Dwarf dressed as a clown kills eight
Behind the flashy name existed an already legendary community of the extinct Orkut. It compiled odd headlines like “tiny rabbit helps 31 escape from prison” or “American guy beats girlfriend with a tuna.” At its peak it came to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and generated even a book.
In other words, say what you want of the poor dwarf, but never deny that it was case of success. And in a world where the second most valuable coin is attention, a dwarf dressed as a clown killing eight became a giant to his public.
Well, if attention is the second most precious coin, the first is bound to it: time. Or, for how long you or your brand is able to hold the attention of the public. It’s precisely in this equation that the efforts — and the overwhelming success — of platforms such as Facebook and Netflix are focused.
They know: attention is time invested in your product or service. And time’s investment, is potential money too.
As our dwarf with severe anger control problems has proven, a dramatic and unexpected opening captures attention. We react to the surprise. Always. But for the audience to stay, perhaps, that’s where it gets complicated.
We have to offer something vital in return.
In a world full of stimuli, attention and permanence is never for free. Just to illustrate: Can you list how many brands you see over a whole day?
I listed.
442.
The number itself surprised me. This includes brands I’ve seen on the way to work, on the internet ads, and even on the background TV of the restaurant where I lunch.
Nowadays everything screams. And in the midst of this bloody battle for attention everything ends up becoming just a white noise. An irrelevant symphony of madmen. 442 brands. And how many of them do I remember? Or more, how many did I even notice?
Only one.
Not by accident.
Besides the differential of communication, the message behind is full of humor and humanity. In spite of being, it doesn’t look like a somebody who just wants to sell me something. And so, of four hundred forty two trademarks, that one stayed in my head.
According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute the average dedicated attention for each brand is approximately eight seconds. Our brain is programmed to filter, after all, with this overload of stimuli it’s impossible to absorb everything. What’s left, inevitably is very little.
It’s one of the biggest fights on TV today, for example, that has the hard mission of reinventing the commercial time in a world like this where no one else can concentrate for 15 minutes on a succession of ads with happy family passing butter on a bread, image that our brain has seen and processed millions of times until it reaches irrelevance.
You need to offer a greater experience than that. Something that makes sense. One of the keys to reaching such experience is to exercise self-criticism through three very basic questions: “What do I have to offer to anyone?”
In a world where everyone yells with megaphones that they are the best, the most economical, beautiful, charming and smelling, what can I say that is different from that?
What can really capture the public’s attention without betraying what I am offering? The most difficult and misleading: do I really offer what I think I offer?
A fourth freebie question: — What do I offer have value when compared to what others offer? Why? Surprisingly few know the exact answers to these simple questions.
Unlike in the old days, better than speaking to the greatest number of people is to speak to the most faithful. And to gain loyalty, we need to understand what we offer and the public. Understand what makes us human. To surprise, to promise, to accomplish. And add something more so you do not get lost in the crowd.
Let’s talk about it.
Remember that it’s such different times where even a dwarf dressed as a clown get fame and notoriety killing eight.
