In the US, [next Sunday] is a major holiday. The Superb Owl, with nachos, commercials and beer. People who don’t even watch football watch this game, and it’s one of the largest audiences each year on TV.
For a certain kind of mass marketer, a Super Bowl ad has been the gold standard for 40 years, ever since Lee Clow and Jay Chiat did the original Mac ad. As a result of advertiser demand, the per-viewer cost of running an ad for this mass audience is actually more than it would cost to run targeted ads at only the people you actually want to reach.
To put this clearly: advertisers are paying extra to reach people who don’t care and won’t take action.
Because it’s big. Super. Easy.
A few brands can actually justify these ads with results. They make beer and chips. For just about everyone else, mass isn’t your friend. Mass means average, and the average person isn’t ready to sign up, talk about it or switch. That’s because change always happens at the edges.
The same thinking drives companies to advertise on the biggest podcasts, exhibit at the biggest trade shows and hire at the biggest colleges. Not because it’s effective, but because there’s a crowd.
The pitfall of Big Game thinking is our lack of focus. We are distracted by what others are doing, have decided is important or chosen to value, instead of doing the rewarding work of focusing on the change we seek to make.
Noise is a generalized function. Messages are specific.
PS in a shocking display of my cultural awareness that also reveals how little I care about football, the big game is next week.
“Why did the chicken cross the road” tells us a bit about jokes. It’s a joke about jokes. The first half is a setup, reminding us that an absurd question creates tension, which is then relieved by the punchline.
But the second half undoes this by refusing to release the tension. “To get to the other side” is banal. There’s no point to this Q&A. And so we sit, empty, unsure about what happens next. The absence of a punchline reminds us of how much we care about punchlines.
On the other hand, “which came first, the chicken or the egg,” isn’t a joke at all. Instead, it’s a false paradox based on a misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution and taxonomy. The only thing that can be born from a chicken egg is a chicken, whereas something that’s almost a chicken could lay a chicken egg. In fact, that’s how we got chickens in the first place. The egg came first.
But that’s not the reason for the question. The question exists to create instability, to cause us tension as we seek to find our footing in the face of an infinite loop.
Conversations and interactions become more than rote performance precisely because we can create, seek out and relieve tension.
Along the way, folks have talked about “niching down” as a way to help a project find focus.
But that’s backward.
When we identify and embrace the smallest viable audience, we’re moving up. Up the quality hierarchy. Up in responsibility. Up in the likelihood that we’ll make an impact.
To niche up, identify the smallest group of people that would be enough to sustain the project. That group, the group you get to choose, what do they have in common? What do they want? What would they miss if it disappeared…
This puts us on the hook, because if they don’t like it, the work needs to be improved.
And it gives us the foundation to kindly recommend alternatives to people who aren’t in our group. Instead of hustling for more, we’re focusing for better.
[PS today is one of the calendar’s great universal holidays. Hugs to all groundhogs, of any species.]
I walked by a psychic’s storefront studio. The window said that this person had been reading palms and predicting the future since 1989. It was a large space on a vibrant New York City corner. The rent must be astronomical. Or else the purveyor owns the building.
Given that this retail space is quite coveted and the storefront is almost always empty, is this the best use for the space? Wouldn’t the psychic owner do better by renting it to someone who values it more highly?
The metaphor for our use of time is clear.
The next few minutes or days or months–sure, you own them, and you can put them to whatever use you choose. But just because you’ve been using your time in a particular way for a long time doesn’t mean you need to keep doing that.
At first, this stop sign sign makes a lot of sense:
Lives are at stake. Break the rhythm, turn something ignored into something noticed.
The challenge with “highlighting” is that it fades. When everything is in all caps, nothing is. Exclamation points are like salt.
When people are commanded to pay attention, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re asking for payment. That attention is scarce. And that we waste it, all the time.
When we prioritize our pattern breaks, rotate them and keep them fresh, we’re more likely to get the useful attention we need. Also…
In a free market for attention, someone is always racing to the bottom.
Shoplifters lurk in the shadows. They realize that they will have an easier time if they quietly steal stuff, because speaking up about it won’t help their cause.
Sometimes, though, some people seek to change the culture in a way that celebrates taking. “I own this jetski and I can ride it as long, as loud as I want to. Get out of my way.” It’s clearly in the owner’s interest to take over the lake, but not really in anyone else’s.
It’s a short-term dead end, though. Your selfish today will probably be replaced by somebody else’s selfish tomorrow.
Culture is what happens when the community insists.
Engineers can optimize a bridge. There are some bridge designs that satisfy aesthetic, financial, durability, safety and efficiency needs better than others. The work of optimization is finding the best set of tradeoffs.
Maximization, on the other hand, seeks the solution that ranks the highest for just one goal.
After it peaked, Yahoo sought to maximize short-term stock price (and the needs of its top executives) instead of optimizing for customer experience, innovation, resilience and utility.
Over time, social networks fade away for similar reasons. They turn users into the product instead of treating them like customers.
Maximizing something is simple and may be satisfying. It doesn’t involve difficult tradeoffs and it’s easy to measure.
If you don’t realize that you have power, you might not be able to exercise it.
The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organize, to march, to write, to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’.
It’s tempting to imagine we have less power than we do. It lets us off the hook. For now.
