Evolution and the hidden cognitive bias that’s sabotaging advertising’s future

It’s a curiosity of scientific progress that black holes were postulated decades before a theory of evolution was¹. Not only is evolution a latecomer to the party, it also happens to be a straggler when it comes to popular appeal.

Why did it take so long for someone to come up with the idea of evolution? And even after 150 querulous years, why is it that so many people struggle to accept it?

According to Ernst Mayr, architect of neo-Darwinism, the blame rests squarely with Plato².

Plato believed that the world we inhabit is but an imperfect projection - a shadow - of an ideal world; a flawed departure from its perfect essence³.

For eg., there are rabbits in the world but there also is the ideal ‘Rabbit’, which is perfect and immutable for all time. Real world rabbits do differ from this ideal ‘Rabbit’ - they may have longer ears or differently coloured eyes. But these, in essence, are undesirable deviations from the ideal 'Rabbit', which serves as a conceptual blueprint for how all rabbits should be⁴.

Similarly, according to Plato, for every living and non-living thing there exists a category type of the same - its perfect version. Every thing in the world ‘strives’ to embody its category type.

As inheritors of the Greek tradition of thinking, we continue to see the world through the lens of this idea - a cognitive bias now dubbed essentialism⁵.

Essentialism has us believe that the categories we assign to things (and people) have a deep underlying basis to them. Instead of viewing categories as a helpful way of understanding the world, we begin to see them as factual features that are actually present in the world.

Based on this, we expect sharp and pronounced divides between different categories - triangles and squares, but also rabbits and non-rabbits. Any intermediates are only temporary anomalies.

To really appreciate evolution, however, one needs to disavow essentialism and see the world through the prism of ‘population thinking’.

There are no ideal types in the world, only real instances of populations with variations in characteristics. There is no perfect Rabbit form. Moreover, today’s commonplace rabbit form is anything but immutable and could have very different characteristics a thousand years hence, depending on selection pressures.

Evolution, if nothing else, is a wholehearted embracing of variation.

* * *

If essentialism has a professional cheerleading squad, it has to be the advertising industry.

At the heart of every advertising or brand-building endeavour is an exercise in essentialism.

Step 1: Define an archetypal experience or consumer: for eg., the tastiest burger, the sexiest man, the healthiest breakfast, the smartest housewife or the bounciest hair. Step 2: Present any deviations from these ‘ideals’ as sharply delineated and deeply flawed. Step 3: Suggest corrective action, buying the brand in question.

That’s not all. The process of creating advertising, from start to finish, rests on driving wedges of categorisation in a spectrum of contiguous variations: generations of consumers (Gen Xers OR Millenials), proficiency in using technology (digital natives OR digital immigrants), consumer affinity (favorability OR advocacy), brand personality (hero OR sage), and so on.

And it goes deeper still. Unlike magicians, we remain convinced in the magic of our own trick, even after the curtains have come down.

So when thinking about the future of our industry, we continue to resort to the categorical clarity of Platonic ideals.

We dichotomise between creative types and everyone else (We have a monopoly on creativity); between professionally produced ads and user generated content (Nobody would do this for free); between bold visionary ideas and ideas that arise out of research and testing (A consumer can have nothing constructive to add); between ads that look like ads and content marketing (Nobody wants to read, everyone wants to be entertained); between stories and data (Everybody loves to listen to stories); between the eternal kingdom of advertising and the end of all advertising as we know it (Nothing will change! Everything will change!)

Our instinctive response to all problems - including our own - is to seek ‘essences’, to leave no room for intermediates. Our reality remains firmly bounded by our ideas of it, rather than the other way around.

While Platonic certainty served us well in simpler times, the present and the future are decidedly messier⁶. To thrive in these interesting times, we need to master an ability to experiment with and vary our response to the world, not impose our mental order on it⁷.

But as long as we continue to see any deviation from the norm as an undesirable (and temporary) aberration and as long as we continue to mistake the map for the territory, we are destined to remain trapped in an essentialist maze of our own making.


References and Notes:
1. John Michell elaborated on the idea of blackholes in a paper presented to the Royal Society in 1793 (John Michell and Black Holes). Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s ideas of evolution were first presented to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858 (Wikipedia: On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection).
2. Ernst Mayr presents this argument in his book ‘What Evolution Is’ (and elsewhere.) Richard Dawkins writes in The Greatest Show On Earth, “According to Mayr, the reason Darwin was such an unconscionable time arriving on the scene was that we all - whether because of Greek influence or some from other reason - have essentialism burned into our mental DNA.”
3. This is the idea captured in Plato's Allegory of The Cave.
4. Richard Dawkins uses a rabbit to explain essentialism and population thinking in The Greatest Show on Earth. Since I discovered the distinction in his book, I saw no reason to change the example animal in my own narration.
5. “Essentialism is a cognitive bias that people across a wide range of cultures seem to have, and across a wide range of ages too. It’s a belief that the everyday categories in the world around us have some deep underlying basis to them.” (An Interview with Susan Gelman PDF link)
6. Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes in The Black Swan, “The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.”
7. Gareth Kay in his piece Advertising’s Kodak Moment I.M.H.O. calls on the advertising industry to take on a hacker’s approach to solving problems: “... hacking is about a predisposition and bias towards speed. It’s about solving a problem in a better, faster and easier way. It fights the tyranny of perfection that far too often slows us down. It lets us move and experiment at least as fast as culture.”
Adrian Ho in his Cannes presentation on innovation and agencies references Bruce Lee’s martial arts style, Jeet Kune Do which is “A style without style.” This idea of foregoing hardset techniques is also captured in Bruce Lee’s famous quote : “Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Both Gareth Kay's and Adrian Ho's calls for advertising to adopt a looser, less-wedded-to-technique and problem-solving attitude are, in my opinion, a call for an end to essentialism in the industry.

Native advertising and the equilibrium between the useful and the promoted

You may or may not have heard of ‘native advertising’ yet but chances are you’ve already encountered it, and often¹.

In a recent survey by OPA, just under 75% of US publishers self-report that their sites featured native advertising, with a possibility of that number reaching 90% by year end².

So, what is native advertising³? It is a paid-for placement that appears on a publisher’s site or content stream, its appearance being ‘native’ to its visual surroundings. Along with residing on the publisher’s - not the marketer’s - site, it is designed to be discovered and shared in the same ways as regular content. It is also promoted alongside the site’s editorial content, though identified as ‘sponsored content’ or as created by ‘marketing partners’⁴.

One of the promises of native advertising is that it’ll significantly contain the pestilence of banner ads on the Web. No longer will we have to suffer visually screechy intrusions to our attention, nor will publishers have to sell them for next to nothing.

