A sandwich is a food typically consisting of vegetables, sliced cheese or meat, placed on or between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein two or more pieces of bread serve as a container or wrapper for another food type.
A very wise man once gave me a very delicious analogy between Television and the Ham sandwich. “In 1970”, he said, “the most popular sandwich was ham on white bread with mayonnaise.” He paused. “In 1980 the most popular sandwich was ham and cheese on Rye bread.” Another pause. “In 1990 the most popular sandwich was ham, lettuce, tomato and mustard on a roll. Today, the most popular sandwich is ham and gouda on ciabatta. What is the common denominator?” I’ll give you a hint; it’s not various types of bread.
“TV is like the ham in the sandwich”, this very wise man stated with unequivocal authority.
Despite the variety of ways we’ve conjured up to distract ourselves, TV remains the most popular Medium and its popularity makes it a fame machine for Brands. Why else would Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google collectively be the 3rd largest Television advertiser ($1.9 billion) behind P+G and General Motors if they could simply cross promote on their own platform? Why, in any given minute, would 76 percent of adults be engaged with TV versus 7 percent for Facebook? TV is an important part of our culture and communities and is practically the only thing that connects the increasingly lonely and disconnected society.
Without the benefit of “technical rationality” (like case law in the legal profession), self-belief has always acted as the foundation to our professional authority. And boy did we self-believe a lot of hooey! After an exasperating decade of hyperventilating about the coming Apocalypse for TV, here we are still savoring our favorite medium.
The State of Advertising report, released in mid-June by the World Federation of Advertisers, shows the vast majority of those interviewed disagree with the idea that 5 years from now traditional formats like TV advertising will be a thing of the past. No surprise, but someone should tell that to Bill Gates, the smartest person to ever swallow the ‘Death of Television’ mantra hook, line and sinker. Back in 2006, he said this about the then current state of TV: “I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that in 5 years we will laugh at what we had”. 2011 came and went. No one laughed.
It’s fair to say that the basic rationale behind the “ham sandwich” analogy is that some things are just fine the way they are. Said another way, right out of the gate they were in a state of near perfection and any room for improvement had little to do with their core proficiencies. I’ll take the ham sandwich analogy one step further. In 2004, Malcom Gladwell wrote of the Ketchup Conundrum, where he found it curious that mustard came in dozens of varieties but ketchup has always stayed the same. Of the 5 known fundamental tastes in the human palate, ketchup hits 4 of them; salty, sweet, sour and umami (umami is that full-bodied taste often referred to as “adding body”) in a near perfect ratio. “What was true about a yellow condiment that went on hot dogs was not true about a tomato condiment that went on hamburgers.” Ketchup is ketchup. It’s perfect the way it is. With its perfect ratio of sight, sound, motion and emotion, so is TV. “Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having”, Gladwell’s article concluded.
Just like Television ….and the Ham Sandwich.
