Monthly Archives: May 2017

Flow and the Machine

“In the future, either you’re going to be telling a machine what to do, or the machine is going to be telling you.”

Christopher Penn – VP of Marketing Technology, Shift Communications.

I often talk about the fallibility of the human brain – those irrational, cognitive biases that can cause us to miss the reality that’s right in front of our face. But there’s another side to the human brain – the intuitive, almost mystical machinations that happen when we’re on a cognitive roll, balancing gloriously on the edge between consciousness and subconciousness. Malcolm Gladwell took a glancing shot at this in his mega-bestseller: Blink. But I would recommend going right to the master of “Flow” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced, if you’re interested – me-hi Chick-sent-me-hi). The Hungarian psychologist coined the term “flow” – referring to a highly engaged mental state where we’re completely absorbed with the work at hand. Csikszentmihalyi calls it the “psychology of optimal experience.”

It turns out there’s a pretty complicated neuroscience behind flow. In a blog post from gamer Adam Sinicki, he describes a state where the brain finds an ideal balance between instinctive behavior and total focus on one task. The state is called Transient Hypofrontality. It can sometimes be brought on by physical exercise. It’s why some people can think better while walking, or even jogging. The brain juggles resources required and this can force a stepping down of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that causes us to question ourselves. This part of the brain is required in unfamiliar circumstances but in a situation where we’ve thoroughly rehearsed the actions required it’s actually better if it takes a break. This allows other – more intuitive – parts of the brain to come to the fore. And that may be the secret of “Flow.” It may also be the one thing that machines can’t replicate – yet.

The Rational Machine

If we were to compare the computer to a part of the brain, it would probably be the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC). When we talk about cognitive computing, what we’re really talking about is building a machine that can mimic – or exceed – the capabilities of the PFC. This is the home of our “executive function” – complex decision making, planning, rationalization and our own sense of self. It’s probably not a coincidence that the part of our brain we rely on to reason through complex challenges like designing artificial intelligence would build a machine in it’s own image. And in this instance, we’re damned close to surpassing ourselves. The PFC is an impressive chunk of neurobiology in its flexibility and power, but speedy it’s not. In fact, we’ve found that if we happen to make a mistake, the brain slows almost to a stand still. It shakes our confidence and kills any “flow” that might be happening in it’s tracks. This is what happens to athletes when they choke. With artificial intelligence, we are probably on the cusp of creating machines that can do most of what the PFC can do, only faster, more reliably and with the ability to process much more information.

But there’s a lot more to the brain than just the PFC. And it’s this ethereal intersection between ration and intuition where the essence of being human might be hiding.

The Future of Flow

What if we could harness “flow” at will? If we work in partnership with a machine that can crunch data in real time and present us with the inputs required to continue our flow-fueled exploration without the fear of making a mistake? It’s not so much a machine telling us what to do – or the reverse – as it is a partnership between human intuition and machine based rationalization. It’s analogous to driving a modern car, where the intelligent safety and navigation features backstop our ability to drive.

Of course, it may just be a matter of time before machines best us in this area as well. Perhaps machines already have mastered flow because they don’t have to worry about the consequences of making a mistake. But it seems to me that if humans have a future, it’s not going to be in our ability to crunch data and rationalize. We’ll have to find something a little more magical to stake our claim with.

 

 

How I Cleared a Room Full of Marketing Techies

Was it me?

Was it something I said?

I don’t think so. I think it was just that I was talking about B2B.

Let me explain.

Last week, I was in San Francisco talking at a marketing technology conference. My session, in which I was a co presenter, was going to be about psychographic profiling and A.I. – in B2B marketing. It was supposed to start immediately after another session on “cognitive marketing”. During this prior session, I decided to stand at the back at the room so I didn’t take up a seat.

That proved to be a mistake. During the session, which was in one of three tracks running at the time, the medium sized room filled to standing room only capacity. The presenter talked about how machine learning – delivered via IBM’s Watson, Google’s DeepMind or Amazon’s Cloud AI solution – is going to change marketing and, along with it, the job of a human marketer.

