Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (46 page)

Once a server knows it’s her, he can make sure the service is perfect, the food is hot, and the check is calculated properly. Once he knows it’s her, he can guarantee that the staff will do their best.

You’ve already guessed the problem with this strategy. The problem is
Zagat
(and
Chowhound.com
, and a thousand other restaurant blogs). There isn’t just one Joanne Kates in Toronto anymore. Now there are thousands.

You can no longer be on the lookout for Joanne. Now you have to be on the lookout for everyone.

Attention spans are getting shorter, thanks to clutter.

In 1960, the typical stay for a book on the
New York Times
bestseller list was 22 weeks. In 2006, it was two. Forty years ago, it was typical for three novels a year to reach #1. Last year, it was 23.

Advise and Consent
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. It’s 640 pages long.
On Bullshit
was a bestseller in 2005; it’s 68 pages long.

Commercials used to be a minute long, sometimes two. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long.

It’s not an accident that things are moving faster and getting smaller. There’s just too much to choose from. With a million or more books
available at a click, why should I invest the time to read all 640 pages of
Advise and Consent
when I can get the idea after 50 pages?

Audible.com
offers more than 30,000 titles. If an audiobook isn’t spectacular, minute to minute, it’s easier to ditch it and get another one than it is to slog through it. After all, it’s just bits on my iPod.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t limited to intellectual property. Craigslist.org is a free classified-ad listing service. A glance at their San Francisco listings shows more than 33,000 ads for housing. That means that if an apartment doesn’t sound perfect after just a sentence or two, it’s easy to glance down at the next ad.

If you’re exhausted, it’s no wonder. You’ve been running around all day.

The end.

In the new transparent age, it’s really difficult to tell two stories simultaneously.

Why George Allen won’t be running for president:

It was a great Web moment. George Allen was the Republican Party’s next star, anointed as a potential candidate for president in 2008. But first he had to win the Senate race in Virginia, considered by many to be a layup for him.

The traditional way to run a political campaign is to control your message. Control what you say and when you say it. Control who hears it.

Tell one story to your raving fans, and a more moderate story to people in the center.

As voters have seen again and again, politicians are good at this. Some people call it lying. But in general, politicians have gotten away with it.

The top-down, control-the-message strategy worked in the past for a few reasons:

• Media companies were complicit in not embarrassing the people they counted on to appear on their shows and authorize their licenses.
  
• Politicians could decide where and when to show up and could choose whether or not they wanted to engage.
  
• Bad news didn’t spread far unless it was exceptionally juicy.
  

But George Allen discovered that the rules have fundamentally changed. Allen’s challenger asked S. R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, to trail Allen with a video camera. The idea was to document Allen’s travels and speeches. During a speech in Breaks, Virginia, Allen turned to Sidarth and said, “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” said Allen. As I write this, YouTube reports that Allen’s slur has been watched on YouTube more than 318,000 times. Add to that the pickup from the broadcast media (which picked it up because it was popular, not because it was “important”), and you see why George Allen lost the election.

The ironic part of the appearance is that the first words out of Allen’s mouth on the tape are, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to run a positive campaign.” The story didn’t match the facts, and the facts showed up on YouTube.

Summary for non-politicians: you can’t tell two stories at the same time. Not for long.

The democratization of wealth

Rich people used to all be the same, just different from the rest of us. Now they’re not just different from the rest of us, but different from each other.

Rich people used to do similar jobs, wear similar clothes, live in similar neighborhoods, and read similar magazines. As a result, marketing to rich people was pretty easy. No longer. As the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen, the number of people considered rich increases daily, and the diversity of the rich increases as well.

It turns out that not only are the wealthy like us, but they are us. Despite the widening gulf, there are more wealthy people than ever before. In fact, you’re probably one of them. Michael Silverstein and Neil
Fiske of BCG talked about this in their book
Trading Up
, and the trend has only become more pervasive.

That means there are rich NASCAR fans, rich porn stars, rich entrepreneurs in Kenya, and rich teenagers. Every silo is discovering that it can create a top tier.

(Almost) everyone wants choice

Choice makes some people stressed and unhappy. But it also makes lots of people happy. And now people have the choice.

By itself, a bias for choice is interesting but not particularly surprising. What’s surprising is the magnitude of this desire. My favorite example is the comparison of a typical Barnes & Noble store with Amazon. If you examine the sales of the 150,000 titles in a big store, you’ll see that they account for perhaps half of Amazon’s book sales. In other words, if you aggregate the millions of poorly selling titles on Amazon, they add up to the total sales of all the best-selling books in the physical world put together.

Another way of looking at it: more people watched more video on YouTube last week than watched the top ten shows on network television.

Another way: a quick look at your grocer’s beverage aisle will prove to you that Coca-Cola is no longer the most popular soft drink in the country. The most popular soft drink is “other”: none of the above.

The mass of choices defeats the biggest hit.

This curve shows up over and over. It describes travel habits, DVD rentals, and book sales. Give people a choice and the tail always gets longer. Always.

