Team Coco – Your Outrage Cannot Be Monetized

A reader—and not just any reader but the great Skip Tramontana–recently asked me to weigh in on the NBC/Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien imbroglio. I was not inclined to do so because so much has already been said about the cascade of bad decisions involved. No point in beating a dead talk show host. Whether there is any point in beating a dead network executive I leave you to work out among yourselves. (And before you send hate mail, I will point out that I am a fan of Mr. O’Brien’s; Mr. Leno merely makes me tired.)

All that being said, it does strike me that there is some wisdom about social media to be gleaned from this situation. A few points to consider—some obvious, some less so:

• NBC makes money when people watch its programs. No one makes money off the social media outrage that results when they make controversial decisions to change them. (Figure out a way to do so, and you’ll be able to buy a bigger jet than Larry and Sergey.)

• The decision to watch a late-night talk show is a significant commitment. Not an hour-long commitment. It’s a commitment that lasts years or even decades (See Carson, Johnny and Leno, Jay). It’s a habitual behavior. The commitment required to tweet about your displeasure is–what?–twenty-five seconds. Even if it could be monetized, it wouldn’t be worth much when stacked up against the commitment of people who have made watching a particular program every night for a number of years. Or in this case, the lack of such people.

• Yes, Conan’s numbers went up dramatically over the last couple of weeks of his tenure. So too will crowds gather around a burning building. What counts in the world of programs that are on every night is not whether they’re worth watching when the set is burning to the ground, but whether they’re worth watching when they’re ordinary. The evidence is that these were not.

Will Conan be able to convert the tweeters of outrage into ratings when he reemerges, most probably on Fox, and slaughter Leno, Letterman and all comers? Unlikely.

• From a purely demographic standpoint, Leno’s fans are more likely to make an appointment to watch every night at 11:30 than Conan’s fans. The younger the audience, the more absurd the idea of doing anything on someone else’s schedule.

• What the marketing industry is crying out for is a way to quantify the relative value of different types of media interactions based on the commitment level of the viewer. For example—for a pure lean-back experience (i.e., watching a television show or an online video), multiply the number of minutes spent by 1. If you forward that video to a friend, multiply the number of minutes spent by 2. For a lean-forward experience with some interactivity, multiply the number of minutes spent by 3. For a lean-forward experience that includes consumer’s pushing out of some form of content (e.g. a tweet, blog post, etc.), multiply the number of minutes spent by 4. Whether these number are right, I haven’t the slightest idea. I leave the math to the great Michael Fassnacht and other propeller-heads of his ilk.

Whoever gets it right will be a billionaire. He/she can mail me a check whenever it is convenient.

Cigarettes, Bacon and Freud: The Dawn of Modern Marketing

Lisa Held, a doctoral student in the History and Theory of Psychology at York University in Toronto, has written a fascinating piece on how the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward L. Bernays–who was born in Vienna but raised in New York–used his famous uncle’s theories to sell cigarettes and bacon to Americans. His approach was all about leveraging psychological insights to “engineer consent” for new types of behavior.

In 1929, for example, “nice girls” didn’t smoke. Indeed, a woman who smoked was apt to be seen as promiscuous. In an attempt to broaden the market for his client Lucky Strikes, Bernays consulted with A.A. Brill, his uncle’s leading disciple in the United States, who told him that cigarettes were a symbol of male power.  Bernays took this insight and produced a P.R. campaign that not only made it acceptable for women to smoke, but made it desirable. Held writes:

Equating smoking with challenging male power was the cornerstone of Lucky Strike’s “Torches of Freedom” campaign, which debuted during New York’s annual Easter Parade on April 1, 1929. Bernays had procured a list of debutantes from the editor of Vogue magazine and pitched the idea that they could contribute to the expansion of women’s rights by lighting up cigarettes and smoking them in the most public of places—Fifth Avenue. The press was warned beforehand and couldn’t resist the story. The “Torches of Freedom Parade” was covered not only by the local papers, but also by newspapers nationwide and internationally. Bernays was duly convinced that linking products to emotions could cause people to behave irrationally. In reality, of course, women were no freer for having taken up smoking, but linking smoking to women’s rights fostered a feeling of independence.

