Hide the Mechanic!
When you show vs when you tell
In my last post, I suggested three product primitives for building consumer-tech products that “sell themselves”, i.e. the product experience is its own form of product marketing.
an Aesthetic: the visual experience that instantly communicates what this is and who this is for
a Mechanic: the novel interaction pattern that creates a “wow” moment
a Promise: the simple, focused value proposition that's easy to explain
And I tied this back to the original iPod, which is a canonical example:
You didn’t need to be beaten over the head by an advertisement. Just through the experience of using an iPod, consumers instantly “got it.”
The white earbuds and cords were the aesthetic, the part of the product experience where users themselves signaled who was using this and why
The click wheel scrolling was the mechanic, a novel UX that unlocked the ability to actually navigate a massive library now possible through small hard drives
The ability to listen to any of your songs anywhere was the promise, the enduring and habitual value prop that kept people using their iPods once the novelty of the prior two elements had worn off
That said… you can’t do a live demo for everyone in the world. Contrary to the adage, sometimes you actually do need to “tell, don’t show”. This is what advertising is meant to solve — conveying a simple concept that can be delivered in a clear and compelling manner.
Advertisements need to convey a lot of information in a very short amount of time to indifferent consumers. So it follows that an advertisement can really only focus on either the aesthetic (aka the vibe) or on the promise (aka the tagline.) Conversely, the mechanic itself, no matter how cool it is, is probably best relegated to something experienced live.
So which element should the advertisement focus on? Interestingly, this was a challenge even for a company as great at advertising as Apple.
Vibes and taglines
The original introduction of the iPod, delivered by Steve Jobs to an audience of insiders during a town-hall, led heavily with the promise — “a thousand songs in your pocket.”
The biggest thing about iPod is that it holds a thousand songs. Now, this is a quantum leap, because for most people it’s your entire music library.
How many times have you gone on the road, and said “Oh God, I didn’t bring the CD I want to listen to.” But the coolest thing about iPod, is that your entire music library fits in your pocket.
He goes on to discuss the technological breakthroughs needed to deliver on this promise, compare it to the size of a deck of cards, and then finally pulls it out of his own pocket to show it live.
Yet the most memorable advertisements for the iPod, the “Silhouettes” campaign, focused entirely on the aesthetics. From the excellent and well-researched 2011 article by Pop History Dig:
Sometime in 2003, the TBWA/Chiat/Day team of Lee Clow, James Vincent, a former DJ and musician, and art director Susan Alinsangan, came to a meeting at Apple with Steve Jobs to set the iPod advertising campaign. They had worked up a sampling of poster art, photographs, and outdoor billboard proposals that they spread out before Jobs on the conference room table.
These samples offered a range of imagery, some of traditional photographic images on white background and others with silhouetted figures that emphasized the white iPods and their white wires…
Jobs shook his head, not certain the silhouettes would work, according to Walter Isaacson’s account of the meeting in his book, Steve Jobs. “It doesn’t show the product,” said Jobs, perhaps thinking that more computer-type imagery was needed. “It doesn’t say what it is.”
At that point, James Vincent told Jobs the silhouette images could include a tagline such as, “1,000 Songs in Your Pocket.” That apparently satisfied Jobs and he gave the go-ahead for the silhouettes. And as Isaacson points out, even though Jobs at first had his doubts.
Despite that concession, the campaign itself focused almost entirely on the vibes, with billboards and videos featuring exaggerated stark white cords swaying from silhouetted dancers played over Apple-esque music picks.
And in this case, the campaign produced some of the most iconic ads of the 2000s.
Leaning into the aesthetic’s specific POV, of course, comes with a tradeoff. By conveying who this product is for, it carries the risk of unintentionally conveying who it’s not for. Whereas “a thousand songs in your pocket” is a pretty universal message, even if it lacks the same visceral urgency.
That said, I think this was a rare case. Apple had to decide between selling their product via a great aesthetic or a great promise — a pretty amazing problem to have! There aren’t too many examples of products where both of these resonated so well.
And more broadly, a focused aesthetic seems to work better for vibes-based messaging (e.g. billboards and videos), while a promise works better for personal storytelling-based messaging (e.g. influencer spots and podcast host reads.)
Hiding the Mechanic
So what of the mechanic? I often fall in love with the product mechanic, especially if it’s a particularly elegant solve or something delightful to use.
But even I have to admit, the mechanic usually doesn’t make for a great advertisement. Great mechanics are often both kind of spacey-conceptual and require hands-on experiences, which make them pretty poor messengers.
In the “Silhouette” print ads, for instance, the click wheel is incredibly forced and doesn’t even really demonstrate its power. Ironically, showing off the click wheel required the models to hold the iPod in an awkward way, rather than — you know, putting the iPod in your pocket where the tagline literally tells you to put it.
So the click wheel, the iPod’s most immediate “wow” feature — ends up hidden in plain sight.
I think this is true for a lot of novel mechanics. A great mechanic often works best when you experience it yourself, explicitly or implicitly.
Snapchat created the mechanic of sending disappearing photos + hold-to-view gesture to view them. But this only made sense when you’re in a situation where there’s a value to the photo capturing an ephemeral moment, rather than the traditional role of photos to permanently capture a memory.
Spotify’s Discover Weekly introduced a mechanic where Spotify proactively delivered a personalized mixtape to you every Monday morning. But in a screenshot it looked identical to any other playlist that updated weekly — you had to actually experience the accuracy of your recs to really “get” that was made for you.
AirBnB’s popularized a mechanic of star ratings for both hosts and guests, presumably borrowed from star ratings assigned by trusted travel guides. However, in this context you needed to wrap your head around the fact that AirBnB ratings were especially relevant to you because they reflected the collective trust of people just like you.
So while I think you can go either way advertising the aesthetic or the promise, I also think it’s super important for product teams to not get carried away selling the mechanic itself.
Instead, it's better to let the mechanic "hide in plain sight", letting users discover it for themselves.
I’d go so far as to say this suggests an optimal first-order strategy: bring in a first cohort of users through paid advertising that relies on either the aesthetic or the promise → deliver a great first-run experience and sustained usage through the mechanic and promise → let that usage generate organic word-of-mouth around the mechanic and promise → draw in the next cohort of users.
Next up — The iPod case is an example of everything working well together. What does it look like when things don’t?