never mind the bull elks

Bull Elks face, what the economist Robert Frank calls, a collective action problem.

Over time the genes for bigger antlers have prevailed because larger antlers make an individual bull more likely to win in a fight with a rival bull.

Bulls that win more fights have greater status in the herd, and access to more lady elk action etc, so there’s significant benefit on an individual level.

However, large antlers force on their bearers some less than optimal compromises.

Getting about in the elks natural habitat - dense wooded areas – is hampered by giant antler-age, and therefore increases the risk killed and eaten by predators such as wolves.

As a group, elks would be much better off if each bull's antlers were much smaller, bulls with smaller antlers would be better able to escape predators.

But as long as there are some bulls with the big antlers the less well endowed will always come off worse in battles, and therefore less likely to pass the genes for those smaller antlers into the next generation.

The individual payoff on larger antlers is thus substantially larger than the collective payoff.

The collective action problem (on behalf of bull elk genes) is that even though it would be better for all bull elk if everyone’s antlers were smaller, it’s not in any individual bull's interest.

Any trait that emerges because it helps individuals compete in battles against members of the same species runs the risk of resulting in a handicap for the species as a whole.

This might be what's going on in online advertising.

While publishers at one point may have shared common interests with advertisers - reaching readers -each also had conflicting interests, principally around how each made a buck.

Enter stage right, 3rd party adtech with the promise of identifying and tracking prospective customers on behalf of advertisers, thus devolving the publisher from their part of the conundrum - providing the audience - and 'incentivising' huge volumes of fraudulent traffic that drives down the value of CPMs.

This created a wedge - adtech are not interested in the needs of readers, but publishers became distanced from the needs of their readers and their advertisers - and before you know it we’re in the whole mess of aforementioned fraud, malware and goodness knows what else.

There's an argument for banners as simply low-cost mini-billboards, a super cheap vehicle for impressions. So cheap that the fact that most people don’t see them, and that a significant chunk of views are fraudlent doesn't really matter. The market has adjusted the cost down to make them good buy even factoring in the waste (this is proper wastage, not 'costly' waste that carries signaling power kind of waste).

Meanwhile, the advertisers who really only want to efficiently reach punters, start scratching their heads.

The individual payoff for online publishers on adtech antlers once promised to be large, now the collective payoff is more like being stuck in the woods with a wolf.

Don Marti wrapped this up nicely with 3 points.

When bottom feeders pay indiscriminately for fraudulent and legit banners, they are funding malware development. 

The glut of ow-quality impressions don’t pay for original sites, and fuel all the other bad behavior.

When advertisers buy on markets that include both legit and fraudulent inventory, publishers pay for fraud in the form of lower CPMs.

It's a collective action problem.

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can brands really be altruistic?

Philosophy defines altruism in different ways, however most definitions will generally revolve around describing altruistic behaviours as those that benefit others rather than oneself.

The term altruism (French, altruisme) was coined by the 19th century philosopher - incidentally, also the founder of the discipline we now know as sociology - Auguste Comte.

He described altruism as our ‘moral obligation to renounce self-interest and live for others’

Aside from ethics, altruism in biology similarly describes a range of behaviors that may be performed by animals, which benefit others while seemingly to their own disadvantage.

We say ‘seemingly’ as there is no moral lens that can be applied.

For instance, by behaving altruistically, an organism may reduce it’s own chances of survival, or the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but give a boost to the likelihood that other organisms that share its genes may survive and produce offspring.

It doesn’t make sense to share food with just anybody, it is more sensible to share with your relatives – they are genetically similar.

The costs and benefits animal altruism in the biological sphere are measured in terms of the resulting reproductive fitness, or expected number of genetic descendants.

It appears then, that the biological notion of altruism is somewhat different to the ethical concept.

For humans, an act would only be called 'altruistic' if it was done with the conscious moral intention of helping another, but in the biological sense there is no such requirement.

So, which definition is appropriate when talking of brand altruism?

In 1973 the Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’.

It could also be noted that nothing in brand behaviour makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Brands, like organisms, have two principle concerns.

Survival and reproductive fitness.

Survival should be a self-evident notion. In terms of reproduction we would look at salience and distribution as measures of fitness.

So-called brand altruism then, is perhaps better understood through the lens of Biological Market Theory.

Animals (including humans) can be observed exchanging benefits through reciprocity mechanisms. This happens in a variety of ways and in a variety of scenarios, however the common thread is that benefits in kind almost always find their way back to the original giver.

The theory of reciprocal altruism was originally developed and published in 1971 by the evolutionary biologist Bob Trivers in order to explain to explain instances of (apparent) altruism among unrelated organisms, including members of different species.

Trivers' basic idea was pretty straightforward: it may payback to help another, if there is an expectation of the favour being returned in the future.

Equivalent to the heuristic ‘You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours’.

The cost of helping is offset by the likelihood of the return benefit, allowing the behaviour to evolve by natural selection.

However, even reciprocal altruists are vulnerable to exploitation by rogue non-altruists.

Suppose we have a group – or category, let’s say supermarkets – made up exclusively of altruists, all playing nicely together, and placing the benefit of their suppliers and customers above their own needs. It only takes a single mutant to enter the category, adopt some selfish policies to gain relative fitness advantages then the altruistic system starts to collapse and eventually become overtaken.

Altruism, by definition, incurs a fitness cost.
So why would a brand perform a costly act?

