Avoiding the Culture Shrug

Welcome to We Fixed It. You're welcome. The show where we take over companies, you come along for the ride, and we try to put them back better than we found them. Welcome back. Kadira, when's the last time you saw a really great movie? Do you remember it? I do because I don't go to the movies or watch movies often, so I would say the last really good movie was Sinners. That was a good one. Melissa, thank you, Kadira. When's the last time, Melissa, you saw a truly awful movie, like so terrible, it left a huge impression. Do you remember that? You know, I have never really wanted to walk out of a movie theater, but I did at one point. It was many years ago, and it was because of the day we were watching a movie, and I just felt it was inappropriate. And that was Scream, and that's the first Scream, so you know how many years ago that was. And it was on Christmas Day. That was the suggestion of my brother-in-law to go see Scream. And I said, okay. And then we sat in there. And when Drew Bremmerer got killed in the first five seconds, I was like, I'm done. I'm out. I don't know why I didn't think it was a horror movie. I didn't. I didn't know what it was. And I've never really wanted to walk out. But that time I did. And it wasn't. And now I love Scream. All right. Well, thank you. Today we're going to talk about something else. We're not going to talk about Scream was a giant hit, obviously. And they're on Scream 8 or whatever they are now. Sinners was great. We're not going to talk about great achievements. We're not going to talk about epic bombs either necessarily, but we're going to talk about things that barely register. So we talked about movies that made an impression for one reason or another, but what about movies that have a lot of hype? Maybe we even saw them and we paid for a ticket, but then you can hardly remember it. You look at it later and say, did I even see that? Or there's a gadget launched by a huge tech company and everyone's excited and it's going to be the next big thing. And then it wasn't. Or you see these expensive TV remakes that no one seemed to ask for, and they never find their audience, and they come and go. Well, we're going to give them a term. We're going to call these culture shrugs, right? So these are big swings. They depend on mass appeal to be successful. And we all greet them with the collective, whatever, and then forget all about them. As a culture, they make little to no impact. Maybe they make a little money. Maybe they don't. They're on the line, but nobody really cares. So if you are a company, if you're a creative, if you're the driving force behind these types of projects, you don't want to see that happen. That's like heart-wrenching, right? And it could have negative financial implications, of course. So we're going to fix it. We're going to build to a set of rules for how to create something with staying power and avoid fading instantly into obscurity. And we're going to save companies and movie studios millions in heartache. And they might just throw us a parade for our valor. Are you up for it? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Well, this episode was in part inspired by a column I've been reading and enjoying at MovieWeb. So Britt Hayes is their deputy editor. Shout out. She's awesome. And she has her own term for things that come, go, and are forgotten. So she calls it a memory hole. So at MovieWeb, she's been writing this brilliant weekly column called Memory Hold, for the D, where she revisits movies that showed potential but then fizzled out. And she's been trying to make sense of why some things are erased in pop culture's memory and why they come and go so fast. So some examples that she's been giving are like the Oz the Great and Powerful movie where Wicked's a huge hit, but that's an Oz movie that came and went with James Franco. There's a Total Recall remake with Colin Farrell. Lots of examples like that, but she's essentially describing something every industry fears. You can take it beyond movies, creating something that, you know, checks all the boxes. Maybe it tests well. Maybe it makes a little money, like I said, but then it vanishes. and no one outside the company seems to be championing it, didn't live up to expectations. No one's building community around it. No one says this is our thing. And it's not infamous enough to be a disaster or not special enough to be a guilty pleasure. So let's call it a culture shrug. It's a moment where consumers look at something that was specifically designed for them and they collectively go, yeah, I'm good. So some examples that Britain may get to or the mummy movie with Tom Cruise that was supposed to start a whole dark universe franchise. But yeah, people didn't really care. The Man in Black movie, the one without Will Smith. People didn't care so much. Quibi was a shining new streaming app that was supposed to be the new short form content to rival YouTube. That lost a lot of money. It came and went. Or the Amazon Fire Phone. Google launched the Pixel. Everyone loves the Pixel. Did they love Amazon's Fire Phone? Not so much. Big launch, little impact. So that's the danger when you're aiming for mass market appeal. So if it's a loud flop, at least, you know, it could get re-evaluated over time. Generations later might rescue it as a camp classic or a cult classic. Or it could lead to a new way of thinking. You know, we spent