Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

How Activation Works in an Absolute Value Market

As I covered last week, if I mention a brand to you – like Nike, for instance – your brain immediately pulls back your own interpretation of the brand. What has happened, in a split second, is that the activation of that one node – let’s call it the Nike node – triggers the activation of several related nodes in your brain, which is quickly assembled into a representation of the brand Nike. This is called Spreading Activation.

This activation is all internal. It’s where most of the efforts of advertising have been focused over the past several decades. Advertising’s job has been to build a positive network of associations so when that prime happens, you have a positive feeling towards the brand. Advertising has been focused on winning territory in this mental landscape.

Up to now, we have been restricted to this internal landscape when making consumer decisions by the boundaries of our own rationality. Access to reliable and objective information about possible purchases was limited. It required more effort on our part than we were willing to expend. So, for the vast majority of purchases, these internal representations were enough for us. They acted as a proxy for information that lay beyond our grasp.

But the world has changed. For almost any purchase category you can think of, there exists reliable, objective information that is easy to access and filter. We no longer are restricted to internal brand activations (relative values based on our own past experiences and beliefs). Now, with a few quick searches, we can access objective information, often based on the experiences of others. In their book of the same name, Itimar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen call these sources “Absolute Value.” For more and more purchases, we turn to external sources because we can. The effort invested is more than compensated for the value returned. In the process, the value of traditional branding is being eroded. This is truer for some product categories than others. The higher the risk or the level of interest, the more the prospect will engage in an external activation. But across all product categories, there has been a significant shift from the internal to the external.

What this means for advertising is that we have to shift our focus from internal spreading activations to external spreading activations. Now, when we retrieve an internal representation of a product or brand, it typically acts as a starting point, not the end point. That starting point is then to be modified or discarded completely depending on the external information we access. The first activated node is our own initial concept of the product, but the subsequent nodes are spread throughout the digitized information landscape.

In an internal spreading activation, the nodes activated and the connections between those nodes are all conducted at a subconscious level. It’s beyond our control. But an external spreading activation is a different beast. It’s a deliberate information search conducted by the prospect. That means that the nodes accessed and the connections between those nodes becomes of critical importance. Advertisers have to understand what those external activation maps look like. They have to be intimately aware of the information nodes accessed and the connections used to get to those nodes. They also have to be familiar with the prospect’s information consumption preferences. At first glance, this seems to be an impossibly complex landscape to navigate. But in practice, we all tend to follow remarkable similar paths when establishing our external activation networks. Search is often the first connector we use. The nodes accessed and the information within those nodes follow predictable patterns for most product categories.

For the advertiser, it comes down to a question of where to most profitably invest your efforts. Traditional advertising was built on the foundation of controlling the internal activation. This was the psychology behind classic treatises such as Ries and Trout’s “Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind.” And, in most cases, that battle was won by whomever could assemble the best collection of smoke and mirrors. Advertising messaging had very little to do with facts and everything to do with persuasion.

But as Simonsen and Rosen point out, the relative position of a brand in a prospect’s mind is becoming less and less relevant to the eventual purchase decision. Many purchases are now determined by what happens in the external activation. Factual, reliable information and easy access to that information becomes critical. Smoke and mirrors are relegated to advertising “noise” in this scenario. The marketer with a deep understanding of how the prospect searches for and determines what the “truth” is about a potential product will be the one who wins. And traditional marketing is becoming less and less important to that prospect.

 

The Spreading Activation Model of Marketing

“Beatle.”

I have just primed you. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had things popping into your mind. Perhaps it was a mental image of an individual Beatle – either John, Paul, George or Ringo. Perhaps it was a snippet of song. Perhaps it was grainy black and white footage of the Ed Sullivan show appearance. But as the concept “Beatle” entered your working memory, your brain was hard at work retrieving what you believed were relevant concepts from your long-term memory. (By the way, if your reaction was “What’s a Beatle?” – substitute “Imagine Dragons.”)

1-brain-neural-network-pasiekaThat’s a working example of spreading activation. The activation of your working memory pulls associated concepts from your long-term memory to create a mental construct that creates your internal definition of whatever that first label was.

