no robot apocalypse (yet)

'The Frankenstein complex' is the term coined by 20th century American author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov in his famous robot novels series, to describe the feeling of fear we hold that our creations will turn on us (their creators) — like the monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel.

One hundred years later in 2018 we still seem worried about this idea of subordination. That we might ultimately lose the ability to control our machines.

At least part of the problem are the concerns about AI alignment. Alignment is generally accepted as the ongoing challenge of ensuring that we produce AIs that are aligned with human values. This is our modern Frankenstein complex.

For example, if what has been described as an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) ever did develop at some point in the future would it do what we (humans) wanted it to do?

Would/could any AGI values ‘align’ with human values? What are human values, in any case?

The argument might be that AI can be said to be aligned with human values when it does what humans want, but…

Will AI do things some humans want but that other humans don’t want?

How will AI know what humans want given that we often do do what we want but not what we ‘need’ to do?

And — given that it is a superintelligence — what will AI do if these human values conflict with its own values?

In the notorious thought experiment AI pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky wonders if we can specifically prevent the creation of superintelligent AGIs like the paperclip maximizer?

In the paperclip maximizer scenario a bunch of engineers are trying to work out an efficient way to manufacture paperclips, and they accidentally invent an artificial general intelligence.

This AI is built as a super-intelligent utility-maximising agent whose utility is a direct function of the amount of paperclips it makes.

So far so good, the engineers go home for the night, but by the time they’ve returned to the lab the next day, this AI has copied itself onto every computer in the world and begun reprogramming the world to give itself more power to boost its intelligence.

Now, having control of all the computers and machines in the world, it proceeds to annihilate life on earth and disassembles the entire world into its constituent atoms to make as many paperclips as possible.

Presumably this kind of scenario is what is troubling Elon Musk when he dramatically worries that ‘…with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’

Musk — when not supervising the assembly of his AI powered self-driving cars can be found hanging out in his SpaceX data centre’s ‘Cyberdyne Systems’ (named after the fictitious company that created “Skynet” in the Terminator movie series) — might possibly have some covert agenda in play in expressing his AI fears given how deep rival tech giants Google and Facebook are in the space. Who knows?

The demon AI problem is called ‘value alignment’ because we want to ensure that its values align with ‘human values’.

Because building a machine that won’t eventually come back to bite us is a difficult problem. Although any biting by the robots is more likely to be a result of our negligence than the machine’s malevolence.

More difficult is determining a consistent shared set of human values we all agree on — this is obviously an almost impossible problem.

There seems to be some logic to this fear but it is deeply flawed. In Enlightenment Now the psychologist Steven Pinker exposes the ‘logic’ in this way.

Since humans have more intelligence than animals — and AI robots of the future will have more of it than us — and we have used our powers to domesticate or exterminate less ­­well-endowed animals (and more technologically advanced societies have enslaved or annihilated technologically primitive ones), it surely follows that any super-smart AI would do the same to us. And we will be ­powerless to stop it. Right?

Nope. Firstly, Pinker cautions against confusing intelligence with motivation. Even if we did invent superhuman intelligent robots, why would they want to take over the world? And secondly, knowledge is acquired by formulating explanations and testing them against reality, not by running an algorithm (and in any case big data is still finite data, whereas the universe of knowledge is infinite).

The word robot itself comes from an old Slavonic word rabota which, roughly translated, means the servitude of forced labour. Rabota was the kind of labour that serfs would have had to perform on their masters’ lands in the Middle Ages.

Rabota was adapted to ‘robot’ — and introduced into the lexicon — in the 1920’s by the Czech playwright, sci-fi novelist and journalist Karel Capek, in the title of his hit play, R.U.R. Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots).
In this futuristic drama (it’s set in circa 2000) R.U.R. are a company who initially mass-produced ‘workers’ (essentially slaves) using the latest biology, chemistry and technology.

These robots are not mechanical devices, but rather they are artificial organisms — (think Westworld) — and they are designed to perform tasks that humans would rather not.

It turns out there’s an almost infinite market for this service until, naturellement, the robots eventually take over the world although, in the process, the formula required to create new ‘robots’ has been destroyed and — as the robots have killed everybody who knows how to make new robots — their own extinction looms.

But redemption is always at hand. Even for the robots.

Two robots, a ‘male’ and a ‘female’, somehow evolve the ‘human’ abilities to love and experience emotions, and — like an android Adam and Eve — set off together to make a new world.

What is true is that we are facing a near future where robots will indeed be our direct competitors in many workplaces.

As more and more employers put artificial intelligences to work, any position involving repetition or routine is at risk of extinction. In the short-term humans will almost certainly lose out on jobs like accounting and bank telling. And everything from farm labourers, paralegals, pharmacists and through to media buyers are all in the same boat.

In fact, any occupations that share a predictable pattern of repetitive activities, the likes of which are possible to replicate through Machine Learning algorithms, will almost certainly bite the dust.

Already, factory workers are facing increased automation, warehouse workers are seeing robots move into pick and pack jobs. Even those banking on ‘new economy’ poster-children like Uber are realizing that it’s not a long game — autonomous car technology means that very shortly these drivers will be surplus to requirements.

We have dealt with the impact of technological change on the world of work many times. 200 years ago, about 98 percent of the US population worked in farming and agriculture, now it’s about 2 percent, and then the rise of factory automation during the early part of the 20th century - and the outsourcing of manufacturing to countries like China - has meant that there is much less need for labour in Western countries.

Indeed, much of Donald Trump’s schtick around bringing manufacturing back to America from China is ultimately fallacious, and uses China as a convenient scapegoat.

Even if it were possible to make American manufacturing great again, because of the relentless rise of automation any rejuvenated factories would only require a tiny fraction of human workers.

New jobs certainly emerge as new technologies emerge replacing the old ones, although the jury is out on the value of many of these jobs.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that people in western economies would work a 15-hour week. In technological terms, this is entirely possible. But it didn’t happen, if anything we are working more.

In his legendary and highly amusing 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, says that Keynes didn’t factor into his prediction the massive rise of consumerism. ‘Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.’

Graeber argues that to fill up the time, and keep consumerism rolling, many jobs had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. ‘Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.’ He calls these bullshit jobs.

The productive jobs have, been automated away but rather than creating a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own meaningful activities (as Keynes imagined) we have seen the creation of new administration industries without any obvious social value that are often experienced as being purposeless and empty by their workers.

Graeber points out that those doing these bullshit jobs still ‘work 40 or 50 hour weeks on paper’ in reality their job often only requires working the 15 hours Keynes predicted — the rest of their time is spent in pointless ‘training’, attending motivational seminars, and dicking around on Facebook.

To be fair, robots are unrivaled at solving problems of logic, and humans struggle at this.

But robot ability to understand human behavior and make inferences about how the world works are still pretty limited.

Robots, AIs and algorithms can be said to ‘know’ things because their byte-addressable memories contain information. However, there is no evidence to suggest that they know they know these things, or that they can reflect on their states of ‘mind’.

Intentionality is the term used by philosophers to refer to the state of having a state of mind — the ability to experience things like knowing, believing, thinking, wanting and understanding.

