sugar-plum fairies dancing in their heads

Merry Christmas and the usual thanks to all who have read, shared and commented in 2017.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

supernormal stimulus

Human biological evolution solves only ‘adaptive’ problems, the kind that concern surviving long enough to successfully pass on our genes into the next generation.

Among these problems are; what to eat, avoiding getting eaten, finding the best quality mating partners, and competing with each other for status and resources.

These are the kinds of problems that were the most common in the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ - the stone age hunter-gatherer environment our ancestors navigated - not our modern world of technology, media, celebrities and consumerism.

It was during this time - that’s approximately 99% of human existence, the stone age lasted for a couple of million years - that our minds did almost all of their evolving. A time when we lived in small groups of maybe only a few dozen people gathering plants and hunting animals.

Our modern world is a tiny, tiny blip in comparison.

We only developed agriculture about 10,000 years old, the industrial revolution was just over 200 years ago and the internet has only been around for about 20 years. Not nearly enough time has elapsed for our minds to adapt to these new conditions. Our modern minds are designed for solving ancient stone age problems, not for dealing with the supernormal stimulus of the 21st century.

The theory of supernormal stimulus was developed in the 1950s by biologist and ornithologist Nikolaas ‘Niko’ Tinbergen. He found that biologically salient objects, like beaks and eggs, generated far more interest from his bird subjects when they were painted, pimped and blown up in size.

In one experiment herring gull chicks pecked more at big red knitting needles than adult herring gull beaks, because they were bigger and redder and longer than real beaks.

A young student of Tinbergen called Richard Dawkins experimented with male stickleback fish and supernormal dummy females. The real female sticklebacks naturally swell up when they are fertile and full of eggs.

By making his dummy female fish much bigger and rounder than normal the males became more attracted to the dummies. Dawkins is credited with introducing ‘sex bomb’ into the lexicon in describing this example.

Evolution has designed male Australian jewel beetles go after for cues of shiny amber-brown surfaces with the presence of dimples, as these were almost certain to be female beetles. This normal stimulus triggered a normal adaptive behaviour. But Australian beer bottles – stubbies - give off these exact same cues, only much bigger and shinier.

They are everywhere in the male beetles' environment and the boys are getting distracted. Beer bottles are a super-normal stimulus for male beetles, triggering a maladaptive behaviour.

Of course, many animals exaggerate features to attract mates, mimic other species or protect themselves against predators. But these changes happen slowly over evolutionary time.

Supernormal is a term that can be used to describe any stimulus that elicits a response stronger than the stimulus for which it evolved.

Junk food is a super stimulus version of real food to humans. Things like sugar and fat – that were biologically salient, but scarce in the stone-age environment – are all around us, in abundance, every day.

But it’s not just the external cues that are super-normal, but the internal rewards too. A Big Mac gives you a bumper hit of sugar, fat, and flavour far more intensely than a bowl of rolled oats or boiled cabbage.

Oscar Wilde famously stated ‘I can resist everything but temptation’.

None of us can. Stuffing our faces with calories, drinking and taking drugs, gambling, obsessing over the lives of celebrities whom we are never likely to meet instead of going out in to the real world and forming real relationships, competing for status at work and generally wasting time with people who wouldn’t care if we lived or died rather than spending time with our families. These are just a few examples of common, and maladaptive, behaviours.

Of course, all of these new temptations mentioned are hard to resist, because in the world our minds evolved to inhabit they didn’t exist. They are supernormal stimuli that elicit a response stronger than the stimuli for which their response mechanisms evolved.

Humans, however, now have the cultural tools that allow us to consciously manipulate these signals in real time, and the makers of these tools know this very well.

If you were the planner in an ad agency anytime between 1965 and about 10 years ago, your work was fairly straightforward. You would do your research, find some insights and – if you were any good – develop an interesting platform that creatives could jump from to make the ads.

But the sexier modern advertising environment has raised our reward thresholds. The old rewards just don’t synergise 24-7 mindshare, do they?

Our new blockchain content glasses are super-normal stimulus causing maladaptive behaviours.

The super successful products of the digital economy like Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram are all supernormal stimuli. They work so well because they are perfectly adapted to create supernormal stimuli for our stone-age minds. We are wired to compete for status among our peers in the small groups on the savannahs we used to inhabit. But now we can super-compete with millions of strangers on the internet.

So, the next time you hear about how the internet is rewiring our brains, it’s really the internet adapting to and exploiting how our brains work.

Because, rather than being an all-purpose information processor, the mind consists of a number of specialised ‘modules’, or apps, designed by evolution to cope with certain recurring adaptive problems.

The mind’s ‘apps’ are specific processes that evolved in response to our ancestral environment. Our minds have apps for mating behaviour, gossip, looking out for family members, making deals with strangers, signalling personality traits and so on. The successful products of the digital economy are the ones that mirror and exaggerate these response mechanisms.

What’s modern is in our environment, not in our minds.

And an OS update takes thousands of generations to load, unfortunately.

So for your next disruptive innovation idea, just find a super-stimulating version of a natural reward. But make it sexier, cuter, sweeter, bigger, louder or with more teeth.

There’s a free strategy for you. Off you go.

Psychological junk food.

Although, AI robot sex dolls is already becoming a crowded category.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above is an excerpt, adapted from Eaon's forthcoming book 'Where Did It All Go Wrong? Adventures at the Dunning-Kruger Peak Of Advertising' which comes out in January 2018 and will be available for pre-order soon on Amazon worldwide.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

when love breaks down

Onora O'Neill's 2002 Reith Lectures series 'A Question of Trust' are as apt today as they were then.