As an aside, it’s probably no accident that the current popularity of the brand altruism idea corresponds with the development on another on the consumer side – virtue signaling.

Much has been written on virtue signaling so there is no need to unpack the term fully here, but suffice to say that – and depending on which report one reads - apparently upwards of 70% of millennials declare that the social responsibility record and ‘altruism’ of a brand is a major factor in their propensity to buy or use that brand.

It is also claimed that this next generation of consumers will be willing to PAY MORE for altruistic brands! What cannot be disputed is the propensity the connected generation to perform actions (mostly online) that signal to others that ‘I’m a good person’.

It’s worth noting that the message need not be actually accompanied by doing anything good. This opens the window for brand altruism as a virtue-outsourcing vehicle.

And as we have noted in previous posts, authenticity is everything. Once one can fake that then one has it made.

So is brand altruism something of a misnomer, and simply a contemporary biological market tactic pandering to the current cultural mode for virtue signaling?

If this were the case then that may cause some significant cognitive dissonance for the authenticity seeking future consumers.

(Not all is lost however. Lack of millennial buying power notwithstanding, there is still much fun to be had given that the only thing people seem to like more than virtue signaling is judging other people.)

Perhaps another idea to consider is this.

Brand altruism may simply be interpreted as signal.
A costly and strategic signal, that provides an honest indicator of quality.

A brand might make a strategic investment in altruism that acts simply as a signal of its ability to be altruistic - the brand signals that it has the assets to do so.

In this sense, brand altruism is simply another form of costly signalling just like investing in high quality advertising and equivalent to a ‘handicap’ for which the peacock's tail has become a metaphor.

It’s altruism, but it’s competitive.

To paraphrase Ambler and Hollier’s much cited work (and one this writer returns to frequently) ‘The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works’.

‘The perceived extravagance of [a brand’s altruistic acts] contributes to advertising effectiveness by increasing credibility. It draws especially on the Handicap Principle in biology: animals use wasteful characteristics to signal their exceptional biological fitness. It hypothesizes that excesses in [altruism] work in a similar way by signalling brand fitness…’

In summary, we should probably understand this emerging idea of brand altruism as a part of the brand marketing process through which brands compete with each other in terms of conspicuous generosity (or if you prefer, observable competitive altruism) in order to enhance the status, reputation and perceived quality of the brand.

If some good is worth doing, it’s worth doing in public.

And, of course, the more salient the ‘altruistic’ acts of the brand are then the associated ‘generosity’ traits transfer to buyers and users of the brand, more grist to our virtue signaling.

For sure, it is good that brands may wish to contribute to a greater good, or to society as a whole. Let’s hope that the brands that are successful enough and profitable enough continue to do so. But let’s not get too caught up with esoteric notions of ‘pure’ altruism.

Rest easy advertisers and marketers. We can make the world better and still be our selfish, insecure and status-seeking selves.

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magic, monkeys, moggies and management gurus

There’s a clip in an episode of illusionist Derren Brown’s TV show in which he predicts he can flip a coin 10 times in a row and it will come up heads every time.

He proceeds to do exactly this, flipping the coin into a bowl 10 times and it comes up heads every time, just as predicted.

Magic, right? Or at least some sort of quantum entanglement.

The truth is less mysterious; he flipped the coin for about ten hours straight until he produced the sequence he wanted. His team then edited out all the failed flips and presented only that successful sequence.

Similarly, you’ll be familiar with the famous thought experiment that describes how an infinite number of monkeys bashing on typewriters for long enough, will result in one of them eventually writing a novel.

But what are the chances our monkey author would bash out a follow-up?

Or another monkey would come up with anything?

How about the many popular videos on YouTube that feature cats?

Is this evidence that featuring cats in your video makes it more likely that it will be successful?

Perhaps the success of some cat videos is simply proportionate to the huge number of cat videos that are out there in the first place, the vast majority of which receive little or no views at all, bar their proud owners.

In the coin-flipping skit, monkeys who produce nothing, and the mountain of unwatched cat videos that are forgotten, we only see the survivors.

The same survivorship bias is prevalent in marketing departments and agencies every day. For instance, it’s common for marketers and agencies to get distracted by the high response rates and dramatic ROI that appear to result from certain marketing activities.

Discounts and price promotions are just one salient example. While they can contribute to short-term sales boosts, they tend to be taken up by consumers who are already brand buyers, and are therefore detrimental to profitability.

Survivorship bias is the error of looking only at features that winners appear to have in common, and assuming they’re the only reasons why things are successful.

Management guru Tom Peters studied several companies enjoying successful periods and published a book – In Search of Excellence – outlining a success formula based on those things that the companies appeared to have in common.

However, many of the organisations highlighted by Peters then found themselves having difficulties within a few years, while employing virtually the same strategies that had made them successful.

Perhaps the book would have been more appropriately titled In Search of Halo Effects.

One does not have to look far on the interwebs to find studies that appear to show how a single factor, such as company culture, customer focus or a company’s commitment to social responsibility, lead to high performance.

It could just as easily be argued that it’s because companies are high performing that they subsequently benefit from better culture, or are able to contribute to social responsibility activities.

More recently Richard Shotton and Aiden O’Callaghan from ZO in the UK published a splendid report debunking the idea that brand ‘purpose’ is a driver of success as popularised by the Jim Stengel book ‘Grow’.