Now, an important second step may or may not happen. First, you have to decide how long you’re going to let the “Beatle” prime occupy your working memory. If it’s of fleeting interest, you’ve probably already wiped the slate clear, ready for the next thing that catches your interest. But if that prime is strong enough to establish a firm grip on your attention, then you have a choice to make. Is your internal representation complete, or do you require more information? If you require more information then you have to turn to external sources for that information.

Believe it or not, this column is not intended as a 101 primer in Cognitive Psych. But the mental gymnastics I describe are important when we think about marketing, as we go through exactly the same process when we think about potential purchases. If we can understand that process better, we gain some valuable hints about how to more effectively market in an exceedingly fluid technological environment.

Much of advertising is built on the first half of the process – building associative brand concepts and triggering the prime that retrieves those concepts into working memory. Most of what isn’t working about advertising lies on this side of the cognitive map. We’ve been overly focused on the internal activation, at the expense of the external. But thanks to an explosion of available (and objective) information we’re less reliant on using our internal knowledge when making purchase decisions. Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen explain in their book “Absolute Value”: “A person’s decision to buy is affected by a mix of three related sources: The individual’s Prior preferences, beliefs, and experiences (P) Others. Other people and information services (O) and Marketers (M).”

Simonson and Rosen say that with near perfect information available for the consumer, we now rely more on (O) and less on (P) and (M). Let’s leave (M) and (O) aside for the moment and focus on the (P) in this equation. (P) represents our internal spreading activation. After we’re primed, we retrieve a representation of the product or service we’re thinking of. At this point, we make an internal calculation. We balance how confident we are that our internal representation is adequate to make a purchase against how much effort we have to expend to gather further information. This calculation is largely made subconsciously. It follows Herbert Simon’s principle of Bounded Rationality. It also depends on how much risk is involved in the purchase we’re contemplating. If all the factors dictate that we’re reasonably confident in our internal representation and the risk we’re assuming, we’ll pull out our wallets and buy. If, however, we aren’t confident, we’ll start seeking more information. And that’s where (O) and (M) come in.

Simonson and Rosen lay out a purchase behaviour continuum, from (O) Dependent to (O) Independent. It’s at the (O) Dependent end, where internal confidence in retrieved beliefs and experience is low, that buying behaviors are changing dramatically. And it’s there where conventional approaches to advertising are falling far short of the mark. They are still stuck in the mythical times of Mad Men, where marketers relied on a “Prime, Retrieve (Internal beliefs), Purchase” path. Today, it’s much more likely that the Prime and Retrieve stages will be followed by an external spreading activation. We’ll pick up that thread in next week’s Online Spin.

 

Consuming in Context

npharris-oscarsIt was interesting watching my family watch the Oscars Sunday night. Given that I’m the father of two millennials, who have paired with their own respective millennials, you can bet that it was a multi-screen affair. But to be fair, they weren’t the only ones splitting their attention amongst the TV and various mobile devices. I was also screen hopping.

As Dave Morgan pointed out last week, media usage no longer equates to media opportunity. And it’s because the nature of our engagement has changed significantly in the last decade. Unfortunately, our ad models have been unable to keep up. What is interesting is the way our consumption has evolved. Not surprisingly, technology is allowing our entertainment consumption to evolve back to its roots. We are watching our various content streams in much the same way that we interact with our world. We are consuming in context.

The old way of watching TV was very linear in nature. It was also divorced from context. We suspended engagement with our worlds so that we could focus on the flickering screen in front of us. This, of course, allowed advertisers to buy our attention in little 30-second blocks. It was the classic bait and switch technique. Get our attention with something we care about, and then slip in something the advertiser cares about.

The reason we were willing to suspend engagement with the world was that there was nothing in that world that was relevant to our current task at hand. If we were watching Three’s Company, or the Moon Landing, or a streaker running behind David Niven at the 1974 Oscar ceremony, there was nothing in our everyday world that related to any of those TV events. Nothing competed for the spotlight of our attention. We had no choice but to keep watching the TV to see what happened next.

But imagine if a nude man suddenly appeared behind Matthew McConaughey at the 2015 Oscars. We would immediately want to know more about the context of what just happened. Who was it? Why did it happen? What’s the backstory? The difference is now, we have channels at our disposal to try to find answers to those questions. Our world now includes an extended digital nervous system that allows us to gain context for the things that happen on our TV screens. And because TV no longer has exclusive control of our attention, we switch to the channel that is the best bet to find the answers we seek.

