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| Photo: Thom Forbes |
But that’s okay. In the end, you’ll find yourself latching onto something that resonates and you’re sold. Which, probably not coincidentally, is how his business operates.
About seven years ago, fresh out of Notre Dame, Spartz started Chicago-based Dose, which aggregated content for Millennials. As his team got better at marrying the science of testing and algorithms with the art of human judgment and creativity, Dose transformed into a site publishing strictly original stories. It garners more than 50-million unique visitors a month.
More recently, Dose is taking what it has learned about predictive, data-driven tech to the worlds of brand marketers and Hollywood studios so that they, too, can quickly give social content that’s getting the most attention its best shot at going viral.
“The way I think about it is, the old school model is basically ‘create and pray,’” Spartz says. “Create content; pray that it works. Our model is ‘create and optimize and pray.’ Still to pray. There’s still a lot of guesswork involved. But what we’re aiming to do is to minimize [it].”
The company does so with a three-step process named after three innovators from the Age of Enlightenment: Johannes Kepler, the astronomer, Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and Charles Darwin, the naturalist. Here’s a quick summary: The Kepler stage is creative pre-testing of your ideas. The Mendel stage is creation and optimization of the ones that show promise. Darwin is distribution.
“It’s a natural selection, survival-of-the-fittest process, where we basically have all these different versions of the content competing with each other, just like in the wild,” Spartz. “We find one piece of content that resonates much more, and then that is the one that we really focus on distributing.”
It’s time to bring out one of those analogies.
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Source: MediaPost Communications