It turns out that spectacularly failing brands like Nokia and Kodak were just as ideal-driven as the successful brands Stengel chose to feature in Grow.

But those examples didn’t fit the story.

And we prefer the story, if we are honest.

Sometimes this means turning fact into fiction, even for business book authors.

As our favourite literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, points out in The Storytelling Animal.

'When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.'
It turns out that many of the things that we commonly believe to be contributions to company performance are in fact attributions.

We’re mistaking outcomes for inputs.

Skill is a factor, but so is luck. Skill allows you to make punts that are a bit more informed, but it’s no guarantee of success.

Success is, for the most part, the result of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty, and always shaped in part by factors outside our control.

As Daniel Kahneman famously noted, 'A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.'

Business theorist Phil Rosenzweig unpacks much of this flawed logic prevalent in contemporary business thinking, in his book The Halo Effect.

“Business is full of mysteries, but none greater than this: What really works?”

In finding out what works, Rosenzweig advises that we should be mindful of dazzling halo effects from apparent winners, and examine the failures a bit more closely.

What can we learn from magic, monkeys, moggies and management gurus?

Firstly, all strategies involve managing risk and uncertainty.

Execution is also uncertain. What works well for one situation may not be effective for another, however similar.

Randomness plays a greater role in success (and failure) than we like to admit and bad outcomes don’t always mean that mistakes were made.

(Likewise, successful outcomes don’t necessarily mean that we made brilliant decisions.)

Successful strategy, then, is skillfully interacting with chance.

It could be that successful strategy emerges simply because some people are better at interacting with chance and bad strategy comes from the failure to take chance opportunities by confusing outcomes with inputs and being too easily distracted by halo effects.

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some product! carri on storytelling.

You may know the semi-legendary rant by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in which he splendidly calls BS on ‘storytelling’.

Speaking at a Canadian design festival in 2014, Sagmeister attacked the current vogue in the communications industry for describing our work as that of storytellers.

'Now everybody’s a storyteller,' he says.

‘Recently I read an interview with someone who designs roller coasters and he referred to himself as a ‘storyteller.’ No fuckhead, you are not a storyteller, you’re a roller coaster designer!’

He continues ‘There is this fallacy out there. I don’t think I fell for it, but somehow maybe unconsciously I did, you know... I’ve seen a number of films so I must be able to make a film’.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films don’t see themselves as storytellers. It’s all the people who are not storytellers suddenly now want to be storytellers.’

I’m not sure if Sagmeister expands on this in any of the 22 books he has published.

All this is pretty funny, but is it fair?

Given the prevalence of inane drivel spouted in the name of brand storytelling on the interwebs is hard not to side with Stefan.

Where to begin?

In the early chapters of his fantastic book ‘The Storytelling Animal' author and literary Darwinist Jonathan Gottschall makes this observation:

'The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.'

Why might the mind be wired for storytelling?

"We are an insatiably curious species’ says the sociobiologist, EO Wilson '…provided the subjects are our personal selves and people we know or would like to know'

So it would also appear that we are born to gossip. (Albeit within narrow parameters.)

Indeed, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar agrees, calling gossip ‘an instrument of social order and cohesion’ - akin to the grooming behaviour common among our cousins in the larger primate world.

Primate grooming is not so much about hygiene, although that is a nice by-product. Grooming is essentially a substitute for language.

It creates bonds, establishes social status and influences other primates.

Dunbar and other evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans developed language specifically to serve the same social purposes.

(Grooming was simply not practical for early humans. Given their large social groups - around 150 or so - grooming one another would have been an impossible time-suck for our hunter gatherer ancestors.)

Language evolved, as it was a more practical and useful way of keeping up to date with friends and family, and obtaining social information about others in the group.

Particularly information about whom one should trust.

This explains – at least in part - why all of us 21st century humans are still pretty preoccupied with gossip and stories about other peoples behavior and reputation.

Reputation became important in this sense because – as a rule of thumb – it made more survival sense to be more generous toward others who were also reputable.

I often afford a wry smile at the call from some corners of the marketing world for ‘authentic brand stories’.

This is something of an oxymoron given that it is in the nature of stories to feed our social instincts for gossip only cherry picking the most dramatic and salient parts in recounting events.

The behavioural scientist Daniel Nettle echoes EO Wilson:

‘Conversations are only interesting to the extent that you know about the individuals involved and your social world is bound into theirs…

Given that dramatic characters are mostly strangers to us, then, the conversation will have to be unusually interesting to hold our attention. That is, the drama has to be an intensified version of the concerns of ordinary conversation.’

He goes on to argue that we don’t watch films about people going shopping; we watch films about people going shopping who are having an affair with an ex-lover.

Similarly, a book about some old geezer who goes fishing is not that interesting.

But a story about an old man who goes fishing off the coast of Cuba and ends up in an epic existential battle with a giant pointy nosed fish while contemplating his own mortality is more compelling.

To Sagmeister’s earlier point, everyone is a storyteller to some degree – inasmuch as this innate allergy to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence requires it in order that we tell our own story to ourselves.

Among communications professionals perhaps that the ability to create evocative brand stories probably depends on a couple of key skills - not necessarily available to all and the reason why great creative minds are so valuable.

The first– and this is planner territory for the most part - is the ability to observe and interpret the hidden parts of everyday life (aka insight), then ensure that the drama is an intensified version of these concerns.

