Morning folks.
Last week I unloaded a little about my obsession with the concept of time. I have a lot more thoughts on it, as it connects to a lot of other concepts I like to stumble around. I know a lot of you share the same passion as I, for when you truly dive into the physics of time, it is so fascinating that you don’t want to stop talking about it. But reader beware: HOT GIRLS DON’T CARE ABOUT TIME. Literally, figuratively, and conceptually. So save yourself the trouble and don’t bring it up around them. Theory of relativity, out. Second law of thermodynamics, out. The concept that time doesn’t exist and we have all experienced, are experiencing, and will experience everything to ever exist all at once, get the absolute fuck out! Hot girls are perpetually in the next moment, so all of you guys struggling to even stay in the moment can already kick rocks. Anticipating others anticipation, as Keynes described as the key to investing, is applicable in a multitude of ways.. one of which is dating and relationships. I am of course kidding, there are a few hot girls out there who care about time, so make sure when you find them, you don’t let them go.
My pet theory about the world that is totally wrong is that women experience time differently from men. Men are impatient, women are not (in the aggregate, and under controlled circumstances.. don’t come at me). Men expect things to develop quickly, women cherish the slowly developing circumstances (foreplay, anyone?). Is this biological, environmental, a social construct? It’s actually none, because the theory is wrong, but time is funny because people do perceive it differently. The person ardently contributing to their 401k every month perceives, or at least understands, time differently than the person letting it ride at the roulette wheel in Vegas. The person taking NMN every morning versus the person eating breakfast burritos. Immediate versus delayed gratification are psychological conditions based on a person’s perception of time.
When marketing a product, you have many different strategies at your disposal. Some of them are time based. You can use both, or neither, but two that are applicable to my point are: Direct Response (DR) and Lifetime Value (LTV) Marketing. I’m sure some of you might see where I’m going with this.
Direct Response is instant gratification. You see some t-shirt advertisement on Instagram and you need to buy it immediately. There is no expectation that you’re going to buy another t-shirt from this company. So the positioning of the messaging on the advertisement has to illicit a purchasing response, but more importantly, you cannot spend a lot of time and effort on this campaign. If the margin on the t-shirt is $35, and it costs you $0.01 to legitimately put it in front of someone, you don’t have the luxury of showing it to more than 3,500 people for each purchase just to break even. There is no business beyond that, you would either have to find a way to show it to more people for less, or convert more people faster by changing the messaging.
LTV Marketing is more patient, more time based. Let’s say you are selling some SaaS subscription service, and it costs $50 per month. That means an annual contract is $600. Plus, your company has a Customer Success Manager that makes it really hard for a client to cancel their subscription, so 2 years retention is the normal lifespan. This gives the marketer some extra time-based leeway. Let’s say it costs $5 to get in front of a legitimate customer. This company can get in front of the same customer 100x (for $500) and still make a gross profit (assuming the CSM is working for free). But what’s more, is that for these types of long term relationships between client and customer, the customer needs those multiple touchpoints. They want to be wooed, excited, convinced, because they are entering a long term relationship.
Dating is Digital Marketing. In an infinite number of analogous ways, especially considering the exponential amount of people who are meeting their partners online. Your online presence is your brand. Your Instagram, your TikTok, your LinkedIn, your Google-able DUI from 2007. Visibility plays a part. Positioning plays a part. Imagine trying to buy a t-shirt for an ad you clicked and there were no pictures on the website! Mysterious for sure, but is it real, or a scam? Only a certain type of consumer takes that risk, and it relies heavily on the ad that brought them there. The amount of potential partners you talk to are your Sessions, the ghostings are your Bounce Rate, and you can insert whatever “event-based metric” you want to determine your Conversion Rate. But your advertising is always your communication.
