Penn and Teller are the greatest magicians in the world who do death defying stunts, fantasmagoric sleights of hand, and witty banter in their Las Vegas show, on their long running TV series “Bullshit” and in a series of books, blogs, magazine articles, and ‘casts (both pod- and vlod-).  In reading one of their books I came across a fascinating rule they use to determine whether or not to do a trick…it is the rule of NPD: No Permanent Damage.

The basics of the rule are like this: when designing one of their magic tricks, they may do things that hurt, that make them uncomfortable, or that just plain suck; wearing a straightjacket while upside down in a tank of water, for example. But if everything goes wrong, a stagehand comes out with an axe, smashes the tank, water goes everywhere and Penn and Teller get embarassed.  No Permanent Damage.  Burning the roof of your mouth hurts.  But will you be scarred for the rest of your life?  No.  No permanent damage.

I’m reminded of this rule everytime someone asks me:
“Do you think this will go viral?”

It’s incredibly difficult for professionally produced video to “go viral”.  There’s a number of factors here, but the main one was put forth by the inimitable Scott Rhodie who said:  “most corporate video is crap“.

“Going viral” is both the brass ring for any online media (how great would it be to just make something and let other people do the work of distributing it?), and an impossible thing to create.  Going Viral requires perfect timing, external circumstances, and a little bit of magic in addition to  creating media that is intimate, compelling and sharable.  But the professionally produced media that have gone viral (for example, the Old Spice “I’m On A Horse” commercials, or The Subservient Chicken) have one thing in common…Balls.

Here’s the thing…most advertisers, most media that is created with the notion of selling something, is risk averse.  We worry about offending people.  We worry about spending a lot of money on something without a return.  We worry that we’ll get letters.  Old Spice did a brave(-ish) thing by putting out an ad that was sexy, funny, and patently ridiculous.  The abstract nature of it was brave.  Subservient Chicken was similarly weird, and a little bit naughty.  There was an element of bravery to putting out these campaigns, and it paid off with people sharing them.

There is, for the moment, an element of “Can you believe a big company is doing something that’s actually…cool?”  which adds to the sharability, but the chief factor here is bravery. Sure, the ads might get letters (Subservient Chicken was slightly controversial), but in an ad world of big dollars, a little bit of naughtiness (and the balls to put it out there) can go a long way.

So, when imagining how to reach people, there’s an additional question to ask: will there be permanent damage?  When you’re charged with creating something that will compete with captured moments from real life, once-in-a-lifetime miracles, and the capricious anarchy that is having children, pushing the boundaries is a necessary consideration.

Besides…what’s the worst that could happen?