(another) inconvenient truth?

Kahneman and Gigerenzer have clashed many times over the years with regard to their individual points of view on intuitive heuristics.

Why they are at each others throats is slightly puzzling to this reader, as they are both saying the same thing, for the most part.

When confronted with a problem that requires some degree of thinking, and where there is at least partial ignorance (ie just about everything) - some examples often cited are; choosing a chess move or deciding whether to invest in stock — decisions are governed mostly by intuitive thought, and the intuitive mind does the best it can with whatever information it can use.

In Gigerenzer's writing he identifies a number of smart heuristics - 'take the best' and 'recognition validity' are two.

Similarly, Kahneman would say that if the individual has at least some relevant 'expertise', she will recognise a solution, and that this intuitive solution that comes to mind is quite often correct.

But what happens when the question is more difficult and a 'skilled' solution or smart heuristic is not available?

DK would say that we instead answer an easier and related question, automatically and usually without noticing the substitution.

Indeed, attribute substitution is thought to underpin a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions, something GG and DK can agree upon, and is part of a larger set of shortcuts that form the effort-reduction framework as proposed by Shah and Oppenheimer, which states that people use a variety of techniques in order to reduce the mental effort of making decisions.

So, an easier question to answer might be one that allows us to simply look at our previous behaviour. If that feels related to the problem at hand we then feel reasonably happy proceed in-line with what we have previously done.

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable thing, of course.
We want our attitudes to be in line with our behaviours.
Whilst we might believe that we are not the sort of person who drinks and drives, once a couple of beers have gone down and we have to get home we soon change our minds.
The behaviour has been done so that's impossible to change, so of course we want our attitude to be consistent and tell ourselves a story to rationalise it. It's just easier to do this.

I've done some of my own research that seems to indicate that despite having more access to information than at any point in history in order to do proper evaluation of alternatives in choice situations, we simply cannot be arsed and will use all manner of effort reduction strategies to dramatically simplify and limit consideration sets.

Especially, as it would appear from our studies, in categories such as insurance; where making the wrong choice could have pretty serious consequences. Yet the vast majority of buyers are happy to buy from an existing FS provider, or if they do switch; then the brands with biggest share of market and share of voice tend to pick up most of the switchers and new to market buyers.

So, for example,  if the difficult question (or computationally complex attribute) asked is “Should Scotland be an independent country?”.

The reality is that for many voters perhaps an easier to calculate heuristic attribute might be “Am I already deeply invested in a pseudo-religious and political sectarian Unionist or Republican 'philosophy', (imported from somewhere else) and based on my allegiance to a particular Glasgow based football club?”

Despite the fluffy rhetoric about a nation engaged in a new passion for political discourse, debate and democracy, we fear that this description does not account for all of the voting public.

But for a number of the reported 1.4million Scots who are R*ngers supporters this will almost certainly be the case. Numbers for C*ltic are unavailable, recognition validity indicates they will be similar, though...

Whether those numbers are enough to have made a significant impact on the final poll we will never know. Perhaps they cancelled each other out, in which case an engaged minority held the balance.

What was clearly visible were the ugly scenes of from George Square last week.
Far from any intellectual jousting of political and national ideologies the scene resembled more closely the famous 1980 Scottish Cup Final. A sorry affair in which a narrow one-nil victory for the green half of the great unwashed resulted in a pitch invasion from the blue side, a mass bricks and bottles battle between thousands, and TV commentator Archie MacPherson prompted to remark 'its like a scene from Apocalypse Now'.

The Unionists won the vote, of course. Goodness knows what might have happened had they lost.

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drummond, brown, artisanal toast and fantasy nationalism

There's a splendid chapter in Bill Drummond's book 45 entitled 'A Cure for Nationalism' that seems to neatly sum up the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance at the heart of a certain kind of Scottishness, and particularly poignant at this defining moment in modern political history.

To set the scene, our protagonist, Drummond, is in Paris for the 1998 World cup where Scotland faced - and were narrowly defeated by - Brazil in the opening fixture.

Drummond's dissonance is revealed, made manifest and resolved within a few short paragraphs.

'I was present at the births of all five of my children; not once did I well up with the mystery and wonder of it all, but just the notion of Scotland is enough to make me weep. 