Think about it this way, third order intentionality is required to for even the simplest of human exchanges (where someone communicates to someone else that someone else did something), and then four levels are required to elevate this to the level of narrative (‘the writer wants the reader to believe that character A thinks that character B intends to do something’).

Most mammals (almost certainly all primates) are capable of reflecting on their state of mind, at least in a basic way — they know that they know. This is first-order intentional.

Humans rarely engage in more than fourth-order intentionality in daily life and only the smartest can operate at sixth-order without getting into a tangle. (‘Person 1 knows that Person 2 believes that Person 3 thinks that Person 4 wants Person 5 to suppose that Person 6 intends to do something’’).

For some perspective, and in contrast, robots, algorithms and black boxes are zero-order intentional machines. It’s still just numbers and math.

The next big leap for AIs would be with the acquisition first or second-order intentionality — only then the robots might just about start to understand that they are not human. The good news is that for the rest of this century we’re probably safe enough from suffering any robot apocalypse.

The kind of roles requiring intellectual capital, creativity, human understanding and applied third/fourth level intentionality are always going to be crucial. And hairdressers.

And so, the viability of ‘creative industries’ like entertainment, media, and advertising, holds strong. Intellectual capital, decision-making, moral understanding and intentionality.

For those of us in the advertising and marketing business it should be stating the obvious that we should compete largely on the strengths of our capability in those areas, or the people in our organisations who are supposed to think for a living.

By that I mean all of us.

For those who can still think any robot apocalypses are probably the least of our worries. But take a look inside the operations of many advertising agencies and despair at how few of their people are spending time on critical thinking tasks and creativity.

Even more disappointing is when we’d rather debate whether creativity can be ‘learned’ by a robot rather than focusing on speeding up the automation of the multitude of mundane activities in order to get all of our minds directed at fourth, fifth and (maybe) sixth order intentionality. The things that robots’ capabilities are decades away from, and that we can do today, if we could be bothered.

By avoiding critical thinking, people are able to simply get shit done and are rewarded for doing so.

Whilst there are often many smart people around, terms like disruption, innovation and creativity are liberally spread throughout agency creds power point decks, as are ‘bullshit’ job titles like Chief Client Solutions Officers, Customer Paradigm Orchestrators or Full-stack Engineers, these grandiose labels and titles probably serve more as elaborate self-deception devices to convince their owners that they have some sort of purpose.

The point being that far from being at the forefront of creativity most agencies direct most of their people to do pointless work giving disproportionate attention to mundane zero-order intentionality tasks that could and should be automated.

Will robots take our jobs away? Here’s hoping.

Perhaps the AI revolution is really the big opportunity to start over. To hand over these bullshit jobs — the purposeless and empty labour we’ve created to fill up dead space — and give us another bite at the Keynes cherry, now liberated to be more creative and really put to use our miraculous innate abilities for empathy, intentionality and high level abstract reasoning.

To be more human.

Because, and as evolutionary theory has taught us, we humans are fairly unique among species. We haven’t evolved adaptations like huge fangs, inch-thick armour plating or the ability to move at super speed under our own steam.

All of the big adaptations have happened inside our heads, in these huge brains we carry around, built for creativity and sussing out how the world works and how other humans work.

That’s the real work. Not the bullshit jobs.

In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly agrees that the human jobs of the future will be far less about technical skills but a lot about these human skills.

He says that the ‘bots are the ones that are going to be doing the smart stuff but ‘our job will be making more jobs for the robots’.

And that job will never be done.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Eaon’s first book ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong? Adventures at the Dunning-Kruger Peak Of Advertising’ is out now on Amazon worldwide and from other discerning booksellers.

This article is an adapted excerpt from his second book ‘What’s The Point of Anything? More Tales from the Dunning-Kruger Peak’ due at the end of 2018.

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cultural fossils

‘Stranger from another planet welcome to our hole.
Just strap on your guitar and we'll play some rock 'n roll’

If some band of galaxy-wandering aliens should indeed stumble upon this planet earth, our species has one thing worthy of their attention and study.

And it’s not our science and technology, as you might immediately imagine.

Yes, we’re the only species to have achieved civilization on this planet - so far - but we would have nothing to teach them about science.

The mere presence of these extraterrestrial visitors proves that our technology must be vastly inferior. Or else we would be visiting them.

So what would aliens learn from us that has any value to them?

The biologist and author EO Wilson poses the above questions the in his tome ‘The Meaning Of Human Existence’.
Professor Wilson is Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University - amongst other chairs - the world’s leading expert on ants and generally regarded as the ‘godfather’ of sociobiology (aka evolutionary psychology).

Wilson argues that the only thing humans have that would interest the little green men is the humanities.

Our history, philosophy and politics.
Our languages, literature and other creative arts like drama, painting and music.
Our design, architecture, our media, communications and other cultural products.
Electric guitars and that. Rock’n’Roll.
Human creativity.

Oh yeah, and advertising.

These same products of human popular culture are to present-day anthropologists and psychologists what fossils and skeletal remains represent to paleontologists.
Although human minds do not fossilise, the cultural products created by human minds do.

Even so, most scientists would agree that the total sum of everything that humans know about (or can meaningfully, label) science is less than five hundred years old and perhaps our major cultural/technological achievement to date - the internet - has only existed for around 20 years then it’s safe to say that it’s early days in the era of science and technology on this soggy planet.

‘Theoretical physics consists of a small number of laws and a great many accidents’, according to particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

As a planner, and one who subscribes to the evidence-based approach, of course I lean on science to shape the development of strategy. But - similarly to theoretical physics – the very best work done in advertising and marketing has always been based on a small number of laws and a great many accidents.

The cultural fossils of advertising have been, and always will be, the creative ideas and executions.

If this all sounds misty-eyed for advertising’s past, maybe it is.
However it’s worth noting that much of the cultural fossils produced by the likes of, say, Gossage and Ogilvy in the 50s and 60s, would stand head and shoulders about most of what passes for branded content today.

If that sounds argumentum ad antiquitatem to some I’d say go look at the work and read Gossage. Many of his ideas took 40 years to permeate.

Yet I would challenge a large chunk of the marketing business with excessive argumentum ad novitatem. Routinely and repeatedly overestimating the new and modern, prematurely and without investigation.

At this time of year we are traditionally dumped upon with the predictions around which game-changing revolutions we should expect in the next 12 months. These predictions are typically prefaced with some variant of ‘technology is disrupting everything rapidly, and as a marketer, you need to be one step ahead. Or die’.

(Less headline-worthy but more accurate would be to predict that 2016 will be very similar to 2015 with the only changes being so small you’ll barely notice.)

If any little green men had landed in 2014 or 2015 then one doubts they would have been particularly impressed with how we’d been handling the business of brand building lately.

Let’s hope that one small shift is that we re-straighten our heads around the false dawn of adtech.
It’s a long way from idea-rich For Mash Get Smash to the idea void of tracking pixels and data leakage. No doubt any intergalactic visitors would chuckle at our marketing automation systems in a similar way that those celetoid alien robots did at our rudimentary potato mashers.