I found it interesting. The audience seemed to think so as well. The presenter wrapped up – the moderator got up to thank him and introduce me as the next presenter – and about 60% of the room stood as one and headed for the exit door, creating a solid human wall between myself and the stage. It took me – the fish – about 5 minutes of proverbially and physically swimming upstream before I could get to the stage. It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions.

I tend to take these things personally. But I honestly don’t think it was me. I think it was the fact that “B2B” was in the title of my presentation. I have found that as soon as you slap that label on anything, marketers tend to swarm in the opposite direction. If there is a B2B track at a general marketing show, you can bet your authentic Adam West Batman action figure (not that I would have any such thing) that it’s tucked away in some far-off corner of the conference center, down three flights of escalators, where you turn right and head towards the parking garage. My experience at this past show was analogous to the lot of B2B marketing in general. Whenever we start talking about it, people start heading for the door.

I don’t get it.

It’s not a question of budget. Even in terms of marketing dollars, a lot of budget gets allocated for B2B. An Outsell report for 2016 pegged the total US B2B marketing spend at about $151 billion. That compares respectfully with the total consumer Ad Spend of $192 billion, according to eMarketer.

And it’s definitely not a question of market size. It’s very difficult to size the entire B2B market, but there’s no doubt that it’s huge. A Forrester report estimates that $8 trillion was sold in the US B2B retail space in 2014. That’s almost half of the US gross domestic product that year. And a huge swath of the business is happening online. The worldwide B2B eCommerce market is projected to be $6.7 trillion by 2020. That’s twice as big as the projected online B2C market ($3.2 trillion).

So what gives? B2B is showing us the money. Why are we not showing it any love? Just digging up the background research for this column proved to be painful. Consumer spend and marketing dollar numbers come gushing off the page of even a half-assed Google search. But B2B stats? Cue the crickets.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s just lack of attention, which probably comes from a lack of sex appeal. B2B is like the debate club in high school. While everyone goes gaga during school assemblies over the cheerleading squad and the football team, the people who will one day rule the world quietly gather after class with Mr. Tilman in the biology lab to plot their debate strategy for next week’s match up against J.R. Matheson Senior High. It goes without saying that parents will be the only ones who actually show up. And even some of them will probably have to stay home to cut the grass.

Those debaters will probably all grow up to be B2B marketers.

It may also be that B2B marketing is hard. Like – juggling Rubik’s Cubes while simultaneously solving them – hard. At least, it’s hard if you dare to go past the “get a lead and hound them mercilessly until they either move to another country or give in and buy something to get you off their back” school of marketing. If you try to do something as silly as try to predict purchase behaviors you have the problem of compound complexity. We have been trying for some time, with limited success, to predict a single consumer’s behavior. In B2B, you have to predict what might happen when you assemble a team of potential buyers – each with their own agenda, emotions and varying degrees of input – and ask them to come to a consensus on an organizational buying decision.

That can make your brain hurt. It’s a wicked problem to the power of 5.4 (the average number of buyers involved in a B2B buying decision- according to CEB’s research). It’s the Inconvenient Truth of Marketing.

That, I keep telling myself, is why everyone was rushing for the door the minute I started walking to the stage. I shouldn’t take it personally.

Disruption in the Rear View Mirror

Oh..it’s so easy to be blasé. I always scan the Mediapost headlines each week to see if there’s anything to spin. I almost skipped right past a news post by Larissa Faw – Zenith: Google Remains Top-Ranked Media Company By Ad Revenue

“Of course Google is the top ranked media company,” I yawned as I was just about to click on the next email in my inbox. Then it hit me. To quote Michael Bublé, “Holy Shitballs, Mom!”

