second brain

dept. of disastrous semiotics

(via Andrew Sullivan)

how fluent is your marketing?

Perhaps that's a question we should all start asking ourselves. The study of "cognitive fluency" is a hot topic in psychology and might soon be one in communications. We can intuitively grasp that, all things being equal, the mind prefers simple information to complex information. What's more surprising is how much simplicity or ease-of-use affects our judgements across all sorts of criteria:

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities... Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information.

Or, as an old client of mine was fond of putting it, "if I can't spell it, you won't sell it."

two cheers for domino's

Domino's have a new campaign - Pizza Turnaround - that's attracting a lot of attention. It does something that is, on the face of it anyway, very bold - it admits their pizzas have been crap:

I'm not a huge fan of this. On the one hand, I genuinely like the principle of a company "opening itself up" to the public, exposing its workings, being ultra-candid, and showing people where it's moving to as a business. And, being English, I like a bit of self-deprecation. I also applaud attempts to break with ad conventions. This is from Slate's commentary on the campaign:

These are commercials masquerading as documentaries—designed to pierce through the viewer's built-up resistance to typical scripted, acted spots.

But therein lies the problem. The campaign is very obviously scripted and acted. These are clearly not real people saying spontaneous things. They are actors (or perhaps in some case Domino's employees who have been made to sound like actors) delivering cute lines, in contrived environments. Consequently it doesn't feel authentic. It feels like a trick, a scam, a masquerade, albeit a fun one. In other words...it's an ad.

It's like the client and agency got so far towards a truly bold and radical execution of a bold strategy - and then got nervous, and decided to return to those old, reassuringly conventional ways...

why twitter is here to stay

As David Carr remarks at the beginning of this excellent piece, it's got one of the most godawful brand names ever. But that just goes to show that if the product is good enough, nothing else matters.

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

even the new rules can be broken

I've come across a big, consumer-facing company that doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, does very little to "engage" with its customer community, isn't transparent (in fact is positively secretive), doesn't give anything away for free, often seems to treat its consumers as ATMs to be regularly emptied of cash, and in its marketing relies overwhelmingly on TV, press, and posters.

This company must be dead or dying on its feet, right?

Well, not quite.

the choice architecture of restaurants

A behavioral economist dissects the design of restaurant menus.

search wars

The news that News Corp is considering an alliance with Microsoft will be causing real concern at Google.

Now of course, News Corp is the David here, up against the digital Goliath. The Murdoch media empire is just a small part of the world's information and news services, so it may well be that by removing themselves from Google they're simply shooting (or stoning) themselves in the foot. But even if that's so, the very act of unsettling the status quo just might prove deeply damaging to the world's favourite second brain.

As consumers, we've been in the thoughtless habit of going to Google whenever we want to find information for ten years now. This development might make it less thoughtless, and less of a habit. When you know that certain content will only be found on another search engine, not only will that prompt you to consider a specific alternative - it will prompt you to consider why on earth you're so reliant on one particular search engine in the first place. And who knows where that will end...?

Google's search technology isn't demonstrably superior to its competitors. One its biggest competitive advantages is consumer habit. News Corp's move - whether beneficial to News Corp or not - has the potential to unravel that advantage.

the "paradox of choice" is no such thing

Tim Harford - the nemesis of behavioral economists - explains why new research seems to show that this most heralded and cited of recent ideas is, well, of dubious substance:

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided...to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why. After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect. The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way

(via Tyler Cowen, who saw this coming)

why (genuine) brands make you a better person

Dan Ariely, behavourial economist and author of Predictably Irrational, outlines a fascinating experiment which suggests that wearing fake brands is bad for one's moral health. Luxury brand-owners agree.

a lesson in how to create branded content (from 1895)

From the New Yorker's fine piece on the Michelin guide:

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat.

tmi

(via Indexed)

sunday night is suddenly alright

Sunday night TV has, for as long as I can remember, been an entertainment desert for anyone born after the release of the White Album. A relentless diet of hymns, antiques, bumbling vicars and period frocks, it's been a conspiracy to bore the nation, or at least half of it, into a state of melancholic resignation at the end of another weekend.