This morning I sit silent on the train. I feel totally empty. Not because Scotland lost. Even if they had won I'd feel the same. It's investing all that emotional energy into something that you have no control over. 

At least Bruce's men were willing to give their lives to defend Scotland's sovereign statehood. 

What do I or any of the Tartan Army ever actually do for Scotland? For the good of its appalling nutritional standards, its chronic abuse of alcohol, its stagnant economy, its highest rates of cancer in Europe? 

"Let us do or die" - what a lie. we do nothing but die. 

Forget fantasy football, this is fantasy nationalism. None of us really gives a sh*t about Scotland, even those that vote SNP. 

Thank God we are not about to do or die like some former Yugoslavian state. We have never had an empire, never wanted one.'

But on the upside, he concludes... 

'Thank God we do not suffer from a crippled national psyche that makes us go around kicking Johnny Foreigner and smashing up continental bars and thinking we are doing it because we and our pompous has-been country deserve respect.'

It was also interesting to notice former UK PM Gordon Brown's final rallying call to the 'NO' lobby, in which he waded straight in with a deft pulling of the 'No True Scotsman Fallacy' lever within the first few seconds of his speech.

'[You] are the REAL people of Scotland...'  he declares to the faithful.

Now, obviously, one is either a person of Scotland or one is not, there is no 'real' about it, however whilst Brown was often framed by the English media as a somewhat out-of-date and dour irrelevance in his time as PM, his playing of the (fake) authenticity card - straight out of the blocks, no less - is as much a slice of zeitgeisty 2014-ness as any artisanal toast.





Speaking of logical fallacies and biases, then the 'No' lobby would seem to have 'System 1' on it's side.

Given the uncertainty that surrounds a possible 'Yes' outcome, tendencies towards loss aversion ( ie things are not too bad just now, so do we want to risk things being worse? And are the potential gains heavy enough to outweigh anticipated losses given that we weigh them a bout 2.5 to 1 on the loss side?) will be a significant factor when it comes to the crunch.

From an 'availability' or 'recognition' perspective the fact that just about all of the British mass media (most significantly the supposedly balanced BBC) has come out firmly in the 'No' camp it's probably pretty remarkable that less than 24hrs before the polls open it's still neck and neck.

It would seem that up to half of the turkeys are not voting for Christmas.

Whether the final polls reflect this neck-and-neck ness that has been salient throughout the campaign remains to be seen.
And from a peak-end-rule standpoint, how we remember the campaign will be influenced by it's outcome.

To keep up the football theme that we started with, the famous 1999 Champions league Final is regarded as one of the great footballing episodes of recent times.

Principally because of how the Fergie-led United snatched victory with two goals in the nail-biting last minute.

What no-one mentions is that, for the experiencing self  the previous 119 minutes was pretty stodgy stuff.
The peak and the end followed in such quick succession that the remembering self has a somewhat false recollection of excitement over the entire piece.

Similarly if the indyref does finish in a 'No' and the final polling numbers stray into, say, 70/30 territory at the death (and as the aforementioned loss aversion, status quo bias and system justification bias do their worst), then the memory of what has been a fairly significant episode in mass engagement in politics may appear somewhat more cut-and-dried in hindsight than is a true reflection.

With all that said, and whichever way it goes, it's still shite being Scottish.

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influencer theory is the wrong end of the stick

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

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

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

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

Ka-chow!

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

Sadly neither of these things are true.

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

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

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

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

There’s bad news and good news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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juiciness

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

They talked of 'juiciness' in the gameplay.

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

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

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

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

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what would independence mean for advertising in scotland?

In a couple of weeks Scotland will vote yay or nay for independence from the rest of the UK. 

As ex-pats we are ineligible to vote so will not waste any space on here debating the politics of the issue but among the commentary we were drawn to this article in the Herald by Ian MacWhirter. 

In the article MacWhirter takes a humorous swipe at Lord Birt - the former Director General of the BBC - who has apparently warned Scots that, after independence, they will be cut off from BBC programming and 'sent to bed early with no Dr Who... the screens will go black and cultural life in Scotland will wither as Scots lose access to Strictly Come Dancing'.

