The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

While the importance of the messenger—Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen—is vital to social epidemics, the actual content of the message is also important for achieving Tipping Points. Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues are two examples of sticky children’s television shows whose creators found “a simple way to package information” that made it “irresistible” (132).

The creators of Sesame Street discovered, “If you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them” (100). This contradicted received wisdom about the possibilities of education via TV. Crucially, children pay attention when the content makes sense, and they become distracted when the material is confusing. The stickiness of a program depends on how long a child’s eyes are actively and interestedly glued to the screen. Sesame Street’s legacy as an influential education children’s program is rooted in the realization that “if you paid careful attention to the structure of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness” (110). Substantial research about how young children digest television programs and when they become distracted informed these discoveries about sticky television, including psychologist Ed Palmer’s well-known Distractor technique that determined how often viewers actually paid attention to the screen by running a slideshow next to a television showing Sesame Street.

Blue’s Clues is even stickier than Sesame Street. While Sesame Street insisted on including some humor and cleverness designed to appeal to adults to keep parents interested, Blue’s Clues did away with wordplay, was more direct, and focused on “[teaching] kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think—in the form of the story” (121). Unlike Sesame Street’s “magazine”-style presentation in which segments lasted a maximum of about three minutes, Blue’s Clues followed the same narrative format each week: “Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog” (122), with lots of changing scenery and a resolution at the end when Steve returns to his Thinking Chair. The show preserved the stickiest parts of Sesame Street and expanded them up under the philosophy that “kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and given the opportunity they’ll be behaviorally active” (123). The show’s creators regularly tested episodes with groups of children to determine what worked and what didn’t, including the order of the segments or puzzles. Sometimes, a change in the order determined the stickiness of the episode. In this case, the secret of tipping was “tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of [...] ideas” (131) instead of making major changes.