por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
Crisis communications is perhaps the only discipline in marketing where the correct action most of the time is to communicate less, not more, and where the instincts that make someone good at promotional communication tend to make them terrible at damage control. The brand manager who is excellent at crafting engaging content, building audience, and projecting confidence and momentum is working with a toolkit that is, in a crisis, often actively counterproductive. The skills are not just different — they’re sometimes opposed. And the organizations that don’t understand this distinction tend to discover it at the worst possible moment, in public, while everyone is watching.
A crisis, for communication purposes, is any situation where the gap between what the organization is saying and what its audiences know or believe is large enough to be damaging. This gap can be created by a genuine organizational failure — a product defect, a data breach, a leadership behavior, an operational error — or by external circumstances that associate the brand with something negative regardless of its actual responsibility. The communication challenge is the same in both cases: close the gap, or at minimum stop making it wider, as quickly as possible, while preserving whatever trust hasn’t yet been destroyed.
The First Rule: Stop Digging
The most common crisis communication failure is the response that makes the crisis worse. This happens in predictable ways. The defensive statement that reads as corporate and cold when the situation calls for human acknowledgment. The legal-cleared language that says nothing when the audience needs to hear something specific. The aggressive counter-messaging that treats legitimate criticism as an attack, which tends to generate exactly the kind of attention that crisis communications is supposed to defuse.
The principle at work is simple but difficult to execute under pressure: in a crisis, the audience’s emotional state matters more than the factual content of your communication. People in a crisis situation — whether they’re affected customers, concerned employees, or attentive journalists — need to feel that someone is taking the situation seriously and that something is being done about it. A response that is factually accurate but emotionally tone-deaf fails the most important test, regardless of how carefully it was lawyered. The audience doesn’t grade on factual accuracy in those first critical hours. They grade on whether they feel heard.
Speed vs. Accuracy: The False Choice
One of the persistent debates in crisis communications practice is between the imperative to respond quickly and the imperative to respond accurately. The “respond fast” school argues that the first hours of a crisis are decisive and that silence reads as guilt. The “respond accurately” school argues that premature statements based on incomplete information create secondary crises when the facts turn out to be different from the initial communication.
This debate presents a false choice. The answer is to respond quickly with what you actually know — including acknowledging the limits of what you know — rather than waiting to respond until you know everything. “We are aware of the situation and are investigating” is not a non-response if it’s delivered quickly and followed by regular updates. It’s the honest starting point for a communication process that will evolve as facts become available. The statement that makes the situation worse is the one that claims certainty about things that aren’t certain yet, not the one that acknowledges uncertainty honestly.
What Social Media Does to Crisis (And Vice Versa)
The social media environment has changed crisis communications in two fundamental ways. First, it has dramatically compressed the timeline between an incident occurring and public awareness of it. Events that would previously have had hours or days before media coverage are now visible in real time, often at scale, before the organization’s internal crisis protocols have even been activated. The organization that responds in two hours may already be responding to a conversation that has been running for six.
Second, social media has created a permanent record of organizational behavior that makes inconsistency catastrophically visible. The brand that claimed to value customer safety in its purpose campaign and is now being shown to have known about a safety issue and concealed it — that gap exists in screenshot form, available to anyone with a search function. As we argued in our piece on brand purpose, the gap between stated values and actual behavior doesn’t disappear; it accumulates. In a crisis, that accumulated gap becomes explosive.
The Apology That Isn’t
One of the most studied phenomena in crisis communication is the non-apology apology: the statement that uses the language of accountability while deflecting actual responsibility. “We’re sorry you feel that way.” “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.” “We apologize if our communication wasn’t as clear as it should have been.” These statements are now so recognizable as corporate evasion that they often make crisis situations worse than silence would have. The audience knows an apology when they see one, and they know a non-apology when they see that too.
