Mad Men. Season 2, Episode 1.
Peggy: “Sex sells.”
Don: “Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this. They take all this monkey crap and stick it in a briefcase, completely unaware that their success depends on something more than shoeshine. You are the product. You feeling something. That's what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can't do what we do and they hate us for it.”
CLS x Cory Levy
Last Wednesday, Columbia Law and Entrepreneurship Society (a club I recently helped start at Columbia Law School) had its first speaker event of the year.
We had the founder of Z Fellows, Cory Levy, come and speak about his thesis that controversial founders tend to be the ones who have outlier outcomes. He cited Elvis, Kanye, Uber, and others. You can watch the talk here:
Cory’s Thesis
Cory’s basic argument can be summarized as follows:
The traditional ‘if you build it, they will come’ idea is false; distribution matters tremendously.
We live in a world saturated with screens. If you want to reach consumers directly, these screens are where distribution happens.
The digital platforms that dominate the shelf space on those screens are optimized to prioritize content which drives engagement.
Controversial content is very engaging.
If you combine these premises, companies and founders that can deliver controversial content can get a distributional advantage.
Think of Logan Paul. One can draw a straight line from the forbidden forest in Japan to his fights with Mayweather and straight through to his energy drink company Prime.
McLuhan’s Thesis
One of my favorite thinkers at the moment is Marshall McLuhan, the communications theorist from Canada. McLuhan had a famous phrase. He once observed that “the medium is the message.” (This really means more that the medium shapes which messages get amplified).
In other words, the types of content which get prioritized on a given communications medium naturally crowds out all the rest. Other creators mimic the content that gets the most scale. Think about TikTok trends. Dances and sounds that initially become popular ripple out throughout the creator universe in a wave of mimicry until they fully exhaust audience engagement. Then a new cycle of content trends (a pairing of a sound and a dance) begins.
The fact that the medium shapes the message is made quite obvious by studying politics. Politicians of different eras needed different communications skills to get elected. On radio, FDR dominated every other politician. With his fatherly presence and hopeful and powerful words, he won the hearts of the American people. It is quite unclear if FDR would have done as well on television, with his obvious physical limits. Alternatively, Kennedy dominated television with his good looks. But would he done as well in a time of pamphlets? Like him or hate him, Trump dominated Twitter and cable news. No one can deny that Trump gets distribution.
One can draw a straight line between what McLuhan is saying and what Cory is. You have to optimize you message for the medium to get distribution. In a world of digital communications, controversy is how you do that.
Creators and Vertical Integration
Everyone knows about Logan Paul and Mr. Beast moving into consumer goods after developing a massive distributional base of consumers who watch their content. But let’s also take a smaller creator. Take Alexandra Botez. As she describes in this video, she found content-market fit streaming chess videos. Now she’s trying to move upstream by creating a new chess-adjacent game called Chess 2.0 that she can push to her community.
Starting at the very bottom and vertically integrating into the top layers is clever. A lot of people are trying it. It remains to be seen who can do it best. But maybe the defining startup strategy of the 2020s is to generate controversy, build an audience, and then build a real product that audience needs so that you can sell it to them.
After all, the medium is the message.