It's All About The Eyeballs: How Engagement Drives Discourse
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Engagement has always been the currency for creating anything, be it content, product, service, news, etc. Without eyeballs, there is no profit. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how this concept has become detrimental to how we frame our news, drive discourse, and make money. Everyone wants to see the car wreck. But are these large companies and media outlets stepping over the line? Keep your ears glued as Bill and Tom tackle the Facebook whistleblower, Newsmax, and how businesses value engagement and profit over purchasing truth.
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It's All About The Eyeballs: How Engagement Drives Discourse
Bill, I'm excited to talk about the subject. We have quite a few good examples to discuss regarding how it's all about the eyeballs and marketing messaging in terms of what we're seeing a lot in our media and in our social media discourse.
Tom, to make this as exciting as possible because most people in business know that in marketing, you've got to get eyeballs to look at your product or service. In sales, you've got to get them to engage or consume the product in order for it to work. The function of business is how do I get somebody to buy my product or service? If it's not enticing enough, there's another product or service that says, “Me next.” You and I have both been to carnivals. We've walked down past booth over the booth of, “Shall I get this stuffed animal? How about this stuffed animal?” The question is that do I need another stuffed animal?
No, there is something about that stuffed animal. Your brain is trying to pick the right stuffed animal. Is it by the cups? Is it by the shooting gallery? Is it by the basketball throw? Is it by the beanbag toss? We're trying to engage our experience of life. A big part of the experience of life has to do with how our emotions are moved by things. A big part of my practice in business and helping people communicate better is how can you get a message so that people listen to you? If you're going to make it exciting then you've got to figure out a way to do that or otherwise, you won't get eyeballs. That's a big part of our discussion is how do you get the eyeballs?
When does a company step over the line? When does an organization or individuals step over that line and go like, “You're getting eyeballs but it's at the expense of a value and a long-term business strategy.” It’s a good talk. I'm looking forward to mixing it up a little bit here because Facebook is having some problems. Certain media outlets are having some problems with stepping over the line and then stepping back. It's like, “We didn't mean to shut down that department.” We definitely have some problems.
I think that Facebook is a real prime example now of this. It's certainly in the headlines because of the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who's been on 60 Minutes and other things. It's quite shocking to learn that, according to her and all these documents that she's released, Facebook was putting their profits ahead of the safety of having safe conversations ahead of the disinformation that people are trying to propagate. They said, “The eyeballs of all this information leading up after the election, certainly, are more important to their bottom line, their profits than making sure that we're policing this disinformation.”
It's unsettling. There's a choice. You and I have talked about this that businesses make choices. It's sometimes better for the business to pay the fine rather than to clean up the toxic spill. It's better. It doesn't cost as much. It's less expensive for them to fix the pipe ahead of time and to pay the fine when the pipe breaks. You figure that there would be that integrity, ethics and things. Tom, you and I have let remodeling projects go and it comes around to bite us because the pipe breaks.
You and I have let things go regarding the car and then the car breaks down. It costs twice as much. The worst one though is we've made choices regarding our health choices and ignored certain health situations and that has come back to cost more or be more painful and those kinds of things. As animals, we forget that we have a brain that is picking and choosing things that are not in our best interest.
They aren't for the long run. That is going to be a big challenge over the next 30 years. I think the next 30 years are going to be tough for us as human beings because we've got to face things like plastic in the ocean and the number of pollutants that we throw around on the planet. How are we going to process these things?
We're seeing that on the California coast right now with another big oil spill due to a pipeline. Not that this is our subject but I have a theory as to why that pipeline broke. They haven’t figured it out yet but there are so many containerships sitting off the West Coast, the Port of Los Angeles waiting to be unloaded because of the whole shipping infrastructure problem. I think an anchor from one of those ships likely caught the pipeline and broke it but they haven't identified it yet.