Joking aside, clearly Birt is discounting Scots ability to use things like the internet and satellite broadcasting services.

Anyway, the more serious point of the article is this.

'Scotland has had no shortage of broadcasting talent, but it largely gets exported to London, which is why Scottish accents are so prevalent in the media village. Anyone who wants to get on in the BBC has to go to London - as I did - because that is where the jobs are, where the careers and the budgets are. I spent more than 20 years in the BBC, nearly half of it in London... 

...Many Scots do try to come back from London, of course, but it is a big risk. I was speaking recently to one of my contemporaries, who started in the BBC when I did and became one of the best documentary film makers in Britain, with a string of Baftas and other awards to her name. She tried to come back to Scotland three years ago, and found she simply could not get any commissions from the BBC. So she had to go back to London. If you are not in the metropolitan village you are little people.'

Having been away from Scotland for a long time, it's only natural that once in a while the call of of home can be heard and we get a misty eyed for the skirl of the pipes and so forth.

Don't worry, this is not one of those occasions.

And even if it were then we wouldn't necessarily use this journal to express anything of that nature.

Plus, it would be pretty pointless anyway as the advertising industry in Scotland is so small that it cannot employ even a small percentage the Scots ad talent, they face the same conundrum as their broadcast media counterparts as almost the entire industry is in London.

MacWhirter goes on to ask. 'So Scotland could go it alone (ie having a Scottish national broadcaster), but would it ever have to? Everyone I speak to seems to believe the BBC would be determined to maintain its brand identity across the whole of the British mainland, not least as a bulwark against digital fragmentation, which is a threat to the future of the licence fee.'

Would Scotland's advertising industry go it alone?

I can't help thinking of this Australian population data point as comparison.

For instance in Victoria, where we have a population of about 5.7million - broadly similar to Scotland's.
Apart from MediaCom, whom I know are in Edinburgh I can't think of any other global network agency who still operate out of Scotland, yet Melbourne is able to sustain a medium sized office just about every global agency one can think of. BBDO, DDB, JWT, TBWA, Y&R etc etc are all here.

And they almost all have at least one other office in New South Wales, some are in QL, WA, and SA too. All the media agencies are here too, plus numerous indies and digital shops etc.

From that population standpoint, post-independence, a Scottish advertising industry at some sort of scale would seem to be equally sustainable (in theory).

Or is Australia just some sort of weird anomaly?

Would the global agency networks be required to open up (or re-open) their outposts in Glasgow or Edinburgh post-independence?

How much advertising spend from companies based in Scotland goes to London based agencies?

And, critically, would the Scottish talent that has had to follow the industry to London and abroad be prepared to return?

Would they even be welcomed back?

 

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large, black & white, funny and sexy

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

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

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

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

We were right.

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

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

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

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

Obviously the famous Bonds 'BOOBS' poster came up.

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

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

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

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

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

'Was there roadworks or something?'

No.

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

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red stitching turn-ups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely, we were being asked the wrong question?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So said Bill Bernbach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another way of describing salience and creative publicity.

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

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

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

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

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

Difficult? Yes.
Impossible? No.

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


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

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

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

Just Don't Bore Them?

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

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

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

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

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

'Can you multi-task for a moment?'

'Of course' is the reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



Tried living in the real world instead of a shell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a useful example of a recognition-based heuristic.

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Sharp says:

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

Then goes on to describe recognition heuristics almost exactly.

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

Then later adds.

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

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

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

These factors combine to create demand.

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

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

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

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when johnny comes marching home

This Guinness spot from the US caught our eye, from a scientific standpoint.

Perhaps a teeny bit schmaltzy and all-American for Aussie tastes but worth noting it does a few things well.



Well branded right from the off, the product in action using repetition.

The core narrative is, of course, super easy to get, it's 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'.

Bar 'America The Beautiful' that's as full-on a slice of Apple Pie as one gets.

[Funnily enough the lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home were written by the bandleader Patrick Gilmore, an Irish immigrant during the American Civil War.

Even more peculiarly the song was widely adopted and sung by both sides.]

One responds emotionally (I detected a slight physiological response too, you may also depending on how much of a wuss you are).

I’ve trained myself to let go in these matters and be the punters - don’t fight it, feel it - and duly recorded a nice tight peak-end rule being deftly applied.