Subsequently, Bernays pulled off almost as neat a trick that persuaded Americans it was OK to eat a gigantic 1,000-calorie breakfast every day. You can read about it here.

The idea of engineering consent remains powerful even today. Despite appearances, we still do not live in a world where everything is permitted. Millions of consumers still need a stamp of approval before changing their behavior. Brands that can give it to them can change the game.

Twitter and The Hierarchy of Needs

In “The Tao of Innovation,” which you can find on on psychologytoday.com, Moses Ma writes that “Understanding the psychology of Twitter as a case study helps innovators learn how to better predict and even invent emerging white space market opportunities.” Quite.

What’s particularly interesting is how Ma takes this relatively new technology and shows how it fits into a a nearly 70-year-old theory on human motivation, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s kind of a nice way for marketers to think about the different roles Twitter can play in the lives of its users. Does it soothe their existential anxiety by reassuring them that they belong to a tribe? Does it, as an essentially narcissistic form of communication, raise their self-esteem? Do they use it to self-actualize? Or something else entirely?

The bottom line: Knowing that your target audience uses Twitter is not an insight. Knowing why they do is.

 

Why Every Cheeseburger Ad Is Also An Ad for Twinkies

A new study published  in Health Psychology by Jennifer Harris, John Bargh and Kelly Brownell of Yale says in so many words that whether we realize it or not every food ad we see on television (or in any other medium) is actually an ad for whatever food we have in the pantry at the moment:

“Children consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising. Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising compared to the other conditions. In both experiments, food advertising increased consumption of products not in the presented advertisements, and these effects were not related to reported hunger or other conscious influences.”

What’s interesting about this is that the basic idea of food appears to be stronger than any specific suggestion made by advertising. The authors conclude:

“These experiments demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime automatic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.”

In other words, much as we want our ads to be rifles, they are shotguns. Let those who claim otherwise be condemned to eat nothing but Milk Duds for all eternity.

Why Ad People Burn Out

A whip-smart  white paper by Dsyke Suematsu called “Economic Treadmill: Why We Are Destined to Burn Out” should be required reading for all ad agency leaders regardless of discipline. He argues that using one’s mind for highly skilled or creative jobs (as opposed to doing tedious assembly-line-style work) has no bearing on the likelihood that a worker will burn out. What matters is the connection (or lack thereof) between the worker’s job and and the things he actually cares about:

What is deceptive, especially in the West, is our assumption that repetitive and mindless jobs are dehumanizing. On the other hand, the jobs that require us to use the abilities that are uniquely human, we assume to be humanizing. This is not necessarily true. The determining factor is not so much the nature of our jobs, but for whom they serve. “Burnout” is a result of consuming yourself for something other than yourself. You could be burnt out for an abstract concept, ideal, or even nothing (predicament). You end up burning yourself as fuel for something or someone else. This is what feels dehumanizing. In repetitive physical jobs, you could burn out your body for something other than yourself. In creative jobs, you could burn out your soul. Either way, it would be dehumanizing. Completely mindless jobs and incessantly mindful jobs could both be harmful to us. 

Good managers are able to align the goals of an organization with the goals of the individuals who comprise it. It is an increasingly rare skill. When the de facto goal of an advertising agency–or any other organization for that matter–becomes nothing more than to make the quarterly numbers (or to do whatever it takes to make the client happy), the tether to the hearts of its employees is cut. This is why caring about doing great work is important. This is why your employees need to be proud of whatever is on the computer screen in front of them at all times. We have all seen how much advertising people despise staying one minute past 5:00 to do mediocre work. On the other hand, when they are doing something they are genuinely proud of, you cannot force them to go home.