In the 5th of her lectures, 'Licence to Deceive', the Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Philosophy was principally referring to the state of journalism but, in 2017, we can apply her insight to what has happened to advertising in general and by advertising technology in particular.

'Do we really gain from heavy-handed forms of accountability? Do we really benefit from...demands for transparency? I am unconvinced.

I think we may undermine professional performance and standards...by excessive regulation, and that we may condone and even encourage deception in our zeal for transparency.'

The final sentence is perhaps the most disturbing.

How can we discern the trustworthy from untrustworthy? O'Neill argues that we should perhaps focus less on grandiose ideals of transparency and rather more on limiting deception.

This means media agencies stepping up, taking back our lunch money. Reclaiming the control of strategy that -  in a decade of Dunning-Kruger peak stupidity - we've ceded to our Silicone Valley overlords. The smiling assassins.

(As a fun police aside, I would put a stop to agency staff walking around wearing the swag they have received from vendors. Facebook and Google t-shirts etc. Enclothed cognition!)

And O'Neill was some 15 years ahead of my Google/Facebook 'crunchy-on-the-outside-fluffy-on-the-inside' metaphor.

'The new information technologies may be anti-authoritarian , but curiously they are often used in ways that are also anti-democratic. They undermine our capacities to judge others' claims and to place our trust.'

The IAB and others say, 'We need to make measurement sexy. It's a topic we need to embrace and give a lot more love to'.

Good luck with that.

Because it's when trust moves out, that measurement moves in.

And not everything that can counts can be counted.

When love breaks down,
The lies we tell,
They only serve to fool ourselves.

We are where we are, and it's going to be a long road back.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

digital vs the internet

It's common to hear 'digital' conflated with 'the internet', when the two are obviously interconnected but not the same thing.

'Digital' is not a thing, it’s an adjective. The internet is not strictly a thing either but is certainly more thing-like. Or at least a 'place', of sorts.

If the internet is a place, digital is it's underlying structure.

We came across this splendid analogy from the film-maker Adam Curtis which seems to help with the distinction.

“[The internet] will become a bit like a John Carpenter movie. You go there, amidst the ruins, and it’s weird, and you can be nasty — just have fun and be bad, like a child. From about ’96 to about 2005 people built these lovely websites, they put up masses and masses of fantastic information. They’ve left them sitting there, but it’s like a city that everyone’s gone from. And what’s come in instead is a weird world where you don’t know what’s real — just people shouting at each other. It’s good fun, but it’s not real.”

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

machine gun etiquette

The technology always comes first.

Then creative people mess with it and create something new and unexpected.

Artists never invented oil paint, or the movie camera but they saw the opportunity the technology gave for creativity.

Bill Drummond once made this point (I sometimes see it attributed to Lee Clow, either way it’s a useful insight).

Historically, the advertising business has erred on the side of caution in its adoption of new technology. The first ever TV ad, a whopping $4 dollar production for Bulova Watches, ran in 1941 but it was almost 20 further years before the industry embraced television as a platform.

But things have speeded up in recent years.

In fact it’s been a head-first dive into digital and social media, then virtual and augmented reality, black boxes of every flavour and now artificial intelligences and machine learning.

As a bonus, with each of these new developments in technology comes the processing of huge amounts of new consumer data – we have more than any other generation of communicators could have even imagined - so it should naturally follow, fully stacked, we can now connect with consumers better than any other generation of marketers.

Yet it can often feel like more data actually means less. We are even less connected.

Because, in spite of the bluster and gusto, advertising hasn’t had a good time figuring out how to make tech, data and creativity work together, and therefore doesn’t appear to have a clear articulation of its own future.

Indeed, in most of the industry the conversation is still stuck with a false dilemma.

As if the data-driven and creative are incompatible.

It need not be this way, and we need to resolve this dichotomy fairly urgently.

Data is everywhere, and every day there is more and more data.

For many, simply being exposed to the idea of data at this scale is enough to just switch off and become misty-eyed for simpler times, whereas for others the accumulation of data has become something of an end in itself, as if simply possession of the data constitutes a silver bullet.

But the daily reality, for the most part, is more mundane. Agencies may tend to limit their view of data as either, oft times inconvenient, input to inform or rationalise strategic choices, or as, equally inconvenient, output in the form of metrics and measurement.

What’s even worse is that during this process they tend to obsess over the wrong data, giving disproportionate focus to small and insignificant differences, get distracted by noise rather than finding the signal, get dazzled by vanity metrics and miss the big important things that really matter in guiding strategy.

From that standpoint, any lofty ambitions to assimilate data as a part of the creative process seem a long way off.

Direct marketers and digital marketers will, of course, disagree. They will crow of how they can already effortlessly track and retarget elusive consumers, whilst micro-segmenting audiences and optimising each campaign to within an inch its life.

But is that all there is? Efficiency?

All of the time each of us spends on the internet, and on our smartphones, all the websites we visit, the apps and services we use, everything we buy or think about buying and the people we talk to generates an incredible amount of data on our behaviour and our preferences that could be used by brands to better connect. However, just this observation is banal.

Yes, the domination of programmatic delivery, automation and further advertising technology is inevitable. Very soon all media will be bought and distributed in this way. It’s a wonderful thing, but the tech, on its own, is not good enough.

We desperately need our best creative minds to grab the opportunity that data and technology provide for creativity. But we need a bridge to connect the two.

To that end, I propose that the role for strategic planning in agencies will have to change in this new data-rich environment.

While no planners should be strangers to data analysis - some may even have a basic grasp of statistics and recognize a NBD curve when they see it - but the key imperative for strategic thinking in agencies will be to provide the human understanding that connects the data and technology to the creative product.