Also worth noting that the main creative device employed is in the area of 'personal triumph'.

Johnny makes it all the way home.

If you've perused Karen Nelson-Field's findings on viral (or not) video then you will have noted that the data would suggest that this device is the one that tends to benefit from more shares than others, with the caveat of significant paid promotion to maximise initial reach applied.

Gung ho.

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the great advertising swindle (actor-observer bias remix)

Advertising's outcomes are notoriously hard to measure.

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

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

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

Some agencies even claim to offer this.

How they can do this is unclear.

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

Maybe they are, who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both highly incentivised to pursue award-winning activities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone is scrapping with everyone else.

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

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

The more you get, the more you get.

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

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

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

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

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

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stand and deliver

Pop stars talking about advertising. What could possibly go wrong?

Corporate rapper Kanye West for a start.

Consider, his much repeated quote-age from Cannes for example.

“I dream to help raise the palette and raise the taste level of a generation and also be involved with the production and distribution and advertising of that thing everyone’s begging for.”

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.



Adam Ant, however, knew a thing or two about the role for advertising and its subsequent effectiveness. And preferred to express this in how the work spoke for itself.

'I'm the dandy highwayman who you're too scared to mention

I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention'

It's not that difficult.

Spend the cash on looking flash.

Then get noticed.

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shot with your own gun (or the META-return of the texas sharpshooter fallacy)

The sciences of human behaviour show that we all are susceptible to foibles known as cognitive biases.

These are processes of thinking that can sometimes lead us to making less than optimal decisions - particularly in conditions of uncertainty - or more often just relatively benign and harmless routine confabulations.

In the following case, the firm favourite - confirmation bias.

This is our tendency of people to favour information that confirms pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.

And it's often compounded with a touch of the old texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Refreshingly, from time to time behavioural economists themselves are just as likely as any of us to be caught in these cognitive traps.

In theory, this analysis in Smart Company of how the celebrated Sarah Wilson’s 'I Quit Sugar' books and 'community' have helped a large number of people adopt more healthy behaviours seems to add up.

A slightly edited excerpt follows that links BE staples status quo bias, intrinsic motivation, loss aversion and social proof with positive and negative tension.

Here we go.

'[Wilson uses] positive tension to create anxiety about status quo [and] create an appetite for change.

By pointing to the gap between what’s undesirable now and what is a desirable future you can stimulate sufficient motivation in your customer to be open to changing their behaviour.

Loss Aversion tells us that people are more motivated to avoid loss than seek gain, so you need to work hard to reduce the perceived downside of progressing with you...overcoming negative tension to build people’s willingness to change.

By providing step-by-step meal plans as well as cooking and shopping tips, Sarah reduces people’s fear that a life without sugar is too difficult.

Further, through a thriving blog (engaging over 260,000 every day) and social media presence (over 385,000 followers) Sarah has harnessed a community of advocates and tapped into the behavioural principle of Social Proof.

People new to the materials or program who may feel anxious about whether it will work for them can have their fears allayed by seeing how many others have succeeded. There’s no surer anxiety-buster than knowing that someone else has done it before you.

This analysis is not wrong. We just smiled at it's possible over-theoreticalness.

[And before you start, sure, the irony of that statement is not lost on us...]

Another, perhaps simpler, explanation for the success of the 'I Quit Sugar' phenomenon can be found by applying the Fogg Behaviour Model.



Central to Fogg's theory is that increasing motivation is very hard and almost never works.

Making the desired behaviour easier, even where there is low motivation is generally a much better plan.

For Wilson's wannabe-sugar-free readers there is already likely to be a high motivation to change their behaviour, however because of a perceived lack of ability, it seems hard to do.

In cases like this Fogg recommends the use of a 'faciltator' trigger.

Make the desired behaviour easy by showing people who are motivated how to do it, easily.

Wilson's books, forums, recipes are facilitators, and this is how her empire has been built.

Buy making something that used to be hard, easy.

And branding it well.

Of course, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the planner joke applies, sometimes what works in practice doesn't always work in theory.

Having said that, we are signed up for the Marketing Science Idea Exchange later this month, at which the author of the piece is conducting a couple of workshops.