Native advertising, it is also being touted, could be a saviour for online publishing and lead to a win-all for almost everyone (except, of course, ad agencies who may see their role as intermediaries between marketers and online publishers all but vaporise⁵.)

It is not all smooth sailing, of course. A drumbeat of opposition comes from advocates of old-school journalism, who revere the rigid church-and-state line of separation between editorial and advertising. To them, this is a textbook definition of a slippery slope⁶.

* * *

In Game Theory 101, the choice of driving on the left or the right side of the road is often presented as a coordination problem, one in which both players stand to derive mutual gain (and road safety) by mutually agreeing on one, while remaining indifferent to any specific choice⁷.

But for most of history and up to the 18th century, the choice of which side of the road to ride on was more than just a problem of coordination, it was fundamentally a question of trust.

Which is why almost everyone rode on the left of the road⁸. In case they encountered highwaymen or aggressors on their way, this placed them with their right arms in the best position to defend with sword or knife. (Paradoxically, staying to the left also made it easier to be the attacked as one would be to the ‘right’ side of oncoming traffic.)

The rise of multi-horse carriages changed this dynamic⁹ (with the drivers preferring to stay right), but a papal edict in 1300 firmly established riding on the left as the law of the land¹⁰.

The French Revolution, which sought to rebuild society based on new egalitarian principles, brought an abrupt end to several artefacts and accepted norms of life. One of the casualties was the left of the road custom¹¹.

Napoleon decreed by royal order that this game of mistrust would no longer be enacted on roads in the European continent. His army was instructed to march on the right side of the road as a sign of trust and goodwill¹². This “civilised” practice spread far and wide, though the British and their erstwhile colonies still choose to be left behind¹³.

The church-and-state line of divide between editorial and advertising in the media, likewise, imposed a Napoleonic bargain in the way we navigate the world of news and information.

It was a coordination game, but also much more. We could safely encounter an armada of oncoming information in our daily lives and rarely have reason to mistrust its sources or intent. We stayed to the right, doffed our hats and chose to engage with content or advertising as we desired, with no worry about mistaking one for the other¹⁴.

One consequence of native advertising is a return to a bottom-up pre-Napoleonic state of affairs.

But isn’t this a fatal blow to the idea of journalistic ethics? Won’t we end up swimming in endless torrents of corporate propaganda endlessly repackaged and subverted as editorial content?

Unlikely. As minor league Robin Hoods through the centuries realised, it takes two to play a game of coordination and trust. There are no unilateral decisions.

Our new tripartite pact with journalism and native advertising will definitely not have the crisp starched principles that some of us fondly remember. But there’s no reason to believe it will be any less real, or helpful.

Millions of micro-interactions and negotiations between readers and a daily torrent of news will determine where the equilibrium of this new bargain lies. Far from being a rigid and straight line running only through the organisation charts of media companies, the division of what constitutes the useful and the promoted can and will be made in the marketplace, and by readers.

If you doubt that, welcome to the left side of the road.

References and Notes:
1. High-profile web publishers sporting native advertising include Gawker, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes, BuzzFeed, Slate, Cheezburger, Techmeme and The Atlantic (Reuters: And now, a word against our sponsor).
2. eMarketer: How Native Ad Campaigns are shaping up
3. There a wide variety of confusing and overlapping definitions currently in use for the term native advertising, ranging from content marketing, publisher tweets to contextually-relevant non-standard advertising units (eMarketer: How Native Ad Campaigns are shaping up). Felix Salmon of Reuters has a useful matrix that clarifies how to think about distinguishing between many competing terms and definitions (Reuters: The Native Matrix).
4. I have outlined this definition based on pieces written by Felix Salmon (The disruptive potential of native advertising) and Lewis Dvorkin (What’s next for native ads? Controversy gives rise to market realities).
5. Andrew Rice covers Buzzfeed, one of the vocal advocates of native advertising in this piece for NY Mag (Does Buzzfeed know the secret?). He provides a panoramic view of the potential of the innovation along with what the critics make of it. Writing on his Reuters blog, Felix Salmon makes a positive case for its disruptive potential (The disruptive potential of native advertising).
6. Jack Shafer writes, “When Web publishers deliberately blur the visual and textual divide that separates editorial from advertising, as The Atlantic did, they force readers to judge whether a page is news/opinion or a commercial advertisement. But they’re not confused; it’s the publisher and the advertiser who are confused. The publishers and advertisers have polluted their own tradition by erasing the traditional line. Suddenly, it’s completely reasonable for readers to blame controversial news stories directly on advertisers and blame controversial advertisements directly on reporters and editors, because publishers and advertisers have essentially merged operations. Such calamities injure both publisher and advertiser, even already controversial advertisers like Scientology.” (Reuters: And now, a word against our sponsor)
7. “A typical case for a coordination game is choosing the sides of the road upon which to drive, a social standard which can save lives if it is widely adhered to.” (Wikipedia : Coordination Games)
8. “In the past, almost everybody travelled on the left side of the road because that was the most sensible option for feudal, violent societies. Since most people are right-handed, swordsmen preferred to keep to the left in order to have their right arm nearer to an opponent and their scabbard further from him. Moreover, it reduced the chance of the scabbard (worn on the left) hitting other people.” (World Standards: Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left?)
9. “These wagons had no driver's seat; instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team. Since he was sitting on the left, he naturally wanted everybody to pass on the left so he could look down and make sure he kept clear of the oncoming wagon’s wheels. Therefore he kept to the right side of the road.” (World Standards: Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left?)
10. New Scientist : Left if right on the road
11. New Scientist : Left if right on the road
12. This move by Napoleon has been widely attributed to either the fact that he was left-handed or he was doing the opposite of what Britain, his enemy, did (Wikipedia: Right-and Left Hand Traffic). However, one does not have to attribute idealistic motives to Napoleon to see that ordering his armies to march on the right had a worldwide impact and did improve the trust capital of all involved.
13. A world map of countries driving left of the roads shows how much along British-lines this practice is divided. (World Standards: Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left?)
14. Jack Shafer writes, “It’s equally important to advertising-supported journalism that the news not be confused with the ads that run nearby, a point Benjamin Franklin made in his advertising manifesto in his 1731 “Apology for Printers.” Franklin held — and most publishers continue to hold — that the controversy raised in news stories is 1) desirable, 2) should not be held against advertisers and 3) that the content of advertisement should not automatically be held against the newspaper publishing them.” (Reuters: And now, a word against our sponsor)

The consumer is not a moron. He is the other half of creative genius.

In the myth-making that follows success, the beginnings of any creative endeavour or career always happen under the light of a guiding star.

