Never get out of the boat

Friday, February 07, 2014

behavioural science at the movies

This probably tells it's own tale of extreme nerdiness but we particularly enjoyed a couple of movies recently in which the plots leaned heavily on some choice behavioural nuggets.

First up is the latest Richard Curtis rom-com, About Time.

The main protagonist Tim, as played by Domhnall Gleeson, learns a secret about the men in their family from his father.

They all have the ability to time travel.

Upon learning the trick, Tim is then able to transport himself back in time to pivotal moments in his life and remake certain decisions, for the most part around relationships with women, that resulted in sub-optimal outcomes.

But the real stars of the film, are of course, our old friends system one and system two. Most of Tim's bad decisions that he goes to fix are of the automatic and emotionally driven.

With the benefit of his time machine superpower Tim is able to revisit the system one emotional errors and put them right with a bit of system two logic.

Hindsight bias a-go-go.

Now you have a scientific excuse to enjoy some rom-com fluff.

Using the splendid Random Cognitive Neuroscience Paper Title Generator we've retitled the film as 'Neural systems for romantic love: A new hypothesis'. Or perhaps even 'Quantification of episodic retrieval and semantic processing'.

Next one, and probably no surprise is American Hustle.

It was down ther on our to watch-list but rapidly moved up to the top following a tweet by radio presenter, ad chap and behavioural/psychology author of Born Liars, Ian Leslie.

Leslie commented 'Unacknowledged scriptwriters on American Hustle: Daniel Kahneman and Robert Cialdini' which is a pretty spot-on assessment.

Loosely based on a real-life 70's political and mob corruption scandal, two con artists, Irving Rosenfeld Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser are coerced by an FBI agent, Richie DiMaso into devising - perhaps the original - classic fake sheikh sting operation, by which the bureau hope to nab some 'bent' politicians and the New Jersey mobsters.

The phoney sheikh is introduced to supposedly fund the building of some super casinos thus boosting both the local economy, which pleases the basically good but somewhat flakey mayor, and the mafia (aka the local business community) lot that he has to keep in with.

As one would expect with a narrative about con-artists the recurring theme is 'people believe what they want to believe', aka confirmation bias.

As it is set in the 70's there are no social media experts present, however.

With liberal doses of justification bias and cognitive dissonance - good people rationalising why they are doing bad things - it's also a psychology-of-persuasion-fest.

Essentially every trick in the Cialdini book (count 'em) comes into play between all the characters as they each try and out-manipulate each other.

So it goes, and may the best persuader win, but although there are a good few laughs don't expect a Richard Curtis-esque feel-good fuzzy ending.

We retitled this one as 'A double dissociation of narrative comprehension from spoken cued recall in motor cortex'.

Thursday, February 06, 2014

distinctive brand assets again #BobDylan

By the mid-80's Bob Dylan's singing voice had somewhat evolved from his 'classic' 60's period ouvre.

Softer and a touch more melodic.

While not troubling the pop charts as often as in the previous two decades he was still pretty huge.

Therefore Bob was an obvious shoe-in for Lionel Ritchies 'We Are The World' project.

For younger readers, this was a US version of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure's Band Aid, a multi-artist charity song to raise funds for the Ethiopian Famine crisis.

The story goes that as Bob was rehearsing his lines in the song, Ritchie - the musical director - was having trouble getting to grips with Dylan's softer vocal approach and phrasing.

Ritchie was mindful of the fact that each individual voice needed to be instantly recognisable and distinguishable for a mass global public.

In the end, the only way Ritchie could ar the performance he wanted from Bob was to articulate it thus..

'That's great Bob, but could you do it again. This time make it a bit more....Dylan-ish'.

The clip below doesn't feature this fabled exchange however you can see Dylan making a solid effort to sing more like 'himself'.

As a footnote, his Bob-ness popped up in an epic, de rigueur, Chrysler Super-Bowl spot.

To the cries of sell-out from the outraged faux-hipster commentators, obviously.

But the furore reminded us of this nugget from Heath and Potter's Rebel Sell.

'Whenever you look at the list of consumer goods that [according to critics of capitalism] people don't really need, what you invariably see is a list of consumer goods that middle-aged intellectuals don't need ... Hollywood movies bad, performance art good; Chryslers bad, Volvos good; hamburgers bad, risotto good.'

Tuesday, February 04, 2014

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.

Monday, February 03, 2014

distinctive brand assets

Apparently while A/B testing, Facebook engineers uncovered this little nugget.

When their app was shown to be slow to load on iPhones, users were more inclined to apportion blame to Apple when the recognisable round spinny Apple thing appeared.

Whereas the appearance of the blocky thing indicator meant that their ire was more likely to be directed at Facebook.

I wonder which one they decided to go with?

This reminds me of a meeting I once sat in with the head of a big entertainment 'portal', in the UK.

The discussion was around the challenges faced when integrating third-party content into their platform.

The head of the platform said: 'Let's remember that it's not always about solving the problem, it's about making the other guy look bad'.

It's the sharing economy, baby.

(hat-tip for the pic to somebody on Twitter, can't remember who.)

**UPDATE**

Original Twitter source was probably James Kimmel - sorry mate.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

anthropomorphism

I once met Bud Luckey.

He's most famous as the chief character designer on many of the Pixar movies.

Toy story, Cars, Mosters Inc and the Incredibles, amongst others.

As an ad nerd I was more excited to be meeting the creator of Tony The Tiger from the Frosties ads.

Bud's ouvre is anthropomorphism.

A word that should be familiar to us in advertising.

The attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

It should have been familiar to me, indeed I was once scolded by Mr Dodds for not knowing the word.

My only excuse being that I was used to the easier to understand 'personification', which means kinda the same thing.

Anyway, I wonder what Bud would make of this real ticket barrier on the London Underground's Jubilee line that sings Blur's 'Song 2'.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

in them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

Looking at most everyday products, stuff like light bulbs, car insurance, bleach or any of the other myriad of products that one doesn't reasonably choose to buy or not, product x is easily substituted by product y.

More often than not these will be purchases driven by things like habit, price and whether or not we have heard of the brand.

These would be what we might call utilitarian purchases.

With these type of things there's likely to be very little narrative constructed by the buyer around the activity.

If, on the other hand, the product in question is more 'unnecessary' or hedonic, some gizmo or other - probably expensive, there is a greater chance the buyer will create a story for themselves, usually about how said gizmo fits in with your self-image.

This helps you rationalise the fact that you had to choose the item, then spend some significant wedge on it.

Choosing one thing over another thing requires a narrative about why you did it.

Knowing this it's easy to undertand why certain premium brands appear to benefit from greater brand 'loyalty'.

These buyers are not necessarily more loyal, they have just had to construct a better post-hoc narrative to convince themselves they made good choices.

We'll tend to display a consistency bias - in which we will modify future behaviours to be in line with what we have previously said or done.

For most brands, the majority of sales come from the huge volume of people who might only buy one or twice a year. Not the hardcore loyalists.

This is because very few people are 100% brand loyal in any given category, I'm no exception.

Except when it concerns tea.

It was not always this way, but given the opportunity, ie the availability, I'll now only drink Yorkshire.

Things changed.

Yorkshire was among the preferred choices in the UK though, in line with the duplication of purchases law we were also perfectly happy with Tetley's, PG Tips or even M&S own brand on occasion, and depending on physical availability.

On coming to Australia the tea situation was different. The most popular brand, I'm guessing as it occupies the bulk of shelf space in the supermarkets, was Liptons.

