Platforms
One of the key parts of making something go viral is having an audience. You can find audiences in many diferent places, and you should try to find the appropriate audience to your chosen subject. The main websites that things go viral on are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Tumblr and then News websites pickup on them sometimes.

Content
I got in contact with a friend of mine who is coincidentally in viral marketing. She told me that it is important to

1. Be aware of current events and trends.
2. Be specific with content(in particularly on twitter). Being specific is what will interest the audience. If you talk about a broad range of things you can easily lose your audiences interest for good.
3. Be aware of what key words you use. Key words is what will make your content show up on peoples screens. If you use keywords of what people are searching frequently, your content will be seen by many.
4. Be aware of the first impression of your content. Many people who are browsing the internet or in the open world, will not read a large body of text or share it with friends. Using photos can 
5. Submit your content to Reddit. It is the homepage of the internet and there is an audience for anything you post there.
6. Don't be boring. Make sure you word your content to excite and intrigue the audience.

Yellow Journalism - Journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.

Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.

1. scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips
5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

The Onion is a parody news organisation that was founded in 1988. it is a website and printed newspaper. The onion reports on real stories sometimes, but changes them a lot to make them funny, or simply make up a lot of ridiculous stories which have been mistaken for real stories on multiple occasions.

The look and almost everything about the onion website and its tabloid seem like an actual news website, apart from the ridiculous content.

The onion website has a very similar look to that of the BBC news website below which I have spoken about here. If we were to create a blog that is similar to the onion we would probably go for a similar, professional look.

I used Reddit as a platform to discuss reading habits with other people. The questions you can ask have to be specific, but open ended, so that there can be a discussing, so I simply wrote 'why isn't reading popular?', to which I got a lot of responses. Some disagreed with me, but a few people gave me some intriguing answers which gave me a new perspective.

1. "I think some people don't want to use their imagination when reading, but would rather go see the movie instead where you don't have to much."
2. "Probably the same reason few kids ride bikes anymore: they're all to fixated on texting and video games to be interested in anything else."
3. "Other forms of entertainment require less mental effort and are more readily accessible. When is the last time you saw a commercial for a book? They don't exactly get good marketing compared to....well...anything else."
4. "It is, but people like to do many things at once...which really isn't possible when reading."

My group and I are not decided on what type of reading we plan to make people do more of, but by the sounds of it, getting people to read books would be very hard.

I also found some facts and statistics here about reading which we could possibly use to encourage people to read, depending on the route that we go down:

1. 14% of children in lower income homes rarely or never read books for pleasure.Parents are the most important reading role models for children and young people.
2. Only 1 in 5 parents easily find the opportunity to read to their children.
3. 10 to 16 year-olds who read for pleasure do better at school.
4.  46% of 16 to 24 year olds don't read for pleasure. 
5. 15% of the working age population in England (5.1m people) are at or below the level of literacy expected of an 11 year old. This figure was 16% (5.2 million people) in 2003.More people are at the lowest level of literacy than in 2003 - 1.7m compared to 1.1m.
6. Children who are read to every day at age three have a vocabulary at age five , nearly two months in advance to those that are not.
7. A child taken to the library on a monthly basis from ages three to five is two and a half months ahead an equivalent child at age five who did not visit the library so regularly

World Book Day takes place on March 6th. It's a campaign to try and encourage young people to buy books and read more. as you can see from the website here the branding is aimed at young children. It's bright and colourful and features very large, interesting type.

Target Audience: Children

Tone of Voice: Friendly

Method of Advertisements: Posters, Websites, Book stalls in Schools, TV adverts, Twitter, Facebook page

This is the about section on the website:

World Book Day is a celebration! It’s a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and (most importantly) it’s a celebration of reading. In fact, it’s the biggest celebration of its kind, designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and marked in over 100 countries all over the world.

This is the 17th year there’s been a World Book Day, and on 6th March 2014 children of all ages will come together to appreciate reading. Very loudly and very happily. The main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own. That’s why we will be sending schools (including those nurseries and secondary schools that have specially registered to participate), packs of Book Tokens and age-ranged World Book Day Resource Packs (age-ranged into Nursery/Pre-School, Primary and Secondary) full of ideas and activities, display material and more information about how to get involved in World Book Day.

Although we are not creating advertisements it is useful to look at interesting adverts that are put into the world. For example the BBC billboard below is a really unique eye catching way to show that they don't pick and choose what parts of the news story is seen. They show the whole story.