The rise and fall of the current version of adtech positively correlates with the false belief that communications can succeed through technology alone. This has never and will never be the case.

There are certain web companies and (nefarious) adtech and data companies who would prefer it to not be so. Former four-term Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards could just as easily be talking about them.

"Without the humanities to teach us how history has succeeded or failed in directing the fruits of technology and science to the betterment of our tribe of homo sapiens, without the humanities to teach us how to frame the discussion and to properly debate the uses-and the costs-of technology, without the humanities to teach us how to safely debate how to create a more just society with our fellow man and woman, technology and science would eventually default to the ownership of-and misuse by-the most influential, the most powerful, the most feared among us."

The ongoing search to unravel the human condition is based on uncovering and analyzing the products of human creativity.

In the advertising/marketing/content business, this is the stuff we produce.
The humanities and cultural fossils.
It needs to be great and creative because it’s a reflection of us.

‘But the money's no good,
Just get a grip on yourself’

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catenaccio, totaalvoetbal, tiki-taka

'That’s the essence of strategy: to outperform rivals, who are trying to do better than us' 

Phil Rosenzweig ‘Left Brain, Right Stuff’ 2015 

On the evening of 31 May 1972 in Rotterdam, Ajax of Amsterdam defeat Internazionale of Milan 2-0 - via two second-half goals from Johan Cruyff - to win the European Champions cup for the second successive year.

The Times reported ‘Ajax proved that creative attack is the real lifeblood of the game; that blanket defence can be outwitted and outmanoeuvred, and by doing so they made the outlines of the night a little sharper and the shadows a little brighter.’

This game is often said to be totaalvoetbal’s finest moment.

The Dutch press trumpeted ‘The Inter system undermined. Defensive football is destroyed.’ 

The Inter system, or catenaccio was a tactical system in football with a strong emphasis on defence.

The system had been employed most notably and successfully by Helenio Herrera, coach for the great Internazionale team - known as Grande Inter - in the latter half of the1960s.

Inter dominated domestic Italian football during this period and when they won three Scudetti, two European Champions Cups and two Intercontinental Cups.

Herrera adapted the traditional Italian 5–3–2 formation known as the verrou (door bolt) - a parking-the-bus approach focused on preventing opponents goal-scoring opportunities - to include the new idea of the swift counter-attack.

Counter-attacking being a rapid back-to-the-front tactic typically beginning with long passes from the defence catching opponents out of position while they are focused on attacking manuevers.

Key to the catenaccio system – and rapid counter-attacking - was the introduction of the role of a libero or sweeper. The libero is a free creative defender who operates behind a line of three defenders, ‘sweeping up’ loose balls, double-marking and setting up counter-attacks from behind the defence.

The Grande Inter team were captained by libero Armando Picchi.
Though perhaps the most famous sweeper of all is the German, Franz Beckenbauer.
The irony of this fact shall become apparent.

Herrera was also notable introducing motivational psych tactics and was good for a few one-liners.

‘Class + Preparation + Intelligence + Athleticism = Championships’ 

But while Inter and catenaccio were dominating European football a new development began to emerge in the Netherlands.

Totaalvoetbal, (total football) pioneered by Ajax of Amsterdam, under the guidance of coach Rinus Michels emerged from around 1965, flourished between 1970 and 1974, and that one night in May 1972 appeared to have effectively killed Herrera's catenaccio stone dead.

To observers at the time totaalvoetbal, seemed to be the antithesis of catenaccio.

For a start, totaalvoetbal is an attack-oriented strategy.

A pro-active approach. There is no counter-attacking, total football works by constant positional interchange among the players, pressing hard to gain and keep possession while preventing the opposition from having the ball.

The genius of total football was its agile approach.
NO player is fixed in his role; anyone can assume the role of an attacker, a midfielder or a defender, depending on the nature of the play.

In the 1970-73 era Ajax dominated the domestic Dutch league and won three successive European Cups. In 1972, after Ajax defeated Inter 2–0 in that European Cup final the experts confidently announced the victory as the ‘destruction of catenaccio’ .

The final nail in the catenaccio coffin was the following year as Ajax destroyed Milan 6–0 to lift the European Super Cup.

While seemingly polar opposites in approach - catenaccio being defence oriented, totaalvoetbal attack based – there are commonalities.

The Dutch striker Johan Cruyff, for example, was totaalvoetbal’s poster child.

Cruyff was officially a centre forward, however he played all over the pitch, starting attacks from wherever he could collect a pass.

Cruyff's teammates had to adapt themselves flexibly around his movements, regularly switching positions so that the team kept its shape, although the positions were filled by anyone.

In a sense the Cruyff role was the attacking free role version of the defensive libero of the Grande Inter era.

Cruyff summed up his (total football) philosophy:
"Simple football is the most beautiful. But playing simple football is the hardest thing." 

The 1970/71 Ajax coach Michels was later appointed Dutch national team coach for the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

Unsurprisingly, most of the 1974 squad were players from Ajax and rivals Feyenoord (who also played a style similar to the Ajax totaalvoetbal).

The Dutch cruised through their first and second round matches, defeating Argentina 4–0, East Germany 2–0, and holders Brazil 2–0 to set up a final with hosts West Germany, which they were expected to win.

So, when Johan Neeskens scored from the penalty spot to give the Netherlands a 1–0 lead within 80 seconds of play (and before a German player had even touched the ball) totaalvoetbal’s moment on the global stage seemed to be imminent.

However, the German defenders Beri Vogts and – in a throwback to the Inter catenaccio system – libero Franz Beckenbauer, were able to snuff out Cruyff's influence, dominate midfield, and went on to win 2-1.

Using the same strategy, the Dutch reached the 1978 World Cup final only to fall once more at the final hurdle, this time to Argentina.

Perhaps totaalvoetbal could be countered?
Perhaps defensive football was not destroyed?

Though neither the ’74 German side, nor the ’78 Argentina team would be described as defensive, in the catenaccio sense.

Even Beckenbauer, in his sweeper role, often played further up the pitch into midfield.

While both the park-the-bus and counter-attack of catenaccio, and the all-out-attack of totaalvoetbal, had each delivered success in the short term it turns out that neither strategy was enough on its own .

Just like how ‘performance’ based direct digital marketing that seeks to capture intent and convert will not deliver long term effects on its own, without the presence of brand building work, conducted consistently over time to create demand.

Just this week, Amsterdam’s own Martin Weigel addressed this very issue, in a long piece - that is worth taking the time to digest in its entirety – a section of which is quoted below..

‘Under pressure to account for our activities and to show that they are having an effect (any effect) and hooked on the crack cocaine of the short-term, we seize on intermediate metrics…like crazed junkies desperate for the next fix. 

This data might be exciting, it might be highly responsive to communications activity, it might be easy to measure, and it might give us impressive sounding numbers to use in case study videos, but it is short-term data that tells us nothing about the long-term business effects of our efforts. 

Worse, our holding up of short-term metrics that simply measure the exposure of consumers to our ideas as evidence of our success relegates our contribution to the mere distribution of content. And so – such is our appetite for evidence that something happened in the short-term – we relentlessly conspire to render the creation of enduring ideas, the building of memories, the shaping of perceptions, preferences, and behaviours a trivial side-show. 

