Your Ordinary Is Your Audience’s Extraordinary
The simple framework behind some of my favorite posts.
I love reality TV shows. And, in particular, I love reality TV shows about work. If Ice Road Truckers or Cake Boss or Million Dollar Listing is on, I am tuning in. They’ve got it all. Good drama (did you know there are serious rivalries between the trucks on Canada's ice highway?), layered character development, and explanations of niche skills (like how to properly place fondant on a cake). I can’t get enough of it.
I hadn’t thought much about how my love for these shows translated to social media until I was recording with CI to Eye, a podcast about marketing for the arts, and the host Dan Titmuss put words to a concept I was describing:
“Your brand’s ordinary is your audience’s extraordinary.”
It’s true. For the crab fishermen who star in Deadliest Catch, that’s just their job. To the viewers, they are some of the most captivating characters.
Lucky for most of us, your brand’s “ordinary” doesn’t need to involve 40-foot waves for it to still be extraordinary to your audience. How do I know this? Because I’ve been seeing it play out on social over the past few months and now I (finally!) have words to put to it.
Like when the Getty Museum explained how they earthquake-proofed the ceramics on display and got 17K likes.
Then there’s this video of an employee at Wild Rivers Waterpark Irvine showing how they walk the slides each morning to make sure they are safe. It has 400K views.
Or when The Natural History Museum posted a video of Exhibition Maintenance Manager, Trenton, vacuuming the 21,000-pound blue whale model.
The Ritz Paris has a video titled “The Art of Room Service”.
This video about what it’s like to be a guard at The Met is filled with comments like “Best job in the whole world ❤️” and “What an ambassador you are. Just delightful.”
LOEWE showed how a shirt from their SS25 menswear show came together.
Anyone else on pool cleaning TikTok?
This simple, funny moment captured by American Ballet Theatre might be ordinary to those who work there (someone even commented “I love the stage guy walking by like nothing new is happening 😂”) but has 1.2M views.
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I asked Dan to tell more more about why this type of content resonates, he said:
“A lot of the time, especially in the arts, we think about the end product. We want to show the fancy trailer or stunning poster because we are proud of the art that we produce. We don't think about how fascinating the actual work behind the end product is, because we are so close to it. I'm a big House of the Dragon fan, and every time I finish an episode I rush to the companion show, which shows all the behind-the-scenes footage of how they created the world and shot the episode...and it's almost more entertaining than the actual show.”
I think the companion show is a good example here. It’s a serialized way to show the “ordinary”. Which is why I love what the Utah Department of Transportation has done with their series “There’s a Reason For That” where they explain what they are working on. This episode is a video about potholes but it’s also about science, humor, and their state asphalt engineer Howard (“I felt the menacing energy in Howard’s tone” says one commenter). Another commenter summed it up best with: ”Love to see the people behind the scenes and screens who organize these construction projects. I feel like we’re all a team 🥲 same goal anyway”.
In this video from the Philadelphia Eagles, Julie, their social media manager, takes us along for a day in the life. The video has 303K likes and teases another “episode” with the caption “Should we check in with the rest of the social team next?”.
The beauty of this Sotheby’s post is in its simplicity. Perfectly-timed cuts. Building tension. Intriguing auctioneer. In fact, people went down a rabbit hole of watching content of this auctioneer after this video went viral—”Anyone else going down the Phyllis Kao rabbit hole?”. It didn’t start as a series, but turned into one with follow ups here and here.
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I haven’t been able to get “Your brand’s ordinary is your audience’s extraordinary” out of my head since I heard it and I hope it sticks for you too.
As Dan said, “When we are enthusiastic about the weird and wonderful everyday occurrences that have become so normal to us, it's infectious—people love a behind-the-scenes moment. It invites them into our world and makes them feel like an insider.”
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These are great finds. I think fundamentally this insight is why shows like The Bear are so beloved—you feel like you're getting inside the mundane day-to-day of an industry you didn't know that much about. Niche is in!
I do social for an internally-facing city government agency and our most engaged posts usually involve behind-the-scenes peeks with our frontline workers, like a tour of a fire engine mechanic's toolbox on TikTok or a day in the field at a police station with a painter on YouTube. It can be mundane to the people who do the work, but for city residents, it allows them to feel more connected to the folks who help keep their communities functioning. It's so cool to see this trend across other industries.