Category Archives: Online User Experience

The Psychology of Entertainment: How American Idol, Survivor and Dallas Hooked Us

In this series of posts, I’ve covered off at some length why we find some things inherently funny. We’ve also talked about the importance of connecting with characters in developing a long term loyalty to the show that separates the long running hits from the one season wonders. But obviously, there is more than just comedy on TV. There’s drama, Reality TV and Action Thrillers, all dealing with the same basic elements of characterization and narrative (even Reality TV, which is really unscripted drama). With this, let’s look at how some different shows have approached the challenge of long term loyalty.

What Made Some Show Hits?

Survivor

survivor logoSurvivor was the most successful summer replacement in history. It rocketed to popularity in 2000 and was responsible for the flood of reality TV we’re still saddled with. The popularity of Survivor, however, has dropped dramatically over the past few years. One possible reason is that Survivor forces you to reestablish connections every single season. The situation is more important than the characters in Survivor. Just as we start to care about a character, they get voted off the island. We watch Survivor like an anthropologist would, intrigued by the challenge and how the human cast reacts to it, but unable to form connections that endure from season to season. The producers realized this and started to bring back past favourites for an “All Star” survivor, hoping to re-establish past connections, but by then it was too late. Our interests had moved on. The connections had been discarded. Survivor had “jumped the shark.” Other reality shows, such as Big Brother and the Apprentice have faced this same inherent “shelf life” problem. In terms of gaining long term loyalty, characters we connect with will always trump intriguing situations, for reasons I explored a few posts back.

West Wing

WestwingMy personal favorite. But as I said in an earlier post, even my degree of connection with West Wing suffered after the third season. Writer Aaron Sorkin’s scripts demanded a high degree of investment on the part of the viewer. The byzantine tangle of situations, delivered through machine gun quick, impossibly clever dialogues, was more like intellectual gymnastics than a relaxing hour in front of the tube. Earlier this week, I talked about the psychological attraction of wit. We all wish we were wittier and the characters on West Wing, thanks to Sorkin, were impossibly clever and witty. It left you breathless just trying to keep up. However, Sorkin continually delivered huge returns on that investment. For me at least, West Wing hit highs I haven’t seen since. After four seasons, Sorkin moved on. Also, the inevitable cast churn started. Perhaps we were just worn out from trying to keep up, but in it’s last 3 seasons, West Wing continually lost steam.

Other long running dramas, including ER and Dallas (technically the most successful show in history, if you look at global syndication as a measure), relied on various formulas of social connectedness. ER wrapped in our preoccupation with health (another inherently wired hot button in humans) with rich characterizations. Dallas took the soap opera primetime, offering a shallower but undeniably fascinating tangle of greed, betrayal, sex, love and occasional redemption through the actions of more sympathetic characters. Dallas was like junk food for our brains, playing to our lowest psychological denominators. It’s a path many shows have followed.

American Idol

AmericanIdolSo, in the examples above, it appears we need an ongoing narrative to keep us engaged, right? Then how do I explain the success of American Idol? There is no narrative. And just like Survivor, the cast of characters changes each season. So why is American Idol the most popular TV show in recent memory? Well, it turns out that American Idol does rely on a narrative. It relies on our narrative.

If our connection with characters provides the glue that keeps us tuning in week after week, how would I explain the success of American Idol? While we might start identifying with one particular contestant, there is no real narrative that drives American Idol. It’s a talent show. And it’s not the only online success. America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, the Susan Boyle phenomenon. What is the mechanism at play here that entertains us? Again, it seems to come down to narrative, but in this case, it’s our narrative, not the characters, that proves to be the glue.

TV Provides a Reference Point for Ourselves

Our connectedness to characters seems to rely not so much on their situations, but on our own. Somewhere deep inside, we project their fantasy on our reality. The narrative of our favorite characters have to have some hooks or bearing points that we can anchor in on. There has to be some degree of affinity. We can relate to the situation (med students watching Grey’s Anatomy) or we can relate to a character’s qualities (I’d like to be Chandler Bing’s friend). We can fantasize about being in a character’s shoes (being Jack Bauer in 24) and we can care about a character’s well being (Will Schuester has to dump his wife and hook up with Emma Pillsbury). A TV show has to give us a reason to want to live our lives vicariously through it’s characters and situations. The formula for American Idol relies on the same hooks. We want to be on stage too. It’s the same hook that made Rock Band and Guitar Hero massive best sellers amongst video games.

What connection do we have with the contestants on these massively popular talent shows? Why are talent shows inherently appealing to us? Let’s return to Susan Boyle and Britain’s Got Talent. Why did we get a chill down our spine when this frumpy Scottish spinster suddenly opened her mouth and belted it out? Why was it so deliciously satisfying when the smirk was wiped from Simon Cowell’s face? Well, it’s because we humans travel in herds. Seriously.

Monkey See, Monkey Aspire to Do

Television Britain's Got TalentWe admired Susan Boyle. We admire talent when we see it. And we especially admire talent when it’s undiscovered. Why?

Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White have a theory about that. They believe admiration is like a short cut to success. And unlike other species, where social prestige comes primarily through physical aggression, humans can take many paths up the social ladder. The examples of humans achieving social status through talent or intellectual ability far outnumber those succeed through physical domination. Our brain is our greatest asset and human society has evolved to recognize our unique advantage.

When we see someone suddenly winning a crowd over, we can’t help but feel chills of admiration going down our spine. (Here’s a link to the video on YouTube, just in case you’ve forgotten the sensation. It’s been viewed almost 90 million times) Their success could be our success. They provide a new potential path in our own personal narrative, a road to prestige that we to could go down. And the appeal of the talent show format is that these are undiscovered talents. Their current social status is not so different from our own. In fact, as in Susan Boyle’s case, based on appearance alone, we initially put ourselves several rungs up the social ladder. So, if Susan could suddenly soar up in social value, our odds must be even better (ignoring for the moment that we can’t sing like her). We measure our chances against the yardstick provided by Ms. Boyle. We can readily imagine ourselves in her no-nonsense leather shoes. It’s why we are predisposed to root for the underdog. And the more “under” the dog, the bigger the cheers.

What is the Darwinian logic to this behavior? It’s not so difficult to understand. The path to social success, and all the evolutionary advantages that accrue to one who attains it, is easier if you follow in someone else’s footsteps. We are a social animal and one of the advantages of that is that we can advance faster if we learn from other’s failures and triumphs. We are hardwired to both admire, criticize and topple fallen idols (a la Tiger Woods). Reality talent shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent take full advantage of these behavioral traits.

So, we’ve covered the required elements of the drama, the comedy and Reality TV. But so far, I still haven’t touched one genre of TV entertainment, the action show. More on that next week.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Why We Love Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Phoebe

friendsIn a post last week, I dove into the question: Why are some TV shows enduring hits, some flash-in-the-pans and some none starters?

What separates a M*A*S*H, Friends or Cheers from a Baby Bob, Mama’s Family or Veronica’s Closet (Huh..you say? Exactly my point).

The difference, according to researchers Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman, and Susan Heckler (“Chapter Fifteen People and “their” Television Shows: an Overview of Television Connectedness,” The Psychology of Entertainment Media:  Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion, ed. L. J. Shrum. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004) is our degree of connectedness with the show. Do we take the characters and situations into our own lives? Do we build a bridge between our reality and their fantasy? The stronger the bridge, the more durable the connection will be.