Every creative breakthrough, this myth holds, is foreordained. It benefits and enriches us - we undeserving flock of consumers - through the work and preachings of a chosen one. A christos¹, whose genius is to know something we don’t: what we really want.

Our own destiny, it seems, is to conserve the inertia of ignorance and wait for the moment when what we want is magically handed down to us on a platter of premonition.

This birth of the chosen one - or, interchangeably, the chosen idea - is greatly honoured and blessed by gifts sent forth by the three kings.

The first king is Akio Morita, founder of Sony and inventor of a product that famously failed research but didn’t fail history - the Walkman. His gift to the chosen one are these words: “We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready.”²

The second king is Steve Jobs, a phoenix among mortals, the inventor of the spiritual successor to the Walkman and übermensch above all³. His biggest legacy is, of course, his own extraordinary and multi-blockbuster career.

His gift, therefore, carries more than its weight in meaning; his words express the philosophy of a man who seemingly⁴ demonstrated their truth, time and again: "You can't just ask customers what they want then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."⁵

The last king is Henry Ford, an American icon who did more to transform the world (by making the car affordable) than we can possibly realise. His gift is the Hattori Hanzou⁶ sword of every creative ninja: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.“

As along as we have horses and period dramas set in Victorian London, this is the closest we will get to a Euclidean ideal of marketing.⁷

* * *

If you lived in ancient Greece or Rome and wanted to be known as a genius, your only option was to hope for rebirth, preferably as a creature of fantasy.

Because until the 15th century, a genius was not a human being. Instead, some overachievers had ‘a genius’⁸ - an other-worldly spirit, divinely assigned to them, who was the true source of their godly prowess in their chosen art.

The gifts of the talented, therefore, were not their own. Their creations were the result of a coalition of humble human contributions subject to a tsunami of creative forces unleashed by a supernatural collaborator - their attending genius.

This construct - of a human amanuensis and a genius spirit - assuages much envy, but also captures a fundamental reality of the creative process.

The act of creation is inherently a dialogue. A dialogue between primal unknowable forces and an all too human interlocutor - while the former makes unbridled brilliance possible, the latter ensures it remains relatable to human experience.⁹ We cannot have a masterpiece without either.

The ancient duality of a genius-human tag team offers space, even a distinct identity, within the creative process for a proto-consumer.

The same is true for our own three kings. They indeed had genius, but this genius was not free-standing - it was in attendance to an inherent consumer.

Their gifts do us no service by equating an absence of a formalised dialogue between disjointed creators and consumers as proof of the absence of any dialogue at all.

And if there ever was a gift horse that needed its dentures examined, it is Henry Ford’s.

Even if the people of his time naively longed for “faster horses”, Henry Ford the astute listener and creator knew which one of those two words mattered more. This does not signify a breakdown in communication; it is the perfect example of exactly the opposite.

That creation is effected by dialogue does not mean all or any exchange is good and should go unchallenged. Much of the current apparatus of formalised dialogue in our context - market research - is based on outdated assumptions¹⁰. There has never been a greater need to inject genuine empathy, communication and understanding back into our creative processes.

But we do ourselves no favours by attempting a reformation of this process with fingers pointed squarely at the consumer¹¹ - by endlessly repeating assertions that he cannot possibly know anything valuable and therefore has nothing to contribute¹².

Just think of the almighty genie¹³ - the genius - of the lamp, blessed with the power to summon or create anything at will. He still needs to ask someone, “What do you want?”

References and Notes:
0. I have kept things stylistically simple by using the standard convention of referring to a reader or consumer as ‘he’, without intending to imply that I think of them exclusively as male.
That said, in the headline I have specifically departed from the female pronoun of the David Ogilvy original quote to avoid the suggestion, or misunderstanding, that it’s only the female half that can possess creative genius.
1. Greek for ‘anointed one’ - the second name added to Jesus by early Greek-speaking christians. (Behind the name: Christos)
2. Akio Morita notably ignored focus groups that hated the Walkman (Man and Superman).
3. Chris Dixon uses the great man theory of history to suggest that firms run by intuitive geniuses like Akio Morita and Steve Jobs end up defying the natural lifecycle of companies (Man and Superman).
4. Seemingly, because his failures are often forgotten or ignored. “When Steve Jobs has fancied himself the chief creator, disastrous failures often ensued. His instincts were often wrong. For example, his much ballyhooed Apple Cube, which was in fact a successor to the NeXT cube he'd developed during his Apple hiatus, was a $6,500 dud. He was also openly disdainful of the Internet in the late 1990s. And before his hiatus from Apple, in 1985, his meddling and micro-management had gotten out of control.” (Co.Design: What made Steve Jobs so great?)
5. A view he expressed to Inc. magazine as far back as 1989 (The Decade of the Entrepreneur). A couple of decades later when asked what market research went into the iPad, he famously said "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." (Co.Design: What made Steve Jobs so great?)
6. A special katana sword - in the mythical tradition of fabled and enchanted weapons - prepared for the protagonist by a renowned swordsmith of the same name in the Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill Vol 1. The swordsmith and sword are named for a famous 16th century Samurai and Ninja master of the Sengoku era (Wikipedia: Hattori Hanzo).
7. Euclidean geometry consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms and deriving other propositions from them, creating a comprehensive logical and deductive framework (Wikipedia: Euclidean Geometry). Plato - the idealist’s idealist - is supposed to have inscribed above the entrance to his famous school, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here." (Wikipedia: History of Geometry)
8. This sense of genius also gives us the English word ‘genie’, both derived from Latin gignere, meaning “to produce.” (Lexial Investigations: Genius)
9. In the Indian myth dealing with the creation of the epic poem Mahabharatha, the scribe is charged with the job of understanding every word that’s being dictated by the creator - in fact, he is commanded not to write down anything until he has understood it. An effective way to ensure the genius’ work is understandable to a commoner. I wrote more about this in the context of story-telling: Ganesha, the Mahabhratha and Complexity as Narrative Device.
10. Faris Yakob’s blog post All Market Research is Wrong and paper Uncovering Hidden Persuaders do a good job of rounding up the objections to market research as it is currently practiced and proposing approaches to tackle the shortcomings.
11. This marketoonist cartoon by Tom Fishburne and this parody video of a prehistoric focus group capture the popular disdain of seeking any consumer input in the creative process.
12. Consumers do know a lot more about their needs than they are usually given credit for. Proof of this is the increased occurrences of user innovations. This phenomenon is captured by MIT professor Eric von Hippel in his book ‘Democratising Innovation’.
In the book he writes, “Product developers need two types of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both need information and solution information are often very "sticky"-that is, costly to move from the site where the information was generated to other sites. As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have, while manufacturers have a better model of the solution approach in which they specialize than the user has.”
Therefore, the innovation that companies pride themselves on turns out to be a particular and limited kind of innovation. “One consequence of the information asymmetry between users and manufacturers is that users tend to develop innovations that are functionally novel, requiring a great deal of user-need information and use-context information for their development. In contrast, manufacturers tend to develop innovations that are improvements on well-known needs and that require a rich understanding of solution information for their development.”
13. The arabic term ‘djinn’ is rooted in terms meaning ‘conceal’ or ‘cover of darkness’ and is unrelated to the Latin word ‘genie.’ It was translated to ‘genie’ by the original French translators of The Thousand and One Nights because of its proximity to the latin ‘genie’ in sound and meaning (What’s the difference between genies, jinn, and djinn?).
The djinns and spirits of the Arab world are mostly mischief makers, but among them were also the functional equivalents of the Latin genius. “Another manifestation, called Qareen, were devil companions appointed to every human being by Allah from among the jinn who, like Iblis, whispered evil things into their hearts and led them astray. Such was their influence that they were believed responsible for every inspirational work in pre-Islamic Arabia. Every poet was alleged to have a qareen devil of whom he was only a mouthpiece. A fantastic vision of the qareen given in one report shows him having a translucent body in the shape of a frog perched on the left shoulder bone of a man. It had a stinger like a mosquito’s, with which it actively probed the depths of the man’s heart and injected its message.” (Lapham’s Quarterly: Mischief Makers)

