luck to all the shortlisted agencies, clients and media owners.

Download FOMLA14 Shortlist

Ah, “Reach”.  Experiential, meet thy nemesis.

The same dance has been performed for over a decade now. Experiential agencies brag about the influence their campaigns have on consumers, while their clients reply “well, it had better do for £4.26 cost per contact”. The agencies then mutter something about “marketing mix”, and we start all over again.

Everyone has a point here, and ultimately they compromise, accepting it as inevitable that “reach” and “experiential impact” are two ends of a see-saw, and we must choose between them.

The truth is, this isn’t completely accurate; and here’s why:

Once again, we are seeing experiential suffer from being viewed through the same paradigm as other forms of marketing. Unlike TV, print, social, and so on, experiential has no “format”. A TV ad’s “format” is 30 seconds of video in an ad break; a print ad’s “format” might be one full page of a magazine; meanwhile, experiential sits outside of this – whatever your idea is, that is your format. This paradigm has had a similarly misleading effect on reach.

With other media channels, we “get” reach. We’re dealing with an isolated media unit, and we just look at how many people it gets put in front of. How many people were viewing that TV show? How many people read that magazine? How many impressions did that Facebook post get? And so on.

Coca-Cola is the giant of the soft drinks industry, yet the original mass marketer with the distribution reach of God has received quite a bit of negative press lately: carbonated soft drinks are losing their fizz with volumes down and profits harder to maintain. On top of this, it seems that the Coca-Cola Company has become the company we all love to hate. 

It’s Coca-Cola’s fault we are obese. It’s Coca-Cola’s fault that our kids are out of control and high on preservatives. It’s Coca-Cola’s fault our rivers are polluted with empty bottles. It’s Coca-Cola’s fault our teeth are rotten.  It’s Coca-Cola’s fault we don’t understand what “in moderation” means. Big, bad Coca-Cola.

But it’s not just Coke that is suffering from being big or being viewed as bad, multinationals everywhere are under constant threat of diminishing returns, lacklustre results and bad press, but it’s the effect these have on organisations’ behaviour that is the real threat. When big companies feel threatened, introspection and fear are familiar by-products. Whether the source of that threat comes from the City and shareholder demands, market changes or competition, this introspection and fear translates into organisations not doing what they need to do but rather what they can do; in other words, creating “stuff”.

"I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren't all that different" - Divergent

I recently took a trip to Montana, and noticed something I haven’t seen in many years: hitchhikers. How could they, I thought, risk getting into a car with a complete stranger? And why would any driver take such a gamble? But then I realized that my friends and I do almost the same thing on a near daily basis when we’re in the city—we use Uber, the on-demand and independent taxi service app. Uber is now in 42 countries—a massive expansion since its founding four years ago in San Francisco. Experts, and millennials, say that it’s changed the cab industry forever. What we call the “sharing economy” has made it okay for people to essentially hitchhike for a small, auto-charged fee.

Ad tech companies are cropping up all over the show; it’s proving quite difficult to keep up with them all. But according to the 2014 Tech Track 100 [an annual league table of Britain’s fastest-growing private tech businesses] advertising and marketing companies now make up a fifth of the country’s fastest-growing private tech, telecoms and digital media companies.

That’s quite a sizeable chunk but if you compare it with the 2008 league table, in which there were just six companies representing the ad-serving sector, that’s more than tripled!

Have a look at the full list of the UK’s 100 fastest-growing private tech, telecoms and digital media companies below and see if you can spot the ad tech companies. You might want to keep an eye on these guys…

“There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along” – David Bowie

The next time you sit down to write words to get an idea across, consider this: Over 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared on social media every day. Facebook users upload 350 million new photos every day. Over 400 million images are sent on Snapchat per day, and 5 percent of all selfies on social media are shared on Snapchat. On Instagram, 20 billion photos have been uploaded, with 60 million photos averaged per day. 100 hours of video are uploaded per minute to YouTube, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute. 

The age of the Visual Web is here.

A visual conversation is taking place online and smart brands and publishers are looking for ways to participate by producing original visual assets to power their campaigns and initiatives. Content creators must now think in GIFs, snaps, vines, pins, Instagram videos, Twitter cards, any piece of multimedia content that provides a more immersive digital experience while adding value to the viewer.

Lifestyle brands, in particular, have excelled at this concept (perhaps because their products and aesthetics are easier to market to a younger, social-active demographic than other service-based verticals.)

Let’s be honest, we all got a little bit excited when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (more affectionately known as Wills and Kate) announced the arrival of Royal Baby number one [including all these guys]. So when it was announced earlier this week that baby two was on the way, we couldn’t help but smile with glee. And it seems we weren’t the only ones…

Nissan responded like lightning fire to the news, creating an ad just seven minutes after the announcement was made – pretty impressive, eh?