I ran across a comment on the blog that I wrote last week. It caught my interest.  

Ejdalise wrote:

Not to say you guys won’t get there, but . . . I don’t know; perhaps it’s where I live, but I don’t often meet people who would be considered your target audience. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I thought about it for a bit, and wondered, why would he make that type of comment?  It didn’t take that long to realize that what is happening at least in terms of Ejdalise, is that many people don’t really understand our goals and intentions for this program, and thus think that we are aiming to create a show that is aimed at our smallish, yet active skeptical community. This is just not so.  

In order for a TV series to be successful in a “real” way that’s judged in the scale that will even make a blip in the Nielsen ratings, one must create a program that is consumable on the national, dare I say, international, scale. Too bad really, because that means that we have to create a show that must be, hmm how to say this correctly well… just easily understood by the general TV viewing audience. 

If we went out and created a TV show “For the Skeptics by The Skeptics” We wouldn’t last a season, probably only two episodes.  Forget the major networks, it wouldn’t get off the ground. As big as the community is, we’re not nearly big enough…yet.

I find most TV pretty dull, and rarely educational.  I have my favorites, generally divided into two categories: Mainstream network sitcoms that I can watch while working away on my laptop without fear of missing an important plot point.. A handful of network weeknight prime-time shows. Then there’s a few shows that I truly anticipate and watch, Mythbusters is surely one of them, I love to learn how things are made, how processes work and I really enjoy learning about new science, though most science shows seem to be re-hashing of pretty out of date science “wow” bits.

This sounds like I’m bashing the very industry that employs me, I’m not.  We all understand that in order to be successful in business you need to provide your customer with goods or services that they want, and in this case, our product is televised entertainment, and our customer just happens to be the majority of the TV viewers.  Well, that’s the hope anyway.

The Skeptologists needs to be a show that non-skeptics can watch and really enjoy.  A show that teachers can comment on in their 5th grade class the next day to their students. That the assembly line worker can joke about to his buddy over the din of the machinery.   And.. I didn’t forget.. A show that skeptics can watch, be entertained and educated by.   That’s a tall order. I want to create more than a show, I want to create a culture, and carefully injected into that culture is hopefully a few small bits of a molecule that will grow within the public.  An idea that thinking things through with different ideas and opinions is good.  Questioning things that are taken for granted, and sometimes just stopping to wonder why.

We all used to do it so much as a young child?  Why this? Why that? At some point along our growth, we stopped asking why, and got concerned with how much? What’s in it for me?

I know what your thinking, “Oh no, the show is going to be boring and dumbed down.” Not so.  My aim is to assemble a program that’s got great, new, relevant science, fun and interesting tests and experiments to determine and come to conclusions right before our eyes.  The show is about a cast of characters who all come from different but amazing backgrounds and a way to watch as they all bring their own perspectives to bear on the subjects.

The show is about The Skeptologists and without giving away the format, it’s about how they interact to come up with solutions to problems and challenges.  It’s not about the things, it’s about the emotions, the wonder and the creativity that’s required to be a good thinker, scientist and skeptic.  It doesn’t matter if they are performing high level equations or simple arithmetic, that’s not the story.  The story is why we do things this way and why some people choose not to take the time to consider why, or how.  

The world is full of people taking advantage of other people in many different ways.  The Skeptologists have the power to show people how to think better, deduce, use logic and critical thinking.  Maybe we’ll start to find that people just need a common ground in which to discuss tricky topics.  It could be that they never gave it much thought, or perhaps, they didn’t dare bring it up for fear that their own doubts would be looked upon by others as negative. By creating The Skeptologists culture within our show, our viewers can talk about the show… but hey, look at that, what they are really talking about is how they’re suddenly skeptical about something. 

So who is our Target Market? I’ll be bold and greedy and say: Almost everyone. That’s a really tough demographic, but I intend to give a bit to everyone, and my amazing cast and crew will deliver the goods… I’m sure of it.

It’s all well and good for us to sit back and snicker at Kevin Trudeau for being a scumbag and selling snake oil, but it’s also true that he’s kicking our ass. Absolutely kicking our ass. He makes millions of dollars selling useless products, and the skeptical community makes virtually nothing offering only scientific fact. As a consequence, Kevin Trudeau has more marketing dollars and spreads his message much wider than we could ever hope to.

Please don’t misinterpret this as a defense of Kevin Trudeau or his ilk. As harmful as his products and his messages are, it’s useful to also understand how and why he is able to get such traction with them. Whatever else he might be, he is a brilliant marketer.

I look around The Amazing Meeting and I see a lot of ingenious scientists and critical thinkers, but I also think how valuable it would be to have a few people with Kevin Trudeau’s marketing savvy. Skepticism is certainly not about making money, it’s about helping people. But, like a hospital or a magazine, it has to make money to survive. You can’t spread your message if you have no budget with which to do it.

On the one hand, the message that critical thinking offers is the one “product” that’s actually truly valuable. Our message protects people from fraud. It encourages them toward evidence based medicine. It protects them from a host of irrational paranoias and xenophobias. We help people to make good life decisions based on reality.

But on the other hand, our message is also the opposite of what’s easy to sell. We don’t promise fast, easy answers. We don’t promise that you are in total control of what happens inside your body. We don’t promise overnight wealth. We don’t promise to double your mileage. Instead, we promise only that those goals are difficult to achieve and require hard work.

Does this conundrum doom the critical thinking community to obscurity and irrelevance? Or, can the core message of skepticism be wrapped in a package that our target audience, the general public, will want?

I believe that it can. Becoming a skeptic is not rocket science; people can be taught how to do it. They can reap real rewards by doing so, unlike Kevin Trudeau’s customers. Do we have a message that Oprah would want to promote? We might, if we can package it right. As skeptics, we often like to pat ourselves on the back for being the enlightened few in a world of darkness. That’s fine, but it’s not as helpful as shining that light outward. We just need more megawatts, and I believe the power is available. Let’s turn more of our attention toward generating that power, and finding a way to make skepticism commercially viable.