To target or not to target

Adliterate recently penned a rant about targetting in online advertising. The experience that triggered it is something all of us have encountered (or will eventually do so) - search for something online and be bombarded with ads for the same for eternity.

His conclusion about targetting - it's a great idea in theory, but in practice it's better to waste ad spend reaching a broader audience. Hard to disagree with that, especially if one has been at the receiving end of this pesky tactic.

Malcolm Gladwell in a recent TED talk addressed this issue as well - not with regards to advertising, of course. He recounts the story of Carl Norden, a Swiss engineer who created the Norden Mark II Bombsight - a complex device designed to vastly improve the accuracy of dropping bombs from aircraft. Adopted by the US in WWII, it took a lot of money to develop and was great in ideal conditions. But in battle, it hardly achieved its promise. Another case of targetting failure.

But what these two examples reveal is that targetting is a ruse that's not just limited to advertising or to dropping bombs - it's a widely adopted stratagem in the natural and unnatural world around us (Think about a bird's keen eyesight and its graceful swoop over its prey or the over-representation of sharpshooters in warlore.) That partly explains its enduring allure. A yearning for more efficiency through targetted means is something that's deeply inherent in all us - especially when we're expending our own resources. (Which can hardly be said to be the case for planners and adfolk recommending clients to loosen their purse strings willy-nilly.)

So, while not targetting is an option, targetting is a legitimate strategy too - and clients are right to pursue it. Some may decide it's not for them, some may experiment with it and then decide it's not for them - and some may persevere in demanding better targetting technologies and techniques. (The US Army didn't stop pursuing accuracy in bombing even after the dismal failure of the Norden Bombsight. Which is why we have cruise missiles and Predators now - not everyone's idea of progress, but progress nonetheless.)

And what is it about receiving targetted ads that drives us nuts? When targetting in advertising doesn't work or draws attention to itself, it's failure is starkly obvious to its quarry. We understand the ruse and are repelled by its naked artifice - by its profiteering motive and its seeming use of 'pilfered' data. Like a victim aware of a conman's trick, we then either mock its failure or are repulsed by its successs.

That may very well be what the non-advertising professional will continue to do. But for those of us in the business, it's a chance to observe how and when our (or someone else's) best-laid plans don't work. To contemplate ways to improve or change that; and while we wait for things to get better, to explain to our clients the risks of targetting as is practiced now. (And for this reason alone, every person working in advertising should suffer from the failure of targetted ads.)

And it is here that the final act in the story of Carl Norden and his bombsight has something more to impart to us. Though its track record in WWII was dismal, the Norden bombsight was ironically used to drop the atom bomb - a device of destruction built to make the very idea of accuracy redundant.

And that's the lesson we could also be sharing with our clients and with our comrades-in-advertising. To either pursue better bombsights or more destructive bombs - but not both together*. That targetting has its place, but not alongside rampant repetition and the racking up of exposures.

(*To be fair to the US Allied forces, they spent a lot of money on the bombsight and the atom bomb but probably did not expect to use the atom bomb in the first place.)

What traffic in Mexico City can teach us about social media

In ‘Traffic: Why We drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)’, author Tom Vanderbilt explains how a right of way is negotiated in some places:

"Eye contact is a critical factor at unmarked intersections in Mexico City. Look at another driver and he'll know you have seen him, and thus dart ahead of you. Not looking at the driver shifts the responsibility to him (assuming he has actually seen you), which allows you to proceed first - if, that is, he truly believes you are not aware of him."

Experiments in the lab confirm this. In one study, subjects were shown pictures of equidistant cars approaching an intersection. One had the right of way and the other didn't.

When confirmed eye contact was made, most subjects thought that the driver who had the legal right-of-way would/should claim it. When no clear eye contact was made, the subjects had lesser clarity on who had the right of way - thereby absolving the driver without the legal right of way of any responsibility if he wrested it.

Avoiding eye contact is a strategy employed not just by motorists but by pedestrians too.

Motorists are willing to slow down or stop if they think that pedestrians have not seem them approaching. However, if the pedestrian has made eye contact with the motorist, this is less likely to happen.

So what has all this to do with social media?

Put very simply, our traditional mass-media approaches to advertising are all about avoiding 'eye contact' with our consumers - lest we be forced to change our well drawn out strategies and plans. So we put the pedal to the metal and zip past intersections and pedestrian crossings, all the while staring rigidly ahead - so that no one can 'expect' us to slow down, stop or change directions for them.

But social media is about the opposite approach. It's less about right of ways and wanting to wrest them at any cost - it's about acknowledging our consumers, slowing down to let them pass, being receptive to their choices and letting them influence our journey.

Therefore, a good way to test your social media strategy is to ask the question 'Is it enabling eye contact with our consumers or helping us avoid it?'

If it's the latter, you ought to know it’s just a mass media strategy in social media clothing.

Chief Not Listening Officer

The obvious - and rightful criticism - to the current fashion for Chief Listening Officers is that everybody in the organisation should be listening, not just one designated person or department.

But as this report suggests, Chief Listening Officers aren't really performing the touchy-feely task enshrined on their business card but instead bringing hard data-analysis skills to the torrent of online chatter about the brand. In fact, Susan Beebe - CLO at Dell - describes her job as building "complex queries."

