Confessions
Hasan Minhaj was on a recent episode of The Colin and Samir Show. He was full of so many insights that I found relatable to doing advertising and strategy. He talked about the power of the pdf — the simplest form of the idea (“the take”) that you put on paper before you describe the scene in detail.
I wanted to dig deeper into his thought around confessions and why insights feel like confessions. He starts his new special, The King’s Jester, with one:
You guys wanna know a secret? For four years my wife and I couldn’t get pregnant. And it was my fault.
He wanted to bring his audience in right away and create a sense of intimacy with them. In doing so he does something that songwriters do too. While doing some research for a recent project I came across a study on the most popular music theme of the past 60 years. The result? Breakups.
According to its findings, most of what we like to listen to is steeped in suffering: “Breakup” was the most consistently popular theme, while variations on regret, uncertainty, and longing only grew more intense as pop music aged.
Sharing your perspective on breakup is a confession, whether you’re at fault, heartbroken, or a mix of the two. Take it from Usher, who had two songs called Confessions on his album, Confessions.
Everything that I’ve been doing is all bad
I got a chick on the side with the crib and a ride
I’ve been telling you so many lies
Ain’t none good, it’s all bad
And I just wanna confess
It’s been going on so long
Girl, I been doing you so wrong
That was after he wrote U Got It Bad, so maybe he didn’t learn? Either way, it makes his confessions more indicative of a credible internal struggle.
I’ve been there, done it, fucked around,
After all that this is what I found
Nobody wants to be alone
In Conversations On Love, a beautiful exploration of confessions, the author Natasha Lunn quotes Alain de Botton from their discussion:
Our emotions are not entirely reliable: they tend to overshoot or undershoot the target. Think, for example, of fear. We tend to be afraid of the wrong things and overlook the real things we should be afraid of. We’re afraid of ghosts, but we’re not that afraid of how short our lives are, or that we’ve neglected our true talents.
Confessions of fears are the product of repeated self-examination. What am I afraid of? No, what am I actually afraid of?
The ad world talks a lot — nay, too much — about what an insight is. Maybe because they’re so important and none of us know the one true answer? My submission is that they feel like confessions.
If insight is a way to communicate a deeper understanding of something people want to know more about, what gives you a deeper understanding than that feeling you get when someone confesses something juicy? When Usher confesses (in lyrics just too explicit for this family-friendly blog) that he doesn’t mind if his girlfriend is an exotic dancer as long as she’s coming home to him? Juicy!
The ways we articulate business challenges, audiences, products, communications opportunities, and more should be full of insight. A juicy confession is a useful filter for making sure we do that.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