The very things which that are the source of our value as an industry, and the generators of sustainable value for brands and businesses.’

The way forward is not this OR that, but this AND that.

Johan Cruyff, at the end of his playing career now knew this.
He took over as coach of Barcelona in1988 and continued through to 1996.
During this time Cruyff introduced a new theory.

Tiki-taka 

Cruyff’s revelation incorporated the purism of totaalvoetbal and the pragmatism of catenaccio.

Not this OR that, but this AND that.

Characterised by zonal play, short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession tiki-taka is associated with Barcelona from Johan Cruyff's era through to the present, and also the Spanish national team.

Crucially, Tiki-taka is "both defensive and offensive in equal measure" – the team is always in possession, so never needs to switch between defending and attacking. 

Tiki-taka – as employed by the Spanish national team has won them Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012.

And also continues to be used by arguably the greatest club team in the world, Barcelona, which have won two European Champion’s League titles in recent years while also co-dominating Spanish domestic football (alongside the slightly more pragmatic Real Madrid).

Tika-taka has been described as the most difficult version of football possible: an uncompromising passing game, coupled with intense, high pressing.

To the same token, combining direct response with long term brand-building - 'brand response' - is not easy either. In fact it's perhaps the most difficult form of marketing possible.

Further in Martin Wiegel’s article he points out:

‘The short-term is invariably easier to manage and measure than the long-term…what is important, and what is easy to measure, are not always the same thing. We forget the distinction between the important and the easy at our peril.’

Cruyff, similarly is wary of being data or performance driven at the expense of all else.

'I find it terrible when talents are rejected based on computer data. Based on the criteria at Ajax now I would have been rejected. When I was 15, I couldn’t kick a ball 15 meters with my left and maybe 20 with my right. My qualities - technique and vision - are not detectable by a computer’.

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the streisand effect

‘There's no such thing as bad publicity", as the saying goes.

Because when people are publicly (and conspicuously) outraged about how some piece of media is offensive in some way - and the greater and more amplified the outrage becomes - so it draws disproportionate attention and chatter, increasing the fame of the thing itself, and furthermore arousing the natural curiosity of bystanders who want to know why this thing is deemed so offensive.

A close relative of this phenomenon has been coined the Streisand effect.

Roughly, this effect describes how when it becomes publicly known that someone famous or powerful/influential is using strong measures to try to suppress or hide a piece of information then many more people will start to want to know what it is, even if they never cared before.

When the California Coastal Records Project - a government-commissioned photographic study of the entire California coast – included a pic of Barbara Streisand’s Malibu home in their 2003 report Babs tried to sue the photographer and force him to take the pic off of his website.

Of course this quickly backfired, the internet (albeit pre-Twitter etc) went off on one and now everybody wanted to see the picture that Babs didn't want us to see, wondering why she didn't want us to see it.

Turns out there was nothing much to see, it was a picture of a big house. 

Except now it was a picture of a big house reposted on hundreds of websites and the 'problem' (that was never really a problem) was a thousand time worse.

In ye olden times, a decent tactic for a singer or group trying to have a hit record would be to attempt to get the record banned by as many radio stations as possible. Frankie Goes To Hollywood managed to make a decent career on minimal talent this way.

So when the internet kicked off this week around the 'Are you beach body ready?' campaign for the weight-loss brand Protein World my guess is the brand couldn’t believe their luck.

The protests – apparently the campaign promotes negative body issues - are reported to be culminating in a 40,000strong demonstration in London’s Hyde Park on Saturday.

As a card-carrying fatty myself, perhaps I should be joining them.

However Protein World themselves claim that the campaign – and the unexpected associated kerfuffle – has brought them in 20,000 new customers and a million quid’s worth of new revenue in under 4 days.

It's also reasonable to argue Dove's semi-real time response mimicking the Protein World branding and creative treatment simply helped amplify 'recognition' value for the original, given the almost invisible nature of the Dove branding. For the distracted and indifferent consumer (ie just about everyone) the 'parody' could, for al intents and purposes, be just another extension of that 'beach body' thing that they vaguely remember hearing something about.

[*UPDATE 10.23am* It's been pointed out to me that the Dove parody was not an official Dove communication, but was still widely shared so the point is still valid]

What is unclear is why this particular campaign has particularly irked those who find these things irksome.

A cursory Google search on Beach Body or Bikini Body even, throws up thousands of articles, diets, sports nutrition and fitness DVDs all illustrated in a similar manner, and presented by brands like Cosmopolitan, Womens Health mag and suchlike.

The kerfuffle is especially surprising given that 'Beach Body' as an advertising 'idea' itself is almost banal, such is it's unoriginality and ordinariness.

Protein World will perhaps just accept their good fortune, in having caught this week's wave of conspicuous outrage - or what James Bartholemew in the Spectator this week called virtue signalling.

‘I hate 4x4s!’ you declare. This is an assertion that, unlike others, you care about the environment.

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are.'

Not exactly the Streisand Effect, but enough is enough.

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influencer theory is the wrong end of the stick

The idea that brands can pick out and target a small group of social media users with large 'followings' and then imagine that they will direct everyone else is still prevalent however this influencer theory is a myth and its protagonists have got things the wrong way round.

There are a couple of reasons marketers still like to believe in this idea of the 'influencers'.

Firstly, a little bit of laziness. It’s a lot easier to believe that a message can spread by the brand tapping apparently popular individuals - those special few to whom we all turn to in order to make decisions as Gladwell-ian rhetoric would have it - rather than get down with the messy business of continually reaching a mass of distracted, disinterested consumers.

Secondly, just by implementing these ‘influencer’ strategies it’s actually the brands themselves who appear to be the ultra influentials!

Ka-chow!

They, after all, are now the ones who influence the influencers.

Sadly neither of these things are true.

If they were our jobs as advertisers would be so much easier and predictable.

What is true, is that you're just as likely to spread a message or product by targeting a mass market of random consumers as you would by going after so-called influencers, as long as the conditions are right.

If people are ready to adopt a product, message or trend, then just about anybody can start one, but if the conditions aren’t right, then no one can.

Indeed, most of what we should call real influence is much more accidental and principally involves easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people, without either party being particularly cognisant of the influence.

There’s bad news and good news.

The bad news is that the specific conditions in which any given trend might emerge are very hard to predict and success only looks like success in hindsight.

The good news is that the psychology literature explains the general conditions for copying behaviour pretty well.

All day long people unconsciously mimic the behaviours of others they interact with, including facial expressions, accents, postures, gestures, mannerisms and emotions.

And the simple act of observing others’ behaviour can induce behavioural mimicry, particularly the behaviour of others who appear similar to us, and all of the above are unconscious automatic processes.

Likewise, simply observing others’ choices induces choice mimicry - just like behavioural mimicry it occurs automatically - and collectively when we are uncertain about which behaviours or choices are acceptable or accurate, then we use the ‘social proof ‘ heuristic to be on the safe side.

Or in more simple terms, ordinary people copy other ordinary people without really noticing they are doing it.