Anyway, environmental problem, I couldn't help but throw that in there. What's challenging about Facebook is that more so than any other company, I think even more directly so than media outlets, although I think we can't let them off the hook. We're going to come around to talk about them in this episode too. For Facebook, the product that they are engaged in producing is the engagement of people. It is the eyeballs of people.
If they don't have eyeballs of people on their platform, they don't make any money. They have put fostering that engagement, good or bad, as what they need to do. When you allow misinformation and disinformation to be spread on your platform, it keeps more people's eyes engaged on the platform for longer and you make more money.
There has been an overreach when I am choosing to inflame because it is a part of my business revenue model. I'm choosing to do that. Because there is a certain group of people that want to buy this thing that I'm selling. There are people that are still smoking cigarettes even though it doesn't meet their need for health. There is the challenge here that it is up to the consumer, the buyer, to shut off the cashflow. The company is saying it is not our responsibility what these other human animals do. There isn't that level of accountability until it shows up on their doorstep.
Until you get called into Congress for a hearing or something.
It has been a challenge, which is interesting to see how Congress is going to do this one. The defiance piece makes me come in and be accountable, make me accountable for what I'm saying in front of the Senate for this. Instead of, “This speech, I'm giving is going to give me way more eyeballs if it's inflammatory. My voters are not going to hold me accountable because once I get in, I have name recognition, there's nothing to get me out of here. All I got to do is keep my numbers up to such an extent.
People that are on my team are forgiving.” It's like, “They're forgiving. I had this mistake. I’m forgiving because it's my party. I'm still going to vote in that direction even though this person did this and this is.” It’s like, “You polluted this. You broke these ethics. You didn't do this.” It's problematic and troublesome to watch what the brain does to, “I am loyal to my team.” It was very hard.
We're seeing that play out in our Congress and politics right now but let's not get too distracted with that at the moment. It’s a different set of eyeballs. Maybe we'll tend to come back around to that. I even wondered, as a business owner, is it legal for her to take tens of thousands of documents from Facebook? Apparently, as a legal matter because Facebook is a public company and the SEC is the regulating body there. It’s absolutely legal because, as a public company, Facebook is supposed to disclose things voluntarily. If the whistleblower reveals they didn't properly disclose things for the good of their investors and public awareness then it's definitely going to be more of a problem for Facebook than it is for Frances Haugen. I'll tell you that. It's become clear.
It's very interesting that they had this civics integrity committee or project internally that she was a part of. She was hired in 2019. I guess in the interest of not impacting a free and fair election, they did more at Facebook to try to reduce the amount of disinformation on their platform leading up to the election. Once election day came in 2020, they flipped the switch. All of a sudden, “We're going to allow disinformation again. The election is over. No harm, no foul.” We saw the consequences of that in terms of getting so many people riled up to the point that they executed an insurrection on our capital, government and process of the peaceful transfer of power.
It’s the power of media and messaging. If you're getting more money by getting people to look at you, it's very similar to you and me driving down the freeway. There's a car wreck with ambulances up ahead. Everyone is slowing down to look at the car wreck. This style of, “We need to create another car wreck now in order to get the eyeballs, to get everybody to look down our way, to look at the latest car wreck that we made.”
It's who is going to make the next car wreck. It's not about driving safely on the freeway anymore of media or the stream of media. There are no guardrails and it's a mountain road. It's a great example, Tom, of taking the guardrails off. We're going to open the stream of cars and the cars are coming up this hill and they're driving. They're going to like, “What did somebody say?” Everybody's trying to drive out this thing.
It's like, “The bus is going to go off the road here if we keep trying to, ‘Yeah, let's all go here.’” The problem with the insurrection is that it's one thing to speak up about an injustice but it's also to being inflamed with the limbic part of the brain running towards that experience of going, “I got to see what this car wreck is. I'm going to support what I believe is true and that's why I'm showing up here.” That's the thing that's hard. Once the media or identity find something that works then they're going to keep doing it until we're tired of looking at the car wreck.
