The Intelligence Class & Word-of-Mouth

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HHMcreateyourownintelligencia

Another derogatory comment about the size of most social media efforts got me to thinking about the nature of influence. Particularly because for just a few bucks per thousand, I could make a whole lot more people sort of recognize my brand.

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How do you know a person is intelligent?

Mostly, we equate intelligence in terms not simply of general knowledge so much as knowledge of the right kind of stuff. No to children’s books, but yes to obscure Greek mythology. No to short-hand texting ability, yes to spelling words most people couldn’t use in a sentence.

But I think it’s quite clear that relative to one another, most people aren’t strangely smart or strangely stupid. There are anomalies, but most of what we assume is intelligence is really a symptom of something else, maybe a natural desire to accumulate knowledge, or access to good schools, challenging parents, luck, whatever. So our version of intelligence has more to do with access to information than IQ scores.

And it’s these “intelligent” people who use that perception of smarts and access to gain influence. The more intelligence perceived, the more influence gained and the more access given. It’s the echo chamber of smarts that happens as we ask ourselves questions like...

What do we consider smart? (Reciting Shakespeare, yes, fixing carburetor, no) Do other people we define as smart consider this person smart? (smarts in TX just don’t equal smarts in NY) Does this person do things we think smart people would do? (reading the Economist, yes, collecting comic books, not so much) And finally, do these people have access to things we don’t? (whether that’s people or information)

And based on stuff like this, one person can have considerably more influence than that of another person.

And so it is with word of mouth, online or otherwise. What is important is not only reaching the same number of people as we can much more easily with reach media. More often than not, it just won’t happen. But what we can do is supply those people with the access, the information, and the kind of smarts that would make our constituents influential with the audiences that matter to us. And by doings these things, we can create or enhance an echo chamber of influence for ourselves, too.

Point being – a carburetor-fixing, comic book-collecting mechanic from Texas might not be able to sway a local election, but can become quite influential with access to the higher-ups at Marvel and a limited edition issue of Dark Avengers given the right audience.

And if anyone tells you that’s bullshit and your 10,000 earned don’t hold up to their 100,000 paid, just tell them they’re stupid. There’s an echo chamber for that, too.

Life Lessons of an Ad Man

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Thegreatamericantrain
Brilliant TED talk from Rory Sutherland, one that may make ad men walk a little taller after watching.

From the TED Blog,

"He's here to speak about value, about value that you can't always see. In the world if advertising, Sutherland explains, they realize that many problems in life can be changed by tinkering with perception rather than reality. For example, when given the problem of making a train ride more pleasant, engineers come up with a solution to make it shorter, one that costs millions. He says, take not even half that budget and hire supermodels to walk the cars with Chateau Petrus. People will ask that you make the journey longer."

Only problem is that I'm not real sure he's really talking about advertising at all, but more so experiences that change perceptions. The train metaphor is great, but it discounts what the vast majority of real-life ad agencies would see as step 2, which would most often be a splashy ad buy touting how great it is to ride without traffic or how much work you could accomplish without worrying about the driving bit.

Either way, there aren't many left that can still capture the romanticism of the advertising world quite like that, and I'd hardly call Rory your run of the mill advertiser, so maybe I should just shut up and applaud.

photo via James "Busdriver" Scott

Advertising is Hard.

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Processiseasy

I’ll be quite honest with you. My creative briefs all look totally different. My project approach for something I start tomorrow will look very little like what I did yesterday. Generally every project includes lots of hours of poking around, drawing nonsense, waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a moment of genius (which invariably will be incoherent only a few hours later). Format works great, but it’s usually best when it’s used to explain something that’s already been done, not necessarily setting up a challenge for later.

And I think the reason is that what we do is really fucking complicated.

At first, our creative strategy was to create a single, simple, benefit-oriented message and repeat it again and again. We assumed a rational brain with a knowable attention span as our willing recipient. But now, difficult is an understatement. We still need that single, simple something, but now that Gossage’s reality is a for-real reality, we’re expected to entertain like a movie, make inanimate objects human, be comfortable with experimentation but forecast for success, all while speaking to smaller and smaller slices of audiences and battling an increasingly misused research environment.

