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.

Can a book really change your life?

I know next to nothing about Chinese philosophy. Expect for this proverb, which my teacher at prep school used to drill into us: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” The great Confucius said that. Or did he?

Whoever said it, they were obviously on to something. These sage fellows loved asking the big questions that puzzle many of us today. Who am I? Why am I here? How can I be better? Consider that “heart” and “mind” are the same word in Chinese – “xin”. Human beings have been learning and searching since the dawn of civilisation. No wonder self-help books are big business, worth more than £6 million in the UK and $10 billion in the US at last count.

One or two may have found their way into my hands: Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Cargenie, for instance, as well as new age novels The Alchemist and The Celestine Prophecy. They didn’t change my life but they did encourage me to shift my perspective and ask different questions. Nevertheless, I remain quite skeptical when it comes to such books. Some are quite wooly and fail to appreciate the complexity of the modern world. Others make me vomit with their cloying optimism.

The other night I attended a talk by Harvard professor Michael Pruett at workspace Second Home. Pruett, another advocate of unconventional wisdom, has been making the headlines for the past few years because his Classical Chinese and Ethical Political Theory course has been one of the most popular on campus. Remember, this is an Ivy League school more famous for its STEM and finance options.

He aims to show students how Chinese philosophy can help them to be a better person and find their place in the world. The first step is to break free from what they think they know about themselves – no easy feat in the egocentric age of social media when so many millennials are striving for self-actualisation and desperate to project their chosen identity.

This is not guru guff masquerading as education. Pruett draws directly from five Chinese philosophers— Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi and Xunzi – who all lived more than 2,000 years ago. Relics of a bygone age, you might think. Hardly. In fact, these were “exciting and radical thinkers … expanding the scope of human possibility,” as Pruett explained to the Guardian.

Together with journalist Christine Gross-Loh, who met the professor while covering his story for the Atlantic in 2013, Pruett has written a book called The Path. The title is a play on the opening line of Taoism founder Laozi’s Tao Te Ching and boldly sets the course: “The way that can be clearly defined is not the enduring way.”

Students are given small tasks to do: try a new hobby, smile at a stranger and change their tone of voice, for example. Then they are asked to observe how others respond and pursue the things that arouse good feelings and new sensations. Their assignment is to discuss what it’s like to live by these philosophies. What a refreshing approach – the idea of education as a means of transformation. All too often, pupils are treated as nothing more than vessels to be filled with knowledge, assessed and fast-tracked. Similarly, The Path tries to harness our ability to sense situations so we can apply our learning for the benefit of others. 

During the talk, Pruett covered a lot of ground in a matter of minutes but his main point was that we are all “just a bunch of messes”. Follow that thought through and you realise that there is no one self to find or be true to. There is no pre-defined destiny – whether career, relationship or any other accepted form of success or fulfilment. Instead, we are challenged to remain open-minded and experiment with new ways of living better. A nightmare for advertisers, data junkies and devotees of demographics but a major step forward for humanity.

I think back to the wall of expectation analogy in Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. We are often told how important it is play to our strengths, to focus on a particular goal and follow a set path to achieve it. But the more rigidly we set about that task the more frustrated we can become. Pruett frames this phenomenon differently, in terms of damaging patterns of behaviour. We are all guilty of these. Getting angry with those that cut in line, raising our voice on the phone, holding ground in the workplace because you don't feel valued, staring at a screen for hours and expecting good ideas to appear… These traits become an unflattering take on our personality.

Pruett says the challenge is to start reacting differently to things, to sense the problems and patterns in everyday life and then break them. These are what Confucius called “as if” rituals, loosely translated. Transformative changes in behaviour – faking it, if you have to. Again, the simplest example is smiling and talking to strangers. It's that sense of being spontaneous, open to the world and, dare I say it, in harmony. Mencius, the late 4th-century BC scholar said that these chance conversations, interactions and experiences help us to see new connections and opportunities everywhere. In turn, our influence grows and we begin to have a positive effect on the lives of those around us.

Zhuangzi encouraged people to embrace trained spontaneity, the idea that you apply yourself in a particular area – playing a sport or learning an instrument, for instance – so your mind doesn’t get in the way in the moment. Perhaps the most counterintuitive idea is not playing to your strengths. Xunzi says that nothing is natural. So if you can’t dance, won't dance, sign up for that class. If you don't like getting wet, jump into the swimming pool. Not to get better, specifically, but to live life “as a series of ruptures” as Pruett puts it.

A fascinating aside: Pruett described himself as being part of the ’89 generation who felt there was no need to ask big questions because “we felt they’d already been solved”. (I wonder how big a factor the rise of the internet was in all of this?) Now people are enjoying being fundamentally challenged on how they should live from day to day and these questions are being debated furiously in the blogosphere of post-Communist, post-imperialist China, in particular.

I came away from the talk feeling quite liberated. It’s ok if you don't have all the answers, to feel like a work in progress, even in your thirties. I will definitely add The Path to my reading list and dip in to the original texts. As with any book that draws on so much source material, there will be those who find it too general or too quick to reach a consensus among the different philosophers. But as a break from the norm it sounds promising.

Mindfulness continues to be a hot trend, indicating that there’s an appetite for alternative ways of living, particularly in the pressure cooker environment of the city. Pruett won’t show you the path specifically but he’ll certainly help you make a few tweaks here and there. Add all those up and who knows…

Right, I’m off to talk to strangers in Pret and tango the night away.