I've always wondered, for years now and often out of sheer frustration whilst flicking across channels, why none of the broadcasters, despite their ferocious competition for viewers elsewhere in the week, hadn't taken the initiative and tried something different on a Sunday evening. It seemed like such an easy win. You have a near-captive audience who want to stay in and sedate themselves in preparation for the start of another work week, including the much sought-after younger demographic, shagged out from partying the previous two nights. And if you move first, you have an enormous advantage over the almost uniform tedium across the schedule. Why hadn't anyone gone for it? When I worked at Channel Five I used to ask this question of everyone, including schedulers. I never found a satisfactory answer. It was just the way things were, apparently.

Finally, ITV has taken a look at this open goal, and decided to boot the ball into it:

Traditionally an evening for the small-screen equivalent of a warm bath, ITV's decision to broadcast its hour-long X Factor results show on Sundays has brought it massive ratings.. "It was waiting to be done. I'm not surprised that there's a large audience on a Sunday night – people don't go out," said the ITV director of television, Peter Fincham.

And that, folks, is why TV execs get paid the big bucks.

decent, honest, truthful

It's not about brands but it is - in the broader sense - about human behaviour, so here's a link to my recent Times piece on why we have a very evolved capacity for deception (not a capacity that those of us in marketing and advertising ever exercise of course...).

the marshmallow test

The marshmallow test is one of the all-time great psychology experiments. It was invented in the 1960s by a Stanford psychologist called Walter Mischel and has been repeated many times since. Essentially, it's a test of self-control. In brief: put a four-year-old in a room with a marshmallow (or some other sweet they love) and promise them another, but only if they can wait a few minutes before eating the first one.The researcher leaves the room, so the child is left alone with their temptation. Some kids barely wait till the researchers have closed the door (or not even) before gobbling up the one on the plate. Some stare at the thing intensely until they can wait no more and give in after a minute or so. Others find ways to distract themselves - singing, looking away, crawling under the table - and win their reward.

What made the experiment really notable was that Mischel followed the lives of the children in those first tests as they grew into adolescence and adulthood. He found that the ones who managed to wait it out - who were good at managing their own impulses towards instant gratification - tended to be happier and more successful at school and in their careers. Those who didn't even bother trying to resist were more likely to have drug problems, wayward careers, broken relationships, and so on. This suggests just what an important skill it is to be able to manage our own instincts, to conceive of our future selves as well as address our immediate desires, to play the abstract future off against the clamorous present. For a longer, fascinating account of the experiment and its implications, print 'n read this. (The video above is a sort of impressionistic take on the experiment - I don't know if they were doing it 'for real', as it were.)

The test provides a suggestive analogy for brand management, too. Marketers are constantly having to balance the short-term needs and opportunities of a brand against its imagined future. The temptation to eat the marshmallow on the plate comes in many forms (cut the price, run that promotion, do a deal with a partner that doesn't share our values but offers big volumes). Strong brand management requires a vivid ability to imagine (and persuade others of) a future for the brand for which it might be worth sacrificing the immediate opportunity. Brands that are good at this are likely to be stronger and more valuable in the longer-term. Sometimes, however, you just really, really want that marshmallow.

the homer simpson effect

The excellent Lucid Thoughts describes a fascinating new study on the links between food advertising and actual eating behaviour, based on a cleverly designed experiment. The gist of it is that food advertising does stimulate people, unconsciously, to eat more... although not necessarily to eat more of the advertised brand (I think LT may be over-interpreting a little when he says the ads aren't building a brand - does the paper actually show this or even investigate it? Sounds like a separate question about long-term effects to me but then I haven't bought and read the whole paper).

how to create a successful rumour

One way to read this 1943 document from American intelligence is as a handy guide to viral marketing...

on being old in a world of new media (or why huey lewis was right)

The venerable Washington Post recently resdesigned its website for the 21st century. It looks pretty good; well organised and reasonably clear if a little busy. The headlines are sans serif, as you'd expect in this sleek, fluid medium. And what have they done with the all-important masthead (essentially, the logo)?

This is the new one. Up until the redesign, they were using a contemporary, serif-less font for this as well (in fact I think they were using the dot com address as the masthead). So in order to move their brand into the future, they've gone back 100 years. This isn't as crazy as it seems.

