can you feel it?

I don't normally overtly pimp the agency work in these pages, but indulge me as I summarise the story of how we took Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony to the heart of Melbourne.

And captured the imagination of the people of the city by immersing them in the experience.

Literally…

We needed to frame the MSO experience as accessible, desirable and relevant to a diverse mass audience of music and culture loving Melbourne-ites and drive sales of single tickets in 2014.

We knew that the MSO, and orchestral music in general, is often perceived as being inaccessible, elitist or requiring some specialist practical understanding of the theories of music in order to be enjoyed.

So we wanted to demonstrate that you shouldn’t have to know anything at all.

Because it’s something that you feel.

If we could show a mass audience of ‘people-like-me’ immersed in that experience, feeling something together we could democratise the MSO and attract new customers.

We launched their new brand campaign ‘Don’t Just Hear It…Feel It’ and the 2014 program by turning the forecourt at Southern Cross Station into a concert hall…

Last Monday lunchtime, over 50 lucky commuters, from toddlers to the elderly, were able to conduct the 40-piece orchestra themselves, while hundreds of surprised commuters looked on.

Within hours the story was picked up by the national TV news networks (Channel 9, Channel 10 and ABC News) and newspapers.



So what was our strategy?
(channeling John Grant - note for the ad nerds)

Immerse a mass of people in a richly detailed setting.
Make it larger than life, prompting childlike wonder.
Capture that experience and broadcast it to everyone else.

If you've made it this far also check the extended 12" remix.



The campaign launches today. Results to follow.

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first thing you learn is you always gotta wait

In 1967 the biggest selling and most popular US album was 'More of the Monkees'. Extremely popular, millions of copies sold.

Also released in 1967 was The Velvet Underground's first album 'The Velvet Underground and Nico'.

The Velvets never troubled the top 100 album chart with this, or any of their subsequent albums, but nigh on every one of the brave souls who witnessed a Velvets performance or purchased the album went on to form their own bands or become painters, or artists of some description.

The 'influence' of the Velvets can still be felt as it permeated right through much of the important music from 1967 to this day. Although in 1967 no-one knew that they would be influential, their influence was only apparent after it had happened.

And looking at the long game the Velvets and Lou ultimately outsold the Monkees.



Lou's Transformer is as much an iconic punk document as anything else of the time, even though it's from '72.

In my first punky band as a teenager the bass player's art teacher force fed us Transformer, along with The Stooges 'Raw Power' and (somewhat out of left-field, it must be noted) The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out and bits of John Coltrane.

Later, as a young art student in 1984 my Velvets album was a permanent 'under the arm' fixture - as a signifier.

I also recall petitioning the art materials shop within the college to stock the first Velvets album, as an essential material for new students, along with their paints and canvas.

The true measure of 'influence' is what happens as a result of exposure to said influence.
How the idea propagates and what people do with the idea, over time.

Lou Reed. March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013.

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There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more.

Has Penguin Classics 'chucked 67 years of editorial rigour and learning out of the corporate window and kowtow to the whims of a petulant pop icon' or is it that 'a single, fixed idea no longer suffices in the modern business'.

My sense is that the latter is closer to correct.

While the release of Morrissey's 'Autobiography' on the Penguin Classic label appears to have offended the sensibilities of certain elements of the literati one can't help wondering if this is a splendid demonstration of a kind of arch detournement from the Mozfather and further fuel to the notion that the quest for, or perhaps preservation of authenticity is but status-seeking/maintaining.

Presumably, for those disgruntled authenticateurs Morrissey is less authentic than Linton Kwesi Johnson, who collected poems have also been published via the Classic moniker.

But for Morrissey it's something of a marketing masterstroke.

Talk about salient, noticeable and refreshing existing memory structures.

Of course his book had to come out on the same 'label' as Wilde et al.
The Penguin Classic in hand or in back pocket is as distinctive a Mozzer brand asset as the hearing aid or gladioli.

And Penguin its growing their brand, attracting those new/lighter buyers again, for whom this tome will partner that other Penguin Classic - the copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray - that they already own.

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inattentional blindness and a plug for @gapjumpers

In their book The Invisible Gorilla, titled after the now famous Gorilla experiment in inattentional blindness (vid below if you're one of the few who have never seen it), authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons make a point about how experts often miss information that novices will pick up.

In their examples, experienced pilots can often be less likely to notice an unexpected plane on a runway than new pilots who have only landed a plane a few times. Similarly, experienced doctors can sometimes find it harder to diagnose a rare condition than a trainee doctor or recent graduate.

This is because the more experience one has in any given situation, the more one sees similar conditions over and over again.
Therefore one becomes blind (to a degree) to outliers, extremely infrequent occurrences and randomness.

Over time, we (humans) have developed a number of ways of managing choices more easily.
Most commonly we'll raid our existing stocks of knowledge and beliefs in order to manage new choice situations.

If previous similar decisions have involved certain biases and/or beliefs then those pre-existing behaviours will be likely to exert disproportionate influence on future situations.

That's a long way round to this pimp for Gapjumpers.

GapJumpers is a platform that connects experts that need help solving business problems and young people, so that young people can earn recommendations for their skills.

Why?

Being recommended, by an industry expert or someone at a company is the fastest way to getting a job, but young people often lack the network and work experience to get recommended. So it helps them gain that credibility.

And from this advertising planner's point of view, the fact of being very experienced means sometimes that one does see similar conditions over and over again, sometimes one does find it harder to uncover fresh insights, or new research than a fresh aspiring planner who has had less time to develop certain biases.

But I'm in good company with these foibles as people from W+K, Ogilvy Sau Paulo, Google, TBWA, ZeusJones have posted challenges and had young planners contribute insights and research.

The Gapjumpers people are, of course, friends of this blog. Have a look at www.gapjumpers.me and see if there's a problem you are grappling with that some fresh brainpower might help to solve.

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pablo picasso was never called an asshole (or the futility of authenticity part 2)

When a mysterious and previously unlisted Picasso painting fell into the hands of one of his most serious (bourgoise) collectors, the lucky enthusiast took it to the artist himslf in order that Pablo could authenticate the piece in person.

Unfortunately, Picasso took one look at the painting and declared it an imposter.

Not to be deterred, the hapless collector purchased another piece and, again, took this to the artist for authentication.

Sadly, Picasso again declared that the piece was a fake.

In a last ditch attempt our collecter commissioned a bespoke work, and then proceeded to watch over Picasso himself as he made the painting, in order that he could be sure of its authenticity, by witnessing its creation with his own eyes.

Upon completion, Picasso yet again declared the new painting to be a fake.

The puzzled collector protested 'But I saw you paint this one with my own eyes?'.

To which the deadpan Pablo replied 'I can paint a fake Picasso better than anyone'.

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the futility of authenticity

We've recently been reading Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Goffman is considered  to be perhaps the most influential sociologist of recent times.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - first published in 1959 -provides a detailed analysis of process and meaning in mundane interaction.

By mundane interaction Goffman means; ordinary face-to-face interactions among people in various social situations.

Goffman's method is the 'dramaturgical approach'.

He is principally concerned with the different modes of 'presentation' employed by people and therefore the meaning of each in its social context.

In essence, all human interactions are 'performance', shaped by by environment, audience, and constructed in order to provide others with 'impressions' that are consonant with the desired goals of the actor.

According to Goffman, one's social identity is a series of 'fronts'.

There is no 'authentic' 'self'.

All the world is a stage

Human social interactions are all performances conducted when on-stage, in social situations. Solitary moments - the closest thing to notions of 'self-ness' - being the equivalent of 'back-stage' pre and post performance.

What hope then for brands in finding an 'authentic voice' or being 'authentic'?
Or the much asserted millennial consumer quest for authenticity?