So upon experimenting with the brand leader first, we unfortunately came to the realisation that it was rank rotten.

Others such as Billy Tea and Twinings Australian fared no better.

Then one day at the British Butcher shop out in the eastern suburbs a source of imported Yorkshire was uncovered.

But at $25 a pop for box of 400 it was now firmly in the realm of hedonic purchases therefore requiring a better narrative to rationalise the purchase.

Henceforth, the tea was now in the same bundle of 'taste-from-home' category purchases that included black pudding, tattie scones and square sausage, to be enjoyed once-every-now-and-then.

For many months that same ritual was performed, until now, and Yorkshire appears to have been incorporated as a line in one of the major supermarkets.

To be on the safe side, and feeling my scarcity bias kicking in at lunchtime today, the pictured bulk purchase was made, also not lightly influenced by a price framing effect as $3.50 for 100 significantly kicks the arse of 25 bucks for 400 .

So now with a utilitarian price point and a hedonic narrative it's all win on the tea front, for now.

wouldn't it be loverly?

In Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory and named her Galatea, then subsequently fell in love with the sculpture.

Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is a further adaptation of the same story.

In fact there's umpteen variants, if you're so geek-ily inclined.

In more modern times there's George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion.

In this adaptation - probably most famous as the musical version My Fair Lady - the working-class cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle* is transformed by one Professor Henry Higgins ('Enry 'Iggins), who teaches her to refine her accent and conversation and conduct herself in a manner so to integrate the manners and norms appropriate in upper-class social situations.

*Worth also noting that Audrey Hepburn's cockney accent was somewhat more believable than that other Hollywood cock-er-nee Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins - until I was 27 i was under the impression he was supposed to be a migrant Dutchman on some sort of Euro chimneysweep exchange program.

Psychology has also adopted the theme, The Pygmalion effect occurs when people alter their behavior to meet situational expectations.

We mentioned the Boston cardboard cut-out cop in a previous post.
Not strictly a Pygmalion effect, more of a purist peripheral-exposure nudge.

However the introduction of lifesize cardboard cutouts of doctors and nurses in the fruit and veg section of the Salford branch of UK supermarket Morrisons appears to have contributed to a spike in sales of healthy food, according to a report in the Telegraph.

'In the first study of its kind in the UK, the lifesize images of real doctors and nurses who work in the area were positioned in the supermarket together with Let’s Shop Healthier messages inside and outside the shop.

The study by the National Obesity Forum found that over a 15-week period, volume sales of fresh fruit in the store were 20 per cent higher and in control stores, while frozen fruit sales were up by 29 per cent'.

The kicker is when the Pygmalion effect is combined with what psychologists call the Exposure effect.

As an aside, this effect is why celebrity endorsements are so popular and effective in advertising.

People tend to like things more merely because they are familiar with them.

In this example the medical professionals used in the display were, indeed, all local practitioners so would be familiar to many of the shoppers.

While the report doesn't mention any price promotions that may have been running and the cut-outs are, of course part of a the bigger 'Let's Shop Healthier' initiative, if Morrison's shopper marketing people were adopting the some of the principles of behavioural economics to help their customers make better decisions the wouldn't it be loverly?

Hat-tip and finders fee to Claire McAlpine via Twitter.

does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno.

Using physical metaphor to describe abstract concepts is something we tend to do all the time.

In this blog I'll usually call important books we've been reading a weighty tome, or something.

Meetings get pushed out, arguments are heated, ideas get bounced around (ok, to be clear I never say that one but I've heard it plenty).

As you would expect, there's a name for this phenomenon, there's a couple actually.

In philosophy, the embodied mind thesis holds that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. And psychologists call it embodied cognition.

Morrissey asked the question - in Still ill - 'does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno.'

So, despite being somewhat well read, Moz has clearly skipped some of his key philosophy and psychology texts. It would appear the body does indeed rule the mind.

This mode of interpreting the world has evolved because our thoughts are rooted in the physical, and in particular in our bodies. And that's how we frame it.

Theres a ton of research showing how the physical world can influence our thoughts.

Washing our hands tends to make us more moralistic in the immediate period afterwards.

Other studies have shown that when speaking about the future we tend to lean slightly forwards versus thinking about the past and we lean slightly backwards. The underlying metaphor, of course is that of the 'past being behind us' and 'the future is ahead of us'

The top person on this topic is the linguist George Lakoff. Funnily enough he is the chap most associated with developing idea of framing. Itself an embodied metaphor.

One final example of embodiment interacting with the mind’s metaphors.

As it goes, there's some evidence to suggest that heavier people will often display a greater sense of their own self-importance.

I've dropped nearly 10 kilos over the last 3 or 4 months which is good news, possibly for readers of this blog, and almost certainly for those who have to deal with me on a daily basis.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

the miles davis heuristic

While working in an indie record shop back in the day I picked up a quick rule-of-thumb that had been developed by the owners of the shop and the chain.

In evaluating the credentials and potential threat of any rival shops or even other shops in other towns we would head straight for the Miles Davis section.

Most rivals would stock Kind Of Blue and a few compilations, possibly Sketches of Spain and some of his 80s ouvre.

These shops would not be marked as a significant threat.

However those who stocked an extensive catalogue of Prestige era goodies and stuff like Bitches Brew and the Jack Johnson album were considered to be more serious competitors.

Turns out that one could make a decent stab at evaluating the competition from one data point, and be right more often than not.

Indeed, scientists Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling from University of Cambridge, UK, and University of Texas at Austin, in their paper The Role of Music Preferences in Interpersonal Perception back this up.

Their findings confirm that 'individuals use their music preferences to communicate information about their personalities to observers, and that observers can use such information to form impressions of others:

'[The study] revealed that music was the most common topic in conversations among strangers given the task of getting acquainted...

...observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions on the basis of targets’ music preferences.

...music preferences were related to targets’ personalities,

...the speciﬁc cues that observers used tended to be the ones that were valid,

...music preferences reveal information that is different from that obtained in other zero-acquaintance contexts.

In addition we are reminded of this nugget from his book, Life, in which Keith Richards describes how he and Mick Jagger initially clicked, in the early days before the Stones even existed as a thing.

He notes that they had almost identical tastes in music (blues, r'n'b) and an almost telepathic understanding, and agreement on which music was right and wrong.

He recalls..

'... It was either that's the shit or that isn't the shit.

No matter what kind of music you were talking about. I really liked some pop music if it was the shit. But there was a definite line of what the shit was and what wasn't the shit. Very strict.'

On occasion we've employed the Miles Davis Heuristic in hiring situations.

When it's hard to choose between two candidates, equal on every level, then asking them to provide a list of their top five albums of all time can work as a tiebreaker.

On one such occasion a candidate blew it by offering up a Sting album in their list.

Sting?

It was game over from that point.

Clearly, that isn't the shit.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

reports of Facebook's death greatly exaggerated

So, The Guardian reports on a study from Princeton University that claims Facebook is set to lose 80% of its users by 2017.

Indeed, according to the study, Facebooks's impending doom (sic) comes from 'comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease'.

While the twittersphere has erupted there's a couple of things to note about the article that might temper any death notions for the moment.

Firstly consider this quote 'John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term.'

So things are already starting to smell a bit bogus.

Particularly when the report admits that 'The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could explain the drop in Google searches – those looking to log on are no longer doing so by typing the word Facebook into Google.'