Successful Sitcoms have to go beyond the “Sit”

Imagine you were in a pitch for a new sitcom. “We have 6 20-something friends in Greenwich Village who hang out at a coffee shop and talk a lot” or “we have a middle aged sports writer and his family who move across from his Italian mom and dad in Long Island.”  In a Hollywood pitch for a new sitcom, it will typically be the “sit” part that gets pitched – what’s the situation? This is where the concept tends to trump character in most premises. But situations are only of fleeting interest to us humans. Situations engage the mind in the same way a puzzle or brain teaser would. They can introduce a partial picture and our curiosity wants to resolve it to our satisfaction. We want to see how the situation turns out. By the way, this mastery of unresolved situations is the basis of the appeal of humor and drama as well. But situations don’t have “legs” when it comes to consistently engaging us. We have limited attention spans for situations. Once we resolve them, or feel that we’ve resolved them, our attention moves on. This is the way it works in the real world. Life will throw us situation after situation, often several in a day. If we lingered over each one longer than was necessary, we’d never move forward. We’d keep getting caught in situational “eddies”, separated from the main current of our lives.

It gets worse. If situations can’t be resolved in a timely manner, we grow frustrated and bored with them. Our brain starts telling us, through our emotions, that it’s time to move on. So, for a show to be successful, it has to introduce a parade of situations, just like real life would.

So, how does a show keep us engaged in between situations? What keeps us tuned in? The characters. Characters are what we connect to. Characters engage us at a completely different level than situations. Situations are an intellectual challenge. Characters create emotional bonds. We care what happens to them. And this caring, this connection, provides the emotional overtones that keep the situations consistently interesting.

Let’s look at the mother of all entertainment situations, the budding romantic relationship. This has universal appeal. We all (hopefully) experience love. And we all experience sexual attraction. This is something we can relate to. When it’s simmering between two characters we care about, it’s almost irresistible. Hollywood has tested this formula thousands of times in all different situations. They have mastered the ability to mercilessly tease us through the various stages of outright hostility but inner intrigue, unrequited love, flirtatious exploration, tentative connection, secretive romance, open declaration, romantic entanglement, betrayal, the inevitable break up, and then, the cycle can start all over again. It seems contrived because it is. But it works. I’ve just described 10 seasons of Friends. The truth is, however, that we would have never stuck it out if we didn’t care about Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica, Joey and Phoebe. The appeal of Friends was the appeal of the characters, not the situations.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at humor. What strikes us as funny, and why? Why is there a fine line between a baby’s laughter and tears? How can we find both Tyler Perry and Oscar Wilde funny? What part of the brain processes humor? Why is this different in men and women?

The Psychology of Entertainment: Our Connection with TV

TV viewing, like everything else, has changed drastically in the last few decades. America used to have fairly homogenous tastes in TV. Any given night, it was a safe bet that a significant portion of America was sitting down to watch Happy Days, or All in the Family or, in an early generation, I Love Lucy.

But, with the explosion of the multi-channel universe, our TV tastes have fragmented along several lines. The result? It’s difficult for an advertiser to gain critical mass with an audience by advertising on any one show. America now watches TV in thousands of small splinter segments. And, as we consume more video online, we can pick and choose not just from a broad swath of programming, we can also shift consumption to match out schedule.

This post, however, is not about the challenges of time shifting, market fragmentation or digital consumption. This posts asks a more basic question: what is it about TV that we find entertaining? Why are some shows hits for several seasons, some for a single season, and others complete misses out of the gate? Why do we love the boob tube?

Why We Love TV

Well, the answer, in part, explains the fragmentation of the TV universe. There doesn’t seem to be any universal answer. Humans are too unpredictable to allow Hollywood to forecast with any great accuracy the success of a TV show. There are several different levels on which we can connect with a TV show and the success of any show depends on it’s unique mix of factors that lead to it’s connectability.

TV shows somehow have to weave themselves into the fabric of our society. It becomes a resonating soundboard for our popular culture. This means that the popularly of TV has to not only successfully navigate the churning waters of the diversity of human behaviour but also has to do so against the ever changing snapshot of our cultural context. Obviously, in the 1960’s, the Beverly Hillbillies struck a chord with a significant number of people. It’s unlikely that it would survive today.

In The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2004. Page Number: 275) Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman and Susan Heckler explore the various dimensions of TV “connectedness” and identify just some of the variables at play here. I’ll touch on the more interesting ones.

There are some fundamental truths here when it comes to why we watch TV. At the highest possible levels, there is commonality across all of us. We watch TV to improve our moods, learn something, aspire to a higher place in our society and give us something in common to talk about with our friends and co-workers. But each of those things are much too general to give us much insight into why one show succeeds while another might fail. For example, most sitcoms are funny enough to lift our mood, but some last for 10 seasons and others die shortly after the pilot airs. Simple mood improvement is obviously not enough to explain TV success.

Connecting through the Tube

We start to gain more insight when we look at the level of connection people have with one particular show. The depth of that connection determines loyalty, the degree of social “grease” (how much you talk about a show within your social circle) and, ultimately, the longevity of a show. What is that distinct “something” that causes us to connect with a TV show? On the basis of connectedness, one could argue that, although it only lasted 10 short episodes, Star Trek might be one of the most successful TV shows of all time. It engendered a level of connectiveness that was almost obsessive (remember the backlash when William Shatner told a bunch of Trekkies on Saturday Night Live to “get a life?”). That connectedness created a franchise that spawned 11 movies, 6 TV series and a lifetime slate of speaking gigs (if they want them) for the original cast.

So, what is connectedness? It’s that quality of a TV show that goes beyond simple watching to directly influence the personal and social aspects of our lives. When we connect with a TV show, we seek to jump over the gap that separates us from the show. Russell, Norman and Heckler show that this can happen in three ways:

The Vertical Connection: Viewer to Program

The connection between a viewer and a program is very similar to a brand connection. We become fans of the “brand” of the show. We watch every episode, we feel anxious when we miss an episode, We admire the quality of the production (i.e. the writing) and we may extend our loyalty to the purchase of the show on DVD  or perhaps books, soundtracks or other spin offs from the show.

The Horizontal Connection: Viewer to Viewer

Here, shared appreciation for a TV show acts as sort of a “social lubricant.” It gives us common ground for discussion within our social circles. This level of connectedness leads to group watching of a TV show. Often, there are real or aspirational similarities between the cast of the show and these groups of fans. For example, med students love to watch Grey’s Anatomy (and ER before that, and St. Elsewhere before that).

The Vertizontal Connection: Viewer to Character

Here’s where the line between reality and fantasy starts to get disturbingly blurred. Often, fans begin to identify with the cast members in a show, seemingly forgetting that they’re fictional. This combines aspects of the two previous connections. The connection is between the viewer and the show, but it’s a social relationship that goes beyond simple brand-like loyalty. We want to be friends with Ross and Rachel. We want to have Ray Romano as our next door neighbour (preferably without his parents). We want to join the Glee Club at William McKinley High School. We begin to adjust our reality to incorporate the characters fictional reality. This level of connection leads fans to begin adopting gestures, facial expression and vocal characteristics. They want to wear the same clothes, eat the same food and experience the same things.

It’s these three levels of connectedness that account for loyalty to, and through that, the success of a TV show. What leads to these connections?

Growing a Relationship over Time

If you look at the great TV series that have endured over time, they often have one thing in common – few were hits right out of the gate. Cheers, All in the Family, M*A*S*H and many others all took some time to find their audience. And, if we look at our connection to a TV show as a type of relationship, this is not surprising. Relationships don’t suddenly blossom overnight. They take time to develop.

