Author Archives: ghotchkiss

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #2: Values are Non-Negotiable

Walt_young_featureWalt Disney’s values were forged in the hardscrabble reality of Kansas City, growing up in a family led by a father that never was quite able to grab success by the tail. Walt was a deeply spiritual individual who held the importance of American and Family values above all else. He spent the rest of his life pursuing an ideal – that of clean wholesome family entertainment. Walt was scrupulous about it. I suspect the adult movies that are now released through Disney’s production arm, Touchstone Films, would have earned a disapproving frown from Walt. Yet of all the major studios, Disney is still the one synonymous with family entertainment.

The normally affable Walt could quickly become contentious when his values came into debate. He drove the overall moral tone of Disney entertainment with an iron will. The door was open for technical and creative innovation, but heaven help the poor Disney employee who let their moral guard slip, even for an instant. It’s only very recently that Disney Park employees were allowed to have a beard, a mustache (ironic, considering Walt himself sported one) or sideburns. Walt felt facial hair detracted from the clean, wholesome image he wanted to maintain in his parks. And the classic Disney films each strove to be more than entertainment – they each carried a strong moral message, usually about the value of a strong family unit.

Whether or not you agreed with Walt’s highly idealistic views, you had to admire the ardor with which he defended them. Walt felt that a corporation without real values was a soulless organization without direction. And his values still live in Disney’s corporate values today:

Values Make Our Brands Stand Out

    * Innovation
          o We follow a strong tradition of innovation.

    * Quality
          o We strive to follow a high standard of excellence.
          o We maintain high-quality standards across all product categories.

    * Community
          o We create positive and inclusive ideas about families.
          o We provide entertainment experiences for all generations to share.

    * Storytelling
          o Every product tells a story.
          o Timeless and engaging stories delight and inspire.

    * Optimism
          o At The Walt Disney Company, entertainment is about hope, aspiration and positive resolutions.

    * Decency
          o We honor and respect the trust people place in us.
          o Our fun is about laughing at our experiences and ourselves.

Are they defended as strongly as they were when Walt was alive? I suspect not, yet it’s a testament to the man that for must of us, Disney and family values are synonymous.

Values are a highly personal thing. You might not subscribe to the same values that Walt did. But the fact is, values have to live at the heart of an organization. They breathe life into it and give it a purpose that’s not open to negotiation or compromise. They are the bearing points that can always be relied on. They stand above profit statements and quarterly earning reports. If they don’t, all you have is a bunch of people standing around trying to figure out the best way to make money. And there are better things in life than that.

The Spring Search Insider Summit: Where is Search Going?

First published March 11, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last column, I talked about Steve Ballmer ruminating about the future of search. Steve isn’t the only guy thinking about this. A number of people I’ve talked to in the last few months have been pulling their crystal balls out and doing a little prognosticating about where searching as we know it might go in the future.

I think we (and by we, I mean anyone remotely connected to the search industry) all agree that we’re at the cusp of a sea-change in our world. Most everything we know will get swept along with this change: revenue models, our search experience, marketing strategies, the role of search agencies, the tools we use — and even the very platforms we use to launch our search.
One simply can’t overstate the importance of this. So, with another Search Insider Summit rapidly approaching, the folks at MediaPost and I have decided to turn the entire summit over to that one central question: Where is search going?

Those of you who have ever attended a Search Insider Summit know the basic premise: spirit a number of the smartest minds in search away to a fabulous location and let them share ideas for three-and-a-half packed days of brainstorming. This time around, on lovely Captiva Island in Florida, I want the future of search to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

And that’s where I need some help. I need passionate and compelling presenters who can “Captiva-te” our audience with their vision of where search is going. I’m looking for pitches around the central question. I’ve switched it up a little this time, dividing the primary question into six different sessions:

Where is the Core Technology Going? The engine that drives search is undergoing some significant tweaking, both in the labs of Microsoft and Google and in countless start-ups around the globe. How is the fundamental function of indexing and organizing information evolving?

Where is the User Interface Going? What will our search engines of the future look like? What is the next flavor of the 10 blue links? How will we query — and when we do, what will the results look like?

Where is the Search Experience Going? Already, we launch our searches from more and more places: mobile devices, entertainment screens, tablets and desktops. And the explosion of screens means the diversity will only continue to grow. How will the very act of searching change for us? And what will it mean for those of us doing the searching?

Where is Search Marketing Going? As search changes, the ways we use it as a marketing channel must also change. How will we adapt to the changing user experience and interface? What will our touch points with prospects who are searching for information look like in the future?

Where is the Search Marketing Industry Going? At past summits, we’ve talked a lot about how the search marketing industry has to change and adapt. Despite its rapid adoption and tremendous success, the search marketing industry is still in its relative infancy. Will stand-alone search agencies be part of the future marketing landscape? And if they are, what do we have to start learning to do — and what should we stop doing?

Where are Search Marketing Tools Going? One of the knocks against search is its lack of scalability. Tools have consistently scrambled to keep up with the changes and have made great strides in assisting the search marketer in keeping track of what is, by necessity, a tremendously granular management task. But what will those tools look like in the future?

If any of the above topics strike your passion, let us know. Send us a speaking pitch in the following format:

Introduction: One (short) sentence summarizing your pitch, along with the session you believe it fits into.

Description: No more than 300 words giving us more detail about what you want to speak about.

About Yourself: A little bit about you and why you’d make a compelling presenter on the Search Insider Summit stage.

