That's Interesting!

 

It is the responsibility of the next of kin, not the police to clean up a crime scene. So, if you are unfortunate enough to be in that situation, who are you going to call? There was a segment on This American Life over the weekend about a company called Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. in California. The company truck signage reads Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. Specializing in Homicide, Suicide, Accidental Death. Nancy Updike the producer of this segment of the show interviews the founder, Neal Smither, about his work. She makes the point that "his directness about what he does is intentional, it's his marketing strategy." And based on the fact that he's been able to franchise his business all over the U.S., it would appear to be an effective one. Smither is not concerned with being discrete, he's concerned with being memorable. In the show, Smither explains "Gore sells. Look at the truck... I hope I don't offend too many people. I try to be honest with them. Yo...

As we all know, the Super Bowl is weird and getting weirder all the time. As one of the few remaining mass eyeball events, it attracts advertisers who want to stake their claim to relevance and distinctiveness with the widest possible American male audience. But every year, the Super Bowl ads become ever more identical and predictable. It’s largely just a question of which celebrities will show up and how wacky and self-deprecating they’re willing to be. This used to be more interesting when celebrities were more rare and incongruous behaviour by self-aware celebrities poking fun at their own image was exceedingly rare. But it’s not anymore. Watching the Super Bowl advertising actually made me feel a little bit nauseated, like I had eaten too much of the same meal at Cheesecake Factory, but the waiters kept bringing it anyway. Lazy. Retread. Not funny. Over-earnest. And those were the good ones! https://deadspin.com/super-bowl-commercials-bud-light-walken-1851247440/slides/4

  The winners of the 2024 USA Today Ad Meter during the Super Bowl were all very likable. Big helpings of celebrity star power, entertaining shenanigans, and a tiny measure of the heartwarming. Ads nobody would be offended by. In the Ad Meter Replay analysis, USA Today measures the ads people are talking about on social media for a week after the game. The 2024 Ad Meter Replay , looks at four qualities of likability: Most Comical, Most Inspirational/Heartwarming, Best Cameo, and Rookie of the Year. Rookie of the Year isn't exactly a measure of likability, but judging from the ad that won that award (CeraVe with Michael Cera) they were measuring likability. Aiming for likability is a reasonable goal. Especially in the context of the Super Bowl where people gather to be entertained, likability can go a long way in getting people to listen to you. It can also generate positive feelings about your brand - even if they may not remember why they have those feelings over the long term....

We may not yet have reached peak TikTok, though it doesn’t seem as far out of the question as it did a year ago ( https://lnkd.in/dp-Hqwbb ). But the possibility raises a more general question about the long-term attraction of increasingly personalized content feeds: Is there a point at which you might you lose interest in the output of an algorithm designed specifically to keep delivering things that will engage you? Is ‘going off your feed’ the natural and inevitable consequence of having too much of a supposedly good thing for too long? My in-house longitudinal case study of TikTok consumption among early teens (It’s not bad parenting. Just solid research methodology.) indicates that there comes a point when the active expectation of interest devolves into a rote process of ‘checking,’ like a hunter who can’t help checking all her traps every morning even though she hasn’t seen a live animal for weeks. Eventually, the checking itself becomes the pastime, and while your hypo...

“Back in the day, it was all about taking three key messages, grinding them into some kind of indistinguishable, bland pulp that nobody could possibly remember,” Mr. McGowan said. He said media training had shifted its focus, preaching memorability over safe messaging. “Media training should be about creating memorable, provocative, interesting things to say and stories to tell." ( https://lnkd.in/dDjJNmgs )