That’s how humans operate. Our lives are a constant quest to fill gaps in our knowledge and by doing so, make sense of the world around us. When we become aware of one of these gaps we immediate scan our environment to find cues of where we might find answers. Then, our senses are focused on the most promising cues. We forage for information to satiate our curiosity. A single-minded focus on one particular cue, especially one over which we have no control, is not something we evolved to do. The way we watched TV in the 60s and 70s was not natural. It was something we did because we had no option.

Our current mode of splitting attention across several screens is much closer to how humans naturally operate. We continually scan our environment, which, in this case, included various electronic interfaces to the extended virtual world, for things of interest to us. When we find one, our natural need to make sense sends us on a quest for context. As we consume, we look for this context. The diligence of our quest for that context will depend on the degree of our engagement with the task at hand. If it is slight, we’ll soon move on to the next thing. If it’s deep, we’ll dig further.

On Sunday night, the Hotchkiss family quest for context continually skipped around, looking for what other movies J.K. Simmons had acted in, watching the trailer for Whiplash, reliving the infamous Adele Dazeem moment from last year and seeing just how old Benedict Cumberbatch is (I have two daughters that are hopelessly in love, much to the chagrin of their boyfriends). As much as the advertisers on the 88th Oscars might wish otherwise, all of this was perfectly natural. Technology has finally evolved to give our brain choices in our consumption.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are We Guilty of “Numbed” Marketing?

BombsightA few years ago, I was moderating a panel on mobile advertising. The room was full of marketers. After much discussion about targeting and the ability to track consumers both geographically and behaviorally, one audience member lamented, “Why don’t the carriers just share the subscriber information? They know who they are. They know addresses, family status, credit history, demographics – they have all that information. Then we could really pinpoint our market.”

I had to jump in. I asked this room full of marketers to indicate who would like to have access to that information by raising their hand. The entire room answered in the affirmative. Then I added a twist…

“Okay. Everyone in this room has a mobile phone. Who, as subscribers, would want your carrier sharing that information with anyone who wanted to target you? Keep your hands up.”

Hands wavered. You could almost hear the switch clicking in their brains. Every hand slowly went down.

That story came to mind last week when I read the following passage in a book by Arthur J. Dyck called “Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities: The Moral Bonds of Community,”

“In his study, (Robert Jay) Lifton takes note of a phenomenon he calls “numbed warfare,” a mode of combat in which participants have psychological contacts only with their military cohorts and their own equipment…. Lifton describes research that found a striking correlation between altitude and potential for guilt:

‘B-52 pilots and crews bombing at high altitudes saw nothing of their victims and spoke exclusively of professional skill and performance…’

Lifton calls these B-52 pilots “numbed warriors.” What have been numbed are their empathic emotions: ‘lacking emotional relations with his victims, the numbed warrior receives from them very little of the kind of feedback that could permit at least one layer of his mind to perceive them as human.’”

That may seem like a horrific parallel to draw with marketing, but the similarities are striking. One of the ways warriors have always desensitized themselves is by thinking of the enemy in non-human terms, either as a faceless, monolithic group, or by assigning a dehumanizing (and usually derogatory) label to them. We marketers have been doing this for years. What is more dehumanizing than taking a thinking, feeling person and calling them a “consumer?” Someone once described consumers as “mindless wallets eating shit and crapping cash.”

Warriors have to clearly delineate the concepts of “us” and “them” in order to do what they have to do. But as my room full of marketers realized, when it comes to marketing – “them” is “us.” In a recent PEW study, 80% of social network users were worried that their data would be accessed by advertisers. That means 4 out of 5 people don’t trust you, Ms. or Mr. Marker. They’d rather you didn’t know who they were. If you knocked on their door, they wouldn’t answer. Maybe it’s because you keep calling them a consumer or a target market. I’m also betting that if you were asked that question, you’d answer the same way. Because even though you’re a marketer, you don’t trust other marketers.

In a recent interview, I was asked what one piece of advice I would pass on to other marketers. I said, “Be an empathic marketer.” Or, in plainer terms, don’t numb yourself to your market. I’m not alone in saying we can be better. Fellow Spinner Cory Treffileti talked about the importance of emotion in ad messages. And Katie Meier recently asked the question, “What if data wasn’t about numbers, but instead we made it about the people the numbers represent?”