Maybe that headline doesn’t seem extraordinary in the context of today, but I’ve been doing this stuff for almost 20 years now, and in that context – well-it’s huge! I remembered a column I wrote ages ago about speculating that Google had barely scratched its potential. After a little digging, I found it. It was in October, 2006, so just over a decade ago. Google had just passed the 6 billion dollar mark in annual revenue. Ironically, that seemed a bigger deal then their current revenue of almost $80 billion seems today. In that column, I pushed to the extreme and speculated that Google could someday pass $200 billion in revenue. While we’re still only 1/3 of the way there, the claim doesn’t seem nearly as ludicrous as it did back then.

But here’s the line that really made me realize how far we’ve come in the ten and a half years since I wrote that column: “Google and Facebook together accounted for 20% of global advertising expenditure across all media in 2016, up from 11% in 2012. They were also responsible for 64% of all the growth in global ad spend between 2012 and 2016.”

Two companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago now account for 20% of all global advertising expenditure. And the speed with which they’re gobbling advertising budgets is accelerating. If you’re a dilettante student of disruption, as I am, those are pretty amazing numbers. In the day-to-day of Mediapost – and digital marketing in general – we tend to accept all this as normal. It’s like we’re surfing on top of a wave without realizing the wave is 300 freakin’ feet high. Sometimes, you need to zoom out a little to realizing how momentous the every day is. And if you look at this on a scale of decades rather than days, you start to get a sense that the speed of change is massive.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that both Google and Facebook have introduced a fundamentally new relationship between advertising and it’s audience. Google’s outré is – of course – intent based advertising. And Facebook’s is based on socially mediated network effects. Both of these things required the overlay of digital connection. That – as they say – has made all the difference. And there is where the real disruption can be found. Our world has become a fundamentally different place.

Much as we remain focused on the world of advertising and marketing here in our little corner of the digital world, it behooves us to remember that advertising is simply a somewhat distorted reflection of the behaviors of the world in general. It things are being disrupted here, it is because things are being disrupted everywhere. As it regards us beings of flesh, bone and blood, that disruption has three distinct beachheads: the complicated relationship between our brains and the digital tools we have at our disposal, the way we connect with each other, and a dismantling of the restrictions of the physical world at the same time we build the scaffolding of a human designed digital world. Any one of these has the potential to change our species forever. With all three bearing down on us, permanent change is a lead-pipe cinch.

Thirty years is a nano-second in terms of human history. Even on the scale of my lifetime, it seems like yesterday. Reagan was president. We were terrorized by the Unabomber. News outlets were covering the Iran-Contra affair. U2 released the Joshua Tree. Platoon won the best picture Oscar. And if you wanted to advertise to a lot of people, you did so on a major TV network with the help of a Madison Avenue agency. 30 years ago, nothing of which I’m talking about existed. Nothing. No Google. No Facebook. No Internet – at least, not in a form any of us could appreciate.

As much as advertising has changed in the past 30 years, it has only done so because we – and the world we inhabit – have changed even more. And if that thought is a little scary, just think what the next 30 years might bring.

Shopping is Dead. Long Live Shopping!

Last week, a delivery truck pulled up in my driveway. As the rear door rolled up, I saw the truck was full of Amazon parcels, including one for me. Between the four of us that live in our house, we have at least one online purchase delivered each week. When compared to the total retail spending we do, perhaps that’s not all that significant, but it’s a heck of a lot more than we used to spend.

We are a microcosm of a much bigger behavioral trend. A recent Mediapost article by Jack Loechner reported that online retail grew by 15.6 percent last year and represents 11.7 percent of total retail sales. An IRI report shows similar trends in consumer packaged goods. In 2015, ecommerce represented just 1.5% of all consumer packaged good sales, but they project that to climb to 10% in 2022. In fueling that increase, Amazon is not only leading the pack, but also dominating it to an awe-inspiring extent. Between 2010 and last year, Amazon’s sales in North America quintupled from $16 billion to $80 billion. Hence all those packages in the back of the afore-mentioned truck.

