42 years ago, it was my first job, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The very first day that I showed up at Spinnaker Software, we were one of the first companies to make educational computer games. I was 23 years old. It was my summer internship. I wheeled myself in, and they said, come on, let's go. We're going to Cabot. And I was like, what's Cabot? Cabot was our ad agency. And we walked into the ad agency meeting, and there was the creative director, the art director, the copywriter, the person who set type. There was the account executive. All of these people from the ad agency. The ad agency's job was to buy magazine ads because in those days, magazine ads were it.
If you were in the software business, that's what you had to work with. Today, each of you is in a meeting like that, except it's a bit different. Because if you've got a laptop, you have all of the tools that each one of those individuals at Cabot had to play with. It's possible you have all of those jobs in addition to being the lead on strategy. It's possible that you're also the client, But your job, your job is to somehow spend time and money to earn attention and trust and the benefit of the doubt. It's possible that your job is to get people to buy more of what your organization makes. And it's very easy if you have a hammer to believe that everything's a nail.
And it's pretty tempting given the hundred year track record of advertising to come to the conclusion that the best way to get attention and turn it into sales is to run ads and pay money for them. So what we're here to do is talk about strategy, to be willing to ask the hard questions and find a way forward because the medium doesn't work the way most people think it does. So to begin, we're going to talk about this idea of attention. Everyone gets the same amount of attention every day and we start over every day. That attention keeps getting cut into smaller and smaller pieces. So when most of us were very young, there were two or three or four TV networks.
That was it. There were three or four or five important magazines, just a handful of newspapers. If you could buy a slot in one of those media pillars, you could do something with that attention. So if we think about the brands of the 60s and the 70s, Pepsi and Coke and Ford and Pellegrino and wherever you live in the world, famous brands. They got to be famous because they bought a lot of ads. If you bought enough ads, you made enough money to buy more ads. And so fast forward to 2025 and what a buffet is being offered to marketers today. That you can have all of these places where you can chase attention almost for free. You can buy a click for a penny.
You can put time and effort into building your TikTok presence or showing up in Pinterest. There's an endless list of places where we can either put our own free ads or pay money to a middleman who will put our ads in front of lots of people. And as a result, billions, practically trillions of dollars have moved from let's buy some TV ads to we need a presence on social media. We need to go buy some attention. And there are some real challenges here and opportunities as well. So let's take them one at a time. The first one is this. Mass media worked because you got mass. That the more people you reached, the better you did. You made average stuff for average people.
and this is still our cultural bias. We come up with something and someone says they don't like it so we sand off the edges. We propose something and someone says, eh, it's not for me so we sand off the edges. We try to make average stuff for average people. We come up with the slogan, you can pick anyone and we're anyone. The problem with this is it's a race to the bottom. Someone's going to make their stuff more average than yours. Someone's going to lower their price or make themselves more convenient than yours. So now, let's make a list of the brands that matter now compared to then. They are brands like Patagonia or Allbirds. They're brands like Supreme.
They're brands like the bakery that people wait in line to get into. Every one of them got there without making average stuff for average people. Every one of them got there without buying a lot of ads. Because the first secret is this. The explosion of media means that not only is mass dead, not only can't you reach everyone, you might not even want to. So here in the United States, a show like Succession was the buzziest show there was last year. The finale got covered all over the internet and three million people in my country watched it when it went on the air. Three million. The last episode of MASH in the 1970s was seen by 70 million people.
That even a Super Bowl ad doesn't reach the kind of audience that advertisers used to take for granted. And that's a good thing. Because instead of paying extra to reach lots of people, we can pay a little to reach some people, specific people, people who want to hear from us. So the first job of anyone who's doing strategy or marketing is to ask, who's it for? who exactly are we seeking to serve? When we show up with what we've got, who wants it and who would miss us if we were gone? And then the second question is, what's it for? If I'm going to take attention from somebody, if I'm going to show up in front of them, why? Is it something as simple and selfish as because I'll make a profit?
Or am I serving them? Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. What we seek to do is help people get to where they want to go because it is very difficult to persuade someone to go somewhere they don't want to go. And so most successes in the last five years are brands offering services or products, software, non-profits, that when people encounter them, they don't need to be persuaded or hustled. They simply need to know of it, to learn of it, to be able to say, this is what I want. And then, before we move on, the last piece of this is the fact that the expression, people like us do things like this, just seven words, is the essence of what it is to be human.
That a thousand years ago, if you were in a tribe wandering the steppes of East Asia, your culture was different than if you were in a tribe of people outside my window here near the Hudson River in New York, which was different than if you were in a tribe of people who were wandering around Stonehenge in England. Culture. Culture is what drives humanity. And there isn't one monoculture, as much as some would like to persuade you there is. There are tribes everywhere we look. And you are not going to be able to capture a tribe, own a tribe, make them your tribe. But what you can do, what is the opportunity of our lives is to find a tribe that needs a leader, to find a tribe that wants to add something to its culture, to find a tribe that needs service, to honor them, to connect them, to lead them.
Tribes, people like us, do things like this.