Send all this along to my email: gord@enquiro.com and please cc my assistant: denise@enquiro.com. Time is short, so if you’re interested, please get your pitches in by next Tuesday.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #1: Dreams Make a Difference

waltdisneyMy friend and fellow Search Insider columnist, Aaron Goldman, has gained a lot of mileage from one column. Sometime ago, he wrote a column entitled “Everything I Need to Know about Marketing I Learned from Google”. Since then, he’s managed to stretch that out into dozens of columns and an upcoming book. For the next few weeks, I’d like to take inspiration from Aaron and share a few things that Disney has taught me. I don’t expect to get nearly the same mileage that Aaron did (possibly because I don’t have the same attention span) but it’s certainly not because Disney is any less inspirational than Google. For me, Disney presents one of the great corporate histories of the 20th century and Walt has always been one of my personal heroes. But, I will restrict myself to 10 blog posts, one for each of the lessons that Disney has taught me about life and business success. So, let’s start with Lesson One:

Dreams Make a Difference

Walt Disney was possibly the biggest dreamer of the 20th century. Walt always had his gaze firmly focused not the future, quickly moving on from past successes. The next “thing” was always the most important “thing.”  He knew if you spent too much time patting yourself on the back, you’d have your sights focused on where you’ve been, not where you’re going.

In behavioural economics, there’s a saying, “Loss looms larger than gain.” Most of us, faced with a decision of protecting what we have vs. risking it all for a potential future gain tend to circle the wagons and protect the piggy bank. Not Walt. Walt drove his brother Roy crazy by constantly betting it all on a bigger and better dream. For much of it’s history, Disney rode a roller coaster that came frighteningly close to bankruptcy on more than one occasion.

Walt knew that dreams are the fuel that drive us forward. Dreams that focus forward can be achieved with passion and purpose. Dreams that look backward are just one step away from regret. We can do nothing about the past, but we can do something about the future.

Walt was much more than a dreamer, however. Unrealized dreams have not influence on the world beyond the holder of the dream. And that was the magic of Walt. Somehow, he was able to make dreams come true. He knew how to sell dreams, infusing them in others and thereby inspiring them. His dreams were highly contagious, spreading from him (and eventually his brother) through his company outwards to a circle of financiers and partners. Eventually, his dreams reached far enough to touch each one of us.

Disney has not dreamed quite as big or successfully since Walt’s passing, but it’s still a corporation that knows the power of a dream. It has a history of recognizing dreamers and providing the superstructure required to lift those dreams up to the heights.

In Disneyland there is a plaque that says, “It all started with a mouse.” But really, it started with a dream. Walt Disney knew how to take a dream and leverage it to move the world. Powerful stuff indeed!

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

First published March 4, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell, Danny, don’t yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good-natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.

I suspect there will be no shortage of coverage on the keynote and the areas explored. Ballmer was careful to tone down his enthusiasm about Bing with a realistic nod to Google’s current dominance. But there was one comment in particular that I want to explore a little further today. Ballmer made all the obligatory comments about us being very early in the game a search, an observation that has become rote in search interviews. And usually, that observation refers to the user experience, the functionality or the platform from which we search.  But Ballmer purposely singled out one area that is not generally talked about when we discuss the nascence of search — the revenue model.

The Crystallization of a Revenue Model

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But it’s unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Here’s what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need  — the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a “click,” the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

It’s Not That Simple Anymore

But here’s what’s happening now: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going “under the hood,”  powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. We’re demanding more from search — more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online — finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps — search will just be another piece of that functionality. This “usefulness” explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility.

Google, Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue-producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect it’s this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made — far more revenue, in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

The Psychology of Entertainment: The Genotype of Art and the Phenotype of Entertainment

In the last post, I started down this road and today I’d like to explore further, because I think the question is a fundamentally important one – why do humans have entertainment anyway? What is it about us that connects with it?

Our Brains House a Stone-Age Mind

MaliThere is much about our behaviors are culture that does not align completely with the directives of evolution. It’s easy to see the evolutionary advantage of the opposable thumb or language. It’s much harder to see the advantages that saturated fat, iPods and American Idol give us. As I started to say in the last post, that’s the difference between a genotype and a phenotype. Our genetic blueprint gives us a starting point, a blueprint that cranks out who we are. But, unfortunately for us, there are a number of “gotchas” coded into our genomes. And that’s because the vast majority of the coding was done hundreds of thousands of years ago for an environment quite different that the one we currently inhabit. For example, a taste for high calorie foods. This makes sense if you live in an environment where food is scarce and when you do find it, it might have to sustain you for a day or so. It doesn’t make much sense when there’s a McDonald’s around every corner. The genotype for efficient food foraging, necessary for survival a 100,000 years ago, leads to today’s phenotype of an epidemic of obesity. As evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby say, our brains house a stone-age mind.

This clash between phenotypes and genotypes leads to many of the questions that arise when we apply evolutionary theory to humans. The primary calculation in evolution is a cost/benefit one. How much do we have to invest in something and what is the return we get from it, in terms of reproductive success? For example, why do humans have art? The reproductive purpose of a bow and arrow or a cooking pot seems to be easy to determine. Both ensure survival long enough to have offspring. The evolutionary advantage of a canoe also makes sense – it provides access to previously unobtainable resources, including, presumably, the opposite sex. Canoes enabled prehistoric precursors to the Frat house road trip. But why did we spend hours and hours decorating our weapons, or cooking utensils, or transportation vehicles? What evolutionary purpose does ornamentation have? Art is universally common, one of the criteria for evolved behaviors. The answer, or at least part of it, lies in another human truism – the guy with the guitar always gets the girl. Or, to use Darwin’s label, the Peacock Principle.

Hey, Nice Tail Feathers!