The Long Tail has been around forever, but only now does it really matter. That’s because of several trends working together:

A.
Online shopping gives the retailer the ability to carry a hundred times the inventory of a typical retail store.

B.
Google means that a user can find something if it’s out there.

C.
Permission marketing gives sellers the freedom to find products for their customers, instead of the other way around.

D.
Digital products are easy to store and easy to customize.

E.
Digital technology makes it easy to customize nondigital goods.

The question isn’t, “is this real?” The question is: “What are you doing about it?”

In a factory-based organization, little ideas are the key to success. Small improvements in efficiency or design can improve productivity and make a product just a bit more appealing. New Marketing, which exists in the noisy marketplace, demands something bigger. It demands ideas that force people to sit up and take notice.

At the same time that we see how game-changing ideas (like the iPhone) can trump little improvements, we’re also noting the end of the “big idea” in advertising.

There’s a difference between a big idea that comes from a product or service and a big idea that comes from the world of advertising.

The secret of big-time advertising during the 1960s and ’70s was the “big idea.” In
A Big Life in Advertising
, ad legend Mary Wells Lawrence writes, “… our goal was to have big, breakthrough ideas, not just to do good advertising. I wanted to create miracles.” A big idea could build a brand, a career, or an entire agency.

Charlie the Tuna was a big idea. So was “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”

Big ideas in advertising worked great when advertising was in charge. With a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of hungry consumers, the stage was set to put on a show. And the better the show, the bigger the punch line, the more profit could be made.

Today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is pushed deeper into the organization. Let the brilliant ad guys hang out with your R&D team and watch what happenses.

Yes, there are big ideas. They’re just not advertising-based.

What if I told you about an industry that:

• Indebts most of its customers, sometimes for twenty or more years per person
  
• Not only consumes most of four years of its customers’ time, but affects its prospects for years before even interacting with them
  
• Enjoys extremely strong brand preferences between competitors and has virtually no successful generic substitutes
  
• Dramatically alters relations within a family, often for generations
  
• Doesn’t do it on purpose
  

… and …

… according to most of the studies I’ve seen, shows very little or no difference in the efficacy of one competitor vs. another.

Of course, I’m talking about undergraduate colleges in the U.S.

The most competitive colleges are as competitive as ever—in most cases, more so. Many admit only one in ten students. According to two senior officials at Swarthmore, the differences among the “good enough” applicants are basically zero. Rather than putting tens of thousands of kids through insane anxiety, these officials wonder, why not just put all the “good enough” students in a pool and pick the winners randomly?

Here’s the amazing part: according to
The Chosen
, an exhaustive study of college admissions, there’s no measurable difference between the outcomes of education with the most exclusive schools and the next few tiers. Graduates don’t end up happier. They don’t end up with better-paying jobs. They don’t end up richer or even healthier. The whole thing is a sham (which costs a quarter of a million dollars a person at the top end).

There’s no question that a Harvard degree helps (or is even required) in a few fields. There’s also no doubt that spending four years at Yale is a mind-changing experience. The question isn’t, “are they wonderful?” The question is, “is it worth it?”

It’s almost as if every single high school student and her parents insisted on having a $200,000 stereo because it was better than the $1,000 stereo. Sure, it might be a bit better, but is it better
enough
?

Boomer parents have bought into the marketing hype at a level rarely seen in any other form of marketing. They push school districts, teachers, and kids to perform pointless tasks at extreme levels just to be admitted to the “right” school, even though there’s hardly any evidence that the right school does anything but boost their egos.

Schools respond by spending a fortune on facilities that will increase their rankings in various faux polls, even though there’s no evidence at all that a better gym or a bigger library matters one bit to an undergraduate’s long-term success in life.

If it weren’t so expensive (in terms of time and money), it would make a marvelous marketing case study. Add in the tears and wasted anxiety and it’s really a shame. Very few people are pointing out that the emperor is barely clothed, and those that do (like me, I guess) get yelled at.

I’m not criticizing a college education per se. No, it’s clear that that’s a smart investment. I’m talking about the incremental cost (and anxiety) separating consumers of the “top” 500 schools from students at the “top” 50. It appears to be pure storytelling, a story that so appeals to the worldview of baby boomers with teens that they are absolutely unable to resist the story, despite the facts.

High school students are thrust into a Dip, in some cases the biggest one of their lives. The Dip extracts significant costs along the way, and then ends with a giant spin of the roulette wheel. I wonder if we’re marketing ourselves to a dead end.

I guess I’d do two things. First, I’d figure out how to teach parents to understand what really matters and what doesn’t about time spent in high school and the choice of a college. Second, I’d push for every selective college to share one application and do a draft similar to the one they do for medical residencies. Every applicant ranks the schools they’d like to attend, in order. Every school considers all the applications, grabs the students they’d love to have in priority order, puts the rest into the “good enough” pile, and lets a computer sort ’em all out as Pareto optimally as possible. At least kids will go into their twenties correctly blaming a computer instead of mistakenly blaming themselves.

Things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart).

The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0:

0.
The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.

Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing that it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.

1.
Past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Every single industry changes and, eventually, fades. Just because you made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there’s no reason to believe that you’ll succeed at it tomorrow.