Secondly, is the creative’s ability to work within our cognitive limitations and make things simple yet still contain enough neuro-juice to get noticed.

(This is not to infer that people are stupid, rather that we have a lot more important things to occupy our minds with than brand stories - simplicity is paramount.)

I think it was Dave Trott who coined the idea that any idiot can take a simple idea and make it complicated. It takes a lot more skill to make the complicated simple.

The great stories – and therefore the great brand stories – always reflect the great universal themes of life.

Evolutionary study has produced a universal picture of the human mind that can be mapped and reflected in all human activity.

From the ice age to the dole-age there is but one concern. Ok, more like five.

Surviving, finding mates, being a parent, being part of a group and being the hero who triumphs in the face of adversity.

Brand storytellers should relax. Perhaps not try so hard.

Storytellingit seems, is less something that is done to us, and more something we are super skilled in doing to ourselves.

Our innate ability to confabulate and fill in the gaps - often extensive - with plausability,  and preserve some sort of narrative continuity based on the merest scraps of information is nothing short of a marvel.

So, carri on storytelling.

Gottschall agrees:
'The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours.'

(And even in a perfect world, where everyone was equal.
I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel).

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gossip

During his last year in office, Winston Churchill was in attendance an official ceremony.

A few rows behind him two backbench MP’s were gossiping. "There’s Churchill. They say he is getting senile. They say it’s time he stepped down and let someone younger run things." And so on.

At a break in proceedings, Churchill turned to the two men and said, "Gentlemen, they also say he is deaf"

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just get them to say yes to something

You'll be familiar with Cialdini's Principles of Persuasion.

This clip from the movie Boiler Room, featuring Ben Affleck illustrates his principle of 'commitment and consistency'.

The idea being this; if people can be nudged to commit, ie say 'yes' or agree, to a particular idea in advance, they are more likely to honor that commitment.

It has become accordant with their self-image.
Most people would rather have a reputation for conscientiousness.
Either way, it's a personality trait that is often advantageous to display.

(A bit like authenticity.
Once you can fake that, you've got it made.)

Even when original incentive or motivation is removed they will tend to honor the agreement.
Even better, encourage your subjects to agree a smaller request before being hit with the bigger one.
Potential buyers are more likely to say yes to buying if they’ve answered in affirmative to something else.

Indeed, even eliciting 'yes' responses to seemingly irrelevant questions upfront can still trigger the effect.

Affleck's character Jim Young - one of the co-founders of the brokerage firm J.T. Marlin - is giving a rocket to junior brokers on closing.

'Ask rhetorical questions.
Anything. Just get them to say yes to something.
If you're drowning and I threw you a life-jacket, would you grab it?'



If a potential buyer is on a landing page with their credit card out they are ready to buy.

Just get them saying yes to something.

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born to be wilde

'What is the difference between scandal and gossip?' asked Lord Windermere.
(in Wilde’s ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan)

‘Gossip is charming!’ exclaims Cecil Graham
‘But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”

Great advertising may/should facilitate gossip.

But is Brand ‘purpose’ just marketing made tedious by morality?

To further paraphrase his Wildeness, perhaps there is no such thing as moral or immoral advertising.
"[Advertising] is well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards [things] we personally dislike.”

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boxing day

Festive best wishes to all who have read, commented, shared and inspired this year.

Also special thanks to mumbrella and warc who have republished from here.

Next year is ten years since I first started writing this blog. As it's a milestone of sorts we shall endeavour to recapture some of the prolificity of earlier years that was missing a bit in 2015.

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cultural fossils

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yeah, and advertising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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to brand or not to brand? is that a question?

[This post originally appeared in November as one of my regular articles for warc.com]

In 1934, the young Rosser Reeves left his small town home in Danville, Virginia, for the bright lights of New York City, following his dream of working as an advertising copywriter.

Within a few years he had landed a plum job at the Ted Bates Advertising Agency and by 1950 he was vice-president and head of copy, rising to chairman of the board in 1955.

Then in 1961 he published his first book Reality of Advertising, a large portion of which was devoted to Reeves’s principal legacy (and the ‘secret’ to the phenomenal success of Bates in the 1950s) – the unique selling proposition (USP).

(Incidentally, the Don Draper character from Mad Men is generally agreed to be an amalgam of several of the leading ad figures of the time, including Reeves. George Lois and Draper Daniels are the others most often referenced.)

Anyway, Reeves defined a USP has having three main parts. Each ad must contain a proposition – ‘Buy Brand X and you get this specific benefit’. The proposition must be unique to the brand – something that competitors can’t offer. The proposition must sell – it must be something that will, for example, convince consumers to switch brands.

To this day the requirement for and persuasive power of a USP is perhaps the most commonly held belief in agencies of all flavours.

Almost any variant of a creative brief will contain box for the ‘proposition’. Or the ‘one-thing-we-must-say’.

It sounds confident and plausible, but the truth of the matter is that the idea of a USP was simply something Reeves made up, was based on exactly zero evidence, no research and – as Paul Feldwick points out in his Anatomy of Humbug (a must-read for those with an interest in the history of these matters) – not even on a semi-coherent theory.

Slightly less well known is that propagating the USP notion was a deliberate strategy employed by Reeves to distance his own agency, and the industry as a whole, from a more dangerous idea being touted by one Vance Packard via his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders.

