How to hijack attention: Lessons from jingles, candy crush, and betting sites

0:00All right. I've got a thing I want to fill you in on. and this is something I've been thinking about lately and I think that you actually you're going to bring more application to this topic than I am and so it's my theory but I want to hear how you would apply this idea that I have so did you see that blonde haired woman she had that song that was like looking for a man in finance 6 '4 whatever what was it blasphemy 6 '5 bro 6 '5 is finance 6 '5 yeah blue eyes or whatever. Dude, have I seen that? Has there been 10 minutes in my house where either me or my daughter is not singing that song? My four-year-old daughter.

0:38By the way, it's very different when your daughter says it. My dad hormones kicked in. And I was like, you ain't looking for... What are you looking for? You're looking for your Barbie, your toys. You're looking for Legos. That's what you're looking for.

0:55There was really funny follow-ups where people are like, let's do the math on that, by the way. How many men are 6 '5"? It's like 0.1%. How many people live in New York City? How many have a trust fund? And it was like, you know, and they're single. It was like... There was like seven guys left. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty funny. But that got me thinking. And before I tell you exactly what it is, I have to ask you a question. Do you know your mother's or father's cell phone number by heart? I do not. So for the life of me, I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I could tell you the area code, but I couldn't tell you her number, which is like a big deal.

1:30However, how many commercials from the 90s do you remember? I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. I want my baby back. Yeah. Or Hot Pocket. Like you remember some of these songs? $5,$5. We know what comes up after that. I don't even have to have known you, right? You could be a complete stranger. But if I'm like $5,$5, the guy's going to stay foot long at the end of that. So I got really interested in jingles because I don't remember my wife's phone number. You don't remember your parents' phone numbers. But I can cite all these jingles. In fact, I follow Instagram accounts where it's like commercials from the 90s.

2:06The 90s, because that's when we were kids, and for a lot of listeners, that was the heyday of these jingles and commercials. And in my opinion, we need to bring that back. And I want to tell you, I'll give you a little bit, a short history of jingles. So in the 90s, something like 15 % of commercials had jingles. Now it's closer to 1%. So in the 20s, this company called General Mills came out with this thing called Wheaties, Wheaties cereal. And it wasn't that big of a hit early on. And so they were like, let's write a song about it. And we're going to create a commercial on the radio for Wheaties.

2:41And it's the first time that there was ever a dedicated commercial for a product. And the Wheaties wasn't really doing that well for the first three or four years. That song comes out in year five or so. It takes off. And now Wheaties is a huge brand that we all know. And I just, I think that we need to do more of that. In the 90s, it kind of kicked ass because when we were kids, there was what, like 50 or 60 channels. So there was less channels. And the key to a jingle sticking and like something to remember is you need to hear it tons and tons of times. So when the Wheaties commercial came out, they ended up playing this song something like 300 times a day on a variety of radio stations.

3:19And back then there weren't actually that many radio stations. And so repetition is important. However, once YouTube, Facebook, whatever came about, we have so many different channels. However, when you run Facebook ads, you can increase the repetition, the frequency, I think they call it, right? You can increase frequency. And so you can see like, am I hitting the same person 20, 30, 50 times? A lot of times with ads, it's just a photo, right? It's usually a photo for like, there's little silly trends like for a long time it was pointing an arrow at something or zoom in on someone's face there's like little silly trends that you'll see one successful brand do everyone copies them yeah one we had was we would write the ad in the notes app on iphone take a screenshot of that so it looked like someone was sharing a screenshot from notes but it was actually just an ad yes and i remember reading or seeing this short video it was launched at sundance actually it was like a featurette in 2016.

4:14Maybe you saw this, but it was about people who have Alzheimer's and they were like really bad. You know, they're elderly of Alzheimer's and they were just out of it all the time. And so these doctors played music that the people would have listened to when they were in their 20s and 30s. And all of a sudden it clicks and they start singing the song and they're like, oh, I remember this song. I was in the army doing this or whatever. And that's when I met my wife. And then they like have the next three, four or five minutes that are like speaking normal. And it kind of like made me realize music is really important for that reason, but particularly for advertising brands and products.

