We are always looking for the biggest bang, the most impactful, the largest voice, but many times we forget that the very targeted success is the way we are judged.
Let’s call it the audience of one.
I was reminded of the value of one to one a few times in the past few weeks. First was a New York Times story about South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, and how she has redone her appearance literally from head to toe…in order to come more into the focus of one person…Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Another time it came up when talking to a colleague about a wide ranging impactful cause marketing campaign his company had been doing with an NFL team. “It was great,” he said. “But the guy we are trying to reach only measures impact from the sports trade journal he reads, so if we didn’t get any love there we didn’t achieve what we wanted.”
The idea of the “audience of one” sometimes seems quizzical. There was an urban legend that a union erected a billboard in New York City that could only bee seen by one office…the office of the Mayor of the City of New York at the time, David Dinkins. They would change the billboard, which they owned, every month. It was on the fourth floor above a building on Broadway, facing away from the street and traffic. The message needed to remind one person, not the public, and that was the best way to do it.
There have also been campaigns on newsstands, on train stations, on lampposts, outside prominent residences and offices where decisionmakers live and work, hoping to target the person that has the ultimate say on a project. Public opinion is nice, but only one individual makes the call so if he/she isn’t swayed or informed directly, then all the other efforts fall short.
I remember when we were with the Knicks, and received a troubled call from Brian McIntyre, then the head of comms for the NBA. He asked if we had an issue with a player named Michael Sweetney and his interest in violent and misogynistic hip hop music. We were stunned, because Sweetney, a first round pick out of Georgetown who is one f the kindest and most mild mannered people you would ever meet, was certainly not in the crosshairs of controversy. Somehow this issue went from and center with late Commissioner David Stern, who wanted McIntyre to get to the bottom of it.
How did all this come about? Stern lived in Westchester County and on his driveway every morning was a copy of his local paper, The Journal News. Mike Dougherty, one of our beat writers, had a mentioned of Sweetney listening to a song while in the locker room one day, and included it in his notes column pretty innocuously. Not a feature, just a note.
Commissioner Stern read it, in his local paper, and it became an issue.
An audience of one, in Westchester County, a powerful one, was irked, and we had to calmly and clearly clean things up. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a feature about the team’s success, it was an issue to deal with, By the way, lesson learned, if we had to make sure there was a positive message to be sent to the league, Mike Dougherty’s notes column became a great way to do it.
The “audience of one” idea was also very important, and still is, to the use of Twitter, now known as “X”. The great value of twitter is that it gives you the ability to have a direct one on one conversation with anyone you follow who follows you back. The Obama administration used the tool to great success to speak directly to millions of people with custom messages. DM’ing someone became a thing, and a thing that the “Audience of One” personified.
I have heard many actors we have worked with say that they use a technique in live shows of finding someone in the audience to speak directly to, and using that person as the focus of their monologue. Yes they are speaking to everyone watching, but their focus is on one person, and it makes that delivery that much more impactful.
None of this is to say that all focus should be on one person. There are many, many ways to make sure the message is delivered…calls, word of mouth, social campaigns, heck even emails delivered right to an inbox. However, what is important to note is to fully understand the objectives when telling a story or communicating a message.
In an attention challenged world, one cannot assume by just getting something “out there” everyone is seeing, reading or hearing the message. It has to be clear that the delivery message resonates with the right audience where they get their info, whether that is a CEO, an athlete, an influencer, a student, or a mayor.
Without that delivery, even if that person doesn’t react or engage, all the work can go for naught.
Message sent.
Balancing The “Albatross of Expectation”…