so much on that movie and it's a disaster. We're done with westerns for three decades, which has happened. You know, you end a genre because something's so phenomenally bad. And then that creates new and inventive ways of, you know, new filmmakers come and they're nimbler and they have smaller budgets. And, you know, like it could reinvent a whole new way of thinking or approaching things. But a culture shrug doesn't do any of that. It just is. So, Melissa, start with you. When a company's invested so much time and money into a project, how do you think it happens where there's this perfect storm of mediocrity and it lands with the collective? You know, I think this is actually interesting because I think the cultural shrug is not just about the movies industry, which I love is where we kind of entered the portal of this. But it's really applies to businesses in general and companies in general who are providing products and services. I had a founder at one of my recent startups that I was at who used this in product prioritization. And I've used it with my teams when we've been doing process architecting and trying to transform an experience, et cetera, is one question. So what? That's really simple, right? So what? But if you think about it and you're like sitting there and the head of product is giving you a business plan and saying, this is, you know, the targeted audience and this is what we're going to sell and the ROI on it is this and at the end, the founder's like, so what? It makes you think. And I feel like that's a question that maybe the directors and the scriptwriters and producers of these movies and films isn't thinking about. And the same way the companies aren't thinking about, right? Like if you were to use Queeby or Amazon, right? You know, the Fire Phone. Like, so what? What makes it different? What makes it appealing? Who is your audience? Do you even think about that? And it's not just trying to do mass appeal, which I think is the problem with some of the movies today, is that there's this whole idea of like mass appeal to be able to pay for like these movies that are over 100, 200, 400 million dollars to produce. You need how many people do you need to show up? So that's a huge audience versus, you know, there was that time when Sundance and some of those places were bringing you really kind of craft driven movies, really interesting, very low budget. and now it's like big studios are trying to reproduce that but then I would say so what like what is the story you're telling how is it compelling how is it drawing on the characters intertwining relationships and what is it trying to tell us and I think that today we are bombarded with media in all different forms we can pick and choose what we want to view and what we want to you know, consume. And a lot of us don't have time for all of the things that are out there, right? Nor the money. I mean, I think the economy is up and down and like the availability. When I say consumers are savvy now, they want everything instantaneously and personalized. So you have to think about your audience. And if that's the case, you know, they're used to having, you know, DoorDash bring their dinner to them. They don't even have to go through the drive-through because that's too much time for them, right? They're going to sit at home. I'm going to stream it. I don't even have to get Netflix to stream it. I can use YouTube to go look at different types of movies. But I do believe that it's a challenge for our teams today and definitely for leadership. Really, I think identifying who is the core audience that you're trying to heal to and then thinking about the mass. Because I think what happens is you're thinking more about the mass. And so you get a Men in Black 55, and that's not what anybody asked for versus maybe, you know, an offshoot of that. There's an interesting side story to that, right? You know, you look at the Marvel Universe. My God, I didn't even know there were so many, you know, not even in that world. But like, you know, picking a character or a lane, Star Wars has done the same thing, right? What's the origin stories of some of the favorite characters? Like, again, thinking about how to make it touch people and an audience, and it answers that so what question. Going online without ExpressVPN is like driving without a seatbelt. You might be careful, but if something risky happens, wouldn't you want to feel more secure? Well, every time you connect to public Wi-Fi, it's like you're not wearing a seatbelt because your data is vulnerable and valuable. Like your logins and credit cards, people want them. And learning how to steal your data is easy. But guess what? So is protecting it. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. Whether you're on a phone, a laptop, or tablet, you can rest easy wherever you go. And when I say easy, I mean easy. You open the app, click a button, and that's it. Look, hackers got a hack, but it's important to me that you don't fall victim to them. This one's obvious. If you could protect your data anywhere you go for about 12 cents a day, why wouldn't you? So buckle up and secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash fixed. That's expressvpn.com slash fixed to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com slash fixed. I love that. So what? I think to your point, companies, brands, you know, the movie houses all should be asking that question. And what really is interesting for me is like, these are the big bets, right? That came out of those brainstorming sessions that came out of all the resources and all the really smart, brilliant, talented people sitting around the table, right? Lots of resources, lots of data and trend reports And you touched on this in your intro It like the shrug the cultural shrug is actually almost more hurtful and disappointing than like something that actually flops Right Because it's like, hey, at least it was out there and we tried. And I think we are definitely in a culture right now where like we even celebrate the failure. Right. Like, hey, you put it out there and OK, fine, it didn't work. But to your point, like this, this concept of a cultural shrug, It's like, gosh, no one even noticed, right? Like that's heartbreaking. I think, you know, even when we talk about the so what, I think part of what we're seeing today is this widening gap between what the culture is actually doing and what companies think the culture is doing, right? So like if we think about culture, it's moving at mean speed, like warp speed, right? Like you see something on social media or you hear about something, something goes viral. it's top of mind maybe for a couple of days and that's if nothing else happens right and and again there's so much going on and you jump on it and then a couple of days later a couple of weeks later folks aren't even talking about it anymore but we have to remember that like studios and brands and companies are operating on a year 18 month timeline they've got approval chains that stretch you know as long as a toilet paper roll right and so by the time something reaches the public, you know, the vibe has moved, right? Like the trends has changed. You're like, okay, wait, what are we talking about? I don't even remember that. Okay, fine. Refresh my memory. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it. Right. So I think the stakes now aren't just like, if we put this out, will it be good? It's like, will anyone even care at all? Will they even remember? Right. I think that the biggest danger today isn't controversy. And I know we've had those conversations around like, are you going to be canceled and all the things, like I said, even failure is celebrated now, the big fear and the big danger, I think these movie houses and studios need to be thinking about and companies in general is will I be invisible? Will this product, what we put out be invisible? And so I think that's really what fascinates me about this whole topic is like, how do you figure out why some things take a life of their own? You know, why others evaporate, they hit the air. And it's really been interesting to watch because I definitely have seen some things where I'm like, I didn't think that was going to catch on. Right. And years later, people are still talking about it. And look, there have been some things that I'm like, wow, I thought people were going to be all over that. And they were. So, yeah, this is really a really interesting topic. We talk about just the shrug versus the flop. Love how you said that to Kadira, because I think it's are you just mid? Right. Are you just average? Right. And average now isn't good enough, right? It's almost like the controversy is great because it gives you that, those viral moments, whether it's good or not good. And so when you say something like that, it does talk, you know, it makes me think about how we as businesses, as people, as, you know, consumers, how we've shifted in the way we view things and, and what we align ourselves towards. One of the things I was interested, I don't know, Erin, maybe you know a little bit more about this from the entertainment industry, but like one of the things I've been seeing feels like recycling of old movies, right? They're redoing a lot of old movies, Robocop or whatever, Men in Black, whatever. We've already seen it. Like, so now you're just putting new younger actors in it. You're adding, you know, CGI, whatever. And I just feel like we've lost some true creativity, right? You know what I mean? Because I'm just wondering like, yeah, I get that there are certain stories that, you know, kind of repeat themselves, but there's different ways in which to tell them. And so like when, when movies are actually redone and it's not like a sequence or an origin story or anything like that, it's, it's just the same movie. I just, it makes me wonder, like, is that laziness? And it's just corporate greed, like studio greed that they just want to, you know, you know, bank and try to get some money out of it. But I just feel like I've seen so many of those that those just don't interest me. Like seeing, you know, like going to one of those and spending the money for the experience in a movie theater, I would not do that. I would wait for it to come out and then compare it to what I've already seen before. Yeah, well, interesting points all around. I think the abundance of remakes and rehashing and prequels and sequels and legacy sequels and all those things, part of it is it's easier to get something greenlit if the audience has familiarity. So if you think there's a base for it, you know, you could come up with something subpar and it's fourth or fifth in the franchise. And if there's a proven audience for it, they'll still come out for it. And maybe they'll, you know, it'll be one of these memory shrugs where they'll say, well, that