As a starting point it’s worth remembering that any data is really only as useful as the questions asked of it. Data has no intrinsic value.

Understanding what consumers actually do rather than what they say they do is critical. We’ve learned from the recent advances in behavioural economics and consumer psychology that consumers have, pretty much, no access to the unconscious mental processes that drive most of their decision-making.

However, this doesn’t prevent people providing plausible-sounding rationalisations for their behavior, when asked. Even the process of asking people what they think exerts its own unconscious influence. To the extent that much of the survey data that has traditionally fueled marketing decision making is, at worst, a total fiction or at best only an artefact of the research process, itself.

The consumer psychologist Philip Graves famously channeled Edgar Allen Poe by remarking ‘Trust nothing consumers say, about half of what we see them do, and nearly everything the sales data tells us they have done’.

Graves is adamant that real sales data and covert behavioural observation should always be the start point of any research.

The use of the words ‘covert observation’ can quickly divide a room. However when the focus of any research is overt – i.e. the participants are aware of what’s being investigated – then, while it feels like it’s more transparent or ‘ethical’ it is mostly useless. Knowing one’s behavior is being observed is intrinsically biasing. When people are aware that they are being observed they become more self-conscious and their behaviour changes.

This is where the new developments in data technology might become interesting.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are two buzz phrases being used right now - often interchangeably - but they are not quite the same thing. For our purposes as advertisers, it’s enough to know that one is effectively an application of the other.

Machine Learning, then, is a particular application of one AI based around the idea that - given access to enough data - machines can learn for themselves. Put simply, a machine learning AI is essentially a system fueled by algorithms, and as these algorithms are exposed to new data they teach themselves and grow.

Basic Machine Learning applications can read and interpret text (making inferences about the tone of the text it is reading), all programmatic ad trading is applied AI, chuck in other applications like self-driving cars, Siri and rudimentary speech recognition and a lot of this kind of applied AI is all around us, now. But these examples are what the boffins would label ‘narrow’ AI.

Narrow or not, these developments are reasonably impressive from the technology standpoint and present a platform for creative people to do something new and unexpected.

In simple terms, the ability to identify an individual consumer, rather than trying to make sense of multiple cookies and multiple devices that may be associated with an individual, is not just about micro targeting and extreme personalization. This ‘narrow’ view (to borrow the technical jargon of our AI engineer friends) is just more of the Peppers and Rogers circular logic.

AIs and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) are going to be far more useful in accurately sizing markets, uncovering the real sales and behavioural data and the necessary covert behavioural observation that allows us to group together bigger sets of consumers through shared insights.

Advertisers should be interested in observing these network effects. As anyone with even a basic understanding of simple network theory will tell you, the value of a network increases as it grows bigger. A simple applied description of machine learning with personal information is described nicely for the lay person (or advertising practitioner) Kevin Kelly’s 2017 book ‘The Inevitable’ and in the chapter on ‘Cognifying’ (one of the 12 tech forces that he predicts will be the most important in the next couple of decades).

‘The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it, the more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on’

Kelly tells of a moment in 2002 when this became clear to him. While making conversation with assorted engineers at a private party within Google HQ he came to the realisation that we had been looking at our Silicon Valley overlords ultimate goals the wrong way round. Google were not interested in the application of AIs to make their core products like search better, it was OUR usage of search that was feeding Google’s AIs. Google was fundamentally an AI company.

Our usage feeds the AI. The more we use it the smarter it gets, and so on.

Today, smartphone data is obviously they key - about 90% of all these devices are uniquely identifiable with an individual – we can know almost the exact composition of a total audience, as well as where and when media is used. It’s also worth noting that the full-tilt expansion of personal media means that the next decade promises to bring new technologies with capabilities far beyond the abilities of our smartphones.

The mainstreaming of machine learning capabilities, will provide agencies with better building blocks for smarter campaigns, and constitutes something of a leap in marketing intelligence, but as we’ve noted before, simply turbo-boosting targeting and delivery of ads is not where the real potential for AI applications in communications lies. Even adding the benefit of population level behavioural data and insights we are still working with ‘narrow’ AIs.

Things start to get much more interesting when we can map human psychology onto the data.

We live in a modern world of complex social networks. We interact with hundreds of people each day, in both physical and virtual environments. Success in this environment means being best adapted to interacting with, and working with other people.

And getting what you want from others.

Each of us has things that annoy us and things that make us happy. We have become very skilled good at remembering other people’s preferences and they, ours.

But we are limited by our cognitive capacity. It takes a huge amount of cognitive effort to remember other people’s preferences. But the pay-offs are there when we get it right.

This skill evolved long ago in our ancestral past, one of many adaptations that shaped our minds into the way they are because these adaptations enabled our stone-age ancestors to succeed with their (and our) principal concerns, namely survival, reproducing, forming mutually beneficial alliances and looking after families.

When the anthropologist Robin Dunbar was trying to solve the problem of why primates (including humans) and other social species devote so much time and effort to this kind of ‘grooming’ behavior, he happened upon his eponymous number.

Dunbar’s number (around 150) described a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom any individual is able to sustain a stable or meaningful social relationship.

150 is a best case number and even in the age of digital social networks, the number of friends with whom you keep in touch, and groom, is likely to be significantly less than Dunbar’s number.

But for brands, companies and institutions – for whom the Holy Grail is to sustain stable relationships, keep in touch with and groom literally millions of consumers - the really big opportunities that the harnessing the tsunami of personally identifiable data and the power machine learning and other AI applications offer lie in these areas.