People are aways competing for status. Products and brands are signifiers of that status.

So, even being anti-consumption is still conspicuous, 'authenticity' is simply the new 'cool'
.
The fatal flaw is that even when one claims remove's oneself from the competition for status in the mainstream you are simply joining the competition for status in a different sphere.

'What? You mean you still actually BUY products? We only share and freecycle'

Sadly, the call for authentic brands, authentic voices is ultimately futile.

All social interaction is intrinsically inauthentic and performance.
In fact the performance itself is the only authenticity.

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masterclass in the construction of situations

According to Debord et al a constructed situation is a ‘moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and game of events.’

A situation is designed to be lived by its participants.
It’s not just ambience, it’s an integrated ensemble of behaviour.
Situations require:

1. A temporary director or orchestrator.
The orchestrator is responsible for coordinating the basic elements necessary in the construction of the situation, and for conducting certain interventions.

2. Direct agents
The direct agents living the situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the practical composition of the ambience.

3. Passive spectators
Passive spectators who have not participated in the constructive work, BUT whom can/should be forced into action.

In other words, a denotative lesson in how to do 21st century advertising.

1. Do something first
2. Make it surprising (funny, terrifying etc add your visceral emotion of choice)
3. Then advertise what you have done.

Do the above with skill and creativity, throw in a bit of luck and you might have a hit.
With circa 1million views in under 24 hours this one looks like a hit.

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more science plus creativity #littlelesslittlemore

We know that in conditions of some uncertainty (in this case the modification of behaviour or adoption of new-ish behaviours), biases in judgement, and in particular those influenced by the availablity too much or too little information, can lead to less than desirable outcomes.

So, while the execution here, in the current campaign for Blackmore's, seems straight-forward and simple there's a real depth of understanding that makes it so sweet.

Habits are important.
'Little Less Little More' is all about describing how easy to establish new, better habits.
Because habits are more easily established than we believe. Sometimes with only one or two goes.

People are motivated to ‘do the right thing’.
Again, make it easy and fun to adopt and DO the desired behaviour and it will be more likely to happen. You will never think yerself fitter.

We are loss-averse, so the dislike of losses almost always outweighs the liking of gains.
This is compounded by the Endowment effect - whereby people disproportionately value what’s already theirs, so the appearance of taking away perceived 'benefits' or punishing behaviours often causes resistance and can be counter effective. Little less of this is balanced by a little more of that. And most of the little more 'thats' are ones that you actually like.

Most importantly, people need to feel involved and effective to make a changes.
This one is straight out of the psychology of persuasion.
The commitment and consistency effect.
People want to be consistent with what they have previously said or done, so ssk for small commitments first then bigger ones Even better, get them in writing.

The web extension of the campaign does exactly this.



The line goes 'At Blackmores we’re encouraging you to make small positive changes that are achievable and sustainable Choose what you want to do a little LESS and a little MORE of and make your commitment today.'

Finally, the behaviour of other people matters.
Let's have a look at what everyone else is doing then.



Like we said the other day...science AND creativity. What a concept.

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aural sculpture

So I made my Beancast debut yesterday with Joseph Jaffe, Jay Baer, Kate Berg and host Bob Knorpp.

Topics discussed were:

RTM And Being Nimble,
3D Printing,
Context vs. Tactics For Wearables,
Where To Put That Content,
and Consumers Avoiding Brands On Social.

Jump over to BeanCast HQ for a listen or better still subscribe.

Thanks again to Bob for having me on. Hopefully we'll do it again sometime.

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fluff

I don't know how it took me so long to get round to reading Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.

Aside from being choc full of wisdom it's a hoot.

Rumelt describes one of the hallmarks of Bad Strategy as 'Fluff'.

'Fluff is superficial restatement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords.

Fluff masquerades as expertise, thought, and analysis. As a simple example of fluff in strategy work, here is a quote from a major retail bank’s internal strategy memoranda: “Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation.”

The Sunday word “intermediation” means that the company accepts deposits and then lends them to others.

In other words, it is a bank. The buzz phrase “customer-centric” could mean that the bank competes by offering depositors and lenders better terms or better service.

But an examination of its policies and products does not reveal any distinction in this regard. The phrase “customer-centric intermediation” is pure fluff.

Pull off the fluffy covering and you have the superficial statement “Our bank’s fundamental strategy is being a bank.”

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science AND creativity. what a concept.

It's interesting to unpack the latest iteration of the Coca-Cola Happiness campaign - this execution appears to be initially out of Amsterdam - from an evidence based marketing standpoint.

If you've followed this blog at all in the last couple of years there's been something of an about turn over time as the point-of-view has shifted from a digital-centric view to one much more influenced by investigations into the science of advertising and how that combines with things like behavioural economics and bits of other social sciences.

One of the key influences in this turn about has been getting to grips somewhat with some marketing science principles outlined by Dr Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia and Director at Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, in his book How Brands Grow.

Dr Sharp debunks a lot of conventional marketing theory and proposes a framework for building brands based on what works in scientific practice.

In a nutshell How Brands Grow identifies that real challenge of marketing is principally about availability – mental availablity and physical availability.

The splendid Coca-Cola activation appears to be an almost text-book example of this practice, in practice.

In the clip you'll see the Coca-Cola truck take-over a grey urban space by creating a pop-up park resplendent with trees, grass and a Coke vending machine. Passers-by are invited to kick off off their shoes and receive a free coke.

The activation seems to match HBG's seven rules for brand growth to the letter.

1. Continuously reach all buyers of the category – avoid being silent.
While always-on is a social media buzzword de jour, real always-on means being constantly being available.
The Happiness campaign (of which this is an iteration) never stops, and hasn't stopped.

2. Ensure the brand is easy to buy (communicate how the brand fits with the users life).
This iteration is entitled ‘Where Will Happiness Strike Next?'. Coke brings you happiness. This is how it fits. The emotional outcome rather than a fabled emotional 'connection'.

3. Get noticed (grab attention and focus on brand salience to prime the users mind).
Case in point. And watch your mirror neurons fizzing.
This is actually a piece of real social media, a social object. A public intervention that lets people see each other so that they can copy each other.

4. Refresh and build memory structures (respect existing associations that make the brand easy to notice and easy to buy).
The physical cue of taking of shoes and stepping on the grass is a nice little bonus hedonic boost. And you get rewarded for doing something. Attitudes follow behaviour, remember.

5. Create and use distinctive brand assets (use sensory cues to get noticed and stay top of mind).
The coke bottle shaped grass, red everywhere amongst the grey. Happy smiling people using the product. Simple.

6. Be consistent (avoid unnecessary changes, whilst keeping the brand fresh and interesting).
One could argue that coherence rather than consistency is better description but again, the brand idea remains the same as it ever was, the creativity is in finding new exciting expressions of the core idea.

7. Keep the brand is easy to buy and avoid giving excuses not to buy eg by targeting a particular group or groups.
Look at the people in the video. Theres no segmentation going on here. Happiness (ergo Coke) is for everyone.
Even the multi-ligual intro indicates this.

So what if it's semi-staged. It's advertising.

Science AND creativity. What a concept.

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pigs on the wing

A common assumption in advertising, based on not much more than that it is simply the most common and available explanation, is that we have to change attitudes before we affect behaviour.

How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Only one but the lightbulb has to WANT to change. kinda thing.

In reality, however, doing something first makes us feel different after.

It's attitudes that result from actions which lead to explanations which then form beliefs.

The common example being that if one wants to get motivated to get fit then the way to do that is drag yourself to the gym under duress. The doing begets the motivation.

Getting started with action is the hard part, the motivation comes after.

In fact the consistency principle in marketing psychology springs directly from this.

People want to be consistent with what they have previously said or done.