People can't help but look at the car wreck. That's why the car wreck is on the other side of the freeway. It's not even on your side. There's nothing impeding the flow of traffic on your side. I'm from New England. We used to call that rubbernecking because you stretch your neck to look over at the other side. When I lived in the Midwest, they called it gawkers. I don't know what it is in California. I don't even think because I don't commute out here.
People can't help but look at it. I think Facebook knows this. In fact, they know that if you see something that's not in alignment with your beliefs and it's going to get you riled up and push your buttons. By the same token, you see something that is in alignment with your beliefs and it seems outrageous about what the other side is doing. You're going to stay more engaged and, “By the way, here's an ad for something. Wouldn't you like to buy it?”
The more ads people see, the more likely they are to buy something or even if they don't buy something, here's the thing, Facebook makes money because of these ads, they get paid when they put the ad in front of your eyeballs whether you buy something or not. They're a $1 trillion company. I didn't realize that until all this news about the whistleblower came out to a $1 trillion company. That shows you that it's not about power in terms of Facebook. It's about dollars and cents. It's about profits and they're hooked on the drug of making that money. Without government regulation, this is probably not going to stop.
It’s very challenging to get people to look away from that car wreck. My eyeball is attracted to this. This is what I want to see. This is what I'm clicking. The reason why I'm clicking this is because I feel better by doing the click and having an engagement. This engagement with me, this platform and will Facebook take a hit? How much off of a trillion does taking a hit mean? Does it mean losing $1 billion? Is that enough? The answer is no.
I don't think it does. Coincidentally, the day after the 60 Minutes interview aired with the whistleblower, Facebook had an outage across their entire network for about six hours. Their stock went down 5% to 7% during that time, which is because of the outage. Here's some scary honesty. Their stock went down because of the outage, not because of the news of the whistleblower. I saw a funny meme.
It had a meme of Mark Zuckerberg basically saying, “You try to drag us into Congress and give this whistleblower news again. Do you see what I'm going to do? I'm going to put everybody in Facebook timeout.” It’s saying that they shut it down as a consequence, which I don't believe is true. I think that's just a funny meme. Let's pivot on the eyeballs. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of social media, for sure but there's plenty of other news outlets where they're in the business of getting eyeballs as well.
That's a big part of it. The mechanism inside the brain is how do you get the brain to purchase something and get things to engage. There are three distinct steps in that messaging. For those of you who are on the business or the political side of this, it's like, “How do you get a reward to show up?” Even the car wreck has a reward to it. It has to do with, “My need for safety is being met. That person's need for safety is not being met. My need for health is being met. That person's need for health is not being met. My need for financial security is being met. That person's need for financial security is not being met.”
This is the essential element of a drama. If I'm on TV, I want to make sure a drama takes place. It's the difference between how much money does a documentary makes versus how much money does Mission Impossible makes or James Bond. It has to do with the number of body counts. How many people have died? What is the trick? What is the interest? I have more tension in a drama. How do they do all those things in 90 minutes? It’s magical. Jumping out of a plane and doing this in a 90-minute movie that seems like that they have an entire life in a 90-minute movie.
It’s like, “They're not doing all that stuff in 90 minutes. It takes a little while to jump out of the plane. It would take a day.” In the movie, it does. It’s like, “In 30 seconds, you’re doing this and you land. You're in the courtyard and you're at that romantic dinner.” There's a little bit of time transition that goes on here. With that, whatever the value is, it needs to be juiced with anticipation. What's going to happen next?
As soon as you're done the car wreck, driving by the car wreck, there is a physiological letdown, a relief that takes place. Not because you're not in the car wreck. It's like the excitement, the anticipation of, “I'm coming up to this.” It's very hard in media not to look away from whatever's being spoken on Newsmax or whatever's being spoken on some of these other programs. It doesn't even matter what program.
