Tell All Your Friends, but for God's Sake, Don't Freak Them Out!: The Lessons of Derek Thompson's "Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction"

There is a common complaint that most if not all of us have made after seeing a movie, watching a TV show, or listening to a piece of music: "How did this become popular?"  I know I have that feeling every time I come across something having to do with Pokémon. Even as a kid I did not understand its appeal.  Nor do I understand how its appeal can spawn one of the most recent and most hyped fads in recent memory, the Pokémon Go! mobile app that swept through the country last year.  But could there be something to popularity?  Is there a secret recipe for making a hit in art & media today?  

Enter Derek Thompson's book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction published by Penguin Press in 2017.   According to the biography on this book's jacket flap, Mr. Thompson "is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, where he writes about economics and the media."  He's also been named on Inc. magazine's and Forbes's 30 under 30 lists, so clearly this author is someone to watch in the future.  This book is built upon several articles Mr. Thompson wrote for The Atlantic in 2013, 2014, and 2016.  Mr. Thompson's premise is what was just described above: how does a hit become a hit?  What is the secret sauce?

I would recommend you read this book for yourself to find out, but here are some of the key insights I took away from reading this book this past week.

• Tell all your friends- Have you ever played the game "Six Degrees off Kevin Bacon"?  If not, it's a kind of party game where you try to connect yourself to the actor Kevin Bacon through no more than six personal contacts.  Example: My father flew an airplane that took on a passenger who owns a hair salon that serviced Hollywood mail runner who met a screen writer who worked with Kevin Bacon (Not really, but you get my point).  Mr. Thompson writes about a similar game in this book where one tries to connect themselves to the President of the United States in six degrees or less, but his point is that who you know in your network and who they know in their networks can determine how "viral" a piece of art or entertainment goes.  This blog will be viewed by interested people in my network, but it won't go viral unless people in my network share it with interested and influential people in their networks, who shares it with interested and influential people in their network, etc., etc. (Please do share!)  How large and influential one's networks are can determine how popular something ultimately becomes.

• Don't freak them out!: My title for this post wasn't meant to be just a cute attention grabber.  One of the key lessons Mr. Thompson learned and then imparts to the reader is that consumers of art & entertainment do want something new, but not so different that that it unnerves them.  This is a theory of design and marketing developed by Raymond Loewy in the early 20th century known as "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable," or MAYA (see pages 46-48 of this book for more about the origins of this theory).  Let me give you a personal example.  I love opera.  The music and drama is on such a massive scale that, when done right, it can hold its own against any CGI-enhanced summer epic.  But if I were to try to get you to like opera, I wouldn't take you to a performance of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, a short tale of a German reservist driven by madness, jealousy, and paranoia to kill his common-law wife and commit suicide soon afterwards, leaving their bastard child an orphan.  Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful opera and I enjoy it myself.  But German opera got weird after the end of the World War I (Wozzeck was first performed in 1925).  Wozzeck uses an atonal score throughout to mirror the main character's growing insanity and depression.  To a generation of Americans who grew up on the Wagnerian tunes of John William's scores to Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Wozzeck's score might sound like bag full of dying cats scratching a dozen chalk boards.  You'll never want to go to another opera again because it was too new for you.  Instead, I would probably take you to one of Mozart's ever popular operas such as The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute.  The musical scores to his operas would seem more familiar to you, probably because you have heard some of them before without knowing where they came from.  However, it could be considered new enough to hook you into opera as a form of entertainment worthy of your time.

Now there is a dark side to this, such as the popularity of Pokémon mentioned above (seriously, I don't get it).  But also, since it is pretty easy to find people's tastes based on surveys, sales numbers and data searches in today's digitally connected age, arts & entertainment moguls can continue to churn out the same, but slightly different, schlock every year.  Tired of superhero movies dominating the summer box office?  I'm not, most people are not yet, and Hollywood knows that.  Hence why Marvel and DC comic book superheroes are getting so many movies in the years to come.  However, Mr. Thompson also notes that there is a dark side to this: 

"It is precisely because great stories are persuasive that we should be cautious about which narratives to let into our hearts.  The storytellers in our lives, from Hollywood kingpins to garrulous grandparents are all subtle instructors of cultural expectations.  A great story can teach audiences that racial bias is right or wrong, that a war is necessary or abominable, that women are subservient sex objects or worthy self-determining heroes.  Narrative drama is not always a moral attribute."

pp. 283-284

Pieces of music, art, literature, movies, and television do not become popular overnight.  According to Mr. Thompson, there is a secret sauce to hits, if you know what you are looking for.  

I hope you enjoyed this weeks book blog post.  Next week will be Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to bring down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar.  Until next time, get back to reading!