A new framework for winning global attention – with ideas that are Visual, Amusing, Simple, Timely, True and Transcultural

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After 30 years of winning brands global attention with quirky ideas, I’ve concluded that you don’t need big ideas to do so; you need VASTTT ones.

VASTTT (pronounced like “vast”) ideas are the following six things:

• Visual
• Amusing
• Simple
• Timely
• True
• Transcultural

Ideas that win global attention tend to have at least three or four of these six elements, but more they have, the better their odds of going global.

Let me now say more about each of them.

 

• VISUAL – makes a good picture/image and/or video

V is for visual. But it could also be for video. We live in an age of still images and increasingly of moving ones.

In our ever more visual age, we need visual ideas that can yield a good picture or image, and preferably also a good video.

In our ever more globalised world, video has become the shared language of the Internet, the world’s lingua franca.

Back in his 2014 book on creativity, John Hegarty, the famed British ad creative, explained this trend as follows:

“There’s no question about it. We live in a visual culture increasingly dominated by screens. From your smart TV to your iPhone to your iPad, we’re seeing more but reading less. All courtesy of digital technology. With so many screens and so much information out there, we’ve had to find a way of absorbing it more effectively. Hence, the value of visual language has increased, even as the influence of the written word has decreased.” 

We are a visual species. We process images faster than words and remember them longer. Pictures stick, while words fade. Pictures travel, while words struggle. A picture, as the saying goes, is worth a thousand words.

Since we were visual animals, living by visual cues, long before we used verbal ones, let alone written ones, this tilt toward a more visual culture is taking us back to the future and our evolutionary roots.

We are not just all looking and watching more but reading ever less. We are, suggest the data, on our way to becoming a post-literate society. (It’s almost hard to believe that you’re reading this now.)

Are we reverting to ancestral type and the age of cave paintings and pictographs (the Stone Age ancestor of emojis), or undergoing a new stage of evolution? “We‘re evolving from social primates into screen mammals,” the British psychologist Dr Iain Smith told The New York Post in 2025.

Our world is not only becoming ever more visual (again), but also, in our borderless online era, ever more international and global. The latter makes it more visual still, since images and moving images are a global language while words are not.

We’re not just a visual species but also a storytelling species. We communicate by images and stories. Ours is the age of visual storytelling.

A striking image or video is not just the best but often the only way to “stop the scroll”. If a media pitch doesn’t include compelling images, it increasingly has no hope. No picture, no chance.

This is true not just for traditional or earned media but even more for social media – where many consume most of their news – to the point where images can seem all that matters.

Back in the 1990s, when social media did not exist, the Internet itself was barely a thing, and I was still working as a journalist, I created a stunt to promote the launch of a new museum magazine of which I was the editor.

We declared that we didn’t just write about museums but also knew how to run one. We launched the Smallest Museum in the World, housed in a London phone box and opened (at least for one day) on Covent Garden Piazza in central London. We recruited the tallest man in Britain, who I seem to recall was seven feet, eight inches, to open it, while admitting that the museum’s only design flaw was that having any staff left no room for any visitors at all.

It was profoundly silly but also superbly visual. TV crews from every continent, bar Antarctica, turned up to cover it, while BBC TV ran coverage throughout the day.

Over 20 years later, the same principle worked again, when I produced Baa Baa Land, an eight-hour slow-mo movie of sheep standing in a field, marketed as “the dullest movie ever made” and “ultimate insomnia cure” on behalf of Calm, the sleep and meditation app.

The story went viral globally, everywhere from Bulgaria to Kazakhstan – not once but twice, both times with the help of striking images.

The first time was when we announced the movie, with the help of a trailer and a brilliant movie poster in the same style as La La Land, not long after all the hype and acclaim for the latter. But instead of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling on the poster, we had two great-looking and charismatic sheep canoodling front and centre. All the coverage led with the stunning poster.