Technology has put us at a crossroads. We could use it to further distance and dehumanize our market, turning real people into digital data points. We could become “high-altitude” marketers, never coming face to face with the humans we’re trying to connect with.

Or, we could use it to create, as my friend Scott Brinker likes to say, “markets of one.” But before we do that, we have to make them want to listen to us. They have to answer their door if we knock. And that will take some work. We have to start treating them the way we want to be treated, when we’re not wearing our “marketing” hats.

Why More Connectivity is Not Just More – Why More is Different

data-brain_SMEric Schmidt is predicting from Davos that the Internet will disappear. I agree. I’ve always said that Search will go under the hood, changing from a destination to a utility. Not that Mr. Schmidt or the Davos crew needs my validation. My invitation seems to have got lost in the mail.

Laurie Sullivan’s recent post goes into some of the specifics of how search will become an implicit rather than an explicit utility. Underlying this is a pretty big implication that we should be aware of – the very nature of connectivity will change. Right now, the Internet is a tool, or resource. We access it through conscious effort. It’s a “task at hand.” Our attention is focused on the Internet when we engage with it. The world described by Eric Schmidt and the rest of the panel is much, much different.   In this world, the “Internet of Things” creates a connected environment that we exist in. And this has some pretty important considerations for us.

First of all, when something becomes an environment, it surrounds us. It becomes our world as we interpret it through our assorted sensory inputs. These inputs have evolved to interpret a physical world – an environment of things. We will need help interpreting a digital world – an environment of data. Our reality, or what we perceive our reality to be, will change significantly as we introduce technologically mediated inputs into it.

Our brains were built to parse information from a physical world. We have cognitive mechanisms that evolved to do things like keep us away from physical harm. Our brains were never intended to crunch endless reams of digital data. So, we will have to rely on technology to do that for us. Right now we have an uneasy alliance between our instincts and the capabilities of machines. We are highly suspicious of technology. There is every rational reason in the world to believe that a self-driving Google car will be far safer than a two ton chunk of accelerating metal under the control of a fundamentally flawed human, but who of us are willing to give up the wheel? The fact is, however, that if we want to function in the world Schmidt hints at, we’re going to have to learn not only to trust machines, but also to rely totally on them.

The other implication is one of bandwidth. Our brains have bottlenecks. Right now, our brain together with our senses subconsciously monitor our environment and, if the situation warrants, they wake up our conscious mind for some focused and deliberate processing. The busier our environment gets, the bigger this challenge becomes. A digitally connected environment will soon exceed our brain’s ability to comprehend and process information. We will have to determine some pretty stringent filtering thresholds. And we will rely on technology to do the filtering. As I said, our physical senses were not built to filter a digital world.

It will be an odd relationship with technology that will have to develop. Even if we lower our guard on letting machines do much of our “thinking” (in terms of processing environmental inputs for us) we still have to learn how to give machines guidelines so they know what our intentions are. This raises the question, “How smart do we want machines to become?” Do we want machines that can learn about us over time, without explicit guidance from us? Are we ready for technology that guesses what we want?

One of the comments on Laurie’s post was from Jay Fredrickson, “Sign me up for this world, please. When will this happen and be fully rolled out? Ten years? 20 years?” Perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.  While this world may seem to be a step forward, we will actually be stepping over a threshold into a significantly different reality. As we step over that threshold, we will change what it means to be human. And there will be no stepping back.

Publishers as Matchmakers

gatekeeperI’m a content creator. And, in this particular case, I’ve chosen MediaPost as the distribution point for that content. If we’re exploring the role of publishing in the future, the important question to ask here is why? After all, I could publish this post in a couple clicks to my blog. And, thanks to my blogging software, it will automatically notify my followers that there’s a new post. So, what value does Mediapost add to that?

Again, we come back to signal and noise. I generate content primarily to reach both a wide and interested audience. As a digital marketing consultant, there is a financial incentive to grow my own personal brand, but to be honest, my reward is probably more tied up in the concepts of social capital and my own ego. I publish because I want to be heard. And I want to be heard by people who find my content valuable. I have almost 2000 followers between my blog, Twitter feed and other social networks, but those people already know me. Hopefully, Mediapost will introduce me to new people that don’t know me. I want Mediapost to be my matchmaker.