4:50And I've been trying to think about what does a jingle have that makes it work. And so I have it down to a few things. And this is a little bit for the modern day jingle, what it needs. The first thing that I think it needs is it needs a little bit of cringiness. I think with ads, we be like, this needs to be cool. It needs to be a little bit overly cringe. The second thing that you have to have is it has to be incredibly repetitive. For example, do you remember that song? Don't you wanna Fanta Fanta? Don't you wanna? You need to say the brand many, many, many times. Like Chiquita Banana. Yeah.

5:24So the Chiquita Banana ad is actually interesting. So that ad, it was like a sexy banana dressed up as a Cuban lady dancer. And she was singing and dancing. And it was all about when do you know a banana is ready to eat? And so she was singing about like, you should peel me back when you see a little bit of brown, like whatever. It was kind of like sexualized and awesome. And that ad would play hundreds of times a day. It was awesome. I love when people sexualize stuff, by the way. My friend Neville had an ad for why you should buy this set of font from him. And he was like, when I whisper, Geranda, does it make you weak in the knees?

6:00If so, this is for you. And so I love when they do that. And then the last thing you need is a call to action. So do you remember this song where it's like, call JG Wetworth, 877 Cash Now? Do you remember that song? Yeah, you can remember full phone numbers when it comes to a jingle, right? You started this by saying, can't remember your wife or your mom's number. But we can remember some company's phone number, 1-800-whatever, if they put it in a jingle. And so this whole kind of rant is, I think we need to bring them back. Now, the problem is, is that I don't exactly have like a consumer brand to do this on.

6:32You do, and you work a little bit more consumer stuff. Why can't you do this for Hampton, by the way? I could. And I should. So that was a bullshit excuse. Yeah, thank you. Do you see this working with your stuff in consumer? Well, I would say in theory, I'm all there with you. As in, a jingles work is a non-debatable statement. Would jingles work for my brand? Well, why not? Jingles work. So we're back to square one. Do jingles still work? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it still works. I think you might have to tweak the form factor, maybe make it a little shorter or whatever. Or, you know, like McDonald's, like what they do now is they have their whole commercial and then it's, I'm loving it.

7:10Right. They just hit that at the end as like a little five second hook at the end, which was shorter than maybe how, how jingles used to be, where it was much more of the whole commercial. So I think there's maybe some tweaks that people are doing to them, but they, they for sure still work. So I'm with you. And I'm also with you that I'm surprised that they've declined because the brain has not changed. In fact, there's a thing I think people call the phonic loop or something like that, the phonetic loop. I forgot how they call it, but it's like the people who study the brain and the ear. And there's like neurologists.

7:40There's even somebody called like a musicologist. They basically try to figure out why is it that when we teach kids that they learn easier through nursery rhymes? Yeah, there's like a nursery rhyme to like learn your home address. Have you ever seen those? Dude, I could tell you Caracas, Venezuela, Lima, Peru, right? I can tell you like the capitals of South America that I haven't thought about in 30 years. But when I was six years old, some teacher taught us a song, right? Or all of the states, right? I could teach my daughter the states much faster than I could teach her numbers because I could turn it into a song.

8:14And so there's something in this, right? And I think they call it earworms. It's basically what they call it when a small repetitive snippet of a song or a slogan or a jingle just gets stuck in your ear, right? And that's called an earworm. And so using this to improve recall, improve memory, and even make your brand associated with something that's kind of fun or upbeat or positive definitely has value. Now, the question is, why don't I or you or any of us kind of modern marketers use this? And I think really most people would say, well, it doesn't work anymore. The form factor change. People got over it.

8:52Well, I don't think any of that's true. I think it's just like fashion. I think it's marketing fashion trends. I think it's out of out of vogue right now. And as soon as somebody brings it back in, it will become a thing again. Remember Dat Piff? That was where like mixtapes were. It was like rappers. So this was it was like Lil Wayne would put out like a rap a day on Dat Piff. And he would just turn these suckers out. I think you need a certain creative type of person to be able to do this. But we can definitely churn these out in a relatively fast way and see what works, which is different than a commercial.

