If aliens crash landed on Earth, and the United Nations asked me to teach our visitors about human beings, I would give them a box of Cards Against Humanity (CAH). In my humble opinion, this game has a more honest and varied set of stories about humanity than any book, movie or website – even Wikipedia. For anyone who spends their days thinking about content strategy and the art of engaging an audience, this “party game for horrible people” is creative dynamite.
What is Cards Against Humanity?
If you’re unfamiliar with CAH, it’s a card game similar to the more politically correct children’s game Apples to Apples, and it works like this:
- One player picks a black card with a question, or scenarios that having a missing noun, and s/he reads it aloud to the group
- Other players anonymously submit a white card to answer the black card’s question or fill in the blank. The white cards contain a noun or noun phrase.
- The judge picks the “best” white card. Typically, the judge will read and re-read the black card with the nouns from each white card so that every player hears what others submitted.
Cards Against Humanity The Human Experience
Now, assuming that the extraterrestrials can conveniently understand English, I still wouldn’t play the standard version of CAH. What alien would find the ritualized breaking of our social norms entertaining? If you don’t understand general human culture and history, how could you feel the pleasure of violating political correctness in order to win a game?
No, I would ask the aliens to pull cards and ask me questions about each one because every card tells a rich story about human beings. Because we all know the stories, each CAH card is a lens into our history, society, humor and collective experiences that define who we are.
Cards Against Humanity and Content Strategy
Today, most digital content makes me think the writer must be an alien. Scan through a bunch of branded blogs (not this one of course) and social pages, and see if you spot a coherent content strategy. What is engaging about a company trying to cross-dress a sales pitch as thought leadership? Who are they talking to and what would make people want to read?
Content without empathy makes the creator feel listless (or alien), it makes the reader bored and makes the blog or social page as welcoming as a graveyard. On the other hand, if you’ve played CAH, you know this is one of the few activities left where people are actually engaged with each other and not their smartphones.
Cards Against Humanity is a form of content. In terms of engagement, it surpasses virtually everything out there, and it is filled with principles of content strategy:
Creative Boundaries –> Content Strategy
The greatest challenge facing content creators is overwhelming choice. Limits are actually freedom. Our fear is not that we have nothing to say, but rather that we don’t know which things are worth saying. The universe of possibility is intimidating.
The black cards in CAH are genius because they impose artificial limits. Although they are typically one liners, they always have a story:
- What’s Teach for America using to inspire city students to succeed?
- MTV’s new reality show features eight washed-up celebrities living with ______
- The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History has just opened an interactive exhibit on _____.
CAH’s content strategy is to pull the players into a compelling narrative that is missing the most crucial detail, and that is one way to write compelling headlines. When you don’t know how the story ends, this produces…
Anticipation
Louis Black, a comedian who yells a lot to make people laugh, recorded a comedy album entitled Anticipation. On stage in Wausau, Wisconsin, Black tells the audience: “There is no better moment than this moment, when we’re anticipating the actual moment itself. All of the moments that lead up to the actual moment are truly the best moments.”
Anticipation is the reason we blaze through Harry Potter books and episodes of Game of Thrones, and anticipation is the reason why CAH players sit in dead silence when the judge is ready to read the white cards. The anticipation of discovering how the story ends is often better than the actual ending, and let’s face it: some of the white cards won’t be funny. The few that are hilarious are like the tasty dog food in Ivan Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments. They teach players to be excited for the next black card, their next white card and the next round of judging.
If your audience doesn’t read your headlines without any anticipation for the writing, or watch your videos without an itch to see next week’s video, you can’t engage. The successful content strategy in CAH is to build anticipation by presenting a compelling story that hasn’t been concluded (the Bud Light Super Bowl commercial, “I’m Up For Whatever”, is a perfect example of this content strategy). You must answer the black card (headline) with a killer white card (writing, video, image, graphic, etc.) often enough to make your audience want more.
Content Strategy 101 – Sun Tzu-ing Your Audience
One blog post is a small space to decode all the content strategy secrets of CAH, so what I will end with is a question that made a 2,500 year old Chinese military strategist immortal: How do you win before going to war?
CAH’s answer is that you think from the perspective of your audience, or in Sun Tzu’s case, from the viewpoint of the enemy. CAH is more fun and competitive with old friends and family – people you know extremely well. The reason for this is that you stop playing white cards for their shock value. Instead, you play the white card to tailor to the taste of the judge based on your experiences with that person. You begin to visualize and anticipate their reaction to each card in your hand in order to win. As a content strategist, too, you have to play your audience, not your cards.
If you take away one idea from this article and CAH, it’s that building anticipation requires you to create stories in a single headline, and the act of creating anticipation is an act of empathy. CAH content strategy is Sun-Tzu-ing your audience with an irresistible unknown. You have to blend creative integrity with an understanding of who you’re speaking to and what that person wants.
If you take away a second idea, it’s that I shouldn’t be in charge of educating extraterrestrial visitors.
