Dazzle Ships

Here we go again...

Sighs of relief all round on the 8th January, as the Royal Institution announced that Baroness Susan Greenfield, whose increasingly hysterical pronouncements on gaming and social networking we've discussed at some length on Dazzle Ships, had been let go as the Institution's Director following a governance review.

But it appears this gave us only temporary respite from the stupid.

Now, as a general rule, life is too short to read Metro, however this morning's front page had such a startling headline that I was compelled to pick it up.

Gaming leads to surge in rickets, it shrieked.  (It was cancer last year)

'Video games and social networking sites have been blamed for a shocking rise in cases of rickets in children' according, Metro report, to a new study in the BMJ. 

Not being a subscriber to the BMJ, I've been unable to read the study (though the abstract makes no mention of gaming or social networks).

That said, Professor Simon Pearce, one of the authors, offers the following 'Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air.  This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years'.

Oh, please.  You might as well blame housing.  Or long sleeve shirts.  This is moronic.

Let's have look at what's happening in the fast moving world of gaming:

 Perhaps the biggest news is the rise of GPS and wi-fi connectivity which is driving a whole new genre that meshes the real world with a gaming element.

SoLocoMatrix, for example, is developing location based games like Fruit Farmer and Treasure Hunt, that encourage kids to run around in a real environment to find virtual objects and avoid virtual hazards.

A similar idea is Aspyr Media's 'Treasure World' for the Nintendo DS, which is already on sale in the US (and is getting rave reviews on Amazon).

 

For the iPhone fanatics out there, The Hidden Park, by Australian developer Bulpadok, is a download from the App store that overalys digital data onto real data, leading kids around their local parks, whilst giving them missions to accomplish and hazrds to avoid.  it currently supports nine cities, including London.

 

Another huge groth area is that of mental agility games, popularised, again, by the Nintendo DS and their Brain Training series.  So popular is this sector becoming that a chain store, Marbles, is spreading through the US, catering exclusively to this area of the market.

 

And it's not just big comapnies that are profitting from all this, gamers are as well.  Molecule Media's Little Big Planet actually allows players to create their own game levels and encoourage others to play them.  By the middle of last year, over 1 million of these levels had been created, which had been played over 250 million times, creating huge social and even revenue potential for those people prepared to put the time in.

 

So, Metro, it's not all bad.  And, while I'm here, I'm might as well have a go at that old canard that gaming stunts social development.

According to ESA's Essential Facts, 59% of gaming is now done in a face to face group setting.

In short, the wider debate about whether gaming is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad ‘ thing feels increasingly irrelevant and out of touch, based as it seems to be on a perception of games and gamers that bears less and less relation to reality.  They'll just carry on gaming, whilst the 'anti's', with their ever more ludicruous pronouncements, will increasingly look like the out of touch and hysterical, clinging desparately to every scrap of evidence, however tenuous and tangential, that supports their narrow and anachronistic views,  and become increasingly dvorced from reality.

Weirdly, that's one of the things they accuse gamers of being.

 

-- Toby 

Carrots and sticks

As Rory Sutherland pointed out in the video I posted last week, when dealing we economic issues we tend to ignore issues of perception in favour of rational structural solutions.  (Hence the decline in the influence of marketing and advertising within client organisations. Discuss)

But this is starting to change.  Reported in the hallowed pages of the Economist the results of an very interesting experiment in China.

In a working paper published in December of last year, Tanjim Hossain and John List showcased the results of an experiment with incentives in a Chinese technology manufaturing plant.

In the experiment staff received one of two letters.  In the first they were told they would receive a weekly bonus if they hit certain targets.  In the second they were told they had already been awarded the bonus but would forfeit it should they not hit said targets.

From the perspective of neo-classical economics these two options are identical, beacuse the value of something is defined by what it is, not how it is perceived.  But, of course, this is not how things turned out.  Perception is everything.

Why?  Well, the experiment illustrates something we've mentioned before.  Loss Aversion.  The basic principle that people feel losing something is more painful than gaining the same thing is pleasurable.  According to this theory, the people who were 'awarded' the bonus, but then could potentially lose it, would be more liklely to hit their targets than the other group.

And this is exactly what happened.

Even in the most seemingly rational of situations, perception is everything.

-- Toby

The School of Saatchi (and Saatchi)

  

Now, generally speaking, I quite like art. I believe it is, for the most part, a noble endeavour. I know a little about it, and am quite happy to talk about it until the main course is served. But that'll do just fine, thank you.  Let's not get carried away.

If there is one thing I do know, it's that the idea of 'School of Saatchi' is not a good one for the art world.  For those of you who missed it, it's still available on i-player here, but the basic 'lift-sell' is 'The Apprentice for art students, with Charles Saatchi as Suralan'.  This is not likely to appeal to 'art' people who will generally regard the idea of 'measuring' art with some disdain.  For non-art people, forty minutes of art students struggling with their muse, though often unintentionally hilarious, only serves to reinforce the stereotype of modern artists as precious, pretentious bullshitters.  A conclusion reinforced by the fact that the eventual winner, Eugenie, came across as a complete chancer throughout, to the extent that I was half expecting a 'Faking It' style denouement.  Now that would have been good telly.

