Buyhaviour 10: Survivorship bias

May 20, 2020

Picture the end-scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: the rickety bridge with the crocs snapping below. What's the odds of swimming across that river and surviving?

Now imagine, if you miraculously avoided getting eaten alive, that it was your job to do it again - and again and again. You'd be on a hiding to nothing.

This was the lot of WW2 bomber pilots. They had to fly mission after mission across enemy lines in highly-vulnerable planes.

To give them a fighting chance, airforce engineers found a way to lighten the aircraft so to add more armour, but they couldn't put it everywhere otherwise the plane would be too heavy. So, the question was: where should they attach the extra armour for maximum effectiveness?

So they analysed their returned bombers, observed where bullet holes were clustered, and then proposed the armour be reinforced in the spots where the clusters were most dense.

Pretty logical, right - protect where you can see takes the most bullets?

Nope. It's a mental short-cut: the survivorship bias. The clusters actually show where the plane is the strongest, not weakest - the areas that could take damage and the plane return - the proof palpable.

Marketers and advertisers are victim to this bias, too. It explains the irrational intoxication with loyalty and retention (targeting existing buyers). Let me translate a couple of the above lines for context:

To help save a brand, marketers were given a finite sum of funds. The only question: where should they allocate them?

So they analysed their category, observed where their current customers clustered, and then proposed the funds be allocated towards them.

In other words: a campaign reinforcing - like the bullet holes - where they're already strong. And like the bombers, at first glance, this feels logical (just ask Kevin Roberts), but it's not.

"Retention is better than acquisition, is one of the most enduring myths of marketing... In reality, potential gains from acquisition dwarf the potential gains from retention." (Sharp & Newstead 2010)

If you actually want your brand (airplane) to survive and be successful you need to pay attention to the customers (bullet holes) you don't have. 'Pay' being the operative word, because you need to generally 'pay' to reach them; then nudge them into becoming buyers.

And, if you're after evidence, look no further than Disney - the smartest advertisers on the planet - and how they marketed the new Star Wars: The force is strong in this placement.

Buyhaviour 1: Availability Bias
Buyhaviour 2: Status Quo Bias
Buyhaviour 3: Confirmation Bias
Buyhaviour 4: Conjunction Fallacy
Buyhaviour 5: The Spotlight Effect
Buyhaviour 6: The Matthew Effect
Buyhaviour 7: Fight or Flight Heuristic
Buyhaviour 8: Imposter Phenomenon
Buyhaviour 9: Red Queen Hypothesis
Buyhaviour 10: Survivorship Bias

Byron Sharp and Kate Newstead, ‘Loyalty is not the Holy Grail’, Admap, September 2010

The idea assembly line

April 8, 2020

Tl;dr Coming up with insights is the first stage of the creative process, so planners shouldn't do it without creatives. It doubles the work and creates a subpar product.

Ideas have become the pins in Adam Smith’s eighteenth century assembly line. The creative process has been chopped up and divided across departments.

Stephen King, the planner, not the creepy clown guy, was onto something when he said the creative process is like Francis Bacon’s scientific method.

They’re both journeys of discovery. You start with observations (insights), then you hypothesise (ideas), and then you stress-test (reviews).

The ‘idea’ assembly line takes the first step of the journey - observation - from the creatives, and gives it to planners, who then pass them down the line to creatives to come up with the ideas.

But creatives simply can’t inherit an insight. It’s part of the process we can’t outsource, because it’s an integral building block to coming up with the idea.

John Lennon sums it up nicely: "You can't paint a picture on dirty paper, you need a clean sheet". By having someone else do part of the process, creatives start with dirty paper.

A planner’s role isn’t to do part of the creative’s job, so they certainly shouldn't be doing the insight stage without creatives. At the very least, insights should be worked on together.

When planners do concept insights independently, it results in the work spending more time away from the creatives; resulting in a rushed, subpar product.

Worse, because creatives can’t begin the process halfway through, they invariably redo the work, coming up with new insights - unbilled and afterhours.

It’s like being in a relay team, but the first runner is a chess player, and when they finally pass the baton, the second runner is actually at the start, anyway.

Of course a planner has a valuable role to play, interrogating a client brief before it reaches creative, but that should lead to the start of the creative process; not start it.

If we need to get from A to B, a strategy outlines what A and B are; an idea is the route we take to get there. In other words, ideas are how we’re going to tactically achieve a strategy.

Yet, all too often creatives can get hemmed in by a planner’s idea - sold to client - masquerading as strategy. In that case, not only has the process been started, but its first step is set in stone.