In the spirit of idea exchange, hopefully we shall not be sent to the back of the class.

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space travel's in my blood, and there ain't nothing I can do about it

We've just finished reading 'Think Like A Freak', the third book by Levitt and Dubner the others being Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics. You may also know their weekly WNYC radio show/podcast.

Their ouvre is at the lighter pop end of the behavioural economics canon, however they can take some of the biggest credit for opening up this thinking to a mass audience.

Either way it's an entertaining read, I got through in about two round trips to Hobart.

There's one little story towards the end concerning the January 1986 Nasa Space Shuttle mission which I suspect that many of you - my planning brothers and sisters - will identify with.

The following is almost as it appears in the book, I've paraphrased/shortened it a bit...

The launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger had already been delayed several times, both nasa themselves and the engineers were getting twitchy.

However on January 28, 1986, it looked like Nasa could finally launch from Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This particular mission had drawn lot of interest from the public, mainly because the crew was to include a civilian, a schoolteacher called Christa McAuliffe.

However some unusually cold overnight temperatures in the nights before the launch led the chief engineer Allen McDonald to recommended to his Nasa client that they postpone once more.

McDonald and his team of engineers explained that the cold weather might damage the rubber O-rings that kept hot gases from escaping the shuttle boosters, indeed, the boosters had never even been tested at temperatures as low as forecast.

Nasa pushed back, they wanted a launch.

Years later Mcdonald wrote about this.

"This was the first time that Nasa personnel ever challenged a recommendation that was made that said it was unsafe to fly.

For some strange reason we found ourselves being challenged to prove quantitatively that it would definitely fail, and we couldn't do that."

So the advice of the engineers was ignored and the launch was officially back on.

McDonald - and his team of experts - had been overruled.

In fact when Nasa came and asked McDonald to sign off on the decision to launch he refused.

His boss signed it off instead.

So the next morning, Space Shuttle Challenger took off as scheduled.

73 seconds later Challenger blew up in mid-air, killing everyone on board.

A subsequent enquiry found that explosion was caused by a failure of O-rings due to the cold weather.

Interesting.

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vivid demonstration vivid metaphor

It seems simplistic but I'm consistently surprised at how often an explicit description of the actual role for the advertising is absent from first attempts at creative briefs I see.

There are principally two roles, but lack of clarity around either or both often means wholesale back to the drawing board for the author.

Stephen King set the template for these two roles while he was inventing Account Planning back in the day, and even to this day no-one has come up with a better or simpler model.

We're either creating advertising that seeks a fairly direct response or a fairly indirect response. Or a specific cocktail of both.

At the indirect end of the scale, what King would describes as vivid metaphor, is advertising that is 'borrowing something from outside the brand itself which has personality characteristics that are similar to the ones we want our brand to have.'

Here's to the crazy ones and suchlike.

At the other more direct and less fashionable end of the spectrum these days; are the vivid demonstrations. These kind usually pick out and dramatise some specific feature of a product or brand and frame it in 'what's in it for you' manner.

The following couple of ads from Aldi seem to be an exemplary blend of the two roles.

A vivid demonstration of the principal benefit (cheapness).

And it's probably not too much of a stretch to say that the various surprising creative devices employed are a vivid metaphor for the surprise element of the actual brand experience itself.

Who among us has not headed straight for the middle aisles for a chainsaw and flippers on a sunday morning.

These are also possibly some of the best examples in recent months of the continuing triumph of meaningless distinctiveness over meaningful differentiation, and for 15seconds of hardcore retail to be so choc-full of 'idea' they are an inspiration for any of us out there with big box retail clients to serve.





Behavioural footnote:

At the core of Aldi's Strategy is a deep understanding of how we actually buy.

The mental shortcuts we use to make it easy for ourselves.

Despite what marketers might like to believe most people hold practically no brand knowledge whatsoever, even for brands we like and buy regularly.

Because the shampoo we buy is the green one. The toilet paper is the one with the purple stripe etc.

*UPDATE 14-07*

And now we love this series even more, the latest one has the classic enclothed cognition gag.

Like retail ads. Only better.

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the wheels on the bus go round and round, all through town...

On a very basic level, advertising should probably do two things.

Putting low involvement processing aside for the moment, here's one of them.

