I was there on the ground floor of Mad Men when it came out in 2007.
My wife and I even dressed up as Don and Better Draper for Halloween that year.1
After watching the first season finale after Don gives his carousel speech to Kodak, I knew this could be a Pantheon-level show:
The storytelling is beautiful:
In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain of an old wound’. This is a much stronger ache in your heart than memories alone. This device is not a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes forward and backward. It takes us to a place we long to go back to.
It’s not called “Wheel”. This is called “Carousel”. It allows us to travel like a child travels. We turn around and return home again. Where we know we are loved.
With the spread of television in the 1960s, the Mad Men era emerged. In 1950, about 9 percent of Americans owned a television. This number increased to 65% in 1955. In the early 1960s, penetration was over 90%.
And the advertising industry has probably been one of the biggest beneficiaries. Radio was a nice way to send a message, but the ability to use visuals to sell your product was a game changer.
David Halberstam describes this change in his book as follows: 50s:
Initially, the television departments of the major agencies were small, understaffed and losing money. That changed quickly enough. Rosser Reeves, one of the chief architects and beneficiaries of television advertising, said: “We discovered that this wasn’t a domestic kitten; we had a wild man-eating tiger. We could take the same advertising campaign from print or radio and put it on television, and even when there were so few sets, sales would go through the roof.” The rapidity with which television’s power rose was astonishing even those who predicted it: In 1949, Madison Avenue’s total television bills were $12.3 million; the following year it rose to $40.8 million; and the year after that it jumped to $128 million. Of course, because television was visual, it could do what radio could never do. “Show the product and show it in use,” said Ben Duffy, one of the men who wrote the rules while learning them.
As in almost every aspect of life, the best story wins in advertising. But how the story is presented can also have an impact.
In his book Alchemy, advertising executive Rory Sutherland tells the story of some A/B testing of charitable donations. They sent hundreds of thousands of envelopes to potential donors with amounts equal to:
- One was hand-delivered by a volunteer.
- One of them included a form to get a 25% tax deduction.
- One was in higher quality envelopes.
- One was in a different format.
So which one received the highest response from donors?
I would assume this would be a tax deduction option as startups can be very strong. No. The logical option had: lowest response rate. The best response came from higher quality paper.
Maybe people are just superficial, but there’s something about high-quality visual aesthetics that can make a story more interesting. Stories tend to stick with people more than statistics.
at Stanford The researchers had students give one-minute presentations filled with both narrative and data. When the audience was later asked to recall different aspects of the pitch, only 5% of people could remember statistics, while two-thirds of the crowd remembered a story told.
The problem is that in finance, numbers matter. Statistics are important. Data can help you make better decisions.
I love using data in my communications. It can be extremely helpful for setting expectations, establishing a foundation, and providing context. Everything comes together when you can combine stories and data visualizations.
This is the secret sauce.
Inside Risk and Reward I used over fifty different charts, graphs, charts, and visualizations.2 Here I am giving a tough sell on the images in the book Campus and Friends last week:
It was very important for me that the book was visually pleasing. Daniel Parra from our production team designed the cover for me. Graphic Kid Matt He helped format the images in the book.
Let’s look at two paintings in the book to talk about the stories they can tell.
This shows the average daily gains and losses on the S&P 500:
It’s hard to believe that the average daily gain over the past 100 years has been just three basis points. These handful of fundamental points really do add up in the long run. The stock market’s total price return during this time period was almost 40,000%. When you add in reinvested dividends, we’re now talking over a million percent total!
No one invests for 100 years, but data shows that the longer your time horizon, the better the combination and the higher your likelihood of success. This churn rate chart dating back to 1950 demonstrates the importance of expanding your time horizon to increase your chances of success:
Since 1950, 44% of all trading days have been at a loss. However, 81% of the market is up on a one-year basis. 95% of the market has been positive for 5 years. If you extend your time horizon to 10 and 20 years, it’s a pure win.
Check out all the charts in the book Here.
Further Reading:
Everyone is on Sale
1Nobody knew who we were supposed to be.
2For audiobook listeners, my publisher has a PDF with all the graphics so you can follow along.