Packard’s best-seller ‘revealed’ for the first time the psychological manipulations and mind control techniques that the evil ad industry – aided by foreign psychologists and subliminal advertising – used in order to make Americans want stuff they didn’t need.

This fear was possibly a lingering by-product from the Cold War with Russia that had unfolded from the late 1940s, the concern that America was being infiltrated by communism – the ‘reds under the bed’ – and their stock-in-trade mind-control techniques.

Reeves was clear in his point of view: “There are no hidden persuaders. Advertising works openly, in the bare and pitiless sunlight.”

In a way Reeves’s USP notion may simply have been a strategy to defend the entire industry against the scare tactics of the likes of Packard. He didn’t believe in it particularly, but if it got the ‘investigative’ journalists off the scent then it was all good.

Yet the USP prevails to this day and, what’s more, it has spawned several other equally unquantified yet stated-as-fact marketing theories like ‘differentiation’ and ‘positioning’.

Sadly, consumers are not up to speed with these theories and tend to buy popular brands they have heard of and/or used before. And brand loyalty – while it absolutely exists – is, for the most part, a simplification strategy employed by consumers to avoid having to think too much rather than having anything to do with brand-love.

Many marketers still also believe that changing customer retention rates is cheaper than improving customer acquisition, and that asking customers their likelihood of recommending the brand is a predictor of brand growth. This is known as the Net Promoter Score devised by Frederick Reichheld, also responsible for the prevailing and widely believed myth that a five per cent drop in customer defections leads to 80 per cent plus increase in profits.

There is scant scientific evidence to credit any of these theories (in the Reichheld five per cent defection case – the maths proves it to be absolutely false), and yet they are widely believed to be facts.

In this world of content marketing I’ve noticed another curious idea often present – that native advertising or sponsored content should not explicitly promote or reference the brand sponsoring the piece.

This is believed by some practitioners to be overly ‘shilling’ or inauthentic, and therefore will be rejected by readers as ‘advertising’.

But is there any evidence to support this view?

A recent report commissioned by AOL and presented at ESOMAR Congress Dublin in September 2015 titled ‘What normative data says about effectiveness’ looked at sponsored content (native/advertorial) within Huffington Post and some of its other digital publishing properties.

On the topic of branding within sponsored content, and after scrutinising the data, author Christian Kugel came to the conclusion that: “Not only do activations with heavier brand integration perform better to drive higher recall and consideration, the content itself is also rated directionally more favorably.

“One would expect that content with less brand presence would be more favorable, so the fact that this shows an equivalent measure is excellent news for brands as well as publishers involved in content marketing. It means that we do not have to be afraid to push for heavier brand presence and integration. It is a fascinating revelation and a counter-intuitive insight coming out of the data.”

Kugel’s findings in the area of content marketing and sponsored content seem to correspond with what we’ve begun to understand about the science of sharing in the video space thanks to Dr Karen Nelson-Field from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

In her landmark 2013 study, Nelson-Field found there was no detrimental impact on how much sharing across the social web a video achieved relating to the level of branding used.

Not only that, the evidence suggested that overt branding has no impact on a video’s ability to illicit an emotional response.

These findings also run counter to the industry’s conventional ‘wisdom’, which suggests removing branding or keeping it to an absolute minimum.

“It turns out that consumers have a higher threshold than many practitioners initially assumed,” says Christian Kugel.

It turns out that a lot of what the industry believes is based on assumption, received wisdom and a complicated set of Chinese whispers dating as far back as the 1940s.

Just because certain beliefs are popular, doesn’t mean they are right.

This situation isn’t helpful for poor modern brand marketers. Let’s not forget they are grappling with all kinds of new problems in 2015, many more than their predecessors in past decades.

These new problems include making sense of new-fangled ideas like 'digital disruption', 'big data', navigating the implications of programmatic media buying and getting their heads around the ever-growing number of channels available to potentially reach consumers.

Luckily, recent developments in marketing science and behavioural science are giving us a much better view of how categories typically behave, models to better understand the patterns that underpin what people buy and the types of strategies buyers use to simplify buying decisions.

And it turns out that creativity and science are much better friends than many would have you believe.

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virtue signalling

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”


- C.S. Lewis

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digital advertising. where did it all go wrong?

By 1971 Manchester United’s Irish star George Best's hectic off-field celebrity life style had began to take its toll on his effectiveness on the pitch.

Arguably the most talented footballer of his (or just about any) generation George had lost interest in the game, developing a reputation for general unreliability and missing both training sessions and matches.

This erratic behaviour was connected to Best's developing problem with alcoholism. He eventually parted company with United (and football) during the 1973/4 season, at the end of which Manchester United were relegated.

George Best was only 27 when he quit - an age when most players are usually regarded as being at or near their peak – and the ‘wasted genius who threw it all away’ narrative was never far from the tabloid headlines.

Without the distraction of football, George was free to pursue his other interests – namely drinking, gambling and glamorous women.

One night in 1974 George spent the evening in a casino with a former Miss World.

They won a silly amount of money, went back to their hotel room and ordered the hotel’s best champagne which was shortly delivered by an Irish room service waiter.

The waiter looked at George, Miss World, the piles of money scattered all over the bed, the vintage champagne and said to Best:

“So tell me now George…

 Where did it all go wrong?”

On the surface, George didn’t look like he was having too many problems.

Similarly, looking at the numbers, online advertising seems to be in rude health.