Anyway, as I watched each episode I was struck by some pretty weird parallels between what was happening on screen and what we do.  These made me a bit, er, uncomfortable.  Here's what I noticed.

That to most of the artists, the idea was more important than the execution.

Most of the show consisted of our brave artists struggling to come up with an 'idea'.  Now, there's nothing wrong with this.  But, once the idea had been had, things started, in many cases to go a bit wrong.  First the execution of the idea was largely outsourced.  Again, there's nothing necessarily wrong with this.  Artists going back to Raphael have 'outsourced' the prodcution of their work to others.  But what really struck me was how unconcerned many, though not all, of these art students were about the final 'product'.  Lots of them just looked rubbish.  Nothing like the grand conceptions that had been introduced earlier in the episode.  This did them no favours in the judging.

But perhaps what was most interesting of all was that the winning work (shown above), did not come from an idea at all.  It was something the student noticed whilst walking home one day, she phoned the council, got them to cut out the bit of fence the tree was lodged on and, hey presto, art!  Again, I haven't got a problem with this.  The work was clearly the most visually interesting of all the contributions, and therefore, in my view, a deserved winner, but for Tracey Emin to call this a 'genius idea' is clearly missing the point.  There's no idea here at all.  It's all about the execution...

Additionally, the show's runner-up, Matt Clark, consistently the best performer (in my opinion and that of the blogosphere in general, it seems), seemed to spend less time agonising about the conceptual idea, and simply took the brief as 'How can I create something that will look amazing in this space'.

So, in conclusion, if you want to get ahead in the art world...

1.  Don't believe your job has finished after you've had the idea, make sure you see it through to execution

2.  An idea might be important to you, but creating something that gets noticed is important to the audience

3. Keep the brief simple, and stick to it

Good advice, that...

Toby

The Battle of Big Behavioural Economics

Apologies readers - I actually wrote this last year, but forgot to publish.  Sorry.  Toby.

I'm no fan of advertising fads.  I didn't like neuro-marketing, though I will concede that it was a worthwhile attempt to add some scientific respectability to what we do, even if sticking people in MRI scanners seemed a little far-fetched.

After this hoopla died down (too much like hard work), we moved onto 'engagement' and 'conversations'.  I liked these even less.  Though some interesting ideas did emerge, everything became a bit slippery and notional, and I couldn't help but feel we were basically talking to each other in ever more elaborate ways, whilst everyone else, just ignored us.  I think Rory Sutherland summed it up perfectly when he said marketing's like astrology - all the stuff we talk about sounds very impressive to 'believers', but to everyone else just sounds like bollocks.  Try explaining 'engagement' as a big idea to someone who doesn't work in marketing and they'll just stare at you, slightly bemused, and smiling and nodding politely.  (I know, I've tried).

Last year, though, this started to change.  Rory Sutherland became IPA President and set out his agenda to 'promote the value of agencies' by linking what we do to behavioural economics.

So, what do we think of this?  Have we been here before?  Is behavioual economics this year's neuromarketing?

I believe the answer is no.  This approach is hugely promising and deserves to work.  For the following reasons.

First, unlike the nascent neuro-science, behavioural economics is actually pretty well established.  Notwithstanding it's current popularity (ref. Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, The Logic of Life et al.), the foundations of the approach were outlined in the 1970s, by academics like Daniel Kahneman and Gary Becker (the latter's The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour of 1976 is something of a fonudational work, and well worth a look).

Second, the basic principle that underpins the field, that people don't behave as 'neo-classical' economics says they should, is in large part, the same premise that underpins advertising and communication - if everyone's buying behaviour was completely considered and rational, then a huge proportion of what we do is a total waste of money (though of course, this may still be true).  Daniel Kahneman's Nobel citation congratulated him on 'integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgement and decision under uncertainty'.  This, to me, sounds like a pretty accurate description of what we try to do.

This leads me nicely to my third point.  Whilst in theory we may claim to do the same as Kahneman, the reality is we don't.  Not really.  I think it's pretty unlikely any of our research projects (with apologies to our fabulous insight team) will be on the radar of the Nobel committee.  This, of course, does not stop us drawing on the last 30 years of accumulated research to help in our planning.  In fact, this is something smart planners, agencies and marketers have been doing anyway.

Whilst, unlike classical economics, there aren't a set of behavioural economics 'rules', there are a set of well-researched, well-documented theories that provide great insight into human behaviour.  Try the following as a taster - Loss Aversion, the Endowment Effect, Time-delay choice, Option-paralysis.  Anyone reading this stuff will immediately, I hope, be able to see how it can be applied to what we do. 

(For those of you who work at OMD, Alex and I have saved a series of articles and research papers on the Exchange, that deal with all of these theories, and a load more besides, in much more detail.  Go read them - they're really interesting.)

So, after clutching at straws for the last few years, it feels like we really might be onto something with this approach - finally we've got the research and the langauge to provide a really robust intellectual framework for what we do.  This is one industry initative we should get behind and wholeheartedly support.

And, if nothing else, we'll get more great talks like this:

-- Toby