Matthew Toffolo's Weekly Blog - January 26th/2007
I always remember the great montage from the Coen brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy showing how the Hula Hoop became the most popular toy of the 20th Century. It mistakenly flies down the Suburban streets when a 10-year old child picks it up, analyses it and instinctively puts it around her waist and does what it was made for. Other children see this and want to do the same thing. So they go to a Toy store looking for it. Then everyone in the neighborhood is doing the Hula Hoop when someone from the next block notices and wants to do it too. So next thing you know, the Hula Hoop craze hops from town to town, city to city, state to state, country to country and becomes the biggest selling toy in history. All the while the price of the Hula Hoop goes from 10 cents to 5 dollars. Matthew Toffolo and Idea-Virus Marketing There are so many examples of this way of marketing since the beginning of the new century, especially in the Internet world. Myspace and Youtube were basically sites built from word of mouth in a span of months into what they are now. Hardly any money was spent on advertising to promote their sites. And the popularity of these sites didn't happen by accident. The creators and investors of these sites systematically figured out how to do this. They knew exactly what they were doing. They started their sites with a 100 or so of their friends as the beginning members and those members told them to ask their friends to join and next thing you know their sites are worth a billion dollars. 100 people each ask three of their friend to join. Say they all join and now you have 400 friends. Then they ask 3 friends, and those people ask 3 friends and so on and so on...... Of course it isn't always this easy. For every Idea-Virus marketing technique like Myspace, there's 100's that fail. Things need to fall into place properly. You need to have the right pieces in place, but essentially you need to have a GREAT IDEA and execute that idea. An idea so good that you know that people will want this. An idea so original and basic all rolled into one that people don't know how they lived without it before. The 20th Century really got into this act of thinking and now this is what the 21th Century will be all about. Matthew Toffolo talks about the Great Idea In the 19th Century as North Americans settled into their new (stolen) land, the big man on the totem pole was the person who had the best and usually the most farmland. That was how success was defined. Then the 20th Century, factories became the big man on campus trade of capitalism. Now as we begin the 21st Century, it's all about the GREAT IDEA. About adding something into our world that changes the way we do things. Of course this has occurred since the beginning of man. It's how we evolved faster than the rest of the animal race. But now we're going to skyrocket. We're going to jump into overdrive. Now we have more freedom and more energy than man have ever had (at least a large population of us do). Kids growing up don't have to work as hard as they did before. They have time to get to know themselves, times for inner thought and inner creation. The people with the Great Idea will be the ones who will be the royalty in our society. They will be the people in control for the first time in history. And that will spark more great ideas as they'll inspire more people and those people will inspire most people and so on and so on......We're headed into a very interesting century. 100 years from now will be vastly different from the world we're living today. Matthew Toffolo talks about the Creative People of the 20th Century Think of Bill Gates. He said himself that the best ideas are the ones you steal from others. His creations are from everyone else's separate creations . He just put them all together in his own package to create the monster he did. He saw parts and realized that he could create a living thing as no one else saw what he did. That is creative genius. And I don't think any of these guys were twiddling their thumbs thinking like madmen how they were going to change the world. They were just having fun, trying to do what capitalists do and thinking of ways to build their company to the next level. They had no idea how big a monster they created. Einstein I'll save for another column. But let's just say that this man was the greatest poet of our time. No other person of the 20th century made people think more than he did. Matthew Toffolo talks about the new world And those guys I talked about all have the same things in common. They are all white and they are all men. As we learn to open up and actually understand that we're all equal year after year (and we've come a long way), there will be this gigantic population who will also have the freedom and opportunities that these men shared. Woman and non-Caucasians will jump in and turn this entire world around. I have a theory that by 2107 Woman will have the most power in our world. It will be their time to run things. And I don't think the world is doomed or is going to destroy itself soon. I was at a One Minute Festival last month and one of the films was a montage of how Man is going blow up our planet with our selfishness. I actually booed that film out loud I was so appalled by it. The first time I've ever done that in my life. I'm perhaps too much of an idealist or spiritualist, but I think we'll always be smart enough to figure things out. I think we're here to learn, first and foremost. And as we learn, we grow. And as we grow, we make mistakes and do stupid things. But in the end, we realize our faults and get ourselves out of the hole we put ourselves into. I also believe that we're just understanding our own intelligence and centuries later, we'll be so smart and be able to control so much with our inner power, that we'll be able to fix anything. Thanks Matthew Toffolo Return from Matthew Toffolo's Blog to WILDsound Filmmaking Feedback Events home page
|
