I see, hear and read so many people disparaging data and the practice of paying attention to it in order that you might make better creative decisions. I’ve written about this before, but it bears some serious repetition. Most recently it was Christopher Kimball of Milk Street on the People Vs Algorithms podcast - words I saw quoted liberally afterwards. He said: "Stay aligned with your core and do things that are unique that nobody else can offer” which is great advice, adding: “and screw the algorithm because you're just going to end up doing what everybody else does." If the message you get from “the data” is to “be like everyone else”, you are, catastrophically and willfully, reading it wrong. Similarly, the blithe truism that the data “can only tell you about the past” is recited like a magical incantation that will protect pristine creativity from the evil forces of common sense. I never wanted to be a data guy - but the idea that we should shun rich, accurate and incredibly detailed information about how people respond to our work seems totally mental.
I’ve noticed an absolute epidemic of reductionism in discussing successful media. “People will watch anything with celebrity x”, “our audience just loves that host” or even, hilariously, “food scales” - all given as explanations for why something massively outperformed expectations/the competition. Simple answers seem to offer decision-makers comfort. Never mind Celeb X’s many flops or that the host struggles outside of the format they’re known for or that, and it’s wild that I should need to say this, some food shows don’t do great. The alternative to this knee-jerk simplification and pathological reductionism is, I’m happy to say, so much richer, cooler, denser, more interesting and fun, more mysterious and fascinating. It’s eminently possible, highly advisable and at times genuinely enjoyable to break down what aspects of a creative work made it resonate with people.
Fractional Distillation
The first image that sprung to mind was from chemistry class - that of fractional distillation: separating a mixture of liquids by evaporating and condensing them at different boiling points. You can un-mix a cocktail. Essentially, you can investigate something complex and blended in terms of its components to assess the proportions of each and how they contribute to the overall effect. A whisky of great complexity and subtlety might primarily be water and ethanol, but then there’s an almost magical intermingling of lactones, lignans, dienes and esters that make this exact scotch itself. I asked around a few friends and it turns out diagrams of round-bottomed flasks and bunsen burners weren’t as seared into people’s minds as I thought they might be.
So maybe cooking is a better metaphor. A chef eating at someone else’s restaurant wouldn’t be considered cynical for tasting a dish, musing on the application of technique and combination of ingredients that made it delicious, then taking inspiration from that to make something of their own. No-one would suggest that they attempt to perfectly reverse-engineer that exact thing and add it to their menu. It’s impossible to encapsulate everything that makes an amazing dish work - but they might pick out the way smoke does something special to shellfish or how a bitingly acidic citrus note complements the heat of a chili. It could be more conceptual - how comfort food twisted toward sophistication satisfies in two interestingly contrasting ways. The point is that there’s nothing sinister or anti-creative in really learning how to taste, figuring out what the constituent parts are of something’s success and then adding those to your palette, your box of tricks.
What I’m advocating is really just stopping to think about the elements of a creative work’s appeal. Avoid the easy answer. The easy answer will be wrong. Go into forensic, atomic detail. It’s absolutely an art - much more like learning how to taste the nuances in expert cuisine than exactly fractionating compounds into beakers. Jurassic Park’s box office gross and 30-year longevity in our minds, of course, can’t be explained by “people wanted to see dinosaurs brought to life” or “Goldblum scales”. Everyone’s version of the recipe will be different, but the deeper you go and the more honest you are with yourself, the stronger and more advanced your hypotheses will be. Each of these fundamental elements of appeal that you can identify is a building block with which to construct your own unique path to creative success. It’s the antithesis of “doing what everyone else does”. Everything, we shouldn’t need to remind ourselves, is a remix.