In a previous post, I talked about how admiration plays a big part in entertainment. We’re hardwired to admire talent. Why? Because social status accrues to those with talent. Also, it appears that talented people are more attractive to the opposite sex. This is driven by sexual selection, reinforcing this behavioral trait in the evolutionary psychology. Let’s use the peacock as an example. Somewhere, sometime, a male peacock, through a genetic mutation, was endowed with slightly larger tail feathers. And, for some reason, female peacocks found this to be desirable trait in selecting a mate. The result. The male peacock with the bigger tail feathers got more action. This started an evolutionary snowball that today accounts for the bizarre display of evolutionary energy we see in male peacocks.

Does this account for art in humans? Were artists given special status in our society, allowing their genes an easier path into the next generation? Well, there’s certainly evidence that points in this direction. But Ellen Dissanayake believes there’s more to it than Darwin’s Peacock Principle.

Art: Making Special

Dissanayake believes there are two other factors that explain the presence of art in our culture, and both have to do with how we adapt to our environments. The first question Dissanayake asked was “what is art?” The answer was “making special.” Art, she believes, comes from our need to take the ordinary and set it apart as something to be cherished and honored. And often, these cherished items were integral to the ceremonies we conduct as part of our culture. If you strip art away from ceremony, or ceremony away from art, each half suffers significantly from the separation.

The second question Dissanayake asked was: Why do humans create art? What is the evolutionary “return on investment?” The answer comes in two revelations. When we chose something to “make special,” it wasn’t any old thing that we applied this special treatment to. These favored objects or themes were, not coincidentally, the things that most lead to an evolutionary advantage: weapons, cooking utensils, hunting and foraging, sexual reproduction, vigorous health – the things that propelled our genes forward into future generations. The Darwinian logic here is obvious – by elevating these things to a higher status, we focused more attention on them. Our culture enshrined the very same things that provided evolutionary advantage.

Dissanayake’s second revelation revives a recurring theme in human history. We seek to control our environments. Art soothes us in the most uncontrollable parts of our lives. And it’s here where the connection between ceremony and art is at it’s most basic. The ceremonies in our lives, across all cultures, are at the times of greatest transition: birth, marriage, war, sickness and death. It’s here where we gain some small measure of comfort in the control we can exert over our ceremonies, and as part of those ceremonies, we create art. As I mentioned before, a sense of control, the solving of an incongruity, is also the psychological basis of humor. We seek to control the uncontrollable, through our mythologies, our culture and our beliefs. This illusion of control over the uncontrollable has a direct evolutionary benefit. It allows us to get on with our lives rather than obsess about things we have no control over.

Through these two observations, Dissanayake was able to connect the dots between art and an evolutionary payoff. She believes an appreciation of art is part of the human genome, an evolutionary endowment that drives our aesthetic sense. There are universal and recurring themes in the things we find aesthetically pleasing that go beyond something explainable by cultural influence. When it comes to art, just as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker believe with language, there is no “blank slate.”

What’s the Evolutionary Purpose of Entertainment?

But what about entertainment? If art starts in the genotype and extends through the phenotype, is the same true for entertainment? Does entertainment serve an evolutionary purpose?

When we talk entertainment, the line between genotypes and phenotypes gets much harder to detect. There is very little I could find that would parallel Dissanayake’s exploration of the evolutionary purpose of art when it comes to entertainment. The fact is, historically humans don’t do very well when we get too much leisure time on our hands.

Most of our genetically driven behaviors and traits are built to insure survival, as they should be. Propagation of genes requires survival, at least to child bearing years. When humans thrive, to the point of having excess time on our hands, those survival mechanisms start working against us. We become fat and lazy, literally. Genes drive us to get the maximum return for the minimum effort. This works well when every hour of the day is devoted to doing the things you need to do to survive. It doesn’t work so well when we can cover the basics of survival in a few hours a day.

Leisure time is a relatively new phenomenon for humans. Except for a few notable exceptions, we haven’t had a lot of time to be entertained in. The exceptions provide a stark warning for what can happen. Leisure time exploded in ancient Rome as slave labor suddenly allowed the citizens of Rome to stop working for a living. The same was true in ancient Greece and Egypt. This fostered a dramatic increase of artistic output, but it also lead to an gradual erosion of social capital, leading to complacency and ennui. Eventually, these cultures rotted from the inside.

Let’s look at the causal chain of behavior here. Leisure time allows talented artists in our culture to “make special” more often. We have a hardwired appreciation of this art, so we admire those that create it. This gives them greater status and social benefits. Which makes us admire them more, but also become envious of them. We are built to emulate success, but in this case, there is no identifiable path to take. We may admire the benefits but we haven’t been granted the ability to follow in their footsteps. A cult of celebrity starts to emerge. Once it starts, this cultural snowball picks up speed, leading to ever higher status for celebrities and greater admiration and envy from those watching. Greed emerges, along with a sense of entitlement. Our values skew from survival to conspicuous consumption, driven by genes that are still trying to maximize returns from an ever increasing pile of consumable resources. The phenotype of this genetically driven consumption treadmill is not a pretty sight.

Entertainment Seems to Live in the Phenotype, Not the Genotype

Try as I might, I could not find a evolutionary pay off for entertainment, which leads me to believe it’s a phenotypical phenomenon, not a genotypical one. At it’s most benign, entertainment is a manifestation of our inherent need for art and ceremony. At that level, entertainment seems to live closest to the gene. But it doesn’t stay there long. Fuelled by our social hierarchal instincts, entertainment seems to rapidly sink to the lowest common denominator. It rapidly steps from art to raw sensory gratification. It’s much easier to absorb entertainment through the more primitive parts of our brain than to employ the effort required to intellectualize it.