The most successful TV series rely heavily on strong characters. And the series with longevity seem to have characters with some depth and complexity. It takes time to get to know a Hawkeye Pierce, a Sam Malone or even an Archie Bunker. What at first seems to be a one dimensional character reveals more of themselves over time, in a multitude of situations. Strong writing drives this character development.  Just like in real life, our strongest TV relationships tend to be with people we’ve known for awhile. Their initial appeal first catches our interest, but there better be some depth there to maintain our interest.

A Continuing Storyline

Just like relationships, a narrative that bridges the gaps from episode to episode seems to lead to greater loyalty. The price of entry is higher (you need to invest in watching a few episodes to pick up the threads that carry from show to show) but once you make the investment, it’s much easier to get hooked.

A personal example shows how powerful this loyalty can be. One of my favorite shows on TV was West Wing. My level of connectedness was primarily between viewer and show – I was awestruck by Aaron Sorkin’s writing. But if ever a TV show required a substantial investment on the part of the viewer, West Wing was it. If you missed an episode or two, the rapid fire dialogue between Toby, C.J. and Josh might has well have been in Mandarin. You had no idea what the hell was going on. I managed to make this investment for the first 3 seasons of West Wing but then lost the storylines somewhere in season 4 and, despite trying a few times, never managed to pick them up again for the rest of the show’s primetime run. Last year, I bought the show in a box set and I’m now working my way through it. The advantage of watching on DVD is that you can always go back to listen to a particular piece of dialogue again.

The Human Connection to the Narrative

A continuing storyline gives us a narrative to follow. And we are huge fans of narratives. We tend to see the world, and even ourselves, through the narrative lens. As I said in a previous post, our brains have a inherent connection to stories. Our brain is built to process a story.

Narratives give us a self view that we use to make sense of the world and our place in it. It provides a frame of reference for the very tricky question of consciousness: Why do we exist? How do we exist? What causes us to act? What causes others to act? Good, evil, God, the Devil, nature, catastrophe, our place in the world – all these questions that we have relentlessly pondered since we were first able to, all have been woven into narratives that form our common mythology. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.” Shakespeare was on to something, but he had it backwards. The stage is in our minds, a construct of our brain. The script is written by us, and we assign the roles as we see fit, including our own.

If we constantly participate in this ongoing narrative we write of our own lives, deciphering the motivations of others from our vantage point in our own life stories, is it any wonder that we find  continuing story lines particularly appealing in our favorite TV shows? This is, as we see it, life. And these story lines bring the characters alive (sometimes too alive) for us.

Why We Love Happy Endings

If we see life as a story, it makes sense that we’re suckers for a happy ending. Aristotle figured this out about humans 2000 years ago. ” A good man must not be seen passing from happiness to misery,” and “a bad man from misery to happiness.” Narratives have to make sense to us, based on our understanding of what is right or wrong. In other words, shit happens, but don’t let it happen in my favorite TV show. Of course, script writers use our inherent dislike of this moral unfairness to tweak us on a regular basis. But in doing so, they run the risk of losing us. After getting hooked on an entire season of 24, I was so upset at the resolution of season 1 that I never watched it again. I had the same reaction when Mark Green died in ER. There are consequences if you decide to break Aristotle’s laws of narrative.

Tomorrow, I’ll further explore how we connect with TV. For example, I’ll look at why women tend to accept fictional characters at face value, while men remain more detached, treating characters as a literary device to be manipulated by the author. Why teenagers in particular are susceptible to being influenced by characters in TV shows. Why some of us go “over the edge” in our degree of “fan-ship”. And why some of us love action packed shows and others like to relax with more sedate shows.

The Psychology of Entertainment: A Nation of Watchers

In Brock and Livingston’s investigations of our need for entertainment, they ran up against a problem: how do you define entertainment? In attempting to answer that question (at least for the purpose of their study), they uncovered an interesting finding that provides some troubling commentary for our society.

Watching vs. Doing: The Evolution of Entertainment

Brock and Livingston were seeking to separate passive entertainment (watching TV) from active entertainment (playing a sport). They asked study participants to further define what they meant when they used the word entertainment. In two separate groups, 3 out of 4 participants defined entertainment in it’s passive sense – sitting down to watch a TV show or movie. Now, perhaps this is just a question of semantics – the word “entertainment” and the word “activity” may seem to have different meanings for us. But there are reams of social data to show that as we have adopted more forms of passive entertainment, the most ubiquitous being television, our level of activity has steadily dropped. This, however, is not the only fall out of our addiction to TV.

Watching vs Belonging: The Erosion of Social Capital

s-curve-real-lifeI’ve talked before about Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam investigated a dramatic reversal in our desire to engage in community minded activities that occurred in the mid-60’s. These activities ran the gamut from voting and being active in PTA’s to having friends over for a card game and joining a bowling league. In chart after chart, Putnam showed how this community-mindedness peaked in the late 50’s and early 60’s and then went into a long and steady decline over the last half century. As TV invaded our front rooms, we abandoned the community hall, the voting booth and the local chapter of The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (one of the biggest fraternal organizations in the world). We stopped spending time with each other. Our definition of entertainment moved from the active to the passive.

This expectation to be passively entertained has spilled into other areas of our society as well. How we perceive our world may have changed from an environment we interact with to a parade that we simply sit back and watch go by. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, speculates that as America turned from a culture revolving around the printed word to one revolving around images (especially images that jump cut from one to the other, set to a pounding aural beat, saturated with high impact stimuli like violence and sex) we have become a society of attention deficit watchers that have high expectations of being passively entertained, no matter where we are:

What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. … The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

This trend shows up in our consumption of news, political issues and education. Classrooms now are not the Socratic arena of debate so much as they are a theatre, where the professor or lecturer is expected to entertain with a bag of tricks including animated Powerpoint presentations and multimedia content. Consider the difference in the campaigns of two politicians from Illinois. In 1858, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglass took 7 hours and the entire audience stayed put in the hall, their butts glued to hard wooden chairs for the entire time (the bladder control alone boggles the mind). 151 years later, we had trouble making it all the way through a 37 minute YouTube video of a Barack Obama speech.

A Different Definition of Thrill Seeking

SnvOn Monday, I talked about the normal distribution of variance in any human characteristic, typically plotted on a bell curve. Our need to seek sensation is just such a trait. Some of us are quite content to keep our pulse ticking away at a rate barely above comatose. Some of us constantly seek a massive jolt of adrenaline, always riding the ragged edge of disaster. Most of us fall somewhere in between. Marvin Zuckerman created a scale that measured our need for sensation back in 1971.

This need for sensation has an impact on the type of entertainment we seek. Historically, one would expect a strong correlation between our need for sensation and our level of activity. Traditionally, the need for sensational thrills was satisfied through participation in high adrenaline sports and activities such as rock climbing, various forms of racing and other “extreme” pursuits. The neurological loop here is fairly easy to understand. By pushing our bodies to the point where our brain decided we were in danger, our neurological defence mechanisms were duped into taking the appropriate response: a massive release of neuro-chemicals, including adrenaline, that jolted our body into a higher state of awareness and readiness. The seeking of sensation provided a natural high. On the upper end of Zuckerman’s scale, extreme sensation seeking can be clinically addictive.

But technology has thrown us a psychological curve ball when it comes to sensation seeking. There used to be a fairly well defined divide between most forms of passive entertainment and sensation seeking. The exceptions were gory spectacles such as the gladiators of ancient Rome and, in more recent times, wrestling and boxing. However, the line between the two has become more and more blurred in the 20th century. Passive entertainment now regularly relies on unabashed tweaking of our inherent subliminal defense, retaliation and sexual modules. Modern entertainment plays directly to our animal instincts.

