Colorado and its cities end up on a lot of “best-of” lists. Here’s how those rankings hijack your brain.

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Denver is the fourth-best city for brunch lovers, seventh-most Irish city in the U.S., third-best city to get stoned and No. 18 for hangover cures. Coloradans are sixth most likely to go vegan and rank a poor 45th for pet ownership — yet, paradoxically, at the top of the list for dog adoptions and a respectable 10th for cat-craziness.

If there is a buzzworthy topic or dubious distinction out there, someone is making it into a listicle, charticle or otherwise appealing morsel of media based on troves of easily and cheaply accessible data, powered by a seemingly insatiable online appetite for content. These are the ubiquitous polls, surveys and data crunches that break down our lives and our surroundings into a million metrics, holding Colorado up against the rest of the country so we know exactly where we stand. 

They reveal the happiness of our marriages, delve into our affinity for cowboy boots, weigh the depth of our obsession with “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” ultimate fighting and fantasy football. They gauge how well we’re sleeping, take stock of our dreams and even project what our dream home looks like, based on artificial intelligence technology.

Then they run some more numbers to determine how afraid we are that the same AI technology might take our jobs.

Generated by a wide variety of businesses dealing in everything from personal finance to online gambling to lawn maintenance, they usually seek to drive internet traffic to their websites by putting our lives under the microscope and adding analysis to statistics and polling readily and cheaply available in the digital age.

These snapshots of the cultural moment land in journalists’ inboxes with amazing frequency, offering free statistical compilations, centered on geography (here we see Colorado, Denver and other cities across the state highlighted) and custom made for easy-to-digest tabulation. Over a few weeks, a single email box can easily accumulate at least a couple hundred pitches, ranging from fun or whimsical topics to data analysis useful and reliable enough to feed into news coverage. 

Lists as a marketing technique certainly predate the internet age, although online tools eventually turbocharged the process, says Bert Sperling, who carved out a niche in this space about 20 years ago when he began teaming with Money magazine to compile research on the best places to live. That wildly successful effort now lives on at BestPlaces.net.

The internet’s on-ramp to seemingly endless sources of data has made it easy for anyone to cobble together information and, with varying degrees of effort, turn it into some manner of cultural pecking order. Sperling likens the volume of information flowing through digital channels to the proverbial fire hose. What thirsty consumers needed was a way to make sense of it.

“People need something that’s curated for them, and they love the idea of saying, ‘Just tell me what’s the best.’ That’s all they want,” he says. “That’s all we can handle these days. In fact, the more and more information we have, the more and more we need this sort of curated decision making for us.”

Leveraging lists to capture eyeballs

For a company like BetColorado.com, an online resource for legal and regulated sports betting, a data set available from the American Veterinary Medical Association recently produced state rankings on pet ownership — information that has little to do with the money line on the Nuggets or Avalanche but nonetheless piques curiosity and drives eyeballs to its website.

“Fun little surveys and data number crunches are really popular among people who may not be interested in the sport side,” says Daiana James, spokesperson for BetColorado.com, noting that stories like the one on pet ownership are proven drivers of internet traffic. “So in tackling the competitive nature that all people tend to have, people like to see where they measure up against other states and other places. From this marketing perspective it is very much about increasing our reach and getting increasing visibility.”

The pet ownership numbers, perhaps counterintuitively for the many Coloradans who share their homes with animals, rank our state 45th nationally, based on the AVMA’s ownership numbers that were then used to calculate the percentage of each state’s population that owns pets. Colorado registered 47.2%, making this one of the least pet-loving states. Wyoming ranked first at 71.8%.

On the other hand, Colorado ranked at the top of the list of states most likely to adopt a dog, based on a combination of Google search results and “live outcomes” of adoptions relative to state populations — calculations produced by the site Bookies.com, which provides information on online betting sites. The results were keyed to National Rescue a Dog Day. What about cats, you say? Colorado ranks 10th.

All types of media outlets are hungry for content, and the easy availability of data — sometimes even free, from government agencies or public entities — and the ease with which rudimentary polling can be accomplished delivers a smorgasbord of chatter-worthy information. The connection to reality may range from seemingly spot-on to straining the imagination, but that’s part of the appeal.

“Pretty much there’s a constant flow of ideas on what story we can do,” James says, “and yes, there is a strategy to it. For example, the pet story that we did, we based on National Pet Day. So sometimes the timing may be based around that, or it may be that we just got a handful of data from a particular source and we found a way to crunch the numbers and present it. 

“Very often we sit on ideas until we think they’re a little more timely,” she adds. “But there’s definitely sort of a constant churn. We’re always looking for inspiration, even if we don’t use it immediately, but definitely all the time.”

The data dives and polls routinely find their way into the media landscape at moments when there might be higher interest surrounding an event, whether traditional or contrived. Earth Day. April Fools’ Day. World Sleep Day. 4/20. May the Fourth. Wedding season.

Recognized “days” do tend to be popular hooks, which led LawnStarter.com to build a story on which of America’s cities are friendliest toward naked gardening, whose “day” falls on the first Saturday each May. 

Manufacturing methodology

Sometimes the methodology itself can be a conversation starter. This data crunch assigned values to a dozen metrics, including nudist population size, indecent exposure laws, gardener-friendliness, forecast local temperature on that day, toplessness laws, the universal go-to of Google searches for “naked gardening terms” and, um, sex offenders per 100,000 residents.

The analysis ranked Denver 17th. Don’t forget the sunblock.