I am in no doubt the need for such a role exists. What I question instead is the need for the grandstanding title.

In fact, listening is only one half of the CLO's job - and definitely not the more important half. As Susan Beebe clarifies in the comments of a now-extinct blog post, "It's important to not only "listen" but prioritize and disseminate that information back to the relevant business lines so they can take action on the information."

What the CLO is doing primarily is "prioritising feedback", choosing one thread of discussion over the other, ignoring the feeble - but probably revelant - voice, even while delivering on a delusional self-satisfaction to the brand that it's "listening" to everything directed at it.

In fact, if you have anything to say to the brand you'll have better luck routing it through anyone in the organisation except the CLO. While anyone in the organisation can ignore feedback and fail to act on it, it takes a CLO to do so and justify it as his/her job.

The critics are only partially right. It's indeed everyone's job to be Chief Listening Officer. Even better if everyone knows and agrees whose job it is to be Chief Not Listening Officer.

The rationality of altruism in brands

If you follow science journalism, chances are sooner or later you'll hit upon a discussion on the irrationality of altruism in people (and some animals). Evolutionists have tried to solve the conundrum by devoting scientific papers, books and entire careers to the problem. But the sense that it's still a mystery (and hence a bugbear to evolutionary theory) persists.

Contrast that with brands and altruism. Follow any marketing magazine or blog and you're likely to run into articles about how CSR pays and why brands should identify causes and make their contribution.You'll find abosultely no discourse about why it's irrational for brands to practice CSR. Simply because it isn't.

There are (or must be) perfectly valid reasons why we humans practice altruism despite its cost and irrationality. But this explanation is so obscured in a chain of logic and causation - and our own personal experiences that contradict scientific assertions - that it remains, in all but the most flagrantly obvious cases, a noble act. We feel the need to value and applaud it.

On the other hand, when brands practice CSR it is baffling only to a handful of people - and not for very long. What brands should remember is that when they start seeing a lot of head-scratching, career-making curiosity and books with titles like "The mystery behind why brand X practices CSR" (and half a dozen titles that dispute the findings) - then, and only then, are they practicing CSR.

Until that happens, it's just a case of investments and returns.

What fiction writers can teach us about writing creative briefs

Recently, Guardian invited prominent authors to list out their 10 rules for writing fiction. It became a popular feature, collating the wisdom of several authors and even overflowed into a part two.

Reading it, I wondered if a few of these rules can be picked out and applied to something closer home - like writing a creative brief. It does seem like a stretch as the two activities are possibly diametrically opposite, if nowhere else but in our own minds.

Still, armed with my own thoughts on writing creative briefs, I set out to trawl the entire list and came up with this - 10 rules for writing creative briefs from fiction writers.

I have copied each rule and tweaked it - minimally - to suit our need. My own edits in the rule are italicised. The author's name and the corresponding rule number (from their list) are mentioned in brackets for reference.

1. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. (Elmore Leonard, 5)
2. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. (Elmore Leonard, 10)
3. Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. (Roddy Doyle, 8)
4. Learn poems by heart. (Helen Dunmore, 5)
5. Have regrets. They are fuel. (Geoff Dyer, 6)
6. Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Most creative briefs, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation. (Geoff Dyer, 8)
7. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a creative brief is devalued along with it. (Jonathan Franzen, 5)
8. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it. (David Hare, 3)
9. Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say. (Michael Moorcock, 10)
10. If it reads like a creative brief, rewrite it. (Elmore Leonard, summation)

Of course, these rules are my own version of what I think these fiction writers would say to us. I would love to hear what other rules you would pick out.

How to forge a top-of-the-line cyborg planner

Clive Thompson points to this wonderful essay on computer chess by Garri Kasparov and draws our attention to an intriguing experiment in human chess-machine diplomacy.

Undone by the brute calculative power of IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, Garri came upon a wonderful way to juxtapose the deep calculative method of chess computers with the intuitive and strategic approach of human chess players.

He put together a tournament where humans and chess computers play together against other such 'cyborg' tag teams instead of against each other. Human and computer both would collaborate to play the perfect chess - fortified with the other's strengths and shielded from their collective weaknesses.

This approach was later adopted by an online chess playing site in 2005 in a 'free-style' tournament in which teams of players and computers in any configuration could take part.

Here's what transpired in Kasparov's words:

"Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming. 

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."

Fascinated by Kasparov's epiphany, Clive Thompson nails the argument:

"We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it (I often use it to resolve “tip of the tongue” moments — i.e. to locate the name of a person or concept I know but can’t quite put my finger on). Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we care about. Tools like Mint help us spot invisible patterns in how we’re spending, or blowing, our hard-earned cash. None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they’re often cognitively quite alien processes — which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we’re still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want — or don’t want — to be.  

What I love about Kasparov’s algorithm — “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and … superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process” — is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software."

[This reminds me of a post I wrote a while ago - what blogging does to planners. Drawing on the evolutionary arguments of extended phenotypes I wrote about how planners can enhance their cognitive capacities and weave a web of information around themselves.

Reading the above arguments - and my own post again - I realised what I got right with the above post, inadvertently of course, was to emphasise the process of blogging rather than the tool itself.]

In light of Kasparov's epiphany, the question we planners need to continually ask ourselves is this. Our abilities abound and so do tools and services to enhance them. But what are we doing every single day to fuse them together into an effective cyborg planner? Because it's the latter that will make us radically better at our jobs, not either of the former.

Why scam ads are like pedigree dogs

Leafing through an old issue of New Scientist magazine, I came upon this op-ed column that expresses outrage at the cruelty and insensitivity inherent in breeding pedigree dogs.

It seems that pedigree dogs are so efficiently bred for narrow award-winning characteristics that as a result they often end up suffering grave ill-health and a greatly reduced quality of life.

That immediately struck me as an appropriate way to describe something closer home - a scam ad. After we are done condemning the creatives and agencies behind scam ads (whenever that would be), it isn't too difficult to see the life of a scam ad as one akin to a dog's - metaphorically, if not always literally.

And then the problems that are endemic to pedigree dogs suddenly seem widespread in scam ads too.

"Pedigree dog breeders compete to produce animals that conform to written standards, which may include traits that inadvertently compromise quality of life. These traits were included in the first breed standards set when dogs left the working arena and entered the world of dog shows in the late 1800s. Many of them were valued by early dog domesticators because they served a purpose, such as long legs for hunting dogs, or muscular build for guard dogs. Unfortunately, breeders now tend to priortise looks over function, and to pursue traits with excessive zeal."

Even a casual peruser of scam ads will notice the traits that are being pursued with excessive zeal - long copy, no copy, microscopic logo, clever visual, ambient device, etc.

