Talent imitates, genius steals

Control is Not Control (but it still feels good)

[Ripped from here]

The desire for control seems to be a universal motivator - we are endlessly fascinated by our ability to effect change outside of ourselves.

Our macro ability to modify our environment is one of the defining features of humanity, but at a personal level we love to control the world around us - it's a corollary of our desire for choice, despite the paradoxes that brings.

Babies demonstrate the appeal of control [in controlled experiments].

[Whilst experimenting on babies sounds a bit unpleasant, infant psychology is truly fascinating. Ask yourself, how do babies think, before they can speak?

While you are asking yourself, you are thinking in words - they can't do that.

It must be like accessing the world without the filter of language, before Lacan's Great Other, the language instinct, exerts its desire for control, slicing up the continuum of reality into chunks, things, words... but I digress. Kind of.]

In the Paradox of Choice, Schwartz mentions an experiment where one group of babies - those who had control [but not, paradoxically, the control group] - were put into cribs face up. If they turned their heads they activated some dancing animal lights above them.

They quickly learn that the dancing animals respond to them moving and so they keep doing it again and again and again.

[Babies love repetition - they control basically nothing in their lives, so when they see something "Again! Again!" it's something that isn't new, something therefore they feel control over.]

A second group also get to see the animals, when group one activates them, but has no control. They quickly lose interest.

It's not the light show that is interesting - it's the control:

I did this! Isn't it great. And I can do it again whenever I want.

This feeling of control is rewarding - in fact it may be crucial to remaining chipper. Some believe that one of the triggers of depression is learned helplessness - the feeling that nothing you do can really to alter your situation.

Prior [perhaps repeated] exposure to uncontrollable negative events makes you think that nothing you do makes any difference.

That's what I think Copeland was talking about in Generation X, when he said:

Control is not control.

The illusion of freedom, delivered through the illusion of [too much] consumer choice, ultimately resolves to an understanding that nothing you do [buy] makes any difference, which precipitates slacker ennui.

Maybe.

Anyway, the point being is that we want to have an impact on our environment - it makes us feel good, which perhaps lies at the heart of the appeal of interactive media - by definition it is content which you can influence.

The rise of games and gaming behaviours is undoubtedly a response to our desire to have greater control over content - and it's going to continue to spread into other content forms.

With things like this interactive video trailer for new crystal meth cookery drama Breaking Bad [found via Hyper] - it's ultimately a trailer that you can click on - but that makes it something different, blurring the boundaries between video and website and game.

And, although you know you can't really change the outcome [it really wants you to watch the trailer] - it still feels good to be controlling the experience.

So, if you want people to get involved in your communication, give them something to do.

Preferential Looking

Studying baby psychology is inherently tricky. Since they can't talk, you can't ask them questions.

Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke has been trying to understand how children develop knowledge and language and so had to find more ingenious ways to understand what's happening in their heads.

The experiments carried out at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies attempt to infer the cognitive abilities through the observation of "preferential looking":

the tendency of infants and children to peer longer at something that is new, surprising or different. [To steal from Scientific American]

This fact was discovered in the 50s by Robert Fantz, who demonstrated that children [and chimps] stare longer at things they perceive as unexpected.

Which suggests that spending more time looking at something new, original, unexpected is a hardwired reaction and perhaps helps to explain why original work is more effective - our brains force us to pay more attention to it.

Lubricants of Reason

[Image used without permission because I liked it - please go and buy a print here. Let me know if you want me to take it down.]
I've just finished reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. Hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the 'smartest books of all time', it's an exploration of the huge role of randomness in life.

Taleb is a derivatives trader and his hobby is understanding the stochastic limits of epistemology. His core thesis is that we think we know how things work because our brains like cause and effect so we apply a deterministic model to observations, which in turn leads us to make mistakes and leaves us open to being 'blown up' [trader lingo for losing way beyond what you believed possible] by very rare events of huge magnitude [he argues that in a sufficiently large samples, extraordinary high magnitude events are inevitable - the 'black swan' theory].

The book is consciously iconoclastic but his attacks on the certainties of traders and economists ring true and have interesting implications for the arts and sciences of persuasion.

In passing, Taleb dismisses classical economics as completely pointless and I agree.

Classical economics is a normative science - it describes how things should be in an idealised model, ceteris paribus - which means that it is, basically, science fiction - it simply doesn't describe how things actually are.

The foundation of this fiction is the idea of Homo Economicus - rational man - that makes decisions via a cost benefit analysis of each option and always works towards the highest possible personal utility.

This is clearly rubbish. Unfortunately, we're intellectually wed to binary oppositions, so once we realised that emotions had a role in decision making, an opposition was established between rational and emotional persuasion in communication. Maybe we make some decisions emotionally and some rationally.

Thanks to people like Phineas Gage and others who have had accidents that  messed up their amygdalas, we know this simply isn't true.