So asking for very small, easy commitments first means that those who participate will be more likely to be receptive to a bigger ask, later.

Knowing this is why we, at Boat HQ, always have a soft spot for action-oriented marketing.

Compassion in World Farming connected an interactive billboard in London to a free-range farm in Buckinghamshire.

Passers-by were invited (at 1GBP a pop) to virtually throw 'apples' at the billboard and trigger a catapult on the farm to throw real apples them to the hungry free-range pigs at the farm.

The 1GBP price point was the nice touch. Not only was there an action/commitment but those effects were reinforced by the addition of the (albeit very small) cash commitment.

Compassion in world farming from shwan hamidi on Vimeo.

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good habits, bad habits

“But who are we, really?

Just a bundle of good genes and bad genes mixed with good habits and bad habits.

And since there's no gene for coolness or confidence, then being uncool and unconfident are just bad habits, which can be changed with enough guidance and will power.”

― Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

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midnight to stevens

To coincide with the release of the box set Sound System, Google Play has produced a 5 part documentary, Audio Ammunition, with the surviving members The Clash, each part focussing on one of the five most important albums.

The Guy Stevens produced London Calling is still up there with the greatest ever rock'n'roll sets and in part three of the doco Paul Simonen reminds us of this classic Stevens-ism.

The ability to seamlessly mix rampant ego-mania with humble deference being genius of sorts.



'There are only two Phil Spectors in the world... and I'm one of them!'

See the Open Culture blog post with all five films.

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it was going to be pie in the sky

There's a old adage that goes something like 'good scientists are as happy to be proven wrong as right. What makes them happy is the proof itself'.

The same can be said for planning.

Contrary to the beliefs of some of my colleagues (ha) I'm just as happy when the application of certain principles may not work the way we intended. Whichever way it goes we've learned something.

One persuasion principle that works more often than not in advertising is the 'liking' principle.

People are generally more open to suggestion when the message comes from someone, or some brand they like, or indeed if the message is presented in a way that is likable.

We are more likely to say yes to someone who pay us compliments, or whom we feel like will co-operate with us.

One way of leveraging the principle of liking is to share something in common before we start negotiating.

Because we generally tend to like people who are similar to us.

This principle has a high strike rate but doesn't always work.

I enjoyed this example from Laurie Taylor's 'Thinking Allowed' Radio 4 sociology program.

A Labour politician had developed a winning formula when canvassing in a downtrodden area of London where many of his constituents lived in tower blocks.

The candidate would ring all the bells on a particular floor in order to get 4 or 5 voters on the landing at once, therefore giving himself more of an audience for his pitch.

This saved time and also he understood that his constituents had more propensity to be influenced by each other than in one on one situations so there was a fair chance that he could take advantage of another principle (social influence/herding). So far so good.

Our politician's opening gambit would include sharing something in common with his targets.

He would use the 'liking' principle, usually along the lines of explaining that they could trust him because he came from the same area as them.

Until one day when he rang four bells but only one old woman answered her door.

Deprived of a group audience our politician still pitched with his 'You can trust me, I'm from this area, too' opener.

To which the old woman replied from behind the slightly ajar door, with security chain still in place...

'I wouldn't trust anybody who comes from round here'.

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always think you are going to win

Sir Alex: 'I am a gambler—a risk taker—and you can see that in how we played in the late stages of matches. If we were down at halftime, the message was simple: Don’t panic. Just concentrate on getting the task done.

If we were still down—say, 1–2—with 15 minutes to go, I was ready to take more risks. I was perfectly happy to lose 1–3 if it meant we’d given ourselves a good chance to draw or to win.

So in those last 15 minutes, we’d go for it. We’d put in an extra attacking player and worry less about defense. We knew that if we ended up winning 3–2, it would be a fantastic feeling. And if we lost 1–3, we’d been losing anyway.'

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changing a habit with one interaction

While mindful of not confusing repeat purchase, or habit, with loyalty, a lesson for us could be; that when we are designing experiences that require customers to complete any set of tasks over time - be that filling out forms or collecting points with purchases or even simply purchasing a number of items over time - framing that task as one that is already underway – for example using some kind of indicator that progress has been even made before the customer has to start - improves the chances of a customer completing the thing we want them to do.

As an example, earlier this week I visited a new coffee shop, not my usual one, and along with my coffee I received a card that gives me a free coffee once I fill the card with stamps.

So what? Pretty standard coffee shop practice, I hear you say.

But, my card requires 10 stamps for a free coffee, and the cheeky barista gave me a jump start with two free stamps.

Now transpose this onto an imaginary situation.

Suppose for a second that I had visited said coffee shop with a friend and that friend had also received a 'loyalty' card. Except my friend doesn’t get any free stamps, but their card only requires 8 stamps instead of 10.

So both of us are looking at the same number of future transactions (8) to get a free coffee.

But, assuming we don't go for coffee together every time, who do you think is more likely to come back enough times to fill up their card?

As it goes, it’s 'me'.

I have the card that needs 10 stamps in total, but now I've already received enough stamps to get 20% of the way towards the free coffee.

And, as it also goes I have returned to the unfamiliar coffee shop this week for more stamps, and broken my usual habit without thinking about it.

In the case of data analysis it's never a good idea to infer the general from the particular.

However in human behaviour, particularly around common mundane activities, observing ones own behaviour can often be a good indicator of what others are likely to do.

So armed with that observation I subsequently found out that this situation is called ‘the endowed progress effect.’

I also uncovered that in experiments conducted around similar habitual behaviours 34% of people who got a 10-stamp card with 2 free stamps in advance went back enough times to complete the cards, compared to 19% of customers who started with the empty card requiring only 8 stamps. This is despite the fact that both sets of customers only needed 8 stamps for a free thing.

And what’s more, those given the two free stamps also tried to fill up their card faster.

By giving people just a feeling of instant progress towards a reward, they’re more likely to take the required steps to reach that reward.

By giving the two free stamps the barista has framed the activity (i.e., buying enough coffee to get a free one) as one that is already in progress.

With any new behaviour, the hardest part it getting started in the first place. so by fuzzying up the commencement takes advantage of our naturally inclination to complete tasks that we feel we are already into.

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this was pop

It wasn't that long ago when the subject matter and context in pop songs had somewhat more substance and sense of enquiry.

Yes kids, this was pop, believe it or not.

'If you ever get close to a human and human behaviour be ready to get confused...

..there's definitely no logic to human behaviour but yet so irresistible...

...but, oh, to get involved in the exchange of human emotions is ever so satisfying'

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making it easy to donate #asku

What if you could help charities raise funds without having to put your hand in your pocket for cash?

What if it was enough for you to just put your hand in your pocket for your phone?

A new app called AskU allows this very thing to happen.

The idea being that whilst hanging about waiting for trains or any other inbetween times you can fire up AskU, answer some market research type questions, and the organisation posing said questions pays AskU, and the participating charities, for your answers.

This potentially solves a big behavioural problem for the charities involved.

Many people like the idea of supporting charity but when it comes to the crunch, handing over the dosh is a huge barrier.

There are many theories around things like reward substitution that have been proven be effective.

However, AskU simply removes the barrier completely and outsources your donation using someone else's (or some company's) dollar instead.

AskU - Harness your idle time to change the world! from AskU on Vimeo.

AskU, was developed by PwC in collaboration with The Australian Charities Fund (ACF).

ACF has nominated four charities to benefit from AskU in the first phase of its growth;
Opportunity International Australia, The Smith Family, Mission Australia and Redkite.

Free on iTunes and Google Play, the app is available for all iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

Some friends of this blog are involved so we'd appreciate it if you would give it a whirl.