Now, the second question to ask is, why are you reading this post on Mediapost? While I don’t presume to be able to know your own personal intentions, I can take a pretty good shot at generalizing – you are a Mediapost reader because you find the collection of content they publish interesting. It’s certainly not the only place online you can find content about marketing and media. And, if they chose to, any of the MediaPost writers could easily publish their content on their own blogs. You have chosen MediaPost because it acts as both a convenient access point and an effective filter.

This connection between content and audience is where publishers like MediaPost add value. Because you trust MediaPost to deliver content you find interesting, it passes the first level of your filtering threshold. I, as a content creator, get the benefit of MediaPost’s halo effect. The odds are better that I can connect with new readers under the MediaPost banner than they are if you’re introduced to me through a random, unfiltered tweet or alert in your newsfeed. And here we have a potential clue in the future of revenue generation for publishers. If publishing is potentially a match making service, perhaps we need to look at other matchmakers to see how they generate revenue.

In the traditional publishing world, it would be blasphemous to suggest that content creators should be charged for access to an audience. After all, we used to get paid to generate content by the publishers. But that was then and this is now. Understand, I’m not talking about native advertising or advertorials here. In fact, it would be the publisher’s responsibility to filter out unacceptably commercial editorials. I’m talking about creating an audience market for true content generators. In this day of personal branding, audiences have value. The better the audience, the higher the value. It should be worth something to me to reach new audiences. Publishers, in turn, act as the reader’s filter, ensuring the content they provide matches the user’s interest. Again, if the match is good enough, that has value for the reader.

Of course, the problem here is quantifying value on both sides of the relationship. I would imagine that both the content creators and content consumers that are reading my suggestions are probably saying, “There is no way I would pay for that!” And, in the current state of online publishing, I wouldn’t either – as a creator nor a consumer. The value isn’t there because the match isn’t strong enough. But if publishers focused on building the best possible audience and on presenting the best possible content, it might be a different story. More importantly, it would be a revenue model that would realign publishers with their audience, rather than pit them against it.

From the reader’s perspective, if a publisher was acting as your own private information filter, and not as a platform for poorly targeted advertising, you would probably be more willing to indicate your preferences and share information. If the publisher was discriminating enough, you might even be willing to allow them to introduce very carefully targeted offers from advertiser’s, filtering down to only the offers you’re highly likely to be interested in. This provides three potential revenue sources to the publisher: content creators looking for an audience, readers looking for an effective filtering service and advertisers looking for highly targeted introductions to prospects. In the last case, the revenue should be split with the prospect, with the publisher taking a percentage for handling the introduction and the rest going to the prospect in return for agreeing to accept the advertiser’s introduction.

While radically different than today’s model, what I’ve proposed is not a new idea. It was first introduced in the book Net Worth, by John Hagel and Marc Singer. They introduced the idea in 1999. Granted, my take is less involved than theirs is, but the basic idea is the same – a shift from a relentless battering of prospects with increasingly overt advertising messages to a careful filtering and matching of interests and appropriate content. And, when you think about it, the matching of intent and content is what Google has been doing for two decades.

Disruptive innovations tend to change the ways that value is determined. They take previous areas of scarcity and change them to ones of abundance. They upend markets and alter existing balances between forces. When the markets shift to this extent, trying to stick to the old paradigm guarantees failure. The challenge is that there is no new paradigm to follow. Experimentation is the only option. And to experiment you have to be willing to explore the boundaries. The answer won’t be found in the old, familiar territory.

Same Conversation. Different Location.

online_publishing_vxwndNote: This is my first OnlineSpin column for MediaPost.

First of all, let’s get the pleasantries out of the way. I’m Gord. I’m new to Online Spin, but not to MediaPost. If you don’t know me, I have been writing over on the Search Insider side of the house for the past 10 and a half years.

Nice to meet you.

Now, on to business. Just before the switch, I took online publishing to task for sacrificing it’s ability to communication for the sake of advertising revenue. The user experience on most online publications is so littered with intrusive ads and misleading click bait that it becomes almost impossible to actually read the content. My point, which is probably obvious, is that the short-term quest for revenue is jeopardizing the long-term health of the business model.

Among the comments posted were a few asking for guidance rather than just criticism. Fair enough. It’s much easier to criticize that it is to create. So, where does the future of publishing lie?

