Just adding "hyper" in front of your product category is not a solution

Sometimes cheating is a good thing...

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? All good here - just working my way through the Bear Season 4. I think there’ve only been 17 speeches about how important restaurants are. So that’s good.

Today:

• More, worse

• Super hyper-personalized

• Cheating 2 ways

• The best part

Sharing Gobbledy with other marketers is a nice thing to do:

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More, Worse…

I would normally put this in the P.S. section at the bottom, but I thought this essay titled “The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work” that ran in the excellent media & technology newsletter 404 was worth sharing here.

The piece makes the argument that media companies that are “making the pivot” to AI are not just screwed, but they have already cordially invited the fox into the long-crumbling henhouse¹.

I find the current media landscape to be a fascinating, troubling, vexing strategic challenge, but not all of you do (and it’s certainly not what we spend our time on here at Gobbledy). However, I thought one section was applicable to those of us who produce content on behalf of tech companies (and to those of us who hire people who produce content on behalf of tech companies:

NY Times writer Kevin Roose recently asked whether the growth of AI content will lead to a counter-movement, in the same way that the growth of fast food led to the growth of the slow food, organic movement. The essay responds:

This has ALREAAAAADDDDYYYYYY HAPPPENEEEEEDDDDDD, and it is quite literally the only path forward for all but perhaps the most gigantic of media companies. There is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet. It’s already being made, by spammers and the AI companies themselves. It is impossible to make it cheaper or better than them, because it is what they exist to do.

He doesn’t usually use so many capital letters.

This is such a good point - we cannot compete with people or companies that want to just produce a lot of content. We will lose that battle. Or likely we already lost that battle.

Along these lines, I wanted to share a chart. If I had an editor, that editor would tell me to be more specific. Since I don’t have an editor, I’ll be more specific. This chart captures vinyl album sales in the US over a 50 year period:

Why am I sharing that? Excellent question, me!

What we can see there is that vinyl sales declined with the introduction and growth of CDs, a superior (in most ways - let’s not get into a whole audiophile thing about whether a CD can truly “capture” what the artist intended, etc etc etc) physical artifact for capturing and playing music. Vinyl died because CDs grew, but it stayed dead because CDs were a replacement for vinyl (if you’re around my age, there are albums that you owned on vinyl, on cassette, and on CD - you kept replacing the old thing with the new thing).

Oddly, vinyl stayed dead until Spotify showed up. Spotify was “better” in that you didn’t need a physical artifact to listen to nearly every piece of music ever created.

But it turns out, it wasn’t exactly a replacement for having a physical artifact of the music. And as we see in 2024, about 8% of recorded music revenue in the U.S. is from vinyl sales.

The growth of easily accessible, digitally distributed music led to its own “slow food” movement, as a segment of music listeners sought out a physical artifact for music.

I’m telling you all this because as our industry is pushed to use new technologies to produce more content that can be distributed in more places, that will lead to an opportunity in the market to be the slow-food-vinyl-album of content.

Can I share an example? No? Hm. I guess you should skip to the next section. Yes? Oh, thank you. That’s kind.

I’ve been chatting with someone at NinjaCat, an analytics something something something. I can’t actually tell from their homepage (I can help! NinjaCat team, I’m right here!), but that’s not my point.

The content team there embraced slow-food-vinyl-album content and created a musical called Big Data Day, that’s a really clever top-of-funnel brand marketing play. (You can listen to it here). I was going to say “clever for a software company,” but it’s clever, software company or not.

I’ve been saying that the outcome of the last 18 months of new content tooling is going to be “More, worse.” It’s gotten so much easier to create fast food and MP3s. It hasn’t gotten much easier to create slow food and vinyl. But if you think your audience would respond to content that is curated, and cared for, and where someone gave a shit, this is your time.

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On Hyper-personalizing and Cheating

Part 1: Personalizing (hyper or otherwise)

If you work for a software company, and that software company has a product, and that product has a component to it that will personalize an aspect of the experience, you might be a redneck.

No, that’s not right. I meant, you may have had this conversation at some point:

Person: I think we need to update our website.

You: OK sure. What needs to be updated?

Person: I feel like it’s not really capturing the full value our product offers.

You: Hm. We just went through a whole workshop about this, and we hired someone to re-write the homepage. Is there something specific?

Person: Yes, as a matter of fact there is.

You: Sorry, you cut out. I didn’t hear that. The last thing I heard was “product.”

[I forgot to mention this was a Zoom call.]

Person: Sorry. Is this better?

You: Much.

Person: I said, “yes, as a matter of fact there is.” I like how we say we “personalize sales outreach.” That’s good.

You: Great! I thought you’d like that.

Person: But, I’m not sure that really fully captures how good the personalization is. Plus, all our competitors say they “personalize sales outreach.”

You: Yes, we say that because we personalize sales outreach.

Person: Yeah, but how will people know how MUCH we personalize it. Like “personalize sales outreach” could mean we just sorta regularly personalize it. Is there another word we could use to really, really emphasize it. Like hyper-emphasize it. Wait.

You: What?

Person: That’s it.

You: What’s it?

Person: That.

You: What’s that?

Person: Hyper. We should say we “hyper-personalize” outreach.

You: We could say that. But then doesn’t it just become an adverbial arms race (tm)?

Person: What’s an adverb?