To be honest, I’m still grappling with this concept, as you can no doubt tell from this post. There’s a big concept here and one of the joys and frustrations of blogging is that you never have the time to properly explore a concept before having to post it. For me, my blog serves as an intellectual grist mill, albeit a relatively inefficient one. I’ve got to go now and figure out where this goes from here.

Search and Decisiveness

First published February 25, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My last two columns (column 1 | column 2) explored decisiveness within a very defined scope: college students picking courses. I did that by analyzing an interesting study conducted by Wesleyan University, which used eye tracking to show how decisive and indecisive people differed in their processing of information.

In reading the study, my mind went back seven years to one of the first research studies Enquiro ever did (and still our most popular download): Inside the Mind of the Searcher. In it, we observed the behaviors of 24 individuals as they used search engines to carry out tasks. It was the first qualitative study we did, before we used eye tracking. But the Wesleyan study reminded me of some interesting insights from that study.

As we looked at the group, we started seeing some different search strategies, which we divided into four groups: The Scan and Clicker, The 2 Step Scanner, the Deliberate Researcher and the 1,2,3 Searcher.

Here is a brief description of each:

The Scan and Clicker (12.5% of our total group). These people scanned the top three or four results and clicked right away if they found something of interest. They were less likely than the 2 Step Scanners to return to the results set.

2 Step Scanners (25% of our total group). They’d scan the top results, same as the Scan and Clickers, and might click on a listing of interest, but would tend to “pogo stick” more, clicking through to a site, but then returning to the search engine and checking out at least one or two other sites before committing to one site.

Deliberate Researchers (41.6% of our total group). This group felt they had to scan the entire results set before clicking on a result. This group spent the longest time on the page, almost 40 seconds, compared to 15 to 20 seconds average duration for the other searchers.

The 1,2,3 Searchers (20.8% of our total group) This group worked down the results in order, seeming to consider each result individually. There didn’t appear to be as much back and forth consideration as we saw in other groups. Of course, we weren’t using eye tracking, so it was difficult to accurately track specific eye movements.

Now, these sessions were recorded seven years ago now, so I suspect some of the behaviors we saw were modified as people became more familiar with search engines. I’ve talked before about how we develop conditioned strategies through repeated tasks. Search is a prime candidate for this.

Decisiveness and Search Patterns

In looking back, it does seem that the same decisiveness vs. indecisiveness behaviors identified in the Wesleyan study were also appearing in ours.

One of the interesting things I’ve found in our own research, and something also alluded to in the Wesleyan study, is that you need to track behaviors in minute detail before you start to see the nuances that may indicate different underlying strategies. For example, we’ve seen aggregate heat maps that look almost identical between two groups, but it was only when we walked through the eye movements on a second-by-second (even a quarter-second-by-quarter-second) basis that we saw people taking significantly different paths to end up at the same destination.

The Wesleyan study found that under the pressure of time, indecisive people might abandon maximizing strategies to adopt “satisficing” behavior. This may yield similar results at the end, but can generate greater levels of stress and anxiety on the way to a decision.

I suspect decisiveness could be a critical factor in how we might navigate any Web page, including a set of search results. For example, how would decisiveness impact our interaction with the sponsored ads at the top of the page, or visually richer results? Great questions — currently with few answers.

I’ll see what I can do about that.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Does Entertainment have an Evolutionary Purpose?

One of the interesting things we found about the 20th century was that humans are not really built to deal with abundance. Anytime we have too much of anything, our evolutionary guidance control systems seem to go awry. The human survival mechanisms were designed in an environment of scarcity. In the words of John Locke:

The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

We were built to rise above the odds, to survive in spite of adversity and hardship. In that scenario, the resiliency of humans is astonishing. But once the fight is over, we tend to languish and drift. History has repeated the story over and over again. The first well documented case was the fall of the Roman Empire:

“But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight…. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.”
– Gibbon – Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Getting Soft Does Not Equal Survival

The Inevitable Effect of Immoderate Greatness….a cautionary tale if ever there was one. What does that have to do with the psychology of entertainment? Well, everything. With abundance comes leisure time. With leisure time comes a desire to seek entertainment. And when we seek entertainment to excess, we tend to get mired down as a society. As Edward Gibbon documented, the Roman Empire fell because of many factors – a wide spread empire that overcame its notion of centralized government, the rise of Christianity, economic reasons, but most of all, Rome fell because most Romans found themselves in the leisure class and didn’t know what to do with themselves. They got soft.

We’re A Modern Rome, and that’s not a Good Thing

8293_psychology_cartoon_DKMy personal feeling is that we’re currently following in Rome’s footsteps. The 20th Century was one of extreme excess. The richest parts of the world got fat and lazy. No, not everyone. But on the average, the facts speak for themselves. Over 70% of Americans are fat or obese. If we look at the last 50 years, the percentage of US adults who are obese or extremely obese has gone from under 15% (in 1960) to 41.3% (2006) according to the National Health Examination Survey. And the latest AC Neilsen numbers indicate that the average American spends over 5 hours a day watching TV. That’s 153 hours of TV every single month. Of course, TV’s not the only passive form of entertainment we consume, but it’s by far the most measurable and easiest to identify. Using the internet is rapidly catching up, with Forrester reporting we spend about 12 hours a week, or 50 hours a month, online. Of course, one of the challenges we’ll identify with online time is that it’s difficult to categorize it as entertainment. But let’s say that at least 25% of our time online is spent being entertained in some way (consumption of online video is a popular activity). That brings the grand total to about 165 hours a month being passively entertained, about the same time we spend at our jobs and almost as much time as we spend sleeping. We spend almost a third of our lives being entertained, in one way or the other. This is not active entertainment, this is not social entertainment, and in most cases, this is not intellectually stimulating entertainment. This is sitting in front of a screen consuming mindless entertainment. Humans were not built to do that.