The same message has been shown by the guardian in this promotional viral advert which puts a twist on the very well known tale of the 3 little pigs.

The reason for this viral videos success is the fact that it is a well known story. Everyone knows exactly how it goes and doesn't question that it could be told from a diferent perspective. The way in which they have put the 3 pigs in a modern day society gives it comical value.

The tone of voice is very important when creating something with the intention of going viral. Below is the very popular viral campaign for metro which has features which sinister lyrics but played in the style of lullaby to give it a strange comical tone.

Our 'the sauce' campaign was to feature a similar tone to this, but swapped. Very ridiculer silly stories, which would be written as very serious news stories.

Creating Interest

To make something go viral we need to create something that will interest the audience to the extent that they are going to take photos of the design and tell their friends about it. Below are a few examples of guerrilla advertisements that have thought outside the box and make people look twice.

It would be hard for us to create something at such large scale as some of these adverts, but it is a mindset that we need to get in if we are to create an engaging campaign.

As research for the secret 7" brief I looked in the library for some inspiration and a look at the styles of illustration used for diferent bands. i found this book '1000 Music graphics' which I've found very useful.

These covers were designed by Sanna Annukka, and artist from Brighton. They are very flat, but the colour schemes and use of shapes make these very interesting to look at. They have an asian theme to theme to them which I don't believe suites the bands genre of music.

these were all designed by Dan Stiles, an illustrator who's work can be found here. The style looks very mono printed and looks as though it were inspired by the work of Saul Bass. They too, use a variety of complimentary colour schemes that really make the designs stand out. He has taken very literal approaches to the band or song names. For example for '50 Foot wave' he has depicted a had reaching out of the water as though he was pushed under by a wave. The scissor sisters design is also very literal and would definitely catch the eye of the audience and make them laugh.

these designs are a lot more random and rely on the randomness to attract the audience. My favourite designs so far have been the vector based artworks. They have a more modern vibe and have a fresh, new look which would appeal to a wide audience.

The Clashs 'London Calling' album cover is an iconic image as it completely sums up the genre of music. It expresses the complete madness and anarchy that surrounded the band. The album's front cover features a photograph of bassist Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision Bass against the stage at The Palladium in New York City on 21 September 1979. Pennie Smith, who photographed the band for the album, originally did not want the photograph to be used. She thought that it was too out of focus, but Strummer and graphic designer Ray Lowry thought it would make a good album cover. In 2002, Smith's photograph was named the best rock and roll photograph of all time by Q magazine, commenting that "it captures the ultimate rock'n'roll moment – total loss of control".

The Iconic 'Dark side of the moon' album cover is partially inspired by Pink Floyds use of many lights during live performances. The design is 'simple and bold' as requested from the band when deciding on a design for the cover. The design reflects the bands simplistic style.

This album cover is a great representation of the music that Everything everything play. The cover looks as though like a glitchy TV screen that has broken. Everything everythings songs are very jolty and sound quite broken and glitchy. Everything Everything singer Jonathan Higgs is quoted as saying: “We’re not really interested in copying certain genres or anything, so I guess you’d say it’s unpredictable and sort of surprising.”

Billy Talents album covers always feature strong, bold colours, often red, black and yellow, with a powerful image that represents their style of music.

The mysterious, epic style of Imagine Dragons music can be seen in their album cover that features a misty scene of a person standing on some god-like structures.

I have looked at the current album cover for the album which features 'Grounds for divorce' but I can't really get a sense of what it is trying to say if it is at all. All of elbows album covers feature some hand rendered styled drawing. This album features similar colours to those used in the music video for the song. Browns, blacks, and whites.

This album covers designer, 'Strom Thorgerson', said 'In thinking that the music was strong-minded yet lyrical persuaded us to think of material flapping in the wind like flags - the flags of a revolution. Not little flags or small bits of fabric, but enormous flags the size of a modest office block, which we affixed to a scaffold tower on top of a hill on a windy day. The sound of the undulating material was affecting, let alone the bizarre shapes. The actual cover used red and blue flags to represent the sexes'.

The cover is a very strong image and I believe gives a great visual interpretation of the type of music that is played by Biffy Clyro, which is a mixture of powerful, loud choruses, and calm, peaceful melodies. The loud, strong and powerful nature of their choruses is shown through the huge scale of the flags and the contrast between red and blue express the ongoing theme of good and evil throughout their songs.