Such was the global success of the movie’s announcement that a couple of months later we came back for more attention and staged the movie’s red-carpet world premiere at the Prince Charles cinema in central London, complete with sheep in tuxedos and evening gowns, walking the red carpet and placing their hoofprints in “cement” (in fact, trays of soft mud) for the benefit of TV crews from the world’s leading global news agencies, which shared the images around the world.

No sheep were harmed, as they say, or consulted, on either occasion, but eye-catching images delivered global attention on both.

In Perfection, his 2022 novel about the lives of international young creatives living their best lives in contemporary Berlin, Vincenzo Latronico writes of his protagonists:

“They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them. Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after the other, beneath their fingertips”

“It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel-hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people. But really, it wasn’t like anything else, because it was new.”

The even more striking and recent trend is the rise of short-form video. Some 80% of content consumed on Facebook was video, 90% on Instagram and, of course, 100% on TikTok and YouTube, as of late last year but the percentages are likely even higher now.

“What’s the biggest trend of the last 12 months?” asked the Anglo-Australian entrepreneur Daniel Priestley in May 2026. “Most people would answer that it’s AI.” But there’s one trend, he argued, that’s way bigger: the short-form video boom.

“A year ago, the number of short videos being watched per day was 70 billion,” said Priestley. “12 months later, we’re now at 500 billion. On average, we’re now watching 1.5 hours of short-form videos per day. That’s where human attention has moved.

But video has been outperforming still images for longer than just the last year or so.

In his 2024 book, The Guide to Going Viral: The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media, the digital strategist Brendan Kane, states:

“We emphasize video because it generally performs better with the social media algorithms due to its higher retention rate compared to other formats. In other words, videos typically keep viewers engaged in ways that photos and text simply cannot match, increasing both engagement and the time spent on the platform, which are key goals for social media companies.”

Back in 2011, Marc Andreesen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder, declared that “software is eating the world”.

If so, short-form video is now devouring it.

 

• AMUSING – ideas that are funny, make ’em smile, if not laugh

What goes viral? Not facts but emotions.

The best-known online emotion is rage. Promoting rage, it can sometimes seem, is the business model of social media, while rage is the reserve currency of the attention economy. Hence the terms “Rage to engage” and “rage-bait” (content designed to provoke rage), the Oxford University Press’s 2025 “Word of the Year”.

Instead of “A” for “Amusing”, I could then have made the second letter in my formula an “E” for “Emotional”. But that would have changed my acronym from “VASTTT” to “VESTTT”, which doesn’t sound exactly cool.

The reasons I didn’t opt to do so include that my go-to emotion is amusement or, even better, amusement and delight. My own aim is to generate ideas that make people smile or laugh – that they’ll share because they think that others will find them amusing too.

As well as being my personal preference, the other reason for preferring amusement to rage is that the data show that the one thing that most, if not almost all, ideas that go most viral have in common is that they are funny and make people smile or laugh.

In a 2013 blog post titled, Why Content Goes Viral: The Theory and the Proof, the SEO software business, Moz declared that “content that is truly and broadly viral is almost always funny.” It quoted a 2006 study titled From Subservient Chickens to Brawny Men: A Comparison of Viral Advertising to Television Advertising that: “Humor was employed at near unanimous levels for all viral advertisements. Consequently, this study identified humor as the universal appeal for making content viral.”

Many or most of the ideas that go most viral are like jokes. They aren’t just like jokes; they are jokes. They use the same techniques as jokes and have the same structures. In-person stunts are often just staged jokes – little pieces of comic theatre staged for the cameras.

The ideas that win most global attention are, you might say, global jokes.

When Jay-Z announced, with more than a hint of self-importance, that he was dropping the hyphen that had joined the two parts of his name for 19 loyal years, I felt sorry for the jilted hyphen. On behalf of both the hyphen and my client, Craigslist, we posted a personal ad in the Men Seeking Women section of Craigslist Manhattan titled, “Single Black Hyphen seeks understanding apostrophe – 19”.

