Want to go viral? Don’t try too hard

Think of the coolest person you’ve ever met. Don’t know any cool people in real life? Sad, but okay. Instead, think of the coolest person you’ve ever seen in a movie or TV show. Got it? Good.

No matter who you answered (office replies varied from El Duderino from “The Big Lebowski” to Cher Horowitz from “Clueless,” proving that “cool” may have the most fluid definition in the history of humankind), chances are their coolness was effortless.

Trying too hard is not cool. In fact, it’s the opposite. Unfortunately, this is a lesson advertisers have been slow to learn, especially when it comes to Internet culture.

Executives who aren’t sure how to pronounce meme are aching for a viral video to take their advertising campaign to the next level. And in desperate pursuit of that goal, they pander. They pay a middle-aged man who still uses a Blackberry to approximate what he thinks teens on Facebook will respond to. It’s all very … uncool.

But there are also those who get it right. Case in point: Twentieth Century Fox’s recent partnership with Getty Images.

In order to promote their new Vince Vaughn comedy, “Unfinished Business,” the studio teamed up with Getty Images’ iStock to create a set of stock photos that will be instantly recognizable to every office drone (myself included) who has ever had to search Shutterstock for generic business-related images.

It’s an incredibly subtle form of advertising – a way for a major corporate entity to show its audience that it’s in on the joke, that it gets it, maaaaan. In short, it feels effortless. It feels cool. And unlike some desperate attempt at going viral that would leave my friends and I cringing, this is something we’d actually share with each other.

Yep, deep down I know that I’m essentially acting as an unpaid one-man advertising team for a huge company that just wants to take my money, but I don’t care. It works.

And while it’s untrue to say Twentieth Century Fox didn’t try too hard (after all, there were likely many people involved in coming up with this stunt), it doesn’t seem like it. So I won’t try too hard to fight it.