That being said, pride in one’s work may not be enough. Dyske writes persuasively on how increases in productivity that have come thanks to technology (so often a jackal in sheep’s clothing) actually have increased the likelihood of burnout for those in creative positions:

…take graphic designers. Now with computers handling everything from typesetting, layout, image processing, color management to printing, what used to be done by several specialists are now combined into one person. The number of jobs one can handle in a year increased dramatically. Now designers spend more time being creative, and less time creating the final products. This may sound good, but in terms of stress and rewards, it is not. Because creativity is irrational and unpredictable, coming up with a creative solution can be highly stressful. Designers now have to come up with significantly more creative solutions per year for the same amount of money.

Perhaps worst of all, burnt-out people don’t quit. They keep coming to work. They just stop caring. Human beings have an almost limitless ability to put up with things that make them unhappy. Don’t make them. Every manager’s job is to give his people something to look forward to when their alarm goes off in the morning and they put their feet on the floor. Make your agency stand for something they care about.

Want your ad agency’s employees to be smarter? Stop sending them to industry conferences.

Stephen Strong–Global Director of Interactive at Alberto Culver, connoisseur of fine beers, noted bon vivant, poster boy for all that is good and right in America and a reasonably good amigo of mine–has a post on his Platforms Optional blog called “The Ad:Tech Analysis That The Man Doesn’t Want You To Read!” Rather than quoting anything from it, I think I can best sum it up by sharing a Tweet that Stephen sent me from the floor of Ad:Tech in Chicago: 

“This thing [i.e., Ad:Tech] could use a couple bloody lips.”

Let’s be frank about advertising industry conferences. At best they are delightful boondoggles (I’m looking at you, Cannes). At worst, they’re a waste of time. I grant that there is a possibility, albeit remote, that someone somewhere has learned something of value from a speech at Ad:Tech (I say this as a former speaker at the conference). Let us be generous. Maybe even a handful of people have. But in these tough economic times, agencies should be demanding a higher intellectual ROI than conferences deliver. Add up the registration fees, airfares, hotels and meals and you can get into some fairly serious money pretty quickly. This would be OK if not for the fact that most presenters are conferences are ill-prepared, ill-informed, insipid and/or uninteresting. I should note that this is not always their fault. Conference organizers have a bizarre habit of assigning topics to presenters, regardless of whether the topic matches their area of expertise. By way of example, last year at Cannes I was put on a panel about socially responsible advertising–something I  was capable of expounding on after putting in a little study, but definitely not in my wheelhouse. (By the way, there is a special place in hell for the organizer of panel discussions–perhaps the greatest time-waste conceived since the weekly status meeting.)  

I am proposing a radical alternative that I guarantee will build infinitely more intellectual capital for every agency that adopts it, while costing a tiny fraction of what they are now spending to send people to conferences all over North America and the world. And it’s stunningly simple. Build a reading room at your agency–comfy leather chairs, good lighting, no computers or iPhones allowed, lots of signs that say “no talking.” Once you’ve done this, require every single employee to spend at least eight hours per year in it reading books assigned by his or her supervisor. The reading room must be treated as inviolable. Neither client calls nor nastygrams from accounting about incomplete time sheets may be allowed to breach its threshold. Do this and the people who emerge from the room will in every single case be more valuable than the ones who went in.

Funny thing–the people who actually have something worthwhile to say eventually get around to writing it down. The mere act of writing something down almost invariably means it is more thought-out, better argued, and more complete than the alternative we get in spoken form. Proclaiming this is heresy, of course, in the age of the image and presentation. Yet I am not about to argue that image and presentation are unimportant. What I will argue, however, is that the people who have spent time reading, absorbing and learning the wisdom contained in the great books written about advertising over a period of hours (rather than being exposed to lesser thoughts for a matter of minutes) will in every case be better prepared to leverage what they know in their work and share what they know in their own presentations. 

So if your objective is merely to reward your people, keep sending them to conferences in Vegas, Austin or Dubai. But if your objective is to make them better and more valuable, tell them to sit down, shut up and read.

The science is clear: “People in brainstorming sessions produce fewer and lower quality ideas than those working alone.”