When people lose access to their emotions, they are no longer capable of making decisions. This is because if you were literally to try to apply pure logic to every decision, you're brain would freeze up with the limitless amount of data you were trying to process.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings and we are, to a certain extent, but without the heuristics of emotion to help us, we'd never be able to decide anything. We almost never have the perfect knowledge required to make truly rational decisions. Life just isn't like that. Hence we evolved emotions.

So it's not that there are emotional and rational side pulling us in different directions but that emotions are the "lubricants of reason" - we can't think without them.

This thinking is expressed nicely in a relatively recent theory of decision making known as the somatic marker hypothesis:

Real-life decision making usually involves assessment, by cognitive and emotional processes, of the incentive value of the various actions available in particular situations. However, often situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives, with a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. In such situations, cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option.

In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process. In the environment, reinforcing stimuli induce an associated physiological affective state. These types of associations are stored as somatic markers.

So decisions / stimuli that have made us feel good in the past become somatic markers that are then employed to covertly bias our own cognitive processes when we face similar decisions in the future. The covert part means people will always under report this fact in research.

This suggests that the role of communication could be simply establishing the somatic markers in association with brands, so that when consumers hit the painful decision of which jam to buy, the markers kick in and lubricate the decision, preventing paralysis and panic attack.

Brands take away the need to choose by covertly biasing cognition, and thus make our lives easier.

Would you like to work for Amnesty?

Planning to change the world? 

Amnesty are looking for a planner in London:

Bored of advertising? Want to flex your brainpower across amazing projects like TV programming, documentaries, exhibitions, social networking, and odd web 2.0 stuff? Fancy doing this for one of the world’s most trusted brands? How about for a brand where you make more of a difference than sell a few cans of baked beans? Amnesty International is looking to recruit a brand planner to do all of this and more. It’s a dream job, and if you fancy a whirl, more info here (http://amnesty.org.uk/jobs_details.asp?ID=161)

Be quick - deadline is 6th August.

People are Always in Beta

I think one of the reaons that Russell's Always in Beta resonates so strongly with people is because people are always in beta too.

People continue to make mistakes and learn from them and [hopefully] get better all the way along and I think we respond to brands that make mistakes, and apologise, better than those that deny they ever mess anything up, because they feel more like us. They're more real and nicer.

There are few things more annoying than people who claim to never make mistakes and never say sorry.

When brands are making mistakes and learning from them, it gives the impression that they are constantly working to make things better, rather than resting on their branded laurels.

Toyota calls it Kaizen, or continuous improvment.

I'm not sure if I learn from all my mistakes, but I'm still intending to make another.

Romanian Rumination

[The People's Palace, Bucharest. The second biggest building in the world, after the Pentagon, built with bad karma.]

I've just flown in from the Idea Forum in Romania and, boy, are my arms tired.

Sorry.

Anyway, it was a really interesting experience. Whilst I think there's a real hunger for new ideas out there, there's also a feeling that they are somewhat removed from new stuff that's happening.

I think Iain captures it really well here - it was lovely hanging out with him and Russell. I'm a big fan of hanging out, as I may have mentioned previously.

Everyone was very nice -  particular thanks go out to Bogdana and Christian for taking excellent care of us, and to the lovely planners of Leo Burnett Romania who let us play in their office for a bit and were generally very nice. Thanks also to everyone in my seminar for making the experience very pleasant and not too scary.

Stencil grafitti is huge in the city, and I loved the fact that they stencil up the faces of their greatest writers and their poet laureate. I doubt Banksy would immortalise Andrew Motion but you never know.

Although the screaming kids were still hunting boyband.

Behavioural Engineering

[Image by bullish1974]
Once in a while, advertising transcends the stratum reserved for commercial communication and becomes a cultural phenomenon - quite literally something that can be seen to have an effect on culture.

Many posts ago, my mate Yusuf pointed out that the truly viral part of the 118-118 launch campaign, which could definitely be said to have ascended into the collective consciousness, was shouting "Got your Number!" at people in the street. They did it in the ads, then the boys hit the streets all over the UK and did it in real life. And then everyone was doing it.

The ultimate aim of all commercial communication is to spread ideas that elicit a behavioural response. Specifically, we want to influence mass purchase behaviour. But if a brand can propogate some intermediate behaviours, like getting people to shout "Got your number" or "Wassup!" at each other, then you get a whole host of additional benefits.

Before consumer generated content was a thing, people made hundreds of "Wassup" spoofs, spreading the message further. In a person's head, the behaviour recalls and reinforces the brand, and vice versa, keeping the brand salient. And, of course, behaviour is viral. Humans are hardwired to learn by imitating [see Herd]. The drive to copy is so powerful, when children are shown behaviours they know are pointless to achieve the required goals, they imitate them anyway.

Monkey see, monkey do.

This behavioural engineering seems to be at the heart of BBH's very successful, ongoing campaign for Lynx / Axe. Young males are perhaps the single target audience most prone to adopting learned behaviours - observe the instances of fist bump in any playground, or indeed pub or office for that matter. Many Lynx executions have imitative behaviours at their core. Pulse - the dance. Click. Bom Chicka Wah Wah.