There’s no end to the categories: Denver is the fourth-best city for brunch lovers, seventh-most Irish city in the U.S., third-best city to get stoned and No. 18 for hangover cures. Coloradans are sixth most likely to go vegan, and 47% of us consider ourselves survivalists. We also took the top spot among the most physically active states in the country — so says the data analysis of the experts at MattressInsider.com, the sleep experts.

Part of the appeal of these attention grabbers is that they tell us, however superficially and unscientifically, something about ourselves. But more importantly, notes Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, they purport to show where we stand relative to everyone else.

“Anything that’s competition-based is always going to be attractive,” she says. “Winners, losers, status, signaling — there’s a lot of psychological things going on here. It’s pride, it’s identity. And to the extent that you feel connected to something on a top list of whatever, it’s just going to perpetuate, because people will share it and talk about it more. So that’s a winning formula from a media perspective.”

In an era of plentiful data, Google searches and internet surveys, there are limitless ways information can be sorted, aggregated and channeled to the particular interests and imaginations of a local audience.

From the (perhaps) useful: Which diets are Coloradans most interested in trying? Where does Coors Field rank for prices of tickets, merchandise, food and beer? How does the state rank for job opportunities? How dangerous is Colorado for motorcyclists?

To the sort-of-interesting: In which Colorado counties does Social Security go the furthest? Where does Denver rank for STD rates? How long do Coloradans believe they’ll live, relative to life expectancy?

To the whimsical: What percentage of Colorado couples are happy in their marriages? What states are the least interested in King Charles’ coronation? Where does Colorado rank in terms of “Star Wars” fandom?

And then there are some linked — however tenuously — to front-of-mind issues like the environment: Where does Denver rank in terms of the most sustainable cities? How does it rate in terms of air and water pollution?

“If you’re going after, let’s say, Gen Z, who are basically in love with the environment, and they want to support and enrich the environment and protect it, obviously you want to make sure you craft those lists or the content in a way that entices them to open and read it,” says Ali Besharat, associate professor of marketing at the University of Denver. 

“Any smart marketing campaign managers should do their target marketing and know who they’re going after,” he adds. “So you have to tailor the content to them so they could relate to it in terms of message fitness, execution and the relevancy for them.” 

Creative calculations

The calculations may or may not be statistically sound, but they can be creative. James, of BetColorado.com, notes that sometimes the company combines data groups to create its own multifaceted methodology. For example, James cites a compilation and ranking of the best movies shot in Colorado. Instead of just ranking them by box office performance, awards can be considered with all of the data cobbled together to create a unique grading system.

“We’ll incorporate the box office scores and we’ll add an Oscars bonus and rank them in that way,” she explains. “I do think that it’s a matter of what data is accessible and also what resources we have to run surveys.”

Surveys, she says, can come together in a variety of ways. Emails to a focus group can produce one set of responses. Links posted in internet forums also can yield content. The process employed can depend on the type of data the company seeks or the subject matter being referenced.

And while the surveys are mostly fun and lighthearted, they’re usually connected to topics that people tend to be passionate about — hence the high traffic on the website for subjects like pet ownership even on a site devoted to sports betting.

“These fun lifestyle pieces are some of the more popular ones on our site historically,” James says. “And I think it is just that they appeal to our humanity in a way that we don’t get to be in touch with everyday, especially when we’re reading the news.”

Barasch, who designs studies and surveys and does research for a living, notes that data has never been easier and cheaper to collect. And while surveys can be constructed to yield almost any desired answer, the goal of most of these marketing surveys is to be “accurate in some way” — at least enough so that consumers can find some use for them, even if it’s just bragging rights or good fun.

“I can create a survey about the best Disney characters and get data in five minutes from a thousand people,” she says, “and then tell everybody that Belle is the best Disney princess. It’s based on very little rigorous research, but it’s fun. I’m actually OK that it’s not perfectly reliable, as long as the goal is interest or entertainment.

“With any list, you have infinite ways to compose that list. And so it gives the creators a lot of leeway to tell a story. It’s a way to position facts and information. And because it’s not purely objective, it’s a great tool you can use to tell a story and make it seem somewhat objective even when many, many degrees of freedom went into creating that list.”

On some level, are we addicted to lists, to rankings?

Besharat, the DU expert, says that to some extent we are, and there’s even an academic term for the reason — these polls, studies and lists can serve as “cognitive minimizers.” In other words, shortcuts to information.

“People are driven to this kind of list because it does the homework for them,” he says. “That’s why they’re successful. Honestly, people just want to consume. They don’t want to do the homework.”

BestPlaces.net’s Sperling points out that it’s not just about the data, but interpretation of the data. Artificial intelligence, which in a rudimentary form helped launch Best Places, will assume a bigger role not on the data side, but in the presentation, he predicts. AI can power the summaries of the data, create the textual narrative, which Sperling says his company already is exploring.

And the gatekeepers — the list-makers — will become more valuable. 

“Legitimate news sources are going to be more highly regarded because people will trust that as opposed to some sort of list that’s been spun off via a website or some blog, looking just to try and get eyeballs or clicks,” he adds.

“It’s going to be amazing,” Sperling says. “And this is just the beginning. Data scientists have said there are going to be bad actors doing bad things with AI. And it’s going to be really important for people to figure out what they’re looking at. And so then the whole thing is a matter of trust. It’s gonna be the wild West for a while.”

Of course, when it comes to artificial intelligence, there’s already a list of the most AI-obsessed states to tell readers what they really want to know.

Colorado ranks 6th.

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