The Danger of Monoculture, Or How Potatoes Should Inform Your Marketing & Advertising Choices

Long Fry Me

In my social feed this weekend was a marvelous rant about, of all things, potatoes. Don't worry, it applies to marketing and advertising, and most specifically, email work. But first, we've got to get the background, or What I Learned.

It turns out that there has been hundreds of varieties of potatoes in our past. The Incas are said to have had thousands, many of which have not been seen before or since. What has happened in the centuries since is that the commercial market has driven down the number of potatoes that are viable economically, which means that we're down to, at most, 50 or 60 kinds of potatoes today.

At this point, your eyes may glaze over a bit and say, um, Dave? It's a potato. How different can they be, really? If no one insisted that we keep eating them, maybe they tasted terrible. And the answer is... well, I have no idea, and you have no idea, and if we applied the same logic to birds, the world would be a lot less fun for a whole lot of people, and maybe the skies would be thick with nothing but pigeons. Not exactly appealing.

But leave that as it lies. The single biggest potato on the planet, from an economic standpoint, is the Russet Burbank. And the reason why the RB is such an economic monster is because it makes long and perfect French fries, which is to say, it's more or less the official potato of McDonald's.

Once again, I'm going to be rude and anticipate your reaction: you have a problem with McDonald's french fries? Dear Lord in heaven, no. I don't eat them much any more, because I am of the age where denying myself pleasures is its own strange reward, and once you start to consume them, its pretty much impossible to stop. So I just don't put myself in their path. (This is more trouble than you might imagine, in that there is a McDonald's within a 3-minute walk of my home. Troubling. Luckily, as I write this, it's too late in the evening to cave. Moving on.)

The problem isn't with the commerce; it's with the potato itself. RBs are adored by more than just fast food lovers. They also bite the dust to every fungus, weevil, blight and microbe that you can imagine. In terms of sustainability, the RB is a fainting violet. If it were a heroine in an action movie, it would faint a half dozen times, and be abandoned by the hero for something with a little more meat on her bones. If it were a stock car at Daytona, it would lead after five laps, then explode. It's just not meant for massive cultivation.

Which means that, well, we have to force things. Massive micro-management, fertilization, et cetera. You pretty much need soil that grows nothing but RBs to grow RBs... which puts us right into a rather substantial point in human history, at least as it relates to people related to me. The Irish Potato Famine, which happened in the 19th century when there was also a monoculture that couldn't overcome a blight, and flooded America with so many Irish, it makes for all kinds of old-school anti-immigrant moments now. But let's walk it back from the political.

In email and digital marketing and advertising, testing to a monoculture is depressingly easy. You A/B test to the point of optimal efficiency, usually around a single metric if you want to set up maximum possible fail, or just make one number. Let's say it's open rates, or click, since that's easiest to monitor. Then the world changes -- ISPs stop delivering that kind of subject line, consumers stop responding to that call to action, dayparts fail and so on and so on -- and hey presto, you've got a monoculture that's failing, and all kinds of Crisis. With no data that says, um, let's try Next Best Potato and see if we can get 95% of what we had.

There's a better way, of course.

A rich biosphere, with an environment that looks at multiple metrics. A tolerance for "losing" art, so long as it provides a good learning point. Re-testing "optimal" practices to make sure the world hasn't changed dramatically without your notice. Understanding that some campaigns might be better served by multi-use, or video run times, or tracked acquisition, or synergy to other marketing channels and collateral. And so on.

It's a lot more complicated than just making one kind of potato, and maybe even a little less lucrative.

But only in the short run.

Oh, and there's also this...

We're marketing and advertising people, not farmers.

And we have a hell of a lot more fun, and learn a hell of a lot more in the doing, when we make more than one kind of product.

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