Attribute This!

Maybe you watched the Kennedy Center Honors event earlier this week.  If you did, you witnessed this performance of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" ... performed by Ann and Nancy Wilson.

You had a band, an orchestra, a choir, and Ann Wilson belting out vocals.  By most accounts, this was a spectacular performance, if you like music from this genre.

If you work in my industry, you'd be asked to parse this performance, attributing the reasons why it was successful.  Based on the elements that were successful, you'd be asked to invest more in the areas that yielded success, less in other areas.

1. What percentage of success do you attribute to Ann and Nancy Wilson?
2. What percentage of success do you attribute to the living members of Led Zeppelin being in attendance, being honored, enjoying a version of a song they created, what, 35 years ago?
3. What percentage of success do you attribute to the choir?
4. What percentage of success do you attribute to the orchestra?
5. What percentage of success do you attribute to the band?
6. What percentage of success do you attribute to the fact that the drummer passed away years ago, leaving his son to play drums in this performance?
7. What percentage of success do you attribute to Jimmy Page, at the 3:58 mark of the video, checking to see that the guitar solo is played properly?  Or to the soul playing the guitar at the 3:58 mark of the video?
8. What percentage of success do you attribute to the lighting?
9. What, specifically, caused Robert Plant to have tears in his eyes?

It's funny.  When it comes to content / product / merchandise, we'd never think of tearing the thing into bite (or byte) sized bits, would we?  The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  We fully accept that you don't separate the choir from the orchestra and assign value to each.

In marketing, we want to reverse engineer everything, parsing the parts so we can sum things up on a scorecard, regardless how accurate or inaccurate we are.

Just a little something to think about as we head into the New Year.