When clicks count

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This article was published 17/09/2016 (3388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the morning Meg Athavale went viral, she shuffled through security at the Winnipeg airport. She shouldered her bag and flashed a boarding pass for the afternoon flight to Toronto. It was almost noon on July 31, and everything was normal.

Within minutes, the future of Athavale’s business would change. She just didn’t know that part yet.

In fact, as she walked to the gate, the CEO of Lumo Interactive felt deflated. At her company’s McDermot Avenue office that week, her team had made a heart-wrenching decision. Together, they realized it was time to let go of their founding vision.

For three years, Lumo staff had poured their hearts into the Lumo Play, a projector that could transform any floor into an interactive wonderland. They had fine-tuned its software, and developed dozens of bright and kid-friendly games.

Athavale believed deeply in the idea, and she wasn’t alone. The concept had attracted a fervent fan base, many of them parents of kids with autism. In Lumo Play, they saw a device that could help their children connect with the world around them.

In 2015, a crowdfunding campaign raised US$98,866 to support the toy’s development. Buoyed by the support, Athavale bounced around the world looking to make it happen. She met with manufacturers in China and toy giants in Los Angeles.

Yet by the turn of 2016, the next step was still out of reach. Lumo’s team started to focus on making interactive installations for companies such as McDonald’s; Athavale relocated to Toronto, to stay close to a growing stable of corporate clients.

Now, she realized, the dream of Lumo Play might be ending. In Winnipeg that week, the team decided to give it a few more months; then they would start refunding all the supporters who had given cash to the crowdfunding campaign.

“It felt like we were stepping backwards,” Athavale said. “All the work we put in to generate a revenue stream from the commercial side was meant to allow us to launch to consumers. We were kind of giving up on that. It felt really bad.”

That is what Athavale was thinking about at the airport, when her phone started buzzing. She waited for it to stop, but it kept quivering, convulsing with the shock of incoming messages. There were hundreds at first; then there were thousands.

Confused, Athavale thumbed through her phone. She found the culprit in an application called Slack, which the Lumo team used to chat. Suddenly, it had become so seized by incoming message notifications it was almost unusable.

The app, Athavale remembered, also dinged whenever anyone signed up for the Lumo Interactive newsletter. Maybe it was one of the guys back in the office playing a prank, she thought. Maybe it was a friendly rival having a laugh.

So she checked the traffic data from Lumo’s website. There, she found another clue: visitors to the site weren’t “bouncing,” she said. In other words, they were sticking around to read about the company.

Athavale’s eyebrows shot up.

An automated prank program would just sign up for the newsletter and leave the site, she knew. It wouldn’t browse around. For some reason and out of the blue, more than 100,000 people from across the globe were clamouring to learn about Lumo Play.

In her seat now, Athavale frantically flipped through her messages. As the plane prepared for takeoff, she hid her phone from the flight attendant, trying to squeeze out a few more moments to figure out what had happened.

Suddenly, Lumo Play wasn’t on life support anymore, though that hadn’t sunk in yet.

“By the time the plane took off, I knew it wasn’t a joke,” she said. “Then I started seriously thinking, ‘How am I going to tell these people the project is over?’”

At nearly the same time and almost 2,500 kilometres away, Melissa Hardee opened Facebook, and clicked on a jaunty notification bubble. A friend of hers had shared a video, posted by a parenting blog called Fatherly, about a new children’s projector.

Right away, Hardee was curious. The 64-year-old grandmother from San Antonio, Texas, had searched “from here to the moon” for new toys for her two grandkids, she said, so she loaded up the video and let it play. What she saw blew her away.

There were games, glowing to life right on a floor. Kids dipped their toes into rippling digital streams, or kicked projected air hockey pucks with their feet. The video, originally made by Winnipeg’s Parachute Media Lab, showed Lumo Play at its best.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Hardee said, with a peal of big Texas laughter. “I’ve never seen nothing like that. Children love these computer games, but they’re getting so they’re not active at all. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is perfect at getting them up and moving, and it would be fun for them.’”

