My Sunday mornings would be much poorer without the NY Times Magazine. Well, that and strong coffee. Every week there's something great in there (the magazine, not the coffee).
Two good pieces this week. One is a Rob Walker column about the Martin Agency's Geico cavemen campaign, and its path towards becoming a TV series. He makes the observation that since part of the campaign's appeal is that they haven't spelled everything out, leaving room for people to speculate and be drawn in, the writers face a challenge maintaining that openness in a sitcom format.
[Online] people debated whether the cavemen were gay, or asserted that the ads “cleverly play with race issues.” ... In the mainstream press, the campaign has been described as mocking political correctness, but the online deconstructions have been more varied, more subtle and, in some cases, so obsessive it makes you wonder about the routine claims that nobody pays attention to advertising anymore.
In fact... it’s exactly because we’ve seen only brief glimpses of the cavemen that their stories are so open to interpretation. In the comparatively limiting and formulaic context of a sitcom, characters have back stories (and usually a defined sexual orientation), and plots are linear; there’s less room for ambiguity and thus for engaging speculation. And of course, sitcoms are generally on just once a week, on one channel. If a caveman sitcom materializes, its great challenge will be figuring out how to make an already-popular concept work in such a staid, predictable context.
The other piece is a fantastic article on why the entertainment industry can't predict hits. The reason is our herd mentality. We like to like the same things that everyone else likes, but how does that start? It turns out the events that start one song/movie/book (and not another) on that bandwagon are actually fairly random.
The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.
Interestingly, the author has conducted some ingenious research to demonstrate this. It's all given me a bunch of thoughts about how this applies to brands and marketing which I'll write up tomorrow.
Comments