Let's look at a couple of UK newspaper brands, as manifested in advertising. Here's The Guardian:

When it was launched, a couple of years ago in a pre-crash world, it looked right: contemporary, colourful, creative. But to my eyes, this style looks dangerously flippant and throwaway in these gloomier, more insecure times. Also - note the logo. It's just another website address. That's reflected in the actual Guardian masthead, which is designed to look like an internet brand: lower case only, the two words running together. Looks cool. But what are they giving up when they do this?

Here's The Times (other executions here):

The Times is right up against it. If News Corp are about to introduce some kind of payment-model for it, then their brand advertising needs to work harder than ever. Leaving aside the question of whether it will do so in vain; I think these ads do about as good as job as they can do in the circumstances.

What they focus on is reasserting the brand's authority. Each ad is rooted in The Times' expertise: its special correspondents, its grasp of the facts, its depth of knowledge. They've also kept faith with a more traditional masthead/logo, and put it front and centre in the ads.

The internet has been a great leveller and democratiser. Our information sources have been infinitely expanded. News comes from everywhere and anywhere, including our social networks. This is a terrific and exciting thing. But our euphoria at this transformation is curdling. We're starting to realise that, like most terrific things, it carries a cost. Blogs skim and snatch at events; opinions flow as easily as tapwater; rumours spread like smallpox. It's ever harder to know who and what to trust, where to find serious analysis rather than cheap chatter, and how to do so quickly and easily. Here's where newspaper brands - precisely because they've been around forever - should find their competitive advantage. But some of them are so busy trying to look like the rest of the internet that they've forgotten how to be themselves.

The Washington Post and The Times are realising that in the world of new media, one of a newspaper brand's greatest strengths is being old. It's hip to be square.

species variation

This helps with a few questions I've had for a while...

(Via Geek Media)

good old-fashioned advertising

Or, how to spend a huge amount of money and energy creating a finely crafted commercial based on a hopelessly flawed metaphor:

If I were an American with funds to spare, here are some things this ad would make me think:

1. Wow, cool ad.
2. What's it for again?
3. An investment fund. Something about thinking long term. Cool.
4. I'm putting my money in a savings account.

how things spread

The metaphor of epidemics or contagions for the spread of ideas, preferences, habits and more has become very fashionable in the last few years, partly as a result of Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, and partly because of the increasing influence of the internet on our social lives. It has led to much prefixing of marketing with words like "buzz" or "W.O.M" or "viral", and confident assertions about the targeting of "influencers". But the truth is, scientists and sociologists are still getting to grips to with this phenomenon. We still don't know, for instance, whether so-called influencers have any more influence than anyone else.

It's definitely true, however, that the field of social network analysis is important and exciting, and anyone involved in marketing needs to be abreast of it. Social networks are getting easier to study and analyse: the rise of digital communications means that we're now leaving ever-richer data trails about where we are, what we're doing and what we're thinking and of course, who we're connected to.

For a brilliant survey of what we know about social networks, look no further than this article in the NYT.

thinking and drinking

Talking of the bias towards rationality...

"Know Your Limits" is part of a long-running campaign. There's another example, from last year, here.

It goes without saying that the problem of binge-drinking and its social effects is a very serious one. Which is why I'm concerned about how and whether this kind of advertising works. What follows is speculative and inquiring rather than evidence-based.

When I suggest there's a rational bias at work here, I don't mean that the ad itself is unemotional. Clearly it is designed to have some kind of visceral impact on the viewer (we can debate how much of one, but let's leave that to one side). My question is, what's the model of human behaviour that purports to link the experience of watching this ad in the cinema (as I did last night) with the "moment of purchase" - or in this case, the moment of being blind drunk at 2am in a group of similarly pissed mates?

I imagine it's meant to work via metaphor: when I'm drunk, I'll remember my mild revulsion at that man in the ad proposing all manner of silly stunts, think to myself "That's just like me right now", and stop myself from throwing up into the gutter.

As I say, I've not looked at any data, but to me that suggests an extremely implausible optimism about the power of the frontal cortex.