And media might be even worse. It wasn’t so long ago a media department could function on a single rolodex. Now they’re expected to deliver not only more platforms, but hundreds of thousands of media opportunities both online and off. Guerrilla and otherwise. And they can’t buy for impressions, but engagement, and do so creatively with content partnerships, atypical placements and the like. And we haven’t even gotten into analytics. All we know is that the old metrics aren’t worth much more than the paper they’re printed on and nobody agrees on what the hell will replace them.

Yeah, really fucking hard. Single, simple message written for TV, radio and a magazine ad sounds great. Now we know why they had so much time for a scotch. And it’s easy to understand why 360 degree marketing strategy took hold for so much of this decade. It gave us a sense of control in an utterly manic marketplace.

But back to process. Of course, I have somewhat of a way I do things, just like you yours. We read a bunch of stuff, broadly, we talk and think about the audience, the marketplace, the product, stuff like that. We have certain tricks to jog our brain when things get stale.

The problem is that stringent process is used when we’re trying to make a certain product. But now that we’re not trying to make a single proposition necessarily, and not really advertising, but sometimes applications, utilities, sometimes events or experiences, hell – sometimes training programs, kiosks, intranets, whatever. So Gossage said that people read what interests them, and sometimes that advertising. Maybe we should say that we solve problems, and sometimes that includes advertising.

Until then, this broad process allows us to mask what the actual creative process is like, a potluck of crazy sprinkled with magic.

photo via Neil Krug

Another Brisk Stroll through Stuff

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Selling Music and the 1% Principle

“He forgot there was a number lower than one percent.”
Reminds me of many stories told when another banner is sold based on direct response metrics alone.

The Other Howard Gossage Quote

“To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone.”

Another Economist Mag Didjaknow?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2jDOkzrVew&w=500&h=310]

Some "Holy Shit" numbers from TIVO about timeshifting

Not surprisingly, a higher-rated show means more timeshifting which means no one watching your ad. Maybe it's better to kick it on re-runs of Three's a Company. Might only be nine people watching it, but at least they're more likely to actually see your crappy info-ad.

A Brief History of Social Media

From Phone Phreaking in the 1950's to now. Awesome stuff.

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Lots of dudes, checkin' out chicks. Facebook fancy woos the rich, while MySpace rules the hicks. Save your money on banners, cuz, money don't by you clicks. Werd. You heard?

"'To be successful, you need to shift your mindset from social media to social strategy,' he continues. A good social strategy essentially uses the same principles that made online social networks attractive in the first place—by solving social failures in the offline world. Firms should begin to do the same and help people fulfill their social needs online."

Are Your Friends Making You Fat?

"Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn’t."

The Marshmallow Test and Delayed Gratification

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5239013&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

The 20th Century was Wrong

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20th-cent

I love the obviousness of this statement from Lee Bryant. While most (probably not many around here), fight to hold on to the status quo, fight to retain the hierarchies, the efficiencies, the gray of modern business, it's probably good to remember that this is not our natural state, but just something we've grown used to over the last century or so.

"Some people see new social technology and networked culture as dangerous and 'new', and they fall back on their experience of technology and organisational culture in the late Twentieth Century as the 'established' model. Yet, in fact the reverse is true. The Twentieth century took the ideas of the industrial revolution and applied them to people. Mass production. Mass marketing. Mass slaughter.

If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life." 

The Twentieth Century was Wronghttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=c20bk&stripped_title=the-twentieth-century-was-wrong
View more documents from Lee Bryant.

Sort of reminds me of the traditional marriage debate. But something tells me you'd rather avoid that rant...

photo via vw-busman

Collaboration or Cooperation

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Interesting thought that captures some of the selfish drivers that exist in even altruistic endeavors.

via Ulrike Reinhard

"He (Stephen Downes) describes in this presentation the concept of the internet as a form of global consciousness. He is looking at the idea of human nature as it has traditionally been represented but suggest that a more appropriate model is that of a collection of neurons. With this model he analyses what a global consciousness would look like - not collaboration, as in the organization of a company or a nation, but cooperation, as in the actions of autonomous but interdependent and connected individuals."

