Ray J is espousing the supposed virtues of “crashing out.”
During an appearance on The Breakfast Club on Wednesday (Nov. 19), the 44-year-old, who in recent months has been the subject of no shortage of crashout and/or crashout-adjacent headlines, simultaneously argued that there are business benefits to such behavior while also admitting that he’s unsure where to draw the proverbial line.
“If you have the option to make mistakes and it works, the mistakes work, then you find yourself in a weird position because crashing out works,” Ray J said during the interview, seen in full below. “How do you balance that with just being level in life? And sometimes for me, it just gets confusing and everything just becomes blank and it all just gets real blurry.”
After some polite pushback from Charlamagne tha God, Ray J continued to lay out his reasoning.
“But it does work,” he argued. “It does work for impressions. It does work for certain scales when you’re doing Snapchat or you’re doing Twitter or you’re doing Instagram or you’re doing Twitch, and you’re running 15 ads an hour and you want your CPM to be solid, right? You’re running ‘em at night, in late night, and you want those to work as well. So I think it all works if you’re looking at it from a really scientific level. I think a lot of people don’t think we look at it like that, but we do.”
Still, Ray J conceded that “enough is enough at some point,” though he’s uncertain where that point lies.
“I don’t know when it is,” he added. “I don’t know when enough is enough. Because I’m like, enough’s enough now, but I’m like, is it enough?”
CPM, for those unfamiliar, is an acronym for cost-per-mille, a.k.a. cost-per-thousand. This is the cost an advertiser might pay for a thousand impressions on a given ad. Frequently, such stats are viewed as crucial in marketing campaigns.
Ray J’s reasoning on the perceived value of “crashing out,” unfortunately, is very much in line with the current wider thinking about such tactics. One need look no further than the litany of artists who have amassed extensive headlines attention in recent years related to controversies of varying degrees of severity for proof of this rationale in action.
As has been said before, we are living in an attention economy.