This is exactly the kind of problem that would benefit from a serious investigation into the mental processes of a mind under the influence, and how/whether it's affected by recently absorbed communications. Perhaps the client and agency have already done this, rather than rely on the conventional and deeply flawed assumptions about decision-making that are embedded in marketing-think. But I'd be surprised if they'd done so and come up with this as an answer.

the ambler

Here's a podcast of a fascinating interview with Tim Ambler of the London Business School on the potential of neuroscience to improve our understanding of how marketing works. It's worth five minutes of your time.

Ambler argues, in his pleasingly robust style, that most market research is based on a false premise: that we make our consumption choices rationally. The truth is, everything that we've learned about how our brains work in the last few years points to the overwhelming dominance of our unconscious, emotional brains in decision-making (if you haven't read this superb book, you must). But the in-built bias towards rational analysis in marketing (neither consumers nor marketers like to believe that they proceed largely by feeling and intuition) inhibits our investigation of what's really going on.

He makes the intriguing suggestion that marketers ought to work with scientists to investigate autism, because autistic people either lack, or display extreme versions of, universal human traits that marketers rely on or attempt to tap into (a pronounced tendency to entrenched habit and routine on the one hand, a lack of emotional empathy on the other).

sentiment analysis

An excellent piece from the NY Times on the new industry forming around projects that crawl the web and look for indicators of people's mood, creating global emotion maps.

freedom and responsibility

Netflix has posted the slideshow it uses to communicate its internal values, and it's a hundred times better than most such documents, which - as this one makes you realise - seem to assume their employees and stakeholders are gullible and rather dim and deserve to be patronised.

Look out for the slides on Enron.

an argument for consistency

(Via Consumerist)

naysayers

Interesting post from the excellent PsyBlog that rounds up thinking and research on the question of dissent and its relationship to good decision-making. Dissenters play an essential role in avoiding a collective detachment from reality (otherwise known as groupthink), but they have a very difficult balancing act to pull off:

To be effective dissenters must tread a fine line, avoiding pointless confrontation or personal attacks; instead presenting minority viewpoints in an even-handed, well-modulated and authentic fashion. For their part the majority has to fight its instinct to crush dissenters and recognise the risk they are taking in being critical of the majority opinion.

if poets were brain scientists

From McSweeney's: love poems enhanced by 21st century research findings:

"How do I produce dopamine upon detecting your pheromones? Let me count the ways ..." p. 37

"I shall not compare thee to a summer's day, given the imprecision of nonliteral, subjective representations of the natural world ..." p. 47

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit that the dramatic increase in the Western male's lifespan from 1950 to the present has rendered superfluous the average 25.7 years of marital cohabitation that must be negotiated post-child-rearing, child-rearing being the primary evolutionary impetus behind the persistence of monogamous tendencies in frontal-lobe circuitry ..." pp. 56–78

"Love is patient. Love stimulates mammalian brain attributes associated with care-giving and species survival ..." p. 80

More here.

mirror neurons: fire!

A small but brilliant example of social contagion, from the Sasquatch Music Festival:

(Via Jonah Lehrer, who links it to the Milgram experiment and to Jane Jacobs's wonderful dictum "Life attracts life".)

political animals

Our Prime Minister lives to fight another day. We can leave the politics to Marbury - here I want to point out how Brown owes his survival to the convergence of two powerful social-psychological phenomena.

First, behaviorial norms. The meeting of Labour MPs at which Brown received his party's backing meant everyone was in one room and 'visible'. By packing it with supporters and making the most noise, the Brownies successfully created powerful social momentum for their man.

Second, loss aversion. The Euro election results were so bad that, paradoxically, it has made the party want to stick with what it knows. Labour MPs are now in a position analogous to that of voters following the economic crash, who were suddenly drawn to the PM. Once they knew the sky wasn't going to fall in, voters deserted him again. If and when Labour starts to rise in the polls as the economy recovers later this year, Brown might start to feel more confident. But according to my reading, this will be exactly when he needs to worry about his own MPs again.

where our knives have fallen

This is from an Ipsos/Reuters poll that's based on data from 23 countries that make up 75 percent of the world's GDP.

re-twittering

Nielsen made quite a lot of headlines a few months ago when it published data purporting to show that Twitter has very low retention rates (certainly compared with facebook and myspace). I was inclined to believe this, given that I'm a mild Twitter-sceptic myself (albeit a user). But I've just come across this counterblast that argues convincingly that Nielsen's analysis is flawed because it failed to take into account migration to third-party applications.

when it comes to pleasure, are you myopic or hyperopic?

