Numb and Dumber: Your Audience Doesn’t Care
At last, the golden age of good enough is upon us. Apps are still buggy, we want to believe service bots don’t suck, and we’re elated after three weeks of wifi uptime. Delight abounds when things function at their bare minimum. “It’s good enough,” we concede. “For now.”
But it’s always now. In the eternal conga line of present moments, a mass lowering of expectations has taken hold—one that reaches far beyond tech fails. Quality marketing, advertising, and brand strategy aren’t customer priorities either. The thumbs have spoken. Crazy to think, what with the unprecedented amount of information we have on demand. Time was, better technology and higher intelligence went hand in hand.
Until they didn’t. According to recent research, we’ve entered a Reverse Flynn Effect era, indicating our “matrix reasoning, letter and number series, and verbal reasoning” scores are shrinking. Meanwhile our screens grow and content accelerates. The Reverse Flynn, experts assert, started in 2006—just months before the iPhone’s debut.
The MTV Generation introduced the world to the “meh” ethos, mastering the art of apathy under the spell of 24-hour music video. That new genre of exciting stimuli, available worldwide almost overnight, anesthetized what would become Generation X. One look at Madonna in a wedding dress and game over.
Fast-forward to Generation Meh, where every age bracket from Boomer to Beta just can’t be bothered. At some point, we discovered that demanding more from services, media, entertainment, and even ourselves requires energy we don’t have, so we simply turned the expectation dial to ‘low’ and carried on, satisficed. Then forgot about it.
Of course there’s danger in living this way. When we presume the least out of a company, institution, brand, or neighbor, we can slip into what’s called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson coined the term to describe a marginalized group that’s held to a lower standard based on racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic stereotypes.
It can be re-factored to apply to business and other organizations, however. When we assume that a particular group (e.g., a beleaguered industry, government body, sports league) is simply incapable of performing any better than it does now—or we’re just too preoccupied to notice—we stop challenging the group to reach its potential. Instead, we hand out mental participation trophies and move on to quicker gratifications. Absent a feedback loop, the group and the expectations placed upon it fall further behind.
You might agree the industry’s work of late is, by and large, substandard. Nielsen did. I’m sure COVID and WFH had something to do with it. And yeah, much of it is “supposed to look native,” I get it. But without the attention economy, where does this leave the premium, skilled storytelling industries? Do we as a workforce even care anymore?
Despite industry consolidation, thousands of pink slips falling from the sky above agencies and in-house shops, and clients pointing their dollars elsewhere, the craft will live on. Great communication art never dies. It just downsizes to those willing to invest in innovation and expert detail for an audience that appreciates it—the part of the agency spectrum the boutiques always occupied. The rest of the budgets (and practitioners) are already moving en masse to social, humans/AIs with big followings, and transactional retail media. Content mills await.
Now we’re trapped inside a pincer movement of lowering intellect and rising stimuli. There’s little oxygen for sophistication in here. No use spending on high-touch when the audience can’t recognize it. “I have an idea. Let’s shoot an hour of whatever on my phone—it doesn’t matter, no one cares—cut 6 spots out of it in iMovie, upload to our $10 CPM CTV buy, and watch quantity and frequency drive conversion.”
From so-so to siso. When good enough goes bad.
Maybe it’s not that way at all. Maybe the audience is a lot smarter than we think. What if, after years of putting up with self-important promo drivel that doesn’t help them make the right choice, they decide to take their business to only the brands that give a damn about how they carry themselves and the customer benefits they guarantee? You know, the ones with great appreciation for the customer’s intelligence and taste that really stands out in the work?
What if the low expectations this whole time were ours—of the audience and of ourselves? What if the customer’s the one in the pincer?
And we’re in the conga line.
