The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,34

full complement of the advertising created by his firm in the local editions of TV Guide and Parade magazine in twenty six media markets around the United States. In thirteen of those markets, McCann should be allowed to air its “awareness” television commercials. In the other thirteen, Wunderman would air his own set of television commercials. Whoever’s commercials created the greatest increase in response to the local TV Guide and Parade advertising would win the whole account. Columbia agreed, and after a month they tabulated the results. Responses in Wunderman’s markets were up 80 percent, compared to 19.5 percent for McCann. Wunderman had won in a rout.

The key to Wunderman’s success was something he called the “treasure hunt.” In every TV Guide and Parade ad, he had his art director put a little gold box in the corner of the order coupon. Then his firm wrote a series of TV commercials that told the “secret of the Gold Box.” Viewers were told that if they could find the gold box in their issues of Parade and TV Guide, they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record free. The gold box, Wunderman theorized, was a kind of trigger. It gave viewers a reason to look for the ads in TV Guide and Parade. It created a connection between the Columbia message viewers saw on television and the message they read in a magazine. The gold box, Wunderman writes, “made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system. Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants. It was like playing a game....The effectiveness of the campaign was startling. In 1977, none of Columbia’s ads in its extensive magazine schedule had been profitable. In 1978, with Gold Box television support, every magazine on the schedule made a profit, an unprecedented turnaround.”

What’s interesting about this story is that by every normal expectation McCann should have won the test. The gold box idea sounds like a really cheesy idea. Columbia was so skeptical of it that it took Wunderman several years to persuade them to let him try it. McCann, meanwhile, was one of the darlings of Madison Avenue, a firm renowned for its creativity and sophistication. Furthermore, McCann spent four times as much as Wunderman on media time. They bought prime time slots for their space. Wunderman’s ads were on in the wee hours of the morning. In the last chapter, I talked about how epidemics are, in part, a function of how many people a message reaches, and by that standard McCann was way ahead. McCann did all the big things right. But they didn’t have that little final touch, that gold box, that would make their message stick.

If you look closely at epidemic ideas or messages, as often as not the elements that make them sticky turn out to be as small and as seemingly trivial as Wunderman’s gold box. Consider, for example, the so called fear experiments conducted by the social psychologist Howard Levanthal in the 1960s. Levanthal wanted to see if he could persuade a group of college seniors at Yale University to get a tetanus shot. He divided them up into several groups, and gave all of them a seven page booklet explaining the dangers of tetanus, the importance of inoculation, and the fact that the university was offering free tetanus shots at the campus health center to all interested students. The booklets came in several versions. Some of the students were given a “high fear” version, which described tetanus in dramatic terms and included color photographs of a child having a tetanus seizure and other tetanus victims with urinary catheters, tracheotomy wounds, and nasal tubes. In the “low fear” version, the language describing the risks of tetanus was toned down, and the photographs were omitted. Levanthal wanted to see what impact the different booklets had on the students’ attitudes toward tetanus and their likelihood of getting a shot.

The results were, in part, quite predictable. When they were given a questionnaire later, all the students appeared to be well educated about the dangers of tetanus. But those who were given the high fear booklet were more convinced of the dangers of tetanus, more convinced of the importance of shots, and were more likely to say that they intended to get inoculated. All of those differences evaporated, however, when Levanthal looked at how many of the students actually went and got a shot. One month after the experiments, almost