wasn't a good one, but it could make, come out revenue positive and then everyone's happy and they go on to the next. So that's one. Another could be a rights issue where you have something on the verge of expiration and you're about to lose studio control over it. and you need to make something quick under the umbrella of this brand name or this established name. So you rush it to market and it's just not that good, but you retain control. And then the next time around you do it better. And there's a third scenario, blame the algorithms, blame AI, blame the constant trend watching of audience habits, because, you know, the algorithms will say this suddenly became a hit and it's a five-year-old show. Let's make more of that. You know, people, like you said, most of the people have seen it. They've seen it a billion times. They've seen that, but they haven't seen the follow-up to it. So we get these engineered concepts and follow-ups and rehashes that are based on what the algorithm thinks or knows the audience wants to see. And that's not, you know, getting a computer to dictate what our entertainment is or what our enjoyment will be doesn't always work, right? Just because you like the original doesn't mean you'll like the third time around with new actors. So those are three factors at play. Or I think we're getting this market proliferation abundance of just stuff. As much as I love data, I think that over-reliance is what can absolutely cause us to be out of sync kind of with the culture at large. Right. And so, you know, there is. And look, I can appreciate, again, the data and totally understand how the algorithm makes sense. But I think what really needs to happen is companies, again, these studios, movie houses, whatever, need to be. I'm big on like making sure that you're actually engaging the actual community that you're speaking to. And so I will, you know, whether, again, I'm working for a company and we're building a framework around philanthropy, whether it's a product you're building, just make sure if you're going to rely on the algorithm, understandable, and you're going to rely on that data, fine. but like that over-reliance means that you also might be ignoring the exact community you know to Melissa's point that like I don't want to see this or I'm not going to go to the movies to see this I'll just wait until it comes out even you know on regular tv I might even pay for my streaming for it right so I think again that the biggest thing there like kind of to correct that is like even stepping outside of like those traditional focus groups you know maybe it's you know the influencers on social media but like how do you actually touch that community that target audience that would be the group that you believe is going to want to see the movie. Because data, again, it can be quarters, even a year old. And yes, it's a great prediction. But again, that over-reliance can lead to assuming versus what I would suggest observing what is actually happening present time with your core key audience. I love what you said there because I think it's important to understand. And I think, Aaron, you brought up a great question, but the data is going to producers in a board studio. They're not necessarily the core customers or the core audience for the movie, right? So in those scenarios, I think it gets to Kadir's point where you're over reliance on data that is actually, they're probably looking at ticket sales. They're looking at different types of things, you know, like fill the theater numbers, you know, how long did it stay at number one, whatever, whatever. And so maybe there needs to be new indicators that track cultural stickiness from day one, for example. Like almost like a net promoter score that companies use among the very core audience. So early people that go in right away and also without paying them. Like it's, it's just, you know, you have them push a button, smiley face, not smiley face as they exit the theater. Right. But really understanding like the impact that the movie may have had on like how they felt. Right. Like, so what's truly like going to get them to talk about it to their family or to their friends and say, you've got to see this movie. This is a great movie. And I know all of us have done that. Right. Like we've seen a movie where we've been like, oh my gosh, this is such a great movie and you need to go see it. Like I remember when Parasite came out and I was heavy deep down into Korean dramas and all that stuff. So this was very easily in target with me. I'm that target audience, Korean as well. But like being able to share it with my friends and my colleagues and other people and say, this is like a movie you've never seen before. And even though it's subtitled, you've got to go see it. It's worth reading. Like I used to, we used to have a joke in my family about like, whether it was worth going to a subtitled film, you know, like, you know, and it was right. And so again, I think that like thinking about how you define and track indicators and signals, you might have to do it differently depending upon who is looking at it, right? Because like I said, like the board of directors at a company, they're looking at very different types of things. But that doesn't mean that the product that you're providing is actually going to have any relevance, right? It could end up being the fire phone, right? For sure. Yeah. Well, Melissa, I love