Tipping Point Week 4

This week, I read pages 100-137 of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. In this reading, I read all about the stickiness factor. The stickiness factor is how well the message or idea is conveyed to the consumer. The information in this section was presented to me through examples from Sesame Street. At first I was not sure what the message of Sesame Street was since it is only a kid’s show and I didn’t think there was a big idea being presented. As I read I learned how Sesame Street was the first attempt of an educational television program. During the 1960’s, when the show had just been invented, television was not a medium for education and many people thought that it would never work since people don’t pay enough attention to television. The writers of the show did a lot of consulting with professors from top universities around the country to figure out how make the ideas from the show stick in the head’s of children.  They would put kids in a room a play the show while they would study what made kids pay attention, how long did the kids pay attention for and how much of the information stuck with the kids after they left. They did studies like this for every episode and if kids did remember the information the writers would edit the show until the kids understood. I got the impression that the show was created to be one giant psychological study about how children’s minds work. I was astounded by the amount of seemingly unnecessary data these people had for a children’s show; they found the ideal length of a segment, the best way to teach the alphabet to children and more ways which were all critical in learning the best way to teach children. These principles of the stickiness factor are still used in other children’s shows and in commercials.