The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 195: Derek Thompson - What Makes Something A Hit? (Hit Makers)

Episode Date: March 12, 2017

Episode 195: Derek Thompson - What Makes Something A Hit? (Hit Makers) Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show "Think of speechwriting like a music composer.  Use repetition and choruses." In This Episode, You Will Learn: What makes something a hit? Is there a formula?  No, there is not a formula... People think there is and that's a mistake Bottom line: "Distribution beats content" -- "This is an unsentimental book" There is power in distribution How did Simon Sinek's TED Talk go viral? It was shared by people with millions of followers on multiple platforms like Reddit Think: Who is my audience? Broadcast your content to the right audience Why do we always watch Dumber and Dumber and Shawshank Redemption? There is nostalgia in art We are always trying to recover existential love How did Bumble spread? Injected into mainstream consciousness through celebrity -- Start with one very attractive sorority and continue to repeat How did Facebook spread? Piggy backed off of other networks (Harvard) How Jon Favreau and President Barack Obama write speeches: They think like musicians Using choruses and repetition The best speeches connect with people where they are -- "The power of repetition in song is remarkable" How has Derek made his book a best-seller? Familiarity and repartition followed by surprise Familiar surprises throughout Great distribution "We don't like pure originality that much.  We like familiarity."  Continue Learning: Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKThomp Read: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 071: Nate Boyer - Green Beret, Texas Football, The NFL Episode 179: How To Sustain Excellence - The Best Answers From 178 Questions Episode 107: Simon Sinek – Leadership: It Starts With Why Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Derek Thompson on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell The Learning Leader Show is supported by FreshBooks: FreshBooks is offering a 30 day, unrestricted free trial to my listeners. To claim it, just go to FreshBooks.com/Learning and enter LEARNING LEADER in the "How Did You Hear About Us?" section.

We don't like pure originality that much. We like things that are sneakily familiar. We like new songs that sound a lot like older songs we've already decided that we like. We enjoy new movies that are sequels, adaptations, or reboots, or even original movies that, again, are sneakily familiar. We even like political essays or podcasts that take a subject area that we already know a lot about and advance it by only a little bit, by testing our capacity. for thinking, but not entirely breaking it.

Hey, and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. What an intelligent featured leader tonight. My guest is Derek Thompson, a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine, a weekly news analyst for NPRs here and now. Also, recent best-selling author of his book titled Hit Makers, the Science of Popularity and an Age of Distraction, named to Forbes 30 under 30 list in times 140 best.

Twitter feeds. Derek's really thought-provoking speaker. A few of the topics we got into. What makes something a hit? Followed by what was the key to Facebook's massive growth. Then how President Barack Obama and John Favro think of the speech writing process and how it relates to music. Ladies and gentlemen, I guarantee you will find this one interesting with Derek Thompson. All right, Derek. Thanks so much for being here on the The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here. I saw a tweet from former guest and one of the most interesting people I've ever spoken with,

Tim Urban, and message him then about the fact that there's this new book out called Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, and it's written by you. And I couldn't help, but immediately download it. I know I told you when we were emailing that it was really hard to put my Kindle down from reading this book. And so I wanted to take, I know we got 30 minutes here. I wanted to take some time to dive in immediately and learn why something becomes popular, why something becomes a hit.

Talk a little bit about viral as that's a big term and why either things do or do not go viral. So first of all, my question is, what makes something a hit? This is a great question. There is, I think, a over-literal answer and then a more interesting, complex answer. The literal answer is that a hit is, by definition, something that is extraordinarily successful and is significantly more successful than all of its comps in the peer group. And so it's interesting because sometimes I talk to people and they say, is there a formula? Derek, tell me the formula.

Formulas aren't really good for cultural markets because if there were a formula, everyone would learn it and they would make self-same products. And if everyone knew a formula and made similar products based off of it, by definition, none of them would be extraordinarily successful and none of them would be a hit. And you see this sort of throughout cultural history, people settling on what they think is a formula, and then there's just a lot of stuff that's the exact same, and so none of it is extremely successful. The seven-word thesis of the book is that familiarity beats originality and distribution beats content. And what that means is that I think there's a sentimental story of hits that says that innovation is, king and the best stuff automatically wins. And if something succeeds, that is proof that it was therefore the best. Quality is destiny. That's the sentimental story. This is an unsentimental