If you're a government - or a brand - how do you get people to spend during a recession? This stimulating piece by Virginia Postrel in the Atlantic focuses on our inherently schizo natures:

Behavioral economists, whose work combines the techniques and ideas of economics and psychology, have long focused on what Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel laureate, called the “intimate contest for self-command”—the all-too-familiar inner conflict between the would-be disciplined self who wants to get up early, exercise, and lose weight and the pleasure-seeking self who prefers to sleep in, watch TV, and eat chocolate. These two selves, Schelling noted, don’t necessarily exist at the same time. The disciplined self imagines future virtues, while the pleasure-seeking self succumbs to present urges. “If the person could make the final decision about that action at the earlier time, precluding a later change in mind,” Schelling wrote in 1983, “he would make a different choice from what he knows will be his choice on that later occasion.”

dept of creative media placement

From Indonesia: an ad in a shopping centre that only works when you're looking at it from above:

the unsuggester

I can't tell you how much I like this idea. It's a library service that turns up books that are least likely to be associated with the ones you type in.

In other words, it does the opposite of what intelligent recommendation engines, from Amazon to iTunes, aim to do ('if you like this, you'll like that...").

In practice I'm not sure how much I'll use the Unsuggester, at least as it currently works. But it's the idea of it that I find attractive. The danger of recommendation services, and of the way that digital media is structured more generally, is that we all end up burrowing around our own rabbit holes, and rarely find ourselves sniffing the air in some unfamiliar locale, trying to work out what the hell this is all about. Which is bad, in my blog, because it stifles creativity. Now and again, we need stimulation from sources we'd never have sought out on our own.

(Discovered via the always-stimulating Sparkthinking)

fly little birdie, fly

Well, I'll be darned if this ain't the cutest thing I've seen this year:



Strategically it's quite interesting too - they're targeting people's sense of altruism rather than going straight for the selfish jugular. Or at least, slightly more cynically, the selfish sense of gratification we get when we're able to do something nice for someone else. Though actually that's not cynical at all - it's what makes the world go round.

meerkat magic

What a brilliant, unforgettable, deliriously silly idea. My campaign of the year for 2009 so far - and it might still be by the year's end.

coping strategies

Amongst the industries struggling to navigate a path through the age of digital disruption are newspapers, and porn.

Slate's Jack Shafter ponders the possibility of iTunes for newspapers here.

The Atlantic's Tom Johansmeyer surveys the recent travails of the adult entertainment industry and glimpses the future: iPorn. Handy.

Relatively small, fragmented, and unaccustomed to outside investment, the U.S. porn industry (which generated roughly $12 billion in 2007) is some­what buffered from today’s credit crunch, but it has its own problems. Video sales have been falling by 15 percent a year since 2005, and online content doesn’t deliver the returns it used to, now that Web sites such as RedTube and PornHub basically give it away. Struggling companies need investors to help right their operations, and those that are thriving in a brutal market need funding for growth.

Enter Koenig and AdultVest. He sees the porn downturn as temporary and believes that technological improvements will trigger a turnaround. One example: iPorn, a start-up in AdultVest’s portfolio that is developing an application to deliver porn to the Apple iPod. “The industry’s not going anywhere,” Koenig says. “You’ve got 6 billion people on the planet,” he laughs, “and they’re all horny.”

too much looking in the rear-view mirror

Thomas Friedman nails the reason that the American car industry hasn't been able to turn itself around:

Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: “We have to make the cars people want.” That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.

clever targeting

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge was one of the most influential books of the year, finding its way into the speeches of Barack Obama and David Cameron and generating a huge amount of discussion. Its basic premise is that small changes in the way that choices are presented to citizens or consumers can have big effects on behaviour (for a fuller explanation, here's a video of Thaler). One of the quirkiest examples of "nudging" can be found in the men's urinals at Amsterdam airport, where an astutely positioned painted fly has been found to reduce "spillages" by 80%:

the shaping of things to come

Not sure about the coinage but this does sound interesting: Bruce Sterling's book on the future of objects that are half real, half ethereal:

We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object—we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable—that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time.

it's the customer, stupid

I've seen ads for the new touch-screen Blackberry that describe it as "purpose-built for Vodafone".

