Never get out of the boat

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

love action for Peter Pawlett, baby.

With any rule or set of rules there can be exceptions or anomalies.

A social media manager recently presented conclusive proof to us that Facebook sells product.

Sales data over a four week period on a particular item had remained steady until the item was a featured post on the brands Facebook page, then et voila a 30% spike in sales occurred.

Conclusive proof, right?

Not really. We all know now that a brand's Facebook following is made up of mostly its heaviest and most 'loyal' buyers, albeit a tiny fraction of its total customer base.

In all likelihood the vast majority of these 'extra sales' were merely sales 'brought forward', that would have happened anyway. The measure and value of Facebook pages being their ability (or not) to spread a message and bring in new or lighter customers and increasing penetration.

Historically Facebook has never been very good at that, and by all accounts the algorithm changes (much reported by geeky types elsewhere, so no need for my ham-fisted interpretation) now mean a significant acceleration of its transformation from a social network into an ad network as organic reach becomes less and less likely for most brands.

However, one should always expect the unexpected.

While fans of a brand page are among its heaviest and most loyal buyers, what happens when that group generates momentum around the product of another brand, in a completely different category, where there is very little cross pollination of customers?

80's synth weirdos turned popsters, The Human League, woke up this week to find that their 1981 chart topper 'Don't You Want Me' has had a mysterious revival in interest and (at the time of writing) is sitting pretty at number 13 in the iTunes chart having not troubled said charts for 35 years or so.

The principal driver of the revival has been a collective campaign to 'bum rush the charts' (yep, it never gets old) by football supporters on Facebook, to push the song to number one.

Why is this so?

An interpretation of the song has been adopted and sung by the fans of (my beloved) Aberdeen Football Club throughout this season.

The latest highpoint of said season was the League (no pun intended) Cup triumph last weekend, when Aberdeen edged it on penalties in a semi-local derby against Inverness Thistle at Parkhead (renamed for the day as ParkRed, again a fan-driven modification in recognition of the fact that 90% of the 50k match tickets were held by Aberdeen supporters).

The phone video clip below will reveal all.

The latest in a long tradition of pop songs adapted with football lyrics, Dont You Want Me is replaced with the name of star Aberdeen attacking midfielder Peter Pawlett. Hence 'Peter Pawlett, Baby'.

(As another aside, one of my favourites of this nature is sung by Chelsea fans to visiting Liverpool fans. To the tune of the famous 'Do They Know it's Christmas' charity song, Chelsea's version goes 'Feed the Scousers...'. Also worth noting that Aberdeen have some form in this terrace meme department having invented the 'ten men went to mow' thing, later adopted - with somewhat less gusto - by Chelsea)

What examples like you see in the clip also clearly demonstrate is that social influence is less the 'hub-and-spoke' model as the common Gladwellian 'influentials' notion suggests - ie a small group of influencers directing the many - but much a more fluid and mutual influence, all happening at once. It's much more akin to what Mark Earls describes as the behaviour of the 'influenced' (and their perspective) counting for more than that of the 'influencer'.

For those in the crowd who may have not known what was going on they could quite easily get it because of what they see ordinary others around them doing, in the moment.

Then following that mutual influence there's a further action available, Buy the song.

So, yes, Facebook can sell.

Just not in the way we think (or perhaps would prefer).

And what we, as marketers, can learn and apply is probably something like this.

Understand that it is impossible to try to predict random events. Instead, it is essential to make peace with uncertainty, randomness and volatility (as Taleb would say).

This is, in effect, the essence of the 'real-time marketing' opportunity.

Not the one where every brand in the world huddles round the Oscars or such-like waiting for the thing to comment on.

The one that, when it comes along, the smart brand takes it.

Certainly for The Human League a chance to capitalise on some unexpected newsworthy-ness among a public (many of whom will never have heard of Phil Oakey and gang, and many who had forgotten) getting acquainted and reacquainted with the brand - it's all about those associated memory structures, after all.

And for Aberdeen FC a fan driven vehicle to further attract the 'light users' that are critical to brand growth.

40,000 supporters made the trek to Glasgow for the cup final, whereas the average attendance at home matches is closer to 10 or 12,000.

There's a huge market of lapsed or infrequent customers who can, and should be nudged to buying a little bit more.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

a note on brand frames and anchoring

In the clip above, Aussie discount retailer Best&Less hosted a pop up store in a Sydney shopping mall.