book. This is a book that uses, I hope, really interesting stories to animate serious scientific principles of psychology and sociology and network theory to explain how information actually becomes popular. And the truth is that we don't like pure originality that much. We like things that are sneakily familiar. We like new songs that sound a lot like older songs we've already decided that we like. We enjoy new movies that are sequels, adaptations, or reboots, or even original movies that, again, are sneakily familiar. We even like political essays or podcasts that take a subject area that we already know a lot about and advance it by only a little bit, testing our capacity for thinking, but not entirely breaking it. So that's what I mean

when I say familiarity beats originality. And we can get into some of the really interesting stories I talk about from across the cultural landscape there. But to touch on the second point really quickly, I think a lot of times producers of content want to think that quality is destiny. The best stuff is just self-distributing. It'll just go viral if it has the contagious elements. That's just not the case, unfortunately. What we've seen across cultural history is that it is the people who have the power of distribution that tend to dictate popularity. So if you have something, you love it, you want it to become popular, seek out the broadcasters, seek out the places where you know audience members and consumers are already arrayed and hit them where they already live.

So let me get to a few examples, Derek. Simon Cynix viral, I know you don't like that word, but viral TED Talk. It's the first one, his TEDx talk, Puget Sound, 30 plus million views, microphone breaks in the middle of it, really tiny audience. He's writing on a, there's not even a PowerPoint deck, he's just writing on paper. How did that become such a hit? Right. So I look at hits from the book world, 50 Shades of Gray. I look at them from the music world, rock around the clock, and even from the digital world.

How do online videos go big? And here's the interesting thing when you look at this issue of virality. I think that's gone viral, has become a default for that thing got big really quickly, and I don't know how. So we say, okay, it just went viral. It was probably just shared organically a lot, a lot, a lot, and that's why it got so big. But we know that there is another way that information spreads to many people at once. and we're familiar with it as a broadcast model.

So, for example, the Super Bowl, nobody said after watching the Super Bowl that a Super Bowl ad went viral, right? 115 million people were arrayed around the television screen at the exact same time watching that Super Bowl ad. So it didn't really go viral. It was broadcast to 110 million people at once.

So the question is, when information goes big on the Internet, does it spread furthest and widest, most dependably, just by organic sharing or by a handful of broadcast moments. And when data scientists have looked at this question, they've said, you know, when we study the information cascade of online viral videos, what we see is that their distribution looks a lot more like a broadcast. In short, not a lot of one-to-one moments, but rather a handful of one-to-one million moments. So, for example, a broadcast, a viral video, that you find on YouTube that say has, you know, one, two, three million viewers.

If you study the information cascade, you might realize that it was actually tweeted by Aston Coucher, Justin Bieber, featured on the homepage of Reddit and the Huffington Post, and included in a lot of broadcast moments. And I think that's what happens a lot of the time when a video so-called goes viral, is that it's actually been passed along a lot of broadcast platforms. So with someone like Simon Seneca, you know, I went on Facebook and I saw some, Some of his videos go really big. But you look at some of the people who are sharing this, and sometimes these videos hit the top

of Reddit, or they were shared by Facebook accounts with millions and millions of followers. These are broadcast moments. They're not purely social viral moments. And so I think we should be careful in the way that we describe how they became popular. So if somebody is looking for that formula that doesn't exist, they would say, based on what you just said, I need to get this in the hands of somebody who has millions of followers and hope that they share it. Yes, and something a little bit, that is absolutely true.

The next step would be, who is my audience for this particular piece of content, right? So if I make a funny web video, that's a different audience than if I write a political essay about Trump's macroeconomic plan. So what you want to do is to hit, to broadcast your content toward people who are obviously already inclined to be interested in it. In the last 50 years, we've seen that the power of broadcast has been democratized. That 50 years ago, broadcast power was only in the hands of a handful of people. It was in the hands of the radio stations, the television stations, the national newspapers.

But now you have people on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube celebrities that essentially have broadcast power, who are sometimes more influential for their particular demographic than the old gatekeepers. And so you have to look at them as well. You have to look at them as potential broadcasters, as people who make content go really, really big online, which we ultimately sometimes call viral. You write about the fact that you've seen the movie Dumb and Dumber about 100 times and it never seems to be redundant. I'm in the same boat there, Shalshank Redemption, other movies like that. Why do these movies specifically have so much staying power, have the ability for people to watch them over and over in their lines be quoted amongst friends constantly. How is it that these specific ones are able to do that?

Yeah, well, I think there's two things that are happening here. One thing that's happening is that these are movies that certainly I saw dumb and dumber when I was a bit younger for the first time. I was probably in, I don't know, middle school or something. And young people have what's called a sensitive period. We tend to sort of decide our favorite pieces of music between our teenage years and our 20s. We tend to decide our political ideologies between our

teenage years and our mid to late 20s. And I think this is really true that we have sensitive periods for all sorts of art and for movies as well. I have seen lots of, I'm 30 years old, I've seen lots of movies in the last few years whether it's moonlight or her that affected me.