I'd rather it was purpose-built for me.

whither jamie

Jamie Oliver's current series, in which attempts to teach Rotherham - and by extension the whole nation - how to cook, may be his best show yet. It's certainly his most socially ambitious. Although he's been derided for patronising the working classes (almost always by middle-class TV critics) I think his refusal to accept that a whole stratum of people should be eating appallingly badly when they can, at no extra cost, eat much better, is brilliant. He's astonished at the way some people eat. And astonishment - in our knowing, relativistic culture - is an increasingly rare commodity. I admire him for it, and for the determination and imagination with which he sets about attacking the problem he's identified.

The question I have is about whether he'll continue to to believe that Channel 4 is the right partner to work with. I have no idea what the terms of his deal are or have been, and C4 have obviously been enormously good to him over the years. But Oliver isn't satisfied with being a celebrity chef these days. He wants to change the world. Or at least the country. And the natural home for such social crusades is the BBC, for the simple reason that they reach a far bigger audience that C4. Not only would Oliver's TV ratings increase on BBC1, but the BBC can deploy its whole formidable arsenal of media outlets on his behalf. He is, after all, performing a public service now. I wonder if, come his next project, he'll be tempted to move to the home of public service broadcasting. It seems a natural fit.

obama and that cadbury ad

For the few of you that haven't seen it before this is probably the most popular and successful UK ad of recent years.

It wasn't acclaimed by everyone as brilliant when it launched, however. Far from it. The most common complaint was, it doesn't make sense. We're used to ads that tell us a simple story that ends with a clear link to the product and a reason to buy it. But in this ad, we see a gorilla playing the drums. Then the milk chocolate bar appears at the end over the familiar (to British audiences) line "A glass and a half of joy". Eh? Why didn't they make the link to the product clearer? Why didn't they spell out the benefit - our chocolate brings you joy, just like music can? And why is it a frigging gorilla?

The people behind the ad realized it didn't quite all add up. But they had a hunch that the ad's very ambiguity would make it successful. They were right. The ad was talked about incessantly, in living rooms, playgrounds and pubs. What was it all about? Was it genius, or rubbish? User groups formed. Emails were sent with YouTube links embedded. The ad was posted on millions of Facebook and MySpace pages. Hundreds of remixed versions appeared, unbidden. And, in the end, more chocolate bars were sold.

There is a parallel here - albeit a tenuous one - with the Obama 'brand'. It's frequently remarked that it can be hard to get a grip on what Obama stands for beyond certain vague notions of 'change' and 'hope'. He is - perhaps sensibly - usually reluctant to take firm, unhedged positions. Nor is it easy to place him in a political or cultural milieu, as David Brooks remarks this week. Obama is well aware of this ambiguity in his image, and cultivates it. He has written that he "serves as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes can project their own views." More recently he said that he has become "a symbol of America's best traditions." He was rather unfairly pilloried by John McCain for this. Rather than self-glorification, he was trying to deflect attention from himself - to say "it's not about me". Elsewhere he referred to himself as "just the excuse". He seeks to remove or at least blur any fixed notions of who he is, or what he stands for, from the campaign. He embraces ambiguity.

Obama and that Cadbury ad are both successful, at least in part, because people are not quite sure what they mean. So people want to talk about them, and write about them, and debate them at length. And - crucially - email, post and create their own user-generated videos about them. In this way do the chocolate bar and the politician become media phenomena. In the age of the web, a little bit of ambiguity is a very powerful thing.

(cross-posted from Marbury)

who is the prettiest of them all?

From a stimulating little piece about mirrors in the NYT:

For that matter, humans do not necessarily see the face in the mirror either. In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive.

planners need to get out more

I visited my alma mater JWT last night to attend its Planning At 40 event, a celebration of the day Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt invented account planning. Industry luminaries, including Jeremy Bullmore, John Grant, Jon Steel, and JWT's Guy Murphy, made speeches on the future of planning. The event was held on JWT's extraordinary Knightsbridge terrace, under blue skies. Drinks and canapes were served, and there was plenty of time after the event itself to catch up with some of the lovely people that have passed through and around JWT in the last forty years. So the whole thing was very nice.

