Unexpectedness

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.

The evidence says that people who buy mutual funds retire a lot poorer than if they’d simply bought index funds. So why do mutual funds keep growing? In our latest Fast Company column, we explore why it’s so hard to get the truth to stick.

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.

I have mixed feelings about this series of spots from the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board in Ontario. (And if the “Safety & Insurance Board” sounds boring, well, you’re in for a surprise.)

The spots show regular workers — a sous chef, a forklift driver, a welder — who suffer rather dramatic and painful calamities due to improper conditions at their workplaces.

Positive spin: The topic of “workplace safety” puts us to sleep. It sounds boring and vaguely dorky (inevitably the solution will involve eye goggles, right?). And yet workplace safety itself is critical — people do get hurt, people do die. To break through the disinterest and inertia, you need to be bold. You need to shock.

Negative spin: It shocks alright. Even people who enjoy movies like “Saw” and “Hostel” will probably wince at this spot, about an accident that befalls a young female chef. But does the shock reinforce the core message of the campaign? If the core message is to take workplace safety seriously, maybe it works. If WSIB wants behavior change of some kind, I’m not clear what it is.

The spots are so brutal that I wonder how the campaign can be (or whether it should be) sustained. I would love to be a fly on the wall at those creative discussions. (“Hey, what if we spotlight someone who’s dismembered by a rogue meat slicer…?”)