Stand-up Comedy Marketing Model
The zero-cost way of doing modern marketing
Gary Vee just came out with a book titled ‘Day Trading Attention’.
One of the first ideas I loved from it is the ‘Stand-up Comedy Marketing’
If you understand this, you’ll understand why smaller brands will continue destroying the big players.
Let’s first contrast the business of movie-making with that of stand-up comedy.
How is a movie made? (roughly)
Someone has an idea, a story they want to tell.
They find the people and resources to make the movie in a few months/years.
After millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours spent, they go to the public with their fingers crossed.
The public decides the fate of the movie. Some make a killing; most fail.
If you’re a marketing professional, this will seem eerily familiar.
Because this is exactly how traditional advertising works.
Someone has an idea to sell more products.
They gather people and resources to painstakingly work on a commercial for weeks/months.
They then hope with their fingers crossed that it succeeds.
Very few succeed; most fail.
However, the widespread failure is not acknowledged because they’ve changed the metrics to measure success. (but that’s a topic for another day)
Now, let’s look at how a comedy special is prepared…
A comic observes different people and behaviors around him.
He (like with movies) gets an idea in the form of a joke.
A story or an observation he wants to share with the public.
Now, he has the luxury of comedy clubs and trying out his joke in front of 50 people.
To see exactly what works and what doesn’t. To test the punchline, the length, the tag, and the audience.
With each appearance at a club, the joke gets better. The fat is trimmed and the comedian is chipping away at guesswork.
After months of performing at smaller clubs, the comic is left with jokes that have ‘proved’ to work with an audience.
He has ‘tested away’ everything that doesn’t work and is left with a tight set of ‘data-backed’ material.
That’s when he records his special. He puts his chips on the table when he knows he’s stacked the table in his favor.
He gambles with very low stakes for months until he’s prepared for the center table.
This is how to do marketing in the Tik-Tok era.
Gary calls it ‘marketing for the sake of better marketing’.
You test a bunch of ideas on organic social to eliminate guesswork.
The current algorithms will tell you exactly what your audience resonates with.
Each organic social post is like a comic trying out a joke at a smaller club.
It’s meant to make the audience laugh but at the same time to gather information.
That’s comedy for the sake of better comedy.
That’s how marketers should look at Organic Social Content.
Each post intends to sell more but at the same time to gather information.
Consequently, if it fails to sell, you don’t lose much. You gain a valuable piece of information.
So, there’s no downside risk.
If the algorithm has proven an idea to succeed, you amplify it.
You pour gasoline over it in the form of media dollars and better production quality.
Like shooting a comedy special and distributing it once you’ve eliminated guesswork.
Brands sticking to the movie-making way will lose to the ones that have shifted to the stand-up comedy model.
And believe me when I say that no one, literally no one, is taking full advantage of the stand-up comedy model yet.
Not even Gary Vee. And he knows that.
Fruit