what you're saying. Like, I found something that maybe the mainstream culture doesn't know about. And I'm going to be a champion for it. I'm going to tell people. And that's certainly true of Parasite or Amelie or maybe, you know, Sinners or Weapons recently, where it's like this radiating out from this core believer group. And of course, movie studios want that to happen. Well, they want the big everyone shows up for quadrants out of the gate. But next best thing is you know these champions that have to tell everyone and then they start to draw the crowds in But it very interesting when that doesn happen if it intended for mass appeal or even if it intended for that kind of sleeper effect and it just doesn happen and kadeer i love what you said about you know the 18 month two to three year production window where maybe it did have a chance and maybe somewhere along the way there was urgency to it and there was you know societal impact along callous calculating way but like that's it was intended for enjoyment but 18 months or two years later or three years later with all the hands and tinkering just might land with a whisper and you know we with our podcast we if we're two days out from release the world might change south park until recently it's had a notorious seven day turnaround production window just so they can be in on the joke in the moment but if you're talking to you know it's 18 months two years and decision by assembly line you might end up with something that is has no bite to it. Yeah. And I think that is a problem that companies and definitely these movies face with the long map to actually end of journey or when it gets delivered. So it's really hard because what do you do when you are getting signal because of the environment, what's going on in the world, whatever, whatever that should we pivot? Should we change it, right? Because you're already deep into it. And so is it pausing or is it fundamentally doing a redo, you know, changing, you know, putting your resources to flood marketing, for example, Aaron, to try to get hype, even though this has lost its cultural relevance that it had a year ago, what kind of partnerships, incentives you can get to force traction. And And that to me is something that companies do a lot of too, where you create almost this hollow success metric because you're forcing it so hard, right? And so you have like something that's super aggressive and a super aggressive price point maybe for a product. You haven't really thought that through. And then what ends up happening is there is no market correction. There is no demand for what you're putting out there. and therefore you are, you know, you're kind of toast, you're cooked, right? So that's a big problem. You know, in my role and in companies, one of the things that I am in charge of is understanding signal from customers, right? And it's so hard in today's world based on, you know, when I think of like some of the older operating type of companies that I've been in, you know, Fortune 500 old school companies, like to be able to pivot on signal, to your point, I think, Kadir, you mentioned it like the chain of command. It's as long as like 14 rolls of toilet paper, right? You know what I mean? And by the time you've changed your mind, it's already too late, right? You've already, you know. And when you've invested millions of dollars into an idea or something, then do you just trash it? What are you going to do? Like read, write the entire script, all the things. So it's a challenge I don't necessarily have a great answer for right now. But I do think it's something that, again, applies directly to companies today. You see, just like I said, the market is just flooded with companies in all different types of spaces. And one of the things, the founder I was talking to recently about his business, I loved that it was very niche. It's a very, very specific, very, very specific type of insurtech. insure tech. And I was like, I just love that you're focused on being the best in this. And there's really hardly anybody else that you're competing with. You're just going to kill it. And it hits. Yet there's all these other companies that say they're tech, that they're this, or that they're this kind of startup. And they're all kind of just, you know, okay, kind of. What makes you different? Again, the software. 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That's expressvpn.com slash fixed to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com slash fixed. So what makes you different than this guy that's charging less, you know? I mean, just going back to, you know, what you were saying, even about the pivot and, you know, again, so much of this blurs into just how companies in general. I think what I was thinking as you were talking about is, and I don't have a good answer either on like from a movie's perspective. Do you pivot? Again, they've invested hundreds of millions of dollars budget wise. If something catastrophic happens in the real world, do you pause the movie to your point or one of the actors? And look, they're used to some of this, right? An actor dies or some controversy and they've got to swap. So some of that pivot is built in there. But I would even challenge, like, I wonder if some of this also has to do even with the internal culture of how decisions and brainstorming are happening, right? Because if I wonder, like, if a studio or, again, a company's