Speaking of hindsight, we’ve never held much truck with the old Gladwell ‘Hush Puppies’ story.

The legend goes along these lines; some East Village hipsters began wearing Hush Puppies in 1994 and then suddenly everyone else started wearing them, too.

What Gladwell failed to notice is that Hush Puppies were a staple of just about every UK subculture from the early sixties onwards, worn by mods, skins, hippies, punks, soul-boys and ravers right through to 3rd generation mod brit-poppers in ermm.. about 1994.

Even if Gladwell’s theory were true, it still doesn't mean that if East Village hipsters did wear a specific product then it would automatically be popular.

Hipsters in the East Village presumably wear all kinds of other clobber that never becomes particularly popular anywhere else, or even in the East Village.

It depends on whether anyone else was open to copying at that time.

This belief in ‘influencers’ can be simply explained using a particular logical fallacy.

Rosenweig’s ‘delusion of the wrong end of the stick’.

This is the tendency to get causes the wrong way round.

For instance, in observing that successful companies tend to have a corporate social responsibility policy, should one infer that these pro-social activities are contributing factors to their success, or is it simply that that profitable companies tend to have money to spend on CSR?

The former makes for a better story – and is therefore lapped up by the purpose-before-profit lobby and more recently proponents of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ - however the latter explanation is much closer to the truth, if somewhat less sexy.

Similarly, ‘influencer’ theory makes for a better story than random copying of each other by ordinary people.

The final irony is, of course, that the so-called ‘traditional’ mass marketing that ‘influencer’ type strategies seeks to discredit is actually far more effective at reaching accidental influencers than activity focused on reaching those with some sort of perceived influence.

Therefore smart marketers could, in effect, have their influencer cake and eat it, too.

As it is impossible to know which person, if any, is going to start any given cascade of influence, then activities should be aimed at as broad a market as possible to give it the best possible chance.

And then if something does catch on they can correctly say ‘we got the influencers’ because the random nature of accidental influence means that ‘influencers’ can only really be identified after the fact.

Article influenced principally by Gigerenzer, Rosenzweig, Watts, Earls and an unspecified number of random conversations and unconscious influence over time.

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juiciness

While talking with some game developers this week there was a particular phrase they used a number of times which stayed with me.

They talked of 'juiciness' in the gameplay.

Afterwards we looked it up to see it as a real thing or simply a foible of our gamer guests.

Turns out that 'juiciness' is an proper piece of gamer vernacular, and describes a type of feedback message, either in actual words or through sound effects or images, that help to create encouraging positive responses by rewarding a player when they perform an action successfully. 

This is duly being filed in the lexicon for those times when saying 'elicit an emotional response' or describing heuristics or other such system one type responses is perhaps overly scientific for delicate client paletes when reviewing their new advertising.

Never mind the differentiation/positioning/loyalty metrics, feel the juiciness.

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large, black & white, funny and sexy

Like most people, we at Boat Global HQ typically while away the chilly winter evenings with a nice Pinot Noir and amusing ourselves with old social psychology test papers.
The other evening one multiple choice question caught our eye...

Advertisements that are _____ are more likely to gain the attention of the consumer.

a. are large
b. are black and white rather than colour
c. avoid humour
d. avoid sex

We were pretty certain that we tend to notice things that are funny and/or sexy, bold black and white can have impact however so does bright primary colour so answer a) are large, felt correct.

We were right.

But what if an advertisement was large, black and white, funny and sexy?
That would seem to be a winning combination, for sure.

Anyway, I went for breakfast this morning with a fellow planning chap.
He works between Melb and Sydney so flies a lot.

You'll remember how this blog has become a big advocate of OOH in recent years, when it is well done?

So we were discussing some of these outdoor campaigns that we had admired.

Obviously the famous Bonds 'BOOBS' poster came up.

Large, black and white, funny and sexy.
Perhaps the most 'pure' a piece of pure brand recognition advertising since the first 'fcuk advertising' billboards in the late 90's.

In case you've not been following our current infatuation with Gigerenzer then a 'recognition heuristic' can be described as a rule of thumb by which  recognised objects will be chosen over unrecognised ones, regardless of any other available relevant information.

What makes 'Boobs' and 'fcuk' even more remarkable is that both in campaigns the singe creative device was simple brand name recognition, yet neither actually used the brand name, by name.

Anyway, my planning friend told me that taxi drivers had mentioned something to him.
There was a particular billboard near either Sydney or  Melbourne airport (cant remember which).

As the cab approached the area the taxi drivers would remark that the traffic tended to be slower in that area at the moment.

'Was there roadworks or something?'

No.

The traffic always slowed because the people in cars wanted to get a better look at the 'BOOBS' billboard.

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red stitching turn-ups

Younger readers may find this hard to imagine, but there was a time not so long ago when simply buying a pair of straight leg Levis jeans was something of a task.

More specifically, for the early-teen punky-mod me in 1979 in provincial Aberdeen obtaining a pair of shrink-to-fit 501XX's was even more arduous, and often required a 3 hour bus trip to Glasgow or engaging an obliging relative in London to secure.

The correct Levi's, however, were important items to own.

Because the distinctive 501XX red stitching visible when the jeans were turned up was one of the key signals of one's status among the rest of the group.

A slightly more discerning in-group within the broader mod in-group if you like.

One simple glance at another young mod's turn-ups was all one needed to do in order to make a judgement of their perspicacity.

To this day I'm as picky, however about different things.

In the case of a unified theory of advertising I'm less likely to satisfice.

But I'm happy enough with Gap jeans these days in case you are wondering.

Although, of course, the distinctive red stitching of original 501's is now standard issue with any form of 'selvedge' denim, available for 50 bucks in just about any retailer that sells jeans.

(Signals have a shelf life, at some point what they signal, changes and they may end up signalling something else entirely.)

And so fast forward to 2014 and we are in a workshop session at a marketing conference.
The delegates are broken into groups of six or so and the facilitator announces a task that the groups are required to solve.

We are asked to quickly, and just for fun, come up with some ideas around 'how to get people TO CONSUME MORE' of a particular product (and using certain tactics/techniques we have been learning about).

As you can imagine, I reverted to type and immediately found a problem with the task.

Surely, we were being asked the wrong question?

Is not the single most important task for marketing and advertising to achieve about growing market penetration?

So therefore the correct question should be 'how do we get MORE PEOPLE TO CONSUME product X'.

As I began scribbling an approximation of an NBD type distribution curve the fella sat next to immediately spotted what I was doing.

The rest of the group were oblivious however the first merest hint of the Dirichlet and the pair of us were in complete understanding of each other's point of view.

Like a nerdy marketing science equivalent of teenage mods noticing each other's turn-ups.

The truth is, in advertising today there seems to be nothing that polarises opinion quite as much as the 'How Brands Grow' effect. You are either in or out, there's very little middle ground.

I recall on one occasion meeting with another Planning Director at an agency I was courting and tentatively dropped a couple of thinly veiled EB-esqe phrases into our conversation.

He noticed my 'red stitching' immediately and kindly offered that I need not be coy, he was also a subscriber. Ha.

However the principle objection to scientific marketing ideas seems to come from creative quarters.

'I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.'

