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“We’ve updated our terms”: How to make the mundane remarkable
Do you listen carefully to announcements at train stations?
Me neither. The familiar voices tend to blend into the usual hum of station noise — people chatting, train wheels screeching, escalators squeaking.
But London Underground had an idea: what if we used a child’s voice?
They recorded the daughter of a station employee who warned people to “take care on the escalator”. It worked. They reduced escalator injuries by a third at Victoria station.
So the novelty of something different rose above the familiar. For writers, designers and marketers that’s the ideal. So how do you create content that actually gets noticed?
Getting past the filter
We follow two simple steps when it comes to the messages we put out:
1) Imagine you’re on the receiving end of that message.
2) Ask: is it rubbish?
Or, if there are business types around: does it feel remarkable?
Merriam Webster defines remarkable as:
Worthy of being or likely to be noticed especially as being uncommon or extraordinary.
We’re interested in that first part. We’re not necessarily aiming for mind-blowing or unbelievable or jaw-dropping. Rather, we wonder whether we can make something that raises the corner of the mouth a little. Twitches an eyebrow. Maybe even prompts someone to share with a friend. We ask: is it worthy of being?
People tend to ignore the familiar — it drifts into the background. It’s the brain’s way of tidying up the barrage of information we’re constantly subjected to. In his book The Organised Mind, Daniel Levitin calls this the brain’s “attentional filter”.
“Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness.”
