Seth Godin is an enterpreneur/marketer with serveral Amazon bestsellers under his belt. He is also an excellent speaker. I analysed one of his presentations for my Communication class and thought I'd put up the transcript. Note his use of rhetoric and framing techniques.
Video of this presentation is available
here
Alternative address
here
A similar presentation given by Seth Godin on the same topic can be found
here
[Applause]
I need to start with a sad story. It’s a story about a fellow technologist, an inventor, a guy named Otto Rohwedder.
[to screen] We could practice going to the… [screen lights up, slides appear] there we go.
Otto Rohwedder, in 1913, invented [pause] the greatest thing: sliced bread. [laughter] and like most inventors, like most technologists, Otto went out, got some money together, and made sure he had the patents, so that no one would steal his idea. And the other thing he did, was he made sure he had the factory all lined up. He made sure he had the operation in place so when everyone showed up, [pause] to buy his sliced bread, he’d be ready.
And for 17 years, no one bought sliced bread. Otto Rohwedder was a complete failure.
And it wasn’t until much later, 17 years later, when the patent ran out, that Otto realised his mistake. He’d forgotten to ask a question, a two-word question: Who cares? No one was wakin’ up in the middle of the night or in the morning, say: ”Oh good! I can go downstairs and get some of that sliced bread and make me some toast!” No one wanted sliced bread; no one needed sliced bread; no one had been sold sliced bread.
And it wasn’t until these guys [Wonder Bread] came along and marketed the sliced bread. In 1930 they started doing this: puting it in the bright bag, with a little twist tie, built strong bodies, 12 ways… the whole thing. They marketed the sliced bread and people bought it. It became a success.
It’s only four simple words: if your ideas spread, you win! That’s the goal: ideas that spread, win.
It doesn’t matter if you are in the coffee business, or whether you are an intellectual, or you are in the computer business or the TV business or if you are in the business of running airlines. It doesn’t matter. All these people succeeded in every line of work, for one simple reason: they figured out how to get their ideas to spread.
And if your ideas spread, that’s it! You win! Everything else, [pause] takes care of itself.
And what we are sittin’ at, right now, is the end of a hundred-year stretch, where our culture, our country has been all about the spread of ideas that we have optimised for, we have lined up for, we have gotten excited about, we’ve rewarded people for. Ideas have never spread faster, they have never spread more fluently than they spread right now, right here.
And a big part of that, is TV. Not just television, but the TV thinking. And TV thinking is based on two words: Pay Attention.
And when you think about those two words, you gotta stop for a second. Because there’s a lot of meaning in it. Attention.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I only get 17 spare minutes a day. And just ‘cause someone comes along, and buys an ad for a minute on a TV show, doesn’t mean I’m gonna give them a minute of my hard-earned attention. I don’t get that attention back!
So the equation is really interesting: pay attention. You pay the media company, you pay the post office, you pay the phone company and I have to pay you [pause] with my attention.
And TV was the greatest example of this, ever! But it was all about a simple idea: you can buy attention in our country. If you’ve got money, you can market yourself by buying attention.
That led to what I call the TV-industrial complex. A little bit of a take-off, here at the belt way. But it starts like this: you buy a bunch of ads; those ads get you more distribution; that distribution helps you sell more stuff; when you sell more stuff, you make a profit; and if you are smart, you are buying more ads!
My loft, where I work, in New York, 7,000 square foot thing, used to be a printing plant. Charles Revson from Revlon did all his printing there. Revlon is a multi-billion dollar company because of this: in 1947, he bought some TV ads. He was one of first cosmetic people to do so. It worked. He got distribution. He made money. He bought more TV ads. The cycle repeated itself and repeated itself.
And if you do things right, and I don’t care if you selling to the consumers, stuff like make-up; or selling to businesses or the government, things like ball bearing. It’s all the same. You can interrupt people, get their attention, and make money.
All these products succeeded, not ‘cause they were really super amazing, except maybe Pop-Tarts, [laughter] but because they were organised to be on television! Right? They were organised to be an average product for the average people, that could be advertised like crazy and make a profit in the process.
And the bad news that I am here to give to you tonight is this: while we were watching; while you were building your businesses; while you were making your plans; while your clients were struggling to build what they built, somebody cancelled [pause] the TV-industrial complex.
All of a sudden, on our watch, right? On our watch, TV ads don’t work, radio ads don’t work, magazine ads don’t work… all that stuff doesn’t work like it used to!
There is a whole bunch of reason and I’ll cover a couple of them. But there didn’t used to be a billion web pages, there didn’t used to be 500 TV channels, you didn’t used to be all that to kill three or four hours IM-ing people on the internet, when you are supposed to be watching Gilligan’s Island! Right? [laughter]
So, this picture is really fuzzy, I had a bad cold when I took it. [laughter] But I showed it to you for an important reason. Take a look at that blue box, centre, one shelf up. The brand manager of that blue box spent 100 million dollars last year, trying to interrupt me.
100 million dollars on coupons, shopping allowances, TV ads, radio ads, direct mail, detailing in doctors’ offices… so that when I was sick, and I had money in my hot little hand, I would go to the deli, and buy her product.
And do you know what I did? I ignored every single one of those 100-million-dollar worth of ads. ‘cause I don’t have a pain reliever problem! Twenty years ago, I’ve started buying the stuff in the yellow box. I am finished! I don’t need another pain reliever. I’m done.
She is invisible. She doesn’t exist! Right? It’s as if her product doesn’t even exist.
And here, it’s sorta the end of my bad news, I think I’ve gotta cover a little bit more:
You are the product in the blue box!
Your law firm, your accounting firm, your technology firm, your agencies trying to sell stuff to the government… all of you [pause] are the blue box!
Unless you are doing something so way out there, what you are busy doing, is trying to solve a problem, for people either don’t know you exist, don’t wanna know you exist, or don’t have a problem they believe you can solve!
And we gotta do something about that, if we wanna get things to grow.
[end of excerpt]
