There’s a conversation I’ve had a lot over the past decade, but in recent days, it feels like I have it more frequently, if not constantly.
It goes like this.
I’m talking to someone who has got something they want to communicate with the public about — a cause, an independent film release, a piece of news — and as we get into a discussion of how to get the message out, they very quickly get mired in hopelessness and the impossibility of communicating anything in this environment.
Getting a message out has never been easy or simple, but there were paths and strategies. You could always… throw an event!
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But lately, as attention spans shrink to the subatomic level, following the usual strategies and paths feels futile. The idea of conveying and implanting a message — a narrative — into human consciousness feels absolutely perverse to even try. It’s like trying to train a dolphin to appreciate quinoa.
It’s time, however, to recalibrate the narrative about our attention spans and stop trying to squeeze square pegs into non-existent holes. If we’re going to communicate with the world, we’ve got to meet the human brain where it lives, not try to replicate the 1980s, when understanding developed after watching the CBS Evening News and reading Time magazine. Too much of Hollywood’s cultural messaging seems tailored to a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
We in the culture business must acknowledge that humanity’s capacity to join our parade has been fundamentally altered, and if we want to speak to them, bring them on board and build interest in products, we have to take the world as it is.
Here then are 26 principles for a new paradigm of marketing:
The Goldfish Rules
The Goldfish Rule: We don’t have a short attention span; we have no attention span. You don’t have three seconds to get your message across. You have zero seconds. You must convey what you have to convey in a flash of lightning.
Memory doesn’t exist. Unless you are in the public’s face at a specific moment, you don’t exist, and you have never existed.
The new point system. There are two scores for messaging: zero and one. If the messaging is ineffective, you get zero. If it is effective, you receive one.
There is no higher score than one. Don’t make your message complex in search of a higher score.