The problem, as it is in so many other cases, is that technology has annihilated the proverbial publishing apple cart. Publishing as an industry began because of the high transactional cost of publicizing information. Information began to be stacked vertically, because that was the only cost effective way to do it. These vertical stacks of information attracted audiences because it was the only place they could get this information. Limited access points created large and loyal audiences which in turn allowed ad supported revenue models. Because transactional costs were high, information was scarce. Scarcity enabled profit.

Today, technology is, one by one, leveling the vertical stacks of information. Transactional costs of publishing have dropped to essentially zero. Yes, I’m publishing this post through a “publisher” but it would be just as easy for me to publish to my own blog. And while MediaPost’s audience is probably larger than my own bog’s, the gap between the two grows less every day. The lower transactional costs of publishing have erased the scarcity of information.

This disruptive change has flipped the publishing model on its head. The problem with information used to be that we had too little access. The problem today is that we have too much. What we need now are filters. We need a way to separate the signal from the ever-increasing noise.

Now, think of what this reversal does for revenue models of publishers. If the problem before were access, we would value any source of information that provided this access. We would be loyal to it. We would spend a significant amount of time with it. But if the problem becomes one of filtering, our loyalty level drops significantly. We just want to get to the information that is most interesting to us as quickly and efficiently as possible. If we have any allegiance to publishers at all, it is as a content filter. This is exactly why publishing empires are fragmenting into more and more specific vertical niches. We don’t need access points – we need effective filters.

Now, back to my original point. If the only way to make revenue from publishing is to introduce more noise – in the form of intrusive advertising – we quickly see the problem. We want publishers to eliminate extraneous noise and they add more. And to compound the problem, they intentionally blur the line between signal and noise in an attempt to generate more click-throughs. And, as Joe Marchese rightly points out, this vicious cycle is exacerbated by the bogus metric of “impressions” that publishers seem to have latched on to. The reader’s intent and the publisher’s intent are on a collision course with each other.

Given this, is there a way to save publishing? Perhaps, but it will be in a form much different than any we currently see. Publishing’s role may be in serving both as a filter and a matchmaker. More to come next Tuesday

The Sorry State of Online Publishing

ss-publishingDynamic tension can be a good thing. There are plenty of examples of when this is so. Online publishing isn’t one of them. The plunging transaction costs of publishing and the increasingly desperate attempts to shore up some sort of sustainable revenue model is creating a tug-of-war that’s threatening to tear apart the one person that this whole sorry mess is revolving around – the reader. Somebody better get their act together soon, because I’m one reader that’s getting sick of it.

Trying to read an article on most online is like trying to tiptoe through a cognitive minefield. The publishers have squeezed every possible advertising opportunity onto the page and in doing so, has sacrificed credibility, cohesiveness and clarity. The job of publishing is communication, but these publishers seem to think its actually sacrificing communication for revenue. Methinks if you have to attack your own business model to make a profit, you should be taking a long hard look at said model.

Either Fish or Cut Click Bait

The problem has grown so pervasive that academia is even piling on. In the past few months, a number of studies have looked at the dismal state of online publishing.

clickbaitIn the quest for page views, publishers have mastered the trick of pushing our subconscious BSO (Bright Shiny Object) buttons with clickbait. Clickbait is essentially brain porn – headlines, often misleading – that you can’t resist clicking on. The theory is more page views – more advertising opportunities. The problem is that clickbait essential derails the mind from its predetermined focus. And worse, clickbait often distracts the brain with a misleading headline the subsequent article fails to deliver on. As Jon Stewart recently told New York Magazine, “It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, “Come on in here and see a three-legged man!” So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”

A recent study from The Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that misleading headlines and something called “false balance” – where publishers give equal airtime to sources with very different levels of credibility – can negatively impact the reader’s ability to remember the story, create a cohesive understanding of the story and cognitively process the information. In other words, the publisher’s desperate desire to grab eyeballs gets in the way of their ability to communicate effectively.

Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith has publicly gone on the record about why he doesn’t use click-bait headlines: “Here is a trade secret I’d decided a few years ago we’d be better off not revealing — clickbait stopped working around 2009.” He references Facebook engineer Khalid El-Arini in the post, saying “readers don’t want to be tricked by headlines; instead, they want to be informed by them.”

