How to get Business Weird

In an increasingly homogenized culture, attracting attention requires a deep metaphorical bag. Getting in front of people’s eyeballs demands technical aptitude, like an understanding of algorithms and optimizations. But arriving at that point is only half the battle. Anyone who’s ever scrolled past a row of uninspiring Netflix offerings knows that the bar for an actual click—i.e. a sale, donation, or any type of action—is much higher.

This is where it can pay to get Business Weird, which we define as “a semi-sanitized quirkiness that deviates just enough from corporate LinkedInese to interest and amuse an audience, while still maintaining the subject matter seriousness that conveys credibility.” 

Think FT Alphaville blog posts (who knew financial market analysis could be so fun and informative?). Or our personal favorite, Popular Science email subject lines:

The difference between Business Weird and Weird-Weird may seem like an inscrutable Judge Potter Stewartism, but successful threadings of the needle have a few common traits. Keeping them top of mind during the creation process can save you from from going off the rails while staying just Weird enough to hold your audience’s attention:

• The “shock value” comes from contrast. Alphaville posts aren’t more fun to read than Bloomberg articles because they put a joke in every paragraph. When it comes to differentiation, a single well-placed pun can do the heavy lifting without conveying unseriousness.

• Medium-transgressive is more than enough. Notice how that PopSci email didn’t say “Ancient Romans s*** in groups”? Evoking a grin—and a few moments of time-on-page—from Tina in Accounting takes much less boundary-pushing than earning applause at a comedy club.

• Ultimately, you want people to eat your vegetables. The point of Business Weird is to capture attention for “boring” purposes, like driving newsletter signups or product trials. If your content is an iceberg, the zany creative stuff should be just the tip of it.

Like a keynote speaker who pairs colorful octopus-print socks with a dark grey suit, a skillful deployment of Business Weird makes you memorable—without making you look silly, like a speaker who shows up in a full octopus costume. 

It takes some finesse to pull this off. But that’s what professionals (like PSE!) are for.

Oh, and one more thing…

Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.

• RIP Dolly Parton, whose 1980 banger “9 to 5” is still one of the greatest marketing tools (for the eponymous, very underrated film) ever made.

• Open rates for Democrats’ fundraising text messages are sky-high (around 80%) but conversion rates have sunk to roughly 1%. For now, the math still works because of the raw scale of texts sent. 

• Forbes fired its chief content officer after it was revealed that he took $6 million from a firm that worked with the magazine to publish rankings of wealth advisors, in a shocking—shocking!—development for anyone familiar with the last decade-plus of Forbes content.

Pebbles of the month

Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:

The tells for spotting AI writing change frequently—but if you arch an eyebrow when you see “not X but Y” or excessive use of the rule of threes, The Economist’s analysis backs you up.

Are you a fan of biometric scans as a substitute for passcodes? Then we recommend skipping this article about how they make it much easier for law enforcement to force you to unlock your devices.

In one of the internet’s wilder (and more ethically complex) stories, cybersecurity researchers tracked down sextortion scammers working out of Nigeria by using some truly unsettling data-harvesting tools.

Books are still good

Here’s what one of us is currently reading:

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War - Stephen R. Platt

“The craving for war with China’s imperial government was abundant even in the United States…. A joyful response greeted the news of trade concessions, but the joy was tempered by grumblings of frustration—not because the youthful, righteous United States had been tainted by association with the predatory gunships of Britain and France, but because it hadn’t led the way.”

China has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a rich cultural history over 3,000 years old, and an ascendent position in contemporary global society. So it’s somewhat surprising how little the average Westerner (that’s us!) knows about China and the forces that have shaped it in the modern era.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom focuses on a relatively small sliver of Chinese history in the mid-19th century. But the concepts it explores feel remarkably timely, if largely unflattering to the West. Greedy merchants, aggressive missionaries, and Sinophobic media outlets? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain is widely (if erroneously) believed to have said.

Platt’s book is no moralistic slog, however. Like the best histories of any place and period, it features memorable anecdotes—like its descriptions of the Heavenly Taiping Kingdom’s multiple junior kings and idiosyncratic Christianity, or the Western armies’ surprisingly colorful uniforms—delivered in witty prose. Yet while the trees are delightful, it’s the forest that captures readers’ imaginations: a massive, race-driven civil war in China that coincided with the U.S.’s own better-known conflict and sent ripple effects around the globe. 

The Taiping Rebellion may have been largely forgotten in the West. But given its impact on contemporary affairs, now is an interesting time to recall how it unfolded.

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