However, ‘The L&B Experiment’, was designed to look like more a boutique fashion store (with the, naturally, hefty boutique-y price tags). The twist being that the clothes for sale were all regular cheapo Best&Less products.

The 'real' price was revealed at the point of payment, around a third of the actual ticket price.

The happy shoppers were, of course, delighted to discover this.

But it's worth remembering what we know about brands as frames.

The amount that we are prepared to pay over and above the objective value of any product is usually equal to the value of the frame that the brand provides at the moment of purchase.

This why we have brands. It makes buying easier.

Framing operates implicitly, hence the shoppers in the clip are not aware of its influence.

Therefore, while the percieved value of the product is greater in the context of this 'designer' store, what happens when the products return to their natural habitat? The Best&Less store.

When returned to their original 'frame' does their percieved value change back to what it was in its original context?

Nice bit of anchoring (with a priming effect) on the price tags, though.

But it remains to be seen what this will deliver from a brand standpoint.

it's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good

Fly6 is an interesting idea that's come from a couple of cycling enthusiasts and inventors out of Perth, here in Australia.

Their product is a rear bike light with an embedded HD camera that 'aims to discourage bad behavior on the part of motorists by warning them that they’re being filmed'.

Essentially a nudge-like move that (in theory) works in much the same way as speed cameras do in managing the speed limit.

Although on consulting Mark, our resident cycling expert in this office, we were reminded that innovations such as this will only be effective as a deterrent if widely adopted by cyclists and 'mentally available' to the mass of car drivers.

Until that point there's still value for the cyclist should they be the victim of dodgy driving, they will have the evidence on film.

But at a $169 price point and limited distribution mass adoption is probably a way-off yet.

Until the $25 knock-offs arrive.

Friday, February 21, 2014

the seven thousand names of wah

We've talked about nominative determinism in this journal a number of times.

As a recap this is mainly a pseudo-scientific bit of psychologist humour, the origin is often attributed to Carl Jung who said to have noted the 'quite gross coincidence between a man's name and his peculiarities or profession.'

Jung kept the gag going by noting the phenomenon among psychologists, including himself:

"Herr Freud (Joy) champions the pleasure principle, Herr Adler (Eagle) the will to power, Herr Jung (Young) the idea of rebirth…"

The label itself is reported to have been coined in 1994 by science mag New Scientist, and explained thus:

'We recently came across a new book, Pole Positions - The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by Daniel Snowman. Then, a couple of weeks later, we received a copy of London Under London - A Subterranean Guide, one of the authors of which is Richard Trench. So it was interesting to see Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester stating in the October issue of The Psychologist: "Authors gravitate to the area of research which fits their surname." Hunt's example is an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon.'

Fast forward to this week and a new University of British Columbia study featured in Science Daily finds that 'we prefer voices that are similar to our own because they convey a soothing sense of community and social belongingness'.

This comes as no surprise, given that we know about the 'liking' principle in the psychology of persuasion.

People prefer to say yes to someone they like, and we like people who are similar to us.

Sharing something in common before you start negotiating is the classic tactic.

And as Kahneman noted 'good mood and cognitive ease are the human equivalents of assessments of safety and familiarity'.

And familiarity breeds liking.

Anyway, after perusing the report, which also concludes 'the findings indicate that our preference for voices...are about fitting in to our social groups' we were unsurprised to note that the authors name was Molly Babel.

Monday, February 17, 2014

'like' if you love cheese is not dead

Thanks to those cheeky Facebook data scientists for our Monday morning chuckle of the day.

AllFacebook reports on the introduction of the 'Pages to Watch' feature available to page admins.

Essentially the feature will alert managers when a post on another page they are watching (ie competitors and suchlike) is getting large amounts of attention and engagement (sic).

This little tactic is designed to activate home bias (aka the keeping up with the joneses effect) in hapless page admins, now futher driven to distraction.

In their paper 'Keeping Up With The Joneses and the Home Bias', Lauterbach and Riesmen (2003) describe this effect as follows:

'We argue that when individuals care about their consumption relative to that of their neighbors, a home bias emerges, that is investors overweight domestic stocks in their portfolios. Domestic stocks are preferred because they also serve the objective of mimicking the economic fortunes and welfare of the investor's neighbors, countrymen, and social reference group'.

The authors conclude 'The basic idea is that if investors care about their consumption relative to that of their neighbors, they would bias their portfolios in the direction of securities correlated with their neighbors' wealth.'

