The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,40

the letter shouldn’t have been on the bottom of the screen because, as almost all eye movement research demonstrates, when it comes to television people tend to fixate on the center of the screen. That issue, though, is really secondary to the simple fact that the kids weren’t watching the letters because they were watching Oscar. They were watching the model and not the beer can. “I remember ‘Oscar’s Blending,’” Flagg says. “Oscar was very active. He was really making a fuss in the background, and the word is not close to him at all. He’s moving his mouth a lot, moving his hands. He has things in his hands. There is a great deal of distraction. The kids don’t focus on the letters at all because Oscar is so interesting.” Oscar was sticky. The lesson wasn’t.

3.

This was the legacy of Sesame Street: If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness. But is it possible to make a show even stickier than Sesame Street? This was what three young television producers at the Nickelodeon Network in Manhattan asked themselves in the mid 1990s. It was a reasonable question. Sesame Street, after all, was a product of the 1960s, and in the intervening three decades major strides had been made in understanding how children’s minds work. One of the Nickelodeon producers, Todd Kessler, had actually worked on Sesame Street and left the show dissatisfied. He didn’t like the fast paced “magazine” format of the show. “I love Sesame Street,” he says. “But I always believed that kids didn’t have short attention spans, that they could easily sit still for a half an hour.” He found traditional children’s television too static. “Because the audience is not all that verbal or even preverbal, it is important to tell the story visually,” he went on. “It’s a visual medium, and to make it sink in, to make it powerful, you’ve got to make use of that. There is so much children’s television that is all talk. The audience has a hard time keeping up with that.” Kessler’s colleague, Angela Santomero, grew up on Sesame Street and had similar misgivings. “We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further,” Santomero said. “TV is a great medium for education. But people up until now haven’t explored the potential of it. They’ve been using it in a rote way. I believed we could turn that around.”

What they came up with is a show called Blue’s Clues. It is half an hour, not an hour. It doesn’t have an ensemble cast. It has just one live actor, Steve, a fresh faced man in his early twenties in khakis and a rugby shirt who acts as the show’s host. Instead of a varied, magazine format, each episode follows a single story line—the exploits of an animated dog by the name of Blue. It has a flat, two dimensional feel, more like a video version of a picture book than a television show. The pace is deliberate. The script is punctuated with excruciatingly long pauses. There is none of the humor or wordplay or cleverness that characterizes Sesame Street. One of the animated characters on the show, a mailbox, is called Mailbox. Two other regular characters, a shovel and a pail, are called Shovel and Pail. And Blue, of course, the show’s star, is Blue because she’s the color blue. It is difficult, as an adult, to watch Blue’s Clues and not wonder how this show could ever represent an improvement over Sesame Street. And yet it does. Within months of its debut in 1996, Blue’s Clues was trouncing Sesame Street in the ratings. On the Distracter test, it scores higher than its rival in capturing children’s attention. Jennings Bryant, an educational researcher at the University of Alabama, conducted a study of 120 children, comparing the performance of regular Blue’s Clues watchers to watchers of other educational shows on a series of cognitive tests.

“After six months we began to get very big differences,” Bryant said. “By almost all of our measures of flexible thinking and problem solving, we had statistically significant differences. If there were sixty items on the test, you might find that the Blue’s Clues watchers were correctly identifying fifty of them, and the control group was identifying thirty five.” Blue’s Clues may be one of the stickiest television shows ever made.

How is it that such an unprepossessing show is even stickier than Sesame