We can’t treat ideas like a widget on an assembly line. It’s reductive to the creative process; it wastes everyone’s time, effort and sanity, and worst of all, it treats ideas like a commodity.

Buddha's poisoned arrow and advertising

August 11, 2019

Buddha said, suppose you were shot by a poisoned arrow, but instead of letting the doctor remove it immediately, you first need to know who shot it, his age, his parents, his hometown, his favourite colour, his favourite food, what type of bow he used, what the bow was made of, what the arrows were made of, and what feathers were on the arrow. You'll be dead before you get your answers.

Likewise with advertising briefs. The agency receives a brief from the client, and instead of giving it straight to the creatives - the doctors in this metaphor - who will solve the problem (pull the arrow out), it instead spends months getting analysed to death in planning.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”, said the sagacious Mike Tyson. We know we're going to (figuratively) get punched in the face by client feedback, so aren't we better off just jumping in the ring as soon as possible, to give ourselves the best chance to get it right?

The cynic in me is aware it's corporate procrastination to extract more money out of our clients, who are happy to oblige because of an irrational enchantment of the mere mention of the word 'strategy'.

But make no mistake, the singular reason top brands use agencies is for their creative ideas. The rest they can do themselves. So, just imagine how much better the ideas would be, if the people doing the actual ideas, got more time to work on them? What if the man in Buddha's teachings just let the doctor get on with his job?

Christopher Ott

A second technique for producing ideas

July 24, 2019

Says James Webb Young, "An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements". And, like balding CDs in trucker hats, this concept is now entrenched in our industry.

The concept metaphorically being that our brains are something like a depository of dots - experiences, impressions, observations and ideas - all waiting to be joined.

This familiar technique is actually called analogy thinking. And, along with ad agencies everywhere becoming increasingly homogenous - being filled with upper-middle class white people on Google, referencing Errol Morris commercials - it helps explain why so much advertising is the same.

We're all using the same technique.

But it's not the only technique. There's a second: 'first principles'. It's a science term also known as ab initio. Latin for: from the beginning.

With this technique you build an idea from the ground up, rather than from an existing experience sideways.

In other words, First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental truths and reasoning up from there.

In philosophy it's called a priori knowledge, which means knowledge independent of experience. Plato describes it as inherent and intrinsic to the subject.

Just like first principle, it has an antithesis; called a posteriori knowledge, which is defined by its dependancy on experience, or analogy.

And, while a posteriori or analogy thinking is well established in our industry, a priori or first principles thinking is not.

Elon Musk used First Principle thinking for his ground breaking batteries, and we can do the same with ideas for our brands. Once you isolate all its elements you can build your advertising from the bottom up - ab initio.

Whatever execution you come up with from that will be, like Plato said, 'intrinsic' or 'inherent' to the subject. In other words it'll be inexorably salient and ownable by your brand.

Compare that to gratuitously transplanting a brand sideways into something 'cool' you’ve seen on Youtube or (worse) another commercial, and it's easy to see the value of first principles thinking in advertising.

Where analogy thinking promotes derivative, hackneyed ideas. First principles - unshackled by the safety of previous experience - has the power to produce genuinely original and exciting ideas.

Christopher Ott

Why a creative became a planner (Updated)

May 8, 2019

To save us all from dying, King Sisyphus tricked and chained-up Hades, the god of the underworld. This enraged Ares the god of war, who’s job, sans killing, became somewhat redundant.

For his effrontery, Ares found and punished Sisyphus. Damning him to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only for it to roll down each night for him to start over, ad infinitum.

Whether for new business or new ideas, advertising creatives get stuck in this Sisyphean nightmare - pitching for the paper shredder. Toiling to conceive creative ideas that don't get sold in.

Einstein's platitudinous quote comes to mind: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Yet that's what we ask of creatives.

Dan Ariely quantified the effect in an experiment. In it he paid 2 groups to build Lego Bionicles. The pivotal difference between the groups was this: the first's was pulled apart later, while the second's was dismantled as they were built - in front of their eyes.

The result: The first group averaged 11 Bionicles; the second only 7. In other words, seeing the fruits of your labor amount to nothing - like the boulder rolling back down the hill - decreases motivation.

The same way the participants were demotivated by seeing their Lego destroyed, so are creatives when their work persistently finds a home in their bottom drawers rather than out in the wild.