"Take the pug, which is required to have eyes that are "very large, globular in shape." Breeders select for this, leaving pugs with eyes that bulge so badly their lids can scarcely meet well enough to wipe the eyeball clean. The poor dogs suffer a lifetime of conjunctivitis that scars the cornea and blinds them."

All I can say that most scam ads suffer a much worse fate. Most of them can't even enjoy a life as an ordinary ad - the one that gets run and whose existence is seen and acknowledged. They are show-freaks who have no place in daily life.

After making a case for "a new approach to dog breeding, one based on a comprehensive understanding of their biology," the above piece ends on this note:

"Perhaps one day breeders will compete in a class for "The dog with the best chance for a high quality of life.""

While the brouhaha over scam advertising usually focuses on the perpetrators accompanied by ritual condemnation (and followed by a swift return to the status quo) - approaching the problem with empathy for the ads and ideas themselves may help us see the problem in a new light. And might even change the motivations of the scam ad "breeders."

As Rory Sutherland puts it, scam advertising is not really an ethical problem at all but an economic one. In the post, Rory also proposes a market system that can mitigate, partially at least, the colossal economic waste that scam advertising results in - and give the dog another chance to have its day.

There do seem to be changes in dog breeding - the above op-ed mentions withdrawn support for dog shows in the UK and also a pilot scheme to promote appropriate behavioural traits in show dogs.

And there do seem to changes afoot in scamland too - the One Show recently announced that it will ban scam creators for up to 5 years.

While many hope that the above will end the 'scam', my worry is that it shouldn't put an end to so-called "scam advertising" - advertising which owes its existence to profligate creativity.

I only hope that the One Show measures push us to work harder to give our scam ideas the legitimacy they deserve - by selling them to clients, going beyond a single execution and release, fighting (often with our own scammy and lazy selves) for their 'quality of life' and for their presence in the brand's legitimate guard book.

The free-climbing guide to planning and problem-solving

In my opinion, problem-solving is one of the key components of a planner's craft.

But too often, problem-solving carries with it a connotation of the ungraceful and the ungainly. Of putting the end before the means, and of putting effectiveness over ingenuity.

The thinking, to misquote Albert Einstein, is "if you're out to solve a problem, leave elegance to the tailor."

The same probably goes for rock-climbing - it doesn't matter how scrappy or clumsy one seems when toiling on a rock-face, boulder or a cliff. To clamber to the top is the goal - achieving that leads to safety and triumph.

But not to John Bachar, whose obituary featured in a recent issue of The Economist.

John Bachar was one of the world's best free-climbers - "a professional sport with no coaches or rule-books, where each climber planned his own tactics himself. It was, in his own words, the real deal."

The piece gives us a pretty good idea of how John climbed:

"John Bachar climbed slowly, like a spider—or, as he preferred to say, a starfish. He seemed to move in slow motion, swinging his legs out in parallel to seek a ledge, pulling to a crouch, raising one graceful arm to grab a hold. Nothing was hurried; all was smooth and unforced... His only equipment, apart from rubber-soled boots, was a bag of chalk slung at the back of his belt, into which he dipped his hands to dry the sweat and improve his grip. He had no ropes, bolts or pitons, and preferably no knowledge of the ascent except what he had gleaned from the ground, telling himself “Dude, there’s some holds here, man.” There was just John Bachar, working out the rock. He could only have been more pure, he said, if he had gone up naked."

But what really suprised me were his sentiments upon reaching the top:

"Unlike mountaineers, he felt no urge to conquer the rock-face. Getting to the top didn’t matter. All that counted was the grace, control and style of how he got there. The rock was his superior and, he felt, should remain as if he had never climbed it."

And, therefore:

"He was horrified to find, when free-climbing in France, that holds had been chiselled in the rock face and stone-like grips glued on. He was offended to come across rusty bolts, or so-called free-climbers setting advance protection for themselves. The effect of all this was to “lower the rock to your level”, removing its capacity to challenge and surprise."

"Lowering the rock to our level" - that struck me as something agencies, and a lot of us, do with the problems/challenges we face. By hammering in bolts and sticking grips in the rock, for us to grapple with when we return or when others follow in our path. By using and touting proprietary planning models/tools as the ropes, bolts and pitons that would tame any marketing/communication challenge.

On the other hand - as John Bachar practiced - a purer alternative would be to contemplate every challenge/problem as a superior that should be allowed the dignity of posing its riddle and continuing to challenge and surprise those that follow after us.

And by doing so, we'll probably enrich our planner colleagues more - and our planning models less.

Why working on a marketing strategy is like solving a sudoku

Adrian Ho wrote a post last week about how solving sudokus serves as a metaphor for doing marketing strategy, and followed up by listing his thoughts on what's analogous between the two.

I am not quite a sudoku aficionado like Adrian, but I do solve the occasional newspaper sudoku - and have also been at the perplexed end of quite a few. And I have also on occasion wondered about the similarities between solving the sudoku and what I do for a living.

So here's a couple of thots I'd like to add to Adrian's.

Excepting for a few key numbers, it isn't quite important which sequence you solve the sudoku in. Every number of the puzzle you solve only opens up solutions elsewhere on the board. Of course, some numbers/positions are key and serve as bottlenecks - all your preliminary answers conspire to lead you to them. Navigate through these and you'll see the coast clear after that.

Though purists would like to think that working on a marketing strategy has to follow a linear route, I prefer to see it in terms of a sudoku puzzle. Fill every blank that can be deduced ignoring where it is on the puzzle - and you'll be ultimately led to the key issue(s) in it. Crack those and you'll only need to fill in the remaining blanks following simple rules and correlations.

I am not sure it's obvious from the above paragraph but what I'm stressing is that it is never obvious in the beginning where in the puzzle lie those key issues/bottlenecks. You can only figure out by starting to solve the problem with what you already have. If you haven't already done that, you can't attack those key numbers - simply because you don't know where they are.

Paradoxically, that could actually mean that coming up with the strategy or the idea was the not the key bottleneck in the puzzle - but instead the key puzzle you may need to solve may be how to work a good backstory or a creation myth from the idea you had 2 minutes after hearing the brief.

My other sudoku-strategy connection might be a little more controversial - or not.

In my opinion, the hallmark of a great strategy is that when you're done with it you know that it is the right solution. Just like when you solve a sudoku. If you've got it all right, you'll know. If you haven't, ditto.

Meaning, the puzzle not only defines the problem at hand but also contains all the necessary information to let you know if you've solved it right. In fact, the puzzle is one half of the solution - the broken part of the key that one needs to complete.

Which brings me to the 'brief.' The one we receive as strategists or the one we pass on to the creative guys. What most briefing formats don't manage to capture is how to arrive at this sudoku state - setting a puzzle (without knowing the solution beforehand) that enables the solver to determine if and when it has been solved correctly.