Now You Read Me, Now You Don’t

If you ever wanted to test your resolve, try getting to the end of an online article. What content there is is shoehorned into a format littered with ads and clickbait of every description. Many publishers even try to squeeze revenue from the content itself by using Text Enhance, an ad serving platform that hyperlinks keywords in the copy and shows ads if your cursor strays anywhere near these links. Users like me often use their cursor both as a place marker and a quick way to vet sources of embedded links. Text Enhance makes reading in this way an incredibly frustrating experience as it continually pops up poorly targeted ads while you try to tiptoe through the advertising landmines to piece together what the writer was originally trying to say. It turns reading content into a virtual game of “Whac-a-Mole.”

Of course, this is assuming you’ve made it past the page take-over and auto-play video ads that litter the “mind-field” between you and the content you want to access on a site like Forbes or The Atlantic. These interruptions in our intent create a negative mental framework that is compounded by having to weave through increasingly garish ad formats in order to piece together the content we’re trying to access.

A new study from Microsoft and Northwestern University shows that aggressive and annoying advertising may prop up short-term revenues, but at a long-term price that publishers should be thinking twice about paying, ““The practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns, as people are more likely to abandon sites on which they are present. In addition, in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate in remembering what they had read. None of these effects on users is desirable from the publisher’s perspective.”

Again, we have this recurring theme about revenue getting in the way of user experience. This is a conflict from which there can be no long-term benefit. When you frustrate users, you slowly kill your revenue source. You engage in a vicious cycle from which there is no escape.

I understand that online publishers are desperate. I get that. They should be. I suspect the ad-supported business platform they’re trying to prop up is hopelessly damaged. Another will emerge to take its place. But the more they frustrate us, the faster that will happen.

 

 

Why Our Brains Love TV

brain-TV-e1318029026863Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk has pegged 2019 as the year when digital ad spend will surpass TV, topping the $100 billion mark. This is momentous in a number of ways, but not really surprising. If you throw all digital marketing in a single bucket, it was a question of when, not if, it would finally surpass TV. What is more surprising to me is how resilient TV has proven to be as an advertising medium. After all, we’re only a little more than a decade away from the 100th anniversary of broadcast TV (which started in 1928). TV has been the king of the media mountain for a long time.

So, what is it about TV that has so captured us for so long? What is it about the medium that allows our brains to connect to it so easily?

The Two Most Social Senses – Sight and Sound

Even as digital overtakes broadcast and cable television, we’re still mesmerized by the format of TV. Our interaction with the medium has shifted in a few interesting ways, notably time shifting, new platforms to consume it on and binge watching, but our actual interaction with the format itself hasn’t changed very much, save for the continual improvements in fidelity. It’s still sight and sound delivered electronically. And for us, that seems to be a very compelling combination. Despite some thus-far failed attempts to introduce another sense or dimension into the sight/sound duopoly, our brains seem to naturally default back to a relatively stable format of sound and two-dimensional images.

It’s no coincidence that these are the same two senses we rely on most heavily to connect with the outside world. They allow us to scan our environments “at-a-distance,” picking up cues of potential threats or rewards that we can then use our other senses to interact with more intimately. Smell, taste and touch are usually “close-up” senses that are relied on only when sight and sound have given the “all-clear” signal to our brains. For this reason, our brains have some highly developed mechanisms that allow us to parse the world through sight and sound – particularly sight. For example, the fusiform gyrus is a part of our brain that is dedicated to categorizing forms we see and fitting them into categories our brain recognizes. It’s this part of our brain that allows us to recognize faces and fit them into understandable categories such as friends, enemies, family, celebrities, etc.

These are also the two senses we use most often in social settings. If it weren’t for sight and sound, our ability to interact with each other would be severely curtailed. This offers another clue. Television is a good fit with our need to socialize. Sight and sound are the channel inputs to empathy. Our mirror neurons are activated when we see somebody else doing something. That’s why the saying is “Monkey See, Monkey Do,” and not “Monkey Taste, Monkey Do.” These two senses are all we really need to build a fairly rich representation of the world and create emotional connections to it.

We want Immersion, But Not Too Much immersion

So, if the combination of sight and sound seems to be a good match with our mechanisms for understanding the world – why has “more” not proven to be “better?” Why, for instance, has 3D and Interactive TV not caught on to the extent forecast?

