Here’s a joke: Elizabeth Holmes walks into a bar wearing the dress and a pair of Crocs!
Remember The Dress? Half of us saw blue and black, the other half saw white and gold, and both halves were convinced the other half needed their eyes checked. Then the same thing happened with socks in Crocs.
One of my favorite podcasts, David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, just revisited the whole thing, and the explanation is kind of beautiful. The photo doesn’t give your brain enough information about the light, so your brain quietly fills in the blanks with the light it’s used to living in. Daylight people correct one way, lamp people correct the other. The best part: nobody feels like they’re guessing.
lol, everybody is guessing.
Now the brilliant Nathan Fielder kind of pulled the same trick on us: he spent three years with Elizabeth Holmes and came back with a three-hour documentary, You Can See Everything.
Like many of you, I ran to the theater. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it for the last three days.
Everyone gets the same footage, the same uncomfortable close-ups, the same “Why would I deceive you?” and somehow walks out with a completely different woman. Victim of a system that needed a villain, or the most committed performance since the Theranos demo? Mom or method actor?
That’s the dress all over again, right? Nobody is getting more information, everyone is getting just enough. And when your brain gets just enough about a human, it fills the gaps with your life. Your ex. Your old boss. That founder who held eye contact a little too long in a pitch meeting.
Yes, I’m bringing up interestingness again. At this point David Nottoli and Jeffre Jackson should probably put me on payroll... but their work keeps being the best lens I’ve got for this stuff.
Short version: things stick when people keep thinking about them after the fact. Three days and counting, so I’m Exhibit A. Run the doc through their ISMAD model and it checks every box.
Three hours of incongruity, significance, mixed emotions, authenticity, and detail.
Ambiguity is a later-thought machine. The dress went viral because it came with a gap, that wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.
Meanwhile, in agency land, we test the gap out of everything. Five rounds of research to make sure nobody could possibly misread the ad. Congrats, nobody did. The ad is so obvious that nobody remembers it either.
Maybe every brief needs one more line: what are we leaving out on purpose?
P.S. She’s wearing white and gold, with pink Crocs. Fight me.