Hopefully the other side of the bus says 'be well branded'.

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does culture really eat strategy for breakfast?

Culture, in an organisational sense, is usually interpreted as the collective behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that - when mixed together - create a particular set of norms within said organisation.

Culture within the organisation gives people direction, and makes it easier for employees to find their way at work without having to think that much and get along with other people in the organisation.

Obviously there can be 'good' culture and 'bad' culture, depending on your point of view.

There are themes that many organisations seem to share.
Uniqueness is one of those.

For the most part unique culture is really a set of generic rules. 

Usually along these lines.

1. Be and think positively (this means total enthusiasm for any new idea, no matter how stupid)

2. Embrace change (but never ask why?)

3. Never criticise the work of others (see point 1)

4. Only look forward, never back (see point 1, again)

However, within those companies where culture is said to eat strategy for breakfast, it is reported that this clear set of shared values and norms actually shapes the way a company operates and is a fundamental driver of the financial success of the business.

A picture of this kind of strong culture features passionate, empowered employees, deeply engaged.

High performing teams, trusting each other, communicating authentically and powering the business towards financial growth and reaching new heights of innovation.

And it all sounds plausible, especially when the usual suspects are presented as case in point.

Zappos, Google, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks are among the most frequently mentioned.

They have dynamic, engaged leaders, organic and vibrant self directed employees, empowered to take risks and fail-fast while truly caring about making a difference in the world. Etc etc.

It certainly seems plausible that culture does, indeed, eat strategy for breakfast*.

[*The quote itself is attributed to Peter Drucker, though there's no evidence he ever said it - other than the anecdotal evidence of Mark Fields from Ford Motor Company, who attributed it to Drucker in a 2006 speech. In any case Peter Drucker is on record noting that culture is hard to change, therefore it's sensible to try and work with whatever you’ve got].

So the fashionable idea is that within these kind of environments the sheer force of strong culture wills the organisation to success. Poor old strategy is relegated to a mere administrative function.

My fear is that the 'breakfast' quote has been skunk-ified and it's proponents are somewhat culpable of mistaking story-telling for fact.

I recently participated on the jury in an advertising awards show. One of my categories to judge was the 'agency of the year' prize. Around 7 or 8 finalists gave their presentations to the jury, each of them presented a section that outlined their respective 'unique values'.

You guessed it, all of the agencies unique values were practically identical. You could probably reel them off yourself right now, with no prompting. All bar one, I should add.

The agency in question presented no values at all, however did present a set of behaviours. Had it been down to me only they would have won the category. As it goes, they came second but that deviation from convention stuck with me.

Anyway, this interpretation of 'breakfast' is like a halo effect - a perception of one quality is contaminated by a more readily available quality. For example because Kanye West is a successful pop-rapper he must therefore know something about the advertising business and should be allowed to lecture us from Cannes.

In his book The Halo Effect Phil Rosenzweig describes (among nine distinct business delusions) the delusion of the wrong end of the stick.

The wrong end of the stick being a halo effect that tricks us into getting causes the wrong way round.

Is it that companies with a strong culture perform better?

Or is it companies with clear goals and strategies to achieve those goals (to paraphrase Rumelt; companies that are doing the work to uncover the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors) are the high performing or growing companies that tend to get a better culture?

Yes, culture can eat strategy for breakfast but if theres no strategy on the breakfast table then culture will get pretty hungry and grumpy.

Does this sound conservative to you?

Well, the 'breakfast' lobby does appear to be the voice of the new digital business.

Purpose before profit right?

It's the sharing economy, that 'could just save the least advantaged from ravages of capitalism' according to poster child and 'culture driven' TPG private equity funded Airbnb.

Where presumably culture is eating strategy for breakfast.

Rushkoff puts it this way.

'[Silicon Valley start-ups] claiming to be saving the world, when they’re really just the latest generation of desperate yuppies chasing capital and,in turn, reinforcing Wall Street’s monopoly over our society. Digital business is revolutionary only in the way it camouflages business as usual.'

For those of us in advertising, rather than simply selling a respectable service we can pretend that we are doing something much more grandiose.

If business is really going to contribute to a better world then we're best advised to focus on providing better strategy for culture to eat.

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