If one were a Darwinist (which I am) one would have to ask – what is the evolutionary point of entertainment? With the single minded view of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene, how does our creation of and need for entertainment increase the odds of our genes propagating? It’s not an unusual question. The same question has been asked about art, for example. Here, I think it’s important to explore the difference between a genotype and a phenotype, as the two often get confused when evolutionary questions arise.

Genotypes and Phenotypes

The genotype (courtesy of Professor John Blamire) is “the “internally coded, inheritable information” carried by all living organisms. This stored information is used as a “blueprint” or set of instructions for building and maintaining a living creature. These instructions are found within almost all cells (the “internal” part), they are written in a coded language (the genetic code), they are copied at the time of cell division or reproduction and are passed from one generation to the next (“inheritable”). These instructions are intimately involved with all aspects of the life of a cell or an organism. They control everything from the formation of protein macromolecules, to the regulation of metabolism and synthesis.”

The phenotype is “the “outward, physical manifestation” of the organism. These are the physical parts, the sum of the atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, structures, metabolism, energy utilization, tissues, organs, reflexes and behaviors; anything that is part of the observable structure, function or behavior of a living organism.”

The difference between a genotype and a phenotype is where many nature/nurture debates get hung up on the rocks. It might be helpful to use an analogy, going back to the concept of a “blueprint”

The Genetics of Urban Renewal

Imagine you’re the architect of a new building that is to be built in the downtown core. You design the building to be the best possible fit for the location where it’s to be built. You put together a highly detailed plan for the building, down to where each outlet is to be placed and the finish of each door knob. Then, you pass the plan over to the construction crew. This is the building’s “genome”.

The building gets built according to your plan, but then your influence over the building is finished. The building becomes a physical object within an environment, and as such, it has many interactions with that environment. These interactions can alter the nature of the building (especially if you’ve built flexibility into your initial design, which is certainly the case in the human genotype) and also, the building will alter the nature of the environment. For example, let’s say this new building was meant as a showpiece for renewal in an older and more run down part of the downtown core. If the building was successful in this goal, one might see it’s spark further development around it, literally changing the face of the environment.

Here’s another example. Let’s say the building was a 32 storey office tower that replaced a 2 storey run down apartment block. Obviously, that’s going to significantly increase the number of people who occupy the “footprint” of the building. In the old building, we might have had 20 lower income families. Suddenly, we have almost 5000 office workers who come to the building between the hours of 8 and 5, then go home. Any urban planner is going to see the dramatic impact that is going to have one the surrounding area. Parking, services, recreational areas, traffic routes…all these things will have to change to accommodate your design.

None of these environment changes were captured in your original blueprint, but they all resulted directly because of your plan. These changes, the interplay between the building and it’s environment, is a rough analogy for a phenotype. The phenotype is the “long shadow” of the genotype.

Evolution is a Harsh Critic of Phenotypes

Here’s another important fact to consider about phenotypes and genotypes. Evolution is relatively ambivalent about phenotypes. While they’re important to the organism, they serve a perfunctory role in natural adaption. Phenotypes are the acid test that determines whether or not genes get passed on. If the genotype leads to a phenotypical environment that results in higher reproductive success, it will get passed on. It if doesn’t, it dies out. This is the sole driver behind Dawkin’s selfish gene.

To go back to our building analogy, it’s as if the sole success of the building was determined by how much lease revenue it generated over a 50 year period. If it generated more than all the other buildings in a 5 block radius, your design would be used again and again. Using this one measure of success, all the phenotypical impact of the building – the rerouting of streets, the sparking of new construction, the addition of parking facilities, the very change in this section of the downtown core – only matter if these led to more lease revenue. If not, all these outcomes of your design are irrelevant.

If we talk about entertainment, I suspect we’re talking about phenotypes, not genotypes. In the next post, I’ll pick up this thought and explore further.

The Psychology of Entertainment: a Recap

psychThus far in this series, we’ve covered a lot of territory in looking at the psychology of entertainment. If you remember, when I initially started, my premise was that an audience had to stabilize before it provided a reliable market for advertisers. Unless you knew who you were talking to, you were relegated to conducting “drive-by” marketing, presenting your message to a transient set of eyeballs rather than a real live person you knew something about.

In looking for this loyalty online, we have to move beyond the “bright shiny object” syndrome that typifies much of our digital behavior. There seems to be a segment of our society that flits from trend to trend, creating enticing hockey stick growth curves that both VCs and marketers chase. But in the vast majority of cases, this attention deficit segment eventually moves on to the newest, greatest thing and the jilted online love implodes. For example, along the social network path there are any number of used and tossed aside past favourites. Remember Six Degrees, Friendster or Orkut? Even MySpace has largely given way to Facebook.

My original premise was that we have to find usefulness in an online destination before we’ll give it our loyalty. And we have to be loyal to a destination long enough for marketers to be able to identify a stable audience that they can know something about. Lance Loveday countered by saying that entertainment could also be a factor, along with utility, that leads to loyalty. That’s when I started to look at the psychological underpinnings of entertainment. Up to this point, I have spent much of the time looking at television, simply because it’s our most common form of entertainment. This week, I’ll be going back online to find entertainment, but before that, I should recap the basics of what we’ve learned, because we’ll be applying the same loyalty acid test to online entertainment.