Check it out asku.com.au

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the dreams we have as children, fade away

Childhood, as a frame, will inspire and motivate because it allows us to reflect back to a time before things became so complicated.

As we get older we get conflicted. Life gets messier and nothing is as simple any more.

Like Noel Gallagher occasionally nailed it...

'When I was young, I thought I had my own key,
I knew exactly what I wanted to be,
Now I'm sure,
You've boarded up every door.'

So it may be the case that when 'memories' of childhood are evoked then our own moral standards can be temporarily rebooted, and therefore we might just act in a more prosocial manner with some of our choices.

Memory, of course, is not the correct description.
While we have a handle on the general gist of what happened the actual details are long gone and so therefore any memory of childhood is largely an idealised fiction.
This is as true when we try and recount what happened yesterday as much is something from many years ago.

You may be surprised, as I was, to know that our memories are actually reconstructed afresh every time we bring them to mind. It's nerve pathways that firing anew each time, and your mind will also fill in any gaps with made up stuff that seems plausible, but these will seem as real the original event.

It's basic human need to make sense out of events, so we create these memory illusions to give a sense of coherence or narrative. But they are illusions none the less.

Anyway, back to the topic, the latest Chipotle trailer seems to be a classic example of pulling those childhood moral compass strings, and to good effect.

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uncertain smile

Mirror neurons – the things that trigger responses in our brains whether we are doing an activity ourselves or whether we simply see someone else doing the same thing. They are a fundamental mechanism for learning (socially), and leveraging these triggers is the oldest trick in the advertising book.

So, when Australian ad watchdog the Outdoor Media Association, ruled that the ad on the left featuring expressionless models was inappropriate; and therefore told skincare brand Ella Bache to relace the offending pic with smiling models instead, they have actually done Ella Bache an unlikely favour.

OMA decreed that the 'serious facial expressions increased the sexual overtones of the image', and therefore the image should change.

According to Mumbrella this morning, Ella Bache's creative director Faie Davis was not happy:

'This bizarre decision is the epitome of political correctness, indicating that as a society we are becoming very fearful of putting a foot wrong, with the result that stymies creative thinking. In the past we have produced ads approved with nude men and women hugging and kissing, yet now we have an industry self-regulator now making judgments on the different sexual mores of a smile or serious expression of models.'

Davis should be advised that the OMA ruling will probably make the ad more effective.

Replacing the neutral faces with smiling faces is a smarter strategy.

Now women looking at the ad will know how they are supposed to feel when using the product.

Not neutral. Happy.

It's no accident that every coca-cola ad in history has featured happy people consuming the product.

This is how you are supposed to feel.

Monkey see, monkey do.

Although full marks to Davis for the cute (or perhaps unintended) use of the old subjective validation trick (aka the Forer Effect) on the line 'as individual as you are'.

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twymyn llinell wen

This is a terrific example of a likely system one decision, endorsed by system two without checking, and then compounded by a further ignorance-of-crowds endorsement.

(Recap: System one being the set of cognitive processes that operate automatically without the need for 'thinking' and by which the majority of our behaviours are driven, while system two drives the slower more effortful critical thinking process)

To explain this process, I've often used the bat and ball example that came to fame as part of Daniel Kahneman's Nobel prize acceptance speech.

It's probably too well known now to be of further use, but just in case...

Consider a bat and a ball for sale in your big box retail store of choice.

The bat and ball together costs one dollar and ten cents.
If the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, then how much would the ball cost?

I once used this when giving a talk to 150 analytics professionals and around 80% of the audience raised their hand for ten cents.

Of course, they were wrong.

Ten cents sounds pretty plausible, this is system one throwing up an answer, then the answer is endorsed by system two and on you go with your day.

If you still haven't worked it out yet the correct answer is five cents.

Similarly, someone in the Swansea City council roads department let their system two endorse a system one decision routinely without checking.

All official road signs in Wales are displayed in English and Welsh language, so the roads department e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of:

'No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only'.

All simple enough so far, except the sign was manufactured and placed with the translation below that reads:

'I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated'

While this is funny enough, and can be attributed to a simple individual mistake in the first instance, one has to wonder how many sets of Swansea council eyeballs this passed by and no-one saw or questioned the error.

Most of the time the common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority around us is perfectly sensible, it feels safer and helps to avoid conflict.

Except when it doesn't.

And most of the time, the automatic decision making of the highly skilled system one, endorsed by system two, serves us pretty well.

Except when it doesn't.

Filed also under change blindness, authority bias and 'no nurse, I said remove his spectacles!'

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another brick in the wall

We’ve all seen reports and studies that supposedly point to this idea that advertising is becoming increasingly irrelevant to how people buy products and services.

I was recently shown a statistic from a social media enthusiast – presented to me with an ‘aha’ intone – from a report which declared that 93% of a group of mums surveyed said that advertising had no effect whatsoever on their choice of breakfast cereal.

Yeah, right.

This was a classic case of the introspection illusion in full effect.

While we may like to think we understand our motivations, our likes and dislikes, why we are the way we are and how we make our decisions unfortunately this is not how we operate in reality.

Really, we act first then construct –post-rationalise - some sort of believable explanation for our actions afterwards.

Just ask anyone whether they believe themselves to be a better-than-average driver.

And while the 93% of mums surveyed claimed that advertising had no effect on them as individuals, if they had been asked wether the advertising was likely to have affected others then the answer would have likely been yes.

This is because the introspection illusion has another effect - we have a tendency to believe that others will more readily conform to - eg - advertising influence than we do.

We view ourselves as independent thinkers but everyone else are sheep.

This is one of the reasons that good mass media advertising - that knows nothing particular about you as an individual - will often be more relevant than the highly ‘personalised’ and ‘targeted’ ads your are served on online, and while the individual may not consciously acknowledge this - we unconsciously register it's simple availability - and the advertising has had it’s effect.

We believe what comes most easily to mind in the context. Often without thinking.

And likewise, in focus groups and surveys, asking people about their own preferences or to articulate their reasons for a particular behaviour leads to false findings and failed campaigns.

However asking people what they believe others might do is a better indicator of the likely behaviour of the subjects.

Similarly with social influence. While subjects are quick to spot the impact of copying , except when that influence is on themselves.

In general it’s probably good practice to ignore reports or studies where the findings are based on people rationalizing their own thoughts or behaviours because they are an illusion. We are routinely pretty bad witnesses to our own behaviour, we fail to detect aspects of ourselves that most others can clearly see.

However ask us what we think other people might do will give better clues.

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the remarkable dispen pak (or how I learned to stop worrying and re-invent the wheel)

This is a guest post from Gil Fewster, Technology head at Sputnik and co-founder of Lab116 our Behaviour, Technology and Experience division.

The post originally appeared at Lab116.com.



Whenever somebody trots out that tired cliché about not wanting to re-invent the wheel, I think about that marvel of understated yet brilliant design, the Dispen Pak.

The Dispen Pak is a refinement of  disposable single-serve sauce packets. You may not know the name, but I guarantee you've used them countless times.

They are those twin-chambered packets of sauce or marmalade that let you squeeze just the right amount of condiment over your meal of choice using (and here's the miracle) just one hand to crack open the seal and dispense that tasty goodness.

Just one hand? Hell, all it really takes is two fingers.

The thing is, people who talk about wheel re-invention are implicitly talking about redundancy; they're inferring it's a wasteful expenditure of thought and energy to make a thing that has already been made.

They do this to champion the new, to falsely align innovation with novelty. But what of refinement?

Improvement? Assessing something with a critical eye, identifying its limitations or problems, and then fixing them?  Genuine newness is a rare thing. Perhaps the only thing rarer is perfection; an object, tool or process which cannot be improved.

The old sauce packs with their single chamber and foil lids you tear off were fine, but Dispen Pak adds two of key improvements.

