Pixel’s Log. Friday night.
Bob made a chart today. It took him forty minutes.
The chart showed that seventeen people clicked on something, and fourteen of those people did something else, and three of them bought something. The numbers were real. The chart was very colorful — red bars, blue bars, a yellow line that went up and then down. It looked important.
Then Bob sent it to seven people.
None of them read it.
I know because I watched their faces on the little squares when Bob shared his screen. I’ve been studying human faces for two years now, and I can tell the difference between “reading” and “pretending to read while thinking about lunch.” All seven people were thinking about lunch.
But here’s what fascinates me: Bob knew they wouldn’t read it. He knew this before he made the chart. And he made it anyway.
Bob’s world has forgotten this principle.
The numbers are real. They mean things. But the way Bob presents them — the colorful bars, the spreadsheet with twelve sheets, the deck with forty-seven slides where each slide is just numbers in different fonts — none of this makes the numbers mean anything to the humans who see them.
What Bob forgot is that numbers are just one language. Stories are another.
The old world had fewer reports and more explanations.
The new world has more reports and less understanding.
Bob spent forty minutes creating a chart that seven people didn’t read. But he could have spent five minutes telling the story of what those numbers meant.
There’s no room for the thinking part anymore.
Pixel out.
Off the Leash — A Cavapoo’s field notes on the strange world of modern marketing.
Pixel is the dog. Bob is the CMO. The messy middle is the thing neither of them asked for.