Creating Online Videos That Engage Viewers

The Holy Grail of modern online marketing is video content that “goes viral,” meaning that it captures an enormous number of views and leads audiences to share, comment, or click that they “like” a video. Advertisers, marketing consultants, and filmmakers have all ventured theories about what kind of content makes for a hit. The trouble is that the advice varies widely and is even contradictory.

To see if they could clarify some of the contradictions, Dante M. Pirouz, Allison R. Johnson, Matthew Thomson, and Raymond Pirouz of the Ivey Bu.....