ability to pivot is directly correlated to how receptive they are to new, weird, freaky, fresh ideas. Right. But then also their bias for action and speed, even in their internal decision making. Right. Because, like, let's be real. we have all experienced death by PowerPoint, death by committee, like we talk about those decision chains, right? And so, you know, even just kind of an idea planted at the start, right? We're all sitting around the table kind of brainstorming what's the next big movie. And it starts out bold and it starts out exciting and it starts out dangerous. And then every meeting, right, adds a little bit more constraint or another stakeholder that you got to go talk to. And now we're getting into that. Okay, maybe it is going to take us X amount of months to decide on this, of course, get into production. But like, if we're not careful just internally on how we make decisions and, oh, no, we don't like that idea. That sounds too risky. No, that's not what the data is telling us we should be doing. Even though we've got some smart person at the table saying, no, on social media, this is all the months, right? I think that in itself is likely an indication on whether or not if something happens, once they get into production, if they're actually going to truly be able to pivot in a way that it is going to be received by the audience. So I think there is a direct correlation between what happens inside and then once they get outside and actually start making the movie. Yeah, absolutely. And the reason it happens on the outside. So Kadira, you really articulated that really well. And I think a great example is that they don't want to, they're like mitigating risk, right? Because they've already made huge investment, right? And that's companies as well as movie studios. They're like in large organizations, we've all sat at tables like this. Bad news travels slowly and optimism is rewarded, right? So like all that are wanting to kind of take those risks and spin maybe that there's a negative, there's signal that this is not going the way we think it should go are usually not the ones that are listened to, right? The people that are listened to are the yes people, right? And so by the time the truth actually reaches the top, we've already invested too much capital to your point. We've already the financial, political, all the different things that are at the table and it's too much. We can't turn back. And so then you've created these unforgettable launches, right? I think an example of this, I know Aaron, you shared some movies for us to look at, but like one of the examples that I can think of is, I think it's called the Invasion a 2007 film where the original director cut was deemed too intellectual and not commercial enough right by the studio so then the studio brought in the wachowski brother were brought in for reshoots and created a frankenstein film that was neither intellectual thoughtful thriller satisfying action movie and critics called it soulless and so the bureaucracy of the process in this case won and optimized for theoretically the broader audience, right? Because the first one was too intellectual and created something that nobody actually liked. You know, it wasn't edgy enough. It wasn't enough of it. It wasn't. And so it's really interesting because you get caught up in that. And where do you, I mean, I don't know, you know, whose throat to choke or where do you point the finger? I don't know if that's necessarily what you want to be doing, but like at this point, gosh, millions and millions of dollars down the drain. It's true. Well, and you get that on the marketing side too. So if you've ever done an agency pitch, you tend to pitch three ideas. The first one is the one you really want to do. It's a little out there, a little crazy. It's going to push the envelope, going to push the edge for what the brand is. The second one has some of that flavor and maybe is a little bit more grounded. And the third is the safety net that no one really wants to do. It's already what the client is doing. It's best you get a little bit of your own sensibility in there, but it's the do no harm. If you have a great client, which can take years to manufacture, they might say, we trust you, do the first one. You know, let's take a big swing. Chances, if you have a new client, they're going to say, oh, we like the third one. And that's why you never pitch anything you don't want to follow through. But yeah, everyone wants to, great clients are great clients. They'll say, do it, you know, go nuts, do number one. But those that want to keep their jobs with assurance will say, do number three, do no harm, you know, preserve. and that's I think what we're seeing happening is in other areas. Now if you get someone at the top and we see this in movie studios too that is the renegade that says I don't care if it comes out tomorrow you're recutting that film and then when they're right they're right and then we talk about it and celebrate it later. We can see that happen and that's the opposite of corporate interference or that's the good side of it. But a lot of these individuals I don't want to name names wind up being very problematic people or use their power in wrong ways too So you have to take them out of the equation whether they commercially viable or not They just not the right people to be in those rooms So you know I wonder if that translates to all across corporate America if that what we seeing is with the absence of someone who misuses and abuses their power, that makes the right calls sometimes, you know, we're having a purging of those types of individuals, which I'm happy to see, but is the end result something that's tepid, bathwater? Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a stress test as necessary. And Kadir, I'm kind of using your platform here that you mentioned earlier, but kind of like why now? Why us? Why is this relevant? Why are we going to be the ones that actually do it and put it out there? And really understanding that, especially if you're making these investments in film, in product, that is going to be a long, there's a long runway to when it's actually launched. I think you have to revisit that at least quarterly to be like, is it still, are the answers we're getting still the ones that we want? And actually, you know, are you asking the right people, right? Are you using a test audience? Are you, I used to lead UX research teams and it was really interesting having our UX researchers bring in people. And we thought, for example, that it was going to be harder to have older people using an app on a phone. And when we brought people in from all different age groups, it was the younger people that were like, I'm not going to use an app. I'll just call you. And we're like, what? Why would you call us? We don't want you to call us. We want you to use the app. But they were like, yeah, your app's kind of, you know, it's not intuitive, whatever. And they don't know about the product because it was complicated. And so here we thought we were doing a favor by making it accessible and personalized, but it was not user-friendly for the different audiences. And that is a big thing. And like for the older folks like myself, I have to use readers, right? And we had buttons that were too close, like yes or no buttons. People like couldn't tell what they were hitting, right? Because they couldn't see them. All those kinds of things, I really feel like those kinds of stress tests and then asking the right kind of questions of the right variety of users is really important. And I don't think it's something that people do as much as they probably should. And it's a cost something. So maybe bigger companies are able to do that. Yeah, I love that. Yes. Lead with curiosity, right? From whether it's the interns, the executives, obviously, that everyone's kind of looking up to. But get curious, It's immersed in real culture. Again, data is helpful. We all rely on it. It's fine. But I think curiosity, especially in this case, is going to be the anecdote to being irrelevant. So, yeah. I like that. It reminds me, you know, like that cultural reevaluation too. Something that's just watered down and neutered probably never is going to find an audience. No one's ever going to care. But there are those curios, cultural artifacts or other time that do get reevaluated. Back in college, I wrote a paper about, it's reminding me about this predates YouTube. Well, what if there was a channel where we could see everything? You know, give us the middling, middle of the road things. Give us the disasters. Give us the things that come and go. Why can't we have them anyway? And maybe it'll find an audience. And that's what, obviously, we are in that climate. We've got YouTube. We have shows that are on their fourth season that are off our radars and someone's watching them. So they're not three channels anymore or four channels. It's rare, I guess, increasingly rare to have those unified experiences where there is a great movie or a great cultural moment. And we all come together. We all appreciate and enjoy it together. So I guess celebrate those when they happen and work even harder to make sure that what you're putting out achieves that status. Because if you want people leaving the house, paying $18, paying a sitter, buying popcorn to give them a lukewarm experience, people aren't going to do it, right? Yep. All right. Well, here's our fix. I pulled together what we were talking about. It's our one, two, three, four steps to creating something that does not fall into the cultural void. So we're going to start with a so what, before we create anything and say, what are we doing here? Does it matter? Do we care? Will anyone care? If the answer is no, kick it out. We're going to look at algorithms. We're going to look at statistics. We're going to look at viewer habits. We're going to look at replays and take that as information, a data point, one factor, but it's not going to be our rinse and repeat. People like that, let's recast it, make it cheaper, put it out because it won't have the same impact. We are going to test, but not test to death. You know, everyone gets scared and they recut it a bunch of times and take all the meat out. We are going to have someone at the top who has final cut, who is a tastemaker, who makes the right calls, but is also a good person, right? A good leader, a good, effective leader, a champion of creatives and not a toxic individual. And then when there's a long lead time, so 18 months, two years, three years, we're going to use that time to find our base and make sure that, you know, maybe it's a four quadrant hit, maybe it's not, but we're going to find someone, some core group that it connects with. Those are our true believers. They're going to march this thing all the way up to the finish