There is a PowerPoint slide that has been presented in marketing departments and agency new business meetings for approximately fifteen years. It features a graph — sometimes a hockey stick, sometimes an exponential curve — and the words “viral potential” written somewhere in the vicinity of the upward inflection. This slide is fraudulent. Not intentionally, in most cases. The people presenting it genuinely believe that virality is a replicable outcome of a sufficiently clever strategy. They are wrong, and the fact that they continue to be wrong at scale says something important about the marketing industry’s relationship with honesty.
What “Going Viral” Actually Means
A piece of content goes viral when a large number of people share it in a short period of time, producing exponential rather than linear distribution. This is a real phenomenon. It happens. But understanding that it happens is not the same as understanding how to make it happen, any more than understanding that lightning strikes trees gives you the ability to direct lightning.
Retrospective analysis of viral content almost always produces confident-sounding explanations: it was emotionally resonant, it was unexpected, it tapped into a cultural moment, it was perfectly timed. These explanations are largely post-hoc rationalization. For every piece of content with those properties that went viral, there are ten thousand with identical properties that did not. We study the successes and ignore the failures, which produces the illusion of a pattern where there is mostly noise.
This is survivorship bias at industrial scale, and it is the foundation on which a significant portion of content strategy is built.
The Viral Content Industry
There is an entire ecosystem of professionals whose value proposition is some version of “I know how to make things go viral.” Courses. Frameworks. Books with titles like The Virality Code or Contagious: Why Things Catch On (that last one is real and, to be fair, considerably more honest about uncertainty than most). LinkedIn influencers who post their own viral metrics as proof of expertise. Agencies with case studies about the one time a campaign blew up and carefully constructed silence about the twenty times it didn’t.
None of this is entirely without value. Understanding the structural properties of shareable content — emotional resonance, novelty, social currency, practical utility — is useful. You can increase the probability of your content performing well by understanding these principles. But “increased probability of performing well” and “guaranteed viral reach” are not the same thing, and the marketing industry, chronically allergic to nuance, tends to collapse them into each other.
What You Can Actually Control
Here is what a responsible content strategy looks like in the absence of a virality guarantee: you create high-quality, genuinely useful or genuinely entertaining content, consistently, for a clearly defined audience. You distribute it through channels where that audience actually exists. You optimize for the metrics that matter to your business — leads, retention, purchase intent — rather than for the vanity metrics that are most likely to impress a client in a quarterly report.
Over time, you build a body of work that compounds. Individual pieces rarely go “viral” in the dramatic, hockey-stick sense. But a sustained practice of excellent content builds authority, trust, and a loyal audience that shares your work not because an algorithm decided to amplify it but because they genuinely find it valuable. This is slower than a viral moment. It is also more durable.
The occasional piece will outperform your expectations dramatically. It will happen without warning, often for reasons you can only partially explain. When it does, study it, learn what you can, and resist the urge to try to replicate it exactly. Lightning does not strike the same tree twice in the same way for the same reasons.
What to Tell the Client Who Wants Virality
Tell them the truth. Which is: we can create content that has the properties associated with high performance, and we can distribute it effectively. We cannot guarantee a specific reach multiple. Anyone who promises you a viral outcome is either lying or doesn’t understand the medium they’re working in — and either way, you shouldn’t be paying them for the promise.
Some clients will not want to hear this. They will hire someone who tells them what they want to hear. In three months, when that someone’s “viral strategy” produces eleven thousand views on a video that cost forty thousand to make, you can be there with an honest alternative. Or not. Sometimes the market rewards the right answer with a long delay.
In the meantime, the KPI Shark at NoBriefs is a good reminder: the metrics that matter are the ones connected to actual business outcomes. Shares are flattering. Revenue is real. Build for the second one.
→ Stop chasing lightning and start building for consistent thunder. NoBriefs — for marketers who’ve graduated from vanity and enrolled in value.