Perhaps 'like if you love cheese' is not dead after all.

Friday, February 14, 2014

smart ways to do occasion based marketing

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

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

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

commitment devices

Some readers will no doubt be familiar with The Rule of Reciprocity, often cited as a way to improve conversions and suchlike.

The formula is usually described as follows:

Give something away — a gift, a service, valuable information, assistance — to create in the other person a feeling of indebtedness.

In theory the recipient of the favour will then be more inclined to comply with a subsequent request from the initial giver.

In most circumstances it's the person or company that gives first that is then in control.

The next task is to maintain that control and then use it to your benefit.

Like most of these kind of rules it's never 100%, but seems to play out a decent amount of times.

When it doesn't work, one typical predictor of failure is when the initial 'gift' on offer is something that has no real value to the recipient or is difficult to redeem in some way.

As in behaviour change 101, the two key factors in moving behaviour are:

1. Understanding the motivating factors in the situation of the subject.
2. Make the new behaviour easy to adopt.

To address the motivator point, it's been shown that often the most effective incentives are the ones that show that the company offering the incentive has gone through some sort of extra effort in order to provide this incentive.

For instance, a software company rewarding survey responses with a supermarket gift card may seem like a decent incentive.

But rewarding the behaviour by offering to send a cleaner round to the prospects office once a month has required significantly more percieved effort on the side of the giver.

I've often used Rory Sutherland's 'flowers and jewellery as commitment device' example in describing this to clients.

In the clip below Rory himself gives an extended riff on the point, just in time for Valentines day.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

intuitive heuristics, pepsi-max and medical mishaps

There's an upside and downside with heuristics.

What we call distinctive brand assets (colours, shapes, logos, taglines etc) are essentially heuristics, mental shortcuts, that help brands get remembered and noticed.

Despite the prevalence of the idea that people pay close attention to brands and seek things like relevance and connection, the truth is we don't think about, or care about most brands that much. A good set of brand 'heuristics' makes a brand easy to notice, remember (albeit implicitly) and buy.

Good heuristics are those that can wrap up useful information in a way that is intuitive to remember and act upon and are specific to their context.

Heuristics that are not so useful are the ones that lead us to less optimal decisions.

For instance, medical professionals are often tripped up by certain heuristics.

Representativeness being one.

In a piece on this topic in the New Yorker the renowned Harvard Medical School Biologist Jerome Groopman writes:

"Doctors make [representative] errors when their thinking is overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates of a disease, and thus attribute symptoms to the wrong cause.'

He goes on to explain how a patient that had reported chest pains the previous day but had been examined, displayed no other symptoms or appearance of health difficulties, given a clean bill and sent home, had arrived the next day in emergency with acute myocardial infarction. Doctor speak for having a heart attack.

The patient survived but the doctor who gave the initial examination was distraught.

“Clearly, I missed it. And why did I miss it? I didn’t miss it because of any egregious behavior, or negligence. I missed it because my thinking was overly influenced by how healthy this man looked, and the absence of risk factors.”

To tie these two thoughts together, onto this nearly splendid film from Pepsi-Max.

The representativeness heuristic is one of the great tricks in the advertising book.

Great for evoking a bit of surprise from the viewer or participant, this one works by taking advantage of how we tend to judge the likelihood of an event by how well it matches our existing belief or stereotype.

When something seems more representative, we'll judge it as more likely or probable.

In the film NBA wonderkid and rookie of the year, Kyrie Irving is disguised as old 'Uncle Drew'.

Pepsi MAX went to a pick-up game in New Jersey under the pretence of shooting a documentary on a young basketball player.

When the player gets injured his hobbling old Uncle Drew comes on as a sub into the game, and after some initial foul-ups to keep it believable eventually turns on the style, to the surprise and astonishment of the crowd.

So while Pepsi-Max used the representativeness heuristic nicely to comedic effect, it's a shame they never took a leaf out of great rival, Coca-Cola's book and applied the daddy of all heuristics, availability.

Advertising need to do two simple things.

1. Get noticed (tick)

2. Be well branded (no tick)

While Coke will always pepper their ads liberally with little brand heuristics (distinctive assets) they are few and far between in the Pepsi spot.

And while Uncle Drew's achievements have been seen by circa 43 million views we have to ask 'where was the branding?'.