They're all hooking right before the commercial break. There is a hook sentence, “When we come back, we will and who knows what's going to happen on the other side?” They're trying to get the viewer to stay on the hook through anticipation to get to the other side. The worst one of these experiences was when Rachel Maddow brought out Donald Trump's first old taxes. That show was a train wreck because there was nothing there and all she could do was a hook. It’s troublesome. “When you back come back, we'll see this,” and there was nothing there on the other side.
When she got into trying to have to explain what about these taxes was so concerning, it's like, “Forget it.” She lost it. The viewership went down. It didn't pay off. There's a good example that we've seen reasonably on Newsmax that we have observed. I want to share with our audience. Newsmax was trying to shine a light on a car wreck, which then didn't work out the way they wanted to. They turned it into a 100-car pileup that they manufactured. It got not only a lot of eyeballs on their own network but every other media outlet talking about this at the same time. It's a good example of getting those eyeballs. Do you remember what it was?
It was the one with the veteran.
It was an interview with a US-Afghanistan war veteran. It was during the whole Afghanistan withdrawal that was going on, which is the car wreck to start. The Afghanistan withdrawal was very controversial. The Newsmax host is interviewing this veteran and trying to get the veteran to agree with the host. He's trying to get them to agree with him that the Joe Biden administration cut it on a whole lot better here. That's putting it nicely. They basically are trying to make it look like the Joe Biden administration is at fault for this thing going so poorly and being a train wreck.
The Iraq war veteran was interested in speaking the truth and not propagating a predetermined narrative. While he agreed that the Joe Biden administration could have done some things differently, he also said, “Any of us veterans who have been there knowing what's been going on and how this has been handled.” What he did is he started to very respectfully criticize Donald Trump as well. Not trying to let the anchor of the program put all the blame on the Joe Biden administrators and say, “The Donald Trump administration deserves a share of this too.”
The Newsmax host took serious offense to that and blew this up again, which I'm equating with the 100-car pileup. He went off and got angry, ranted and yelled at his producer to cut off the guest. “You're not going to criticize Donald Trump on my program. You're not going to impugn Donald Trump.” The reaction was out of proportion with the respectful discussion or comment and criticism that this Afghanistan war veteran was providing.
That's a part of it. There's got to be somebody that is the EMT at the car wreck. There's got to be somebody that’s the fireman there to give CPR. There's got to be a breath that takes place where there's some healing that goes on, at least, for the veterans that are watching too. You cut off the veteran. You go like, “Here we go again. This person is even cutting us off. We thought this person was a person.” All of a sudden, they're going like, “Why are they cutting my fellow veteran off? He was just saying X, Y, Z.”
They're listening and going like, “I don't like how he's not respecting his guest. He is not pursuing truth.” Like Facebook, large media outlets are not tethered by truth anymore. The consequence is so small. It's like a blip on things. It's very hard. As a nation now, we're okay with 700,000 deaths of fellow Americans unless it's an attack on a building with a plane that only kills 370,000. Now, I'm doing a numbers game with 9/11. Both things are bad but the proportion of the outrage is problematic. We're not in a state of thinking unity. How do you unify against the virus?
This is a great example. Don't you think the Twin Towers falling is the biggest car wreck event that people could see that shocked, galvanized and got them all on the same side of this issue? “Who's attacking us? We need to get to the bottom of this.” When you hear the number in the abstract, 700,000 people have died over the course of a year and a half or more now, you don't see it the same way even though it's all over every news program. Stories about hospitals being filled and stories of people that have died. It should be a car wreck. It should be the 100-car pileup times 1,000.
Now we've got a real problem. If you think about it, the way you framed it, Tom, is that imagine you and me going down the freeway and every mile we see another car wreck. Who wants to look at that? It's like every mile, we're going to see another car wreck. I don't want to see a car wreck every mile. Eventually, there is a certain form of numbness that takes place. If the number of people that have died and it takes 1,000 people a day.