1. Functional convenience
   You can use it one-handed while you hold your meat pie in the other.



2. Precision
   Squeeze a little, get a few dribbles of sauce. Squeeze a lot, get a big blob.

These are not trivial enhancements, they are answers to specific problems. One-handed operation may seem unimportant until you consider the context, namely that these packets are often used by people eating takeaway food on the go.

The functional requirements for dispensing sauce at the dinner table are considerably altered when one hand is busy holding your pie of choice and you're walking along a crowded footpath.

The Dispen pak is a design enhancement which can only be arrived at by thinking, really deeply, about not just the object's main function but the context in which that function is used.

It is an answer to a question so subtle that most people never thought to ask it, and yet now that the answer is in front of our eyes it seems impossible to imagine we didn't always squeeze out our sauce that way.

Never be afraid to look around, see what sits right in front of you, and challenge yourself to make it better. And beware of people who tell you they don't want to re-invent the wheel.

Most likely, they just lack the critical vision the see  how much better our wheels could be.

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now I wanna sniff some glue

The Crayola blue glue sticks are a splendid little piece of soft innovation that really solves a user problem.

The glue is blue when active but dries clear.

Genius.

So, when constructing your collage or picture (as my son demonstrates in this in progress Jurassic Park expression) it's easy to see which areas have glue coverage, thus avoiding the inconvenience of unstuck elements after the fact.

Innovation.

Identify a real user problem.

Iterate the product so that it doesn't require a new behaviour but simply makes the existing behaviour easier and gets the user to where they need to be, better.

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to hell with mediocrity (again)

What comes to mind on Nike's fantastic latest film 'Possibilities', from an advertising point of view, is that the message is as applicable to this industry as it is for sports.

Good enough isn't good enough.

Worth also noting being that sight, sound and motion afforded by film is still pretty much the unbeatable storytelling medium when coupled with fresh insight and extraordinary creativity.

To hell with mediocrity and the peddlers thereof, I say.

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like trousers, like brain

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistance.
Talent will not.
There is nothing more common then unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not.
Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not.
The world if full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Belated recognition that yesterday would have been Joe Strummer's 61st birthday.

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work or opportunity?

There is something that the ECD at one of my previous agencies used to say to me on occasion that I didn't fully appreciate at the time.

I understood but didn't 'get it' fully.

At the time I was working in a peculiar space, which I likened to being in-the-hole, like an attacking midfielder, or a deep lying striker.

Linking the play in between planning and creative departments, in the manner of an ad douche Eric Cantona or perhaps Pelé. (that's plenty - Editor)

In occupying that number 10 shirt I would looking for opportunities for the agency to impact other areas of the clients business other than the straight up advertising or promotional route.

The idea being that we could grow revenues from clients by nicking budgets that would have gone elsewhere. As a result we developed proposals for digital tools and utility, customer service initiatives, making things out of data and suchlike.

That’s the backstory.

The problem was that some of this output, while hugely useful and practical, was a tad on the un-sexy side.

By unsexy I mean stuff that wasn't going to be global advertising award contender material.

That's not to say that they weren't great ideas but their practical nature meant that just not those kind of ideas.

So the ECD would ask me 'this is good but what will this do for the agency?'.

This would irk me at the time as I was still a bit giddy on the whole social media branded utility blah kool-aid.

However I understand what he meant much better now.

Jump to earlier this morning in the car and I was listening to a old episode of the gapingvoid podcast, in which Hugh MacLeod and Jason Korman talked with Seth Godin.

I’ve read Seth’s blog for many years and just about all of the books, and he must have dropped the following nugget a number of times but for some reason I was most receptive to it this morning.

Akin to the old adage that 'when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change', one Seth comment reminded me of the difference between doing jobs and creating opportunity.

Seth alluded that when we look at things simply as work then the task is to make as much money as possible for doing the least amount of said work. When we look at things as an opportunity then it’s a different game.

‘What does this do for the agency?’ is not ad people vanity, it’s asking ‘what’s the opportunity to do something where the outcome is great for the client and also for us.’

As a case in point then look to this splendid behavioural and emotional activation for Dutch funeral insurance company Dela which scooped a Grand Prix at Cannes and propelled Dela into the top ten of most famous brands in the Netherlands.

.

Funeral insurance is one of those categories which might easily have been filed into ‘work’ however some people at Ogilvy viewed this as an opportunity, et voilà (or en hier to be correct).

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everybody's doin' the dog

Not sure how this little behavioural nugget slipped through the net, but even though we are over a year late in acknowledgement it's worth a repost here.

So how do you encourage dog owners to do the right thing and dispose of their dogs' poo in the correct manner?

Traditionally, of course, dog owners falling foul would be fined.

Another approach is rewarding the positive behaviour instead.

Use the poo to power free wi-fi in the park so that everyone benefits.

The more poo in the designated receptacles, the more free wi-fi for park-goers.

But this wasn't a civic clean-up initiative (though it would have still been great) but a promotional campaign for Mexican Internet provider Terra.

Bringing people together, giving them something to do, to create their own value.

Thanks to Mark @ SputnikLabs for the prompt.

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golly baby, I'm a lucky......

In simple terms there are two kinds of happiness. The moment-to-moment happiness of what Daniel Kahneman calls the 'experiencing' self. This is how you feel as the real-time self goes about its daily business.

The second kind of happiness is the one that we feel when we look back on life in general or on specific events. This is the 'remembering' self. This is a reflective process.

I'm generally of the point of view that regardless of product or category when we create advertising or brand experience then evoking some kind of strong feeling of happiness in the moment and leaving the viewer/participant with a strong happy memory is just about always going to be effective.

Positive associations of happiness which can be triggered by subsequent exposure with the brand.

In fact, what the Captain says in the video is true.

They should use this in ad school as the definitive 'how to do advertising' text.

'If you don't talk happy, and you never have a dream
Then you'll never have a dream come true'

Plus Cap get's bonus points for getting away with singing 'golly baby I'm a lucky c*nt' on Top of the Pops.

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punk floyd

'If punk is a style, then punk is absolutely and irrevocably dead and buried. If, on the other hand, punk is an ethos, then our perception of this moment in history changes'.

So says Brent Ables in his mostly splendid article 'A House Full of Pain: How the Greatest Punk Album of the '70s Was Made by Pink Floyd' in cokemachineglow.

Ables goes on to argue (citing Johnny Rotten's famous I HATE Pink Floyd t-shirt):

'The punks didn’t look deeply enough. If they had, they would have realized that for the space of an album, Pink Floyd had already done everything they wanted to do and had done it better. Animals was already the greatest punk rock album of the decade, and punk hadn’t even been christened yet.'

Animals is, by some distance, the most venomous, bleak, cutting, ruthless lyrical document released by a major rock band in the 1970s... ...Waters pens some of the most memorable lines of his career, over the album’s three core tracks, Waters unleashes a furious condemnation of you, your family, your boss, your lover, and the depths of your corrupted festering soul. No one is safe....and the point is that you and everyone you know is totally fucked. What is this but the punk ethos in its purest form?

Ables has an entertaining and decent argument but my sense is that he misses the point a bit.

The point of the Sex Pistols and punk as a thing was to inspire a thousand other bands and create a movement of which the Pistols could be the leaders. Of course it was all about ethos.

Because there had to be more than just the Pistols.

Because people' don't see just the leaders, they mostly see the the followers, new recruits follow the followers.

Which takes us back to this story from Bernie Rhodes (I think it was him).

Rhodes managed The Clash back in the day and was in cahoots with Malcolm Mclaren (Sex Pistols) and Jake Riviera (the unsung 3rd man of the original emergent UK punk scene, and erstwhile manager of The Damned).