So said Bill Bernbach.

Bernbach, as we all know, was one of the key players in the so-named 'creative revolution' within advertising in the early 60's - one that was, in many ways, a revolution against the prevailing ideas of the likes of Rosser Reeves.

Whereas the Reeves approach was 'claim based'- he is the inventor of the USP, after all - and could be described as somewhat formulaic, the Bernbach approach was the antithesis, all out creativity.

It was this more 'functional' Reeves approach that Bernbach was describing as 'science'.
Not actual science.

[Fair play to old Rosser. you know you've made it when you get a logical fallacy named after you.]

My sense is that if Bill were around today he would be embracing the emerging field of marketing science for the space it creates for free creativity.

There is a final passage in the famous paper entitled 'Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity' by Helen Bloom, Rachel Kennedy, Andrew Ehrenberg and Neil Barnard; and published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 2002, that may have tickled Bernbach.

The authors propose that brand advertising seems to work best by simply creatively publicising a brand (salience), and not by trying to persuade people that the brand differs from other brands, or is even better or best.

'Some people fear that this 'mere publicity' stance is unhelpful to creatives. But we suggest that the exact opposite is the case.

Advertising a better mousetrap is fairly easy if it is in fact a bit better. One can, for instance, just say so. But having to center your advertising on adding year after year some indiscernible 'Whiter and Brighter' product-boon can restrict the kind of creativity that aims at memorable impacts for the brand.

In contrast, publicizing a brand gives ample scope for imaginative insights and for disciplined marketing communication skills.

This can stimulate creativity, that is, making distinctive and memorable publicity for the brand out of next to nothing. This seems the hallmark of good advertising as we know it. We think still that advertising a competitive brand means just 'Telling a brand story well', without there being just one solution.

There is huge scope-the campaign need not be hemmed in by the brand's 'selling proposition.'

In a recent post we mentioned renowned German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's 'recognition heuristic'.

'Firms that spend their money on buying space in your recognition memory know this. Similarly politicians advertising their names and faces rather than their policies, and colleges, wannabe celebrities, and even small nations operate on the principle that if we do not recognise them, we will not favor them.

Taken to the extreme, being recognised becomes the goal in itself'.

Another way of describing salience and creative publicity.

[Indeed, Gigerenzer even offers a specific smart recognition heuristic for buying hi-fi equipment with minimum effort.

'Choose a brand you recognize and the second least expensive model'.]

For creative types this scientific approach should be liberating. To be free from dealing with message comprehension, USPs, positioning and differentiation and instead inhabit a world where the principle requirement is using unreasonable creativity to get branded ideas noticed and remembered.

And as Professor Sharp says in 'How Brands Grow'.

'...the primary task of advertising agencies is to generate ideas that viewers will notice and and will be willing to process over and over. This process must be brand-centric; it must refresh the memory structures that relate to the brand. This is a difficult task, which is why most advertising fails.”

Difficult? Yes.
Impossible? No.

To paraphrase Rory Sutherland; this appliance of science frees us from a 'world where creativity is heavily policed but where shallow rationality is a allowed to run rampant.'


What better  creative challenge than to be able to battle on a level playing field with everything else in the culture that competes for bits of our attention?

So as we started this article talking about Levi's, it seems fair to end it with their latest campaign. I'll leave it to you to decide whether this new direction is likely to do much for recognition or memory structures.

However as clue to the feelings here at Boat Global HQ, in spite of the disfluency and general unfathomable-ness of the tagline, it is the irony of that line is perhaps the most salient thing on view.

Just Don't Bore Them?

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shoplifters of the world, unite and take over (or: why online advertising is mostly a flop)

Yes, we can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and require little in the way of thinking.

We are mostly reasonably skilled at performing a number of 'automatic' or 'system 1' type processes - chatting to a passenger and listening to the radio while driving, for instance.

However effortful mental activities activities that interfere with each other, multiplying 17 x 24 while making a right turn into dense traffic - the example Kahneman often uses - is much more difficult and should probably not be attempted.

On occasions when I have to interrupt a colleague to answer a question or something, I ask - as they are typing or whatever

'Can you multi-task for a moment?'

'Of course' is the reply.

The subject then either stops what they were doing to listen to my request.

Or continues to type, more or less ignoring me as I speak.

Either way it goes I derive some psychologist humour from the situation.

The truth being that no-one can multi-task particularly.

Magicians and illusionists understand this better than most, particularly those who practice 'close-up' magic of the kind that is often performed at restaurant tables.

One of our favourites is the famous Derren Brown example. In one of his TV shows Derren was able to 'pay' a Hatton Garden jeweller with blank pieces of paper for a 1000GBP watch, by sufficiently distracting the vendor's system 2 with complicated questions about London bus routes.

I was once inspired by this trick and managed to get an Australia Post employee to bag two imported British music mags worth about $50 for free by confusing him with questions about domestic Australian vs overseas stamps.

As I am sinply an enthusiastic amateur psychology geek rather than a habitual shoplifter, I returned to the counter within a few moments and coughed up. The smugness of winning was reward enough.

The term for this is inattentional blindness, and is most famously demonstrated by the famous invisible gorilla experiment.

Inattentional blindness occurs when selective, focused attention towards one task renders us 'blind' to other peripheral happenings around us.

However both mine and Derren's experiments are dwarfed by this example of real world shoplifting skill as reported by ABC news.



A Texas woman has succeeded in stealing $57,000 worth of iPads from various Wal-Mart stores by loading up her trolley with various sundry items, allowing the cashier to scan the ipads, placing these items in her own handbag then informing the cashier that she needs to nip back to aisle 3 for teabags or something then marching straight out of the store while the hapless Wal-Mart employee is busy scanning the rest of the items in the basket.

So we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

This could go some way to explaining the general failure of online advertising versus the continued effectiveness of, less fashionable, outdoor advertising.

It is simply far more easy - extreme creativity allowing - to get a tiny bit of attention from people who are not concentrating on doing something else that is more important.



Tried living in the real world instead of a shell.

But... I was bored before I even began.

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a note on recognition heuristics and moving from party tricks to business results

Until recently we were unfamiliar with the German psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer.

It turns out that Gigerenzer and Kahneman were at odds for many years.

This is despite that both researched and studied heuristics and came to about 95% of the same conclusions, however the principle point of conflict appeared to be; Gigerenzer believed in a kind of ‘expert intuition’, whereas Kahneman is more sceptical.

Whereas the Kahneman and Tversky school (ie much of the behavioural economics lobby) principally associate heuristics and biases with human error  (to be fair, in Thinking Fast and Slow DK does say that his view had softened over time, much System one activity can also be described as 'skill'), Gigerenzer assert that heuristics not necessarily cost the decision-maker and are often 'smart'.

These are the semantics that cause the big rifts in Academia. Heh.

What is initially startling about Gigerenzer's ‘Gut Feelings’ (we are reading this just now) is how much of his schtick Gladwell appropriated for ‘Blink’.

In 'Gut Feelings' Gigerenzer references H G Wells, who famously noted "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking."

To this day we teach reading and writing to children but not yet statistical thinking in any significant way.