As to the content, well. I'm probably not the best person to judge. I'm interested in a long list of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of that stuff relates to brands and communication. But I have to say, the future of planning languishes somewhere near the very bottom of that list. I suspect I'm not the only one. Several of the speakers seemed a bit bored by their own speeches. I don't blame them.

I wish one of them had reflected on the possible connection between the decline of the traditional agency network and an inward-looking culture that results in agencies holding seminars on their own internal processes, rather than on things that clients - or anybody outside of agencies - actually care about. Stephen King may have invented planning. But I'm sure even he got more excited about brands than he did about planning itself.

Apart from the unimaginative choice of theme, I was struck by how nearly all the speeches could have been made at any time in the last five, or even ten years. None of the speakers got stuck into the intellectual, cultural, and social trends that are shaping the way we all communicate. For instance, the influence of 'wiki' thinking and social networks were barely mentioned. For the most part, 'Planning' was discussed in a kind of timeless bubble in which capacious, wind-tunnel nouns like 'ideas/creativity/strategy' stood in for real thought. There were many fond glances to the past, and few wide-eyed stares into the future.

It's all very well to criticise of course, but what, if forced to speak on this subject, would I talk about? Well, I think I would have at least nodded to a few of the current fields of discussion about how human beings relate to each other, all of which have huge implications for what brands do.

For instance, the burgeoning fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which are opening our eyes to the enormous power of our unconscious selves to shape our behaviour; in particular the way in which emotion shapes our rational decisions. There are revelations and data here to delight any curious planner.

Or behavioral economics and social psychology. Books like this and this will shift the emphasis in communications from how we get people to think or feel things to how we get them to act.

Or, as mentioned, the pervasive spread of social networks and social media in general.

Plenty of stuff for planners to get their teeth into. And all of it a hundred times more interesting and important than 'planning'.

marketing to the long tail

Chris Anderson's book has spawned a lot of guff about what the long tail means for marketing. A new epilogue to the book outlines his more considered view on this topic:

if you're selling things, you don't necessarily need to massively expand your product range to tap LT markets. You can instead just reach the "long tail of customers", which is to say all the potential pockets of demand that don't necessarily lie within your normal marketing channels. This is the smaller potential customers, the ones you don't know about, the ones you never considered and the ones who didn't even think they were potential customers until they heard about your products from someone they know.

people like us

The UK ad industry is enjoying a rare fit of self-righteousness over Heinz's decision to pull this ad after a few hundred complaints from the public, or at least from a well-organised pressure group.

There is a near-universal consensus - evident in the pages of the industry's trade mag Campaign - that Heinz have supinely succumbed to the aggressive lobbying of a bigoted but vocal minority. But why are they so sure that discomfort with male-on-male action is a minority 'issue'? A few commentators refer to such discomfort, contemptuously, as Daily Mail thinking. As if the Mail is some fringe pamphlet read only by the crazed few. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, the consumer isn't stupid. She's a Daily Mail reader. I think most people outside of Soho are probably uneasy with this kind of thing being repeated daily in prime time. Not everyone is as marvelously enlightened as we are.

One Campaign commenter gives the game away when he says "I'm offended that Heinz was forced to take it off. It says a lot more about the British public than it does about the ad or the industry."  The reverse is true of the industry's commentary on this event.

The Beatles and Harry Potter

Daniel Hall at The Economist ponders why music consumption seems to be following the law of the long tail, whilst book stores rely, more than ever, on blockbusters:

One of my friends proposed a theory I find compelling: Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from "individual" to "collective". Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distrbitution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

netflix for magazines

A brilliant idea

god we're such assholes

Flynn asserts that immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer.  However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient's eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases.  Although there are several potential reasons for this discrepancy, one possibility is that, as time goes by, the memory of the favor-doing event gets distorted, and since people have the desire to see themselves in the best possible light, receivers may think they didn't need all that much help at the time, while givers may think they really went out of their way for the receiver.

From Cialdini via Cowen