What If It Cost Money?

What would happen if it cost 50 cents to send an email?

What would happen if it cost 25 cents to share a picture (like it once did with film)?

What would happen if it cost 10 cents to post on social media?

This isn't a new concept, but it is one that I've been thinking more and more about lately. What would happen to marketing, advertising, hell communications in general if we started to have a monetary cost instead of the time/attention cost we're currently paying. What would happen if it cost me 10 cents to post this article on LinkedIn - would I do it?

The answer may be no, but either way, it would be a lot more thought out before I hit the publish button. More research would be done, more editing performed. I would be far more aware of what it was costing me because it would have a direct associated cost. It wouldn't be "free" anymore. Now, one or two posts wouldn't amount to anything substantial. But 20, 30, 100 posts - that would be enough to make me double-check everything and pause just a little moment longer to ensure the point I was trying to convey was worth the money I was about to pay.

The short answer, I believe, is that we as humans are historically bad at valuing our time. We will spend 20-minutes in line to simply save $5 on gas. Or we’ll get up three-to-five hours earlier than normal and drive out to a store we rarely visit because they're having a Black Friday sale with $100 off a BIG SCREEN TV! And we act the same way when it comes to how we communicate.

We will send off 30 emails for a point that really could have been made in 1 or 2. But hey, email is free to write, attention is free to give - so we fire away. Or we take a million photos with our smartphones. It doesn't matter if any of them are really any good, because you can always take more. And then we post/ share/repeat. All "free" to do, but is it really?

Think of email. If you are like most professionals in North America, you will get between 100 - 150 emails per day (and I know someone reading this may have just thought "150, more like 1,500).

If we go to the low end, so 50, and we take an avg. reading time of just 15-seconds (which doesn't account for switching costs and I'll get to that), but if we take 15-seconds per email, we get around 15 minutes of email reading time per day. Not that much really. But when we start to include things like switching costs - which is the amount of time we spend between switching from one thing to another (aka; multi-tasking), that number can go upwards of 2-to-3 minutes per email. Add in replies and longer emails, and now we're closer to 5-minutes per email. Now, we're spending over 4 hours a day simply reading and replying to email. And if I look at what most people do in a day, I would say that number is fairly accurate if not on the low side.

But what would happen if each of those emails had an associated cost of 50-cents?

I would be shocked if it didn't go from 50 emails per day, down to 5. And why such the steep drop-off? Because most of the emails we send and receive every day can easily be shortened. Or Combined. Or don't even need to be sent at all. Or we would choose an alternative form of communications like a call or even an in-person conversation.

But why I've been thinking about this has nothing to do with email, although I do think a cost for email could be interesting. No, I've been thinking of this topic because I've been thinking of "Value from Communications." It is the question of:

A typical Super Bowl ad will cost 10mil+ after production, media buy and pre-promotion advertisements.

A typical Super Bowl ad will cost 10 million+ after production, media buy and pre-promotion advertisements.

This is why you see few, if any, extremely poorly design Super Bowl ads. Yes, a few completely miss the mark, like the 2017 ad from Jeep, but that was less about design/production etc., and more about trying to force a message that just didn't work. You don't see weak ads because the cost is so high that no brand, agency or media company would want to waste this very exclusive spot. Do these ads create value? I think so. They make us laugh, cry, get angry (thanks Jeep), and if nothing else, think for a moment. They inspire us, transform us, or simply entertain us better than the "game." They create direct value - even if each ad has its own way of doing it.

The same is often not said for an ad on Facebook. Or an ad on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google etc. Yes, the vast majority of these ads create no value. They are simply there for us to completely skip over. And that is the worst thing that can happen. If I can make you mad - at least you've paid attention. But if all I can manage to get from you is an indifferent pass, I become a useless few seconds between something of interest and another thing of interest. As the line goes:

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

So why do we do this? Why do the majority of ads suck? Why does the majority of items we come across each day add little to no value to our lives?

It isn't hard because adding value is a mythical creature that no one has ever seen. No, it's hard because as humans we interpret value differently, and the majority of brand communications try and hit as many people as possible. Aka; they go for the vanilla of brand communications - trying to appeal to as many people as possible. The problem is that unlike Vanilla ice-cream (which is still #1), there is way more than 30 other flavours and it is highly unlikely that your brand is as popular as the most popular ice-cream flavour.  But yet we see communications like this every day, and I believe we've seen an increase because the cost of producing and distributing content has significantly decreased.

So what should You or I do? Should we imagine that we're running Super Bowl ads for every piece of communications we produce?

No - we should ask ourselves the hard questions:

• Does this add value?
• Would I like to see/read/hear this?
• Would I publish / promote / boost / share / send etc., this if it cost me money?

Pay close attention to that last one because sending something out that sucks always has a cost.