True Love Awaits or an Ad guy's take on finding your Soulmate

One of the advantages of being in an advertising agency is the amount of data available to channel our thoughts and help us work. For example, according to Nielsen, there are 730,000 potential instant noodle eaters in Malaysia and The Star(daily excluding Sunday) has a readership of 1,079,000, with 65% of those numbers from Klang Valley alone. The trick is to use those numbers to the benefit of our clients.

A recent chance listen to some sap song on the radio about having soulmates got me a-thinking; if "Soulmates" do exist*, what would be the most effective way of finding them, and how would we target them to induce a sale - in this case quantifying the odds and increasing chances to be with the soulmate.

So, using publicly available data, I've done up a communication plan with specific calculations to answer the problem. For the sake of argument of this discussion, we'll have the following ground rules**:

1. Your soulmate exists and is somewhere in this world. No need to waste time thinking the universe royally screwed you over by having your soulmate born in 2B.C. Let's all assume fate gave you a fighting chance.
   
2. Your soulmate is of the preferred sexual orientation. Why bother otherwise?
   
3. Your soulmate and you share at least a common language. How would you communicate otherwise? Body language doesn't count.

With these specific rules/assumptions,we can calculate the maximum potential soulmate candidates by multiplying the population of your chosen language by the percentage of your preferred sexual orientation. Let's call this the Soulmate Index (SI)

As an example***, my chosen language is English (1.5 billion native and non-native speakers) and my preferred sexual orientation is straight female. The global gender ratio is about 51:49 in favor of men, so I multiply 1.5 billion by 0.49, which would be roughly 735,000,000. I would then reduce that number further by 2% to get my SI (which is the alleged gay ratio, very important this), leaving me with 720,300,000 straight English-speaking females. If you were a gay male, you would multiply 1.5 billion by 0.51 and then again by 0.02, giving you a much smaller SI, at only 15.3 million.

Okay, now that we have established the product problem, let's see how we can make the sale. So, the likelihood of me meeting my Soulmate is roughly 1 in 720,000,000, and what we’re going to do over the next few paragraphs is work out just how “likely” that is. I’m a 28-year-old Malaysian, and have a life expectancy of 74 years. That means I’ve got a potential for 46 more years of searching for that blasted soul mate of mine. Let’s be more micro, and calculate how many days that is:

(365 days * 34 common years) + (366 days * 12 leap years) = 16,802 days to go

For a fighting chance at this, let’s tack on the past 10 years of my life as well, or since I turned 18, ie, legally capable of having sex with my soul mate should I meet her marrying & losing myself in my soul mate’s eyes forever.

16802 + ((365 * 8) + (366 * 2)) = 20,454 in total

Big number & days are rapidly going by. We can express all of this very simply by saying that if I want to meet my soul mate and I am unlucky enough to have had to meet every single person in my entire SI before I finally meet her, I would have to see 720,300,000 people over 20,454 days starting when I turned 18. (35,216 people per day, or roughly half of the sitting capacity at Old Trafford)

Very discouraging. Let’s do some quick math to work out the problem some more.

I’m sitting at KLCC as I write this, and there are easily 30 other people in and around this place with me. I’ll walk to the car later to go back and there are another 60 people who would be in my way. Later tonight I’ll have dinner at the Pavilion since I need to fix my watch, and will come into indirect contact with about 100 or so different people. If I were taking public transport, I’d get on to a the LRT car with 50 other people all mashed up against each other.

Depending on how much you move around, you come in to indirect contact with about 150-200 unique people every day. Possibly even more than that if you really pound the pavement. That means that without drastically changing my lifestyle, I will see about 4,090,800 people over the course of my life or about 0.56% of my SI. Expressed in more practical terms, my chances of finding my soul mate at any point in my post-18 year old life is about 1 in 200.

Isn't that depressing? Very. 20 years ago, that would be pretty much all she wrote too. But these days we’re fortunate enough to have a way to connect with thousands more at any given moment, ie, the internet or the social networking sites. You have twitter, contacts all around the world from work and studies, facebook, which in turn highly increase the the chance of coming in contact with more people Your own numbers will be differ of course, but the point is that we’re able to cheat the odds by making ourselves really visible online and offline. In fact, if I assume that my soul mate is a straight female who speaks English and has Internet access, my SI is reduced even further. There are 1.4 billion people on the Internet, 430.8 million of which speak English, and 206.8 million of which are probably straight females. Now my chances are about 58:1. If all that sounds a little fanciful, it’s really not. I mean seriously, what kind of cosmos would give a Soulmate that didn’t use the Internet in this day and age? That would really be cruel.

One way to look at the 58:1 ratio is: if I had 58 times to relive my life, I would cross paths with my soul mate once (and here's to hoping one of us didn't screw up karma-cally and end up as a dung beetle). That sounds incredibly sad, so here’s another way to look at it: if you took 58 other guys with similar soul-mate indices as me, only one of us would find our soul mate. I like the sound of that a little bit more, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the right way to look at the numbers (or any less depressing)

The trick here really is to make yourself as visible as possible online and offline so as to reach as many people as possible. Joining social networks and generating online content is the new-school equivalent of taking yoga classes or joining photography clubs in order to meet new people, and it’s a lot more cost-effective too. The idea of course is not to stop looking.

I'm all written out now.

*I personally don't believe in the concept of a Soulmate. I believe in Compatibility.

** If you do not agree with these, do your own calculations. Or you know, don't read anymore.

*** Not that I am looking of course. I said EXAMPLE.