Between the three of them they realised that to create a movement no one band could not do it on their own, but 3 bands...

Do the arithmetic.

3 bands (Pistols, Clash, Damned) each with four members.
Say each band member has five 'friends', thats 60 people minimum.

So a triple header gig in a small strip joint in Soho has an instant crowd of 60 or so likeminded bods, to any waif or stray thats wandered in off the street it immediately looks like 'something' is happening.

As more people decide to join in it's no longer a risk, if they 'get it' no reason not to join in now, and the codes, language, style is all there for them.

It's very easy to participate.

So while the Floyd may have had the message, they didn't have the movement.

There were not a thousand bands formed overnight and instantly performin 27minute prog rock epics in the garage to a dozen friends.

There was a huge audience but it was not participatory.

It's well documented that many older original punks were former hippies.

Tony Parsons famously noted (re: the Pistols Jubilee boat party):

'There were a lot of hippies on the boat, all these sweet people from Virgin. There wasn't actually a huge divide between hippies and punks back then that we made out there was. We shared so much that you can only really discern with hindsight. Both groups were determined that they were going to change the way society was ordered, but both wanted to do it while getting absolutely shitfaced'

Pink Floyd's achievement with Animals was to make a prog rock album straight out of the previous counterculture that was (in part) in tune with the current counterculture without cutting their hair or taking in their flares.

Ables takes a final swipe at J Rotten '...thirty-five years later, while Roger Waters goes before the United Nations in defense of Palestinian rights, Johnny Rotten is growing fat from VH1 reality shows and butter commercials'

This is essentially the Bill Hicks point of view that 'any performer who ever sells a product on television is for now and all eternity removed from the artistic world'.

The lesser quoted other part of that Hicks quote is that if the IRS or some other body is on the back of the performer for money then it's passable.

Rotten has gone on record as saying that the butter ad and 'I'm a Celebrity...' fees essentially paid for the Public Image Ltd tour of 2009 so that goes down a pass in my book.

Thanks to Mr Dodds for finding the original Floyd article.

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police and thieves in the street. oh yeah!

Inexpensive and disproportionately effective behavioural and mere-exposure type nudgey things of the week are; firstly, the cardboard cutout of MBTA officer David Silen that has helped cut bike thefts by 67 percent in Boston’s Alewife subway station.



While the MBTA also added a couple of video cameras and a new lock on the bike cage, the point is deterent not catching bike thieves.

For the potential bike thief do-I-don't-I is a split-second decision, so the merest hint a of cop is enough for the opportunist to look elsewhere for something to nick.

Similarly from India, Bangalore police commissioner MA Saleem has introduced cardboard police as a way of reducing speeding and preventing accidents.



"Drivers in Indian cities violate traffic rules when there are no cops around - they jump traffic lights and go the wrong way on one-way streets," Saleem said, "These cut-out cops are very effective and they can be on the job seven days a week."

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Déformation professionnelle

A phrase the French came up with that describes the tendency to look at problems just from the point of view of one's own profession or area of expertise rather than looking for the real problem.

Déformation professionnelle.

Common example.

The answer is 'social media', now what's the problem?

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two rules to live by

According to Andrew Potter, author of The Authenticity Hoax, it's simply the quest for authenticity itself, that causes the world to seem so unreal and phoney and therefore the quest is ultimately futile.

People can’t help themselves from competing for status (if the modern age was about the search for status via 'cool' the current paradigm is the search for status via 'authenticity'- organic, local, artisan etc) so when one removes oneself from the competition for status in the mainstream one just joins the competition for status in the counterculture.

Having said that, we haven't had a Malcolm quote in here for a while - and my sense is that if there can possibly be a difference between the authentic authentic and the commoditised authentic then it can be found here.

'There are two rules I've always tried to live by: turn left, if you're supposed to turn right; go through any door that you're not supposed to enter. It's the only way to fight your way through to any kind of authentic feeling in a world beset by fakery.'

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problems

On my to-read list is The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berklun.

He's summarised the ten key thoughts in the book in this post on his blog.

Myth number nine caught my eye.

One of the things humans are pretty good at is jumping to conclusions based on little information.

Most of the time this instinct serves us well, however in communications planning we should be advised to check this urge.

9. The myth than problems are less interesting than solutions.

Eintsein said “If I had 20 days to solve a problem I would take 19 to define it.”

There are many creative ways to think about a problem, and different ways to look at a situation.

The impatient run at full speed into solving things, speeding right past the insights needed to find a great solution.

If you listen to how successful creators talk about their daily work, they spend more time thinking about the problem than epiphany obsessed media would have us believe.

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emergent strategy

This nugget from a long lost post by Guy Kawasaki resonated from down a rabbit hole into 2006.

He his offering some advice for entrepreneurial types in the development of business plans however it's appropriate for the conundrum facing communications planning.

While we would love to present agile strategies as default this is often hard for clients to buy into.

Test and learn talk makes us feel fuzzy in the agency but the average CMO doesn't entertain fail-fast.

Perhaps there's a middle way, as GK describes.

'Write deliberate, act emergent.

When you write your plan, you act as if you know exactly what you're going to do.

You are deliberate.

You're probably wrong, but you take your best shot.

However, writing deliberate doesn't mean that you adhere to the plan in the face of new information and new opportunities.

As you execute the plan, you act emergent - that is, you are flexible and fast moving: changing as you learn more and more about the market.

The plan, after all, should not take on a life of its own.'

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never mess with the distinctive brand assets

Apparently this funny and insightful ad for Marmite has caused something of a minor kerfuffle in the UK as some feel that it's humour trivialises the work of animal protection services.

As a result more people will have noticed it so it's all gravy for Marmite.

The real scandal however, as Doddsy correctly points out, is the gratuitous and completely unnecessary display of the Unilever logo on the end frame instead of the Marmite logo.

Rule number one is never mess with the distinctive brand assets, and certainly never replace them in the key moments (remember the peak-end rule) with meaningless ones.

Schoolboy error.

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they thought he was off his trolley

The story of the invention of the common or garden shopping trolley can probably be archived as an early commercial behavioural nudge.

One evening, in 1936, Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain in Oklahoma City sat in his office crunching the numbers on the days sales and pondered on how he might shift more product.

Legend has it that Piggly wiggly were early pioneers of special offers, twofers and suchlike but none of these on the shelf activations were significantly moving any needles.

As Goldman shuffled his papers and prepared to head for home he had an epiphany as he placed one of his standard hand-held shopping baskets onto a wooden folding chair to clear his way out of the cash office.

With a swift application of gaffer tape the basket was melded to the chair and then a set of wheels screwed to the legs and the idea was born.

The next day Goldman shoed the makeshift trolley to one of his staff, a former mechanic, and the pair set about prototyping a metal framed cart with a two-basket capacity.

Their simple insight became manifest. Simply increasing the size of the the shopper basket would be enough of a nudge to make customers buy more groceries.

The first behavioural conundrum solved, the inventors were then surprised to face a second conundrum.

The device did not catch on immediately, prevailing social norms meant that men found the carts to be effeminate, and women apparently made an association with a baby buggy and resisted.

Not to be deterred Goldman’s next master stroke involved employing a number of male and female stooges to push his new carts around his store to demonstrate their usefulness and manufacture the social proof required to remove the barriers to adoption from his status quo biased customers.

The rest, as they say, is history and after patenting the cart in 1938 Goldman became a multimillionaire.

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the last-click attribution fallacy [ #roi ]

‘When an apple ripens and falls – what makes it fall?
Is it that it is attracted to the ground, is it that the stem withers?
Is it that the sun has dried it up, that is has grown heavier?
That the wind shakes it, that the boy standing underneath it wants to eat it?
No one thing is the cause.’

