What is Stickiness?

This article I feel was excellent. It served its purpose through describing itself in a way. The ending of the article pulled all of these ideas together for me, in that it created a new hypothesis for my views on this reading. This is because once I read it, it had similar effects on me about Shelley Jackson's piece, but only the part where I understood it and nothing else. It seemed to me that once I finished reading this piece I realized what the writer was doing. They were using stickiness to describe stickiness. By this I mean that the article was an example of stickiness in itself. It was creative by using different examples of stickiness (the urban legends) and by appealing to people, I felt, by being extremely simple. It most of the characteristics which were listed towards the end of the article when they were broken down into six different parts. This article definitely did stick for me. It did so much that I was able to read it in two parts, meaning that I took a break, went to my job and came back a few hours later and remembered what they were talking about enough that I could pick up reading where I left off and post a blog about it, without having to go back and reread most of it.

It even appealed to me in the sense that I agreed with what it was saying for the most part. I think that stickiness is a simple, creative story which appeals highly to people's emotions and also just their sense in general. Meaning that they simply liked it for whatever reason (comedy, truth, etc.) I think that through those ways it is the only way which you will get the majority of the public audience to remember what it is you are making a case about. There might be some people who will remember it for their own personal reason, whether they hate it or have some personal passion for it, but in order to get it to stick with the majority of the public, your case has to be extremely memorable on all levels so that it will indeed appeal to most individuals.

I like to think of the commercials that we saw in class this semester as a prime example of stickiness. If our class was asked tomorrow if they remembered what happened in both the Asian Pantene commercial and the Hansel and Gretel AT&T commercial, my guess is that they would indeed remember it. This is not because we have watched them so much, as it is that they sticked to people. They stuck because they were creative and that is the most important part in all of this. Creativity is needed whether the case is good or bad. Hansel and Gretel stuck because it was creative and different and it was also a fairly decent commercial. The Pantene commercial on the other hand was, I felt, extremely bad, yet we all remember it because it was creative and different. If we think of mass media and how much simply plain bad material there is on television alone today, there are countless cases that are terrible yet still creative. Think of last season on American Idol, the bikini girl who went to the auditions and didn't make it very far at all. Yet at the end of the season people were still talking about her even though she was such a bad singer. Also, the song "LOL :)" (yes, lol smiley face is indeed the title) I personally like, but it is just such a stupid concept of a song, but it is after all creative and this is why it sticks with people, whether they like it or not. I asked some of my friends if they had heard the song and if they liked it or not and out of the four people that I asked, three of them said that they had heard it even though they didn't like it. They only remembered it because it was so creatively bad and because of this, so memorable.

This is simply how mass media works, sometimes the worse it is, the more memorable it is. Yet this is also another way for people to get their point across to people. If you think of it, it might seem more logical for ad campaigns to use more stupid tactics in their commercials simply because they stick to people more. Geico is the perfect example because their caveman ad campaign is easily the worst ad campaign out there now, yet people still remember Geico and continue to use their services all the time. Lets hope, for the sake of mass media and advertising, that ad campaigns don't get more like Geicos and that producers will stick to using good creative ideas in their ads.