The entire global output of the entertainment-and-arts industrial complex, what we in these posts lovingly refer to as The Business of Pleasure, can be viewed through a single, simple, and extremely useful lens...
The expectation of relevance.
From the tiniest charcoal sketch transforming a bedsit wall, to a Mozart adagio at La Scala, from a Shakespeare soliloquy, to this summer’s (or any summer’s) biggest cinema release.
Even before the brush touches the paper, the curtain rises on Act I, Scene One, or the camera sweeps across the skyline for the establishing shot: ‘Ext. Manhattan. Day.,’ there is the creative intent:
“I am going to produce something relevant for you.”
Even before we buy a ticket for the exhibition, queue all morning outside the theatre, or get that first snort of popcorn, there is the audience’s intent:
“I expect (…want, need, hunger and thirst for) something relevant from you.”
Our onboard Relevance Meter is always running. In the Orchestra Stalls or out on the street. Pointing our attention towards the most interesting prospect, the most worrying problem, the most niggling irritant, from among all the trillions of signals, sensations and thoughts bombarding us at any one time.
There is no off-switch. It’s been hard-wired into us humans, and all our previous iterations, since we first emerged from the primeval sludge, boggle-eyed and bathed in starlight.
Content Plus Context -How to score big on the Relevance Meter.
(A couple of pointers for anyone out there in The Business of Pleasure’s sister sector, The Attention Economy)
The lines of a song, a film, or Lotus Elan, can only reach us, and resonate, by striking a direct hit on a perpetually moving target:
By sounding a distinct and singular note.
By touching, and exposing, a vital nerve.
By evoking a feeling which in turn brings with it a tension.
Which involves:
Finding, and threading, a needle in an entire hay-barn, the size of Hammersmith, rammed to the rafters with competing needs and wants, passions and pain-points, current, historic (and prehistoric!), top-of-mind, barely-conscious and ‘pending retrieval’.
But help is at hand.
Any Producer worth their salt will stop you in mid-pitch and utter those painful truths:
“Stop trying to write something ‘commercial.’ Write from the heart. About things that are relevant, personal, important to you.”
Any Consumer with a few quid in their pocket sits somewhere on a spectrum, from Best Prospects to Adjacent Users.
So the challenge is always to develop your natural audiences to the hilt, those gorgeous souls for whom the perceived content, the stuff you produce, or purvey, is, or appears to be, immediately relevant…
While trashing the barriers holding back the others, by exposing those benefits that render your stuff relevant. And, more importantly, MORE relevant than everybody else’s.
DT
1-8-24
…Hope you found this piece just a wee bit relevant
'Relevance Theory', the brainchild of English linguist Deirdre Wilson and French cognitive scientist, Dan Sperber, is an offshoot of ‘Pragmatics.’
Not to be confused with ‘Pragmatism,’ ‘Pragmatics’ is a branch of linguistics largely built around the work of two British philosophers, JL Austin, 1884 – 1971, and Paul Grice, 1913 – 1988.
Grice laid the foundations for an inferential model of communication, an alternative to the classical code model, which Wilson and Sperber then built upon and advanced in new directions with their Relevance Theory.
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