I think we’ve developed a comfortable balance with TV. Remember, sight and sound are generally used as “at-a-distance” parsers of our world. Because of the sheer volume of visual and auditory information coming through these channels, the brain has learned to filter input and only alert us when further engagement is required. If our brain had to process all the visual information available to it, it would overload to the point of breakdown. So while we want to be engaged in whatever we’re watching on TV, we aren’t looking to be totally immersed in it. This is why we have the multi-screen/multi-tasking behaviors emerging that are quickly becoming the norm while we watch TV. 3D or Interactive TV both add a dimension of focal attention that isn’t necessary to enjoy a TV show.

The Concept of “Durable” Media

It’s interesting that as technology advances, every so often a media format emerges that is what I would call “durable.” It’s information or entertainment presented in a format that is a good cognitive match for our preferences and abilities. Even if technology is capable of adding “more” to these media, over time it turns out that “more” isn’t perceived as “better.”

Books are perhaps the most durable of media. The basic format of a book has been digitized, but our interaction with a book doesn’t look much different than it did in Guttenberg’s day. It’s still printed words on a page. Television also appears to be a durable medium. The format itself is fairly stable. It’s the revenue models that are built around it that will evolve as time goes on.

Facebook at Work – Stroke of Genius or Act of Desperation?

facebookworkSo, with the launching of Facebook at Work, Facebook wants to become your professional networking platform of choice, does it? Well, speaking as a sample of one, I don’t think so. And it all comes down to one key reason that I’ve talked about in the past, but for some reason, Facebook doesn’t seem to get – social modality.

Social modality is not a tough concept to understand. I’m one person in my office, another on the couch. The things that interest me in the office have little overlap with the things that interest me when I’m “sofa-tose” (nodding into a state of minimal consciousness on overstuffed furniture). But it’s not just about interests. It’s about context. I think differently. I act differently. I react differently. And I want to keep those two states as separate as possible.

Facebook seems to understand the need for separation. They’re building out Facebook at Work as a separate entity. But it’s still Facebook, and when I’ve got my business persona on, I don’t even think of Facebook. Neither, apparently, does anyone else. In 2010, BranchOut tried to build a professional network layer on top of Facebook. Last summer, it changed its business model. The reason? A lack of users. When you think of work, you just don’t think of Facebook. If fact, there’s almost an instinctual revulsion to the idea. Mixing Facebook and work is a cultural taboo.

When we look at the technologies we use to mediate our social activities, different rules apply. It’s not just about features or functionality – it’s about what instinctively feels right. Facebook is trying to create a monolithic platform for social connecting and that doesn’t seem to be where we’re heading. Rather than consolidating our social activity, it’s splintering over different tools and platforms. One reason is functionality. The other is that socially; we’re much too complex to fit into any one particular technological mold. I wrote a few months ago about the maturity continuum of social media. The final stage was to become a platform, which is exactly what Facebook is trying to do. But perhaps becoming a social media platform – at least in the sense that Facebook is attempting – isn’t possible. It could be that our social media personalities are too fractured to fit comfortably in any single destination.

Facebook’s revenue model depends on advertising, which depends on eyeballs. It’s a real estate play. Maybe to be successful, social has to be less about location and more about functionality. In other words, to become a social media platform, you have to be a utility, not a destination. Facebook seems to be trying to do both. According to an article in the Financial Times (registration required) Facebook at work will offer functionality through chat, contact management and document collaboration, but it will do so on a site that “looks very much like Facebook,” including, one assumes, ads served from Facebook. By trying to attract eyeballs to drive revenue, Facebook won’t be able to avoid mixing modality, and therein lays the problem. I suspect Facebook at Work will join an ever-increasing string of Facebook failures.

LinkedIn isn’t perfect, but it has definitely established itself as the B-to-B platform of choice. It fits our sensibilities of what a professional social networking tool should be. And it doesn’t suffer from Facebook’s overly ambitious hubris. It hasn’t launched “LinkedIn at Home” – trying to become the social network platform for our non-work life. It knows what it is. We know what it is. Our social modality isn’t conflicted. Facebook is another matter. It wants to be all things social to all people. I suppose from a revenue point you can’t blame them, but there’s a reason I don’t invite my co-workers to my family reunion – or vice versa.

Someday Facebook will learn that lesson. I suspect it will probably be the hard way.