Marketing, music, and meaning.

What Is The Common Denominator?

Until 2017, Formula 1’s viewership was steadily declining. The owner Bernie Ecclestone discouraged the use of social media and relied on traditional broadcasting deals to generate attention. That changed when Liberty Media purchased the sport and created a behind-the-scenes documentary show called Drive To Survive. The series gives a close look at the intensity of the sport, the rivalries, the personalities. In the 5 years since the show launched revenue from the sport has doubled, they’ve set viewership records, and attracted a younger, more diverse audience.

Instead of promoting F1 traditionally, the new owners found what Edward Bernays would call a common denominator between what the business owners wanted and what the public wanted. The sport is inherently interesting, the stakes are incredibly high, the locations of the races are insane, but before the show it wasn’t relating to a younger audience. It wasn’t touching on the overlapping interests of streaming audiences and sports fans. Now it’s reaching more people than it ever has.

I Don’t Feel Like You At All ​

Last night indie artist Mk.gee played Saturday Night Live for the first time. Playing SNL is kind of like the “moment” for an artist, but he got there on an unlikely route. He didn’t hack TikTok, he didn’t sign to a major label, he created a sound that no one has ever heard before.

His guitar tone alone has gone viral with hundreds of thousands of people watching trying to get a glimpse of how he makes it sound like that. Eric Clapton said that “he’s the brightest new guitarist around.” Rolling Stone called him a “new kind of guitar hero.”

​He told The New York Times, “I don’t want to be related to,” Gordon said. “I don’t feel like you at all — I feel like an alien. Why would I make music any other way?” “Ironically,” he soon found, “that’s when people relate to it.”

Instead of trying to reach people with direct force, Mk.gee has created circumstances that have stirred interest in his unique style of music. And he became the new guitar hero in the process.
​

The Only I In The Whole World​

When you’re writing something or making a video or doing anything that requires a certain something it’s easy to get stuck on me. It’s easy to get really zoomed in on your particular circumstance and your particular set of problems. This makes it hard to find overlapping interests because you’re so focused on yourself. How can you see anything or anyone else?

Kierkegaard’s advice is to turn the I into a you.

He says that “it is characteristic of childhood to say: ‘Me want—me—me.’ It is characteristic of youth to say, ‘I—and I—and I.’”

But then he turns it and in a winded way explains how the I should become the you.

“The mark of maturity and the dedication of the eternal is to will to understand that this I has no significance if it does not become the you… It is youthful to want to be the only I in the whole world. Maturity is to understand this you as addressed to oneself, even though it were not said to a single other person. You shall; You shall love your neighbor. O, my reader, it is not to you I speak. It is the me, to whom the eternal says: ‘You shall.’”

Instead of thinking about you, think of the you. Think of the person who you’re trying to reach. Who is that? What are they interested in? What are you both interested in? What’s the common denominator?

Talk to you next week,

Dawson