Relevance always sprouts from a foundation of comfort, trust, familiarity and confidence. It doesn't have to be confidence that a person or brand is good. It can be confidence that he, she or it is a jerk. But it's impossible to be relevant without it.
In order to be relevant to me, you must first have to occupy a space.
In the world of mass advertising, occupying a space is often confused with a “saturation bombing” approach to entering the public’s mind . . . saturation not only in terms of the number of exposures, but also the intrusiveness, visual stimulus, loudness and overall invasiveness of the creative.
But that’s dumb.
In the relevance game, the strategy is not to out-shout the person shouting the loudest. That only leads to people raising their shields and spam filters, eliminating all unwanted noise.
Depending on which study you consult, the average adult in any industrial or post-industrial society is exposed to between one million and seven million communications messages every year: marketing messages, political messages, images, instructions, warnings, temptations, diversions, entertainments.
The vast majority are delivered without our advance permission.
Faced with this unimaginable flood of communications seeking our attention and engagement, we would each be driven quickly insane if we had not all developed the most important skill modern survival skill: the ability to block and ignore the ones offering us nothing we care about. Conversely, we each have an almost instinctive system for allowing in the tiny fraction promising something meaningful, useful, helpful or delightful.
This is our great neurological spam filter, deleting irritating messages without being seen. We block the irrelevant and let the relevant ones pass through.
As everyone with an inbox knows, the most ingenious and unethical spammers have devised tricks to circumvent the filters and get through. When it arrives in your field of vision, you still know the message spam, of course, but it forces you to spend the three seconds (or whatever) to think about it and delete it.
Or maybe it contains a virus that will destroy your laptop. Or maybe, in a few cases, it contains a message you’ve been desperately longing to hear . . . like a Nigerian prince wants your help in getting his inheritance and is willing to pay you handsomely for your services, or maybe:
We’re going to take money back from other countries that are killing us or
We’re going to make Mexico pay for a wall or
The President’s birth certificate is a fake or
Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated on 9/11 or
It’s fun to ridicule the disabilities of people you disagree with or
We shouldn’t let any more Muslims in or
It’s disgusting when women go to the bathroom
Or . . . or . . . or . . .
For most of us (thankfully), this is just spam that got through. It’s an annoyance. When it happens too frequently, it’s a problem. When it seems to threaten to destroy your laptop or hack into your bank account, it’s a crisis and you need find a way to eradicate it. These are the various echelons of relevance it may achieve within your field of vision.
But for some of us (at the moment, it appears to be one-third of one-half of us), it’s not spam after all. It’s exactly the message we’ve been waiting so long to hear, a signal of intense relevance and meaning, to be absorbed, amplified and rebroadcast, not removed. For those of us in this group, it turns out the spam filter wasn’t inside us screening out the irrelevant pollution. It turns out it was outside us, preventing “the real truth” from getting through.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: “Little pig, little pig, let me come in”