We Love a Story

The most common and consistent element in the history of entertainment is the story. There is something inherently appealing about a narrative. In this post, we discovered that our brains respond well to stories. It’s easier for us to keep details in mind when they come wrapped in a story. Stories give us a rich context to project ourselves into, engaging the brain more fully. Stories are “software” that runs natively on our “hardware.” I gave memory champ Andi Bell and best selling author Malcolm Gladwell as examples.

Some of Us are Addicted to Entertainment

In most human characteristics determined by our genome (weight, height, intelligence, etc) the population plays out on a normal distribution curve, with the majority of us clustered around a central norm. Researchers Timothy Brock and Stephen Livingston found the same is true for our need for entertainment. In this case, they defined entertainment as passive entertainment, such as watching TV, rather than active entertainment like participating in sports. They found there is an unusually high need for entertainment amongst a significant segment of our population. While the norm seems to indicate that we’re very attached to our TV set, in extreme cases, researchers have found that TV consumption borders on true biological addiction.

Our Entertainment is Making Us More Passive

Researchers have found another troubling trend emerging through the 20th century. We appear to be turning into a nation of watchers. We sit back, waiting to be entertained. In many areas of our society, including education and politics, the tradition of Socratic debate has given way to passive consumption of information and, in the case of the later at least, propaganda. Neil Postman, for one, feels we’re “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. Robert Putnam found a strong correlation between TV watching and withdrawal from community participation.

How We Connect to TV

So, how did this strong (and in some cases, addictive) bonds to TV form? Our psychological bonds to TV shows parallel our need as social animals to connect with people, to identify our place in our social networks and to share common interests. Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman and Susan Heckler explored how we connected to TV shows and found 3 common bonds: viewer to program, viewer to viewer and viewer to character. The viewer to program bond comes from an aesthetic or artistic appreciation of the show. You applaud it’s production values, or the script. This is probably the most detached bond, and interestingly, is more common in men than women. The next bond is viewer to viewer. Here, a TV show becomes a social lubricant. If gives you something in common to talk about with your friends. The final bond is viewer to character. Here, the veil between reality and fantasy starts to slip a little. At it’s most benign, it’s just an identification with a character in a show. Like tends to bond with like. Grey’s Anatomy if a favourite amongst those that work in the medical profession, for example. And I know at least a few Democratic party faithful who are lifelong West Wing fans. Sometimes viewer-character bonds become less grounded in the real world and turn into delusional obsessions.

Because these bonds to TV are often grounded on social connections, whether real or imagined, it’s not surprising that they are nurtured in the same way face-to-face relationships are. These relationships grow over time, as we learn more about the characters we’re watching. They seem to grow strongest when there is a continuing storyline and character developments we can become engaged in. And finally, this ongoing narrative comes in a language our brains were built to process. We get stories. And we particularly like stories that play out the way we think they should. We like happy endings.

What Makes a Hit Show?

Now that we know the nature of our connections with a TV show, we should be able to predict what would make a successful TV show. What shows cause these bonds to flourish.

If we look at the hits over time, certain themes emerge. In Situation Comedies, characters are more important than the situation. While a novel situation is intriguing in the short term, it’s our connection with the characters that will build long term loyalty. It wasn’t the fact that M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War that made it interesting, it was that the complex environment provided so many opportunities for rich character developments within the show. There can be no situation less interesting than the premise behind Friends – 6 20 somethings living their lives in lower Manhattan. Friends hooked us because we cared about Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Phoebe.

The Thin Line Between Humor and Fear

What makes us laugh? At the most basic level, we laugh when we know something that appears threatening turns out to be harmless. Babies laugh when we make light of potentially stressful situations (a primary care giver momentarily disappearing during a game of peekaboo, an adult staging a mock “tickle” attack). This tendency sticks with us throughout our lives. It’s why we laugh at slapstick. Laughter shows that we’ve mastered some small part of our environment. In the case of a joke, it’s the “click” that happens when we solve an incongruity – we “get” the punchline. However, the satisfaction we get from this depend on our social context. Not all jokes are equally satisfying to everyone.

How We Process Humor

Men and women process humor differently. “Getting” humor appears to depend on a delicate balance between right brain and left brain processing. The left brain (the logical side) tends to assemble the required information, but it’s the right brain that comprehends the situation and, at a subconscious level, finds the humor in it. The “click” of getting a joke happens on the right side. That’s why jokes cease to be funny when we overanalyze them (which happens on the left side). It’s also why an academic paper on humor is probably the least funny thing you’ll ever read. As we start to look at the different types of humor, we start to see some divisions in what we find funny. Women, for example, are drawn to humor that involves social situations. Men tend to laugh more at jokes that involve sex and scatological references. And while slapstick can elicit belly laughs, wit tends to draw a smile. Slapstick taps into the fear/humor circuit, where wit is more of a social aspiration.

The Hooks of Our Favorite Shows

In this post, I took a look at some of the success factors of past TV hits.

Survivor – The situation of Survivor, the idea of competition, was the hook here. Unfortunately, by it’s very nature, Survivor found it difficult to carry loyalty from season to season. We had to get to know a whole new cast of characters each time.

West Wing – Witty dialogue and impossibly clever characters set up perhaps the most socially aspirational show in history (at least for Democratically inclined intellectual elitists) but it was overly dependent on creator Aaron Sorkin’s scripts. When Sorkin moved on, so did our interest.

American Idol – The mega talent show seems to be the exception to the continuing narrative rule. Why is this show not suffering the same fate of other season-by-season reality premises? It turns out that American Idol and other shows like it do tap into a narrative – our own. We have a built in need to admire talent, especially undiscovered talent. Where they go, so could we. It’s another cue that comes from our highly social evolutionary past.

