Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Most float centers have people float naked as the day they were born, but most ads and promotional videos and stuff show floaters in bathing suits. What’s up with that? Well, obviously fully nude images on Facebook or something will probably get flagged, so how do you deal with this situation? Nude models? No?
Ashkahn and Graham break down the problem, their own frustrations with it, and how they’ve dealt with it at Float On.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Welcome everyone.
Graham: Hey, welcome back if you’ve been here before too.
Ashkahn: Yeah and if you haven’t, welcome for the first time.
Graham: So, uh, that’s Ashkahn over there.
Ashkahn: Yup this is me.
Graham: Today’s question is-
Ashkahn: Yeah what is it Graham, what is it?
Graham: Yeah, there we go. I was just waiting. I was just going to kind of give you more cues. Today’s question is, “I’m about to start doing some more Facebook ads. What’s your opinion on people wearing bathing suits in a float tank on ads?”
Ashkahn: The age old question.
Graham: Age old.
Ashkahn: Since I guess the era of photography.
Graham: I mean, I’m an age.
Ashkahn: And float tanks. Basically people get into float tanks naked.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: But you don’t want to just put out nudie photos in your advertisement-
Graham: Necessarily, you don’t necessarily want to put out nudie photos.
Ashkahn: Some places probably won’t even let you put out nudie photos in your advertisements.
Graham: So there’s this sense I think where you do actually want to show people floating because you want to show what? The float tanks are big? You kinda want to show someone’s whole body as well. Like I think sometimes the concern is that people who have never heard of floating feel like floating is done in these little capsules and people think it’s really claustrophobic. And so being able to show just that an entire human can fit in there and stretch out and it’s pretty spacious, is a nice way to advertise for the float experience.
Ashkahn: And usually people hire very tiny models when they-
Graham: Yeah like five feet is the-
Ashkahn: They get the shortest person they can and they put them in the float tank and use that for photography.
Graham: As a side, I was looking at the Pop Up Float, you know Peter Marsh’s tank. Peter Marsh is, I don’t know, like seven feet tall or something, he’s one of the tallest people in the float industry. The ads for it have him standing next to the float tank. It kind of makes it look like really small and it was like, it’s the first time I think where I realized the opposite of that. Like if you don’t put something small next to a float tank and you put a giant it seriously, it makes it look a little more diminutive. So yeah. Okay, end of anecdote.
Ashkahn: Okay.
Graham: So the instinct to do that totally makes sense. Show that float experience and have you know a person inside being able to represent it. And I also really don’t like misrepresenting the float and having people wear stuff inside.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s always weird. It always weird to me to see bathing suits on people in pictures of float tanks.
Graham: So we’ve kind of gone two routes. We’ll take pictures and I guess both of them are the same route, which is we don’t like showing bathing suits on people. Along with this, I guess it’s also worth mentioning, there’s another feeling that not only are bathing suits used, but it’s often like bathing suit models, both male and female that are used in the floating experience rather than kind of more common everyday body types. So that’s maybe mixed in here too. Either way, those are both things, showing bathing suits, showing just models are kind of things that Float On has tended to stay away from. Instead we either go the closeup route, you know, show the face of someone floating and stuff like that. You can even figure out ways to do some nice foreground background stuff where you can kind of show the length of their body and make sure you can see their face and their toes without actually showing the nudity. And illustration is the other way that we’ve gone about it.
So actually kind of illustrating not too graphic, but kind of the representation of human beings floating without needing to actually take pictures of nudies of different people in the tank itself and put those out there. But you can also blur things out. I mean even that like Mental Floss, they did a video at a center and it’s one of my favorite videos for that reason. It’s like kind of a bigger guy who’s going into float and one of the mental floss guys, and he just gets straight buck naked and goes in and they blur it out. They blur out his junk and stuff. But it’s very obvious that he’s both not a model and not wearing any kind of clothing on his body. And that actually makes me really happy. So I’d say even blurring it out is better than showing a bathing suit in my opinion.
Ashkahn: Yeah and it’s just hard. I mean we’ve shown bathing suits before just because there’s only so much you can do. Like the morning news segment comes in and you don’t have time to orchestrate a like tasteful, certain camera angle or something like that. They just want to show two seconds of someone.
Graham: Like we’re going to be wearing this bathing suit. Is that okay? Great. Don’t care.
