Spoiler note: While Ben references larger issues surrounding Severance’s second season’s finale, he doesn’t give away very much, and all but the most spoiler-sensitive among us should proceed with confidence.
Severance is wild.
The Apple TV+ show, which just wrapped its second season, is also hugely original and an incredible experience for a multitude of reasons — not least among them is its ability to teach us something while entertaining us. While the world of Severance is only ever-so-slightly like our own, it does provide some clear lessons on what happens when companies completely misunderstand their audience’s expectations, motivations, and values.
We see this often enough in the real world (see Nescafe, Pepsi, Bud Light, etc., etc.) — but Severance makes it easy to grasp. If you haven’t seen the show yet, now’s the time. The second season of Severance masterfully deepened the eerie, dystopian world of the first, exposing the unsettling consequences of severing work from life, literally. The show offers a frank reminder that some form of severance is what most people want, though with nuance: Thinking about work 24/7 is unhealthy, but surgical separation of your consciousness, between your worklife and your homelife, is, it turns out, not a viable solution to coping with challenges in either realm.
The show is beautifully done. The theme song plucks keys and chords that trigger your subconscious and lets your adrenal gland know it better get ready for action. Each component of the series isn’t merely additive but multiplicative to what makes it great. Full disclosure and incoming nerd alert: My wife and I have rewound scenes with zero dialogue just to try to pick up on all of the facial microexpressions between characters during particularly tense scenes.
American leaders have, for over a century, shared a certain preoccupation: planning — and more importantly, the costs of neglecting to do so. To fail to plan is to plan to fail, according to Benjamin Franklin (perhaps apocryphally). It was a central point in the 1970s bestseller You Can Become the Person You Want To Be, by Robert Mullen. And none less than the Wizard of Westwood — college basketball coach John Wooden — made it a central point of his coaching strategy.
What was good advice in the 18th century is just as valuable now, when business, media, and political cycles seem to move at ever-faster speeds. By carefully considering past downturns, we’ve uncovered some timeless lessons on how to recession-proof your business. What you’ll see below are the most crucial arguments from our co-founder, Ben Dandurand’s, deep dive into lessons learned from previous downtowns. You can see all of Ben’s findings — across a three-part series — here. Otherwise, you’ll find our most crucial strategies below.
Remember: The most salient point you’ll find here is that smart strategy can get around nearly any complication — and there’s never a bad time to think big. As another American leader — in this case, architect Daniel Burnham, a pioneer of the City Beautiful movement — put it: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood.”
You might hate The Bachelor, but you probably know how it works: 25 people show up at a mansion in Southern California with a single goal.
That goal? Not to fall in love, on that first night.
No, their goal is simply not to get eliminated.
And how do they avoid getting eliminated? By making a big, specific first impression.
Obviously, some of these are perhaps too over the top. Nobody’s telling you to dress up like a shark. But if you’re an equestrian, and you show up on a horse, nobody’s going to forget you’re an equestrian — as the contestant in the video above was no doubt reminded by her producer.
And in a sea of competitors who didn’t show up on a horse — well, everyone’s going to remember the woman who showed up on a horse. Who had the courage to tell her story, in a big and memorable way.
Too often — whether while competing on a reality television show or debuting a collection of deeply thoughtful products online — we shy away from telling our big, specific story. This is quite literally bad for business.
Let’s do a quick case study: Figgy, the Wisconsin-based maker of some incredibly well-designed play couches for kids.
Figgy couches cost more simply because they’re better, with higher-quality fabrics and superior construction. What parent wouldn’t want the best possible play couch for their kids?
While Figgy’s creators had gone to great pains to justify their prices on their product detail pages, the facts — like the specifics of the fabric weight, for example — didn’t tell the full story.
Copywriting is a key — if often undersung — element of conversion. Access to cheap — and now both limitless and mostly free — AI-generated copy has brought us to a natural endpoint. Instead of zeroing out the copywriting budget, though, it has only put the value of human-generated text at a premium. We’re at the point where text written by a person has become indicative of a luxury (or at least well-funded) product.
There’s one place which remains open to (human) writers of all skill levels: the founder’s story. It’s your story — truly no one can tell it better than you can. Sharing it in a thoughtful way can build, or increase, a trusted relationship between your brand and your buyers. And nowhere is this relationship more important than it is for brands in the wellness space generally, and more specifically, makers of vitamins and supplements. It’s beyond crucial. And here we’ll see how three brands, with just a couple hundred words, are creating a conversion-friendly environment with something as simple as their own story.
Elite supplement producers have long understood the high expectations placed upon their brands to gain not only their buyers’ interest but their trust — a much higher burden. Their products address our most personal and secret desires: to improve our health (the loss of which shames many of us), to address our age-related concerns (ditto), and to help us confront our loss of sexual potency and desirability (double ditto).
This is often deep, dark stuff, more often discussed between our most intimate friends and advisors (and therapists). We might be willing to share the results of our blood panel or our sexual difficulties from behind the anonymity of a burner Reddit account. We might research supplements that could address our problems. But will we buy something online from an independent brand, without the intermediary blessing of a vitamin or health foods retailer like GNC or Whole Foods? Will we then ingest their product — and expect it to radically transform our health?
The answer, rather incredibly, is an unqualified yes. Online sales of supplements were already rising in 2019, which saw increases of 2.8% in brick-and-mortar supplement sales, and e-commerce growth of 26.5%. The industry has continued this growth (if not at the exponential and unsustainable growth in the earliest days of the pandemic), with certain niches — like sports medicine, mushrooms, and women’s health — at the fore.
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We’re excited to announce that Media Contour has been recognize as one of the Top Conversion Optimization Companies in 2025 by Clutch, a trusted B2B platform that connects businesses with the best service providers. This recognition is a testament to the hard work we put into helping our clients turn website visitors into loyal customers.
“Our success wouldn’t be possible without our amazing clients and our team’s dedication to delivering real results,” said Matt Dandurand, CEO of Media Contour. “This award motivates us to keep pushing boundaries and finding new ways to help businesses thrive online.”
Media Contour, a global leader in e-commerce conversion rate optimization (CRO), is proud to announce its recognition as a Top Conversion Optimization Company in the United States for 2025 by Clutch, a premier B2B service marketplace.
Media Contour's dedication to transforming website visitors into paying customers has been widely acknowledged. This distinction is rooted in genuine client feedback and the company’s proven ability to deliver exceptional results.
“Our team’s hard work and our clients' trust have brought us to this point," said Matt Dandurand, CEO of Media Contour. "Being honored in 2025 is a privilege, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to delivering unmatched value to our clients.”
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