This is where we get an especially grim view of our future. Yesterday, I mentioned that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found evidence that TV was addictive, in the true biological sense of addiction. Sensation seeking also has found to be physically addictive. Are we becoming a nation of passive voyeurs that only truly become alive when we’re plugged into the entertainment grid? Suddenly, the premise of The Matrix doesn’t seem that far fetched (ironic, considering the movie series was a perfect example of sensation seeking through passive entertainment).

The modern video game raises this ambiguity between sensation seeking and passive entertainment to a new high (or low, depending on your perspective). Through lifelike graphics and the game producer’s mastery of what appeals to our baser instincts, video games now efficiently deliver high octane jolts that we used to have to get by actually doing something. What does this mash up of passive entertainment and sensation seeking mean for marketers in the future?

That, alas, is a topic for a future post.

The Psychology of Entertainment: How Our Brains Connect with Stories

Andi Bell has an amazing memory. In fact, if you shuffled together 10 decks of cards, put them in front of Andi and gave him 20 minutes, not only would he have memorized every single card in the pack, he would have memorized them in order. 520 cards, and Andi will remember every suit, every value and what order they came in. It’s a feat that boggle the everyday mind. Andi, however, has a secret. And that secret is the power of narrative. We love a good story!

As I mentioned last Friday, I want to explore the psychology of entertainment a bit more today as we explore it’s role in marketing. In a post last week, I said that audience patterns have to establish some stability before we can effectively market to them. We have become a society of early adopters, or, at least, marketers treat us as such. Because we are continually rushing from bright shiny object to bright shiny object there is tremendous churn in most online audiences. I called it “chasing Digital Fluff”.

Keeping Your Audience in One Place

But what could create the audience stability I’m talking about? I put forward usefulness as one element. In a comment, Lance Loveday also suggested entertainment value. I found this intriguing, but of course, Lance’s suggestion also raised a number of  questions for me. What represents “staying power” in entertainment? Why are some entertainment channels fads and some long enduring trends? How do our brains respond to entertainment? What is the difference between a TV show and a video game, for instance? What is it about entertainment that makes it so…well…entertaining? And finally, is Lance right? Will the entertainment factor be enough to move some digital channels from fad to trend? And, if so, where should we place our (or more correctly, our client’s) bets?

Today, I want to begin by exploring how we respond to what seems to be the oldest form of entertainment in the world: stories. We humans have a deeply wired connection with stories. I suspect that as soon as humans began communicating, we began telling stories. In fact, stories are so important to us, it appears that we have a special channel in our brains to interpret stories – evolution has equipped us with a specialized story processor. And it’s this story processor that Andi Bell uses to memorize 10 packs of cards. Bell discovered the power of the story processor, what he calls the Linking Technique, and it made him the three time World Memory Champ.

How to Memorize 520 Playing Cards – Tell 1 Story

The human mind never evolved to deal effectively with random facts. Our brain does not deal that well with the abstract. That’s why we invented writing, symbols, alphabets and math. These are the ways we take the non-concrete and manipulate them for our use. The world of our ancestors tends to play out in much less abstract terms: Where is food? Where is water? What happens when I sleep too close to predators? What happens when I steal my neighbor’s dinner? What happens when I overstep the boundary between my tribe and the neighboring tribe?

These were the realities of our ancestor’s lives and, as such, our brain evolved native mechanisms for dealing with these realities. The ability of our brains to navigate through an physical environment or to remember parables (which are nothing more than behavioral reinforcing stories) is highly developed. But in this world, our evolutionary environment, the abstract mechanisms we take for granted may be completely absent. For example, many primitive tribes have no numbering systems, or, if they do, they may be limited to three words: one, two and many. We can remember how to navigate through hundreds of places we’ve been before, or we can remember the important details of thousands of stories, but remembering a phone number consisting of just 7 or 10 digits can be a challenge. It’s not because we’re addle minded, it’s just because our brains use different mechanisms.

Andi Bell discovered this and found a way to link the abstract to the more highly evolved memory modules of our brains: our on-board navigation computer and our capacity for remembering a story.  Bell’s technique is fairly simple. In his mind, he has a standard route imagined through his home town of London, England. He’s memorized the route in detail. That’s the first step. The second step is to create a story that plays out along the route. Here, he takes each card in a standard deck of cards and creates an imaginary stand-in for it. He replaces abstract numbers and symbols with concrete images from the real world. The 8 of clubs could become a brown bear. The 3 of diamonds could become a pineapple. These become the “characters” of a story imagined on the fly. 520 random cards becomes 520 elements in a story spread through the streets of London. To recall all the cards, Andi has to follow the route through London, retelling the story as he goes. Bell’s technique is not new. It’s called the Method of Ioci, otherwise known as the Memory Palace, and was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Why do stories seem to have a more direct path to our memory? What is it about the power of a story that’s so compelling to humans? Whatever it is, Malcolm Gladwell is a master of the power of a story and it’s kept him on top of the best seller list for several years now.

Gladwell’s Secret for Writing Bestsellers

Writing non-fiction is a challenge. It almost always involves the writer getting a bunch of facts or opinions from their head onto paper. That in itself is not a challenge. But getting facts into a form that is compelling to read is. But at least with facts, the writer can choose interesting ones. Opinions offer even more of a challenge. We are naturally suspicious of other people’s opinions. They have to pass through the filter of what we ourselves believe in. So how does the non-fiction writer take this unwieldy bucket of fact and opinion and craft it into something that someone else will want to read? How do you write a non-fiction best seller?  With half a million books published every year (and that’s just the ones we can keep track of), there is an extraordinarily long tail in book selling.  The 100 best selling non fiction books of 2009 represents just .02% of all books published, yet represent a huge chunk of the revenue. If there is a magic formula to making this list, Malcolm Gladwell seems to have found it. Right now, Gladwell has 2 of the 15 top selling non fiction books on the New York Times best seller list – Outliers and What the Dog Saw. Gladwell’s Blink and The Tipping Point were perpetually on top of best seller lists for the better part of the last decade. So, what’s Gladwell’s formula?

Like Andi Bell, Gladwell has discovered the power of narrative and it’s appeal to humans. Malcolm Gladwell collects social observations, both through his experiences and that of his network of friends. When he uncovers a compelling question, he first goes to his collection of observations and then, with a journalists instincts, he uncovers the stories behind the observations and tells these stories with a lucid, clear style. He lets his stories make his point for him, rather than pad his narrative with reams of opinionated rhetoric. Gladwell’s style is irresistibly compelling, making him the most successful non-fiction writer of the last decade.

How We Process a Story

So, why is a story so much more compelling than facts that are simply strung together. Why does Gladwell go to the trouble of finding the stories to illustrate his questions, essentially creating a scientific and sociological “whodunnit” (and in this case, the answer to who is always the same – we did it)? Well, for one thing, the basic premise of any Gladwell book could probably be told in 500 words if all the stories were stripped away. But then, no one would read those 500 words, would they? And additionally, stories make things stick in our brains. We are more accepting of a story and we remember it better. As with memory, our brains were built to accept stories.