Albert Camus, the french existentialist, says "the struggle itself towards the heights [of the mountain] is enough to fill a man's heart". While some version of this is what creatives tell themselves to carry-on, I don't buy it - not when it's proven that creativity's the cornerstone of effectiveness.

Look no further than Binet and Field's watershed work 'The Long and Short of It', which irrefutably concludes that big fame-making ideas - the ones clients are averse to - are the most effective.

Coming up with ideas is punishing enough on creatives for them to be repeatedly dismantled. Someone, who clients aren't skeptical of acting out of self-interest, has to protect the ideas. To champion creativity. To help avoid a Sisyphean tragedy.

And that's why I swapped Keynote for Powerpoint, and why I went back to study, and became a full time planner - not just a creative who thought they’re a strategist because they learned the word ‘differentiation’.

But it didn’t last. It was all input and no output. I missed creating things, so I went back to the creative department - better, smarter, stronger for the experience. Who says the Renaissance man is dead, eh?

Buyhaviour 9: Red Queen Hypothesis

January 20, 2019

The most curious part of the thing was [as they ran] that the trees and the other things around them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. And the Queen cried, 'Faster! Don't try to talk!'...

... And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now'.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!' 'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?' 'Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.

''A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

From Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking-Glass; known as The Red Queen's Race. And a metaphor for marketing.

At The Ehrenberg Bass Institute we called it 'The Leaky Bucket Effect': Your brand inexorably leaks customers (as it shares them with other brands according to the duplication of purchase law), so you have to continuously acquire new ones, just to keep the bucket at the same level.

In other words, like the Red Queen, you have to run very fast just to stay in the exact same spot - hold your market share. Yet, because of the current fascination with loyalty, this presents an opportunity for your brand:

While others are obsessed with trying to plug the leak - over-investing in digital, which generally limits reach to existing customers - you have a chance to follow the queen's advice and 'run twice as fast' by focussing on reach and acquisition.

Thinking outside the Lego box

June 19, 2018

Originally published in Adnews 14 October 2015: What Lego can teach us about creative briefs

A planner is only as good as the ideas of their creatives. Which means, next to representing the consumer, a planner's role should be to champion ideas and be the guardian of creative culture.

Page Moreau, marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin, and Marit Gundersen Engeset of Norway's Buskerud and Vestfold University, conducted an experiment on creativity, which produced results that can arguably be applied to advertising.

Their experiment got one group of children to build Lego using kits with instructions (i.e. Star Wars Lego), and the other group to free-build using Lego arbitrarily poured on the ground (i.e. childhood).

And the results: "The kids who tackled the well-defined problem of building the kits performed worse on subsequent creative tasks than a control group and those who built whatever they felt like."

Moreau's main take-out: "The search for the single right answer was largely responsible for the decline in creative performance." In other words: Instructions undermine creativity.

John Lennon - one of the most creative men in history - sums it up nicely: "You can't paint a picture on dirty paper, you need a clean sheet".

Which begs the question: By dictating what's to be communicated, in the form of a 'strategic' advertising brief, have we been unwittingly fostering an uncreative environment?

Because if a brief is not essentially a set of instructions, what is it? And, equally, what's a proposition - single minded, unique or otherwise - if it's not aiming for a 'single right answer'?

Effective advertising, according to Binet and Field's IPA research, is work that achieves salient fame (not the transmission of a persuasive message, or proposition). There's certainly no 'single right' message to achieve fame, so why have we been writing briefs like there is?

All we've been achieving by doing so, if the results of the Lego study are correct, is putting the creatives in a mindset that inhibits creative thinking - and subsequently, results.

So, instead of writing as if briefs are a set of instructions (dirtying John Lennon's paper), all we need to include are the building blocks - insights, associations, category conventions, brand's market-based assets etc.

Then get out of the way and let creatives play.

Christopher Ott

Totally brandom ideas

April 10, 2018

Why would I listen to a shrimp sandwich, or buy insurance from a talking bear, or deodorant from a guy on a horse? Rubbish. Amirite?

If you're nodding your head in agreement right now, you clearly don't get it. Sorry, but these commercials with random ideas are exactly what advertising should be.

I can picture the advertising purists, of the Rosser Reeves ilk, watching them in contempt. Wondering, how is this going to sell products? Where's the unique selling proposition? Where's the persuasion?

I can also picture potential customers watching it on TV, with their perfectly rational mind ticking over, shaking their heads at the absurdity... and smiling.

Lucky for us, advertising is not a sales pitch. Sales pitches are for salesman not advertisers.

