Clients all want their content to “go viral”.
There are some obvious recurring properties of content that actually does “go viral”.
But, when push comes to shove, there is still a tendency to excise those very properties from ideas and content.
This is due to a natural risk aversion on the part of brand managers.
But to reduce the risqué nature of content is to increase the risk of nothing happening when that content goes live.
And what brand managers perceive to be risqué bears no relation to what actually is risqué in the eyes of the people whose help they need to “go viral”.
In the old advertising landscape, brands used to compete with each other.
In the new content landscape, brands compete with every other piece of content that a member of their audience might choose over theirs to engage with and pass on to friends.