DJs, however, didn’t air “Hey Ya!” alongside just any kind of hit. They sandwiched it between the types of songs that Rich Meyer had discovered were uniquely sticky, from artists like Blu Cantrell, 3 Doors Down, Maroon 5, and Christina Aguilera. (Some stations, in fact, were so eager they used the same song twice.)
Consider, for instance, the WIOQ playlist for September 19, 2003:
11:43 “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down
11:54 “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell
11:58 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast
12:01 “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell
Or the playlist for October 16:
9:41 “Harder to Breathe” by Maroon 5
9:45 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast
9:49 “Can’t Hold Us Down” by Christina Aguilera
10:00 “Frontin’ ” by Pharrell
November 12:
9:58 “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down
10:01 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast
10:05 “Like I Love You” by Justin Timberlake
10:09 “Baby Boy” by Beyonce
“Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,” said Webster. “Stations have to take risks on new songs, otherwise people stop listening. But what listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new songs seem familiar as fast as possible.”
When WIOQ first started playing “Hey Ya!” in early September-before the sandwiching started-26.6 percent of listeners changed the station whenever it came on. By October, after playing it alongside sticky hits, that “tune-out factor” dropped to 13.7 percent. By December, it was 5.7 percent. Other major radio stations around the nation used the same sandwiching technique, and the tune-out rate followed the same pattern.
And as listeners heard “Hey Ya!” again and again, it became familiar. Once the song had become popular, WIOQ was playing “Hey Ya!” as many as fifteen times a day. People’s listening habits had shifted to expect-crave, even-“Hey Ya!” A “Hey Ya!” habit emerged. The song went on to win a Grammy, sell more than 5.5 million albums, and earn radio stations millions of dollars. “This album cemented OutKast in the pantheon of superstars,” Bartels, the promotion executive, told me. “This is what introduced them to audiences outside of hip-hop. It’s so fulfilling now when a new artist plays me their single and says,
After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction machine, after he identified hundreds of thousands of female shoppers who were probably pregnant, after someone pointed out that some-in fact, most-of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target knew their reproductive status, everyone decided to take a step back and consider their options.
The marketing department thought it might be wise to conduct a few small experiments before rolling out a national campaign. They had the ability to send specially designed mailers to small groups of customers, so they randomly chose women from Pole’s pregnancy list and started testing combinations of advertisements to see how shoppers reacted.
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week, and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive with firsthand knowledge of Pole’s pregnancy predictor told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly. Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawnmower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
The answer to Target and Pole’s question-how do you advertise to a pregnant woman without revealing that you know she’s pregnant?-was essentially the same one that DJs used to hook listeners on “Hey Ya!” Target started sandwiching the diaper coupons between nonpregnancy products that made the advertisements seem anonymous, familiar, comfortable. They camouflaged what they knew.
Soon, Target’s “Mom and Baby” sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out sales figures for specific divisions, but between 2002-when Pole was hired-and 2009, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $65 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room full of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.
“As our database tools grow increasingly sophisticated, Target Mail has come into its own as a useful tool for promoting value and convenience to specific guest segments such as new moms or teens,” he said. “For example, Target Baby is able to track life stages from prenatal care to car seats and strollers. In 2004, the Target Baby Direct Mail Program drove sizable increases in trips and sales.” [218]
Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.
IV.
The usefulness of this lesson isn’t limited to large corporations, government agencies, or radio companies hoping to manipulate our tastes. These same insights can be used to change how we live.
In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA-one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations-to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician-Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott-for help.
The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else.
Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names. It’s a variation of the lesson learned by Target and radio DJs: to sell a new habit-in this case exercise-wrap it in something that people already know and like, such as the instinct to go places where it’s easy to make friends.
“We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You can change the health of the nation this way.”
Someday soon, say predictive analytics experts, it will be possible for companies to know our tastes and predict our habits better than we know ourselves. However, knowing that someone might prefer a certain brand of peanut butter isn’t enough to get them to act on that preference. To market a new habit-be it groceries or aerobics-you