PwC forecasts that global total internet advertising revenue is set to grow from (US) $135.42bn in 2014 to $239.87bn in 2019, a Compound Annual Growth Rate over the period of 12.1%.

They go on to predict that as the segment captures an ever-larger portion of advertising budgets, it will exceed TV to become the largest single advertising category by 2019.

Here in Australia the digital advertising market also continues to grow with the latest IAB/PwC Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) noting that it generated $1.15 billion during the March quarter, another 5% increase year on year.

That’s a lot of money scattered over internet advertising’s bed.

It’s had a few good nights at the casino but the real problems are only now starting to unravel.

A basic problem is the widespread acceptance and assumption in the industry that ‘advertising online’ almost exclusively means ‘highly targeted direct response advertising’.

Where did it all go wrong?

There is also widespread acceptance and assumption among web users that ‘advertising online’ must mean tracking.

It’s easiest to point the finger at adtech (or programmatic) the spoiled problem child of direct response marketing, given far too many toys to play with.

Adtech’s parents (Direct marketing) knew their role. They were there to make the phone ring after brand advertising had done it’s job.

But that wasn’t good enough for for the adtech brats. They wanted the whole game, and the internet – led by their big brothers and sisters Google, Facebook et al,  allowed them to play it.

But if - as adtech asserts - people are demanding and responding to more personalised and relevant ‘advertising’ , why isn’t ad-blocking adoption going down instead of up?

It turns out that people don't like the idea of being tracked and profiled.

They don't like being followed around the web by ads for stuff they have already bought (this has a knock-on effect in that it harms those brands that are doing the following. It looks desperate, it’s creepy and does nothing for ‘signal’)

And people don’t like their mobile data allowance being spunked by ads.

So naturally they start installing adblocking software.

And everyone loses.

While adblocking solves one consumer problem – they don’t see intrusive ads – it doesn’t solve any privacy problem.

Even if a human user doesn’t see the small portion of ads served that are actually viewable (most of the page views and clicks reported are fraudulent anyway) they are still being tracked, for the most part, and the adblocker may have done a deal with ‘white-list’ adservers anyway to allow preferred ads through.

From an advertisers point of view, and also for agencies and publishers; the failure with ad tech (aside from fraud, data-leakage, invasion of privacy) is that it is simply not able to deliver the necessary brand advertising part of the equation.

The internet’s inability to deliver on brand advertising means it is (today) no place to be if you want to build a brand over the next 10 years, and no amount of adtech is going to fix that because we have set up the web to only deliver direct response marketing in advertising clothing in the form of impressions and clicks - coincidentally the easiest things to fake and to track - and an ecosystem that rewards crap.

Brand advertising creates demand, direct response fulfils it.

A model in which the high quality sites, with high quality audience do their own deals with high quality brand advertisers, extracting (at least) the highest quality parts of their available inventory from the programmatic space might be a start.

Publishers could restrict their premium inventory, creating scarcity and an opportunity for ‘signal’.

A bit of brand-building conspicuous waste.

(I pitched for Vogue.com work a couple of years ago and this was their exact model. There was no way they were going to sully their web presence with anything other than premium ads or premium native – same strategy as the print mag).

And us in agencies need to stop pushing adtech and data-driven as the answer to every digital advertising problem for fear of looking not-up-to-date.

A final thought...if account planners still cared about being representing the minds of consumers rather than the latest gizmo then we would never have got into this mess in the first place. 

Stanley Pollitt is turning in his grave.

George Best famously noted:

"I spent most of my money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."

We've squandered a lot of advertising money on dubious adtech and direct response advertising that's created no value for publishers, advertisers or consumers.

Time to spend some on booze, birds and fast cars.

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I see you baby...shakin' that ass

Lions have a couple of principal hunting methods.

The first is one in which the lion stalks, undercover, getting as close as possible to the target, saving vital energy for a final burst of speed at the end.

Lions can’t run very fast over distance.

The second method involves find a bush close to a water hole, for example, hiding in it and waiting for unsuspecting dinner to appear.

This second approach is double-good for the lion who can also have a snooze whilst technically ‘out hunting’.

A bit like ‘working from home’.

Our Lion wakes up and sees a young gazelle taking a break by the water.

Lion tentatively moves out of the bush, but the alert young gazelle clocks him straight away.

But gazelle doesn’t run.

Nor does he crouch or try to hide.

Instead he turns to face the Lion.

Standing up straight he barks and stamps the ground with his hooves, all the time staring-out his potential attacker.

The Lion comes a bit nearer.

Surely the gazelle should get off his mark now?

Nope. He stands his ground, then begins a series of repeated jumps, using all four legs, a kind of dance known as ‘stotting’.

After a number of these jumps he then begins a somewhat leisurely run, shakin’ his ass and short black tail at the Lion in a kind of gazelle version of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’

The Lion steps back into the bush for another nap.

Why would the gazelle waste time and energy jumping up and down in front of an extremely dangerous predator instead of legging it as fast as it can?

And why does the Lion not go for him?

Biologist Amotz Zahavi asked this same question, and published the findings in 1975 in a study called The Handicap Principle.

(I recommend this one to young planners when they ask for reading material.)

Zahavi suggests that the gazelle is 'signalling' to the predator that it has seen it; and that by 'wasting' time and by jumping high in the air rather than running away, it demonstrates in a reliable way that it is able to outrun the Lion.