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. First published in 1869

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lost in the supermarket - heuristics remix with thankyou water

Thankyou Water, the bottled water company that generates funding for social projects in the developing world are launching a number of extensions into other product categories, ordinary things that you would normally find in a supermarket.

So far the two big Australian supermarkets have never stocked the Thankyou Water and so this campaign seeks to encourage supporters to lobby the big two supermarkets in order to change their policy and offer distribution of the Thankyou products.

From a communications and behavioural point of view it has all the ingredients of something that just might work on both counts - getting the products into the supermarket and raising more funds.

Watch the video, then let's unpack it a bit.

Availability
For a start, Thankyou water have understood that, particularly in fmcg situations, the drivers of purchasing behaviour are much more about the availability of the brand (both mental and physical) than any ideas of loyalty.

Marketers routinely confuse loyalty with habit.

The availability heuristic describes the tendency we have to believe what comes most easily to mind.

To the same token we buy what comes most easily to hand.

Therfore. in developing a habit, the simple mental and physical availability of the product is vital.

Reward substitution.
The kind of projects that Thankyou water support suffer from many of the same problems that things like climate change and sustainability efforts do.

As Dan Ariely famously coined around climate change 'the effects are not visible in our daily lives, the effects will happen to other people a long time in the future and anything we can do now seems like a drop in the ocean'. All of these factors combine to mean that although people care about the issue they tend to do nothing about it.

Ariely points to how eco-friendly cars such as the Toyota Prius have become popular because it allows people to signal to others that they are the kind of person who 'cares about the environment' without any significant behavioural costs. The Prius is a car, it looks pretty distinctive and cool and it's more economical.

So a trolley loaded with Thankyou products does the same job.

Commitment and consistency.
Anyone who has ever made a small commitment by buying the water will now be automatically predisposed to make future behaviours fall into line with what they have previously done.

Thankyou water say that the prices of their new products will be no more expensive that typical supermarket prices, which will also make this easy behaviour to adopt.

Attribute substitution.
Simple question.
Do i like Thankyou Water?

What's not to like?
Rather than talking about the problem they talk in a bright optimistic way about the bright optimism of a better future that YOU are part of.

Social proof and the bandwagon effect.
Goes almost without saying. The participatory element of the campaign may seem like 101 but again, take an existing behaviour that's easy and natural for people to do. And let them see each other in order that they can copy each other.

And finally, also perhaps one of the under-exploited yet often the most effective, tactics in advertising the underdog effect.

Goliath (in the form of the big two supermarkets) being taken on by littkle David (Thankyou Water).

It's a universal insight that everyone loves and self-identifies with the underdog. The little guy sticking to the man.

Suffice to say we are loving this campaign, not least in a nerdy behavioural economics way, we wish it every success and will have our eyes peeled in Coles.

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one greek one cup

'Everything in moderation', as Oscar Wilde famously noted, 'including moderation'.

And he later built on that idea by adding 'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.'

Pythagoras would not necessarily agree, as evident by this, which Adam Alter , author of the splendid Drunk Tank Pink, has described as possibly the worlds first recorded nudge. In this case towards a sense of moderation.

The Pythagorean cup is a form of drinking cup - the invention of which is credited to Pythagoras of Samos - which, firstly, allows the drinker to fill the cup with wine up only to a certain level.

Then, secondly, as the user enjoys a drink the mechanic only allows for small sips. If the drinker attempts any down-in-one style acrobatics, however, the cup will spill the entire contents out of the bottom and therefore all over the hapless aspiring jakie.

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that sinking feeling

Another toilet related snippet caught our attention this week.

NPR reports that a Latvian designer named Kaspars Jursons is trying to help solve European water shortages by redesigning the traditional mens urinal. His design includes a tap and sink right over it.

"It's not just a fancy piece of art," he says. "The idea is about function and consumption. You are washing your hands in the sink on top of the urinal, and the same water that's running is also used to flush. You don't have to use water twice, like when you use the urinal and wash your hands in separate sink."

This is of course a behavioural nudge in the form of bundling.

We should all be familiar with this from checking in baggage when going on a flight.

Most airlines will now provide the facility to pay for your extra baggage at the same point that the flight itself is purchased.

Thereby bundling all the pain of paying, into one perceived transaction and removing the unpleasantness and inconvenience of making another payment at the check-in.

For the loss averse human, paying just once feels better than paying twice despite the financial cost being identical.

In the toilet situation there are also costs involved with a two-step.

In most cases these are behavioural costs rather than financial.

Post-pee we are faced with a situation of potentially walking out without washing when a sink is not available due to other handwashers hogging the facility.

This probably accounts for a chunk of the alleged 40% of pee-ers who dont wash afterwards.

So, by bundling the pee and the wash, in theory, the majority of the behavioural cost of handwashing is removed.

Just to add, I'm a confirmed washer, despite the cost, and will never eat the peanuts on the bar.

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hey hey we're (not) the monkeys - the coda

I half expected to get some grief about the 'Monkeys can do this' post from last week.

And indeed it came.

[If this is news to you, go back and check the original post for context, and also the edit which appeared on mumbrella +comments]

But complaints were of a different sort from what I expected.

For some the Mad Men reference was unacceptable.

Mad Men being the symbol of everything that is old and out of date in advertising.

I'm not so sure.

Let's go again at the problem, but this time from an economics stand point.

And for a start, and for the sake of argument, let's accept the Lionel Robbins definition of modern economics:

"Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Scarce.

People want more of what there is less of, therefore that resource which is in scarce supply can command more value.
Good news for the supplier of a scarce resource.

The democratisation of the production and distribution of media afforded by social technologies is not in doubt.

The fact that any form of media one can imagine is being produced in huge volumes by millions of people is also a given.

But something that used to be scarce is no longer scarce therefore while there may be millions of people able to produce media in any given format for any platform the sheer ubiquitousness means that in economic terms it has little value.

So agencies need to be mindful of this.
The clients pay for the value they perceive themselves to be getting.

So when Don Draper says 'people think monkeys can do this...they can't do what we do, and they hate us for that', I believe we should heed that.

Because monkeys get paid in peanuts.

And that's why the whole anyone-can-do-it idea, this idea perpetuated principally by those of the social media confirmation bias, is generally bad for the whole communications industry.

And it isn't true.

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the empowered c*nsumer

'These data belong to me, and this media belongs to me, i am the c*nsumer who is in control'

With such thoughts a fool is tormented.

He himself does not even belong to himself; how much less the data and media experience?'

The fool who knows his foolishness, is wise at least so far.

But a fool who thinks himself wise? He is called a fool indeed.

(Adapted from the Dhammapada)

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a piss-easy nudge

Another interesting behavioural campaign out of Brazil.

If you recall we've also liked the Immortal Fans organ-donation appeal and the Beer Tunstile in recent weeks.

This one is titled Xixi Elétrico – or Electric Pee – and features electricity-generating urinals on a truck at the Rio Carnival.



According to creators JWT Brasil:

'Every year, at Carnival, Rio de Janeiro must deal with the same problem: Carnival enthusiasts end up using the streets as a bathroom, and the stench is impregnated through the city for days.
The situation is so serious that, since last year, authorities have detained people found peeing out of place.'

In an almost classic reward substitution nudge, patrons are required to 'use' the urinals in order to generate the leccy to keep the tunes going, rather than the previous default - and somewhat anti-social behaviour - which involved 'going' in doorways and suchlike, in the street.

As an added bonus the electricity is, of course, generated in an eco-friendly manner.

Police time is not wasted in booking bladder-challenged revellers.

And, a smashing promotion of the hosts, Brazilian grass roots music non-profit Afroreggae.

hat-tip Springwise

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monkeys can do this

There was a minor story this week that is probably of no interest to anyone outside of the Australian communications business, but is worthy of a brief bit of commentary here.

