The Art of Slow Growth
What do Twitter and Breaking Bad have in common? Neither would have survived based on their pitch alone.
“A blog limited to 140 characters?!”
“A meth making high school teacher dying of cancer?!”
By starting with their own curiosity, the creators of these hugely visible properties let time and user feedback show them the way. Flipping the usual conventions, they raised the bar on excellence in terms of delivery. Breaking Bad creator, Vince Gilligan, said of pitching and selling his show,
“I wasn’t dismayed by being rejected by every studio in town, I was pushed on by my fascination of [lead character] White.”
Twitter had a long gestation before the founders understood what it was, said co-founder Ev Williams:
“With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning.”
Twitter shows us even in fast paced, ever evolving technology, time plays an essential role to traction. I love these two examples because they show how intuition and discovery can lead strategy and analysis. You need a healthy dose of both, but what scares me about the rapid development of data analysis is that we only listen to clicks and views and lose the adventure of discovering something new.
Erin McPherson, Chief Creative Officer of the recent Disney acquisition Maker Studio, deftly lays out the challenge of the modern creator,
“What we are seeing is a shift powered by technology from one-way storytelling into storytelling that is a fluid dialogue between creator and audience. The story builds over time and is more fluid.”
Audience input is affecting the way Hollywood does business, but it’s not actually new. Take for example one of the greatest pieces of architectural achievement, which is currently in its 132nd year of construction: The La Sagrada Família. Antonio Gaudí was a daring architect with a dream of what could be and, if he only listened to consumer habits of the time, his idea wouldn’t have stuck. Instead, he was a visionary that relied on the direct involvement of the community to sustain the vision.
132 years later, the building has been financed only from private contributions. Gaudí himself said,
“The La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them.”
Instead of imposing the idea of what he thought would work, he started on a long journey of something that would stand the test of time, because it required its users engagement.
These examples demonstrate that creative intuition is as much about incorporating feedback and adapting quickly as it is about holding back. Gilligan when reflecting back on Breaking Bad’s success had some impressive insight:
“I didn’t have the opportunity to throw the kitchen sink plot-wise into our first season. If I’d done that, I would have painted myself into some seriously unpleasant plot corners. My general philosophy now more than ever is to give the audience the least possible… but you want to parcel things out as slowly you can…while keeping things interesting.”
Williams adds,
“[Twitter] didn’t take off right away, and many of the most important things don’t take off right away. They only take off after working on them for a long time and pursuing a vision that gets you to the essence of something.”
Despite living in a world brimming with pressure from users and investors, I believe Gaudí would have been proud that creators over a century later are employing his technique of slow growth. “My client is not in a hurry” is what he famously remarked about the slow gestation of his basilica and while it would be nice to have eternity as our timeline, the reality is that our clients are in a hurry. The upside is we are benefiting greatly from the ability to process an incredible amount of information about users in real-time. Being a ‘slow’ creator is more about being a long-term leader than a short-term champion. Merely following the metrics to decide what content to produce will give us more cat videos and less Breaking Bad. Certainly Maker Studio and Netflix are showing us the art of reading metrics to dictate content and there is still much to discover about the art of slow growth and the convergence of creativity and data.
T.J. Berden is focused on the intersection of media and technology. He’s training with the best and brightest in San Francisco at Tradecraft and looking to collaborate with film geeks who are into tech or techies who dig content. Tweet me @tjberden
Thanks to Gabriel Dillon for providing feedback and much-needed copy editing.