A real apology acknowledges the specific harm done, takes responsibility without qualification, and describes what will be done differently. It doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to be specific, honest, and followed by action. The organizations that have emerged from serious crises with their reputations intact have almost universally done so by saying something real rather than something safe — and then backing it up with organizational change that the crisis revealed was necessary.
The brands that model genuine crisis recovery share a characteristic with the briefs and client relationships we’ve analyzed throughout this journal: they do the honest work before communicating rather than using communication to substitute for the work. Just as a good brief reflects genuine strategic thinking and a good creative review reflects genuine feedback rather than institutional politics, a good crisis response reflects a genuine organizational reckoning. The communication is the expression, not the solution.
Working on a crisis response and not sure whether it’s making things better or worse? That hesitation is data. Our shop is for the people in the room who are still thinking clearly. Trust that instinct.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a visual language that has colonized corporate communication so completely that most people no longer notice it. It speaks in images of diverse groups smiling at laptops, handshakes in glass-walled conference rooms, young professionals pointing at whiteboards with expressions of collaborative inspiration, and hands cupping plants to represent sustainability. This is the visual language of stock photography, and it is, by any honest measure, one of the most powerful forces for creative mediocrity in the history of commercial communication.
Stock photography is not inherently wrong. It is a rational response to a real production constraint: most brands don’t have the budget, time, or creative infrastructure to shoot original visual content for every communication need. The stock library offers a practical solution — images, already produced, available immediately at a fraction of custom production cost. For certain applications, this is entirely reasonable. The problem is what happens when stock photography stops being a practical solution and becomes the creative default: when the question is no longer “does this image serve the communication?” but “which image in the library is least wrong for this slot?”
The Visual Mediocrity Machine
The stock photography library is optimized for breadth, not excellence. It needs to contain images that could plausibly serve thousands of different brands across hundreds of different categories in dozens of different cultural contexts. The result is visual content that is, by design, non-specific — produced to be inoffensive, inclusive, and broadly applicable rather than resonant, distinctive, or specifically relevant. It is communication designed to not not communicate, which is a very different thing from communication designed to communicate.
The brand that illustrates its about page with stock imagery of a diverse, attractive, improbably well-dressed team in a sunny office is not communicating that it has a great team. It’s communicating that it has a stock subscription and a limited visual strategy budget. The audience, who has encountered this same category of image across thousands of websites, reads the signal correctly: this is a company that hasn’t thought carefully about how it looks. Which tends to make them wonder whether it’s thought carefully about anything else.
What Original Visual Identity Actually Requires
The alternative to stock photography is not necessarily expensive photography. It’s a visual strategy — a considered approach to what images will represent this brand, in what style, with what consistent characteristics, across all the contexts in which visual content is needed. That strategy can be executed with modest production resources if the thinking is done first. Illustration systems. Brand-specific photography guidelines applied to internal shoots. Commissioned image libraries that belong to the brand rather than the stock library. These approaches require more upfront investment than a subscription, but they produce visual assets that are distinctively associated with the brand rather than generically associated with “business.”
The brands that have built strong visual identities without enormous production budgets — and there are many — have almost universally done so by making deliberate, specific choices about visual language rather than defaulting to the available. A consistent color treatment applied to photography. A distinctive illustration style. A specific approach to cropping or framing. These choices cost thinking more than they cost money, and thinking is what the stock subscription replaces as much as production.
The AI Image Generation Problem (And Opportunity)
The conversation about stock photography is being complicated, rapidly, by AI image generation. The ability to produce custom images — specific to the brief, the brand’s visual language, the particular communication need — at a fraction of the cost of photography is genuinely significant. It addresses the core practical argument for stock: that custom production is too expensive for routine communication needs.
The complications are real too. As we explored in our piece on AI and the future of creativity, the ease of production doesn’t solve the strategy problem. AI image generation in the absence of a visual strategy produces the AI equivalent of stock photography: technically competent, generically applicable, distinctively nothing. The tool amplifies whatever thinking went into the brief. If the brief was “something professional and clean,” the result will be professional, clean, and indistinguishable from everything else produced with the same brief on the same tool.
