I just saw this post by Gareth over at his blog, Brand New. I hope he doesn’t mind me replicating it in its entirety here, I just think it’s a great observation.
We spend 90% of our money distributing an idea and 10% on the content of the idea.
Yet we spend 90% of our time and interest on the content of the idea and 10% on its distribution.Clearly it’s time for a new model with a better distribution of money and attention.
Never a truer word was spoken (written?).
What we spend money on has a great way of cutting through to what we value (Joel Peterson, the current Chariman of the Board for JetBlue Airways, gave a great talk at a Stanford Business School class on this).
In advertising, 90% of the money is spent on distribution because no one really believes the content works – despite all the time and effort that goes into it!
This mismatch between time, money, and effort is because these decidedly continuous variables are used to produce a somewhat binary outcome – great ideas work, nearly great ones don’t.
But we just can’t NOT chase that next big idea, can we?