You: Sorry. I meant, maybe we get ahead of it and say, “We super-hyper-personalize your outreach.”

Person: You’re a goddamned hyper-super genius!

You: I was being sarcastic.

Lesson: Adding “hyper” to whatever you’re doing is not a solution to your messaging challenges.

Part 2: Cheating

A few months back we talked about a company called Cluely that was known for 2 things:

1. A stupid advertisement suggesting you can use the product to lie to women.

2. An origin story about how the founder was kicked out of Columbia for creating this product that helped people “cheat” during Zoom job interviews.

The product itself is a little chatbox that lives alongside your Zoom window that will provide prompts on what to say (or whatever) based on what the other person is saying. The tool isn’t particularly earth shattering (it’s an AI transcription tool that basically ChatGPTs responses to what it’s hearing), but I have come to appreciate their initial messaging. Here was their homepage when they launched:

I will be honest here and mention that in my annoyance over my personal reaction to their founders, I missed such a key insight about their messaging:

“Cheat” is a really brilliant word here.

This product is basically just a chatbot. There are lots of ways to talk about a chatbot, though most of them are centered on something like, “get the information you need, right when you need it! Hyper-personalized!”

That’s really what a chatbot does, not the benefit you get. The real benefit of a chatbot is that it saves you from having to do some other work; which is to say, it helps you cheat in some way.

Everyone else can use a sales chatbot to get their questions answered. But what if you could “cheat” on sales calls. That’s a big, big benefit, no? Hyper-big, you might say.

“Cheat” is such a powerful word that another company used it against Cluely. How?

Turns out - and this is more information than most of you care about - Cluely’s code was pretty wide open for anyone who wanted to view it. And people did view it, and they weren’t impressed with it, and they created an Open Source version of it over a weekend.

Behold, Cheatingdaddy.com:

“Cheat” was such a powerful word that one company was basically able to create a product category in a month (“chatbots for douchebags” is now a “Cheating tool”).

I’d suggest that your product does one of two things:

1. It helps your customer keep up with the competition (“use X so you don’t fall behind”); or

2. Gives a benefit to a customer that would in some way be considered “unfair” to the competition if your customer used it and the competitors did not.

Cluely and Cheatingdaddy (cheatingdaddy…I just can’t…) are saying that you have an unfair advantage compared to all other interviewers if you use it during an interview. “Cheating” is the unfair advantage.

This is shockingly smart, and I virtually never see that kind of language - the benefits (if there are benefits listed at all on a homepage) are usually of the “get more revenue” or “stop wasting time so you can focus on, uh, begging people to buy your product” or “now firing people can be fun!” or whatever. It’s never, “they haven’t made using this product illegal…yet.”

Go find your unfair advantage…

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Speaking of Cheating…

Perhaps you’ve read columns by Dan Savage, a sex/relationship columnist who has coined the term “monogamish” to describe his own relationship with his spouse (and suggests it may be an option for others), where the couple is monogamous but also on occasion not monogamous.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “monogamish” is a cute word, but the “monogam” part is some nonsense - once it’s “ish” it is - by definition - no longer the original thing AT ALL. (No judgment, obviously).

I’m talking about monogamishness because that’s what I thought of when I’ve read articles about the airline JSX, which offers what it calls “semi-private jets.”

A private jet, as you know, is a plane that is used by you and your hand-selected fellow passengers and typically flies into a private airport facility that does not require going through TSA screening.

A “semi-private jet” does not require TSA screening but has you sitting in a regional jet with a whole bunch of other randos. That’s the “semi” part. It’s “semi-private” in the way that monogamish means that your partner is absolutely not monogamous or, like when you were 17, someone may have said that a friend was “technically a virgin” which really made you wonder about the “technically” part, in the way that I wonder about the “semi” part of “semi-private.” Also both suggest there are way more people inside it than I otherwise would’ve expected.

Anyway, I think “semi-private” is brilliant in the way that - as we recently discussed - “mocktail” is brilliant because it positions the product against cocktails (which are more expensive. “Semi-private” can position itself as a less expensive alternative to private, rather than as a possibly-better-than-first-class on a commercial plane (though - and this is for another time - I do not think it is better). Positioning yourself against a more expensive product raises your product’s price ceiling. Brilliant (even if I think “semi-private” is ridiculous.)

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Thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

PS: Every once in a while I read something where I think, “damn, I wish I wrote that.” This incredibly silly piece called, “Pop Music Contrapositives” is one of them.

PS2: That’s an old Playstation.

PS3: I’ve been coaching marketing execs, and I’ve found that just 2 hours a month can make a massive impact in how successful you can be in your role. If you’re someone who could use a sounding board for your marketing challenges, a 6-month engagement where we have a session every other week is an amazing way to work through both the daily challenges and more strategic challenges you’re facing as a marketer. I’m happy to talk share success stories and how this works - jared@sagelett.com or if you hate emailing, fill out the form here. No pressure, but I promise this is the easiest way to grow in your marketing role.

1. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this here at some point, but my favorite example of the “let’s invite the fox into the henhouse” is the still-inexplicable decision by Borders books to outsource their online business to Amazon back in 2000 or so. Some people say that the Time Warner-AOL merger was the worst business decision of the last 50 years or so, but the Borders-Amazon tie up has to be close.