By branding we mean the little imlpicit brand cues (bottles, colours, logos etc) that could so easily have been all the way through, in peripheral exposure, without being detrimental to the entertainment.

I'll see you in the sewer

A couple of news items this week reminded us of a story concerning a rat infestation in Hanoi during the 19thC time of French colonial rule.

To combat the rat problem the French authorities swiftly acted with an incentive for Hanoi citizens.

For every dead rat delivered to the appointed rat repository, the good citizen would receive a reward.

Of course it was not long until the residents began specifically breeding their own rat colonies for the exact purpose of cashing in.

Now, against my advice, a former client was determined to launch a Facebook page - the nature of their business meant that other tactics were likely to bear much more fruit - however they were adamant so we decided to do our best for them.

Initially the page gained a small group of fans, mostly friends and family of employees and some partners etc.

Upon running a recruitment ad campaign we gained several thousand new fans over a period of a week or so.

What seemed astonishing was the the apparent popularity of this Australian industrial manufacturing firm in places like Indonesia and the Phillipines.

Particularly because their products and services were not even distributed in those regions.

Clearly something was not quite right.

On realising what was going on, I next suggested to the client that if we adjust our strategy and make our objective to simply appear to be popular then perhaps it would be cheaper and less effort to simply buy a ton of fake likes from some dodgy vendor or other and leave it at that.

In this way we use the page as a simple peripheral 'popularity' point, invest no further effort other than the odd post now and the,n and focus our limited marketing dollars on the tactics that might actually deliver leads and sales.

This idea was met with horror.

How inauthentic.

In this clip by Veritasium the science video blog, who went slightly off topic temporarily, but give a nice simple explanation of the mechanics of this Facebook 'likes' click-farm phenomenon, and implicating Facebook themselevs somewhat.

While, of course, we have probably all known this to be true for some time its interesting to see specific data.

On a similar note, Warc reports that Vivek Shah, the in-coming chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told delegates at the organisation's annual conference, being held in Palm Springs, California that 'online traffic fraud has reached crisis proportions'.

He quoted figures from comScore research that suggest something in the region of 36% of online traffic is now generated by machines ie bots, not by humans. Ouch.

People say you shouldn't stay down here too long,
Lose your sense of light and dark,
Lose your sense of smell,
I'll see you in the sewer, the sewer, the sewer...

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

a note on noticing what others don't notice themselves not noticing

Some time ago I caught up with a young planner who had interned with us for a while.

She had subsequently sidestepped advertising and moved into a different area.

I asked what she had been up to and did she miss the advertising business?

'Not really. I've been living in the real world for a bit' she replied.

'Watching TV, reading the newspapers, going shopping. Just doing stuff that normal people do'.

This was a timely nudge.

While we commonly claim that 'getting out of the building' is key to the planning discipline, if we are honest, it's something we don't do as often as we should.

Any insights about shopper behaviour in supermarkets, for instance, are unlikely to revealed by asking questions in the street or in focus groups.

To understand why people are behaving in a particular way, it is important to be able to observe them in their natural habitat.

Data about people's shopping habits is very useful.

But equally; situational factors such as lighting, ambient noise, smells, colours, music, other products on display and the behaviours of others present all also influence how someone feels and what they do.

As the saying goes; not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Because we tend not to discuss what’s not in the data.

We are naturally biased towards the information that we have, or is perhaps 'easiest' to get.

Then, naturally we make decisions based on this information rather than giving full consideration to factors that are possibly more relevant but harder to obtain.

For example, there is often as much insight to be gleaned from looking for things that didn't happen as things that did happen.

I recently had a terrible service experience in a favourite restaurant.

There was a new manager who was either having a very bad day or was completely clueless about how to be a host.

Afterwards we joked 'If she was the 'best' candidate for the job I wonder how bad the other candidates were who were rejected?'

We ignore, at our peril, one of the most pivotal parts of a buyer's purchasing process.

Before anyone buys a product they effectively 'decide' (albeit unconsciously) to not consider the bulk of other brands in that category.

In the same way that we ad people are biased towards make decisions based on the information we have rather than the information we don't have, shoppers don't notice themselves not noticing things therefore can only report on what they have noticed.

So there's a solid argument for getting out of the building more, observing what people actually do, what the real influencing factors are and, most importantly, observing what they don't notice themselves not doing.

And it doesn't do any harm to spend more time with people who think differently than the way we think.

In the real world.

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.