The Sydney arm of PR agency Porter Novelli ran a 'job ad' via Twitter, they were looking to hire an account director.

Applicants had to tweet their 'application' as a cute one-liner and tag it #socialcv.

Predictably the hashtag got hijacked and turned into a joke.

Mumbrella (Aussie comms industry news site) have captured the story as it unfolded.

Here's a link.

While recognising the relative unimportance of this in the grand scheme of things I'm compelled to comment that, while it was not the smartest thing Porter Novelli will ever do, that's not the main story.

The comms industry as a whole seems to be infatuated with youth, and a result the assumption that 'youth' are best placed to manage social media comms simply because they know how to operate the tools and are 'digital native' or whatever is rife.

The cliche of 'social media strategy' being the domain of the hapless intern is a cliche for the simple reason that it is still very common.

As you will notice if you follow the story, finally towards the end of the day some grown-ups at Porter Novelli seem to have intervened and have been able to flip it and save some face.

But.

Theres a quote from Don Draper in season 2 of Mad Men that came immediately to mind.

In this scene the young (and still aspiring) copywriter Peggy Olsen glibly described one of her ad concepts to Don with the clarification that 'Sex sells'.

Don retorts 'Who says that?

Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this...

...they can’t do what we do, and they hate us for it.

Stunts such as this one really mean that the joke is on us, as a whole communications industry.

To the outside looking in,we all look like those monkeys that Don Draper describes. If social media PR and and digitally driven comms in general is going to continue to have any credibility in business then we need to do much better than this.

Leaving children in charge of the shop is bad strategy.

And, in general, the idea that an industry publicly communicates that a candidate able to manage a clients business is likely to reveal themselves by their ability to tweet something funny doesn't say much about the likely quality of the thinking that clients are paying for.

In psychology they call this the 'effort reduction framework' and attribute substitution - a human cognitive bias which enables us to answer difficult questions by substituting the original question with an easier one.

This process is useful when choosing one kind of baked beans over another but choosing candidates to guide a clients business seems to me to be something that requires a bit more critical thinking, or else it's true.

Monkeys can do this.

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choice architecture

I've been contemplating the below screen capture from the Guardian mobile app for a few weeks but i'm none the wiser.



Is it a behavioural economist in the subs department having a laugh?

Or is there something in the fundamental arithmetic that I'm not getting?

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heuristics and biases. watch and learn with Katie Hopkins.

If you have even the most cursory of interest in behavioural stuff, human psychology and decision making then this clip from UK daytime TV, which has gone YouTube gangbusters in just a couple of days and features posh mouth and former reality TV 'star' Katie Hopkins, is for you.

Hopkins incurs the wrath of the presenters, guests and viewers for declaring that she uses certain mental shortcuts in order to decide which children she allows her own to play with.

She does this simply by answering the initial 'difficult' question about which she has little information to base her decision...

'Should I allow my child to go over to unknown child x's house to play?'

By instead substituting with a different, easier question...

'What does the name of child x and the location of child x's house tell me about the 'kind' of family that the child comes from, and therefore what are the most salient ideas I have about the socio-econimic circumstances and behaviours of these type of people'.

These shortcuts - and there are a few - that she predominantly relies upon are pretty much universal heuristics and cognitive biases.

The most immediately evident are:

Firstly, the affect heuristic.

In all of us this heuristic is typically useful while quickly judging the risks and benefits of anything.
The end decision depends on the previously stored positive or negative feelings and associations that the person associate with the given situation.

Your 'gut feeling' in other words.

At the same time, she's mapping in another couple of biases - representativeness and availability.

'...Potential playmate Child X -'Tyler'- lives in the 'bad' estate round the corner...'

Hopkins then very quickly fills in the gaps to create a plausible story about Tyler based on his name and where he lives using stereotypical attributes easily associated (ie available, meaning that they come most easily to mind) with working class, council estate kids with 'common' names.
Names who's origins can be traced to pop signers or celebrities from a particular recent time frame.

Therefore Tyler from the bad estate equates to; lazy kid who does not do his homework, has irresponsible parents who are probably unemployed, or work in manual or service industries - drink, smoke and swear, generally let their kids get away with murder - and before you know it her child will be round the back of the shops sniffing glue.

For the bourgeoise Hopkins, these are extremely salient images.

Hopkins gets panned by the other guests and presenters on the show but it's worth noting that these type of processes are in fact the way that most of our decisions are made.

Very fast and done with remarkably little information.

One or two pieces of data are enough for us to make up a story and move on.

Most of the time it's a pretty useful way to operate.

(Making decisions in the Supermarket, for instance, benefit greatly from this kind of thinking.
If we didn't use shortcuts, and rationally deliberated over the ingredients, packaging and cost-benefit analysis of Tomato vs Cream of Mushroom we would never make it out of the soup aisle and likely starve to death.)

From an actual cognitive processes point of view what we can ascertain is what Hopkins real decision was to deliberately give voice to instinctive, emotional System One (the unconscious automatic process) responses - that, for the most part, people suppress when they occur for fear of upsetting social norms - and allowing these suggestions to be fully endorsed by System Two (the rational, analytical process) and therefore Katie says what was actually on her mind without System Two putting the block on it.

But that's her schtick. A kind of posh touerretes.

In a sense our own representativeness bias makes it somehow socially unacceptable for an upper middle-class, minor celebrity, woman to be controversial in this sense, however if the same story had been delivered by a Frankie Boyle 'type' it might be regarded as satire.

Having said that, Hopkins is pretty hard to like, and in a moment of pure comedic cognitive dissonance, venomously berates parents who name children after geographical locations (Brooklyn etc) despite the fact that one of here own children is named India.

Must-see tv for planners.

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yesterday never comes

I wondered why most of the music I listen to nowadays seems to be stuff that I was deep into as a teenager and a lot of the beliefs around politics and culture and my position on things in general have their roots in those years.

There are are at least a couple of explanations. One I like is the idea of the reminiscence bump.

The bump can be explained in a cognitive sense - things experienced during a period of rapid change, ie ones teens, are better encoded as memories due to their novel and distinct nature. Once you're out of that period things become more stable, and more routines develop so the number of new experiences reduces.

Another theory is around personal narrative and identity. Essentially our sense of identity develops significantly during these years and then retrospectively we organise these memories - or, more accurately, 'sets' of associations - into the story of oneself.

And it is a story. Actual distinct memories will be relatively few, so we make up the rest - a kind of cryptomnesia - in order to make it coherent. Essentially our deeply felt sense of our own self and identity is - pretty much - a great work of fiction.

Or if you prefer, a more fun alternative, as reported in PsyBlog, is to consider nostalgia as a medical affliction.

A disease that we have, in fact, been infected with principally by the people of Switzerland.

"Nostalgia was regarded as a medical disease confined to the Swiss, a view that persisted through most of the 19th century. Symptoms—including bouts of weeping, irregular heartbeat, and anorexia—were attributed variously to demons inhabiting the middle brain, sharp differentiation in atmospheric pressure wreaking havoc in the brain, or the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Swiss Alps which damaged the eardrum and brain cells."

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i like big butts and I cannot lie

The City of Sydney has unveiled a large cigarette-filled 'Yuk' sculpture/installation in Hyde Park that aims to get draw some attention to the issue of fag ends littering the park and other areas of the street.



So reports Campaign Brief.

The conventional approach is enforcement through bans and fines but this activation uses emotional triggers; firstly the installation is novel and surprising enough that you may want to have a closer look and then, of course you have another gut reaction (disgust) upon closer inspection.

How long before a hedonic adaptation kicks in (ie the novelty wears off) remains to be seen, but an interesting tactic none the less.

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