Why We Love Violence 

Our taste for violent entertainment actually has a physiological basis. Violence taps into a basic good vs evil archetype, but this alone doesn’t explain it’s appeal. We love violence because it tweaks the danger detection circuits of our brain, releasing neuro-chemicals that give us a natural high. Our bodies become primed for action through the images and sounds we see, and this makes us feel more confident, ready for action and hyper-alert. Violent entertainment tricks our bodies into believing that we’re in danger, so the body responds appropriately. Not all people are alike in this regard. Some of us have a higher need for this type of sensation than others. This trait was quantified in the 70’s by Marvin Zuckerman and his sensation seeking scale. It has been found since that those with the greatest taste for sensation also tend to exhibit other addictive tendencies.

Are Video Games too Real?

If violent entertainment fools our brain into delivering an artificial high by getting us ready for a fight, how can we manage to stay in our seats through a 2 hour movie. As I explained in this post, the danger alert circuit is modulated by our cortex, which dampens down the impact of the alert. Essentially, our brain keeps telling itself that it’s not real, so just calm down. But the new technology being incorporated into video games is making it more and more difficult for our brains to determine what’s real. As games become more sophisticated, with photo-realistic graphics (even in 3d), more interactive and controlled by real body motions and not just a control pad, our brains could be forgiven for forgetting it’s all a game. We already know violent games are mildly addictive as we become dependent on the potent chemical cocktail that gets released as the brain is partially fooled into thinking the danger is real. So what happens, we have to wonder, when these games get even more realistic?

Why We Love being Entertained in Crowds

Why do we enjoy being entertained more when we’re in a crowd? The answer could come from our evolutionary past. The survival success of a herding animal comes from it’s ability to communicate potential danger quickly through the group. So, for humans, emotions are highly contagious. We pick up on the mood of the crowd around us and eventually synchronize our own mood to it. The loops the brain uses to do this are fascinating and are covered off in much more depth in this post.

The purpose of these 11 posts was to explore how we’re entertained. With that in mind, we can then look at our online alternatives and make some guesses about how entertaining we’ll find them. Remember, we’re looking for long term loyalty here, an audience that stays consistent enough that we can start to effectively target marketing messages to them with some understanding of who they are. So, here are the bullet points:

– We engage with narratives
– We connect with characters we care about
– Interactivity can’t get in the way of the narrative.
– Primitive humor and fear share the same basic roots
– Humor is in the eye of the beholder
– We love to admire talent, especially underdogs
– Violence and sensation deliver a natural high
– We are social animals and emotions are contagious

Tomorrow, we’ll start to explore how these foundations of entertainment translate to the online environment. And we’ll begin with an important question: Do we have too much entertainment?

My Interview with Jeremy Victor at B2B Bloggers

Last week, I had the opportunity to have my first “Twitter-view” with Jeremy Victor at B2B bloggers. Jeremy and I took a very quick tour through some of the territory I explored in my book, The BuyerSphere Project (free pdf available on our site, print version available at Amazon). Jeremy has edited the Tweets into a cohesive transcript.

Some of the areas we covered:

  • What is the BuyerSphere and Why Should We Map It?
  • Where are B2B Marketers on the Digital Marketing Adoption Curve?
  • What are the main challenges facing B2B buyers?
  • The irrationality of B2B purchasing
  • What is the Risk Gap?
  • The Need for Face-to-Face
  • The importance of a website as a Digital Asset
  • Are blogs more important that websites?

The Psychology of Entertainment: Why We Love Watching in Crowds

3d-audienceWe laugh more at movies when we watch them with others. We get bigger thrills from action thrillers. We’re more likely to cry during a tear jerker. When we’re with a bunch of other people, it’s as if our emotions are turbocharged. Why?

One could say it’s our environment. Sitting in a darkened theater we focus more attention on whatever we’re watching. There are fewer distractions. We become more fully engaged with the experience. This provides part of the answer, but it’s certainly not the entire answer.

One could also say it’s the technology. It would be hard to argue that a billboard sized image that fills our entire field of vision (especially one that gives us a 3D experience) is more powerful than the typical home screen. Back that up with a full theater sound system and you have a powerfully engaging experience. Certainly that might explain the higher octane thrills we would get in an action movie, but it doesn’t seem as applicable in a tear jerker or a comedy. Is a 40 foot high Rachel McAdams more emotionally compelling than a 2 foot high one? Possibly, but the explanation still seems to fall short.

We know that we behave differently in groups than we do as individuals. At its most benign, it’s the shared experience of an entertainment event. At its most sinister, it’s the so called “mob mind,” a crowd induced mentality that through history is responsible for millions of lost lives. The power of synchronized emotion is immense.

The Psycho-Analytic Explanation

But where does this shared experience, this synchronization of emotions, come from? According to Carl Jung, we synchronize our emotions and thoughts when we come together in a group because we all share an identical “collective unconscious“, a universal framework of archetypes and motifs. It’s as if, when we get together, we all have the same subconscious script we’re reading from, written by our collective culture. Freud felt that we act differently towards people when we’re in a group than we do as individuals. The minds “merge” together into one way of thinking and enthusiasm for this view becomes increased as a result. And Le Bon believed it was the relative anonymity of the crowd that allows us to generate collective emotions that we might not have as individuals. All of these speak to a collective “meta” motivation, a common will that lives apart from the individuals who make up the group. Do mobs have a mind of their own? Most of the research done in this area has been around questions that have a much greater social implication than whether we laugh or not at the movie. But perhaps the answer comes from the same place. And perhaps it’s not as complex as Jung, Freud or Le Bon would have us believe. Is there a collective consciousness that takes over, or is it instead some fairly simple inherent mechanisms that come as standard equipment with we humans.