One time, it was consistent around 1,000 people a day. Now the US is around 700 people a day. Every four days, there's another 9/11 death, do you think that we would unify behind that? Unify but it's something you can't see. It's not a visual that the media can play over and over again. There's not a concerted effort regrettably. There's not a conservative effort of, “Here's the way a virus works. Here's how to stop a virus. Here's what a virus does next. Here's what a virus does. We got to do this. We got to collaborate and cooperate.” There's not a collaborative cooperative narrative.
There is an outrage narrative on both sides. The outrage narrative is going like, “Look at that car wreck. Those other people are creating that car wreck. No, there's no car wreck. Don't look at the car wreck. There's no car wreck over there. That car wreck is made up. There's nothing we can do to stop that car wreck. Wait a minute, there's a car wreck over here and you're responsible you anti-vaxxer.”
Instead of going, like, “We're not looking at the car wreck. We're going to practice safe driving. Here's what we're doing. Here are the success stories, what we're doing and what happened. This is one city that has gotten in front of the virus. Here's an individual that got this. Here's what happened to this individual that got COVID and crystals in her lungs. They have scar tissue and this is what happened. She used to be an Olympic athlete and having a hard time breathing now.”
That is the story that would be healthier for us to put forward as a collaborative cooperative country rather than ranting on different styles of news coverage. It's hard to look away from the car wreck when the car wreck is what people are drawn to. If it bleeds, it leads. That's the thing that's the most important. We have a bit to go into being able to communicate passes and having a lot of empathy and compassion for awareness for what the strategy that they're using.
As well as going like, “Yeah, financial security is important for those companies. What are we going to pick as a people or a nation? How are we going to spend our money with this?” We have a bit to go because anger does sell. Rant becomes the story. It is easier to look at distractions and deceptions. Whatever the next lead is, it becomes the next car wreck that's going to be around the corner, turning at 5:00, turning at 8:00, turning at 7:00.
That’s true. For example, that Newsmax story they're an online outlet only. They're not broadcast on traditional television channels. That whole rant over this issue and cutting off the veteran became controversial in and of itself so much so that every other news outlet in existence pretty much had a story about the rant. I don't even remember the name of the veteran but I remember that it was a Newsmax anchor. You know how they say, “No press is bad press.” Newsmax knows that.
“It's only a fender bender.” “There's an ambulance.” “They have the person of the gurney. I got to see that.” “I watched the person. They're working on giving them life support. I got to see the life support thing.”
“There are flames. The car is on fire.”
“There's a fire over there. I better stay away from that.” Our human body is interested in life and life is about emotions. Our emotions are about how do we turn them up and turn them on. There would not be an entertainment business without capturing eyeballs and creating drama that's not real on TV. Halloween is about creating the moment of fear in an unreal place and way. Scaring people is a part of the emotional jolt up and hijacking the limbic brain is a part of that.
What we do is try to focus on reducing the emotion and creating the motivation that works in order to make a difference in the business and the political world to get a message that's going to stick and be more inspirational rather than detrimental to the greater cause of collaboration and having a thing called the United States versus the divided states. Some people want to do the divided states. That's not a strong narrative. Even if it's profitable, it's not a strong narrative.
That's the scary honesty is that the profit motives are not in alignment with a healthy discourse and a healthy nation.
Let's put gates and checkpoints at every freeway around the State of Texas. The mindset is not playing out the end game of the division. It's a short-term solution but it is not a long-term play.
We have a lot to work on in this country. Don’t we, Bill?
We do. Communication can get us there especially talking about things. Even though Tom, you and I have an opinion, talking about things openly like this allows us to bring points of view in and be able to keep an open narrative safe. Also, empathize with the people that do want to look at the car wreck because they are looking to validate things like identity, belonging and acceptance. They're looking to focusing on their point of view and it might not be yours but that's what they're focusing on. Tom, thanks for this. Thanks for reading. I look forward to connecting with you next time.
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