The ability to manage relationships with and remember the (often implicit and unarticulated) preferences, of millions of individuals with the same intimacy as these tight-knit groups of humans manage their own relationships, is the bridge that finally connects the technology, the data and the creativity.

To a degree, I’m carried by Kelly’s optimism when he proposes, ‘There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.’

Take market research and add AI.

Take consumer psychology and add AI.

Take creativity and add AI.

So, in theory, machine learning and AIs do offer us much more than just the better mousetraps of targeting and delivery. The big opportunity lies in how these technologies will aid understanding what people value, why they behave the way they do, and how people are thinking (rather than just what). This could bring new, previously hidden, perspectives to inform both the construction of creative interventions and understanding exactly where, when and how these interventions will have the most power.

The more sensible proponents for the digital economy have always hoped for this, but if it were that simple then perhaps a lot more would have already been achieved by earlier iterations of the internet and this indicates that there are significant hurdles still to be overcome.

For a start, the impersonality of digital communication almost certainly affects our interactions with others in comparison to face-to-face communications. Spend five minutes on Twitter or in the comments section of any of the ad industry trade websites and this should be self-evident.

These challenges also have their roots deep in human nature and our evolutionary past.

In ‘The Evolution of Language’ Dunbar also notes that ‘Whenever person-to-person interaction is a necessary feature of the process (as in the striking of deals), the old and trusted cognitive mindsets will come into play. Suspicion of the unknown and the fear of being duped by untrustworthy strangers will continue to dictate our decisions…the lack of personalized contacts means that individuals lack that sense of personal commitment that makes the world of small groups go round’

Anyone who uses, the slightly more transparent and therefore marginally more civilized, LinkedIn will be familiar with the words of the data-scientist W. Edwards Deming, which seem to pop up in my own feed at least twice a week.

‘Without data you are just another person with an opinion’.

In our business there are no shortage of opinions. Unfortunately, many are spectacularly uninformed opinions.

Deming, quite rightly, demands the objective facts. And we have more facts and data at our disposal than at any time in human history.

However to complete the picture, and to take the opportunity that data and technology give for creativity, I propose an addendum to Deming’s thesis.

Without data you are just another person with an opinion? Correct.

But, without a coherent model of human behavior, you are just another person (or AI) with data.

----------------------

This is the original and longer version of an op-ed that appeared in AdNews in August.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

appliance of science

There’s a Bill Bernbach quote that appears from time to time.

It’s the one where Bill takes aim at a particular flavour of advertising that was popular in the early 60’s.

“There are a lot great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

When Bernbach goes after ‘science’, I’d propose that he is really just offering the ‘creativity’ counter position to the harder selling advertising as championed by the likes of his rival, Rosser Reeves.

Reeves was influenced by the writings of Claude Hopkin who had published a ‘manual’ for this kind of functional approach entitled ‘Scientific Advertising’ and was dismissive of overly creative executions.

Over time Bill’s statement has become contentious, and fuels the continuous Art v Science false dichotomy. As with most dichotomies the truth is more about the entwinement of the two propositions.

I’d argue that when Bill says ‘science’ he really means ‘formulaic’. I’d also argue that Bill himself might have been more scientific in his approach than the ‘scientists’ that he found irritating.

The Scientific Method is an organised way that helps scientists, strategists or creatives answer a question or begin to solve a problem.

Start with an observation.

If you're not naturally curious about the world then you are unlikely to be able to solve problems creatively. Half the battle is just noticing things, saving them for further thought and investigation and connecting them with other things you’ve noticed. Have an interesting question.

After making an interesting observation, this should next form an interesting question. These kind of questions usually begin with ‘why?’ Now form a hypothesis.

A hypothesis is an informed guess as to the possible answer to the question. The hypothesis may arrive as soon as the question is posed, or it may require a lot of fiddling about. There’s often a few different hypotheses. Another word for this is ‘ideas’.

Conduct experiments.

Ideas must be tested. Bernbach wasn’t a fan of pre-testing. Rightly so, if pre-testing worked then everyone would love all the advertising. The best experiment is putting it out into the world.

Analyse the data and draw a conclusion.

Here’s where we could all do better. We obsess over the wrong data, give disproportionate focus to the insignificant and are distracted by noise. But when we look in the right place then perhaps we have an observation that starts us on the cycle again.

To conclude, Bill Bernbach was as much scientific as creative. The two fields are not incompatible, they are one and the same.

Indeed, Bill was also something of an intuitive evolutionary psychologist.

‘It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.’

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

meme fitness

Meme 'fitness' is not dependent on the meme itself having any properties of good 'quality'.

It just needs an environment that increases replicability.

Case in point is the 'Amazon didn't kill the retail industry...' thing that has replicated itself successfully despite being complete horseshit.

None of those 'dead' things are dead.
Apart from Blockbuster, which was a brand rather than a category in any case.

But the meme is selected for in a Dunning-Kruger environment.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

all this useless beauty

‘Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity
What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?’
Elvis Costello ‘All This Useless Beauty’ 1995

Legendary British creative director Dave Trott is famously quoted as saying that advertising festivals actually prevent creativity.

‘You’re not doing advertising for six million people in the street anymore, but for ten people on the jury, and for a few clients.’

I also recall a comment made by Tom Goodwin a couple of years ago around Cannes in particular.

‘Cannes has become a self-serving fetishisation of the newly possible and the highly improbable. It’s predictable and formulaic in the extreme.’

It’s hard not to agree with these statements - at least in part – when observing some of this year’s winning entries.

Much of the silliness seemed to be confined to the ‘Innovation’ category.