Advertising is about memory. Its role is to make a brand mentally available to potential buyers, so next buying occasion they remember them.

For this to happen, commercials need to firstly get noticed, and secondly refresh and build its distinct branding assets in the audience's minds and achieve salience.

This is precisely what these types of spots achieve. The randomness achieves cut-through (noticeability) and, at the same time, they are well branded (memorability).

What they are not doing is bludgeoning the audience with a blunt unique selling proposition in a vain attempt to differentiate its brand - crisper taste, softest tissue etc.

It's a case of irrational distinction trouncing rational differentiation. Or as Eaon Pritchard put it, meaningless distinctiveness over meaningful differentiation.

MailChimp, Geico, Old Spice and, getting closer to home, Aldi, need to be commended for trusting their agency to go in the direction of this brave new world.

A world that puts cut-through ahead of a rational message. And even puts like-ability before a message, which is the final ingredient along with noticeability and memorability to create great advertising.

I call the phenomena 'brandom ideas', and we should be excited, because more executions like these are coming and they're brilliant, creatively and strategically.

Why most of your adspend is wasted - a case for creativity

June 5, 2017

To all the marketers out there banging your head against a wall wondering why your advertising is ignored. The answer is simple. Most recipients of your advertising messages aren't demanders of it.

Most people, when they are exposed to your advertising - due to availability, timing, gender, money and a million other reasons - simply aren't in the market for your product.

The implications are obvious. If your audience aren't in the market for your product and therefore not demanders of your message, then they just won’t care about your (message) advertising. And if they don't care about your advertising you're wasting your money.

And because wasting money is bad, you, and we as an industry, need to reevaluate our obsession with message-oriented marketing (unique selling propositions etc.).

Says Gossage "The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interest them, and sometimes it's an ad."

So, instead of creating advertising that's reminiscent of a sales pitch, what if we created ads that focus on entertaining, instead? Ones that prioritise cut-through over a laundry list of features, that are creative and demand the audience to snap out of their aloof stupors and pay attention to the commercial in front of them.

While people may not be receptive to advertising messages, everyone is receptive to great entertainment.

This isn't just the fanciful musings of an advertising creative. No. This sort of advertising is effective. In fact, it's the only effective sort of advertising, and here's why:

If your audience is entertained by your commercial, they will like it and pay attention. If you achieve this then (assuming you've branded it right) your brand will get fixed in their memory. And if you achieve that, then when your audience are (eventually) in a position to buy you, you have a better chance of that happening because they remember you. (Compared to them not paying attention to your advertising, not remembering you and not buying you).

Christopher Ott

Buyhaviour 8: Imposter phenomenon

April 22, 2017

"The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler", said Albert Einstein. Unbelievably.

"Impostor syndrome is a phenomenon where people are unable to own their accomplishments. Despite evidence otherwise, those with the syndrome remain convinced they're frauds" (1987).

Originally thought to only effect high achieving women*; then extended to minority groups; then graduates. From talking to colleagues, I'd say advertising creatives are also susceptible to it.

Because - unlike doctors or accountants or labourers - our work is subjective. There's no right or wrong in creativity (just like in Einstein's physics) - and this fosters a nursery of doubts.

Knowing this, you'd think agencies would go out of their way to reassure creatives - the ones that actually make the work that earns them money - that they're valued; that they're not imposters.

But in my experience, inexplicably, the ad industry conspires to keep creatives under the thumb of the phenomenon.

Even from the very beginning, with grads left with no option but interning for free, and juniors only getting paid a pittance - the least of every department.

Then throw in the awards culture, that artificially pits creative teams against each other, which inadvertently breeds unscrupulous douchebags that'll do anything to get ahead.

Plus the vitriolic comments on the blogs (The industry seems incapable of mum's simple rule: If you don't have anything nice to say don't say it at all) - screw professional camaraderie.

And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, a couple of years ago agencies began saying ideas can come from anywhere; totally diminishing the creative's role.

Without creatives, ad agencies don't exist. Simple. Can we say the same about other departments? But instead of allaying their 'imposter' fears, the industry systemically perpetuates them.

And yet in spite of all this, brilliant work still gets done. Those not eaten alive, the ones that prove to themselves they aren't imposters, come out the other side humbled and empowered - unstoppable.

I'll leave you with this from Bob Hoffman:"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."
*Although not the lead, it's also worth mentioning that I've met a confounding number of intelligent, successful women - from suits to strategists - who suffer from the 'Imposter Syndrome' in our industry. Embarrassingly, many of these points - lower pay especially - are compounded for them - and desperately needs to change.