So that's 870 million from what Facebook report as a 1.2 billion monthly active user base, ie roughly 75%ish of users discounted from the off.

Secondly, read into the body of the article the claim is slightly less sensational 'Princeton forecast says it will lose 80% of its peak user base within the next three years'.

So, even if that prediction were to be true, dropping science on it a few rules come into play…

Retention double jeopardy:
All brands drop some users and the loss is proportionate to their market share (so big brands (i.e. Facebook) will certainly lose more but it’s a smaller proportion of their base.

Pareto law redux 60/20:
A bit more than half of Facebook's usage will come from the top 20% of users (peak user base) – the rest come from the bottom 80% therefore a drop of 80% peak user base is not a massive number, and will be balanced by….

Natural monopoly law:
Brands with more market share will continue to attract a greater proportion of light users.

And finally…

The law of buyer moderation:
Heavy users use less in the period after they were classified as heavy users and thus the flip may also probably be true of light users, they will use a bit more (i.e. regression to the mean) and some will become heavy users.

So, will Facebook be over in 2017?

Based on the data we have today, and barring any unexpected or random events in the near future that we can't possibly predict.

No.

**UPDATE**

Facebook's own data scientists have published their own humorous rebuttal which includes this observation:

'In keeping with the scientific principle "correlation equals causation," our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely.'

thanks Phil Sheard and Ciarán Norris for the heads up.

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.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

my hunch is that this probably qualifies as an anti #nudge

Firstly a recap on behaviour change 101.

For a behaviour to be changed or otherwise shaped then there are two principle conditions that need to be taken into account.

Condition number one concerns the motivating factors for the person or persons from whom the change is required.

More often than not the motivator will take the form of some sort of reward.

Condition two requires the new or modified behaviour to be easy for said persons to adopt.

According to nudge theory, the ease in which a behaviour is adopted can be influenced by how the choices are presented.

For instance, arranging the choice architecture in a way that people can be gently nudged in a certain direction without taking away their 'freedom of choice'.

Looking at the situation on this platform in a western Sydney railway station, one is inclined (and there's not necessarily any expert intuition involved) to surmise that this qualifies as an anti-nudge.

From a behavioural economics stand point we should be mindful of that human cognitive bias that always seems to come and trip us up when designing reward mechanisms, namely loss aversion - and its ability to make subjects feel losses (or the prospect of losses) about twice as badly as how one would feel about the equivalent gains.

To that note one has to admit that the possibly dangerous behaviour - standing too close to the platform - does seem to have a certain level of reward attached, meaning that any mechanism designed to combat the behaviour would need a fairly substantial reward upgrade in order to motivate.

And finally, we are reminded of the story of 70s footballer and enfant terrible Stan Bowles, essentially yer English George Best.

Bowles was making a rare appearnce for the English national team and before the match was informed by boss, Sir Alf Ramsey that he would be pulled off at half-time.

To which Bowles replied 'That's great, all we get is an orange at QPR'.

representativeness

'I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar

Then it meant that you were a protest singer

Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible'

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

positional authenticity

Holding my hands up, I've been guilty in the past of wheeling out skunk words like 'authentic' in the past.

Luckily one has sobered up somewhat now.

Giddy on social media and 'prosocial' kool-aid is my only excuse m'lud.

There seems to be plenty of others still caning it, however.

Try this one for size.

"The Human Era is about a fundamental societal shift in relationships," explains Simon Glynn, Lippincott EMEA director in Warc. "As people lose confidence in institutions, and put greater trust even in total strangers, companies need to rethink how they connect with people,"

Full marks to Glynn for 'labelling' his 'thing' from the off.

But when have people ever had confidence in institutions?

Do we really place great trust in total strangers?

Have companies ever connected with people?

Glynn then goes on to describe the six characteristics of trusted brands in this Human Era, namely: customer empathy, behaving like real people, being open and real to the point of being flawed, not being boring, caring about the little things and empowering individuals 'to be the brand'.

[Yes you did read that correctly - 'empowering individuals to be the brand'.]

"Many brands talk about the importance of customers, but few actually deliver on their promise and make an authentic connection," he continues.

Putting the general babble to one side and turning down the volume on the kumbaya soundtrack for a second, just notice the liberal sprinkling of authentic and real.

We should always be mindful of the fact that any notions of authenticity in a market economy are by nature inauthentic.

They are purely positional.

In pretending that a goal of 'authentic connection with our customers' comes before shifting product this faux-pursuit of the authentic simply makes the output even more phony.

So what Glynn is talking about in the Human Era is really urging brands to demonstrate 'conspicuous authenticity'.

Because the market truth is that all consumption is about status. Sorry hipsters.

Authentic, flawed and real are pure positioning, and just as inauthentic as any other marketing.

And that's fine but let's not start trying to claim any higher ground.

And as Andrew Potter says in - his splendid tome on this kind of stuff The Authenticity Hoax - 'That’s all fine and good except for one thing: we don’t have a clue what we mean by authenticity, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know how to find it.'

Monday, January 20, 2014

what you see is all there is

We all have bias towards the information that's available to us versus the information we don't have.

We don't know what we don't know and will make our decisions without taking the information we don't have into account.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this phenomenon what you see is all there is.

With that in mind it's interesting to contrast a couple of points of view that we noticed this week.

Firstly, here's a snapshot from a statement by R/GA supremo Bob Greenberg, as reported in Campaign Brief, around the challenges for advertising in the coming year.

Greenberg made five points, read the whole thing if you like here, we've summarised a couple of the more pointy bits.

On a need for new business models he claims ... '[in these new business models] the purchase is just the beginning that connects consumers to an "ecosystem of value" and spurs further purchases, as Apple, Google and Amazon have all done with their ecosystems: get the same consumer to buy more things from the same brand.'

'Many of these new business models for clients will be based upon the integration of physical products with digital services. The marketing of them will be "built in" to the device itself, as was the case with Nike+ Fuelband.'

'They will "earn" the data from their consumers by providing digital services that deliver tremendous value by becoming personalised partners to consumers in everything from their finances to their health/fitness to what they cook for dinner at night to where they go on vacation to what clothes they wear, what make-up they use.'

Meanwhile in Campaign mag Chris Arnold, former Saatchi & Saatchi Creative Director reports on how the biggest FMCG brands are seeing more success than ever with so-called traditional marketing activities, ie TV, and are reducing spend on on-line activities.

'Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Unilever and Tesco – have dramatically slashed on-line marketing spend.

Tesco currently spends over £34m on TV advertising (that excludes outdoor and press) but now only budgets 1.4m on digital advertising, less than 5% of TV spend.

When it comes to social media, well it seems TV ads are probably the number one reason to talk about a brand, just look at John Lewis. The second is PR.

And for all the on-line chat, 80-90% of chat actually happens off-line. That too may surprise you, but in fact it’s been researched and again the media has hyped up the opposite.'

So who is right?

My sense is that Greenberg's argument cuts the least amount of mustard.

For example, even for tech brands like Apple, their heaviest users are likely to buy as much Apple product as they can reasonably expect to to buy, and - like just about everyone else in every other category - their growth depends on bigger penetration, getting more people who haven't bought much Apple product historically to buy for the first time, or a bit more.

Similarly his argument for brands becoming 'personalised partners to consumers' may somewhat apply in the realms of Nike Fuelband or FitBit but in the world of the 99% of other purchases people make on a daily basis it's a tad on the wishful thinking side.