9:24But one of the reasons why I think it went away is, so the things that you and I liked when we were nine or eight years old, by the time we're 15 to 25, that's like, that's lame. That's no longer cool. But then we get in our 30s and we're like, oh, I remember that. That was awesome. You know, that was so cool. Like, it's kind of like the feeling that you get when you see a surge, like a surge drink, like a soda. You're like, oh, I remember that. That was so awesome. I remember that as a kid. And you get like this nostalgia. And so I think what we can do is look at all of the past things that worked well with the brands that we liked when we were younger.

9:52I really think you can replicate them within like the law and actually not copy and the reason I think that is because the$5 foot long song and McDonald's songs they're coming back and so they're reusing a lot of these songs now because once your customer base is a bit older you can reuse the same stuff and it becomes cool again because it's nostalgic I'm subscribed to My First Million on YouTube there we go well we can workshop that if you want your ad to be memorable which we all do than using one of the most sticky things, which is like a jingle. It compresses several things together, right?

10:28A feeling, a positioning, right? $5 foot long nationwide is on your side, right? Like compresses a position plus a feeling into four seconds, five seconds, seven seconds. And in a package that is now easily transmissible, right? You can sing it, you can hum it, you can tell it to another person as well as sticks with you. So like, of course, that's a that's a good thing if you can do it. I got something that's kind of interesting, totally different angle, but I think you'll like it. Are you familiar with Polymarket? Is it is it gambling for crypto? Well, that's one of looking at it. It's a prediction market, which is yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:03Sort of an A.O. Lee Bane's situation with gambling and, you know, reframing gambling. But it actually is a way to go bet on a prediction that you believe will happen. So if I go to Pauly market right now, I will see the top bet to$237 million has been bet on who will be the winner of the 2024 presidential race. And right now, Trump is a 61 % bet. Joe Biden, 19 % odds. Kamala is 10%, etc. And so you could see for any idea you have that there's there, there could be a betting market for it. So like, you know, you can go to sports and right now the, I think the Euro soccer cup is happening right now.

11:45And Spain is the top, top favorite bet with 34%, or you can bet on Wimbledon right now, but you can also bet in like scientific things. Like there's a bet right now. What will be the June, 2024 temperature increase? And it's like, you know, more than 1.09, less than 1.09. You know, you can bet on, will this hurricane hit the United States? Yes or no. And right now that bet has played out where like, if you click it, you can see that when it started it only had the 18 chance of yes night right now it's a 99 chance which means it's about to hit or almost certainly hit that bet is played out or playing out right now and you could see the top betters so there's a guy named revenge tour 1984 who's bet 2.3 million dollars this week no i don't i don't know if it's that week i think it's uh it's a top volume this week okay maybe maybe it is his if you go to his profile so he's the top better on the platform right now.

12:37So he's got 1.69 million, 1.66 million, uh, in bets placed. Basically his positions that are out there. He's got a P and L where his profit and loss is he's up about a million dollars so far on poly market. And he's traded$169 million worth of, of bets. So like right now, for example, he's got a bet out. Um, will JD Vance win the 2024 Republican VP nomination? He bet it when And it was at$0.06. It's currently at$0.31. He could just sell that position today and bank the profit, even though it hasn't happened yet. So you can win even if your thing doesn't win, as long as the odds go up. So a couple of years ago, I got on Polymarket.

13:17And I got really addicted to this thing. Every day I was going and I basically had like a$10 ,000 slush fund that I was just betting on Polymarket. And I think I ended up making$5 ,000 or$6 ,000. And then I cashed out because now you can't do it in the United States. They ruled against it, basically. So all of this volume, they're doing about$50 million a month in volume, which is huge. Probably the most popular crypto app right now is Polymarket. And so they've done$400 million this year in betting volume. So they're on pace for almost a billion dollars of betting volume this year. What did you bet on?

13:52I used to bet on all kinds of things. So I would bet on tech stuff. So you could bet like, will Tesla stock be above this price on July 31st? It's like easier than buying the stock was just to go and bet. Do you think it'll be here? or will they announce this at this time? I was betting on sports stuff. So I would bet just like a game. Oh, there's a game on a Tuesday night and I can just bet here easier than I could bet, you know, at a sports book. Because the way this thing worked was you would just sign in with your MetaMask wallet. You didn't have to do KYC. You didn't have to do a bunch of things.