There is empirical evidence (Prentice and Gerrig, 1999) that we process narrative differently than we do simple factual rhetoric. Narrative slips in through a different window, one more aligned with the physical world around us. We imagine ourselves experiencing the story. There are concrete hooks in our mind that we can hang the story on, making it more relevant to us. We become engaged with characters in the story. Gladwell wisely adds a generous helping of personal detail about the central characters in his story, as in his compelling description of Lois Weisberg in the Tipping Point :

loisLois (everyone calls her Lois) is invariably smoking a cigarette and drinking one of her dozen or so daily cups of coffee. She will have been up until two or three the previous morning, and up again at seven or seven-thirty, because she hardly seems to sleep. In some accounts — particularly if the meeting took place in the winter — she’ll be wearing her white, fur-topped Dr. Zhivago boots with gold tights; but she may have on her platform tennis shoes, or the leather jacket with the little studs on it, or maybe an outrageous piece of costume jewelry, and, always, those huge, rhinestone-studded glasses that make her big eyes look positively enormous.

Gladwell has conjured an image of Lois in our minds. To make his point, which is that the make up of most social networks include hyper connected hubs like Weisberg, Gladwell invests hundreds of words in creating a vivid profile of her. Why? Because it makes it more real to us. It turns a simple observation – our networks contain super connected hubs – into a story that engages us at a totally different level. We drop our rational guard and allow ourselves to become part of the story. In doing so, he avoids that trap that keeps most non-fiction off the best seller list – he knows that best way to inform is to entertain.

So, we’ve learned that entertainment works best when it slips past our rational processing mechanisms and hits a more concrete, ancient part of our brain. There needs to be ease of access by respecting what our brains were built to do. Tomorrow, I’ll pick the thread up again when I continue to look at the psychology of entertainment.

How Our Brain Decides How Long We Look at Something

In this week, I’ve talked about how our attention focusing mechanism moves the spotlight of foveal attention around different environments: a Where’s Waldo picture, a webpage, a website with advertising and a search engine results page. I want to wrap up the week by looking at another study that looked at the role of brain waves in regulating how we shift the spotlight of attention from one subject to another.

Eye Spy

eyetrackingsaccadesIf you do eye tracking research, you soon learn to distinguish fixations and saccades. Fixations occur when we let our foveal attention linger on an element, even for a fraction of a second. Saccades are the movements our eyes make from one fixation to the next. These movements take mere milliseconds. Below I show an example of a single session “gaze plot” – the recording of how one individual’s eyes took in an ad (the image is from Tobii, the maker of the eye tracking equipment we use). The dots represent fixations, as measured in milliseconds. The bigger the dot the longer the eye stayed here. The lines connecting the dots are saccades.

When you look at a scene like the one shown here, the question becomes, how do you consciously move from one element to another. It’s not like you think “okay, I’ve spent enough time looking at the logo, perhaps it’s time to move to the headline of the ad, or the rather attractive bosom in the upper right corner (I suspect the participant was male)” The movements happen subconsciously. Your eyes move to digest the content of the picture on their own accord, based on what appears to be interesting based on your overall scan of the picture and your attention focusing mechanisms.

Keeping Our Eyes Running on Time

Knowing that the eye tends to move from spot to spot subconsciously, Dr. Earl Miller at MIT decided to look closer at the timing of these shifts of attention and what might cause them. He found that our brains appear to have a built in timer that moves our eyes around a scene. Our foveal focus shifts about 25 times a second and this shift seems to be regulated by our brain waves. Our brain cycles between high activity phases and low activity phases, the activity recorded through EEG scanning. Neurologists have known that these waves seem to be involved in the focusing of attention and the functions of working memory, but Miller’s study showed a conclusive link between these wave cycles and the refocusing of visual attention. It appears our brains have a built in metronome that dictates how we engage with visual stimuli. The faster the cycles, the faster we “think.”

But, it’s not as if we let our eyes dash around the page every 1/25 of a second. Our eyes linger in certain spots and jump quickly over others. Somewhere, something is dictating how long the eye stays in one spot. As our brain waves tick out the measures of attention, something in our brains decide where to invest those measures and how many should be invested.

The Information Scent Clock is Ticking

Here, I take a huge philosophical leap and tie together two empirical bodies of knowledge with nothing scientifically concrete to connect them that I’m aware of. Let’s imagine for a second that Miller’s timing of eye movements might play some role in Eric Charnov’s Marginal Value Theorem, which in turn plays a part in Peter Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory.

Eric Charnov discovered that animals seem to have an innate and highly accurate sense of when to leave one source of food and move on to another, based on a calculation of the energy that would have to be expended versus the calories that would be gained in return. Obviously, organisms that are highly efficient at surviving would flourish in nature, passing on their genes and less efficient candidates would die out. Charnov’s marginal value calculation would be a relatively complex one if we sat down to work it out on paper (Charnov did exactly that, with some impressive charts and formulas) but I’m guessing the birds Charnov was studying didn’t take this approach. The calculations required are done by instinct, not differential calculus.

So, if birds can do it, how do humans fare? Well, we do pretty well when it comes to food. In fact, we’re so good at seeking high calorie foods, it’s coming back to bite us. We have highly evolved tastes for high fat, high sugar calorie rich foods. In the 20th Century, this built in market preference caused food manufacturers to pump out these foods by the truck load. Now, well over 1/3 of the population is considered obese. Evolution sometimes plays nasty tricks on us, but I digress.

Pirolli took Charnov’s marginal value theorem and applied it to how we gather information in an online environment. Do we use the same instinctive calculations to determine how long to spend on a website looking for the information we’re seeking? Is our brain doing subconscious calculations the entire time we’re browsing online, telling us to either click deeper on a site or give up and go back to Google? I suspect the answer is yes. And, if that’s the case, are our brain waves that dictate how and where we spend our attention part of this calculation, a mental hourglass that somehow factors into Charnov’s theorem? If so, it behooves us to ensure our websites instill a sense of information scent as soon as possible. The second someone lands on our site, the clock is already ticking. Each tick that goes by without them finding something relevant devalues our patch according to Charnov’s theorem.

How Our Brains “Google”

So far this week, I’ve covered how our brains find Waldo, scan a webpage and engage with online advertising. Today, I’m looking at how our brains help find the best result on a search engine.

Searching by Habit

First, let’s accept the fact that most of us have now had a fair amount of experience searching for things on the internet, to the point that we’ve now made Google a verb. What’s more important, from a neural perspective, is that searching is now driven by habit. And that has some significant implications for how our brain works.

Habits form when we do the same thing over and over again. In order for that to happen, we need what’s called a stable environment. Whatever we’re doing, habits only form when the path each time is similar enough that we don’t have to think about each individual junction and intersection. If you drive the same way home from work each day, your brain will start navigating by habit. If you take a different route every single day, you’ll be required to think through each and every trip. Parts of the brain called the basal ganglia seem to be essential in recording these habitual scripts, acting as sort of a control mechanism telling the brain when it’s okay to run on autopilot and when it needs to wake up and pay attention. Ann Graybiel from MIT has done extensive work exploring habitual behaviors and the role of the basal ganglia.

The Stability of the Search Page

A search results page, at least for now, provides such a stable environment. Earlier this week, I looked at how our brain navigates webpages. Even though each website is unique, there are some elements that are stable enough to allow for habitual conditioned routines to form. The main logo or brand identifier is usually in the upper left. The navigation bar typically runs horizontally below the logo. A secondary navigation bar is typically found running down the left side. The right side is usually reserved for a feature sidebar or, in the case of a portal, advertising. Given these commonalities, there is enough stability in most website’s designs that we navigate for the first few seconds on autopilot.