The Honest Assessment
The organizations that continue to use stock photography as a creative default are making a choice — even if they don’t experience it as one. The choice is: we will communicate at the level of everyone else using the same libraries, and we will accept the visual anonymity that comes with that decision. For some organizations in some contexts, that’s a perfectly defensible choice. For others — those trying to build distinctive brand recognition, those targeting audiences with higher visual literacy, those in categories where brand differentiation matters — it’s a strategic error that’s easy to fix and rarely addressed.
The fix doesn’t require a massive production budget. It requires a brief — something we’ve argued for throughout this journal, from the foundational case for good briefing to the critique of the mood board — that articulates what the brand’s visual identity should communicate and what choices will serve that communication. With that thinking in place, whether the execution is photography, illustration, or AI-generated imagery becomes a production decision rather than a creative one. Without it, you’re back to scrolling the library, looking for something that’s least wrong. And that’s not creative work. It’s procurement.
Your brand’s current visual identity: a Getty subscription and a prayer? Our shop is for people ready to think about this differently. Original goods. Original thinking.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a body language, a verbal register, and a set of phrases that are unique to creative presentations — and they are almost uniformly self-sabotaging. The qualifier before the work is shown: “It’s still a rough idea, but…” The apology for a brave decision: “We know this might not be for everyone…” The invitation to dismiss before the work has had a chance to land: “Tell us what you think — we’re very open to feedback.” Each of these phrases, delivered with good intentions and genuine professional courtesy, communicates the same thing to every person in the room: the person presenting this work is not entirely sure it’s any good. And if the person who made it isn’t sure, why should anyone else be?
Presenting creative work is a distinct skill from making creative work. Many people who make excellent work present it poorly, and some people who make mediocre work present it compellingly enough to get it approved and implemented. This disparity is real and professionally consequential, and it receives almost no formal attention in the education of creative professionals. The portfolio gets reviewed. The presentation almost never does. And yet the presentation is often where the work lives or dies — not because it should be, but because it is.
The Architecture of a Confident Creative Presentation
A confident creative presentation begins not with the creative work but with the strategic problem. Before showing anything, the presenter establishes shared understanding of the challenge: what the brief identified as the problem, who the audience is, what the audience currently thinks or does, and what the work needs to change. This strategic framing does two things. It reminds the room of the criteria against which the work should be evaluated — the brief, not personal preference — and it positions the presenter as someone who understands the business context, not just the aesthetic execution.
From the strategic context, the presentation moves to the creative idea — the concept — before showing executions. The concept is the thinking; the execution is the expression of the thinking. Showing executions without explaining the concept first is like showing a translation without explaining what language was being translated from. The audience evaluates the execution against their personal aesthetic preferences rather than against the creative logic. That’s how you end up in a discussion about whether the font is right when the real question is whether the concept is right.
The Language of Creative Confidence
The language of confident creative presentation is declarative rather than interrogative, active rather than passive, specific rather than hedged. “We decided to…” rather than “we were thinking that maybe…” “The strategy led us to…” rather than “we tried to…” “This works because…” rather than “we hope this might…”
This isn’t arrogance — it’s professional confidence, and there’s a meaningful difference. Arrogance dismisses feedback before it’s given. Confidence engages with feedback from a position of understanding why decisions were made. The presenter who says “we chose this because X” and explains X clearly is in a much stronger position to evaluate feedback than the presenter who apologized for the choice before explaining it. If the feedback reveals that X was wrong, the confident presenter can acknowledge it and think about what alternative logic would produce. The apologetic presenter has already indicated they expect to be wrong and will probably accept feedback that isn’t actually better than the original decision.
Managing the Room Without Managing It
One of the skills in creative presentation that takes time to develop is the ability to manage the energy and direction of the room without appearing to do so. The client who says “I don’t love the color” when what they mean is “I’m not sure about the concept” needs to be gently redirected toward the concept conversation rather than the color conversation. The stakeholder who starts asking about executional details before the concept has been evaluated needs to be brought back to the strategic question first.
