Roy Williams turned a lot of the crowd at last year's ESTO conference onto Broca's Area, a small region of the brain that anticipates the known and alerts the rest of the brain to the unknown, unexpected and non-linear. The bottom line for "the Wizard of Ads" is that surprise attracts.
Fast forward to Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars," in which he talks of Broca's area in regards the upcoming presidential elections. He suggests that Broca's area will block our reception of messages from Hillary Clinton because Broca's already knows her. Seth correctly predicted that new candidates would capture the lion's share of the public's attention.
While not specifically citing Broca's, Mark Harris and John Harris note in the fascinating "The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008," that Hillary and John McCain have already been ID'ed by the American voter...and that most of us have already made up our minds on both of them.
And now, the online numbers seem to bearing all this out. techPresident reports that Barack Obama's website garnered a 27% increase in unique visitors in the month of February while Hilary Clinton experienced a 34% drop in unique visitors.
So, if one is to believe Broca's, did Obama enter the race at precisely the right time to trick Broca's area into it's "support?" Or will it be out-of-nowhere Fred Thompson that replaces Obama's newness.
Or will it be old-fashioned, barnstorming Tommy Thompson? Or somebody that announces next year that tricks Broca's into saying "you da One?"
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