If fate like any marketing campaign is a series of unexpected twists within a long story as unstoppable as a run-on sentence that could be stopped if only it had an editor, then you know that tossing two dice leads to 36 possible combinations of which only one will land on the table unless you buy in to the multiverse concept, the longer chain of our universe in which the world constantly divides into alternative, splitting realities (say, in this one you have a job but in the other one you're a rock star) which of course bends the mind until you realize multiple universes are based on real physics experiments by scientists who discovered that small (yes, very small) subatomic particles behave strangely when observed, as if moving so fast they can't be pinpointed in any single spot in space but instead randomly exist in two places at once until you view them and they settle down, like necking teenagers freezing under a cop's spotlight, an idea best illustrated by putting a cat inside a steel box, as Erwin Schrödinger suggested in a horribly famous thought experiment, and also adding a vial of poison tied to a hammer to be whacked by a Geiger counter which in turn is connected to a single atom that might or might not decay radioactively in a given hour and then have the fate of the poor cat (do NOT try this at home) hinge on whether and if the atom does decay, tied to the whims of the elementary particles which as we said earlier in this sentence exist in two places at once, then the cat is both alive and dead in the box at the same time because its fate depends on the unrealities of the subatomic particles, until you open the door and observe it, in which event fluffy little Whiskers either meows happily or is looking a little gruesome soaked in hydrocyanic acid, as distasteful as tech geeks hitting up Cougars at a bar, because your act of observation has cast you into one fixed future, now the present (although in another reality you see exactly the opposite), which of course brings the reality chain back to ad campaigns in which marketing managers must align a series of events that are problematic because every tiny action in the chain can lead to an alternative reality, and a lot can go wrong in this multiverse coined by psychologist Williams James way back in 1895 in which Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat co-exists (or not) with your dead-or-alive marketing results, meaning you probably should focus less on the tagline in your creative and worry more about whether the entire response chain is working from ad impression to awareness to inquiry to call center to lead capture to hairy sales guys stepping in to credit check to ecstatic purchase to fulfillment to damn-we've-got-buyer's-remorse, because this is our real point: in a world where every second splits the future into different pathways so much can go wrong that you have to control all the variables to get the process right, like an obsessive Six Sigma cheerleader in an ill-fitting suit squeezing potential errors out of the timeline such as whether wasted, spent consumers who carry mobile phones around in their pockets can dial a number easily from your ad and speak with a knowledgeable sales rep and not just type in the URL (although your hip agency says the web is hip and no one prints unhip phone numbers anymore), which of course is as silly as expecting online readers with social-media-attention-deficit-disorder to read a long blog post without clicking away to Google "necking teenagers", because it's damn near impossible to type on a laptop while driving in a car and who wants to get up from watching TV to boot up a computer anyway, so campaign designers must carefully plot the path to a future chain of events in which everything works perfectly like an improbable run-on sentence if your reputation, hell, job depends on avoiding a radioactive meltdown because who doesn't want marketing results that act like lucky dice or sweating teenagers who never were discovered by the cop in the only perfect future that you want: the one that will make your CEO go meow?
Image: Spacepleb
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