A Gold Lion for a Grand Theft Auto 5 mod seems a bit of a stretch, while the Grand Prix was awarded to a project that plans to save the world by melting down guns.

Even the briefest glance at those cases, sheds some light on the mid-festival announcement from Publicis regarding their intention to give awards a miss next year in order to focus funding and effort on building their AI platform.

On the other hand there were a number of excellent, and well deserved, big winners.

Including Melbourne’s own Clemenger BBDO and their remarkable ‘Meet Graham’ work for TAC.

A few years ago Australian agencies combined could expect to take home around 50 lions in a good year.

At the last count Clems had accumulated around 56 on their own, including 29 for ‘Graham’.

Aside from the inevitable silliness on the fringes these festivals do serve a commercial purpose for agencies.

For the most part it’s reasonable to say that the volume and quality of new business an agency attracts is explicitly connected to the volume and quality of the awards they accrue.

Consistent performance in major advertising awards are one indicator of ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense. Agency ‘sexiness’ if you prefer.

This idea that ‘indicators’ are sexy comes from the work of Israeli scientist Amotz Zahavi.

In his ‘Handicap Principle’ hypothesis, Zahavi proposes that the only way to reliably demonstrate quality during ‘courtship’ is to display a ‘costly’ (alluring) signal. The peacock's tail is his most famous example.

These expensive signals are evolutionarily stable indicators of the brand and the agency’s quality, because cheap signals are too easy for low-quality imitators to fake.

Commitment to creativity signals advertiser ‘fitness’ – ultimately indicating that the most creative advertiser has greater ‘genetic’ value than its less creative competitors. After all, consumers tend to prefer advertisers that display high levels of intelligent creativity and, consequently, brands prefer agencies that do the same.

Participation in the spectacle of Cannes might seem like energetically expensive waste of time, but these kind of wasteful displays are exactly what we would expect from traits designed for ‘reproductive competition’.

I’d stick my neck out and say that big advertising festivals aren’t going away anytime soon.

However perhaps there is a case for a bit of a ‘reset’ and refocus on the commercial part of creativity.

The kind of creativity that touches Dave Trott’s ‘six million people in the street’.

With that thought in mind, and in closing, we stumbled across this excerpt from Prof Ronald Jay Cohen's 'Editor's note' to the judges in The Journal of Psychology and Marketing’s Awards in Advertising 1986.

Think of this as an objective ‘outside view’.

Cohen encourages jurors, in their deliberations, to view the awards in this way.

‘To the extent that it is possible, we hope to avoid the pitfalls associated other awards in the advertising industry. Thus we hope to avoid common criticisms of awards like ‘it's just a popularity contest’ by having voters justify their selections with reference to criteria such as attention-getting ability, attention-sustaining ability, communication of message, memorability of message, persuasiveness, creativity, and psychological sophistication.

Further, voters are advised to take into consideration what is happening in the actual marketplace with respect to the advertised product or service.
Wonderful creativity in a vacuum does not good [advertising] make.

Award-winning advertising is a successful marriage of creativity and ‘sellativity’.

Award-winning advertising is the type of advertising that reconfirms the classic Gestalt adage that ‘the whole is equal to more than the sum of its parts’.

Here, all of the elements of the [advertising] combine to form something that transcends any of the elements alone something that is ‘magical’ in some way.

A pitfall to avoid is becoming enthralled with the elements and failing to realize that there is something lacking from the commercial as a whole.’

The pitfalls of short-termism and over-obsession with metrics are well documented, however the bigger danger is that we are forgetting what advertising is actually for and how it works.

Then all we have is creativity in a vacuum, useless beauty.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

zuboff's law number 3

'Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control'.

In the car, on my way to work, I was listening to an episode of the 'Here We Are'podcast on the car stereo.

The show is hosted by American comedian Shane Mauss, who interviews local science experts and academics he meets while taking his stand-up comedy show from city to city.

In this particular episode he interviewed Professor Adam Bradley from the University of Colorado, a literary critic, musicologist, and a writer on popular culture. They discussed music in general, hip-hop, memory, and the brain.

In a section of the chat Bradley made a point that caught my ear as it seemed to connect to 'modular mind' theory.

Modularity is the idea that the mind is, at least in part, composed of innate neural structures or modules which have distinct established evolutionarily developed functions.

This perspective on modularity comes principally from evolutionary psychology, and the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. They suggest that the mind's modules are units of mental processing that evolved in response to selection pressures that faced our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors, when natural selection was forming the modern human species.

One such unit of processing is likely to be for language.

Music emerged in early human cultures for different purposes than simply inter-personal communication. And it therefore likely that music might be processed by another distinctly separate module.

To illustrate this point the Professor hypothesised that to ask one particular question to another person in the context of normal conversation would generally elicit an uncomfortable response.

'Do you ever wish you had never been born?' .

At the very least it's conceptually a bit strange to contemplate.

However, essentially the same proposition rendered in the context of a song, in the lyrics of the Queen song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' specifically, evokes far less existential angst.

It's therefore reasonable to suggest that the module for processing language and the module for processing music respond to similar stimulus in different ways.

I'm still in my car at this point, nodding with interest, when my Apple watch starts to vibrate on my wrist.

I glance at it and the message on the screen.

The discussion has clearly also caught the ear of my watch, it thinks that it's me talking, and it proceeds to ask me if I am contemplating suicide at this moment, and offers up options for help if this was the case.

Shoshana Zuboff is author of the classic 'In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power'.

First published in 1988 the work was the culmination of several years studying the extensive involvement and implications of information technology in organisations.

Many of ideas in the work have endured, not least the trifecta known as Zuboff's Laws.