And, lest we forget (and to avoid straying into Texas Sharpshooter territory, Nike's brand has been consistently built over a long time with tendrils that wrap themselves themselves around all sorts of media - to quote John Grant 'a cluster of strategic cultural ideas' - including everything from the product itself to the communication.

For the majority of brands it's hard enough to just get noticed and remembered, never mind being a personalised partner. And you will know this by the trail of the dead in branded app world - upwards of 90 percent of all downloaded apps are used once and then binned.

As renowned game developer and theorist Kathy Sierra famously noted 'no-one lies on their deathbed saying I wish I'd spent more time engaging with brands'.

In regard to what you see is all there is, we're inclined to say that pronouncements about the death of advertising and such like that mostly emanate from the digerati bubble and seem to be backed up with the same tech examples all the time, highly visible to the digerati, mostly invisible everyone else.

That's not to say that tactics that delivered rapid growth for some tech companies in early development haven't worked a treat.

Indeed, in Inc this week 'marketing guru' (their description) Ryan Holiday tells us 'traditional marketing tactics are dead...the smartest companies think beyond the traditional marketing and promotion boundaries.

For example, Dropbox found it cost a few hundred dollars per new customer to build its customer base through Google AdWords...until they began offering added storage as an incentive for getting a friend to sign up...the storage-for-referral program generated 40 percent of the company's growth'.

Sure, but for a start someone should inform Holiday that Google adwords do a decent job of fulfilling demand but expecting them to create demand is a bit of a stretch. That's the job of advertising.

Before we get into a this v that channel scrap, Sturgeons revelation applies to all forms of marketing. Mass reach media included. Upwards of 90% is shit.

But, let's be mindful that what may be applicable to something like growth hacking (yuk) for DropBox - and, of course, discounting the fact that for most of its users they are not required to part with a cent to use - does not apply to toothpaste or soap powder and the other 90% on consumer spending that happens off-line, out in the world and for which the predominant factors affecting that spend are convenience, habit, what seems to be popular and simple availability.

Imagining that a Dropbox model applies to everything else in every other category is pretty dubious.

My fear for these ideas of 'new business model(s) in which the purchase is just the beginning that connects consumers to an ecosystem of value' is that it just sounds like too much hard work when we all have busy lives that we just want to get on with.

Horses for courses.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

tell me now 'n' show me how. to understand what makes a good ad?

While I have no desire to repeat the 'make the logo bigger' kerfuffle that followed my comments on the lack of branding in the John Lewis Christmas ad being best understood as an exception rather than a rule - there's another example in this area that has cropped up.

And while my JL comments were actually misinterpreted by most of the detractors I stand by them.

The purpose of branding is, for the most part, creating mental availability - making the brand easy to remember and salient in buying situations.

Creativity is, obviously, the vehicle by which this happens.

But it is still advisable to introduce distinctive brand assets into the content quicker and sometimes more frequently.

So I was interested to view Doddsy's comments on the fantastic new Guinness spot, and will then humbly suggest perhaps a middle way.

John says:

'Guinness's new advertisement featuring the elegant gentlemen of Brazzaville ties in well with their theme of individuality and is unquestionably interesting and visually arresting. But, oh how they shoe-horn in the product shots towards the end and emphasise that this is indeed an advertisement and not a slice of culture.

Personally, I'd have settled for a single mention at the end of the piece and the assumption that the viewer was intelligent enough to make the connection. This way, I fear the reaction is much more likely to be along the lines of "What's this got to do with Guinness?"

If we agree that effective advertising needs to do two things.

1. Be well branded
2. Get noticed.

Then the spot definitely does point 2 but perhaps, to John's point, doesn't do point 1 so well as the product and branding seems somewhat clumsily placed.

So here's my first question.

What's so funny 'bout getting the branding in from the get-go right up front?

'Guinness presents...' then on with the show?

Creatives hate this idea when I suggest it, though I've never had a decent explanation of why.

Second question is around the obvious lack of paid promotion.

The clip is currently sitting at a paltry 165k views despite having all the hallmarks of multi-million viral smash.

There's solid data from Karen Nelson-Field's research at Ehrenberg-Bass that suggests the creative device used (essentially 'personal triumph') tends to be shared the most, and it has the high arousal positive emotional response element (inspiration, probably) plus a kick arse swamp rockin' soundtrack by The Heavy.

Again, according to the data the single biggest predictor (assuming it does the tricks as mentioned above) of online video sharing is it's initial distribution.

For the best performing videos it's about 8 views to 1 share.

24 to 1 is the average.

So to get sharing, initial seeding/paid support is key.

The social media myth is that we need to reach a few influentials in order to reach millions, in actual fact the opposite is true.

You need to reach millions to infect the rest.

Also, to that point, and in an apples for apples situation (i.e. Compelling content that evokes high arousal emotional response) brand videos that are on TV + online are likely get shared more than online only.

But in summary.

If a video evokes a high arousal positive response then the amount of branding present will not inhibit shares and views so, don't be shy, get it in there, right up front.

Even the greatest, most creative most exciting video if only seen by a few people, wont get many shares. Get it in front of as many as possible.

fight to win or you die

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz famously notes:

'As the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice. Routine decisions take so much time and attention it becomes difficult to get though the day. In circumstances like these, we should learn to view limits on the possibilities we face as liberating not constraining.'

In a small agency and often with increasingly small budgets it's easy to get the hump with imposed constraints.

Then a bigger project comes along and there can be too many options. Too many possibilities.

In both of these situations the role of strategy is the same.

Discovering which are the critical factors and designing actions to deal with them.
In both big and small challenges there's still decisions to be made about what NOT to do as much what to do.

To that note I always remember the story of General Xiang Yu, who sent his army across the Yangtze River to take on the Qin Dynasty in the 3rd Century BC.

On the night before the big battle, as his troops slept, the General ordered all of the ships to be set on fire.

The next day he told his perplexed army:

‘You now have a choice: Either you fight to win or you die.’

That's a fairly extreme strategy but it does display a degree of confidence. Never a bad thing.

In recent times we've gone into pitches that, as a small agency, we had no right to win (on paper) but came out with the business.

The appearance of supreme confidence in your presentation is often a critical factor.

So by removing the option of retreat, he switched his troops focus to the the most important thing. The battle.

If they were going to get out of there then it was only going to be in somebody else's boats.

I mention this as I read a splendid post on Adliterate this week entitled In Defence of War.

An excerpt:

'One of the ideas that has most fallen out of fashion in the face of new age marketing has been the metaphor of war. Its use is still reasonably endemic – we talk about penetration, campaigns, winning share, positioning, and the like but its all terribly unfashionable.

The dogma of new age marketing...has created a culture in which we are supposed to stroke people into having ‘relationships’ with brands on an on going basis not launch a full frontal assault on them until they buy our products.

While this nicey-nicey approach feels altogether more comfortable it does rather avoid the reality of business and marketing in which most brands and most categories involve zero sum games where any success is utterly dependent on another businesses’ failure.'

Possibly another slightly extreme view bearing in mind the Duplication of Purchases law that applies in most categories however spot on in the assessment that the fluff around 'relationships' with brands that prevails in just that, and stripping down strategy to the critical factors - fight to win or die - is perhaps not a bad approach to liberating via self imposed constrains.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

someone left a baby in the car park

Somewhat more slapstick than the Carrie thing from last year, which we described as something of a masterclass in the construction of situations, but this one, for horror schlock-flick Devil's Due, gains entry to the archive due to our current obsession with public interventions and the splendid application of technology to enhance what is essentially a simple activation.