Men typically communicate via Direct Response, women via LTV Marketing. That’s why there is so much miscommunication between genders. Now, I am not intimating that men are all about sex and women are all about relationships. Although that is stereotypically congruent, I think the uh, gender gap is closing there, at least in progressive Los Angeles in 2023 as far as this researcher has confirmed.
The end goal of dating is to eventually find a long term partner though, right? Direct Response tactics only work on Direct Response consumers, but I see so many male “advertisers” fail in this regard. Consumers only susceptive to LTV Marketing will never, ever, ever, be sold on the first interaction. You as the advertiser are investing your time into the consumers wellbeing, and should communicate as such. You must therefore anticipate their anticipation. People (women) with a wider aperture of time will place a proportionally less amount of weight on each individual action, but a proportionally higher amount of weight on each individual action as it relates to the overarching set of interactions. People (men) with a narrower aperture of time tend to get this backwards, and assume a disproportionate amount of weight has been given to a particular interaction, not understanding this interaction’s relationship to the total set of interactions. If this is confusing, send me an email and I will give you a $5000 dating lesson for the cost of only $1000.
What’s more, and since this is turning into an overt dating advice column, women love a good mystery. Have you ever played a game of Clue? Mysteries involve time, and multiple parameters. Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory, with the Candlestick. The game takes 19 hours, and it’s not a binary whodunnit.
Things to consider: Who is your target demo? Are you going after the appropriate consumers? What is your messaging? Does it match your target demo?
I suppose one reason I am writing about this topic (other than being someone in the dating pool), is that I see so much bad information being given to young men in regards to pursuing women. There is a common notion going around (on both the male and female side) that one should not ever “chase” anyone. The idea is that if the person does not respond to your advances immediately, you simply move on and shoot your shot with the next person. I think this is an extremely dangerous idea to perpetuate in society and is a microcosm of the problems in our digital age.
As attention spans get shorter and shorter, our filtration process becomes shallower and shallower. Advertisers used to advertise on Facebook and Google, which required actual ad copy that people would actually read. Then Instagram made ad copy obsolete, but optimized for aesthetic perfection. TikTok has now taken that to the extreme, with the user determining in milliseconds whether or not they find the content in front of them attractive. The fact that social media apps are advertising apps means they are also dating apps.
All of this leads to the dating strategy of young men being Direct Response. They cast the widest net possible, shooting shots all over the place, with extremely low conversion rates. But that’s because they are maximizing for aggregate one-time conversions. The problem is that this conditions young women to expect this from young men, and the result is that they either resign to change their own image to be more attractive to this type of shallow approach, or extricate themselves from the dating pool completely, or only date older men.
This is great news for older men, but (and maybe this is a sign I’m getting older) I worry about the younger generation of men and their ability to form relationships. This has generational implications on society. We are seeing in real time the ramifications of China’s “one child per family” policy (which optimized for male babies) is having on their population. It’s declining, and along with it their ability to maintain economic superiority. I’m not saying the US suffers the same fate, or turns into some “Handmade’s Tale” dystopia, but the toxicity is pervasive enough to cause concern. The inability to form relationships leads to a decreased birth rate, which leads to less economic productivity year over year. Shouldn’t we care about the long-term success of the land of the free? Or have we become too obsessed with our own lives?
I’ve talked previously about how it took 180 years to build Notre Dame, and about Benjamin Franklin’s famous 200 year old gift to the city of Philadelphia. Contrast that with someone flipping through TikTok and stopping when they see an attractive smile that hits their feels in just the right way. Humanity’s rapidly changing perception of time affects its compassion towards itself and others. This leads to more anxiety and self preservation, narcissism, ADD, and self-esteem issues. Forget about optimizing for multi-generational prosperity. We are optimizing for this week’s prosperity, this night’s prosperity, this hour’s prosperity, this minute’s prosperity.
We are still living in Rome, but 2000 years in the future. The only difference is that we are all Commodus, and our thumbs up or thumbs down decisions are made 1000x faster.
Are you not entertained?