• Everything that can be automated will be automated.
• Everything that can be informated will be informated.
• Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control, irrespective of its originating intention.

Or as folk wisdom would have it; there are only two groups of people who's movements are continuously monitored.

The first group are monitored involuntarily by order of the courts or suchlike with tracking devices attached to their person.

The second group is everybody else.

Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control, irrespective of its originating intention.

I'll let you know if I have any difficulties in obtaining insurance in the near future.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

if advertising is dead...

The death of this, the death of that, the death of the other and the death of the next thing.

The impending death of something or other is reported every other week.

The death of advertising in particular.

Mea culpa. About 10 years ago I probably was that douche-bag.

I wrote about my folly and subsequent enlightenment a couple of years ago in The Dunning-Kruger Peak of Advertising.

Eventually one gets over one's own bullshit, to a degree.

Or at least goes into recovery.

(I'm taking each day as it comes.)

And with every announcement of the demise of advertising comes the announcement of a new agency model (sic), so it seems that even advertising has abandoned advertising.

As the management consultancies stand in line to buy up agencies all the talk is of doing-things-differently, disruption or redefining-the-industry.

What if the change the industry really needs is to refocus itself towards producing brilliant advertising?

Back in 1979, the emerging young painter Julian Schnabel presented his two breakthrough solo exhibitions at Mary Boone’s gallery in New York.

The shows mainly featured his signature neo-expressionist wax paintings and plate paintings.

Amid the popular and influential artworld narrative of the time included widely read articles with titles like 'The End of Painting' and 'Last Exit: Painting' in respected journals such as Artforum.

It should be noted that those essays (penned by critics Douglas Crimp and Thomas Lawson, respectively) should be approached with some caution unless readers are particularly fluent in academic postmodernist gobbledygook.

The final nail in painting's coffin had barely been bludgeoned into its place when at the exact same time other commentators began to herald Schnabel’s works as 'the RETURN of painting'.

In later years (and looking back), Schnabel - somewhat wryly - reflected:

'I thought that if painting is dead, then it’s a nice time to start painting.'

It strikes me that there is an emerging opportunity for advertising agencies that actually want to make advertising.

It's worth presenting Schnabel's full comment on the 'return to painting', but looked at through an advertising lens.

“I thought that if [advertising] is dead, then it’s a nice time to start [doing advertising].

People have been talking about the death of [advertising] for so many years that most of those people are dead now.”

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

life after adtech

Theodore ‘Ted’ Sturgeon is widely acclaimed as one the greats in science fiction writing.
He wrote a number of novels, was an early scriptwriter on the promising TV series Star Trek in the 50s and 60s and also one of the foremost critics in the sci-fi genre, also penning over 400 reviews before his passing in 1985.

After many years of batting back attacks on the science fiction genre from critics, he had a moment of insight.

This insight became known as Sturgeon’s Revelation, later – and somewhat less dramatically – shortened to Sturgeon’s Law.

Speaking at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in September 1953, Sturgeon responded to ‘proper’ literary critics who claimed that 'ninety percent of science fiction is crap'.

Ted agreed. Ninety percent of science fiction is indeed crap.

But, he argued, to say ninety percent of science fiction is crap is meaningless, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms.

Sturgeon’s Law therefore states that ninety percent of everything - all film, literature, products, culture and advertising - is crap.

Less often reported is Ted’s proposed solution to the problem.

If we agree that ninety percent of everything is crap, then what’s important is to study, learn from and promote the ten percent that isn’t crap.

[Maybe 90% is generous, it’s more likely closer to 99% but you get the idea.]

In advertising there seems to be a period when any new approach, new platforms or technology comes along that – for a time - seems to somehow be viewed as exempt from this law.

Social media marketing, content marketing, AI, VR, chatbots, programmatic delivery and other adtech all arrived in their time, were heralded as the next big thing, then gradually landed in a ditch of disappointment or - as in adtech’s case - murky nefariousness.

But if we had remembered Sturgeon’s law perhaps we could have been more critical of practices and theories from the outset and avoided a lot of unpleasantness.

The shortcomings of adtech have now been fully revealed.

[As another aside, it is peculiar that in this age when information is supposed to disseminate at warp speed, mainstream media has only just caught up with what many of us have been discussing for about 4 or 5 years.]

Somehow we have to shift focus and look for the 1%.

Looking for the good AND THEN CRITICISE THAT.

Where is the good practice, how do we build on that or make that better? – and if there is none then how do we create some?

As an industry we’ve been duped and been cheated, but now we have had our eyes opened.

Will we get fooled again?

Probably, It’s not as if we are strangers to pluralistic ignorance in this business.

Anyone who has sat through campaign or brand tracking presentations by supposedly reputable research companies and thought ‘am I the only one in this room who thinks this is bullshit?’ please raise your hand now.

I thought so. Just about everyone. But we never raised our hand at the time.

The only way to break out of these cycles is to speak up, ask questions, be sceptical and ask for evidence.

A decent rule of thumb would be to DEMAND that the more extraordinary the claim of any technology platform or gizmo, the stronger the evidence must be to support that claim.

This is not a Luddite rant. Programmatic, automation and advertising technology is inevitable. Very soon all media will be distributed in this way.

Crapness, however, is not inevitable.

Bill Drummond once made this point.

The technology always comes first.

Then creative people mess with it and create something new and unexpected.

Artists never invented oil paint, or the movie camera but they saw the opportunity the technology gave for creativity.

The technicians and engineers have had their turn, and the results were less than optimal.