Perhaps we won't get much better at avoiding certain cognitive slip-ups until this is addressed.

An example of a typical statistical error is given from the New Scientist magazine.

A Food inspector visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche.

Clang.

Anyway, Gigerenzer describes a 'smart heuristic' as a tool for making good decisions in an uncertain world, where one sometimes has to ignore information in order to make an optimal choice.

His principal gift to the advertising world is one such smart heuristic - it should be said that this one crops up less frequently than it's usefullness would indicate - the recognition heuristic.

In simple terms, this means that when faced with a choice between something familiar and something unfamiliar, people tend to opt for the former, and this choice is often the best choice.

In other words, it's usually sensible that people should place a higher value on something they recognise over an alternative that is less familiar.

Therefore recognition based heuristics help consumers choose which brands to buy in frequently purchased categories.

Another way to describe this is salience.
Salience in this context, being the propensity of a brand to come to mind in buying situations.

It seems simple but, and this is something you can try at home, when asked to name as many brands in a particular category as possible, people can rarely name more than three or four in that first instant.

After a few moments thought a few more can come to mind, but theres rarely that kind of reflection in a buying situation.

Though when read a list of brands in a given category then people will be 'aware' of a far larger number.

Therefore, unaided salience is an better predictor of the brands people will buy.

And a useful example of a recognition-based heuristic.

As Professor Sharp notes in 'How Brands Grow'; there are many brands that buyers could consider, if they had thought of them.

I've introduced the good Professor at this point for a specific purpose.

I attended the MSIX (Marketing Science Ideas Exchange) conference in Sydney last week.

A fuller review of this I intend to write shortly, but one of the stand out (salient) points was made by one of the speakers - a non-marketing person - Jon Williams of PwC who said that for behavioural economics to have an impact on business/marketing then 'we need to move from party tricks to business results'.

My sense is that is what Professor Sharp was alluding to in an article he published in Marketing Mag this week entitled 'Behavioural Economics is not the big story in marketing'.

Professor Sharp says:

'But what really worries me is that this infatuation with theatrical psychology lab experiments – that show participants in lab experiments can be nudged without knowing it – is bringing back a discredited theory of brand image of besotted/manipulated consumers'

Then goes on to describe recognition heuristics almost exactly.

'Yes, consumers use heuristics to make ‘good enough’, not perfect, decisions. But they use these heuristics because they work rather well. For example, the assumption that higher-priced items are better quality works pretty well because it’s largely true.

Then later adds.

....don’t forget that the main reason your sales aren’t what you’d like them to be is that your brand doesn’t have the mental and physical availability to produce the demand that you would like.'

Many months ago I read a piece by Mark Earls who also expressed some scepticism abut the ability of behavioural economics to paint the whole picture. At the time this didn't really register however there is a picture becoming clearer now that is pointing towards a more unified theory.

What Professor Sharp describes as 'mental availability' - or salience - is the same thing that Gigerenzer would describe as recognition. A major factor in recognition is the sense of popularity - and this is core to Mark Earls's thesis.

These factors combine to create demand.

Fulfilling demand, however, is heavily dependent on 'physical availability' and much of the so-called 'party tricks' of nudg-ery are perhaps best employed in that context, if only from the point of view that even if recognition is a principle driver we will tend to 'satisfice' right at the last second if one of the other couple of brands that are salient present themselves more easily.

Anyway, to round off we were delighted to discover the very first TV ad for the fledgeling VW Golf featuring The Munich Beefeaters Dixieland Band with one Gerd Gigerenzer on the steering wheel and banjo.

As an undergraduate Gigerenzer was a keen trad-jazz banjo player, playing in jazz bands at night in order to fund his university studies.

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the great advertising swindle (actor-observer bias remix)

Advertising's outcomes are notoriously hard to measure.

Which is why in advertising agencies, we love to measure outputs instead.

Agency outputs (ie creativity, ingenuity, technical wizardry and planning cleverness) are far easier to evaluate than the contributions that the work has to actual client business outcomes.

Despite this clients will often clamour for performance based remuneration deals from their agencies.

Some agencies even claim to offer this.

How they can do this is unclear.

I'm oft to remark that if it were possible then Y&R London should still be receiving a performance based royalty from Heinz Beans for the work of their then deputy creative director, the young Maurice Drake, who penned the famous tagline 'Beanz Meanz Heinz' over a couple of pints of a lunchtime back in 1967.

Maybe they are, who knows?

The fact is that the effects of great advertising often take a long time to unfold.

And many other factors other than the advertising will affect brand performance.

(The effects of shit advertising tend to reveal themselves much sooner, of course).

So when, among its peers/competitors, agencies performance can - for the most part - only be evaluated in terms of the creative output, then the agencies themselves are highly incentivised to squeeze the juice out of those outputs regardless of whether those outputs can be said to have contributed to business outcomes.

Even the planners effectiveness awards, known as Effies, are no more precise, for the most part only describe shorter term effectiveness, and are often forced to rely on qual/quant research of highly dubious methodology (such is the ineptitude of our market research cousins, but that's another topic for another time.)

Perhaps you have been following the ad scam kerfuffle over at Aussie media commentator website mUmBRELLA.

If not, then in summary, it has come to light that a few Australian press ads that picked up Lions at Cannes this year benefited from somewhat 'limited' distribution.

While the ads met with the criteria for entry, it has been argued that running one time in a suburban newspaper of little consequence is not fair play.

There's plenty of opinion around this. Several articles have been written, each receiving large numbers of comments.

I'm not going to add further opinion, but perhaps offer some thoughts towards the beginnings of an explanation.

From personal experience I've played in two broad camps.

Both highly incentivised to pursue award-winning activities.

In big network agencies, consistently receiving global and local awards was an absolute imperative.

At [agency X], for example, every Monday morning we would roll in to work and be curious to find out which awards the agency had won over the weekend.

And every significant piece of work seemed to have its creative award entry case study video constructed almost in parallel to development of the campaign itself.

To my knowledge there was never anything cooked up specifically to try and manipulate creative awards, however every piece of work was evaluated internally for its creative award potential, and certain pro-bono work was often considered for the same reasons.

There's nothing hokey about this approach. It's correct.

However, if a major award show came and went where the agency performed poorly in terms of metal then one could feel the pressure to return to winning ways a soon as possible.

In this environment, where success is routine, then winning becomes table stakes.

In smaller agencies or even decent sized indies there is a different sort of pressure.

To level the playing field then these agencies have to look that little bit harder to find the opportunities to generate outputs that can stand up against the outputs of agencies with more resources and better clients.

One could describe the situation as a kind of agency double jeopardy.

Smaller agencies get hit twice. They have fewer, less sophisticated and resource rich clients, who also tend to be less loyal.

This provides the smaller agency with plenty incentive to 'maximise' and then possibly manipulate outputs in order to portray their creative abilities in the best way.

Because no agency is going to attract new sophisticated clients with a portfolio of mediocre work.

By hook or by crook you need to get the goods.

Now, we are aware that the agencies under scrutiny in the Aussie case are DDB, Saatchi's and to a slightly lesser degree JWT. All outposts of big global networks, not small by any stretch.