line with us. They're going to be our social advocates and content creators and all those things. And we make sure that, you know, within that larger pool we're trying to hit, there's at least somebody that's going to help us radiate it out and make sure that it catches fire by the time it drops into the cultural landscape. So if we take those steps, Kadira, do we fix it? I think we have a really good start. I think that the studios and movie houses, I mean, this is decades, if not centuries, so just kind of ways of working, right? I think the only thing I would add is allow for the weirdness, allow for that risk, allow for that thing where maybe the one person in the room spoke up about it and everybody's like, that might be your next fill in the blank that everybody's talking about that we thought was going to be a flop. And it's actually something that folks are still talking about 5, 10, 15 years later. So I think that would be the only thing that I would add, but I think that's a great list. Yeah, great point. I like it. Melissa, did we fix? With Kadira, 100%, I think we've got a great start. I think there's some other things that kind of fold into this that are action steps that people could take. One of them is, I don't know if we use the Amazon model for goal setting and OKRs where you write a press release of what it would look like once your initiative had come to fruition and how great it would be, right? And so I would say for every major initiative and maybe even every movie, you do actually like a movie review and a postmortem, right? Before the movie's even made, right? And so what it can do is prevent you from being culturally irrelevant or memory hold, because you're writing this postmortem headline and you're kind of going, what went wrong? Why did this flop? Right? And then that's kind of that safety trick that kind of unlocks like real honest fears that people might have. And like, we used to do that in kind of privacy, like you would write your press release in privacy. And so I think that would be a great thing because, and then just put them out there and nobody knew who wrote what. So you could kind of see people slant on what they thought about the initiative, but kind of their idea about the movie. So I think that that would be an interesting way to articulate potential failure modes from a user's perspective or from, you know, internally from the director or from actors or whatever it might feel like, scriptwriters, and then you can make maybe adjustments beforehand. I love the idea of using data, KPIs, success metrics, but also tying those to cultural resonance. I think that's really important. We talked about like the feeling, what's the feeling? So like, again, like creating, like there's product roadmaps, but what about a, you know, a culture roadmap? So for every feature or product or movie, what can you do to add an element for no other reason than to delighting a core segment or audience and give that product or movie some soul, right? Like whether it's a song, whether it's, you know, like a iconic line that like only certain people would really understand and get how it relates to cultural theme, whatever, you know, like the 1980s or something like that. You know what I mean? by putting an actor, you know, in that was really relevant in that time decade and isn't anymore, right? You know, those kinds of things are the kinds of things that kind of make movie buffs excited about something. So they feel like it's a, you know, it's a secret that I only understand. So I do feel like making that customer experience, I know this is funny for me to be saying, but making it less transactional and more emotional, because I think that's where we're losing some of the heart of the movies is that when we say they're kind of, it's because we don't remember them. They haven't touched us in a way that it's tying us to like be able to share the joy of what movies bring to us. Yeah, definitely. Okay. Well, I'll take that as a, as a fix. We'll work on the parade part, see if we get the celebration we deserve. But you know, if we save at least one mediocre movie from happening, we've done our job here. And I love the idea of, you know, doing the press release in far in advance. And that could be done for product launches or, you know, anything, apply it to any business you want, write the outcome first, write what the public reception was, and then reverse engineering, go backwards. So great suggestions all around. That's going to wrap us on this episode and we fix it. You're welcome. Hopefully we made it memorable for you. Kadira, Melissa, as always, thank you for breaking this down in such a relatable way. Make sure to check out Britt's column. It's called Memory Hold at movie web. It's a great one. And then to our devoted listeners, our fixaholics, there are thousands of podcasts and you keep coming back to this one and we thank you for it. If you agree with everything we just said, let us know. Drop us a line at we've fixed it pod.com. If you're a true believer of any of the movies or products we wrote off today and you think we got it wrong, let us know. Either way, we hope you enjoyed the episode. Stay up to date with us at we've fixeditpod.com. Our season's getting so close to the end. Don't miss an episode and we will see you next time. We hope you enjoyed this episode of We Fixed It. You're welcome. 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