Hopefully, you laughed at that. And the photo. Connecting with people, whether for humor or love or commerce, is –has to be–a two-way street.  It requires listening. Learn your audience. Know your audience.

Love your audience.

Mark Twain famously observed that all great comedy is born not out of laughter, but from sorrow. The “oh, Man, I’ve been through that…” The connecting. The empathizing. Years later, and not on a steamboat, Martin Heidegger gave us a framework for dissecting the creation of any messaging when he asked, “what gives the thing its thingness?” When we can answer that, we’re ready to start telling a story that’s worth hearing. 

In the mid-’90s, the Butthole Surfers’ frenetic frontman Gibby Haynes screamed an important question in the middle of “Ulcer Breakout”

“Ever fall in love with a Chevy? 
Ever fall in love with a Ford?
Ever felt the torque of a hemi? 
Ever seen the face of the Lord?”

Haynes is not known as a particularly devout man, nor is he paid by Chevy or Ford or Dodge (Hemi), but he and his band create a space within the song that feels authentic and enthusiastic and frankly also like we’re all going 150 mph. The brand names get woven into a compelling story and manage not to become some reductive bumper sticker with the Calvin character pissing on the other guy’s logo. He just makes the brands part of a natural, relate-able story.

Twain, Heidegger and Haynes could have been great ad guys, content generators or TED Talk branding gurus. Fortunately, we live in a world where they each did something [gasp] even cooler.

But these are the questions we are tasked with answering. That’s what we hunt for — the emotional connection, the unique pulse within the thing we’re telling the story about, and a way to build a framework around it that keeps it honest and engaging.