‘Even parties in the most adversarial relationships, such as prey and predator, may communicate, provided that they have a common interest: in this case, both want to avoid a pointless chase.’

The gazelle is communicating – implicitly - to the Lion as if to say:

‘Look at the amount of energy I can waste, and still get away from you.

Let’s not waste each other’s time.

Go and find something to eat that you might have a chance of catching.’

The Handicap Principal in a nutshell states that - to be effective - signals have to be

1. Reliable

2. And in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly.

It’s an elegant idea: waste makes sense.

‘Conspicuous’ waste in particular.

‘By wasting [conspicuously], one proves conclusively that one has enough assets to waste and more. The investment -the waste itself- is just what makes the advertisement reliable.’

The waste itself is just what makes the ‘advertisement’ reliable.

Researchers Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier wondered if the same thing applied in brand advertising and published their findings in The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works.

The pair devised a number of signalling tests including showing respondents showing ‘expensive-looking’ and ‘degraded’ versions of the same TV commercials to experimental subjects, and found that the perceived expense was influential in reported perceptions of brand quality.

 ‘The perceived extravagance of an advertisement contributes to advertising effectiveness by increasing credibility. It draws especially on the Handicap Principle in biology: animals use wasteful characteristics to signal their exceptional biological fitness. It hypothesises that excesses in advertising work in a similar way by signalling brand fitness…

…High perceived advertising expense enhances an advertisement’s [persuasiveness] significantly, but largely indirectly, by strengthening perceptions of brand quality’

The most important fact about a signal is that both senders and receivers benefit from its use.

At the core of signalling is the idea that businesses are constantly communicating through their actions, even when they are not intentionally communicating.

Over time, we implicitly learn that heavily advertised brands are of a high quality, and because advertising causes salience of the brand name, most times we can infer high quality from recognition alone.

It is the increasing absence of such signal that is becoming one of the core problems we have with digital advertising today.

Faris has spoken of it in terms of a Malthusian trap. 

‘Every time some new space opens up in culture, we rush to fill it, create an arms race, destroy the space in our self created Malthusian Trap.’

Bob Hoffman adds this, in his inimitable fashion.

‘I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the internet than adtech.
It is a plague. It interferes with virtually everything we try to do on the web. It has cheapened and debased advertising. It has helped spawn criminal empires. It is in part responsible for unprecedented fraud and corruption. It has turned marketing executives into clueless baboons. And it is destroying the idea of privacy, one of the backbones of democracy.’

Also Don Marti (who has been on the case about signal longer than most)

‘But when advertisers try to target users individually, signalling breaks down. Targeting turns an ad into the digital version of a cold call. Targeted ads tend to “burn out” the medium in which they appear, through a Peak Advertising effect. Each new targetable medium falls in value and popularity as users figure it out, filter it, or get their governments to restrict it.

The question remains.

At some point soon we are going to have to figure out how the hell to build brands on the internet, because we haven’t done much of a job so far.

But more on that later...

'I know you all know what I'm talkin' about,

Don't be lookin' at me like that now,

I see you baby shakin' that ass'

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aim for fame

James Norrington: 'You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of'.

Capt. Jack Sparrow: 'But you have heard of me'.

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how to win at 'chicken'

Two cars head toward each other. 

The first driver to swerve loses the game, along with some stature among his adolescent peers. 

On the other hand, if neither driver bails out, both lose in a bigger way. 

What to do? 

Toss your steering wheel out the window in full view of the other driver. 

Once convinced that you’re irrevocably committed to your course, he will, if rational, do the swerving himself.

From 'The Moral Animal: Why we are the way we are, the new science of Evolutionary Psychology' by Robert Wright

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aberrant salience meets rosser reeves uptown

The term 'salience' - in marketing speak - refers to the likelihood that a particular brand will ‘come to mind’ easily in buying situations. 

In ‘How Brands Grow’, Professor Sharp uses the term to describe the idea of ‘mental availability’.

The easier a brand is to remember, in more buying situations, for more potential buyers, then the higher the overall mental ‘availability’ of the brand, ergo the more likelihood that the most salient brand will be bought.

Salience is also widely used in cognitive science, to describe the attention grabbing quality of things in general.

This is where ad people often get slightly confused.

While a campaign may be salient in the cognitive sense – its content is eye catching or entertaining for example – its effectiveness as a branding vehicle depends of how easily it is for those who view or interact will 'remember' which brand it was at an appropriate buying opportunity.

This requires subconscious (and conscious) brand cues throughout, fuelling the content-addressable memory. Branded neuro-richness, if you prefer.

Therefore ad salience and brand salience are two halves of the job.

Much of the so-called branded content out there seems to fail on these points.

It’s neither ad salient (i.e. brand content that is pitched as ‘comic’ is nowhere near as funny as regular unbranded comedy therefore does not stand-out) nor is it brand salient (assuming one has the mettle to stick it out through five or six minutes of sub standard 'entertainment' the branding itself may fleetingly appear only on the end frame).

Medical conditions such as psychosis and schizophrenia are also now widely believed to involve, at least in part, a problem with the mind’s regulation of salience.

In states of psychosis ordinary or commonplace things appear more important or alarming than they should.

In extreme cases this can take the form of delusions or hallucinations.

More than being mistaken or perhaps mild confusion they can include disturbing states such as believing that your thoughts are being manipulated by aliens, somehow external forces are controlling your actions, or believing that people want to engage in meaningful relationships with brands.