Factor in blind-sided publishers, winner-takes-all multinationals being allowed to mark their own homework, the deluge of shitty content and open season for fraudsters and criminals and we’ve got a big mess to clean up.

At least 90% of the whole adtech shooting match was total crap. But it’s out in the open and we have to move on.

And 90% of everything will always be shit, but it’s only a relentless, sceptical, demand for quality and creativity that points the way forward.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

might as well jump

Note: This thing was written for the Mumbrella '24 hours with...' weekly feature.

After about 6 re-writes it was still rejected as not meeting the criteria, so I gave up. This is version 2 which was the best 'take'.

------------

Are readers are familiar with the BBC comedy TV show ‘Room 101’?

On the show celebrities are invited to discuss their pet hates and then attempt to persuade the host – Frank Skinner - to send those hates into oblivion in Room 101.

The literary Room 101 is the torture room in the George Orwell novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' which reputedly contains ‘the worst thing in the world’.

Interestingly George Orwell himself named Room 101 after a real meeting room in BBC Broadcasting House where he sat through many tedious meetings.

Perhaps you have one such room in your agency…

If I were ever to appear on the show, one of my items for Room 101 would almost certainly be in-flight magazines.

In particular those ‘one day in Marrakech’ types of articles.

‘Wake up early and take a stroll through the local artisanal shepherds market where you can pick up a single-origin Nicaraguan black honey espresso – infused with Apricot, of course – and peruse the selection of hand-made authentic Mongolian compost toilets.’

Hopefully I can get through this article without that kind of status-signaling twaddle. Or at least keep it to a minimum.

I say minimum, as I’m only human.

So, a day in the life - minus the conspicuous ‘authenticity’…

The day begins…

As much as I can I try and organise working time during daylight hours.

Routinely staying up way past bedtime to finish work that didn’t get done during the day is an indicator that something else has gone awry.

Some of us think of ourselves as night people, but - as a species - we have evolved to function best in the daytime.

For a start, we can't see in the dark.

Given that sabre-tooth tigers and suchlike tended to hunt at night this was of some importance or our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

There’s a lot of talk these days about this-or-that disruptive innovation.

In terms of impact innovations such as the electric light were exponentially more disruptive than any Uber or Snapchat glasses will ever be.

Even if you prefer to work at night, it is still the down time on the evolutionary body clock. I have extra admiration for people like A&E doctors who work through the night. It’s a hard enough job as it is without battling against 2 million years of evolution.

I’d rather just get up a bit earlier in the morning. Speaking of which…

6am.

I get up. But nothing gets me down.

I’d like to be able to say that this is a tactical self-nudge to anchor my biological clock, however it’s more about the necessity of getting on the road. I live down the Mornington Peninsula so I’m part of the traffic on the M3, M11 then M1.

If I’m not on the M1 by 7am it can take forever to get to South Melb.

I’ve generally selected the next day's clothes etc the night before – by ‘selected’ I mean jeans and whatever t-shirt is top of the pile (its my variant of the famous Obama two-suits method).

A morning routine helps me function without having to think about what I’m doing, and get out the door without waking the family at stupid o’clock.

Car time is often creative thinking time. But who couldn’t be creative zipping through the morning rush in a canary yellow Porsche 911 Carrera?

It’s a bit harder in a 2003 Honda Jazz, but I manage.

I recently read about the cartoonist Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) who thought up all the original Dilbert cartoons between 5am and 7am before going to his day job.

Even after quitting his job and going pro he continued to do the strip from 6am to 7am and doesn't attempt any creative work in afternoon, reserving that time for admin tasks.

With a bit of luck I’ll get into the office around 7.45. This means I’ve got about an hour and a half to get some creative or investigative work done before I have to start attending meetings.

Once or twice a week I’ll use this time to keep up with political sections of the major newspaper sites, it’s a good idea for me and my team to keep up to speed on policy issues, locally and nationally.

I’d like to tell you more but the sensitive nature of my work for the government demands utmost secrecy. I know you will understand.

I am healthy and well and making lots of money.

(Like Travis Bickle, I’m God’s lonely man.)

It’s hard to say what a typical day is. We work with all manner of government departments and institutions with budgets ranging from tiny to some of the biggest spenders in Australia.

I’m lucky to have a very capable team - all are generalist strategic planners but among them I have three directors - each with their distinct experience and specialisms to add from Behavioural insights, Ehrenberg-Bass Marketing Science and Cultural Science.

In a general sense our remit involves working with information and putting it to use (to paraphrase Stanley Pollitt). This is not just marketing or media research but all the information available – in order to identify and help solve a client's problems.

Lunchtime

Until recently I’d spent the bulk of my career in creative agencies and no suppliers ever wanted to take me to lunch.

It’s a different story in a media agency.

Everyone wants to take you out.

To keep it simple, I generally decline politely.

Not for any virtue-signaling reason, I’ve got a bit of a weird diet to follow (don’t ask), so it’s just easier to bring my own lunch.

Aside from client work our big project at the moment is further developing out our cultural insights platform, DIALECT (Diversity in Identity, Area, Linguistics, Ethnicity, Culture and Technology).

This platform allows us to explore and transform multiple cultural data inputs into usable market intelligence, mapping important cultural nuances – where they exist – and also the human universals that play out across cultures.

DIALECT is essentially our foray into the emerging field of applied Social Physics, fusing data analysis and mathematical laws of biology to understand group behaviour.

Today is our weekly review of the platform, and our Cultural Director, is taking me through the next set of iterations and incrementals. I nod and pretend to understand agile development methodology.

By mid-afternoon I’m already thinking about sleep.

I regard sleep as an essential part of my work.

