Blue's Clues succeeds as a story of discovery only if the clues are in proper order. The show has to start out easy — to give the viewers confidence — and then get progressively harder and harder, challenging the preschoolers more and more, drawing them into the narrative. The first set of puzzles about anteaters and elephants had to be easier than the set of puzzles about beavers and worms, which in turn had to be easier than the final set about fish. The layering of the show is what makes it possible for a child to watch the show four and five times: on each successive watching they master more and more, guessing correctly deeper into the program, until, by the end, they can anticipate every answer.
After the morning of testing, the Blue's Clues team sat down and went through the results of the puzzles, one by one. Thirteen out of the 26 children guessed correctly that anteaters ate ants, which wasn't a good response rate for the first clue. "We like to open strong," Wilder said. They continued on, rustling through their papers. The results of a puzzle about beavers drew a frown from Wilder. When shown a picture of a beaver dam, the kids did badly on answering the first question — what is the beaver doing? — but very well (19 out of 26) on the second question, why is he doing it? "The layers are switched," Wilder said. She wanted the easier question first. On to the fish questions: Why was the little fish hiding from the big fish? Sherman looked up from her notes. "I had a great answer. 'The little fish didn't want to scare the big fish.' That's why he was hiding." They all laughed.
Finally, came the most important question. Was the order of Blue's clues correct? Wilder and Oilman had presented the clues in the order that the script had stipulated: ice, waddle, then black and white. Four of the 17 kids they talked to guessed penguin after the first clue, six more guessed it after the second clue and four alter all three clues. Wilder then turned to Sherman, who had given her clues in a different order: black and white, ice, waddle.
"I had no correct answers out of nine kids alter one clue," she reported. "After ice, I was one of nine, and after waddle I was six of nine."
"Your clincher clue was waddle? That seems to work,"
Wilder responded. "But along the way were they guessing lots of different things?"
"Oh yes," Sherman said. "After one clue, I had guesses of dogs, cows, panda bears, and tigers. After ice, I got polar bears and cougars."
Wilder nodded. Sherman's clue order got the kids thinking as broadly as possible early in the show, but still preserved the suspense of penguin until the end. The clue order they had — the clue order that seemed the best back when they were writing the script — gave the answer away far too soon. Sherman's clue order had suspense. The original order did not. They had spent a morning with a group of kids and come away with just what they wanted. It was only a small change. But a small change is often all that it takes.
There is something profoundly counterintuitive in the definition of stickiness that emerges from all these examples. Wunderman stayed away from prime-time slots for his commercials and bought fringe time, which goes against every principle of advertising. He eschewed slick "creative" messages for a seemingly cheesy "Gold Box" treasure hunt. Levanthal found that the hard sell — that trying to scare students into getting tetanus shots — didn't work, and what really worked was giving them a map they didn't need directing them to a clinic that they already knew existed. Blue's Clues got rid of the cleverness and originality that made Sesame Street the most beloved television program of its generation, created a plodding, literal show, and repeated each episode five times in a row.
We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, by putting the Muppet behind the H-U-G, by mixing Big Bird with the adults, by repeating episodes and skits more than once, by having Steve pause just a second longer than normal after he asks a question, by putting a tiny gold box in the corner of the ad. The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems. The creators of Sesame Street did not junk their entire show after the Philadelphia disaster. They just added Big Bird, and he made all the difference in the world. Howard Levanthal didn't redouble his efforts to terrify his students into getting a tetanus shot. He just threw in a map and a set of appointment times. The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
FOUR
The Power of Context (Part One)
BERNIE GOETZ AND THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK CITY CRIME
On December 22, 1984, the Saturday before Christmas, Bernhard Goetz left his apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and walked to the IRT subway station at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. He was a slender man in his late thirties, with sandy-colored hair and glasses, dressed that day in jeans and a windbreaker. At the station, he boarded the number two downtown express trains and sat down next to four young black men. There were about twenty people in the car, but most sat at the other end, avoiding the four teenagers, because they were, as eyewitnesses would say later, "horsing around" and "acting rowdy." Goetz seemed oblivious. "How are ya?" one of the four, Troy Canty, said to Goetz, as he walked in. Canty was lying almost prone on one of the subway benches. Canty and another of the teenagers, Barry Allen, walked up to Goetz and asked him for five dollars. A third youth, James Ramseur, gestured toward a suspicious-looking bulge in his pocket, as if he had a gun in there.
"What do you want?" Goetz asked.
"Give me five dollars," Canty repeated.
Goetz looked up and, as he would say later, saw that Canty's "eyes were shiny, and he was enjoying himself… He had a big smile on his face," and somehow that smile and those eyes set him off. Goetz reached into his pocket and pulled out a chrome-plated five-shot Smith and Wesson .38, firing at each of the four youths in turn. As the fourth member of the group, Darrell Cabey, lay screaming on the ground, Goetz walked over to him and said, "You seem all right. Here's another," before firing a fifth bullet into Cabey's spinal cord and paralyzing him for life.
In the tumult, someone pulled the emergency brake. The other passengers ran into the next car, except for two women who remained riveted in panic. "Are you all right?" Goetz asked the first, politely. Yes, she said. The second woman was lying on the floor. She wanted Goetz to think she was dead. "Are you all right?" Goetz asked her, twice. She nodded yes. The conductor, now on the scene, asked Goetz if he was a police officer.
"No," said Goetz. "I don't know why I did it." Pause. "They tried to rip me off."
The conductor asked Goetz for his gun. Goetz declined. He walked through the doorway at the front of the car, unhooked the safety chain, and jumped down onto the tracks, disappearing into the dark of the tunnel.
In the days that followed, the shooting on the IRT caused a national sensation. The four youths all turned out to have criminal records. Cabey had been arrested previously for armed robbery, Canty for theft. Three of them had screwdrivers in their pockets. They seemed the embodiment of the kind of young thug feared by nearly all urban-dwellers, and the mysterious gunman who shot them down seemed like an avenging angel. The tabloids dubbed Goetz the "Subway Vigilante" and the "Death Wish Shooter." On radio call-in shows and in the streets, he was treated as a hero, a man who had fulfilled the secret fantasy of every New Yorker who had ever been mugged or intimidated or assaulted on the subway. On New Year's Eve, a week after the shooting, Goetz turned himself in to a police station in New Hampshire. Upon his extradition to New York City, the New York Post ran two pictures on its front page: one of Goetz, handcuffed and head bowed, being led into custody, and one of Troy Canty — black, defiant, eyes hooded, arms folded — being released from the hospital. The headline read, "Led Away in Cuffs While Wounded Mugger Walks to Freedom." When the case came to trial, Goetz was easily acquitted on charges of assault and attempted murder. Outside Goetz's apartment building, on the evening of the verdict, there was a raucous, impromptu street party.