But none have quite affected me so strongly as the one that I fell in love with when I was a teenager a little bit younger. Those are the movies that for some reason really burrowed their way into my brain and have created within them a kind of glossary by which I talk to my friends sometimes almost exclusively by referencing them. And in this way, the movie has become more than a movie. It's become a glossary of friendship. And so I think that a lot of us have these sort of experiences, particularly in our formative years, in our sensitive periods, in our pre-teen and teenage years. The second thing that's happening, though, and one of the beautiful

things about nostalgia in art is that nostalgia, when we go back to the same movie or the same song or even the same piece of painting, over and over and over, we're not just doing it, I think, to recreate that initial experience, to sort of hit that drug one more time to get the rush of emotion that people get from certain pieces of art. We're also trying to recover what psychologists have called existential understanding, which is to say that when I watch Dumb and Dumber at the age of 30,

and I remember what it's like to watch the movie when I was 15, I'm both experiencing the movie in the present at 30, remembering the movie at 15, and kind of measuring the distance in a way, remembering sort of how I've changed in the last 15 years. And the movie sort of performs the role

of like a time capsule that having been unearthed is freshly reacting with the oxygen and telling me something about myself. And so this, I think, is one of the other reasons why we love reconsuming art is because it allows for this sort of existential understanding. Also, I recently heard you talking about, for example, an app and how an app can spread and how we get people to download, specifically Bumble, created by a former worker from Tinder.

and can you share how she was able to make the app Bumble? This is probably people who are married might not know what Bumble is, but, or at least they probably shouldn't. But single people knowing how Bumble was able to start from somebody's idea to now be pretty popular. Yeah, so this is really interesting. To return to our conversation about virality, my thesis statement there is that the vast majority of stuff that we think went viral, that we think, became popular merely through organic sharing. In fact, was injected into sort of mainstream consciousness through a broadcast mechanism,

through a Twitter celebrity, through an Instagram celebrity, through a big YouTube page. But there's an interesting question, which is okay. If broadcast mechanisms are really important for making something become a huge hit, then how do some hit start when they need a thousand people a thousand consumers before they're useful to anyone.

So, for example, a dating app. A dating app is totally useless if there's only 100 people on it in the entire country and only like 13 people on it in your area code. Completely useless app. So the app needs a critical mass of consumers for it to be useful to the next marginal consumer.

So how do you do this? How do you sort of leapfrog your way to growth without a broadcasting strategy? And what Whitney Wolf did, Whitney Wolf, former working, she formerly worked in marketing at Tinder, and then she went to, she founded Bumble, which is essentially Tinder where women start the conversation. She would go to college campuses, and she would go to the most attractive sorority at that college campus, and she would give them a bunch of presents, and she would say, I'm begging you, please get on this app.

When you do, I'm going to walk right over to the most attractive fraternities place. I'm going to get that entire house on the app as well. And so you'll, you guys will have like, someone to play with, and then I'm going to do this throughout the entire campus. But first, she would lasso the entire most attractive sorority all at once, right? Like a single bowling pin, a bowling ball knocking over a bunch of pins. Then she'd go to the fraternity, and she would say, all right, guys, open up your phones, look at all these attractive women on this app. You have to download this app.

And then they would. And then she would take it to other sororities and other fraternities that were in this sort of macro network of the Greek community. and she would say, open up your phones, look at all the people who are on this app, you have to download it. And in this way, she would sort of leapfrog from sorority to fraternity, sorority, fraternity,

in order to create a critical mass of consumers on the app. So the interesting thing about this is that some people might say, oh my God, after this trip, and they look at Bumble's numbers, and they might say, God, Bumble went totally viral. But did it? Is the mechanism by which Bumble hit critical mass, really virality? It's not. What Whitney Wolf did, rather brilliantly, is piggyback off of existing offline networks

and digitize them to create a critical mass for a social network. In many ways, this is exactly what Facebook did to get started. If you recall, Facebook started at Harvard. It started at elite colleges in the Northeast and then spreading to the West Coast. It piggybacked off of networks that already existed. It digitized undergraduate communities in order to sort of jumpstart its popularity. So did it spread

like a virus? I mean, you know, not really. It really spread much more like a disease that's in the water and infects an entire community at once. And I think that that's an interesting thing to know for people who have a product, an