Compared to a website, a search engine results page is rigidly structured, providing the ideal stable environment for habits to form. This has meant a surprising degree of uniformity in people’s search behaviors. My company, Enquiro, has been looking at search behavior for almost a decade now and we’ve found that it’s remained remarkably consistent. We start in the upper left, break off a “chunk” of 3 to 5 results and scan it in an “F” shaped pattern. The following excerpts from The BuyerSphere Project give a more detailed walk through of the process.

searchheatmap11 – First, we orient ourselves to the page. This is something we do by habit, based on where we expect to see the most relevant result. We use a visual anchor point, typically the blue border that runs above the search results, and use this to start our scanning in the upper left, a conditioned response we’ve called the Google Effect. Google has taught us that the highest relevance is in the upper left corner

Searchheatmap22 – Then, we begin searching for information scent. This is a term from information foraging theory, which we’ve covered in our eye tracking white papers. In this particular case, we’ve asked our participants to look for thin, light laptops for their sales team. Notice how the eye tracking hot spots are over the words that offer the greatest “scent”, based on the intention of the user. Typically, this search for scent is a scanning of the first few words of the title of the top 3 or 4 listings.

Searchheatmap33 – Now the evaluation begins. Based on the initial scan of the beginnings of titles from the top 3 or 4 listings, users begin to compare the degree of relevance of some alternatives, typically by comparing two at a time. We tend to “chunk” the results page into sections of 3 or 4 listings at a time to compare, as this has been shown to be a typical limit of working memory9 when considering search listing alternatives

searchheatmap44 -It’s this scanning pattern, roughly in the shape of an “F”, that creates the distinct scan pattern that we first called the “Golden Triangle” in our first eye tracking study. Users generally scan vertically first, creating the upright of the “F”, then horizontally when they pick up a relevant visual cue, creating the arms of the F. Scanning tends to be top heavy, with more horizontal scanning on top entries, which over time creates the triangle shape.

 

searchheatmap5(2)5 – Often, especially if the results are relevant, this initial scan of the first 3 or 4 listings will result in a click. If two listings or more listings in the initial set look to be relevant, the user will click through to both and compare the information scent on the landing page. This back and forth clicking is referred to as “pogo sticking”. It’s this initial set of results that represents the prime real estate on the page.

searchheatmap66 – If the initial set doesn’t result in a successful click through, the user continues to “chunk” the page for future consideration. The next chunk could be the next set of organic results, or the ads on the right hand side of the page. There, the same F Shaped Scan patterns will be repeated. By the way, there’s one thing to note about the right hand ads. Users tend to glance at the first ad and make a quick evaluation of the relevance. If the first ad doesn’t appear relevant, the user will often not scan any further, passing judgement on the usefulness and relevance of all the ads on the right side based on their impression of the ad on top.

So, that explains how habits dictate our scanning pattern. What I want to talk more about today is how our attention focusing mechanism might impact our search for information scent on the page.

The Role of the Query in Information Scent

Remember the role of our neuronal chorus, firing in unison, in drawing our attention to potential targets in our total field of vision. Now, text based web pages don’t exactly offer a varied buffet of stimuli, but I suspect the role of key words in the text of listings might serve to help focus our attention.

In a previous post, I mentioned that words are basically abstract visual representations of ideas or concepts. The shape of the letters in a familiar word can draw our attention. It tends to “pop out” at us from the rest of the words on the page. I suspect this “pop out” effect could be the result of Dr. Desimone’s neural synchrony patterns. We may have groups of neurons tuned to pick certain words out of the sea of text we see on a search page.

The Query as a Picture

This treating of a word as a picture rather than text has interesting implications for the work our brain has to do. The interpretation of text actually calls a significant number of neural mechanisms into play. It’s fairly intensive processing. We have to visually intrepret the letters, run it through the language centres of our brain, translate into a concept and only then can we capture the meaning of the word. It happens quickly, but not nearly as quickly as the brain can absorb a picture. Pictures don’t have to be interpreted. Our understanding of a picture requires fewer mental “middle men” in our brain, so it takes a shorter path. Perhaps that’s why one picture is worth a thousand words.

But in the case of logos and very well known words, we may be able to skip some of the language processing we would normally have to do. The shape of the word might be so familiar, we treat it more like an icon or picture than a word. For example, if you see your name in print, it tends to immediately jump out at you. I suspect the shape of the word might be so familiar that our brain processes it through a quicker path than a typical word. We process it as a picture rather than language.

Now, if this is the case, the most obvious candidate for this “express processing” behavior would be the actual query we use. And we have a “picture” of what the word looks like already in our minds, because we just typed it into the query box. This would mean that this word would pop out of the rest of the text quicker than other text. And, through eye tracking, there are very strong indications that this is exactly what’s happening. The query used almost inevitably attracts foveal attention quicker than anything else. The search engines have learned to reinforce this “pop out” effect by using hit bolding to put the query words in bold type when ever they appear in the results set.

Do Other Words Act as Scent Pictures?

If this is true of the query, are there other words that trigger the same pop out effect? I suspect this to also be true. We’ve seen that certain word attract more than their fair share of attention, depending on the intent of the user. Well know brands typically attract foveal attention. So do prices and salient product features. Remember, we don’t read search listings, we scan them. We focus on a few key words and if there is a strong enough match of information scent to our intent, we click on the listing.

The Intrusion of Graphics

Until recently, the average search page was devoid of graphics. But all the engines are now introducing richer visuals into many results sets. A few years ago we did some eye tracking to see what the impact might be. The impact, as we found out, was that the introduction of a graphic significantly changed the conditioned scan patterns I described earlier in the post.

eshapedpatternThis seems to be a perfect illustration of Desimone’s attention focusing mechanism at work. If we’re searching for Harry Potter, or in the case of the example heat map shown below, an iPhone, we likely have a visual image already in mind. If a relevant image appears on the page, it hits our attention alarms with full force. First of all, it stands out from the text that surrounds it. Secondly, our pre-tuned neurons immediately pick it out in our peripheral vision as something worthy of foveal focus because it matches the picture we have in our mind. And thirdly, our brain interprets the relevancy of the image much faster than it can the surrounding text. It’s an easier path for the attention mechanisms of our brain to go down and our brains follow the same rules as my sister-in-law: no unnecessary trips.

The result? The F Shaped Scan pattern, which is the most efficient scan pattern for an ordered set of text results, suddenly becomes an E shaped pattern. The center of the E is on the image, which immediately draws our attention. We scan the title beside it to confirm relevancy, and then we have a choice to make. Do we scan the section above or below. Again, our peripheral vision helps make this decision by scanning for information scent above and below the image. Words that “pop out” could lure us up or down. Typically, we expect greater relevancy higher in the page, so we would move up more often than down.

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up my series of posts on how our brains control what grabs our attention by looking at another study that indicates we might have a built in timer that governs our attention span and we’ll revisit the concept of the information patch, looking at how long we decide to spend “in the patch.”

How Our Brains Engage with Online Ads

On Monday, I talked about how our brain found Waldo – how we pick a recognized figure out of a busy background.

Yesterday, I took the same principles and applied them to how our brain scans a webpage.

Today, I want to dive into how the mechanics of our brain’s ability to focus attention impacts our engagement with online ads.

The Role of Engagement

One factor above all others dictates the level of engagement we have with online advertising: are we looking for it? Intent is the spoiler in ad effectiveness. When we have intent that aligns with advertising that’s presented to us, the rules of engagement significantly shift in favor of the ad. I dealt with this at some length in a previous post, so I won’t rehash the topic here. However, in all that follows, it’s important to keep that in mind.

As I laid out yesterday, our intent will determine our information foraging strategy on a web page. We will have an idea of what we’re looking for, perhaps even to the extent of creating a mental picture in our visual cortex, and the attention focusing apparatus in our brain working together with our ability to quickly scan a page in it’s entirety through peripheral vision will help us “thin slice” (to use a term from Gladwell’s Blink) the contents of a page, mentally dividing it up into areas of greater and lesser promise. Clusters of information scent are important here to help guide our attention in the most promising directions, as determined by our intent.