The Evolutionary Explanation

So, to go back to the question, are we more likely to laugh at Jennifer Aniston in a theater rather than at home because we have a shared collective archetype-driven subconscious script that indicates we should laugh at her? Do we laugh because we feel anonymous in a crowded theater and so let our inhibitions slip? Or do we laugh because we have given ourselves over to the collective thinking of the group? Maybe, just maybe, we laugh because the person beside us is laughing. Maybe it’s that simple.

We know that emotion is contagious. “Smile and the world smiles with you.” Cliche? Perhaps, but scientifically true. If we see someone smile, we’re more likely to smile ourselves. This is especially true if we like the person who is smiling. This is Bargh and Chartrand’s “Chameleon Effect.” We mimic others, especially those that we feel emotionally connected to. Emotional contagion is strongest between people who are close: family and best friends. In their book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives“, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler cite studies that show when a normal individual is paired with a mildly depressed roommate in college, soon the normal individual also becomes depressed.

Bio Feedback

The amazing thing about emotions are that they don’t always travel from the brain outwards. Our body feeds back signals to the brain that can change our mood. If you smile, you suddenly start feeling better. If you laugh, your outlook on life picks up. Telephone operators are told to smile when they’re on the phone, even though the person on the other end of the line can’t hear them. And there are documented cases of widespread contagious laughter. Dr. Madan and Madhuri Kataria have started Laughter Yoga, a “global movement for Health, Joy and World Peace” based simply on spontaneous laughing, practiced in laughing clubs around the world.

Why do these outward signals of our emotions spread through a group like wildfire, even as they change the very mood of the group? The answer, evolutionary biologists suspect, may lie in the fact that laughter and smiling almost certainly predate language amongst humans. Humans travelled in groups for their own protection. The reason groups are safer than traveling as an individual lies in the fact that groups have many sets of eyes and ears, where a lone human has only one set of each. Groups work as early warning systems. But these systems only work if the word spreads quickly. And that presents a problem. What happens before there were words? This is where our facial expressions and emotions come in.

Our Facial Recognition Hardware

The human brain has a dedicated mechanism solely for reading facial expressions, the fusiform gyrus, which then feeds these signals to the amygdala. The amygdala, as I’ve mentioned before, is the early warning detection system of the brain. And this mechanism makes a very important determination. It either switches on or off our defence mechanisms and it does so subconsciously, in about 1/10 of a second (the same timing, interestingly, that we use to recognize favored brands). So, a look of fear, terror or alarm can alert others around you in a fraction of a second. Language, which uses more recently evolved portions of our brain, can’t respond nearly as quickly. This alarm system alerts those around us by making our emotions their emotions. But it’s not just terror that spreads quickly. We are tuned to pick up any strong emotion and pass it along. Groups that feel the same way about things tend to be a better survival unit than those that don’t. When you think about this, it makes perfect evolutionary sense. It’s not enough to simply make people aware. If you want to survive, you have to ready them for action. And the fastest way to do this is to have the ability to quickly spread the same emotion through a crowd. The human brain is superbly tuned to pull this off. The fairly recent discovery of mirror neurons are responsible for our mimicry and seem to be an integral part of emotional contagion and synchronization. Below, VS Ramachandran provides some amazing examples of how humans lose core abilities when specific parts of the brain have been damaged.

But what happens as we leave the African savannah behind and start hanging out in movie theaters and community playhouses? The same mechanisms come with us, and we use them in the same way. We pick up emotions from those around us. And we do so because we’re wired to do so. It’s not a conscious decision. It’s just a very old part of our brain doing it’s job. And the entertainment industry is starting to incorporate this understanding of human nature into how it builds our entertainment experiences. At the recent TEDActive conference, sheer chance put me beside a psychologist and an amusement park owner during one lunch break. Soon, they were talking about the role of mirror neurons in the design of thrill rides – how closely do you have to sit together and what visual vantage point do you need to let the thrill of a roller coaster spread from one person to the next?

To Laugh, Or Not to Laugh

Perhaps the most interesting example was when Shakespeare’s Globe theater was rebuilt in London. In Shakespeare’s day, plays were performed in broad daylight, people stood together in crowds and they could easily see each other. The plays were raucous affairs filled with laughter, jeers, taunts and strongly expressed emotions. But over time, theaters became darkened and isolated cocoons that started to separate people from each other. When the Globe was resurrected, it was built to be historically accurate. This meant that for the first time in 400 years, people were seeing plays in the same environment they were originally performed in. The result? The crowds seemed to enjoy the plays more. They were noisier, stamped their feet, cheered louder and laughed more. They had more fun. Shakespeare, it appears, knew a thing or two about the power of a crowd.

This all brings up an interesting question for us to consider. In the last few posts I talked about how technology might be turning us into a nation of addicted watchers. Video games may significantly up the bar in false manipulation of the brains circuits. But increasingly, we’re also consuming those entertainment experiences by ourselves. If we’re built to enjoy things more when we’re in a group, what is the long term impact of being entertained alone, in the dark? Will technology start to simulate the effect of a crowd? Will we be put in virtual communities when we watch something? In fact, we’ve already started down this path. TV directors found out very early in the history of the new medium that audiences were much more likely to laugh if they were cued by a laugh track.

In the next posts, I’ll start to bring us back to the original question, which was does entertainment build loyalty online? We’ll look at what we find entertaining online. For example, is a social network useful or entertaining? Do we consume video differently online? Will we build the same loyal viewing habits now that we can timeshift our viewing schedule to our convenience, not the networks? How will an increasingly interactive experience impact our entertainment tastes?