Whose dress is it, anyway? Tumblr's? BuzzFeed's? Tailor Swift's? Roman Originals'? Caitlin McNeil's?
By now, it should be imminently clear that #TheDress belongs to no one - and to everyone. The British retailer that sells this particular product is already reporting a sales spike of 347%, so more of us are literally coming to own the dress now, but in the wake of this past weekend's viral tidal wave, it also belongs to the entire world in a figurative sense. In the age of virtually endless reposting, syndicating, repackaging, curating, embedding and peer-to-peer sharing, content proprietorship becomes meaningless.
People the world over are captivated by this optical illusion, this point of contention, this disambiguation of perspectives. We love the back story, the celebrity involvement, the semi-ironic banality of the whole thing, the brand bandwagoning, the meta-media commentary.
And we all want to get in on the action. As of Sunday morning, Playbuzz-powered polls asking audience members whether they see #WhiteAndGold or #BlackAndBlue had reached 1.9 million viewers in 126 countries.
Let's remember, though, that it's the content that provokes these powerful reactions - not the discovery channel or last touchpoint. When a message strikes a chord, it becomes too big for any person, company or territory to own - especially if it's published on a platform built for syndication and shares. With the right creative, anyone's message can become larger than life.
Patterns in Flux
Until recently, people turned to the media outlets of their choice - the content gatekeeper brands we trusted and identified with - when we wanted to know what stories were worthy of our attention. Now we're hardly loyal to publishers, instead following topics, algorithm-driven aggregators and the influential curators of our tribes.
Today we no longer merely consume items of content. We interact with it to unlock different aspects of it. We discuss it with its creators and our peers. And when we really feel connected to it, we act as its marketing agents and distributors, because telling the world that we endorse it helps us to feel connected to our own public identities. Doesn't matter if you see #WhiteAndGold or #BlackAndBlue - either way, you've learned and shared something new about yourself that seems to be important to a critical mass of humanity.
Today's digital publishers and content marketers are eager to get in on conversations like these, to position themselves as valuable hubs of information and conversation - especially when an issue as big as #TheDress, or the Oscars, or a power outage at the Super Bowl comes along.
Finding the Angle that Resonates
Slapping together an article page that sums up a story is easy. But when the story is already days old, and your audience already saw it countless times in their Facebook feeds, how do you publish content that still has value? "Me too" content doesn't cut it anymore, especially if you're trying your hand at some newsjacking, or trend bandwagoning, or hashtag riding - whatever you want to call it.
Finding your value proposition as a publication or a brand, though, is hardly specific to these situations. Organizations that really know their audiences and know how to publish content that resonates with the people who love them are organizations that can find resonant angles to any story.
In the cases of Spain's El País, Germany's Bild and Israel's Holes in the Net, tailoring #TheDress to their audiences was largely a matter of language use. For England's Pop Buzz, the solution was to embed a stack of compelling Tumblr community reactions to #TheDress. For Reader's Digest, hardly the meme-tracking crowd's favorite, a simple survey asking people what they saw was enough.
Distributed Interactivity for Relevant Engagement
For all of these publishers, the poll embed was a pivotal ingredient. It was the poll that empowered them to get readers interacting with the content, thereby allowing audience members to find and share a bit of themselves in the media experience.
In the mobile, digital, social age, a seemingly never-ending flow of conversation is taking place. For brands and publishers to stay relevant, success depends on the ability to participate and inspire reactions.