Quick recap on situations for those who have not been paying attention.

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.

That's the theory, and whack in some high arousal emotional response (ie physiological) and you are building those memory structures and associations nicely.

Extreme terror is obviously a tactic that should only be employed for certain categories. But when it works it works.

emergent strategy or just good strategy?

Presumably we're all familiar with the notion of agile, or emergent, strategy. The key idea being around limiting up-front planning to a minimum viability based on the assumption of impermanence and unpredictability in any given situation.

Emergent strategy is structured in order to be able to quickly adapt to new conditions as they arise.

Perhaps a close cousin of lean principles, much emergent planning theory is loosely based around the Google 70-20-10* formula for product development.

A formula by which 70% of resources are devoted to Google’s core group of revenue generating activities eg search and advertising. The fabled 'googletime' 20% was supposedly allocated to self directed innovation projects that Google staff were encouraged to pursue, while the final 10% was allegedly allocated to scaling up the bits and pieces that showed promise from the 20% time.

*Turns out that the 70-20-10 Google rule is more myth and legend than anything that actually happened in practice but it's nice in theory.

So in the advertising sense, applying 70% of budget and effort towards proven activities, 20% riffing on innovations based on what is known to work and 10% on wild card experiments also sounds good in theory but one would have a hard shift explicitly pushing that idea through with most of our clients, though of course that's not to say that things can't be framed to be palatable while still being somewhat true to the theory.

[So, this is perhaps where the most value can be gained out of so-called brand 'communities'.

By that I mean the tiny fraction of a brands customer base who seem to demonstrate some degree of loyalty.

This requires reframing these customers as an 'asset' rather than an audience.

This is perhaps the hardest thing for the social media marketing fraternity to swallow.]

For instance continually generating a broad range of small-scale low cost experiments, and then scaling up the ones that gain traction in order to innovate.

Again this is nothing new. Make small bets, light small fires etc.

But my question here is really this.

Is this emergent strategy? Is this agile planning?

Or is it just good strategy?

Reading Rumelt again over the holidays I became obsessed with this nugget.

The best strategists don’t choose or decide on a strategy; they design novel responses to challenges.

Given that challenges will always appear because of the inherent unpredictability in any given situation the emergent strategy is simply good strategy.

In fact Rumelt's kernel of good strategy seems to describe emergent strategy better than a appropriation of the Google rule.

The kernel of good strategy being made up of three components:

1. A diagnosis:
The more knowledge you can glean about the problems and the implications of your strategic options, the better equipped you are to tackle a diagnosis.

2. A guiding policy:
A guiding policy is not a set of hard goals. It does not say where the brand wants to go; it's some some general rules or guidelines for helping meet the challenges from the diagnosis.

3. A set of coherent actions:
So, once we have a diagnosis and a guiding policy established, a set of coherent actions is designed to implement the guiding policy.

Rumelt reckons that too many strategists, mistake the guiding policy for the strategy and forget the action element. And I've been guilty of this myself in the past, handballing what I falsely believed to be 'strategies' (ie guiding policies) over to comms planners to map and action.

So emergent strategy is really just good strategy.

And, in fact, strategy is not a thing in itself but is only realised when the three components of the kernel are present.

Monday, January 13, 2014

okay, okay, dont push us when we're hot!

I've always found it peculiar to have reviews of creative work and suchlike at the end of the working day.

While I have no data to back this up, one often finds that decisions made at these reviews will subsequently get reversed, modified or even thrown out the following day with the benefit of fresh eyes and ears.

In previous incarnations (and when it was my responsibility) I've set processes in place to allow for big decisions to be made in the early part of the day to allow for the rest of the day to be spent implementing and iterating. By the end of the day tired brains are in more of a state of flow rather than requiring big cognitive effort.

So when, at the tail end of last year, Stirling University's Behavioural Science Centre published a post on their blog highlighting their top 15 Best Behavioural Science Graphs of 2010-13 I was not surprised to see included the famous Danziger, Levav & Avnaim-Pesso (2011), Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions chart.

I've used this example in many presentations over the last couple of years to demonstrate the idea of ego depletion.

Ego depletion being the term used to describe the idea that things like self-control, willpower and the ability to perform tasks that require hard cognitive effort draw upon a limited supply of mental resources that can be used up. In essence a typical situation where system two type processes get too whacked out to function and therefore system one will take full control.

In the study the researchers examined over 1000 judicial rulings over a 10 month period by parole judges. The judges reviewed up to 35 parole cases per day and they took two daily food/coffee breaks (ie elevenses and lunch), and dividing the judging day into three sessions.

These break periods were pretty vital for those in the dock as the probability of the judges granting parole falls steadily from a high probability at the start of the day and just after breaks to nearly zero just before the breaks.

So the lesson being that if you find yourself in court - and presumably hope to get let off - then you want to be in front of the judge first thing in the morning or just after lunch or coffee breaks. Otherwise you'll be looking at a stretch.

Likewise, if we want to get the work right rather than just done and save on time wasted doing things over, a simple self-nudge may be to only schedule creative reviews in the mornings or right after lunchbreaks, to get the thinking bit done when there's brainjuice and get the doing done when there's flow.

Monday, December 23, 2013

if you kissed me now I know you'd fool me again

Seasons greetings and that to everyone who's read and shared this blog throughout the year and also to everyone who's ideas and thinking has shaped the stuff written here.

As is traditional we finish off for Christmas with a tune.

Here's James from the Manics injecting some angst into Wham's Last Christmas.

Thanks again, and see you after the break.

Eaon

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

if you can think of it, it must be important

It's sobering to note that at the end of 2013 there are still people, clients, agencies and organisations out there who are in varying degrees of confabulation - driven by emotions ranging from blind terror to rapture - around the impact (both apparent and potential) of the social media for their businesses and communications.

This, of course, only contributes to further uncertainty and, as we know, under uncertainty, biases in judgement - most often created by too much (or indeed too little) information - will lead to errors of thinking (and doing).

While we could joke that this situation would be easier to navigate if only there were some experts out there to offer guidance?

Or some information websites on how to successfully leverage social media?

Perhaps even a webinar or two or a set of ebooks one could buy?

Ha, but the problem is clearly the former. Too much information.

And in this situation two cognitive biases exert disproportionate influence.

Firstly, the availability heuristic is a mental shortcut by which decisions are made based on how easily similar examples that come to mind.

As a result, we tend judge that those events or examples that are easier to think of are more frequent and possible than others. We routinely overestimate the likelihood of similar things happening in the future, and likewise we overestimate the importance of stories that seem to be everywhere (ie easily mentally available).

From a brand marketing point of view, this bias is one that can be extremely useful.

Brands that appear to be popular, that are easily noticed and remembered (mental availability) and with the best distribution (physical/virtual availability) tend to benefit from larger market share. For a small brand looking to grow then getting to grips with availability is crucial.

[Interestingly, and statistically, one is more likely to be killed by a refrigerator falling on one's head than in any act of terrorism, but incidents of terrorism come to mind much more easily and are believed to be far more common.]

On the downside, the idea that 'social media is the answer to all branding and marketing problems' is a hugely available idea, initially propagated within the social media itself by 'experts' and - not only but also - repeated, received-wisdom-style by all and sundry, so that it comes so easily to mind that surely it must be true.

The reality being that there are very very few examples of brands that have been built or grown substantially through social media alone. Go to a few social media conferences and you will very shortly collect the set as the same examples are trotted out at every event.