If you want to influence people's behaviour, give them something to copy.

UPDATE: Mark has written a great build on this that looks at why copying is such an important human mechanism.
 

Oops My Strategy is Showing

NoMessin is a Network Rail youth safety initiative to try and stop kids playing on railway tracks by suggesting other things they can do. There are 11 million incidences of trespass onto railway lines by under 16s every year and, on average, 60 deaths and many more injuries.

So this is definitely a good thing and the roadshow that's out there looking to teach kids skills they might be interested in - skateboarding, DJing etc - and give them reasons not to be on the tracks is also a good thing.

And whilst I agree with Richard that your strategy should be showing, I suspect in this case that it might possibly negate the campaign's appeal to the young people it wants to reach by stating it so directly... 

A Map is Not the World

[Image from 41,000 Faces - Breast Cancer Care]

“If you put the pictures of two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it’s all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed”
Agnes in Immortality, Milan Kundera

I've always had a problem with segmentation. I think it's for the same reason that I don't believe in horoscopes - since I'm a gemini [could you tell?] and the predictions for that sign apply to all geminis, I would have to infer that 1/12 of all the people in the world are, basically, the same as me in temperament and that the vagaries of fate will be treating us in the same way.

This is clearly rubbish, I would tell myself, the world is much more complex than that and, anyway, I'm an INDIVIDUAL, as unique as a snowflake.

Tyler Durden disabuses his alter ego of this notion in Fight Club:

You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

But other, less aggressive, facilitators of enlightenment have made much the same point. We think of ourselves as individuals because we look for the differences. We ignore the similarities, which are far, far greater than the differences.

To put it simply, every single person in the world is more alike than we all are to a tree or a goat or anything else that isn't a person. Taken from a macro viewpoint, it's all just one face in many variations.

That said, I still have some problems with segmentation. Too often segments lapse into stereotypes and neglect to emphasise the fact that we are talking about average behaviours, not absolute behaviours.

My mate Gareth sent me this leaked segmentation report from Phones4U and as he pointed out, as well as being hilarious and slightly offensive, it also implicitly suggests that every iPod Babe is into "Fuck Buddy Sex".

My other problem with segmentation like this is that it aggregates individual tendencies into groups. As Critical Mass points out, this simply isn't a realistic way to model behaviour:

"Individual tendencies do not necessarily extrapolate to group behaviour"

Interaction between agents changes the game completely, which is why scientists developed agent based models to examine the emergent properties of large groups of individuals interacting.

So even if all iPod Babes are exactly the same, all the time, which they aren't, throw a few of them together and all bets are off.

This completely disrupts the notion of Homo Economicus - the rational man [or babe] that makes economic decisions designed to maximise personal utility. Behavioural economics suggests that purchase decisions are influenced by group dynamics and recent experiments have shown this to be true in controlled conditions.

So where does that leave the iPod Babes? Understanding that different people have different drivers and motivators is undoubtedly a sensible thing for a marketer to explore, but there is infinite variation within the average and interaction within the groups.

Segmentation is a map of the populace but, like any map, it's important not mistake it for the world.

Digitourists and Digitravellers

My mate Sarah Morning has written an excellent paper about The Digital Consumer that she's kindly allowed me to [re]publish - you can download it at the bottom of the post.

It's an expansive look at the current digital marketing landscape but, like any good planning document, it comes at it from the view of the users, not the technology.

The dominant metaphor for the Internet is that of space. Whereas once we had the information superhighway, now we have uncharted media landscapes and virtual worlds that we Explore or Navigate.

From here the paper makes a brilliant leap - as in the 'real' world, there are different kinds of explorers of the digital landscape and this provides the foundation for a bimodal segmentation of the digital consumer.

Firstly there are Digitourists:

Digitourists essentially look for embassies in the virtual world. They look for sites or brands that act as guides. Digitourists, like any tourists, know exactly what they want to see and what they want to find - whether it be a product or a piece of information.

And then there are the Digitravellers:

Digitravellers are different to Digitourists - no less or no more technologically able in many cases, they want however to explore things for themselves. They want to navigate their own way around the wilderness of information and stories of the internet, roughing it unguided through the digital landscape. Their interest lies not so much in arriving at a piece of information or a particular site, as the Digitourist’s does, but instead on the journey itself. For the Digitraveller it is all about the people they meet and the unexpected, undiscovered places they stumble across along the way.

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu

The paper goes on to demonstrate how marketing to these different types of digital consumers has to be very different. So much digital display advertising is a translocation of broadcast interruption online, which only makes sense when targeting the Passive Massive in their Digitourist form.

However, if you want to communicate with active Digitravellers, who want to control their experience, then you need to engage not interrupt and this poses a much greater creative challenge, which the paper explores in depth with dozens of great examples.

Sarah's contact details are on the document if you want to get in touch.

Travelling with Moving: The Digital Consumer.