A recent post on Psyblog reports on research that confirms what I have long suspected. Group brainstorming sessions don’t work. Oh, they give the participants a nice, warm feeling. Being part of a consensus does that for you. But there’s a problem with consensus, and Margaret Thatcher summed it up thusly: “To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.”

I do think it’s possible for a couple of people to “think together” productively. But a roomful? Almost never. Thinking is an individual sport, not a team sport. Committees don’t get ideas; they make compromises. If you’ve got an advertising concept that everyone created together and everyone agrees with, you should be deeply suspicious of its quality.

Now if you absolutely must have a group brainstorming session–and some of you will insist on it–Psyblog does offer a few suggestions that may help make it slightly more useful. Of course, most of them involve going off and thinking by yourself either before or during the session itself.

You can have a good idea or you can have everyone feel good about a lesser idea. Which is more valuable to your organization and your client? For most advertising professionals, the answer isn’t as obvious as it would seem.

“Persistent ad formats” persist with a wrongheaded approach to online advertising effectiveness

Today in Adweek Brian Morrissey writes about the latest attempt to infuse online display advertising with value. Video Egg and Meebo have come up with something called “persistent ad formats,” which means they now have ads that consumers can’t scroll away from. The ad units stay on the screen in front of them no matter what. Here’s the problem: It’s 2009 and advertisers are still trying to shoulder their way in front of unwilling consumers.

Perhaps Video Egg and Meebo’s numbers are true, and the “persistent ad formats” are performing well. It doesn’t matter; it won’t last. Consumers will adapt and become just as good at ignoring these new formats as they are at ignoring standard banner ads.

We are in a world where consumers increasingly can choose the marketing they see. Forcing them to look at ad units they don’t want to see merely provokes them. The answer isn’t to come up with new, clever ways to ensure consumers cannot avoid your ad; it’s to come up with ads that exert magnetic force on the marketplace. Brands must draw customers to their communications by delivering some form of compelling value. It could be a smile, a piece of information, an application that will make their life just a little better or something else entirely. In 2009, barging onto their screens as an uninvited guest is simply bad manners.

If you want the math done right, ask a creative director: Traditional media is overpriced by 58%

According to Kathy Durham, VP of Marketing at HP, 40% of the media people consume today is online, yet advertisers spend only 5% of their money in the online space. Allow me to do a little math for you. This means 95% of media budgets are directed at 60% of media consumption. This means that advertisers are overpaying for traditional media by 58%. On the other side of that coin, it means they are underpaying for interactive media by 87%. 

Now, the mossbacks will immediately come that advertisers know what they’re going to get for their investments in traditional media, whereas they’re unsure what they’ll get for their investments in the interactive space. Set aside for the moment that we know with some certainty that 21st-century consumers are more likely to believe a recommendation for a product they receive from a friend or independent third party online than they are to believe pitch that comes uninvited through their TV set. Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Advertisers and agencies alike have been slow to take the steps that are necessary to build compelling mathematical models capable of breaking out ROI by individual media. Make no mistake, not only is this possible, some of the better brands in America already do it and do it well. The math required is complex, but very doable.

The math about how much advertisers are overpaying for traditional media, however, isn’t complex at all. A child could do it. Why do the numbers seem not to bother anyone?

Do marketers overestimate the value of the iPhone?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple and RIM (i.e., the Blackberry guys) “accounted for only 3% of all cellphones sold in the world last year but 35% of operating profits, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff. The disparity will become even starker this year when, he estimates, the two will take 5% of the market in unit terms but 58% of total operating profits.” Obviously, this is jolly good news for Apple and RIM, but is it good news for marketers?

iPhones are undoubtedly one of the coolest technology products ever, and they sold 5.2 million units in the last quarter (up a staggering 626% from the same period last year), yet they still hold a very small percentage of the mobile phone market. How many brands are rushing headlong into the development of an iPhone app even when the market share numbers may not justify it? Of course, there’s something to be said for the caché of having a brand presence on the latest gadget, but I suspect the allure of that approach is fleeting in this challenging economy (at least for the clients who are paying the bills).