Ubiquity

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, right now. It’s about the many little things that accumulate to trigger rapid, large-scale change, sometimes unexpectedly.

Another Gladwell book, Blink, affirmed my belief in what Gladwell calls “rapid cognition.” Marketing pieces succeed or fail in an instant, grabbing attention and inciting desire. Or not. Bada bing.

Tipping Point is divided into three sections: The law of the few, the stickiness factor and the power of context. The first section discusses how important “connectors” are to the process, connectors being the tiny handful of people who know everybody else. They’re the social gatekeepers. “Stickiness” is a common marketing term that refers to how well an ad-driven idea “sticks” in the consumer’s mind. I’m hoping that the context section will address the importance of ubiquity. It’s a blunt instrument, ubiqity, but what tool box is complete without a hammer?

Yesterday, a friend jokingly called me “Cristo” (installation artist Cristo Vladimirov Javacheff) because I’m proposing that our theater produce billboard-size banners to “wrap” (not literally) downtown buildings with our promotional messages. In one year, we’ve gone from 12″x18″ posters to 48″x72″ window banners, so downtown billboards seem a logical next step toward being everywhere all the time.