Internet Marketing expert Dr Brent Coker claims to have developed an algorithm that can predict which ad movies will go viral on YouTube. I don’t plan a career move to advertising but was nevertheless intrigued by the claim from a research methods & design perspective. Unfortunately, there is very little information available (yet?) and what information is available makes me a bit skeptical about the reliability of the conclusion. Still, Dr Coker’s approach might make for a nice discussion in the context of a Research Design course since it touches upon a question students can relate to, and raises various issues from operationalization to theory specification to theory testing. In short, according to Dr Coker, “there are four elements that need to be in place for a branded movie to become viral: (1) congruency, (2) emotive strength, (3) network-involvement ratio, and (4) paired meme synergy”. Congruency is the consistency of the video’s theme with brand knowledge. Disgust and fear, for example, imply powerful emotive strength. The network-involvement ratio refers to how relevant the message is to the seeded network. The last element ‘paired meme synergy’ means that certain memes are effective when paired with certain other memes. “For example, impromptu entertainment acts appeared to work when paired with ‘Eyes Surprise’. When paired with ‘bubblegum nostalgia’, the … pair doesn’t work. Anticipation works with Voyeur, but not on its own. And so forth.” As I said, there is not much information available on the research design, but from what I can gather, the predictive algorithm is based on an inductive approach: analyze movies that did go…
Research Design Matters