AH-HA! (it’s one of those moments) Time traveling back to 2003, here’s a video about being remarkable and a major transition in marketing, and it seems like, for those in the entertainment business (I’m thinking music), it should be something discovered long ago.
I’ve been watching as many videos over at TED recently as my spare time allows. TED, for the uninitiated, is a gathering (in person) and collection of mostly videos (on the web) by some exceptional people doing and thinking some exceptional things.
Take a look… I’ll wait. Okay, here are the Cliffs Notes:
- The standard mass marketing approach is wrong because there are too many choices and people don’t have time. The “mass” (the middle of the bell curve between early adopters and laggards) are really good at ignoring and often consider advertisement an annoyance.
- Successful marketing targets the products to a select few who really care about it then spread the word. Example? At the time, Steve Jobs was giving his talks to 50,000 nerds and the iPod was about 1-year old. In the video there is also a staggering Pearl Jam example.
- “Safe” is risky. Average products for average people is now risky.
- “Being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do.” It is boring.
So here’s the part where we need to think how to apply this as agents. I’ll post my thoughts in Part II. In the meantime, what’d you think?