The whole process of writing a creative or a communication brief in my opinion is to give a marketing/communication problem that sudoku-like quality. By filling in just enough numbers on a blank or almost-blank puzzle to ensure that the resulting brief has one unique and accessible, yet non-obvious, solution - not multitudes.

Brand-building lessons from Batman

Frank Miller is the man responsible for the Batman we know today - dark, morally ambiguous, ultra-violent and not too much more saner than the villains he's fighting. His 1986 comic 'The Dark Knight Returns' is credited with single-handedly reinventing the caped crusader and rescuing him from a campy oblivion.

In the latest issue of GQ, Frank Miller has this to say about his time working on the Batman franchise:

"I was once asked by somebody if writing Batman was like holding a Ming Vase or something. And I said 'No, it's like holding a big-ass diamond that you can't break. You can throw him against the ceiling, against the floor, anywhere, and you just can't break Batman.' There are ten ways to do him and they all work."

While it's now common to sneer at the prelapsarian (and pre-Miller) Batman and laugh at his comic capers, what Frank here is saying that he inherited a character that was in effect unbreakable. He could do anything with Batman - turn him into a blood-thirsty monster for eg. (which is exactly what Miller did) - and the public would still relate to their favourite masked hero. 'The Dark Knight Returns' ensured much more than that - the comic is still in print 20 years after it was first published, making Frank Miller a larger than life hero in the bargain.

Likewise, it's not inoften that one hears talk of treating a brand like it's a Ming vase - so fragile that, one slight bump and it will certainly become scarred and second-rate forever. Of treating it with utmost care, padding its every single action with expert attention and holding its little finger every step of the way.

But shouldn't brands be built to be like the Batman Frank Miller inherited? Virtually breakable and totally impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to the machinations of its well-wishers. String together every wrong move one can think of and set the detonator off - and what should step out when the smoke clears is a brand with tattered tights and a slightly bruised body but with a never-say-die soul.

After all, a brand that cannot risk - or survive - a few collisions with adversity isn't too much of a brand. Isn't it?

Can we have interactivity without spontaneity?

This video clip of Clay Shirky speaking about how to humanise brands got quite a bit of play on the blog circuit a while ago. Clay's point that advertising is too focussed on seeming perfect - and therefore is less inviting to interaction and participation - seems to be spot on.

But I believe that there's something else that Clay may have overlooked.

A pre-occupation with 'perfection' also implies a sustained inward focus and an inclination towards being self-absorbed. And that in my opinion is what primarily hinders interactivity between brands and its consumers - even above the 'touch-me-not' finish of most advertising.

One can't have a conversation with someone who's constantly preoccupied with what to say next or how to say it best. A quest to overwork and craft every word we are going to say only puts us more and more out of sync with the conversation around us - eventually leading our fellow-conversers to abandon the dialogue and move on.

So the need for brands is not to abandon perfectionism and deliberately introduce an unfinished messiness to their advertising, but to be spontaneous and join in the cut and thrust of the conversation as it unfolds. Not, as is the practice now, to withdraw to formulate a repartee and return to the conversation at a time (and place) of their choosing, but instead to go with the flow.

True, as a direct result of this spontaneity, a brand risks making its advertising seem less perfect and messy - but the distinction I'm drawing here is that the latter follows the former, and not the other way around.

If a brand's involvement in the conversation were to be spontaneous and yet well-crafted and perfect, I don't think it would hinder the interactivity or the flow.

On the other hand, withdrawing from a conversation to ponder over a suitable reply almost always kills it.

Free, but not free

A 'skeuomorph', I recently learnt, is a superficial and functionally unnecessary design element/feature in an artefact, copied from other similar artefacts to reinforce familiarity.

A great example of a skeuomorph is the clicking sound of a shutter in a digital camera. Unlike in an analog camera, the clicking sound is not a by-product of the functioning of the camera. It's reproduced in a digital camera by playing a sound clip - to provide feedback that a picture has successfully been taken.

Another example of a skeuomorph is 'engine noise' added to electric vehicles - as their noiseless running can be quite unsettling and deceptive to pedestrians and other traffic.

With a lot of discussion about Chris Anderson's upcoming book on the free economy, I wonder if price could ever become a skeuomorph? As in, the cost of supplying a particular product or service is virtually zero, but a price is charged just because customers are unfamiliar/ uncomfortable taking it for free.

One example - the only one I could find - comes from behavioural economics. Apparently, prostitutes almost always end up losing any clients whom they offer to serve for free - any form of discount or freebie suppossedly moves the interaction from the purely transactional realm (where the only currency is financial) into the social realm (where the currency is partly emotional). As a result, clients want to pay prostitutes in full to make it clear that it is just a financial transaction.

Do leave a comment if any more examples come to mind.

Planning's very own Clover Machines

Clover machine WIRED 16.08 has an article about Starbuck's great hope - a fancy new coffee machine that has wowed coffee connoisseurs eveywhere. So amazed was Starbucks by the Clover Machine that they bought the company that makes them - the Coffee Equipment Company - and promptly stopped selling the machines, so that no one else can have them.

Instead, if you want to enjoy a cup of Clover coffee, you'll have to head across to a nearby Starbucks.

The Clover Machine has some serious following - apparently long queues awaited it wherever it was introduced, and self-described Cloveristas abound. It is the first coffeemaker that lets the user programme three key variables: dose, water temperate and brew time. The result according to Howard Schulz is "the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted."

But for all the hoopla and hope surrounding it, over at the Starbucks' counter the Clover Machine has drawn a skeptical response and - at least to the writer's taste buds - apparently failed to deliver on its promise.

The problem for Starbucks lies not with the machine, but with the beans. "The machine is only as good as the beans you put in it." And Starbucks - a mass producer - is unable to consistently deliver fresh beans of coffee to the consumer.

Reading about the Clover Machine saga reminded me of a post Northern Planner wrote recently about agencies' proprietary brand planning models.

I haven't read the Jeremy Bullmore column referred to in the post, but I do think that brand planning models are the bright shiny objects that agencies spent inordinate amounts of time polishing and showing off - fancy tools that work perfectly under lab conditions, only to fall short of their promises in real life. A lot like Starbucks' overhyped Clover Machines.

The lesson for agencies and us planners is simply this - if one doesn't have the right beans, no coffee machine in the world can help churn out gourmet coffee.

Pagerank: the Car of the Internet?

In the book 'Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile', Lewis H. Siegelbaum notes the ambiguous relationship the Soviets shared with cars. The car symbolised freedom and aspiration - both frowned upon in the Communist world. On the other hand, the Soviet Union wanted to match (or to be able to boast about matching) the West's superiority in everything - inlcuding in producing cars.