Inspired, Hardee did something she’d never done before: she found Lumo’s website and sent the company an email. In truth, she didn’t expect to hear back. You always see neat things on Facebook, she said, but that’s usually as far as it goes.

This time would be different. Back in Canada, Athavale and her team were racing to triage the situation. By then, they’d tracked the source of the deluge back to Fatherly, which had used the Lumo Play video without warning or permission.

Within hours, she and her team had developed a plan to reply to the more than 100,000 messages that were flooding their site. They wrote an automated reply on their email: sorry for any response delays, it explained, but Lumo was going viral.

That concept, going viral, is the most intoxicating promise of the digital age. It occupies some undefined space a few steps short of celebrity, where anyone can suddenly become famous. The tempest of attention can make careers or destroy them.

What it almost always does is make money for someone, and these days much of that reward goes to content marketers.

It’s not clear how Fatherly first discovered Lumo, and emails to its editorial department went unanswered last month. The site is a clearinghouse for the sort of high-interest, low-investment content that flies across social media, particularly Facebook.

This is the format that has pushed the media to consider journalism as “content” and content as a commodity, tracked by the minute. In its Lumo Play post, Fatherly had a modest hit: within two days, the video soared past 28 million views.

That’s not a juggernaut in a social-media context, but for a small company from Winnipeg, it was a storm. Comments flooded in from all over the world: an Arizona woman thought Lumo Play would allow her visually impaired daughter to play with other kids; a mom in New Zealand thought it was “perfect” for children like hers, too sick to go outside.

As the messages piled up, Athavale tried to stay focused. “When something like that goes down, your immediate reaction is that you just have to deal with it, and the emotional stuff doesn’t come until after,” she said. “It was probably about two or three days in, after reading all these emails, that I started to get really emotional.”

First, she had to figure out how to trap the lightning in the bottle. Unlike many companies that see a product go viral, Lumo had no consumer product for sale. Indeed, they had been just weeks away from pulling the plug on its development.

They did have software that could be installed on any projector, but that required technical directions many grandparents would not find intuitive. (One woman who later downloaded a Lumo Play game file worried its source code was a virus.)

Yet Athavale did not want to miss this moment to bring Lumo Play back to life. She’d worked so hard to bring it this far, putting it on the verge of creation. She needed to find a way to keep her new fans interested until the thing could be made.

So the Lumo team decided to try something different. That week, they released their software as a free download, and wrote a user-friendly set of instructions on how to install it. On Facebook, pleased fans posted videos of their homemade setups.

Then, she set about answering the thousands who had messaged. For many, this personal touch would prove as strong a sell as the Lumo Play itself; in a world of transient content, human connection still reigns.

“Meghan, what a sweetheart, she contacted me right back,” Hardee said. “I was just one grandma that was interested in her product. She didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t like I was some spokesperson for a large company who was going to invest. I was just one ol’ lady, and she took the time to write, to explain things, to tell me about her product.”

Now, Athavale’s dream is back at full steam. With a renewed base of support, Lumo is now planning for a consumer release in 2017. Other media took notice; this month, a German TV station posted its own Lumo Play video, which drew big views.

This time, Athavale and her crew were prepared; they’d already translated information about the projector into German.

Above all, their path through the storm of attention can offer some lessons. In August, Athavale gave a talk for New Media Manitoba, explaining to dozens of young entrepreneurs how she managed the crush of going viral.

She was frank about the challenges. The key, she said, was asking for help at the pivotal moment: from advisers, from colleagues, even from the parents she enlisted to review if her letters to new fans hit the right notes.

For now, Lumo is back to business as normal. They kept course through the hurricane, and came out on the other side still holding course. The biggest difference between before going viral and after, Athavale said, is now there is renewed hope.

“There’s a point at which you realize that it’s not going to last forever,” she said. “You also feel like it may never happen again. It starts to feel really unreal… The only thing you can do is take what you have, and act on it.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca