Dazzle Ships

Halve your advertising budget

Strategy is about compromise. We can't influence everyone we'd like to and we can't use all the media channels we'd like to at every stage of the path to purchase. However often I think many comms planners try to get too close to this. Ultimately our job is to make some tough calls. Should we focus on one audience or community? (Non-users, those who are easiest to influence, or maybe passionate fans of the brand?). Should we ruthlessly focus on certain elements of the pathway? (Focus on getting on the consideration list, focus on trial or maybe just nip in there at the purchase decision occassion and steal the sale?). Should we focus on less media channels, dayparts or appertures? Or within this focus mainly on certain titles or properties? (Breakfast only, Sunday night TV, Online at lunchtimes or say bar events on big night outs?).  Or should we just focus over a shorter time period or for example all on one day?

With a big(ger) comms budget it's tempting to cover more bases and potentially spread influence out too thinly. So here's an exercise that might encourage us to work out our priorities:

Halve you comms budget, come up with a strategy, ideas and plan on this budget. Now double the plan up. You may have just found it much easier to compromise.

Stephen

More mobile madness

Another example of just how clever and useful mobile phones are. An article in Ad Age drew my attention to a application called Citysense. This application, which you can download to your Blackberry and soon your iPhone, allows you to see what the density of population is like in any part of the city (currently limited to San Fran but ready to expand) at any time. It does this through monitoring the GPS data from mobile phones, to follow people's movements. Clearly some potential privacy issues, but the data is held anonymously. So, you can see where people are congregating and if the crowd level is higher or lower than usual.

What use could this be? It's being positioned as useful to the average punter to allow them to avoid or intercept crowds. For example, an alarm on your phone would wake you up earlier if it 'senses' that the streets are busier than usual, so you might struggle to get into work on time. And if you're looking for a good night out, you can see which spots really are hot, right now.

Not only that, but it has the potential to provide information that is personalised, based on your behaviour. The application will learn from your own movements and behaviour (given you take your mobile out with you) to see what kind of places you frequent. It can then match this data against the database to match you to people like you - those who go to similar sorts of places. Then, when you want a night out, you can see what places these people like you are actually at, and make a beeline to them.

Quite clever.

From a media perspective, you could see how this information would be valuable to outdoor contractors (it's currently used by retailers to help decide where to position stores). Given we're on the verge of being able to place ads in thin air in particular places (GPS positioned ads that you pick up on your mobile when you get to that position), it would also be very useful for that. And we can imagine how brands related to socialising or traffic and travel would be interested in getting involved.

One to keep an eye on, should it make it over to these shores. Or might we even bring it over here ourselves, with one of the brands we work with?

-- Alex

Tiny people make great viral

Thank you Sarah McBeath for this one.  The video at first appears to be an official review of the new  Samsung Omnia (i900) model from an industry blogger called Technivator.  If you go to the blog you will see that Samsung are behind it.  An entertaining and great little idea that has delivered over a million views on YouTube already. 

Sam

Jesus Shot

Tiger Woods can walk on water, it's official! 

Well not really, but it's a neat little response from EA to a blog posted a year ago that exposed a glitch in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 game. Funny enough the viral coincides with the launch of Tiger Woods 09. Enjoy.

Sam 

The 'Wisdom of Crowds'

(Read the answer).

Who says Americans are provincial?

From the hilarious Fail blog.

-- Toby

The best ad... from Essex?

Is for Rainham Sheds. See the video right here.

Genius...

Stephen

(nicked from the excellent Scamp blog)

Uncanny Valley

Thanks to everyone who followed up on the narcissism of small differences post last week.  Several of you pointed me in the direction of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, which though it's been sitting on my desk for a few months, apparently covers similar territory to John Gourville's stuff on buying behaviour.

A couple of you also mentioned Uncanny Valley, a related concept, again built from Freud.   

Uncanny Valley is a theory developed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970's and hypthesises that as robots become more human-like, so people's empathy with them grows until a point where they are nearly, but not quite, lifelike, at which point approval ratings plummet and a feeling more akin to revulsion sets in.  Hence :

   

In effect, the robot (or prosthetic) has crossed the line between being a 'good robot' and being a 'bad human'.

It's a persuasive theory, and potentially a strong argument for the inferiority of 'virtual' experiences versus actual ones. 

Until you see this...

Wow.  We may just have climbed out of Uncanny Valley.

(Thanks to Ad-lab for the video link)

-- Toby

So that's where they come from

(Thanks to Tudinh)

Anyone know who did this?

-- Toby

Paris for President! Woo!

It's not often that we'll sing the praises of Paris Hilton.  But this is brilliant.

As you may or may not know, the McCain campaign in the US recently ran an ad attacking Obama, complaining that he was a lightweight celebrity, along the lines of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton :

Well, it seems that Paris, with her finely tuned antenna for publicity, is not going to take this, ahem, lying down.  She's hit back with this:

"See you at the debates, bitches"

Nice one.

-- Toby

The narcissism of small differences

This phrase, first coined by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), was used to explain the inbuilt aggression of humans, particularly in ethnic or religious conflict.

The idea is that we tend to feel negative towards people similiar to us, and take pride in the things that separate us, however slight these may seem to 'outsiders'.  Hence 'the narcissism of small differences'.

Anyone who works in marketing will be familiar with this idea.  As our ex-client, Martin Glenn, so succinctly put it "Marketing departments tend to over-value 'different' and under-value 'better'.  I could give you example after example of where 'better' beats 'different' and why there is more money to be made in that strategy".

Quite so. But also not surprising.  'Better' is difficult.  It means understanding your consumers.  It means designing and making stuff they want.  'Different', on the other hand, is easy.  It can be added in later, with a bit of marketing sparkle.

John Gourville of Harvard Buisness School has written extensively about this (something we've also talked about before).  In his paper, The Psychology of Product Adoption, he explains how sellers over-value their new products because they are so much more involved in their markets than consumers are.  They know every single detail, all the spec, and can explain in minute detail all the things that set their product apart from the competition.  Consumers, on the other hand, don't care.  Changing their behaviour has a cost (financial and psychological).  They are often unwilling to pay this, hence the well documented recognition heuristic.  Basically, that people place a higher value on things they are familiar with.

It's very easy for us to fall into the same trap.  Don't.  Focus on 'better', not 'different'.

-- Toby