These redirections require confidence in the work and in the process. They also require having genuinely done the strategic work — if you can’t articulate why the color serves the strategy, you can’t redirect a color conversation toward strategy. The creative who has done the thinking has the tools to manage these moments. The creative who jumped to execution without the thinking has to stand there while the room debates colors for forty-five minutes.
As we explored in our piece on receiving feedback without losing your dignity, the relationship between giving and receiving feedback is reciprocal. The presenter who creates the conditions for productive feedback — through a clear strategic context, a confident presentation of the creative logic, and specific direction for the kind of input that would be most useful — tends to receive better feedback than the presenter who opens the floor to general reaction and then wonders why the conversation went sideways.
The Moment After the Silence
Every creative presentation has a moment of silence after the work is shown. It may last a second or ten seconds, and those seconds are some of the most psychologically loaded in professional life. The instinct is to fill the silence — to explain more, to qualify, to invite the room to speak. Resist it. The silence is the room thinking. Let it think.
The presenter who waits through the silence, without flinching, communicates something specific: they’re confident enough in the work to let it be experienced before being explained. That confidence is read by the room before anyone speaks, and it shapes every subsequent reaction. It is, in that sense, the most important creative decision in the entire presentation: the decision to believe, in public, that what you’ve made is worth the time of the people in front of you.
And if you need a reminder of what you’re presenting against — the organizational dynamics, the stakeholder politics, the brief that may or may not have been adequate — revisit our guide to the eternal stakeholder syndrome. Know the room. Then walk in anyway.
Preparing to present work you believe in to a room you’re not sure about? Our shop is for people who make things worth presenting. You’ve got this.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
Sometime around 2010, a consensus formed in the marketing industry that brands needed to stand for something beyond their products. Not just to sell things, but to make the world better. To have a purpose. The purpose economy was born, and with it a genre of brand communication that has since spread across virtually every category, size, and type of company: the purpose statement, the manifesto, the brand purpose campaign, the corporate values wall. All of it in service of the same project: convincing the market that the company in question is not merely a commercial enterprise but a force for good in the world. Some of it is genuine. Most of it is a sophisticated form of marketing that has been mistaken — by its authors as much as its audiences — for something else.
The brand purpose movement started with real insight. Research consistently showed that consumers — especially younger consumers — preferred brands that had values, that stood for something, that seemed to care about something beyond quarterly earnings. The purpose positioning was a response to a real shift in consumer expectations. The problem is that responding to consumer expectations with a purpose isn’t the same as actually having one. And the gap between the two is where most brand purpose activity lives.
The Purpose Statement as Corporate Aspiration Fiction
The brand purpose statement is a sentence — sometimes two — that articulates what the company believes it exists to do beyond making money. “To inspire and nurture the human spirit.” “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” These statements range from genuinely ambitious to comically vague, but they share a characteristic that matters: they describe an aspiration, not a reality. They say what the company would like to be, or would like to be perceived as, not what the company actually is.
This gap — between the purpose as stated and the company as operated — is the original sin of the purpose marketing era. A company that has a purpose statement about human connection and simultaneously employs a content moderation system that it knows amplifies outrage and division is not a purpose-driven company. It’s a company with a purpose statement. A company that claims to be on a mission to improve health and simultaneously lobbies against nutritional labeling regulation is not purpose-driven. It’s purpose-performed. The statement exists in the marketing department. The actual purpose — generate returns for shareholders — exists everywhere else.
The Purpose Campaign and the Evidence Test
The purpose campaign — the brand film about values, the social media commitment to a cause, the partnership with an NGO — can be evaluated against a simple evidentiary test: is there organizational evidence, outside the marketing department, that this purpose is real? Does the supply chain reflect it? Do the employment practices reflect it? Do the lobbying activities reflect it? Do the product decisions reflect it?