14:19Who makes the odds? There's no odds maker. So this is like a, what's called a automated market maker. So basically the bet gets created and then it's based on the betting volume. So if more people start betting no, then the odds of no go down because that's a more popular bet. If everybody thinks yes, then buying yes will have less upside for you. Most of these don't work like an order book. There's not a buyer and seller. It's the same way that a lot of the DEXs work or the NFT platforms work where it's an AMM. A lot of the bets are weird. So will Taylor Swift be pregnant in 2024? Yeah. 30 % chance, right?

14:58Or something like that? 21 % chance. will Andrew Tate be found guilty of human trafficking in 2024? But then there's weird things like, will Trump say the word MOG in 2024? I don't know what that word is, M-O-G. But can't he just say that then and win the bet? So that's one of the controversies of betting markets is that, okay, the easy example is, oh, wow, if I'm Trump, I could theoretically go place a big bet and then just say the word. But there's a couple of problems with that. One, the more, like, let's say something like that, it probably has very thin volume. So for example, right now, $24 ,000.

15:34Yeah,$24 ,000. So if he went and tried to bet$100 ,000, he would swing the odds himself to yes to the point where it wouldn't really be worth it. There's not much action on the other side. So basically, the yeses win the money from the noes. And the noes win the money from the yeses, depending on how the bet plays out. Right? There's no third party that's involved. So you would have to do it in one of these that has like really big volume if you wanted to make a lot of money. It says, will Travis Kelsey go for rank number four and get engaged this year. Yeah, exactly. There's Elon tweets. How many tweets will we have this month?

16:08Will TikTok get banned in the US in 2024? Right now, only 8 % chance. So if you thought that TikTok was going to get banned, if you're Pelosi, you could go and start betting. Yes, but that bet only has 29 ,000 of volume. So you can't bet too much. You can't make too much of a profit on something like that. The controversy, the thing that people have always said about prediction markets is that prediction markets become assassination markets. meaning if there was a bet that like will this person win or will this person live and let's say there was hundreds of millions of dollars on the line you've inadvertently created a giant bounty to go and assassinate somebody and this is the one of the one of the controversies around prediction markets is that it could become um you know problematic in that way but these are not new like crypto is a new way of doing it but these have been around for a long time like historically typically people felt that prediction markets were more accurate than polls, right?

17:01So let's say you wanted to say, you know, who's going to win the election? They would go do a poll. You have a very small sample size. People might say one thing and then do another, which is like what happened with when Trump won, I think 2016 was he was polling far less than what actually happened when people went to the ballot booth because they didn't want to admit where they stood. Whereas prediction markets, because you're putting money on the line, it's just more predictive. It's more accurate versus just general polling. And so this used to be a really popular thing. There was, in fact, even like on the stock market, you could go and bet this way.

17:34Wall Street was like a hub for prediction bets. But then after World War II, there was kind of a social stigma around it. Newspapers stopped quoting it and they shifted to polls. But I think it's swinging back where we're going to go away from polls and back to prediction markets. And so my prediction of this whole thing is that polymarket is going to be massive, that in this presidential election, it's going to have just like a huge run up this year because already you can see that when anybody is writing about the odds of something about, let's say, the election, they're referencing polymarket and they're embedding polymarket in their articles.

18:12They're doing that now or you think it's already happening? It's already happening. It's why it's got this huge surge. I think a couple of months ago, they had over 100 million embedding volume. And it was because it's made for TV. It's made to be embedded in articles. And in fact, I think they should take this further and make their little betting widget much easier to share and much easier to embed inside of articles, inside of news things. So they're going to need to quote what the predictions are around interest rates, around presidential stuff. It's just going to continue to grow that way.

18:43And so I think Polymarket is actually sort of a media company, a decentralized media company where it has really interesting data that every other media company is going to want to reference. And that's going to just drive this surge. And they've also had just really viral bets. So right now, one of the viral bets is obviously the presidential election stuff. But remember when the idiots went down to the Titanic and the submersible? That was one of the most viral bets. I think they had like$60 million bet on that one thing of like, what's going to happen with the submersible. So they can go viral.