This idea, ‘Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience’ was popularised by the psychiatrist Shitij Kapur.

Kapur’s Aberrant Salience Theory connects delusions and hallucinations to differences in dopamine function.

He argues that dopamine is crucial in highlighting which things are ‘motivationally important’, how they stand out from each other.

Dopamine plays a critical role in the function of the central nervous system, and is also linked with the brain's complex system of motivation and reward.

Dopamine release can be artificially stimulated through the use of drugs like MDMA (Ecstacy), whereas instances where dopamine release would naturally occur include during sex, or when hugging your child, or when a Twitter campaign delivers a 1500% ROI.

Advertising’s adaptation of Aberrant Salience theory is known as the Rosser Reeves Fallacy.

Reeves was one of the most famous ad men of the 50s, and also inventor of the ‘unique selling proposition’.

We can hang him for that one in another post, for this one we want to focus on his equally flawed method for measuring ad effectiveness

In simple terms Reeves method involved taking a sample of your target customer, show them your advertising and see how many of them recognise it.

Compare scores for yay vs nay and there’s your effect.

The Reeves theory is grabbing the wrong end of the stick, the problem is that people are far more likely to notice and remember advertising for the brands they use and like.

And a brand's Facebook fans or social media following tend also to be heavier buyers.

Of course they are, that's why they become fans in the first place.

They become fans of brands that they already know, already like and already use.

As Les Binet and Sarah Carter explain in their Mythbuster series:

‘These new digital incarnations of the Rosser Reeves Fallacy are particularly dangerous. Because they focus on heavy buyers, they lead to a flawed emphasis on loyalty over penetration, targeting over reach, and price promotion over brand building – all strategies proven to be less profitable’.

Just this week the annual Sensis SocialMedia Report asserts:

‘Marketers are failing to give consumers what they want on social media after mistakenly believing the public are keen to have a two-way conversation with their brand.’

All good so far.

84% of marketers are looking to open a conversation, [but] most punters want discounts (45%), give-aways (35%) and coupons (30%).

Exactly, customers don’t want to engage they just want to get the brands and products they already like and use, for cheaper.

Except, the Sensis report seems to indicate that this is what they should be given.

‘[its] important for brands to take a softly, softly approach when first building an audience base before moving to a more sales-driven message. People are engaging with businesses and once they have established a relationship they are absolutely open to…offers and incentives.’

Aberrant Salience Meets Rosser Reeves Uptown.

A problem with the mind’s regulation of salience.

States of psychosis in which the wrong things appear important.

Like the focus on heavy buyers,

The flawed emphasis on loyalty over penetration,

Tight targeting over broad reach,

And price promotion over brand building.

All strategies proven to be less profitable.

And yet still widely practiced and recommended.

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catenaccio, totaalvoetbal, tiki-taka

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

Phil Rosenzweig ‘Left Brain, Right Stuff’ 2015 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Class + Preparation + Intelligence + Athleticism = Championships’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiki-taka 

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

Not this OR that, but this AND that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further in Martin Wiegel’s article he points out:

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

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

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

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football's not a matter of life or death, it's nudge more important than that.

I’m not sure if this story that I heard at the weekend qualifies as a nudge or a full-on behaviour change intervention. Or something in between.

My 6-year-old boy and I were listening to the keeper talk at the giraffe enclosure in Melbourne Zoo, who gave us the gist of the following story.

The giraffes in the zoo have come from the Melako Conservancy in Northern Kenya, one of 26 community conservation areas managed by the Northern Rangelands Trust.

This area covers about 1500 square miles and, alongside the giraffes, it is home to approximately 40,000 Rendille people, semi-nomadic groups who’s main livelihood revolves around rearing of livestock.

In traditional Rendille culture, young men between the ages of 13 and 25 went through initiation to gain status and become a warrior.

Among the rituals the hunting and killing of the native animals such as giraffes, zebras and oryx.

The traditional role of the warrior had been to protect the community, acquire livestock and, as a by product, demonstrate their 'fitness' and gain subsequent status and reproductive advantages. 

The top boys would obviously become tribe leaders of the future, with all the perks that go with that role.

Times have changed, there’s less imperative for young Rendille men to become traditional warriors however old habits die hard and the lads tended to still cause trouble with rival gangs, hunt the wildlife, to jostle for group status.

The bigger problem now is that certain species including Beisa oryx, Grevy’s zebra, giraffe and gerenuk are now becoming endangered.

So the NRT people and representatives from Zoo’s Victoria came up with an intervention that they hoped would work with the need for the nascent warriors to compete for group status but divert it away from the behaviours that put the animals under threat.

It turns out that the Rendille boys other principle interest other than the activities mentioned, was soccer*.

So the NRT and ZV set about bringing in the kit needed to set up pitches, balls and strips.

The Melako league now consists of 16 teams.

The nudgey bit is that the teams are named after the wildlife that were previously under threat and incorporated into the team badges printed on the team shirt.

A commitment device.

The NRT are measuring the impact of this in a reduction in what they call flight distance. 

When wildlife is feels stressed or harassed it is more difficult for humans to get close to them, resulting in longer flight distance.

When wildlife feel less wary of humans then the flight distance is shorter and it is easier to get closer to them, and to count the numbers.

According to our zookeeper friend, the numbers are improving.

*I'm using the term soccer so as not to confuse with the strange game that passes as football in Australia, ok?

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