Now, maybe all this still represents “small potatoes” in the total world of retail, but I think we’re getting close to an inflection point. We are fundamentally changing how we think of shopping, and once we let that demon out of the box (or bubble wrapped envelope) there is no stuffing it back.

In the nascent days of online shopping, way back in 2001, an academic study looked at the experience of shopping online. The authors, Childers, Carr, Peck and Carson, divided the experience into two aspects: hedonic and utilitarian. I’ll deal with both in that order.

First of all, the hedonic side of shopping – the touchy, feely joy of buying stuff. It’s mainly the hedonic aspects that purportedly hold up the shaky foundations of all those bricks and mortar stores. And I wonder – is that a generational thing? People of my generation and older still seem to like a little retail therapy now and again. But for my daughters, the act of physically shopping is generally a pain in the ass. If they can get what they want online, they’ll do so in the click of an OneClick button. They’ll visit a mall only if they have to.

In an article early this year in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson detailed the decimation of traditional retail. Mall visits declined 50 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to the real-estate research firm Cushman and Wakefield, and they’ve kept falling every year since. Retailers are declaring bankruptcy at alarming rates. Thompson points the finger at online shopping, but adds a little more context. Maybe the reason bricks and mortar retail is bleeding so badly is that it represents an experience that is no longer appealing. A quote from that article raises an interesting point:

“ ‘What experience will reliably deliver the most popular Instagram post?’—really drive the behavior of people ages 13 and up. This is a big deal for malls, says Barbara Byrne Denham, a senior economist at Reis, a real-estate analytics firm”

Malls were designed to provide an experience – to the point of ludicrous overkill in mega-malls like Canada’s West Edmonton Mall or Minnesota’s Mall of America. But increasingly, those aren’t the experiences we’re looking for. We’re still hedonistic, but our hedonism has developed different tastes. Things like travel and dining out with friends are booming, especially with younger generations. As Denham points out, our social barometers are not determined so much but what we have as by what we’re doing and whom we’re doing it with. Social proof of such things is just one quick post away.

Now let’s deal with the utilitarian aspects of shopping. According to a recent Harris Poll, the three most popular categories for online shopping are:

  1. Clothing and Shoes
  2. Beauty and Personal Care Products
  3. Food Items

Personally, when I look at the things I’ve recently ordered online, they include:

  • A barbecue
  • Storage shelves
  • Water filters for my refrigerator
  • A pair of sports headphones
  • Cycling accessories

I ordered these things online because (respectively):

  • They were heavy and I didn’t want the hassle of dragging them home from the store; and/or,
  • They probably wouldn’t have what I was looking for at any stores in my area.

But even if we look beyond these two very good reasons to buy online, “etail” is just that much easier. It’s generally cheaper, faster and more convenient. We have a long, long tail of things to look for, the advantage of objective reviews to help filter our buying and an average shopping trip duration of just a few minutes – start to finish – as opposed to a few hours or half a day. Finally, we don’t have to contend with assholes in the parking lot.

Online already wins on almost every aspect and the delta of “surprise and delight” is just going to keep getting bigger. Mobile devices untether buying from the desktop, so we can do it any place, any time. Voice commands can save our tender fingertips from unnecessary typing and clicking. Storefronts continue to get better as online retailers run bushels of UX tests to continually tweak the buying journey.

But what’s that you say? “There are just some things that you have to see and touch before you buy?” Perhaps, although I personally remain unconvinced about the need for tactile feedback when shopping. People are buying cars online and if ever there was a candidate for hedonism, it’s an automobile. But let’s say you’re right. I already wrote about how Amazon is changing the bricks and mortar retail game. But Derek Thompson casts his crystal ball gazing even further in the future when he speculates on what autonomous vehicles might do for retail:

“Once autonomous vehicles are cheap, safe, and plentiful, retail and logistics companies could buy up millions, seeing that cars can be stores and streets are the ultimate real estate. In fact, self-driving cars could make shopping space nearly obsolete in some areas.”

Maybe you should buy some shares in Amazon, if you haven’t already. P.S. You can buy them online.