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/jDyBneAXAg]

Mike furthers the thought by looking at the motivations behind crowdsourcing, specifically in regards to the threadless model.

Marauz_crowdsource_motivation

Granted, much of Downes presentation is a little over my head, but I might rephrase the statement to simply, "Collaboration is the cooperation of autonomous but interdependent and connected individuals." See, everybody wins!

Stuff I Overheard on the Internet(s)

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District 9, the movie, the marketing, afrofuturism and an awesome panel on transmedia.

Part 1/Part 2

"The reason why the film wouldn't have caught many who followed science fiction by surprise is that it has been the focus of a transmedia marketing campaign for well over a year in advance of the film's release. Signs prohibiting nonhuman use of restrooms surfaced at Comic-Con a year ago. By the start of the summer, such signs were appearing on park benches, the sides of buses, and in a variety of other contexts around major cities."

"Afrofuturism offers us a fascinating way of thinking about how the themes of science fiction emerge across a range of different arts, including music, rather than remaining in the space of literary, filmic, and television science fiction which have traditionally been dominated by us white guys. And as the images of science fiction circulated through those channels, they took on new shapes and meanings, becoming a set of metaphors for thinking about issues such as slavery and cultural oppression."

http://www.viddler.com/simple/f94249ea/

The Original Short that preceded the movie (of course, available on YouTube)

Another brand in name only. (or Bino for Rush fans)

Linens and Things sets out to prove that simply keeping the name and a related product set can still work, even in a post-LnT world. (an extension of this post)

Advertising's Problem: It's focused on advertising, not solutions

"What Othmer's example fails to explain is that when the client moves on, no matter how good the agency, at some point they'll probably move on again. History has shown this to be true: key players leave, needs change, relationships sour. Each subsequent agency ends up dealing with the same or similar problems that the last tried to or couldn't solve, all the while making money and thinking they're doing great. All the while wearing out their tools a little more."

The Netflix Prize: Cool Idea, but maybe one doomed to fail

"But I think there's a deeper problem with these newfangled preference algorithms, and it has nothing to do with the details of their programming code. Instead, I think they're making a fundamental psychological mistake: all of these algorithms assume that our preferences are stable and consistent, but that's clearly not the case. In other words, Netflix assumes that if I like Napoleon Dynamite on Saturday night then I'll also enjoy it on Sunday afternoon. It assumes that I'll find Pineapple Express funny when I'm watching it with a bunch of stoned friends and when I'm watching it sober and alone, on a weekday evening. It also assumes that I'll want to watch the same list of movies regardless of when I'll be watching them."

How Does Language Shape the Way We Think?

"The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time."

A Series of Thoughts on the Agency

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Loveyourcommerce  

I spent way too long writing this long-winded piece of bullshit about ad agencies and whatnot, but I was already bored by the end. So here are a few points, maybe I'll talk more about them later.

Being good at making ads doesn’t make you good enough, and communications strategy has become far too tactical. Creating value through more remarkable action is where we should be headed.

We need to be better at finding proxies for customer relationships, considering these relationships need to feel much more human and most companies don’t have the human capital to deliver to scale.

We need to invest much more heavily in understanding what is actually important and wean ourselves off the useless metrics that we keep based on our often faulty notion that bad research is better than no research.

If agencies continue to be shit at collecting and interpreting data, they should be disintermediated from media purchasing entirely until they can be both objective and knowledgeable. Conversely, we shouldn’t buy from media outlets unless they’re making investments to upgrade their understanding of customer behavior. Google shouldn’t be the only one realizing how much information is locked away in those set top boxes.

Communication dollars should be valued in terms of investment, not only short-term spikes.

Agencies will only get the flexibility and respect they need when they become willing to bet on their own success. This means both acting more like a venture capitalist and becoming more comfortable with new product development.

The big idea is still important. Just as important as all those little ideas. No need to proclaim the death of either.

Each communication should be forced to deliver a singular message, just not the same singular message as every other communications device. We should be busy piecing together puzzles not hammering pegs.

There isn’t any such thing as a digital life. Just life, digitally enhanced. And digital agencies, just like traditional ad shops before them, should start understanding and capitalizing on that much more quickly.

photo via pareerica