The ad read as if posted by the hyphen itself, identifying as a “SBH (Single Black Hyphen), looking for love”. It explained: “A little about me. I’ve just ended a long relationship. In fact, I was dumped… after 19 years – by someone I felt part of and thought I could trust. He used to say, ‘You complete me’…”

The story went viral because it was funny, and got international attention thanks to Jay-Z’s global fame.

Likewise, the Smallest Museum in the World and Baa Baa Land, the dullest movie ever made, described above, both owed much of their success to their humour value. Both were ideas extended to the point of absurdity and amusement.

Amusing ideas that go viral often involve parody, spoofs, satire or memes – or just a twist or element of surprise that generates humour.

What “traditionally” went viral on Facebook was content that generated rage, anger or fear. Facebook still has vast reach but also increasingly has the status of “legacy” social media – or, at least, the one used by older demographics.

What goes viral on TikTok is content that entertains, surprises and delights. Humor is not the only way to entertain such users, but it’s among the most effective.

The main reasons that people used Instagram were once inspiration and product discovery. But the main reason they use it now, according to Instagram itself, is for entertainment.

Other marketing thinkers, from the pre-Internet age, came to similar conclusions about the power and value of humour in marketing:

“Make your reader smile, and you’ve built a bridge of connection,” wrote Robert Collier, the bestselling author and copywriter in the first half of the last century. “Make them laugh, and you’ve paved a path to conversion.”

David Ogilvy, the iconic ad man from the second half of the last century, advised in a similar vein that “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”)

PR has sometimes been slower than advertising to grasp this insight and leverage it effectively – but many or most of the best PR and guerrilla marketing ideas do.

 

SIMPLE – communicates in a nanosecond

Simplicity is the key to genius and brilliance.

Simplicity has always been the key both to great art and ideas and to successful communication, but never more so than in our own age of shrinking attention spans, information overload and constant blizzard of messages and distractions.

Indeed, the more complex and overwhelming the world becomes, the simpler ideas must become – able to communicate in a nanosecond.

Now more than ever, the best ideas must be HUGLY simple – ones our audience can grasp in an instant.

Our brains filter out complexity and crave simplicity and clarity, to save both time and energy. This is why simple messages stick, while complex ones fade, assuming they registered in the first place.

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance,” Bruce Lee, the martial arts star, used to declare back in the 1960s. The German architect, Heinrich Tessenow, wrote in 1916, “The simple is not always best, but the best is always simple.”

“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way,” said Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the American poet, novelist and short story writer. No less than Leonardo da Vinci once said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

The difference between highly creative ideas and ordinary ones, wrote the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his famous 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, “is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony.”

More relevant to modern marketing, ad man John Hegarty wrote in his 2014 book, Hegarty on Creativity: “Whatever you’re creating, simplicity is the ultimate goal. The power of reduction, as we say in advertising, means taking a complete thought and reducing it down to a simple, powerful message.”

(A good way to test whether an idea is simple enough is to try and communicate it in an arresting headline, an enticing email subject line and/or the opening line or hook of a social media post. If you can’t do so in a snappy, grabby headline or hook, it may not be simple enough to work.)

The world’s first Testicle Cookbook: Cooking with Balls, which I persuaded a digital publishing client called Yudu.com to commission from one of Serbia’s leading testicle chefs, passed the simplicity test with ease.

Everyone in every country and culture got the idea in the space of two words, “Testicle Cookbook”, while men and women enjoyed it for different reasons. A women’s group in California used it to host what it called “the first feminist Thanksgiving dinner”, with every course using a recipe from the new cookbook.

The job ad I placed for the world’s first “Emoji Translator”, on behalf of a London translation firm, was maybe even simpler. It required no explanation or tagline and went viral globally beyond the wildest expectations of all involved.