Now, obviously the more detail there is on a page, and the more diverse it is, the harder this attention focusing mechanism has to work. Busy pages make us work harder than clean pages. That’s why we tend to get frustrated with them. I’m not sure this tendency is universal, however. Past eye tracking work seems to suggest that at least some of our visual preferences might be cultural. In China, for example, very busy websites seems to be the norm.

So, we have our peripheral vision scanning a page for relevancy, ready to swing the spotlight of foveal attention in the right directions. What happens now?

Conditioning in a Scan Pattern

When we start scanning a website, our foraging strategy isn’t a blank slate. Because there tends to be some commonalities in how websites are built, we have built up some universal strategies we use to find the most promising content on the page. The examples below from The BuyerSphere Project show how these strategies guide us through the first few seconds of interaction with a web page:

webinteraction

These conditioned patterns allow us to mentally divide up a page for easier digestion. This has significant implications for advertising placed on the page. Ads tend to occupy real estate that is outside this conditioned navigation path. They are usually placed at the top (the much maligned banner ad) or on the right side of the page. Because placement is fairly constant, we have become conditioned to expect advertising in these spots. This makes it a sort of “no man’s land” on most websites. Ads are seldom aligned with intent. They tend to interrupt our intent. So we try to filter them out. Ads start with one strike against them. We might scan them peripherally just to see if there are any relevancy “hits” with our activated “target” neurones, but if there’s no hit, we spend little time with them. The eye tracking heat map below shows the difference in ad engagement when an ad is placed in the top banner position versus a position in the middle of content.

adplacement

Ad Relevancy

But, what if an ad is relevant? Thanks to Google and other content targeting ad networks, relevancy has been introduced into our ad targeting strategies. This has a significant impact. Enquiro worked with Google to try to quantify the impact of relevancy in a study we conducted in 2008. We gave respondents scenarios that simulated purchase intent and then showed them various websites. Some were relevant to the purchase, some weren’t. Also, some had ads that were contextually targeted and others had general ads which weren’t contextually relevant. The results, shown in the graphs below (again, from The BuyerSphere Project) were somewhat startling and counter intuitive.

Contextualads

While non-relevant ads scored higher on ad awareness (recognizing that there was an ad on the page) they scored much lower on almost every other metric. 3 times more respondents remembered the ad messages in a relevant ad and  5 times more respondents indicated that the advertised ad would make their short list of candidates. In “intent to purchase” the non-relevant ads actually performed worse than the control group (who saw no ad) and significantly worse than the relevant ad group.

How Hard Do Ads Have to Work?

In my post on the alignment of intent, I said that ads that don’t benefit from aligned intent have to work much harder to get our attention. Ads that are aligned with intent (search ads are probably the best example) can be much more subtle. This was shown in another study Enquiro conducted in 2007. We found that while more intrusive ads (i.e. video ads) did a better job at attracting our eyeballs, they didn’t do so well in convincing us to consider the advertised product. Which ad format performed the best? The lowly text ad, if it was relevant and aligned with consumer intent.

adformat

Let’s go back to our mental attention focusing apparatus and explore some of the possible reasons for this advertising dilemma: why do the ads that are best at grabbing our attention seem to be the worst at putting us in a positive frame of mind about a potential purchase (note: I have reservations about the research methodology here, which I’ll talk about at the end of this post)? Remember, we go to a webpage with a specific intent. Intrusive, interruptive ads have to pull out a bag of tricks to hijack our attention. The most effective of these play directly into the properties of peripheral vision, which acts as a type of early warning system for us. Peripheral vision evolved to keep us alive and warn us of potential danger. What signal is the most reliable predictor of potential danger? You guessed it – movement. Something moving in the corner of our eye is sure to get our attention. But it comes at an emotional cost.

The brain has a rather effective mechanism that allows us to put our tasks on hold if it believes we’re in danger. In effect, the prefrontal cortex – the thinking part of our brain – is bypassed by our danger circuits, routed directly into the amygdala and sub-cortex – the “animal” part of our brain. Movement in our field of vision gets us ready to flee or fight.

Now, you say, that’s ridiculous. Even the most annoying online ads don’t cause you to suddenly run away from your laptop. No, but there’s an element of proportionate response here. The brain also has a slightly delayed dampening circuit that assesses potential danger and shuts down the alarm if it proves to be false. In extreme cases (the oft-cited example of a garden hose mistaken for a snake in your shed) your heart stops racing, adrenaline stops pumping and your hands stop shaking. In mild cases (i.e. intrusive ads) it’s a much more subtle sense of anxiety and annoyance. The mechanism is the same, it’s the degree that differs.

Think about how annoying you find a particularly intrusive ad on a website where you’re there for a purpose other than to look at the ad in question. One of the key sins in usability is using movement in a page element which is not of primary importance in the page. The eye is continually dragged away from what it is trying to do. Yet, this is exactly what most sites do when they include rich media or video ads. Yes, the ads get our attention but in doing so, they almost always piss us off. The reason is that we resent being tricked into paying attention when our intention is to do something else.

Now, I said I did have quibbles with typical ad effectiveness metrics that we and almost everyone else uses in most effectiveness studies. The opinion we get from a respondent immediately after exposure to an ad is typically not very indicative of the longer term effectiveness of an ad. For one thing, it doesn’t capture the subliminal influence of an ad. Barring any compelling empirical evidence, it’s difficult to say what the long term effectiveness of an intrusive but annoying ad might be.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up this topic again as we look at how our attention focusing plays out on a page of search results.

How Our Brain Scans a Webpage

eyesYesterday, I explained how our brain finds “Waldo.” To briefly recap the post:

  • We have two neural mechanisms for seeing things we might want to pay attention to: a peripheral scanning system that takes in a wide field of vision and a focused (foveal) system that allows us to drill down to details
  • We have neurons that are specialists in different areas: i.e. picking out colors, shapes and disruptions in patterns
  • We use these recruited neuronal swat teams to identify something we’re looking for in our “mind’s eye” (the visual cortex) prior to searching for it in our environment
  • These swat teams focus our attention on our intended targets by synchronizing their firing patterns (like a mental Flash Mob) which allows them to rise above the noise of the other things fighting for our attention.

Today, let’s look at the potential implications of this in our domain, specifically interactions with websites.

But First: A Word about Information Scent

I’ve talked before about Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory (and another post from this blog). Briefly, it states that we employ the same strategies we use to find food when we’re looking for information online. That’s because, just like food, information tends to come in patches online and we have to make decisions about the promise of the patch, to determine whether we should stay there or find a new patch. There’s another study I’ve yet to share (it will be coming in a post later this week) that indicates our brain might have a built in timer that controls how much time we spend in a patch and when we decide to move on.

The important point for this post is that we have a mental image of the information we seek. We picture our “prey” in our mind before looking for it. And, if that prey can be imagined visually, this will begin to recruit our swat team of neurons to help guide us to the part of the page where we might see it. Just like we have a mental picture of Waldo (from yesterday’s post) that helps us pick him out of a crowd, we have a mental picture of whatever we’re looking for.

Pirolli talks about information scent. These are the clues on a page that the information we seek lies beyond a link or button. Now, consider what we’ve learned about how the brain chooses what we pay attention to. If a visual representation of information is relevant, it acts as a powerful presentation of information scent. The brain processes images much faster than text (which has to be translated by the brain). We would have our neuronal swat team already primed for the picture, singing in unison to draw the spotlight of our attention towards it.