The idea that 'consumers' want to have deep emotional connections and engage with brands is also a hugely available idea, while statistically on any given week, less than 0.5% of Facebook fans will engage with any brand they are fans of.

Given that a brand's Facebook following will mostly represent but a tiny proportion of its customer base, and for the most part follow for (let's be honest) customer service and/or freebie purposes then it's not a great case for growth through 'engagement'.

A season spent on the conference trail will further compound as one notices the constant presence of availability's close cousin, the projection bias, in which we tend to assume that others feel exactly the same as we do.

Secondly, another close cousin of availability (and projection) and perhaps the most dangerous and widely visible of biases in the social media space is the confirmation bias.

Until recently this was perhaps best described as the social media bubble, fishbowl or echo chamber, in which members display tendencies to read material that confirms existing beliefs, pay more attention to information and people who confirm existing beliefs, and search for corroborative evidence to confirm existing beliefs.

Chuck in a dash of sunk-cost fallacy and it's easy to see why, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, there is now a whole industry of social media gurus who want the 'death of this or that' to be true, will cherry pick and spotlight anything that supports it, and then congratulate themselves on their accuracy.

The word guru has it's origins in Sanskrit, the primary liturgical language of Hinduism.

Much can be learned from ancient eastern wisdom, of course.
Not least a healthy skepticism of the self-annointed thought-leader or guru.

The Kularnava Tantra is an important and authoritative text of the Shakta Agamic tantra tradition and a major statement of Hindu spiritual thought, including this nugget.

‘…there are many gurus who may rob the disciple's wealth but few who can remove the disciple's afflictions…’

Humans are probably the only species with the ability to think about the future, yet that hasn't helped our ability to predict. In fact the only accurate prediction one can confidently make is that the majority of our predictions will be wrong.

My closing hope, as opposed to prediction, is that as an ad industry we can overcome our confabulation in the year ahead, understand properly the role that digital and social has in an overall communications piece (for a role they undoubtably have, but not the be-all and end-all) and focus on what's really important.

To be better at understanding the behaviour of people in buying situations and developing the kind of things and communications that have the best chance of influencing those behaviours.

And finally, to perhaps best illustrate that heady brew of availability and confirmation bias I leave you with this splendid cartoon, shared by Doddsy some time ago in an unrelated tweet, and one that has featured in a number of my presentations this year to illustrate some of the points contained in this note.

Friday, December 13, 2013

magic piano

Here's another nice little situational thing, a public intervention enhancing the mundane by use of 'invisible' digital technology.

Or possibly a man inside the piano.

Drawing in bystanders and spectators at Chicago Union Station.

The Magic Piano, allegedly responds to changes in the environment in real time.

Some of the participants in the clip are clearly actors (or direct agents, as we prefer to call them) but we still smiled.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

what is there to be seen and what we actually notice

The snippet below from Consumer.ology by Philip Graves - a tome who's place on the plannery types bookshelf should be taken as a given - gives further power to the argument that getting advertising and branding noticed in the first place and subsequently remembered in buying situations is our imperative.

And furthermore should raise alarm at how often and easily the lofty goals such as consumer engagement and deep emotional connections are trotted out as likely and achievable.

The reality being that people don't think about brands very much, nor do they know much about them or particularly care. While this sounds grim, what it really describes is the opportunity for creativity.

I think it was Dave Trott who said that the most important question on any creative brief, yet the one that rarely appears is 'how does this piece of advertising get noticed?'.

Anyway, I digress.

Here's the science bit.

"According to researchers from Penn University, the human eye can transmit approximately 10 million pieces of information per second. Regardless of the mind-boggling quantities of data involved, anyone who has ever spent any amount of time looking for something, and then found it in one of the places they had already checked, will know that there is a big difference between what is there to be seen and what we actually notice.

The highest estimates suggest that the most we’re able to process is around 40 pieces of information per second (from all our senses, not just visually), so you can forgive yourself for not finding those keys first time around!"

There is a big difference between what is there to be seen and what we actually notice.

In psychology one description of this phenomenon is 'inattentional blindness'.

Which leads me to this 'card-trick' from Richard Wiseman, kindly shared with us by Wiemer Snijders.

We are into card ticks this week, I played a simple one on the audience at AIMIA last week, as a faux-mass hypnosis memory experiment.

I subsequently recieved several messages asking how it was done.

As my magic-circle application is pending, unfortunately I can't reveal.

may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window?

In an episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil entertains a hard of hearing and somewhat curmudgeonly guest - Mrs Richards - who complains about some of the features of her room.

Mrs. Richards: And another thing. I booked a room with a view.

Basil: [Goes to the window] Yes, this is the view as I remember it, yes, yes, this is it.

Mrs. Richards: When I pay for a room with a view, I expect something more interesting than that.

Basil: That is Torquay madam.

Mrs. Richards: Well it's not good enough.

Basil: Well, may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the...?

Mrs. Richards: Don't be silly. I expect to be able to see the sea.

Basil: You can see the sea. It's over there between the land and the sky.

Mrs. Richards: I'd need a telescope to see that.

Perhaps the good people at Google Creative Labs had this in mind as they developed this splendid installation (not sure what to describe it as) as part of Sydney Opera House's 40th birthday celebrations last month.

The project, entitled Binoculars, entailed a special set of those vintage panoramic view binoculars (the ones that look like a face), installed on the footsteps of the Opera house.

Viewers who participated were then able to do what Mrs Richards was unable to in Torquay and view 40 other iconic locations around the world - including the Colorado River, the Palace of Versailles, and Shackleton's hut in Antarctica - using imagery from, and to demonstrate, Google Street View.

Thanks to Ciarán Norris, who kindly pointed me to this in recognition of my current infatuation with outdoor media enhanced with digital technologies.

The beauty being the ability deliver indiscriminate shared experiences for broad audiences without the baggage of tight targeting, faux-relevance and hyper-personalisation that the adtech world has misguidedly embraced.

The audience for this intervention is anyone with eyes and a sense of curiosity.

The future of digital advertising is out-door :). Here's the Fawlty Towers clip too.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

when saturday comes

I was speaking for the Australian interactive media industry body, AIMIA, this week and last week.

The events were their annual 'Future of Digital' seminars in Sydney and also Melbourne.

I did my usual controversy, which seemed to go down reasonably well.

One of the other speakers was Laurie Patton, the Media and Entertainment Exec Director from Telstra.
We chatted before and after and he was a very nice and smart fella.

He nonchalantly dropped this anecdote in his talk but it struck me as being something of an insight that I had not considered before.

Amongst his duties at Telstra Laurie is working with a number of sports stadia in Australia to integrate digital technology into live sporting events, to enhance them in situ.

The remarkable point Laurie made was that stadia owners and operators are cognisant of the sports viewing experience at home becoming more of an 'experience' than attending in real-life.

In an unexpected flip (to these ears at least) viewing at home on TV with connected devices etc offering in running stats, multiple camera angles and replays (and close proximity to the fridge) is potentially more attractive than the schlep to the stadium and is therefore increasingly a challenge to both the stadia and sporting associations.

Good luck to Laurie and his people in solving this conundrum.

On the one hand it's further fuel to the 'TV is not dead and nor is it likely to be dead anytime soon' lobby and also my own pet thought that the media channel that stands to benefit more from the introduction of digital-ness is the humble out-of-home.

feel good hit of the summer? (or winter - choose your hemisphere)

A textbook case of how how to have a viral hit and maximising brand effect.

