How Air America lost teen spirit

One of my favorite maxims on marketing comes from advertising legend David Ogilvy: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

The people who made Air America what it started out to be—Marc Maron, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Jim Earl, Brendan McDonald, Mike Malloy, Rachel Maddow—understood that.

The suits at the top, notably CEO Danny Goldberg, did not.

In 2003, Goldberg published a book called How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Two years later, while the paperback edition was fresh off the presses, he pulled the plug on Morning Sedition, which more than anything else on Air America had the intelligence, sharpness, and hilarity to grab young listeners (as well as the not so young).

It’s hard to recall just how exciting it was to discover Air America when it was first on the air—and especially Morning Sedition. Jenn and I turned it on when we were barely conscious, and even before our first cup of coffee we were laughing at Morning Remembrance, Future Marc, the Pitch of the Week, and all the other inspired insanity.

Danny Goldberg put an end to all that. In a guest post at the Down with Tyranny blog, he defends himself at length—but scroll down to see what Brendan McDonald and Jim Earl have to say. I’ll let Jim Earl have the last word:

Aside from applauding everything Brendan’s already written, I’d like to add these choice bits:

I wrote for Air America from the beginning, but ended up mostly performing and writing for Maron’s show—this, despite his atavistic predilection for pouring warm spittoon tailings into the break room coffee-maker every morning.

Aside from that, the most peculiar thing I ever witnessed at Air America, including the time Riley secretly married a breakfast roll in the basement, was how a liberal network whose concept was rooted in the goal that it not become a humorless copy of NPR, had now become a humorless copy of NPR. And that was Danny’s genius. No one could suck the happy out of a building faster than you could. And that’s what killed the best, most exciting shows at Air America: some guy who didn’t like or didn’t get jokes. You know—satire, parody, sarcasm. Things that can actually catch people’s attention in politics. Instead you opted to bore the crap out of radio audiences—much like you did to me half way through your blog. Radio audiences don’t like being bored, Danny. And if you hadn’t spent most of your job time recuperating at your Malibu beach house or bunkered in the corner office atop a pyramid of TaB, perhaps you would have discovered that.

What the Dog Saw

The enormous success of Malcolm Gladwell’s books has a lot to do with his beautifully clear and engaging way of telling a story. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that the main ideas of those books are of particular interest to businesspeople and especially marketers.

The Tipping Point argues (as does Seth Godin) that success in marketing comes when you reach not only the groups and subcultures that will be most enthusiastic about your product, but those that are well connected enough to spread the word widely and rapidly.

Blink holds out the promise that the right decision may come to you in an instant (though only if you’ve devoted enough time to learning your subject). (Outliers, on the other hand, may have less appeal to the titans of industry—arguing as it does that success doesn’t always come from hard work or innate talent but usually requires timing, luck, and personal or cultural advantages.)

Anyone with three back-to-back number-one bestsellers is going to generate a certain amount of resentment. Participants in the Gladwell backlash accuse him of oversimplifying and cherry-picking his data and anecdotes. Life is not that simple, they argue.

As if in response, many of the essays in the new book What the Dog Saw make the point that in many situations the quantity of data, of noise, and of complicated interrelationships is such that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, whether you’re in business or not. Storytelling itself is a response to uncertainty, a way of finding (or creating) a narrative thread that makes sense, or seems to make sense, of our experience.

In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell explodes the very kind of appealing narrative explanations that he’s purveyed himself. Criminal profiling, he argues, is no more accurate than the predictions of sideshow psychics based on generalities and leading questions. The experience of being an NFL quarterback is so different from being a college quarterback that there is no way to predict which college stars will do well.

Enron, says Gladwell, didn’t really hide its financial risks—they were simply buried in the mountains of documents they disclosed. Similarly, the warnings about the safety of the Challenger space shuttle, and about the 9/11 terrorist attack, weren’t ignored—they were simply lost in the mass of similar warnings that seemed equally significant. And so on.

All this is interesting, but somewhat unsatisfying to those of us who are looking for guidance in how to make decisions.

One of the few people Gladwell finds who has actually found a way to profit from uncertainty is Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, whose investment strategy is based on buying insurance against large and unpredictable disasters. NInety-nine days out of a hundred, or more, this is a strategy that loses a little money. But every so often—for instance, during a global financial meltdown—it pays off big time.

Concord without us

Some time ago I read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, in which he imagines what would become of our roads and dams and cities if people were to disappear one day. (Tim Butcher’s book Blood River, about traveling through the Congo, reminded me of it.)

I was startled, though, to find that Thoreau tried a similar thought experiment in his Journal.

Here is the complete passage, from November 23, 1860. It follows a discussion of native and imported fruits, and may have been prompted by wondering what would become of the cultivated apple and peach trees of Concord if there were no one to look after them.

At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land, — and rankest of all in the cellar-holes, — and of pinweed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimble-berry, raspberry, etc. in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc. would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets. Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reëstablish themselves. Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more. The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and perchance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood.

Seth Godin on marketing

One sign of Seth Godin’s success as a marketing guru is that he comes up number three in a Google search on “Seth”—right after the guy in the Bible and the Canadian cartoonist. Three of the top ten results are currently about him.

Yet as he admits himself, Godin sometimes makes mistakes. The title of his book All Marketers Are Liars was provocative, but surely turned off many potential buyers. (On the new cover, “are liars” is crossed out and “tell stories” written in.) And for me at least, the title and cover image of his 2007 book Meatball Sundae were nauseating enough to keep me from reading it until now.

As usual, though, reading any book by Seth Godin proved worthwhile. I’ve read most of them and reviewed The Dip and Purple Cow (the book I recommend starting with). Read a couple of his books and you see that he has a coherent view of how marketing works, and how it is changing. Each book takes a different piece of the puzzle and looks at it in more detail.

Purple Cow argued that it’s no longer enough to sell average products to average people by interrupting them with TV ads or billboards. The world is too full of noise for you to cut through the clutter that way, and the Internet makes it too easy for your potential customers to find your competitors. The key is to have a story that is so compelling and so authentic that it resonates with a core group out there—and then to let that core group do your advertising for you.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter make it easier than ever for stories to spread and become “viral”—but just having a Facebook page and a Twitter account won’t help you much if you don’t have an unusual story to tell.

More than that, Godin argues, that story won’t take hold unless it reflects who you really are as a company. It’s a hopeful message for start-ups but not so hopeful for big, established companies that have sunk enormous resources into doing things the way they already do them. Putting nifty new-media tools on top of a stodgy organization, he argues, is like putting whipped cream and a cherry on a bowl of meatballs.

“If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea,” Godin writes at the end of this short but challenging book, “it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.”

Words Without Borders

The Words Without Borders website has been beautifully recreated for the new year by Bud Parr, WWB’s Lead Developer and Blog Editor—and the proprietor of Chekhov’s Mistress. The WWB blog is now known as Dispatches, and at the Contributors page (though it’s not yet finished) you can click on my name or anyone else’s to see what they’ve done.

My latest post, and the first for this year, is a comment on the feature Translate This Book from The Quarterly Conversation. “Translate This Book” includes some African titles that deserve to be known in English, plus recommendations by the WWB’s Susan Harris, Rohan Kamicheril, Ilya Kaminsky, and Sal Robinson.

The end of January will mark my first year as a WWB blogger. It’s been a lot of fun so far. I have a few pieces in the bank for 2010, and some ideas for when those run out.