The Academy Awards of HABITS!

The Academy Awards of habit, influence. I watched the Academy Awards last night. A spectacular show if you like, Stars, movies, entertainment. I was struck by some things that might seem patently obvious to you, but also probably not the normal perspective you're looking at. For every half hour of the show, the Academy Awards, there's eight minutes of advertisements. Well, that's pretty standard for any TV show. What's different is the Academy Awards has such a huge, huge audience. It's typically the second largest audience or the largest audience of the year for American television and it's seen around the world. So that's what's different about it. But here's what I'm thinking. It just struck me as so odd. Let's say you started watching the Academy Awards at 5pm that's when the pre show comes on. It goes until 11 o' clock at night. That's six hours. If you're watching eight minutes of advertisements per half hour, that's 16 minutes per hour. If you add it all up, you're watching one hour and 36 minutes of advertisements in one evening. I hadn't really thought of it quite in those terms before, but when I grappled with raised a number of interesting questions. The other thing is so many ads are still about 30 seconds long. That means you watched 192 ads from major corporations over the course of an evening. Now I'm not even factoring in the issue that the whole Academy Awards show is basically an advertisement for people selling movie tickets. That's a whole separate issue. But the tremendous number of ads that you watch in one evening. But let's go beyond that. According to data from 2017, the typical American still watches four hours a day of television. And if you're a millennial or someone younger, you might not watch broadcast TV, but you could be watching TikTok or YouTube videos for that long. So that's a tremendous amount. This adds up to about 64 minutes of being advertised to per day. This is all coming from major corporations. I'm not saying corporations are bad, but corporations basically have an hour a day just to put video ads in front of us. I'm not even talking about billboard ads and online ads, radio ads, I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about just video exposure, which many marketers consider to be the most powerful form of influencing behavior. And when you add it all up, some crude math, this is roughly 365 hours a year where people are watching not TV but TV ads. This means for two full weeks, 24 hours a day. We as human beings, at least in the Western world, on average, everyone can be a little different. On average, we're watching more than two weeks, 24 hours a day of just advertisements from major corporations trying to influence our behavior specifically to buy products and to buy services. Now, again, this is not even taking into account radio ads, billboard ads, bumper stickers, emails from Amazon saying, buy this. But it's just hard to imagine the sheer quantity of marketing messages we are bombarded, being bombarded with. And let's not forget, we don't typically talk about it this way. Every advertisement is essentially an attempt to create a new key in you, to create a new habit. They want a new action and a habit of buying that product regularly. Coca Cola wants you to buy Coca Cola every day. McDonald's wants you to buy a Big Mac or a shake or an apple pie or French fries every day. That is the goal. That is the explicit goal. Now, yes, occasionally there are government public service announcements designed to try to help you to have a new habit that's good for you. There are public service campaigns to get you to give up smoking, not drive drunk. But let's not kid ourselves. That's probably less than 1% of advertisements you see anywhere. Everything else is about giving our attention to corporations to try to change our behavior, to create habits that frankly, most of the time aren't good for us. They're not what we decided, and we as human beings are just giving away our attention. There's a lot of stories written these days, a lot of talk about how people give away their data too freely, give away their privacy too freely. Those are legitimate issues. But I think the far bigger problem most of us have is we're giving our attention away freely. Because when you give your attention away, you're giving power to others to put cues in front of you that will create responses in front of you. So when you're in the grocery store and you see a Budweiser, or maybe you think of yourself as classy, or you see the advertisement for that expensive import from Germany, when you see that logo, you then buy. You then take an action, and you do it in an habitual way. This is something I think does not get enough attention. When the autopsy of humanity is written. And I hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. I think a crucial moment will be when society decided to basically give away weeks and weeks and weeks of their attention as individuals to other people, to influence their habits and their actions. And that's what we have done slowly, gradually, but it's Been a whole lot faster since the advent of a smartphone because now we're never far away from a video pre roll ad on YouTube and sometimes Facebook and every other platform and ads on every single piece of content everywhere. And believe me, I'm not bashing corporations. I like it. If Amazon sends me an email saying, hey tj, the same people who bought the last book you liked and bought like these other two books, why don't you look at them? And sometimes I do look at those and they are similar and I do like to buy those books and I buy them and I'm happy. But Amazon is influencing my behavior in this case. It may have worked out. But when you add up every single corporation that is bombarding our eyes and ears with advertisements, is there anything left for us as individuals? What's left for us to really piece together? What I think has to happen is there's got to be a counterbalance. We know corporations are bombarding us with ads all day long to drink more soft drinks with sugar, eat more processed fast foods to improve their bottom line. It makes us sick and die earlier, but it's helping their bottom lines. We know advertising works of any form of human behavior and influence. Advertising is the most studied of any form. You can look at every kind of psychological research study with 12 freshmen at Stanford. It's nothing compared to compared to what Coca Cola and General Motors and McDonald's spend every year testing the effectiveness of their ads. We know advertising creates new behaviors. That's why half a trillion dollars is spent on advertising every single year. So what's the solution? We as human beings must proactively create advertisements and serve them up to ourselves. Our advertisements have to be to encourage us to do things that are healthy for us. You know you're going to see ads telling you to eat fast food and pizza. You need an ad telling yourself, hey tj, you like eating fresh fruit? And here I am, a picture of myself eating an apple. I need an ad for that, which is something I'll be showing you later this week. I am in fact working on that. You've heard me talk for quite a while about the need to create audio advertisements for yourself in the form of selfie speak programming, just talking to yourself in your cell phone, telling yourself what actions you want to take on a regular basis. But you can also do it with selfie pictures. Simply take a picture picture of yourself doing the things you want to do. If you want to encourage yourself to lift weights more, take a picture of yourself lifting weights and just put a label on it lift weights three times a week or daily as I do. But you have to look at that picture every day. Now, that's not something most of us do, but it's something you could do than you should do. And it is something that I now do every single day. So we're going to be spending a fair amount of time on this program really helping you figure out how to do that. Not to take some brainwashing ads that I've created because you should live like me. No, you need to create your own ads to control yourself, to live the life you want to. I can't tell you what habits you should fulfill on a daily basis, but I know with 100% certainty you shouldn't just follow the habits that major marketers are telling you to take with the ads they're bombarding you with every single day. Because you're not going to see any ad telling you eat lots of fresh vegetables every day. There's no pot of marketing dollars to create ads to encourage you to eat lots of fresh vegetables. There's no ad out there currently that's going to tell you drink lots of water from the tap. Now, forgive me if you're from countries where the water is not safe, but in the United States and most places in Western Europe at least, tap water is so much better for you than soft drinks, colas, even bottled water. And it's so much better for the environment than bottled water. So I want you to start thinking about if you had a billion dollar budget and you can hire the most expensive advertising agency in the world to create ads to convince you to change your behavior, to create greater market share from you, to do things like exercising daily, getting eight hours sleep, reading more, eating healthy food, producing more. If you could give a billion dollars to a marketing firm to create ads just for you, what would the ads look like? And here's the thing. Now that you have a cell phone, you actually have a billion dollar production facility, a billion dollar production studio right in the palm of your hand. You can make your own ads. You don't have to raise the billion dollars first. Create your own ads with your own audio and your own selfie pictures.