Please share widely?

What's your favorite word?

For me... it's probably "striking it rich." After all, I'm the type who constantly says things like, "I wonder if I'll ever win the lottery." As a kid, I genuinely believed oil, hot springs, or buried treasure might be found in our backyard. Even in advertising work, wouldn't it be great to strike it rich? Wouldn't it be exhilarating to achieve results that rival big campaigns with just a small investment? What might make that possible is the theme of this column: "viral spread."

The first time I saw my own work spreading on social media, I thought, "What an amazing phenomenon!" The very audience you aimed to reach becomes the media. It might sound harsh, but they're helping advertise for free. I can't help but fervently wish every time, "May my work spread!"

Unfortunately, however, diffusion cannot be controlled. Even if people who see an ad become media, they aren't just empty slots; they are "people who think for themselves." Unless you can spark within them the feeling of "I want to say something about this ad," they won't retweet or share it, and it won't spread widely. Fundamentally, "spread" is how we perceive the phenomenon from a bird's-eye view. Look closer, and it's the aggregate of how each individual responds to the ad's prompt. It's never a one-way process where the message is copied and multiplied. Instead, it's a two-way communication that spreads through repeated "dialogue" with them.

So how do you create this "dialogue"? One key point is that the creative itself shouldn't be too self-contained. It should leave room for interpretation, or rather, leave openings for people to engage. If you cram everything you want to say in tightly and finish there, the audience has nothing to react to. Think about when a sports commentator talks too much during a live broadcast. "Today's game saw the opposing team do XX, leading to a very XX situation, but as a player, didn't you feel XX while competing?" That leaves the interviewee with little to say beyond "...Yeah, I guess." Advertising is similar: leaving room for free thought and interpretation makes it easier for people to share their opinions and impressions.

When you're the sender, it's easy to get caught up in just thinking about how well you're speaking. But you should also speak in a way that makes it easy for the other person to respond. Rather than focusing on the phenomenon of diffusion as a whole, I think it's more important to properly look at one individual person. Among us copywriters, we often say, "Writing copy while picturing a specific person actually helps it reach more people." This might be the same idea.

 

This is a bit of a tangent, but I feel like even buzzwords – words that spread widely – are becoming more conversational, perhaps reflecting the SNS era. For example, "Now's the time!" was super easy to use because it paired perfectly with "So when are you gonna do it?" "Double payback!" also makes sense only if you've been wronged first. Retaliating without provocation just makes you a bully. "Je je je!" is also a phrase that only works after some kind of surprise. I've never actually seen anyone say "je je je" in real conversation, but it was definitely used a lot on Twitter. So, words that facilitate "dialogue" – not just spoken, but written too – became popular (spread).

When I create ads myself these days, I sometimes write copy while keeping SNS conversations in mind. I find people who reacted to the ad on Twitter, treat them as virtual targets, and think, "Alright, next I'll try to entertain this person" when crafting copy. I see their reactions and then choose the next copy based on that. It feels like I'm actually communicating, and it's pretty interesting.

Creating ads with a conversational mindset.

Well, coming from someone like me who hasn't talked to anyone today except the cashier at the supermarket... it might not be very convincing.