Never stop learning. I believe this desire is what makes people, organizations and brands great. As we’ve grown, our agency has been lucky to learn from amazing clients, production partners, industry leaders–and, of course, each other.

Sometime in the past year, one of the whiz kids from Red Square came up with the idea of putting on a recurring educational series that would be high on smarts and low on boring. So, we invented Red Tuesday. Held on the first Tuesday of each month, these agency-wide gatherings feature presenters who school us on industry trends, techniques and/or general coolness. The programs are catered (this seems to increase attendance, surprise surprise) and are always hyped by an appropriately clever poster.

In the past several months, we’ve heard from each of our departments as they’ve discussed processes and intricacies of their particular side of the business. We’ve also been privileged to have Michael McSunas speak to us about advertising law, everything from trademark infringement to the implications of social media. On tap today, we’ve got Ward Binns from AirTight Design teaching us how to “Pimp My Web.” And in the months ahead, we’ve got some pretty awesome programs planned, including improv training for our entire staff by a world-famous comedy troupe.

We’ll be posting updates on our mental cross-training here.

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For someone who writes a lot, I like numbers. Statistics was one of my favorite courses in school, and (contrary to what most kids say about classes) I actually apply stats to my everyday work.

This morning a blog post on the odds of a YouTube video “going viral” caught my attention and reminded me of the power of statistics. Noah Brier pointed out an article that appeared in Slate in which author Chris Wilson runs the numbers on YouTube videos and calculates the odds of any given video becoming a viral sensation:

“On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views–that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.”

This is good information for any advertiser who thinks “let’s do a viral video” or “let’s just put the commercial on YouTube and a million people will watch it.”

Viral is a result, not a tactic.

Aside from the statistics, take a minute and think about the most-viewed videos on YouTube. Some are odd. Some are offensive. Some feature news reporters stomping grapes, taking a nasty fall and making strange guttural noises. Some feature chimpanzees doing strange things. To achieve a “viral” result, this is territory you must be willing to tread.

Otherwise, more than likely, your video is going to be a statistic.

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