I’m told I need to use more examples. So here’s a simple example, appropriately, from food media, which shows how I developed a palette of “elements of appeal” from various successful sources and we consequently made the most successful video/show of its kind, by a long way. Orders of magnitude bigger. The show was the answer to the question “how do you make ‘how-to’ work on the home page?” If you’re not familiar, ‘how-to’ videos traditionally get watched by showing up high in search results - which stands to reason. It’s a game of tweaking and search optimization which I didn’t want to play. I like making hits that travel based on how much people like & watch them and thus, in this case, get recommended on people’s YouTube home pages. Epicurious is a brand that helps you know how to do things - so we set out to solve that puzzle. This show (originally called How To X Every Y, eventually called Method Mastery) was the answer, a show that proves that if you combine enough different elements of appeal, you can reach genuinely unprecedented levels of success. Max Stenstrom directed the first episodes of this series, to great effect.
Elements Of Appeal - Method Mastery
I mentioned this rainbow lobster video before when talking about visceral appeal - you can sense that its insane view count comes not just from the sound of cracking shells and the freeing of translucent flesh, but also that sense of artisanal mastery, of craft honed over years - something we see again and again in the biggest food videos on the internet.
Watching, step-by-step, as someone methodically follows a process from beginning to end is hypnotic. I believe we are hard-wired to be transfixed as we watch a sequence of steps that could be teaching us something useful, even if we are never likely to turn the root of a Yew tree into an ornate vase or restore an ancient rusty cleaver.
Abundance works. Large numbers of things disproportionately capture the imagination. Even more so, exhaustiveness - whether it’s trying every state drink or, for some reason, melting together every lipstick in Sephora.
A judicious mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar. I feel pretty confident with deveining a prawn, I could use some pointers on more decorously cracking open a lobster, I would really need help before approaching a sea urchin, I’ve never touched a geoduck before. That spectrum and variety was key to this series as well as sneaker collection/shopping videos and all manner of compilation videos. See Derek Thompson’s fun book Hit Makers for more on the power of blending the novel and the typical.
A predictable, almost metronomic rhythm of repeated elements, with variation in the subject. Think Antiques Roadshow, Storage Wars, Pawn Stars - even those exploitative talent shows. You get how each section works immediately, then stick around to see what the next subject will be - some familiar, some deeply, deeply unfamiliar. At its most nefarious, variable ratio scheduling.
True expertise is always compelling. Anyone who knows how could tell you about getting inside a few molluscs and crustaceans - but Mike Cruz from Greenpoint Fish & Lobster brings a different level of enthusiasm and insight. The fish filleting video in the same series has 39M views. You can see that same aspect of these videos’ appeal in expert-led videos about accents, chess or casino cheating.
There’s a whole lot more to this show’s success in everything the director and editor and producer and DP brought to the table. The bonkers game show vibe in the pilot, the casting, the vibe on set, too many things to note, but at the core of it all are a set of observations really - things which resonate, aspects that connect with people, elements of appeal - stuff that for one reason or another just works.
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” - Thessalonians 5:21
Links
Really interesting to hear Joanna Naugle & Adam Epstein - editors on The Bear - talk in detail about process. Some great little insights here - especially that Forks (one of the best episodes of TV ever and my movie of the year) from Season 2 was modelled in part after sci-fi. / The Editing Podcast
David Poland - a fine industry polemicist provided some nuance in response to the New Yorker’s piece “Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage”. From July, so a little strike-focused, but still soberly relevant. / The Hot Button
“To be clear, none of these shows were hits.” Some refreshing realism about the data on streaming shows in a world where “stoking outrage seems to matter more than factual accuracy” / The Entertainment Strategy Guy
Some nice insights from the must-see network TV era. Particularly “the night of bests” and something I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen for years - respect the audience. Here’s proof from a Think With Google interview I did 5 years ago. / The Town With Matthew Belloni
The Directors Label DVDs are 20. Gondry. Jonze. Cunningham. They were a big deal for people who knew about them in a world before Vimeo and YouTube. You can watch them here. / Archive.org
“This is God's movie. The only thing you can do is play your part. Be where you're supposed to be at the right time, so you don't miss your line.” - Pharrell Williams