app or something, that they want to go viral is to understand that often that which we think has gone viral has actually become popular through entirely different mechanisms. So good content or a good product is simply not enough? It is important, but it's not sufficient. That's right. A lovely example of how it's insufficient and yet important comes to the music world in chapter one of the book. I talk about how when a song comes out, a label has a new wonderful song and they'll give it to a digital testing site. and the digital testing site, one of them is called Hit Predictor, the other one is called Sound Out, and these sites will play the song again and again for a couple hundred, a thousand people,

and that thousand people will give the song a certain rating between, say, zero and about a hundred. And if it crosses a certain threshold, say above an 80, then the song testing site will tell the radio stations and the labels, this song is a guaranteed hit if it has enough exposure, right? But for every 100 songs that has a rating over 80, only about five of them will actually become hits, because only about five of them will get enough radio exposure to enter the Billboard Hot 100. So for every 100 songs that are catchy enough to become hits, only about five of them will receive the necessary distribution power in order to actually become hits.

So what I say essentially by way of summarizing is that quality is a necessary but insufficient element for becoming a hit. I also have studied the art and science of speech writing probably heavily over the last couple of years since this podcast has started as I've gotten asked to get up on stage more often, Derek, and particularly because I want to do obviously a really good job. And so John Favro, not the actor or director, but John Favro, the speechwriter for President Barack Obama is somebody that I followed for years when I heard about this young guy who was hired as President Obama's chief speech writer. I was really interested in him and his process for writing speeches and the fact that he was so young and then experienced at it when he got the job. And now he has a big podcast and he's pretty popular himself.

And I noticed then when you wrote about John and President Obama's speech writing process, and I think a lot of people, regardless of your politics, could agree that President Obama, I think at least, regardless of politics, is a really incredible both writer as well as performer of the speeches that they have. Could you share some of the hit making behind the thought process of John Favreau and Barack Obama? Sure. I similarly really wanted to be a speechwriter when I was younger. I love speeches.

I don't know if you ever bought that William Sapphire book, lend me your ears, his sort of collection of speeches throughout history. But it's this huge volume. If you don't have it, I really highly recommend it. It's incredibly fun. And I consulted it all the time. So first, I was interested in talking to John Favreau because I, like you, was just sort of fascinated by, you know, his rise to power and Barack Obama's. And it's so interesting because Favreau used to work for John Kerry and his introduction to Barack Obama

was actually telling the then state senator, I believe, that he needed to cut a line from his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention because it was too similar to John Kerry. So the beautiful irony of this is that Barack Obama's chief speechwriter introduced himself to Barack Obama by essentially telling him to shut up in a polite way. But it's an amazing story of how they eventually realized that they thought about speechwriting in such a similar way as a lovely marriage of narrative and theory, the familiar and the surprising John told me

that he thinks of the best speeches is those that connect with people where they are, that sort of understand their audience from almost an anthropological perspective, like really intimately understand who they're talking to and their problems. And then just lifts them up just a little bit, just provides the right amount of aspiration and uplift that seems authentic and appropriate, but also really inspiring.

But the fascinating thing about how their story sort of fits into the book is that I arrive at this story in the middle of a chapter about musicology and the science of music and earworms. And what's so interesting about music is the power of repetition in song is just remarkable. There's even something called the speech to song effect whereby if you take a sentence and you take a little snippet of it and you start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again,

the brain starts to hear, and that the mere repetition of the speech stream clicks the brain into hearing what was formerly just sound as song. And obviously, if you think about repetition, the role that it plays in music, it's just absolutely massive, that you have repetition of rhythm creates the necessity for any sort of catchy music, that the catchiest part is the chorus, that the chorus appeased within the songs, and then we repeat songs, we put songs on and repeat, and we want to hear them over and over again. But what was most interesting is to hear that John and President Obama both thought of speech writing as music writing as well, that speech is that speech is, have to have choruses. They have to have themes they return to over and over again. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Donald Trump has done the very same thing, you know, make America great again, make America great again. And there's this amazing power of repetition and rhetoric,

so much so, in fact, that almost every ancient Greek rhetorical device is repetition. Anaphara is repetition at the beginning of a sentence. Winston Churchill, we shall fight them in the air, We shall fight them on the landing fields. There's repetition at the end of the sentence. Tricolon, Abraham Lincoln, government of the people, by the people, for the people. You have an ABBA structure, which in Greek is called antimetabaly. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

A. B, B, B.A. Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights, Hillary Clinton. And it's just remarkable when you step back and look and realize the entire architecture of political rhetoric for the last 2,000 years has been built upon musical principles of repetition. And that, I think, is not only interesting, but useful for any speechwriter to think, oh, if I want to make an idea catchy, I need to put it in A, B,BA, but also useful for audiences to sometimes separate the music from the substance and to understand, you know, hey, do I like that turn of phrase because it's musical? or do I like that turn of phrase because it's saying something I agree with? I think that's a further important question. I love it. Derek, really good. Now, so your book comes out, you know, hit makers, the science of popularity and an age of distraction.