Using branding and market-based assets throughout (purple Santa and Elves was a nice touch) – tick

Evoking high arousal emotional response (i.e. reason to share) INSPIRATION, EXHILARATION, ASTONISHMENT – tick

Presented in the context of brand use and occasion - tick

Creative device? - 'personal triumph (sort of)' - tick

Probably backed with significant paid promotion and seeding upfront to maximise initial reach - (assumed) tick

Also worth noting: another example of doing something first - a situational or cultural intervention - then advertising what you have done.

Congratulations, WestJet.

Friday, December 06, 2013

a friday note on distribution and sharing a coke

This short World Cup 2014 film for Coca-Cola by Ogilvy in Shanghai has almost everything required to be be a viral hit, yet it isn't (yet).

Why should that be?

Here's some clues, from the appliance of science.

In Chapter 4 of 'Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing' by Karen Nelson-Field from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (the chapter is entitled, 'Not all Fart jokes are Funny') Karen imparts the following.

In the course of her team's extensive research they find no correlations between sharing and the particular creative device used in a film, neither were there links between specific emotions and creative device, but there are relationships between the degree of emotional arousal felt and likelyhood of sharing activity.

They describe this as high arousal emotional response.

The one exception to the rule is when the creative device employed is 'personal triumph' - this shares significantly more even with low arousal emotions.

To get shared, the general lesson is to focus less on which creative device is applied and more on how arousing the creative is. So far so good for Coke and Ogilvy Shanghai, the film has all the ingredients

But that's not the whole story.

Karen and her team challenge the common belief that the key to spreading is in infecting a few adopters in order to reach millions over time.

This is the most available idea of how the diffusion of content occurs.

The evidence however says that this is the opposite of what actually happens.

Apart from a few cherry picked exceptions (the ones that appear in the social media case studies) the diffusion curve is, in fact, negative - after launch the degree of penetration for a video drops after a short period of time.

And, assuming it's compelling content, evokes high arousal emotional response, the single biggest other predictor of online video sharing is it's initial distribution.

According to Karen's research, for the best performing videos the ratio about 8 views to 1 share.

For others that perform reasonably well 24 to 1 is the average.

So to get mass sharing, initial seeding/paid support is key. Assuming the video is good and pulls the tricks above, then it needs to be put in front of as many people as possible in order to spread.

A few 'influencers' will not cut the mustard, most of the time.

One can only assume that little paid promotion has been put behind this terrific little film - a story of personal triumph - or else it would be a viral smash.

Likewise the many other Coca-Cola World Cup films in the series, from around the world, all of which are languishing with very few views and shares in YouTube.

Don't tell me Coca-Cola don't have a few bob to stick behind this great content.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

make the logo bigger, eaon

I got hammered by some commenters on Mumbrella for suggesting that the John Lewis Christmas ad, while a stunning piece of content, creativity and all that, is best viewed as an exception rather than a rule in terms of the amount of branding available in the film.

I noted that for most brands - and the challenge of mental availability - it is advisable to introduce distinctive brand assets into their content quicker and more frequently than the John Lewis example.

I stand by my remarks, and offer this by way of an example.

Is this piece of RedBull media any less exciting because of the presence of branding?

Monday, November 25, 2013

excuse me while I kiss the sky

The Asch conformity experiments were a series of laboratory experiments by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

The various experiments demonstrated the degree to which an individual's own opinions and behaviours can be influenced by those of a majority group

The Asch experiments informed the idea about social proof that we often use in advertising.

8 out of 10 cats and suchlike.

Essentially people will often do things that they see other people are doing.Especially similar others.

One experiment, easily replicable and with predictable results is the one in which one or more direct agents in a public space would point up into the sky, as though there is something to see.

Bystanders, or passive spectators if you prefer - will predictably stop to look up into the sky to see what the other are looking at.

My hunch is that some of this background was influential in the creation of this fantastic bit of digital outdoor created by Ogilvy for British Airways.

Who among us has not gazed up to the heavens at a climbing plane and not thought 'I wonder where that one is off to?'.

And then thought 'Wherever it's going, I wish I was on it'.

The lesson? It's easy to lose sight - amid all the huffing and puffing about what advertising does or does not do - of the simple fact that the fundamental, number one task advertising has to perform is to get noticed in the first place.

Gold Lion in Outdoor.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Fridays Angels: links of the week 22|11|13

The latest attempt at a recurring feature in this journal.

Friday's Angels will hopefully be one post every Friday with a handful of links of interest from around the web this week.

This week here's three favourites.

Squat the…?
As an entertaining and rewarding nudge to promote exercise (in the context of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia) OlympicChanges installed a very special ticket machine at a Moscow subway station.
Instead of accepting money as payment, the ticket machine only accepted exercise.
Riders receive a free ticket by standing in front of the machine’s camera, and performing 30 squats or lunges.

next

Sharing fast and slow?
The psychological connection between how we think and how we spread news on social media.
What drives sharing? It’s a mix of attention, emotion, and reaction. Here’s hard data on which news stories took off and which didn’t on social.
Obviously 'Fast and Slow' is a riff on Daniel Kahneman's thinking, and most of the points in this article refer directly to some of those key concepts.

read Sharing Fast and Slow

finally

How to protect yourself from 'prediction addiction'.
I always say 'never make predictions'.
Particularly about the future.
We can't stop second–guessing what's coming next. Our need to gaze into the entrails of the markets – what Jason Zweig, the behavioural finance expert, calls our "prediction addiction" – is hard-wired into our brains.
But the one really predictable thing about our forecasts is that most of them will turn out to be wrong.

read Prediction Addiction

Thursday, November 21, 2013

dog's dinner

Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is just so full of sense and nuggets that it would be easy to just quote the whole book.

Such is it's dip-in-and-out-ability, it's handy to have at one's side to be referenced on almost any occasion.

This passage seemed to resonate this week as a kind of slice of agency life...

'One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish—a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives.

A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy.

It is just a list of things to do.

Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done.

Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into the “strategic plan.”

Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today.'

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

a note on salience and the purpose of branding

As much for myself as for anyone reading this, it's worth - from time to time - to have a quick refresh on the fundamental purpose of branding.

The purpose of branding is to identify the source of any given product or service, and to help us, buyers, make quicker decisions that require less processing/ thought

This is why branding was invented.

This requires the use of things and characteristics that distinguish one brand from other competitors.

First and foremost is, obviously, the brand name itself.
Along with with other distinctive elements of a brand identity.

Coke has the colour red, and the bottle shape, for example.
And taglines - 'Just Do It', 'Think Different' etc.

All of these things help buyers to notice, recognise and remember the brand, in buying situations, and are the most important parts of advertising.

A great creative idea is a great commercial creative idea when it acts as the vehicle to get the brand noticed and remembered.

The more distinctive and salient these ideas are then the more links are made in memory, therefore the easier it is for the brand to be identified and remembered at the right time.

One of the ideas from psychology literature that it's important to recognise and apply in these situations is the idea of the 'availability' heuristic.

Whereby we tend to estimate the likelyhood of events by how easy it is to think of similar examples.

For instance one is statistically far more likely to be killed by a refrigerator falling on top of you than in any act of terrorism, but because examples of terrorism attacks come most easily to mind we fear those more.

In the advertising industry bubble one has no problem in identifying the latest John Lewis Christmas ad, in part, simply because of the availability of the discussion, within the bubble, around the ad this week.