 

• TIMELY – and/or Topical or Trending

Media are looking for answers to at least two questions:

• “So what?” (Who cares? Why does it matter?), and
• “Why now?”

The better your answers to these questions, the better your odds of it landing. A timely idea will tend to outperform a generic or evergreen one.

The most successful ideas, therefore, tend to be timely, topical or trending.

They can be timely in different ways – such as, say, by linking to something in the calendar, like Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve or a big anniversary.

They can also be timely because they either anticipate or respond to something in the news, or else because they chime with something in the zeitgeist and what’s trending and current.

Indeed, they can be timely in more than one way at once. I commissioned a recent survey, for example, which found that Americans would rather spend New Year’s Eve watching Netflix or scrolling TikTok than at a party with friends. This was topical not just due to the hook of New Year’s Eve but also because it reflected an important social trend.

Almost two decades earlier, I used the topical peg of the 2006 World Cup to invent with others the world’s first international language for football (soccer) and publish a book on the site of my client, the self-publishing platform Lulu.com, called Socceranto: Birth of a Language.  

The story circled the globe, with the help of everyone from Reuters to the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, China’s People’s Daily and many others – and was one of several stories that helped Lulu grow sevenfold in 18 months.  

Flash forward 20 years to the 2026 World Cup, and I admired another fun World Cup idea that won global attention when Adidas unveiled a range of World Cup kits for dogs. Launched in the run-up to the latest World Cup – and nothing to do with me – it was not only timely but was also visual, amusing, simple and utterly transcultural.

“Ex-terminator”, the AI tool that I persuaded Photoroom, the AI photo-editing app, to build, allowed users to erase images of their ex from old photos. It resonated and won international attention, not just because people understood the need and found the idea amusing but also because it landed at a time when AI tools were trending, if not becoming a cultural obsession. In short, because the idea was timely.

Some ideas get less attention than you hope, while others get more. One idea that got way more than I expected was the photo calendar I got my self-publishing client, Lulu.com, to create of Sam, undefeated three-time winner of the coveted “World’s Ugliest Dog” title.

Everyone in every country understood the idea of an ugly dog and loved the pictures of Sam’s world-beating ugliness. But what landed the story on the front page of Yahoo! News, at the time the web’s single most visited page, and crashed Lulu’s website from the resulting traffic was Sam’s death from heart failure shortly after the calendar’s publication.

This was timely for us, if less so for Sam, but added the magic ingredient of timeliness to his world-beating looks and turbo-charged the story to unexpected heights.

Not every idea has to be timely, topical or trending, but almost any idea stands a better chance of success if it is.

 

• TRUE – expresses a truth

The truth is the active or magic ingredient of any good idea – the X factor or secret sauce.

When an idea “resonates”, as Americans put it, or “strikes a chord”, as the British do, it is because it strikes a chord of truth.

“At the foundation of any great idea is the truth, the most powerful force in creativity”, writes John Hegarty, the British ad guru, in his 2014 book, Hegarty on Creativity. “… whether you’re writing, painting, acting, directing, or designing, the truth simply expressed is the difference between that piece of work being meaningful or meaningless.”

Just as there are different ways of being timely, so there are also different kinds of truth – ranging from literal or historical truth, to emotional, artistic or even fictional truth.

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth”, the French Algerian writer Albert Camus is reputed to have said (though the line does not in fact appear in his verified writings and so, in that sense, may not be true). 

The jacket of the 2026 book Departure(s), by the British writer Julian Barnes, states that “it is a work of fiction, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true”. (It’s a hybrid of fact and fiction).

The best truths are relatable ones, which we relate to because they prompt the reaction, “That’s so true”.

Such relatable truths are, for example, the basis of observational humour and the comedy of recognition. “The absolute truth”, said Carl Reiner, the great American comedian, writer and director, “is the thing that makes people laugh”.

We laugh at something because, at some level or other, it’s true.