Ashkahn: And you’re like, “Okay.” So I think it’s impossible to completely avoid in certain situations like that, but if you’re creating the media and you’re spending time doing-
Graham: Yeah for like Facebook ads for example.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Then you have a decision and you have the ability to find some creative ways of not showing bathing suits but not having things be distasteful I guess.
Graham: And a couple of nice things come if you managed to do that. One is that you don’t have to put up with a bunch of questions of people asking if they should bring their bathing suits in or just bringing them anyway, and sometimes floating with bathing suits you don’t realize until afterwards and they have like a plastic bag with swim trunks in and you’re like, “Oh you don’t need to wear those.”
Ashkahn: You’re alone in there.
Graham: I actually think there’s something kind of appealing about just being totally by yourself. I think the same kind of thing that appeals to being in the float tank in general also appeals to the idea of being just completely yourself, without that clothing attachment and stuff like that in there too. So I don’t know, I think it just advertises as both a more true experience and maybe a more pure float experience leaving out the bathing suit.
Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean so, good.
Graham: Alright, if you want to come host the show with me, just go to floattanksolutions.com/new cohost and we’ll be a filling the slot and taking some applications over the next week.
Ashkahn: Yeah that sounds good. Sounds great.
Graham: Alright everyone, thanks for listening, floattanksolutions.com/podcast is actually where you want to go to send us questions. But definitely do both.
Ashkahn: Who’s messing up hosting now huh? Not even giving the right website.
Graham: All right, bye everyone.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Choosing the Hours to Staff Your Float Center – DSP 114
How do you figure out how many people to hire? What’s the ideal hours for a float employee to work? Is there such a thing as too many hours? Too few?
Graham and Ashkahn share their insights with staffing Float On and what their staff looks like to cover all their shifts running a six tank, 24 hour float center.
Tips for Creating an Inviting Float Center Lobby – DSP 113
Not all of us are interior designers, but we all want to have a space that is welcoming to our customers.
Graham and Ashkahn definitely have an eye for this, especially after visiting so many float centers. They share some of their favorite designs they’ve seen, as well as common tactics to help make your center comfy and inviting without necessarily breaking the bank on furniture. They also share some of their pipe dreams for their ideal designs that never came to be.
The Weight of a Gallon of Saltwater – DSP 112
When Graham and Ashkahn get to definitively answer a question, it’s like Christmas. Birds sing and the guys bust out their “Answering a question definitively” dance, which has the added side effect of better crop yields during the coming harvest. It’s an exciting time.
There’s a very straightforward mathematical equation for measuring the weight of salt water based on specific gravity, which is excellent. And useful!
Also, whoever wrote this question needs to contact Graham and Ashkahn ASAP!
Tips on Structuring Your Service Menu – DSP 111
There’s a lot of nuance to how you structure your service menu that can have a significant impact on how your customers spend their money. The size of prices, how they’re ordered or arranged, what price you put first on the menu, etc. all make a difference. Given all these small details, it can seem daunting and make some business owners unsure of where to start or who’s advice to take.
Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have been at this for a long time and really dig marketing psychology, so they have lots of advice, tips and even some of the psychology behind why we do the things we do.
What is the Longest Float Session? – DSP 110
There is somebody, somewhere, that has floated for the longest period of time on the planet. And given how recent the popularity of floating is, it’s likely that the person who floated the longest is alive and that Graham and Ashkahn have met them.
The guys share one of their favorite stories from floaters at Float On, which involves the longest float they’ve ever run. Are you listening Guinness? We’re making history!
Latest Blog Posts
Slowing Down, Letting Go, and Stepping Up to iFloat
My intention for this first blog post is to give you some background into my life, and how and why I ended up running a float center, and teaching courses about metaprogramming in float centers. For as far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated with exploring...
We’ll All Float On
This is the introduction that I wrote for the Portland Float Conference program. I wanted to repost it here, so that all of my zany predictions for the future of floating could be recorded for all time. It also seemed like a good piece to kick off this month's topic...
The First Post (in which the nature of the project is revealed)
There is not enough content out there about float tanks. There is certainly not enough for those of us that are actively running, or trying to start, a center. Float Tank Solutions was launched in an attempt to crush this problem. We've already put up a good amount of...