Most purpose campaigns fail this test immediately. The brand that launches a campaign about female empowerment while paying women in its supply chain poverty wages is not demonstrating purpose; it’s demonstrating that the marketing department operates independently of the rest of the company. This is the structural condition that makes purpose washing possible: when marketing can articulate values that the organization doesn’t actually hold or practice, the purpose campaign is available as a tool regardless of whether purpose exists.
As we’ve argued about rebranding in our post on companies that change their logo instead of their problems, the signal without the substance is not communication — it’s noise that erodes trust over time. Purpose marketing that isn’t backed by organizational reality doesn’t just fail to build brand equity; it actively destroys it with the audiences sophisticated enough to notice the gap.
When Purpose Is Real
This is not a blanket indictment of purpose as a concept in brand strategy. Some companies have genuine, operational commitments to something beyond profit that inform real organizational decisions — supply chain choices, employment practices, product development priorities, political positions — and their brand communication is an honest reflection of those commitments. Those companies don’t need a purpose campaign; they have a purpose, and their communication is simply an accurate description of what they do.
The difference between purpose-as-marketing and purpose-as-operation is visible in the decisions companies make when purpose costs something. The purpose-operated company that declines a profitable business opportunity because it conflicts with their stated values is demonstrating real purpose. The purpose-marketed company that declines nothing, changes nothing, and sacrifices nothing has a values document and a brand film. These are not equivalent.
What to Do With the Purpose Brief
If you’re a creative or agency receiving a brief to develop purpose communication for a client, the most professionally useful thing you can do is ask the evidentiary questions before producing anything. What organizational evidence exists that this purpose is operational rather than aspirational? What decisions has the company made that it wouldn’t have made without this purpose? What has it given up or declined because it conflicted with this purpose?
If the answers are strong, the purpose communication has something real to reflect and will be stronger for it. If the answers are weak or absent, you have a choice: produce communication that will ring hollow to every audience member sophisticated enough to notice the gap, or have the conversation with the client about what it would actually take to make the purpose real before trying to communicate it. As we’ve argued about saying no and writing honest briefs, the most valuable thing any creative professional can offer is the willingness to have the honest conversation before the work starts rather than after it fails.
Working on a purpose campaign for a company whose purpose is, demonstrably, making money? Our shop has what you need to get through the week. No manifesto required.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
Ask ten freelance creative professionals what they charge and you will receive ten different answers structured around ten different logics, most of which have more to do with anxiety than with economics. The designer who charges what they think the client will accept. The copywriter who charges what they charged two years ago, adjusted for inflation only when inflation becomes impossible to ignore. The art director who charges what a friend told them was “normal” at a point in time that may or may not reflect current market conditions. The strategist who charges by the hour because that’s how employees get paid and they haven’t fully updated their mental model from employment to self-employment.
Pricing is the part of freelance creative work that receives the least formal attention and causes the most sustained professional suffering. You can spend four years learning your craft, build a portfolio that demonstrates genuine skill, develop a professional network that generates referrals, and still consistently undercharge for your work in ways that make your business economically unsustainable. The pricing failure is not a knowledge failure — most experienced creatives know what they should charge, approximately. It’s a confidence failure, a market information failure, and sometimes a structural failure in how the work is framed to clients.
The Hourly Rate Trap
The hourly rate is the most natural pricing structure for anyone who has previously been an employee — which is most freelancers, at some point in their career. Employment is compensated by time. Freelance work, reasoned by analogy, should also be compensated by time. This logic is understandable and almost entirely wrong.
Hourly pricing penalizes efficiency. The faster and more skilled you become at your craft, the less you earn per project, because excellent work takes less time to produce than mediocre work — and if you’re billing by the hour, less time means less money. This is the precise opposite of the incentive structure that should apply to a skilled professional. It rewards inexperience and punishes expertise. It also creates an adversarial dynamic with clients: the client wants the work done quickly (less cost), the freelancer has a financial incentive to work slowly (more cost). This is a terrible foundation for a professional relationship.
