Technology, multiplication and the reach of influence

Despacito, the Spanish music video by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, crossed 3 billion views in eight months on You Tube; there are seven and half billion people in this planet. Even two years back, there was nothing on internet that reached a billion views, so the speed of outreach itself is massively multiplying.

The reach is influenced first of all by the tendency of the herd to act in concert. Think of it that You Tube’s most viewed artists included the most from Spanish-Latino sections of acts-Ozuna, Maluma, Nicky Jam or J Balvin, all of them exceeded 1 billion views, which is a stratospheric number by all standards, but now dwarfed by Despacito.

But my short script is not on Despacito, but the power of multiplication that technology provides and the use of association that smart phones provide.

But Despacito has shown that transcending cultures, genres, languages and global branding could be done if certain elements of passion could be so ignited that the power of association together with the technology’s multiplicative ability could increase the reach and influence of a message or a product so easily.

Think of it Despacito never needed massive billboard ads, continuous roll up in media ads, including the social media. It just happened to move from country to country without any effort to promote it.

Self-promotion is therefore the new age reality, something that brands have to now grapple with. And this is like the many headed hydra that multiplies at alarming rates.

Think of a powerful brand and you will notice that it uses a mix of different ways to promote itself. But think of something that has the ability to self-promote without a dime being spent on it, you have it every day on the internet.-

That is the power of internet, but it needs certain elements to make associations.

The first of this is the association within a herd. If Spanish music did not associate through the You Tube as a medium, which must have taken several years to achieve the current breadth and depth, Despacito would have remained a smaller wonder, at best a Spanish or Latin American identity limited to the circles in one part of the globe.

The second is that technology, which in this case is the smart phone, allows associations to quickly touch your limited attention span; the intervention through the smart phone is very different from the casual acquaintances we were so used to.

The next and the most potent influence is the social herding that the social media has multiplied several times whenever something attention-worthy is up for display. This is what I call the association by sharing.

The world had almost every soft way of directing attention to something worth noticing or studying or enjoying, but smart phones have made it so easy to share almost anything so easily. This is further augmented by the simple things like “Likes” or with an emotional symbol like a “smile”.

How many years did Coca Cola take to reach 3 billion views, may be several decades. In times to come it would take days to reach that number, such is the power of association and influence that self-promotion allows through the use of technology.

Brands take note that this power to unleash almost anything from mundane ideas to products could actually be synchronized through associations of all kinds and the scale of reach could be enormous.

Political associations have followed suit in this age, far larger numbers are today swayed by the touch on the screen.

But for businesses that sell ideas, emotions or products like music or cinema or content that can be put on a smart phone, they better understand and reconfigure their business models. The old model is obsolete.

For all you know the highest grossed film will be from that remote corner who could give Hollywood or Bollywood the run for its money, just by its sheer ability to transcend barriers of all kinds using the current power of association that the smart phone provides.

Doing business through the smart phone is passe; associating large populations to a theme is where the big thinking is headed. If you have mastered the art of getting people hooked to something as a step one, no matter how valuable it is, the sheer number of association will take you to the next step in business, which could be really valuable.

Step one is more difficult, step two seems easy. It is just the other way, old world models spent all their hours on monetizing rater than multiplying reach and influence.

Let hundreds of Despacito bloom in your business.