However, the Aussie market is somewhat peculiar inasmuch as just about every global network has an office in at least two (often 3 or more) of the major cities.

Everyone is scrapping with everyone else.

In the absence of any way to meaningfully measure clients' business outcomes, the industry evaluates itself in the only way it can. Though outputs - and in the arena of award shows.

The volume and quality of new business an agency attracts is explicitly connected to the volume and quality of the awards they accrue.

The more you get, the more you get.

Without making any judgement call on what-is-or-is-not-scam perhaps some clarity comes from knowing this about our own foibles as an industry.

And perhaps it might not be a bad thing to put this years what-is-or-is-not-scam debate to bed and get on with next years award winners.

Because, as an industry perhaps we suffer from a collective actor-observer bias.

When we judge our own agency's behaviour, we are the actors, and perhaps we are more likely to attribute our actions as a response to peculiarities of the situational factors of the industry; than to any general sense of our integrity or lack of.

However, when explaining the behaviour of others (our competitor agencies), we are far more inclined to attribute their scam ads to their overall cheating-bastard disposition rather than to any of the situational factors that influenced us.

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there’s the first ad

Every agency I have worked with has used their own template variant of what we call the creative brief.

Some will mandate adherence to a specific template more than others.

Either way, the creatives receiving said brief are somewhat more uniform in their response.

They generally give a cursory glance to everything else and jump straight to the proposition/point of view/key idea section (whatever you want to call it).

On more than one occasion, and with different creative directors, it's been pointed out to me that the brief I have provided contained the same problem for them - namely the proposition.

As a 'former' creative that then shuffled over to the other (planner) side my tendency is still to describe the proposition/point of view as though it were a line or an ad idea, and it is written as such.

For some creatives this was not a popular approach.

Their argument being that they now have to work backwards to go forwards, dismantling this 'creative' proposition back into something non-idea-ish, in order to then take it forward into a legitimate creative idea.

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose.

Another way is to adopt the approach of John Hegarty - creative legend and the H in BBH.

We are re-reading John Steel's Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning at the moment and in one chapter Steel reports on how Hegarty, too, headed straight for the proposition and similarly looked for a very simple, singleminded idea.

But Hegarty's next habit is described as this.

'[Hegarty would] take that one sentence and write it on a large piece of paper, above or below a picture of the product, almost as if the line from the brief were a headline.

Then he would pin it up above his desk and ask himself first whether the juxtaposition of that line and that product made some rational sense, and second, whether it also started to suggest something interesting on an emotional level'.

If there was something interesting there then...

'There’s the first ad in the campaign. It’s my job to create something better.'

That's endorsement enough for me to continue to write the brief as the ad for the ad.

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smart ways to do occasion based marketing

The more effectively you can associate a brand (or in this case a brand and a behaviour) to more consumption or behavioural 'occasions', the more you win.

Never mind the demographics/psychographics etc etc, here's the occasions.

'Dumb Ways To .......' ain't going away any time soon. And correctly so, the occasions potential is pretty infinite.

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i'm not like everybody else

In 1976 the USA College Board attached a survey to the Scholastic Assessment Test exams.

These tests are taken by over one million students per year.

The students were asked to rate themselves relative to the average of the sample on a number of criteria.

On leadership ability, 70% of the students rated themselves above average.

In ability to get on well with others, 85% rated themselves above average.

And, indeed, 25% rated themselves in the top 1% overall.

This was one of the first proper studies that uncovered the effect of illusory superiority.

Also known as the better-than-average-effect.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert encapsulates this nicely.

'Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.

Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average.

Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student.

Most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager.

And most football players see themselves as having better football sense than their teammates.

Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer than average drivers,
94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better than average teachers.

Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average too.'

[Likewise, 97% of advertising planners believe they can unearth better behavioural insights than the average planner. I am among that number but obviously I'm not like everybody else in that 97% because I actually can.][joke]



Most people will agree with statements (that appear to be deeply personal but are, of course, deeply general) such as this.

'You are a hardworking person. Others don't always appreciate that about you because you're not able to meet everyone's expectations.

But when something really matters to you, you put forth your best effort.

No, you're not always successful by conventional measures, but that's okay because you're not someone who sets too much store by what the average person thinks'.

One of the ways sophisticated mass marketing works by addressing people as though they are different by finding those things that make us the same.



And of course, the vast majority of consumers don’t perceive brands in a category as particularly unique or different, despite the fact that the idea of differentiation still prevails.

Neither do brands in a category have exclusive customers, people are quite happy to buy from a number of brands. A brief look into your bathroom cabinet will reveal this.

Perhaps the lobby for a future 'humanisation of brands' need to take a step back.

Brands have also been victims of the same delusions and biases as us, their human buyers, for a long time.

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ok, let's get your system 2 on for a minute

We've been describing the importance of recognising the extraordinary power of system one type mental processes in 'how-advertising-actually-works' as part of our planning process for a long time.

To make it fun and easy for clients to 'get it' there are many system one exercises that can be wheeled out to illustrate intuitive decision making, the many ways we fool ourselves and how we respond emotionally even though we might imagine we are thinking rationally.

I've used the famous bat-and-ball example, various card tricks and faux-hypnotism amongst others.

While this is great, there is perhaps a danger that it can sometimes feel a bit like smarty pants, parlour-trickery, so needs to be contrasted with some demonstration of the other side of the coin, the effortful system two thinking.

Here's a quick one that does the job, yet again it's from Thinking Fast and Slow.

So, if you've shown your client that they don't think as much as they think they think by flummoxing them with some system one self delusion then want them to turn on the system two juice, the following exercise* is handy.

[*As a short aside it's not advisable to do this excercise if you want to sell them anything immediately afterwards.

The amount of ego depletion post-task is likely to kick-in some heavy duty system one default-to-no risk aversion.]

To start, get them to make up several sequences of 4 numbers each, make them all different, and write each string on post-it note or something.

Place a blank piece of paper on top to cover your deck of numbers.



This excercise is called add-1.

Next start tapping a steady rhythm with something, about 122 bpm should suffice (if in doubt, imagine a bit of vintage house 88/89 style pumping) or ask the subjects to do it.

Ask them to remove the cover then read the four digits out loud.

Then after two beats, say a sequence in which each of the original digits is incremented by 1.

For example, if the numbers on the first post-it are 1-9-0-3, the +1 increment will be 2-0-1-4.

Got it? Geep them going with the rest of the sequences, keep feeling the rhythm.

After about 5 seconds or so it will start to get pretty hard.

Most people can just about cope with four digits in the +1 task, but if you want to make it harder, then wind it up to +3.

The amount of cognitive effort being used will be reflected physiologically in the dilating of the pupils of your subject, so it can also be useful to film them up close with your phone or something then play it back.

That's your classic system two demo.

Watch the knackered faces of your subjects after just a few seconds.

Then refer them back to their brief to you which contains a long list of things that they expect 'the consumer' to 'think'.

Then propose that, perhaps, a better approach is to simply do our best to get the advertising noticed and remembered by more people in more buying situations by making them feel something, make implicit associations and by appealing to the intuitive system one, who really runs 'tings.

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