The world’s first Testicle Cookbook: Cooking with Balls rang true because people really do eat testicles, and, in many countries, including Serbia, home of its author, they are a national delicacy.

The world’s proudest grandma, who decorated her North Carolina living room with wallpaper, curtains, pillows and tablecloths printed with photographs of her grandchildren, courtesy of my client, Spoonflower, may have gone farther than most, but it won international coverage, because we all know the truth of grandmotherly pride, sometimes taken to extremes.

The first call centre with live hold music and an in situ string quartet playing such hold music classics as The Four Seasons by Vivaldi and Simply the Best by Tina Turner may have been a flight of fancy, but it won global attention for my startup client, because we all related to the truth and shared frustration of listening to canned hold music when we could be doing something better.

 

• TRANSCULTURAL – ideas that transcend cultures

The final T stands for “transcultural”, since the best global ideas are ones that transcend cultures and geographies and don’t need local adaptation.

I coined the word to mean much the same as “cross-cultural” or “universal”. I want it also to have connotations of global, international, tribeless and transnational – in short, to describe things that straddle nations and continents and at least approximate to being human universals.

Perhaps nothing is completely cross-cultural, since every culture brings its own lens and language, but things that are broadly transcultural include, for example, animals, food, nature, the human body and its parts.

Some buildings and landmarks, ranging from the Statue of Liberty to the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China, are also global icons and count in this context as transcultural.

So are some artworks like the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David and Munch’s The Scream. The same goes for historical figures, ranging from Einstein to Shakespeare, Hitler to Churchill, Gandhi to Tutankhamun. And for cultural icons like Superman, Marilyn Monroe, James Bond and Harry Potter.

Some celebrities and leaders these days are also global icons. They include the Pope, the U.S. President (none more so than Donald Trump), sporting celebrities like Lionel Messi, showbusiness ones like Taylor Swift and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and some modern royals, like the late Queen Elizabeth II.

The single most global sport these days is football or soccer, and the single most global event is the men’s football (soccer) World Cup, followed by the Olympics some way behind.

The world’s first Testicle Cookbook: Cooking with Balls required no translation to resonate globally because every country has citizens with testicles, knows what a cookbook is, and, well, knows what food is.

The world’s first bedtime story generated by AI (long before the birth of ChatGPT), and first new Brothers Grimm story in 200 years, won international attention for my client Calm, since everyone knows what a bedtime story and the Brothers Grimm are the world’s – or, at least, the Western world’s – most famous compilers of them.

A lot of stories that go global involve animals, like, say, the aforementioned sheep stars of Calm’s eight-hour slow-motion epic, Baa Baa Land; the photo-calendar of Sam, the world’s ugliest dog; or the fellow canines recruited by Adidas to leverage the timeliness and of the 2026 World Cup, the world’s most transcultural sporting event, and model their new range of World Cup football kits for dogs.

Another story that paired timeliness with global name recognition was when I used the 500^th anniversary of Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David to help launch a London Pilates studio.

We had the studio’s head teacher point out that far from being the epitome of male physical perfection, the David portrayed by Michelangelo would have been a physical wreck, with poor posture, a bad back, weak ankles and all the flexibility of a 500-year-old stone statue. The story not just made the front page of The Times in London but, with the help of global news agencies, Reuters and AFP, plus David’s global fanbase, went round the world.

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Putting VASTTT to work

Not every idea that aspires to win global attention needs to have all six elements of my VASTTT framework – but the more of them it does, the better its chances of generating global buzz.

Before you pitch an idea or ask a client to greenlight it, use my simple checklist and ask: is it Visual? Do you think it’s Amusing? Is it Simple enough to grasp in an instant? Is it also Timely, True and sufficiently Transcultural to cross borders without translation?

Even if it’s not all these things but just, say, three or four of them, it might still have a decent shot of winning global attention, without the need for a multi-million-dollar global budget.