Neurons Storming Your Webpage

sunscreenshotFirst, let me share some of the common behaviors we’ve seen through eye tracking on people visiting websites (in an example from The BuyerSphere Project). I’ll try to interpret what’s happening in the brain:

The heat map shows the eye activity on a mocked up home page. Remember, eye tracking only captures foveal attention, not peripheral, so we’re seeing activity after our brain has already focused the spotlight of attention. For example, notice how the big picture has almost no eye tracking “heat” on it. Most of the time, we don’t have to focus our fovea on a picture to understand what’s in it (the detail rich Waldo pictures would be the exception). Our peripheral vision is more than adequate to interpret most pictures. But consider what happens when the picture matches the target in our “mind’s eye”. The neurons draw our eye to it.

One thing to think about. Words shown in text are pictures too. I’ll be coming back to this theme a couple of times – but a word is nothing more than a picture that represents a concept. For example, the Sun logo in the upper left (1) is nothing more than a picture that our brain associates with the company Sun Microsystems. To interpret this word, the brain first has to interpret the shape of the word. That means there are neurones that recognize straight edges, others than recognize curved edges and others that look for the overall “shape” of the word. Words too can act as information targets that we picture mentally before seeing it in front of us. For example, let’s imagine that we’re a developer. The word “DEVELOPER” (2) has a shape that is recognizable to us because we’ve seen it so often. The straight strokes of the E’s and V’s, sandwiched between the curves of the D’s, O’ and P’s. As we scan the overall page, our “Developer” neurons may suddenly wake up, synchronize their firing and draw the eye here as well. “Developer” already has a prewired connection in our brains. This is true for all the words we’re most familiar with, including brands like Sun. This is why we see a lot of focused eye activity on these areas of the picture.

Intent Clustering

In the last part of today’s post, I want to talk about a concept I spent some time on in the BuyerSphere Project: Intent Clustering. I’ve always know this makes sense from an Information Scent perspective, but now I know why from a neural perspective as well.

Intent clustering is creating groups of relevant information cues in the same area of the page. For example, for a product category on an e-commerce page, an intent cluster would include a picture of the product, a headline with the product category name, short bullet points with salient features and brands and perhaps relevant logos. An Intent cluster immediately says to the visitor that this is the right path to take to find out more about a certain topic or subject. The page shown has two intent clusters that were aligned with the task we gave, one in the upper right sidebar (3) and one in the lower left hand corner (4). Again, we see heat around both these areas.

Why are intent clusters “eye candy” for visitors? It’s because we’ve stacked the odds for these clusters to be noticed peripherally in our favor. We’ve included pictures, brands, familiar words and hints of rich information scent in well chosen bullet points. This combination is almost guaranteed to set our neural swat teams singing in harmony. Once scanned in peripheral vision, the conductor (the FEF I talked about in yesterday’s post) of our brain swings our attention spotlight towards the cluster for more engaged consumption, generating the heat we see in the above heatmap.

Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at how these mechanisms can impact our engagement with online display ads.

How Google Became a Verb

First published December 31, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s probably because I’m just finishing a book (The Stuff of Thought) by famed linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, but grammar has been on my mind more than usual lately. And in particular, I was fascinated by how we use Google in our language. Google, of course, has been “genericided” – the fate that falls on brands that lose their status as a protected brand name and become a generic term in our vocabulary. This causes much chagrin with Google’s legal and marketing team. What is more interesting however is the way we’ve taken Google into our lexicon.

Of Nouns and Verbs

Most brands, when they get incorporated into our language, become nouns. Kleenex, aspirin, escalators, thermoses and zippers all went down similar paths on the road to becoming common terms that described things. It might interest you to know, for instance, that in Japan, staplers are known as Hotchkisses (or technically, hochikisu). Google, however, is different. The word Google doesn’t replace the noun “search engine,” it replaced the act of searching. We made googling a verb. And that is a vital difference. We don’t call all search engines Google. But we do refer to our act of searching as googling.

More than this, we made Google a transitive verb – “I googled it”. That means I (the subject) used Google (the verb) to do something with it (the object). Pinker says the way we use words betrays the way we think about the world. Verbs are the lynchpins of our vocabulary, because we use them to explain how we interact with our physical world. And transitive verbs, in particular, act as connectors between us and the world. I once said that search was the connector between intent and content. The enshrining of Google as a verb reflects this. The act of googling connects us with information.

Sampling the Outside World through Google

But the use of Google as a transitive verb also gives us a glimpse into how we regard the gathering of the content we Google. Transitive verbs tend to reflect a transfer from the outside to the inside, a consumption of the external, either physically or through our senses: I drank it, I ate it, I saw it, I heard it, I felt it. In that sense, their use is personal and fundamental. “I googled it” gives us a sense of metaphorical transference – the consumption of information.

So, what does this mean? If you look at the role of our language, there is something of fundamental importance happening here. Language is our collection of commonly accepted labels that allow us to transfer concepts from our heads into the heads of others. These labels are not useful unless they mean the same thing to everyone. When I say thermos, you know instantly what I mean. Your visualization of it might be slightly different than mine (a Batman thermos from grade 5 is the image that I currently have) but we can be confident that we’re thinking about the same category of item. We have a shared understanding.

Speaking a Common Language

This need for commonality is the threshold that new words must cross before they become part of common language. This means that critical mass becomes important. Enough of us have to have the same concept in our heads when we use the same label before that label becomes useful. Generally, when technology introduces a concept that we have to find a new label for, we try a few variations on for size before we settle on one that fits. Common usage is the deciding vote.

With things like new products, the dominant brand has a good chance of becoming the commonly used label. Enough of us have experience with the brand to make it a suitable stand in for the product category. We all know what’s meant by the word escalator. And new product categories creep up fairly regularly, forcing us to agree on a common label. In the last decade or two, we’ve had to jam a lot of new nouns in our vocabulary: ATM’s, fax, browser, Smartphones, GPS, etc. Few of these categories have had enough single brand domination to make that brand the common label. Apple has probably come the closest, with iPod often substituting for MP3 player.

The material nature of our world means that we’re forever adding new nouns to our vocabulary. There are always new things we have to find words for. That’s why one half of all the entries in the Oxford dictionary are nouns. The odds of a brand name becoming a noun are much greater, simply because the frequency is higher. And by their nature, nouns live apart from us. They are objects. We are the subjects.

The Rarity of a Verb

But verbs are different. Only one seventh of dictionary entries are verbs. Verbs live closer to us. And the introduction of a new verb into our vocabulary is a much rarer event. This makes the critical mass threshold for a verb more difficult to pass than for a noun. First of all, enough of us have to do the action to create the need for a common label. Secondly, it’s rare for one brand to dominate that action so thoroughly. The birth of googling as a verb is noteworthy simply because so many of us were doing something new at the same place.

Why did I share this linguistic lesson with you? Again, it’s because so many of us are doing something at the same place. New verbs emerge because we are doing new things. We do new things because something drives us to do them. That makes it a fundamental human need. And to have that fundamental human need effectively captured by one brand – to the point that we call the act by the brand’s name – offers a rare opportunity to catalogue human activity in one place. One of the most underappreciated aspects of search marketing is the power of search logs to provide insight into human behavior. That’s what my first column of 2010 will be about.

And, just to leave you with a tidbit for next week, currently another brand name is on the cusp of becoming a verb (although it’s exact proper form is still being debated). The jury is still being assembled, but Twitter could be following in Google’s footsteps.