Day 8: Making an Impact

Hello everyone, it's Wednesday and I can't keep that stupid advertisement out of my head. HUMP DAY. If you don't know what I'm talking about then I'm sure a quick google search will help out. Honestly I don't even remember what the advertisement was for. All I remember is that connecting the dots between a camel's hump and the term hump day is maybe the dumbest pun I've ever heard in my life. So how does the stupidest pun you can think of get stuck in the minds of millions forever? Not to say that my writing is the stupidest thing ever, but if an ad with a camel that's happy about it being Wednesday can have such an impact then surely it must mean that just about anything can, right? Right?!

Now for my usual disclaimer. I'm no advertising expert or writing genius. This is just my blog, my thoughts, and if you disagree or think I've said something that is not factual please let me know in the comments.

First lets define having an impact. In my own words, it means to influence people's way of thinking. To create a new realization within their worldview, or to overturn an existing preconception. If someone reads my work and finishes as the exact same person that they were before, well, then it wasn't very impactful. In other words, it was a waste of time. I hate wasting other people's time as much as I hate wasting my own, so I always try to make my writing impactful in some way, even if it is as simple as recommending a powerful book.

So how does a pun about a camel have more of an impact on me than many of the novels I've read? Or, more generally, what determines the impact something has? I like to think it comes down to a few things:

1. Empathy, or more accurately, the ability to get people to empathize with the story, blog, article, what have you.
2. Audience, since even the most impactful piece of literature will only affect a single person if nobody else reads it.
3. Connecting the dots. I think it is the 'X factor' that a lot of publishing agents always say they're looking for. It's a little more complex so I'll define it in depth below.

I'm going to the apply the above three to the camel advertisement to show you what I mean.

1. You can either empathize with the camel, who is an upbeat coworker on a Wednesday, or (and probably more likely) you can empathize with the coworkers who are just fed up with the camel's shit. It makes you feel like a part of the ingroup that the ad wants to focus on. I think it works because most people want to be a part of something, a little leftover caveman in us from back when social outcasts died of exposure.
2. I googled it, and apparently this was a Geico advertisement way back in 2013. I found this article, which definitely seems perfectly 100% legit and since it's on the internet it can't be a lie.

"But US insurance company GEICO has a very special reason to celebrate ‘hump day’. Their ad ‘Hump Day’ has enjoyed extraordinary success since its launch back on May 22, attracting more than 1.62 million shares and 5.3 million views – a very high share rate of around 17%."

Source:
https://unruly.co/blog/article/2013/07/25/geicos-hump-day-ad-has-trended-every-wednesday-since-launch/

So obviously this got around. But what about connecting the dots? What does that even mean? I define it as the ability for a piece of media to cause a realization or trigger a new way of thinking. If that sounds similar to how I defined impact, it's because it is. I think this part is the lynchpin of impacting lots of people, but you can't get there without audience and empathy, so I split it off into its own category.

As much as they say they hate it, people actually love to change how they think, so long as the new way of thinking is merely an extension of their old way of thinking. It's a euphoric moment when things come together. For example, when I first realized that multiplying a number by a fraction (a new and difficult concept for little me), is actually just division (a concept I already understood), I felt like a genius! When that happens it makes you just want to shout 'Eureka!' as if you're a scientist who finally figured out the answer to all life's mysteries. What people hate is when they need to change to a completely counterintuitive way of thinking and there's no path forward. In other words, they hate it when the writer puts in no effort to ... wait for it ... connect the dots! Even a complex new concept becomes familiar when it's put in terms that the reader already understands.

Back to the camel ad. I bet before seeing this ad you never realized the connection between a camel's hump and Wednesday, did you? I certainly didn't. Why not? Because it's stupid, that's why. There's no actual connection between these things besides the word play, and this is probably what everybody would tell you if you just made this pun out of nowhere. Everybody would groan and go on with their day and forget about it. That's why steps one and two are so important. Without empathizing with the coworkers' plight of having an over-the-top camel jaunting around the office, you probably wouldn't give a camel pun a second thought. It enhances the eureka moment by giving you people in common with you that feel the same way. In this case the eureka moment is a bit of an anti-eureka moment, AKA a pun. A false realization that is nevertheless kind of amusing. It has no impact on anybody's life to see the connection between camels and hump day. That is, unless everybody in your social circle also empathizes with the mildly amusing pun and starts repeating it over and over and over and ... you get the point. The empathy, the audience, and the eureka moment all come together and you get a viral ad that people are still writing about a decade later. All based on an extraordinarily stupid pun.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley

P.S. I forgot to mention yesterday that I finished off my short story Demonitization. If I don't get any response from publishers I'm going to publish it here in the next few months. Also, look out for another story I'm going to post on the Wordpress site by the end of the week! Thanks!