Concreteness

Over at Slate, Juliet Lapidos asks, how much is $700 billion?

Let’s say Slate charged its advertisers $30 per 1,000 ad impressions, a common industry rate. And let’s imagine for a second that the federal government decided to nationalize Slate in order to pay for the bailout. We’d need our readers to rack up enough page views to see 23.3 trillion banner ads before the feds were satisfied.

For historical perspective, consider that the Marshall Plan, which helped finance the recovery of Western Europe after World War II, cost the United States about $13 billion. Of course, in 2008 dollars that’s more like $100 billion. And Niall Ferguson has estimated that as a comparable share of the U.S. GDP, it’s more like $740 billion.

Nicholas Kristof has a sticky piece today on the grotesque overpayment of CEOs who fail. Case in point: Richard Fuld, chief of the now-flushed Lehman Brothers, made a half-bil between 1993 and 2007. Good investment.

This story, and others like it, run the board on the traits of a sticky idea: They’re simple (Too much money!). Unexpected ($17,000 an hour!). Concrete ($6,000 shower curtains). Credible (the amounts are indisputable). Emotional (Outrage, envy, disgust). Story (Pick your CEO). And yet the public outcry never builds up to a roar. Only a half-hearted squawk.

I can’t explain it. Maybe people feel powerless to affect it. I.e., if you were really angry, to your core, about CEO pay, what would you do next? At least with global warming, you can switch out a  lightbulb. But sadly, there’s no incremental action with CEOs — you can’t take a dollar out of Fuld’s pocket. (Even if you did, it wouldn’t be worth his time to retrieve it, because in the next 10 seconds, he’d have made another $47.)

Chip and I were thrilled to work with the AHA on their new campaign promoting “Hands-only CPR.” (Our role was limited: We led a workshop early in the process as the AHA team contemplated how to talk about the new technique. But we had nothing to do with the ingenious commercials that Jerry Potts and his team have created.)

So here’s the simple idea: You can save a life just by pumping on someone’s chest. Mouth-to-mouth isn’t necessary. So if an adult collapses, call 911 and pump hard and fast on their chest until help arrives. (In a wonderful karmic coincidence, the correct pumping rhythm is about the same as the beat to the song “Stayin’ Alive.”)

The best sign that this idea has stuck is that SNL has already parodied it.

Add’l info: Our recent Fast Company column, which links the AHA campaign to some more general thoughts on how to explain new innovations.

Reader Greg Miller has made one of our book concepts stickier. Here’s the relevant passage of our book and then Miller’s improvement…

Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that are more human, more everyday.  As a scientific example, contrast the following two statements:

1. Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from the sun to the earth and hitting the target within 1/3 of a mile of dead center.
2. Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting the target within 2/3 of an inch of dead center.

Which seems more accurate? 
As you may have guessed, the accuracy levels in both questions are exactly the same, but when different groups evaluated the two statements, 58% of respondents ranked the statistic about the sun to the earth as “very impressive.”  That jumped to 83% for the statistic about New York to Los Angeles.   We have no human experience, no intuition, about the distance between the sun and the earth.  The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible.  (Though, frankly, the distance is still far from tangible.  The problem is that if you make the distance more tangible—like a football field—then the accuracy becomes intangible.  “Throwing a rock the distance of a football field to an accuracy of 3.4 microns” doesn’t help.)

Miller says: “I’ll offer this suggestion for improving the analogy of throwing the rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting within 2/3 inch of dead-center. Units of distance are still too abstract. Better to say throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting a 50-cent piece (which has a radius of about 2/3 inches.)”

Great point, Greg — thanks for making us more concrete!

Brawndo. A fake sports drink brand in a satirical movie (Idiocracy) becomes real, and now it’s a real brand but it’s still satirical, and it seems to be satirizing a RabidMacho kind of sensibility, and people who drink it must be mocking that sensibility, right?, except that RabidMacho people will almost certainly love the brand too, so ultimately, no one is distinguishing themselves from anyone else, and what’s the point? Well, the point is the ads. They are hilarious, and that’s enough. Watch the ads here. Here’s a teaser:

 

[BRAWNDO] It’s like a monster truck you can pour into your face.

It’s got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? I don’t know but they’re extremely awesome. And Brawndo is full of them! They help plants grow, which is why you should drink Brawndo and not water, because water is from the toilet, and I’ve never seen plants grow out of a toilet.

It’s got caffeine: super extra caffeine. And 5 kinds of sugar, which makes it delicious, and much better than other energy drinks, which are NOT delicious.

Drinking it will make you wonder why you’ve never crushed a human skull with your bare hands. But you won’t have to, because you’ll already know that Brawndo tastes how that would feel, which is like having sex with a tractor-trailer in a parking lot.

Rob Walker wrote a great piece about Brawndo a few months back in the NYT.