When the Soviets did finally start producing cars in the 70s, Siegelbaum notes that "it sowed its own seeds of destruction." Some cars brought luxury, some cars the basic means of transportation and some cars brought ridicule - but all cars brought about glaring inequality in a society that wanted to practice otherwise.

And within a couple of decades the Soviet Union itself was in ruins.

Reading about it, I couldn't help but wonder if the Pagerank could be the 'car' of the Internet. Not having it allowed the early Internet world to exist in a semblance of egalitarian communityhood.

But no sooner was it introduced that everyone wanted to have one - and those who had one wanted to  upgrade to the shinier model labelled with a larger number, ad infinitum. And the result? The socialist state of information was gone forever - made to vanish by the conjuror's trick.

Cars, however, are seen as liberating technologies only in the beginning. As more and more of them arrive, they begin to be seen as oppressors - leading to pollution and traffic jams, signifying the worst side of life in a caplitalist society.

Expect the same to happen to Pagerank. Today's liberator will end up being tomorrow's oppressor.

The long tail and the Big Idea

In a recent post, Seth Godin clarifies one of the most common misunderstandings about the long tail. He emphasises, "Given the choice, it's better to make a hit." But you don't have a say in making something a hit - you can only try. On the other hand a Long Tail approach - collecting many many products among the tail - "permits you to amalgamate a market that may be just as big or bigger than the short head."

I can vouch for the wide prevalence of the misunderstanding. When people read my whitepaper on the long tail of brand-building, their first reaction is to wonder if I am suggesting that the Big Idea is dead.

"We'll always have Big Ideas" is their usual response - reassuring themselves and dismissing my thesis in one go.

What I have not been suggesting is the demise the one big idea for the brand. Given the choice - and inclination - go for the big idea every time.

But if your brand already has a big idea - or if you are still groping for one - also consider amalgamating a wagging tail of smaller ideas that each appeals to its own smaller and focussed audience. These audiences when added up can rival the reach of the one big idea - and effectively double your audience.

The key here is to realise a brand can - and should - have more than one proposition for itself. As I wrote in the paper:

"In effect, the communication for every brand represents an individual market in which different messages for that brand compete for consumer attention and time."

If you haven't already read it, here's a ChangeThis Manifesto of the paper - or if you prefer, the complete paper itself.

PS: In addition, I cannot agree more Seth Godin about the poky professor who missed the point about the long tail. For me, the Long Tail has never been about numbers, hard data and proof - it's an axiom that unveils a simple, fundamental and overlooked truth about the world around us. MisEntropy

Information: To free AND not to free

In a post a while ago, Adrian Ho makes the point that latecoming social media players may be penalised twice - through the double jeopardy of having lower influence and therefore ending up with lower loyalty and therefore lower influence and so on.

I can't agree more with that - though I'd also like to add, it's always better to be late than never.

But Adrian ends the post by noting - with great disappointment, I think - that the Internet is evolving the same kind of barriers to information flow that exist in the physical world, like popularity for instance.

The sharing of information - or the hiding of it - isn't unique to us humans. These twin motivations are embedded into the very fabric of nature and life. And it can be argued that without the continuing tension between them, life - and for us humans, enterprise - wouldn't be possible.

A stick insect is hiding the information that it's present where it is - to avoid ending up as a meal. The vibrant colours of flower and fruits signal information to unsuspecting birds and insects about where the food (and the hidden chore of transporting seeds) is. Nature abounds with myriad examples of this informational hide and seek game.

Alternating between enabling and impeding the flow of information is intrinsic to us too. Wherever we go we'll take this sport along - for it's at the folds where information is hidden and revealed that all of life and human endeavour take place.

Popularity is way of revealing information, and also of hiding it - the popular isn't always the good.

Talking about Wikipedia, Gene Koo (of Harvard Law School's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society)  says, "Its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed - Foucault taught us that this is impossible - but simply visible."

That stands true for all social media properties too. The levers of influence aren't destroyed - they are made visible. Which is why the best social media properties don't just use raw popularity but incorporate as much more information into them as possible. Google's Pagerank measures popularity but also makes transparent - and weeds out - links that manipulate popularity through various spoofing and spamdexing techniques.

But there we run into the dual nature of the universe - the dark side as it were. To keep real information freely and easily available, Google has to hide some information - the details of the factors influencing Pagerank. Else we would have rampant abuse of the Pagerank algorithm - and no free flow of information.

And likewise with every other social media property - the ones we will end up using will be the ones we trust implicitly. But none will be able to live up to the promise of keeping all information free all of the time.

It's not that a universe where all information is free all the time is not plausible. The laws of nature, I believe, make it not permissible.

Disposability: Not a Bic idea anymore?

Following the launch of a Bic-branded disposable mobile phone, Influx Insights plants pertinent doubts about the relevance of the Bic brand in a world where corporate/consumer responsibility and use-and-throw disposability no longer go hand in hand. The post ends with the question "Does it (Bic) need to re-think how it can play a responsible role by making its products modular and re-usable and using more recycled plastics?"

In my opinion, the answers aren't as clearcut as they first seem.

The willingness to license the Bic brand name to connote a disposable product means that at least someone positively think both the Bic brand and disposability are relevant - and is willing to bet money on that prospect. They may be wrong, but you can't fault Bic for encashing their equity (especially if the world's changing fast) and the mobile phone marketers for trying to find out.

The responsibility here rests not with either of them but with the consumers at large. If they don't buy the disposable mobile phone idea, they send the message that times have changed - and end of experiment. If they do buy the product then, both Bic and the cult of disposability live to fight another day.

But should Bic be looking to change course and stay relevant? I am not sure they can, even if they want to.

Brand Bic may have a change of heart but are its consumers/audience willing to alter their perceptions about it? So deep is the association with disposaibility, is it worthwhile at all to spend money to change it? Especially, when the best such a massive image-changing exercise can hope to achieve is put it on par with others on the environmentally-responsible brand wagon?

It is also my belief that in a world of pervasive, distributed and persistent social media, brands will meet great friction if they try to redefine themselves drastically over the short-term. In fact the rise of social media will see a greater mortality rate for brands as brand custodians will find it easier to tear the sheet and start afresh, rather than wrestle with a rudder that may no longer be in their control.

Further, disposable products may not go out of fashion after all. As we pick up on super-efficient waste recycling - disposable products might not seem such a guilt-ridden option at all.

Finally, while disposable mobile phones might seem an irresponsible turn of events - it's not a new idea at all. All along, it's what every mobile phone manufacturer has been hoping you'll do sooner rather than later.