And I know something that's important for a lot of writers is to be on some sort of list. Technically, maybe the New York Times bestseller list. And for me, with podcasting, it was to get on the top of iTunes. but bestseller list or the top of iTunes are, they're self-propagating, meaning the higher you rank, the more people see you, the higher you continue to rank, and on and on and on. So what is your strategy or did you have one for hitmakers to hit one of those lists so that it hopefully stays up there and sells a lot? What a great question.

Well, first of all, I'm happy to tell you that the Times List hasn't come out yet, but I did make the Washington Post first week list, which is lovely. I mean, let's, you know, it's impossible I'm supposed to write a book about hits and not, like, use some of the things that you're learning. Right. You know, I didn't want to overuse because a lot of, I think, like I just said about political rhetoric, a lot of the tricks for popularity are indifferent to morality. Let's just put it that way. And I personally am not indifferent to morality. I wanted to write something that was true.

I'd feel a little uncomfortable over suggesting being overly prescriptive. and self-helpy in my writing. So I didn't, you know, the book, I think, suggests self-help without offering a formula, which I think might have made it more popular, but also a lot less honest. But, you know, back to the thesis, familiarity and distribution. This is a book about hits. This is a book where almost every single story begins somewhere that people recognize. Why is the Impressionist canon, just a handful of painters? How did George Lucas write Star Wars? How was rock around the clock almost a flop? How did 50 shades of gray go quote unquote viral or did it really?

Where did the modern economic model of the entertainment business come from? I think that you have, I'm beginning with the familiar and then trying to surprise people a little bit. And this is one of the major themes from the book is what I call familiar surprises. I think what people are drawn to across the cultural landscape is that which is sneakily familiar. and I try to create moments of sneaky familiarity and moments of aha, I knew a little bit of that, but I didn't realize the whole picture again and again and again in the book.

I'm trying to design for that. And then finally, distribution overall. It's so fascinating that the book publishing industry is a fascinating industry, which does not control its own distribution very well. In the movie business, the movie comes out and a handful of movies come out every week, and you know where to go find them, right?

You just go to your Cineplex. But no one goes to penguin.com every Tuesday to figure out what books are coming out. So the book publishing industry, because there are so many titles, doesn't really control distribution as well as other industries. And as a result, the authors have to self-distribute. And what am I doing right now?

I am here on a podcast talking about my book, and then I'm going to some other podcasts and some other newspaper to talk about my book, I have to build my own distribution off of the channels that already exist. And I've tried to be as aggressive as possible in that regard, understanding that there is no 1960s NBC broadcast for the book publishing industry, no one place where everybody can find something. Instead, there are a lot of little broadcasts.

And the way that a book like this goes, quote-unquote, viral, if it's ever lucky enough to do so, is not to rely on consumers. to play the role of distributor exclusively, but to find places exactly like this podcast that serve as broadcast mechanisms to distribute for me. Perfect. Well, Derek, thank you so much for being here.

I know you've got to catch a flight, but to join me here on the holiday, it's been a lot of fun. As I said, it's very difficult to put the Kindle down when I'm reading your book. I meant it, and I would encourage people to get at the Hitmakers. Hitmakers is a science of populator and age of distraction is really good.

where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? They can check out my Twitter feed. D-K-Thomp, T-H-O-M-P is my Twitter handle. Or they could go to the Atlantic where I'm a senior editor and write about media and economics and all sorts of stuff. So go to the Atlantic and go to Twitter. Great. Thanks again, Derek. And absolutely I want to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man.

All right. Thanks so much, Ryan. All right. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to LearningLeadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show. Pump for our new sponsor this year, it's Fresh Books. The working world has changed. With the growth of the internet, there's never been more opportunities for this self-employed. To meet this end, FreshBooks is excited to announce the launch of an all-new version of their cloud accounting software. It's been redesigned from the ground up and custom-built for exactly the way you work. Get ready for the simplest way to be more productive, organized, and most importantly, get paid quickly. The all-new Fresh Books is not only easy to use, it's also packed full of powerful features. Like,

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