19:16Like just yesterday, it had 5 million in volume. And so business is booming for Polymarket. Who started it and when did it start? This guy, Shane. Shane Copland, I think is his name. And he started in 2020. So this is not a very old business. This is pretty recent. Three, four years it's been out. And I think it's like his first thing. His LinkedIn, when I was on it earlier, was like, he was an intern at Rap Genius. He was an intern at some other place. And then he created Polymarket, and he's been doing that for four years now. Did they raise money? Yeah, they just raised a big round. So it was pretty under the radar and actually seemed sort of sketchy before.

19:56When I was betting on it, people were telling me, what are you doing? Do you put real money onto this thing? And I was like, yeah, it's awesome. And they're like, who runs this? Is this legal? And I was like, I don't really know. I'm not sure. It looked like a very thin app at the time, but they just raised$75 million. from Founders Fund and Joe Gabbia and Vitalik and a whole bunch of other heavy hitters. And so it's obviously become a lot more legitimized. I hate talking about gambling because I don't want to sound like my farts don't smell type of guy or I'm better. But I am because I hate gambling.

20:32I don't like gambling and I don't particularly love products that make it more popular, which is weird because I have vices. I love nicotine and shit like that. So I would be bummed if no one made that stuff. But I feel weird making this more popular. You know what I mean? I understand. I don't know. Obviously, I enjoy betting. I've bet on many things. I have a bit of a betting problem, I would say. It's the honest way of explaining it. It's like porn. We consume it, but we're like, you know, that's disgusting that you would do this for a living. That's disgusting. Yeah. So, but I think there is actually a lot of value in this.

21:11So I think that the wisdom of the crowds has always been a phenomenon I've been interested in. And I think it's just a more pure form of information. Like, I think that it is very easy for the news to tell you one thing or random polls to be quoted and claimed. Like, I like things that are more ground truth. And I don't know, like more ground truth is a actual betting market on something. That is what people actually believe. And the wisdom of the crowd, it is very hard to beat the wisdom of the crowds when it comes to betting. I don't know if I buy that yet. mostly because I'm ignorant to these predictive markets.

21:44In 2016, whatever existed before Polymarket, what did it say about the election? It wasn't as popular back then. So there's been like Augur and a couple other crypto prediction markets, but they were never mature enough. They didn't have enough volume or the people that consumed the world, only crypto degenerates. And so only crypto degenerates skewed one way. It's almost more like a pole in that case. So I'm not sure what they said then. All I know is that all of the polls were wrong. FiveThirtyEight was wrong. All of this sort of like data science around polling was so wrong during that. And I know that also that the other unrelated data point is that one of the things that helped FTX take off back then was Sam Bankman Freed was one of the first to put political bets on his platform, I think in 2020.

22:32And it was a big accelerant for FTX was letting people bet on election information back then. and people around the world wanted to bet. And so it was a way to attract a lot of liquidity to FTX at the time. What was his philosophy, SBS philosophy? It was like, what was it called? Altruism? Yeah, effective altruism. But doesn't him having betting on his website go against that? No, not at all. Effective altruism doesn't mean no sin, no vice. Effective altruism basically means make as much money as you can. The highest impact way to give and contribute to the world is to first do something that's going to accumulate a huge amount of capital so you can reallocate it.

23:13Like getting them addicted to things that they spend all the money on. If you're said Bankman Freed, you are more value. You have two choices. You could go work for a nonprofit or go volunteer in a soup kitchen and pour soup every day, but that's a pretty low leverage way to contribute versus if you become a billionaire and you give away a billion dollars, you have done more good that way. And so effective altruism is basically working for the purpose of accumulating as much capital to give away as possible. Now, in his case, he turned out to be, you know, a liar and a fraud on many accounts, right?

23:44So it's not, I think he sort of tanked the brand of effective altruism, which probably is a little unfair. He also tanked the brand of crypto, which is a little unfair. People are like, oh, crypto is a scam. It's like, no, this dude scammed crypto. He tricked, he lied to the crypto community. Basically, he was taking money and not, you know, somebody would go try to buy Bitcoin on his platform. And instead of buying Bitcoin, he would just tell them it, but he bought Bitcoin, take the money and do something else with it altogether. He was deceitful. It was very different than saying crypto was deceitful.