Value-based pricing — charging for the value the work creates rather than the time it takes — resolves this structural problem. A logo redesign for a company launching a new product line isn’t worth whatever number of hours the designer spent on it. It’s worth something related to what the new brand identity will do for the company over the following years. That value may be ten times or a hundred times the hourly-rate equivalent. Capturing even a fraction of that value as a fee is more economically rational than billing by the hour, and it positions the creative as a business partner rather than a vendor selling time.
The Scope Problem That Pricing Can’t Fix Alone
Even value-based pricing breaks down without clear scope definition. The project that begins as a logo redesign and expands to include brand guidelines, a social media kit, a business card template, and “just one more thing” that appears at each stage — this project will drain whatever margin was built into the original fee, regardless of how that fee was calculated. As we’ve argued about briefs and saying no, the protection against scope creep is clear documentation and the willingness to enforce it.
The freelance rate card solves a pricing problem. It doesn’t solve a scope problem. The two need to be addressed together: what is in scope, what is not in scope, what the cost of expanding scope is, and what the process for requesting scope changes looks like. These conversations feel awkward at the beginning of a client relationship — which is exactly when they need to happen, because having them at the end, when the scope has already expanded and the margin has already eroded, is considerably more awkward and considerably less effective.
The Market Information Problem
One of the structural reasons creatives underprice is that pricing information in the creative industry is remarkably opaque. Rates are not publicly posted. Creatives don’t routinely discuss their fees with peers the way they discuss software preferences or workflow practices. The result is that most creatives are operating with pricing information that is years out of date, drawn from a small sample of their immediate network, and systematically biased downward by the natural tendency to share rates with people who charge similar amounts.
The solution is deliberate information-gathering. Industry salary surveys. Creative professional communities where rates are discussed openly. Informational conversations with peers at different career stages and in different specialties. The uncomfortable reality is that if you’ve never been told you’re expensive, you’re probably not charging enough. The first time a client pushes back seriously on your rate is data. The fee at which you start getting that pushback regularly is approximately the right market rate for your work.
The Confidence Component
Even with perfect market information, pricing requires confidence to execute. The fee that you know is right but say apologetically, with a qualifier or an immediate offer to negotiate, communicates something different from the same fee stated clearly and without apology. Clients who are used to working with professional service providers — lawyers, accountants, consultants — encounter confident pricing every day. The creative who hedges their fee is signaling uncertainty about whether their work is worth it. And clients, reasonably, take that signal seriously.
The confidence to charge what the work is worth is built over time, through the experience of quoting fees and having them accepted, through the data of knowing what peers in similar positions charge, and through the fundamental shift in self-perception that comes with genuinely owning your expertise rather than performing it. That shift takes time. It’s also the single most financially impactful change most freelance creatives can make. More than any change to the rate card itself.
And as we’ve explored in our breakdown of the personal brand trap, the market perceives your work partly through how you position and present yourself — including how you price. Price is communication. What’s yours saying?
Still charging what you charged in 2021 and wondering why the math doesn’t work? Our shop is for the creatives doing real work that deserves real compensation. Start there.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
“We want this to go viral.” It’s said at briefings with the same casual confidence with which one might say “we want the event to be successful” or “we want the product to sell well” — as if virality were a predictable outcome that results from the correct combination of effort, cleverness, and intent. As if there were a recipe. As if the agencies and brands that spent the most on “viral” content and got the least viral return had simply not tried hard enough, or hadn’t had the right insight, or had executed the wrong format. As if any of this were as controllable as a media buy.
The viral brief is perhaps the purest expression of magical thinking in the marketing industry. It asks for an outcome — massive organic distribution, cultural relevance, millions of unpaid impressions — that is by definition outside the control of anyone who briefs or produces it, then frames the request as a creative objective rather than as the statistical anomaly it actually is. And the creative or agency on the receiving end of this brief is put in an impossible position: explain the reality (which sounds like defeatism) or accept the brief as stated (which commits them to delivering something they cannot reliably deliver).