At the moment I’m interested in 90-minute sleep cycles.

90mins is the optimum cycle, this means that you can feel more refreshed after 3 hours sleep than after 5 – waking after 5 hours means you have woken mid-cycle.

The psychologist Richard Wiseman says a good sleep is like a wash cycle on a washing machine – cleaning out your mind of the day’s memories that you don't need.

We all receive vast amounts of information during the day, and quite a lot of it – campaign tracker research reports, for example – can be totally useless, so this sorts out which memories are important and which to discard.

At this time of year the many articles that claim to reveal the top 24 (or more) marketing trends for 2017 can be safely set to boil wash.

A good way of distracting the mind and getting off to sleep is thinking of very positive scenarios.

I’ve come across many marketers who must be able to sleep very easily.

They are especially adept at building fantasy worlds in their head and should be able to drift off easily with very positive imagery of loyalty programs, social media engagement and suchlike.

Before the end of the day I have a catch-up on internal training with our Marketing Science expert in Canberra. She’s coming down in a couple of weeks to get us up to speed with the finer points of NBD-Dirichlet Distribution and Ehrenberg’s law of buying frequencies.

6pm

Back to the Honda Jazz and back to the freeway for the commute home. Tonight I listen to a couple of episodes of the BBC Radio 4 podcast ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage’ that I’ve been saving. Who would have thought that particle physics would be the new comedy?

7pm

At home, I try and park work stuff into my subconscious as much as possible and let it sort itself out while I'm doing other things.

Discerning creatives will be familiar with the seminal 1939 work by James Webb Young, entitled ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’.

Stage 3 of the 5 stage process Young outlines involves removing a problem you are trying to solve out of your conscious mind to stimulate the unconscious.

He likens it to how Sherlock Holmes would often stop right in the middle of a case, and drag Watson off to a cello recital, or something.

That was irritating to the practical minded Watson, but letting the unconscious chew on a problem was essential to the creative process for Holmes.

To let my own subconscious chew, I’ll take the dog out with my boy for a bit then when he’s tucked up maybe Mrs P and I will watch some written-by-algorithm series on Netflix, like ‘Designated Survivor’.

Or re-run old favourites like ‘Utopia’, ‘The West Wing’ or ‘The Thick of It’, anything just to try and switch off my mind from Government work.

I travel most weeks, back and forth to Canberra usually, so before bedtime I might pack my bag.

Flying time is good reading time. I’ve adopted the catchphrase ‘Nothing in advertising makes sense except in the light of evolution’ and I’m devouring a lot of evolutionary psychology just now.

Does all science and no novels make Jack a dull boy?

Round about 10.30pm it is time for some Peach Momotaro Blooming Tea, brewed from its own biodegradable tea temple and then I’m off to sleep for seven and a half hours exactly (that’s 5 sleep cycles).

What?

I only promised to keep conspicuous authenticity and status-signaling to a manageable minimum.

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit

legends of orson-ness

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles famous radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel ‘War of the Worlds’ played on CBS Radio’s weekly ‘Mercury Theatre on the Air’ show.

Mercury Theatre’s regular theme was adapting classic literary works for radio broadcast.

By the late 30’s, much of America was adopting the new disruptive technology of radio for news and entertainment.

As part of the adaptation – and to fit with idea of presenting the play in the form of faux-news bulletins - Welles, his creative partner John Houseman, and writer Howard Koch selected the small town of Grovers Mill from a map of New Jersey to be the site of the alien invasion.

The rest is history, of course.

According to lore (and some allegedly scientific analysis - Hadley Cantril’s paper ‘The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic’ a notable example) something in the region of one million Americans were sent into blind panic - some taking heart attacks and others committing suicide - all of them certain that New Jersey and America were under attack from Martian invaders.

The reality is a somewhat different story.

Very few listeners were duped by War of the Worlds.

For a start, the audience was pretty small.

Mercury Theatre went out against a long running and hugely popular NBC comedy show playing at the same time slot, which regularly scooped up upwards of 80% of the audience.

At the best of times Mercury Theatre accounted for only about 4-5%. Nothing approaching the one million number.

And most of those listeners were well aware that the show’s schtick was dramatic radio adaptation.

The stories of widespread panic were actually fabricated, and grossly exaggerated by the newspapers – most notably, The New York Times – in the subsequent days.

The story goes that the print media were looking to discredit this new emerging channel for news, the radio, as they viewed it as an imminent threat to their advertising revenue model, and therefore their existence.

So they cooked up a bit of fake news.

Not a bad strategy, it shifted the extra units.

The threat of death to printed news, or at least the advertising revenue, never materialized, and the free publicity for Mercury Theatre may even have helped make radio drama seem even sexier, and contributed to increase popularity. Who knows?

Either way, within 24 months post-War of the Worlds, Welles stock was so high he was able to do a total-control studio deal with RKO, and produce his first feature film, Citizen Kane; to this day widely regarded as one of the best movies of all time.

So it was win-win-win.

But, in a sense all news, is fake.

Brietbart and HuffPost, for example, will report on the same 'story' through different editorial lenses.

It could even be argued that biased media are actually more informative.

Readers with a particular political bias are bound to prefer the news media with a similar bias. It’s confirmation bias as strategy.

Or if you prefer, news consumption simply reflects behavioural loyalty.

Consumers like and know more about the news outlets they consume more regularly and know little about news outlets they do not consume.

And the current clamor from sections of the internet to pressure advertisers such as Amazon to cease advertising on sites like Breitbart – and theoretically cut off their revenue stream – has a familiar ring, don’t you think?

Tweet

Add to: Digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | Yahoo | reddit