It would be an error, however, to assume that anything approaching the same amount of discussion and dissection has happened in the lives of ordinary people.

However, for John Lewis, to get noticed and remembered by a mass of people in a buying situation would be the ultimate result, and with a huge PR and integrated push around this 'ad-as-event' it looks to have succeeded.

But it is interesting to watch the video below, and notice how little 'branding' ordinary people take away from the ad on first look, and how many other brands they speculate could be the providers of the content before it is finally revealed.

Also recognise how easily this could have been fixed by inserting distinctive branding throughout the spot.

Therein lies the lesson for the rest of us.

That's not to say it's not a great piece of creativity, and without doubt evokes an emotional response, but as commercial creativity it's an exception rather than the rule.

For most brands, even the greatest creativity cannot act as a substitute for establishing the brand name, the source of the product or service, if it doesn't prime the viewer to remember the brand name it fails.

Waiting until 1:57 to reveal is a risk for all but the most compelling content.

I'm being slightly harsh, John Lewis are big enough, popular enough, famous enough - and the JL Christmas ad is an 'event' anticipated by the public - to get a pass (ha!) this time, but we should be mindful not to take this example as case in point or applicable to the majority of our clients.

thanks to Martin Weigel who tweeted the vid.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

because I'm in love with rock'n'roll double jeapordy

The marketing phenomenon that is perhaps the hardest one for many marketers to stomach, the duplication of purchase law, can be described for us nicely and pop-punk-ily in Ready Steady Go by Generation X.

I was in love with The Beatles (ooooohh!)
I was in love with The Stones (no satisfaction!)
I was in love with Bobby Dylan
Because I'm in love with rock'n'roll

Very, very few people are 100% loyal to any single brand.

People who bought the Beatles also bought the Stones and bought Dylan.

A brand only gets big by attracting less committed buyers (although they may be heavy buyers of the category) to buy a bit more often.

Exclusive brand loyalty is largely a myth, and focussing effort on cultivating it is commercially unwise.

People who bought Generation X also bought the Pistols, the Clash and the Jam.

Unfortunately, in the UK, the Pistols and the Jam attracted more light buyers than Gen X did.
Presumably that's why Billy eventually bailed out and relaunched himself in a bigger market (the USA) with a bigger label and more reach and went on to be one of the biggest pop acts of the 80's.

And Tony launched Sigue Sigue Sputnik as a mass media spectacle, creating huge mental availability before any physical product was available to buy, which subsequently led to massive rapid growth.

Indeed Gen X probably suffered under the law of 'Double Jeopardy'.

The Jam, for example, were rewarded twice: they not only had more buyers, but these buyers also boughty more often (thus with greater loyalty). Whereas a smaller brand like Gen X were sadly punished twice: they had fewer buyers who bought less often.

Yes, it's true that bigger brands do receive slightly more loyalty than smaller brands.
But the big difference is not about how loyal their customers are, but simply that they have so many more of them.

The Clash would have been much bigger than they were if they had gone on Top of The Pops and reached a larger audience beyond simply the hardcore of Clash fans. In walked U2 a couple of years later and stole their chops and thunder.

Indeed the rejection of Top of The Pops by the Clash could be interpreted as something of a 'sunk cost fallacy', there is something of a dissonance at play as their decision to tour as support for the Who (mass audience, light buyers, Shea Stadium etc) helped them the huge selling Combat Rock album in '82, just before the band imploded.

To a large degree success begets success. It's driven by the ability to scale.

Moreover, brands share their customers with other brands in the category and usually in line with their market share.
It's no surprise that Billy was in love with the Beatles, the Sones and Dylan. The three biggest and most popular rock'n'roll acts of the 60's.

So while people do have loyalties to a degree, they are promiscuous.
People are pretty happy to buy from a number of brands in a category.

It doesn't mean they like you less, but it's a mistake to expect devotion from anything but a very few.

Sure, the few need to be looked after but if you have the chance, ask the world to dance.

Or you'll be dancing with yourself.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

making the brand easy to buy

Creatives will hate this, and it won't trouble any award shows but I'd put money on it being super effective advertising.

To paraphrase Prof Byron…

'What works in branding is surprisingly simple – making the brand easy to buy by maximising it’s physical and mental availability'.

Combine Old Spice guy and prominent Coles branding (two memorable sets of distinctive brand assets = mental availability) And I can buy it in Coles (physical availability).

Thursday, November 07, 2013

right on target so direct, you're gonna make me lonesome when you go.

Ever wondered how some of the ads in the music/fashion/motor/gossip etc magazines you read on your way to work, the same ads every reader of the magazine sees, seemed strangely more relevant than the highly targeted data-driven ads you are subjected to on something like Facebook when you fire up your computer?

How can this be, when nature of brand advertising is not personal?
It knows nothing about you, yet this fact is one of the reasons why it works so well (when it's done well).

From Bob's 'Tangled up in Blue'.

'Then she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me,
Written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century,
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal,
Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue..'

Whether Bob is experiencing a moment of clarity or simply subjective validation is unimportant.

General human truths connect, they appear to be highly personal and relevant because something is true if a one's belief demands it to be true.

But hang on, my highly targeted social media campaign delivered incredible response rates?

It’s hugely tempting to get excited about response rates but it’s important to note that response rates are, in fact, not a very good indicator of effectiveness.

For a start, your followers on Facebook and Twitter are, for the most part, already your customers, and they are a tiny section of your customer base, among your heaviest and most loyal buyers.

So therefore an 40% response from targeting 10,000 people Facebook is less in terms of total responses than a 10% response from targeting 100,000 people anywhere else.

Plus the fact that the response rate is so high is skewed as these buyers would probably have bought anyway, at some point.

It’s the equivalent of handing out coupons inside your store.

That's not to say that gathering a group of enthusiasts has no value.
But these customers should be viewed as an asset not an audience.
An asset that requires putting to work to share, amplify and reach new people.

Here’s the thing about targeting and relevance. These are not the same thing.

And even in a direct marketing sense, precision targeting can actually be counter to effectiveness.

Highly targeted campaigns are fashionable with short-termist marketers because they typically deliver high arse-covering ROI in the short term, but don’t deliver growth in the long term (and in some cases can be counter to growth – as even the most loyal of customers tend to become less loyal over time, ergo targeting these customers at the expense of acquisition can make the brand smaller) but that’s for the next marketing director to worry about.

The objective must be to reach as many buyers in the category as possible – most importantly the buyers of competing brands – because growth and profit comes from here, not from existing customers.

Because the purpose of brand advertising is not to persuade or coerce individuals but is to create brand salience - the propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations by more people.

So the great thing about brand advertising is exactly that it is unable to deliver precision targeting and lacks quantifiable ROI.

If the old adage 50% percent of advertising is wasted, but we don’t know which 50% is true, then perhaps we could say the 50% that’s wasted is the 50% that actually works.

f-like

Perhaps the Facebook like button redesign may result in what might be described as 'off-strategy' consumption in some parts of the world.

Readers familiar with the Doric dialect from my native north-east of Scotland will know that the greeting 'fit like?' is how the natives address each other. Often preceded with something like 'aye aye min'.

Loosely translated into English this phrase means 'how are you?'.

In common conversation the 'fit' is often shortened to 'f' and the greeting therefore becomes 'f'like'.

So I'll now be using the F-Like button as a simple greeting, and not necessarily an endorsement.

Social media experts please now factor this in to your important deep engagement/conversation metrics.