W.W.A.D. (What Would Aliens Do?)
First principles, the Apollo Program, and a framework for allocating resources
If you talk to any marketer that ran Google ads during the early 2000’s, they usually have the same regret: not buying more Google ads. At that time, internet ads were sorely undervalued, and for the first time advertisers could pay for results instead of exposure. It was a money printer: put one dollar in, get eight or ten back.
But something held these marketers back from buying more Google ads. Instead of shifting more (or all) of their marketing budget over to Google Adwords, they kept running costly radio spots and TV commercials.1 Within a few years, Google’s ad prices rose and the gold rush ended. Marketers were left kicking themselves. They’d failed to act rationally.
You could look at it this way: they failed to ask, “What would aliens do?”
If your job was to give a guided tour of Earth to a group of aliens, you’d have a lot of explaining to do, especially around allocation: how we choose to spend our time, funds, energy.
Allocation is the one lever we have the most control over, and it’s the one we fuck up most expertly. Our resources are fixed to an extent, but how we use those resources is up to us.
We spend 5% of our time on health-focused activities, even though 100% of our success depends on us being alive and high-functioning.
An author spends a year writing a book and then balks at spending 1% of the book’s future earnings on an expert cover design.
Germany aims to be an influential force in Europe, yet allocates less than 3% of their government spending to defense
Aliens, unencumbered by this planet’s status quo, wouldn’t make these mistakes. They’d call us out on how badly we treat our bodies, how little time we spend crafting first impressions, and they’d challenge countries to spend…hell, 20% of the government budget on peacetime defense, if that’s the price of deterrence.
Occasionally, though, humans get it right. In response to President Kennedy’s man-on-the-moon challenge, the U.S. Government octupled NASA’s budget in 24 months. Critics decried the spending as racist and unsafe, calling it a “cash and crash” approach (three astronauts did die on the launchpad). But it was the necessary allocation of time, money, and human lives to reestablish America’s posture towards a Communist alliance.2
To half of America, it didn’t make sense. But aliens would’ve approved.
Every “best practice” and every “benchmark” is bullshit. In the words of Matthew McConaughey’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s fairy dust. It’s not on the elemental chart.
Yet our brains anchor us to a thousand expectations. “Individuals should hold a percentage of stocks equal to 100 minus their age.” Says who? Start from zero, like a clueless alien would.
Next time you’re reflecting on how you use your time, ask yourself if you could explain your time allocation to a neutral third-party alien. Would an alien approve of your company’s hiring plan? Given that humans respond to cash incentives, is your salesperson commission structure generous enough? What if you doubled it? Aliens don’t care about industrywide salary benchmarks. And they’d never say, “well, that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Of course many marketers had good reasons to run offline brand advertising, but many others didn’t.
Human lives are a tragic, yet effective allocation of resources. In the words of Louis C.K.: “there’s no end to what you can do if you if you don’t give a fuck about particular people.” During WWII, America lost 15,000 airmen in training alone. And it’s clear that America’s willingness to “allocate” these heroic airmen’s lives contributed to the speed of aviation’s development. The Boeing 747 flew just 24 years after D-Day.