Actress and musician Zooey Deschanel has been plastered on the side of London buses for the last month or so to promote her latest tv program New Girl.  No doubt with that in mind, Channel 4 broadcast the movie 500 Days of Summer last night, where she stars alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  One suspects that Channel 4 were hoping to entice a new army of fans to New Girl by giving them a taste of Deschanel in movie form.

Of course the marketers are probably unaware of some Harvard research recently suggesting that we tend to look for things we already like, so people will have generally watched the movie last night that were already familiar with it in some way, and if they're already familiar with it then the chances are they'll know about New Girl already and efforts will be wasted.

That aside however, the movie provides an interesting lesson in the importance of luck.  The central theme of the film is that fate and all that does not exist and that much of what we experience in life is down to little more than luck.  These random paths we all take make making something go viral with any degree of certainty is really not something you can promise.

This didn't stop AdAge awarding Wieldon & Kennedy as their top viral agency of 2011 a few weeks ago.  They were the agency behind the new Old Spice Guy campaign.  Awards are obviously granted to people or companies that achieve tremendous success.  To people that have performed significantly above the average.  It's my belief that such is the complex nature of society, its memes and their viral spread that it's simply not possible for any company to have mastered the trick of getting things to spread each and every time.  Indeed I believe that achieving viral success is as much down to luck as it is to skill and talent.  I would like to present to you the concept of regression.

Regression to the mean

Francis Galton first formalised the concept of regression to the mean back in the 19th century.  It basically suggests that if something is extremely good (or bad) in the first instance, next time round it will be worse as it gravitates towards the average.  So it's essentially saying that whilst talent plays a part, luck or chance is an equal bedfellow, so if someone does significantly better than the average, the chances are that they've simply had a lot of luck rather than a lot more talent than the rest.  Therefore their next efforts, minus this dollop of luck, will be quite a bit worse than expected.

So with that in mind, one would expect Wieldon & Kennedy to not enjoy the same sort of success in 2012, as the luck they enjoyed in 2011 runs out and they gravitate back towards the pack.