What Virality Actually Is
Viral content is content that spreads faster than it’s seeded — where the organic sharing multiplies the initial distribution beyond what the original publisher created or paid for. By this definition, virality is a measurement, not a quality. Content that goes viral has the quality of spreadability: something about it motivates people who encounter it to share it with others. That motivation can come from many sources — humor, outrage, utility, beauty, novelty, emotional resonance, social currency (sharing it makes me look good) — but it is always a property that the audience confers, not one that the creator installs.
This distinction — between the qualities that make content more or less spreadable and the act of spreading itself — is the gap that the viral brief ignores. You can study the characteristics of content that has spread widely. You can try to create content that has those characteristics. You can optimize distribution so that more people have the opportunity to encounter it. None of this guarantees virality, because virality is an emergent phenomenon that depends on cultural moment, competitive noise, platform algorithm behavior, and a degree of luck that no brief can eliminate.
The Virality Graveyard
For every piece of content that went unexpectedly viral, there are thousands of pieces of content that were explicitly designed to go viral and didn’t. Large budgets. Famous talent. Professional production. High-quality creative execution. Strategically launched on the right platform at the right time. And then: a few thousand views, a polite press release, and quiet disappointment. The virality graveyard is enormous and mostly invisible, because the postmortems of failed viral campaigns don’t get written up in trade publications the way the success stories do.
This survivorship bias is one reason the viral brief persists despite all available evidence that it’s based on a flawed model of how content spreads. The campaigns that went viral are visible and celebrated. The campaigns that were designed to go viral and didn’t are invisible. The client watching the successes believes that virality is achievable with the right creative thinking. The agency that produced the successes knows, usually, that a significant element of luck was involved — but rarely says so, because “we got lucky” is not a compelling creative credentials story.
What to Say When the Brief Says “Go Viral”
The honest response to the viral brief is to reframe the objective. Not to dismiss the ambition — large-scale organic distribution is a legitimate and valuable marketing outcome — but to translate it into something that can actually be designed for. Instead of “go viral,” the objective becomes “create content that maximizes shareability for our specific audience in our specific channel context.” That objective can be researched, designed toward, and measured against. Virality cannot.
This reframe also requires an honest conversation about what “viral” would actually look like for this brand in this context. A B2B software company and a consumer snack brand have different definitions of “massive organic distribution.” The B2B campaign that generates 50,000 organic views from decision-makers in the right industry is more valuable than the consumer campaign that generates 5 million views from people who will never buy the product. Virality without audience specificity is not a marketing strategy; it’s a vanity metric with extra steps.
And as we’ve argued repeatedly — from the results report to the awards paradox — the gap between impressive-looking numbers and actual business impact is where most marketing failures hide. A viral video that doesn’t move product isn’t a marketing success. It’s an entertaining footnote. The brief that recognizes this distinction produces better work than the one that chases the metric.
The One Thing That Actually Increases Shareability
If there’s one consistent finding across the research on organic content spread, it’s this: people share content that they feel reflects well on them, or that they believe their specific audience will genuinely value. Not content that is clever in the abstract, or well-produced in the generic sense, or funny to the average person. Content that speaks to a specific community, in a language that community recognizes, about something that community genuinely cares about.
This is the opposite of content designed to appeal to everyone. Content designed to appeal to everyone appeals, reliably, to nobody enough to share. Content designed for a specific someone — a real community with real characteristics and real interests — gets shared within that community with an intensity that broad-appeal content never achieves. The audience that says “this is exactly for people like us” is the audience that shares. That’s not a viral strategy. It’s an honesty strategy. Which turns out to be more effective, and considerably less magical.
Just received a brief that says “we want this to go viral”? Visit our shop before responding. Some purchases require a deep breath first.