Clance, Pauline Rose; Imes, Suzanne A. (1978). "The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention."

How advertising can save the world

January 16, 2017

Advertising has the power to change minds, not just toothpaste. And based on what's going on in the Middle East, and even the Frankston bus, there are lots of minds that need changing.

I have school mates who work for the WHO. Uni friends that've set up schools in Timor, and then there's me, in advertising. These friends, the same ones I'd save the world over a cigarette with, are confounded by my decision to work in the ad industry. But i believe in advertising.

We're at an interesting time in history. Everyone's hyper aware of all the bad in the world. It's become the 10 minute newsfeed cycle. Clicktavists hit 'like', feel morally satiated and move on.

And, unfortunately, the people and organisations that do care are like any client too close to their brand. They believe all they need to do is tell people and they'll act. Plus, they simply don't have the money, time or resources for a big behavioural change campaign.

Enter advertising. "Advertising justifies itself when it is used for social purposes." Howard Luck Gossage said that, and he's right.

Advertising holds the key. We know it takes creativity to change minds. Like a kick in the gut, we're versed in the magic that makes people 'feel' problems - not just be aware of them. Not only that, but we also know where a whole lot of money is - our clients.

That's why it's our job to marry the private greed with the public need. To convince our clients to spend their marketing dollars on campaigns that actually make a difference.

And it doesn't need to be as lofty as solving humanity's greatest problems. We live in a time where there's higher levels of depression than ever before. Everywhere you turn; every link you follow there's some charlatan pushing a new brand of self-help.

So even if we simply created ads that make people laugh - over a sales guy yelling over a powerpoint presentation hurtling a laundry list of features at you - we can help increase the collective utility and make the world a better place.

This is not the wistful musings of a self-loathing adman. Corporations (our cashed up clients) truly can help save the planet while simultaneously making better advertising than they do.

Thanks to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, we all now know that advertising works by helping brands become and stay mentally available - not on how persuasive they can be. And, equally, thanks to IPA's 'Long and Short of It' it's also now irrefutable that effective advertising is about creating big fame-making, emotion-inducing ideas.

That means, creating and refreshing memory structures is the number one objective of any advertising effort. Whatever ownable association we decide to use to achieve this is up to us. So why wouldn't we use ones that can do some good along the way? Ones that, it turns out, have a greater potential to find fame, incite emotion and ultimately be more effective.

very brand you have ever worked on, and will ever work on, has an association with a problem. I've worked on a university - so we pitched an idea about solving adult illiteracy. I've worked on a bedding retail store - pitched an idea to provide beds for the homeless.

Think about Luxottica, who owns eye health, how they along with Saatchi Sydney won big with their brilliant campaign that tested kids' eyes with the Penny the Pirate kids' book.

Plus, earned media has become the holy grail. Doing good things gets brands in the news like nothing else.
You have to be inside a plane to change its trajectory. That's why all of us in advertising have to help elevate our industry out of its quagmire of greed and superficiality.

Advertising is powerful. It can change behaviour. It reaches the masses, which means it has the power to shape culture like nothing else. And like Uncle Ben in Spiderman says: "With great power comes great responsibility". So what are we waiting for?

The GenerHATER

August 18, 2016

Generhater.com

“Cancer mixed with full blown aids” is one of the more frequent and repugnant comments we found on the industry blogs. Says Chris who, along with mates Michael and Jari, have created the GenerHATER.

The GenerHATER is a satirical look at the hateful comments that are all too commonplace in the industry.

‘Because why should people too busy with their own work miss out on insulting others’. Says Jari who, if you ask, will look you straight in the eye and tell you he’s not being sarcastic.

The boys trawled sites like Campaign Brief to find and aggregate the most common zingers. And, having done the research, they’d be the first to admit that some of the comments are pretty creative.

But it’s wasted creativity.

“Hate hate hate” says Michael, who’s better known in the industry as Fudge - a named bestowed upon him by Pat Vitetta; after a fagioli bean, which means ‘little bean’ in Italian.

What Fudge means is, this isn’t condemning feedback. Peer feedback absolutely has a role in our industry. It simply makes the point: if a robot can come up with the same-old burns then they don’t count for much, do they?

Think inside the box

June 10, 2016

Originally published in adnews.com.au 3 March 2015.

As a card carrying creative, what I’m about to say could get me kicked out the circle. Despite what you think you know, ‘thinking outside the box’ is the single most erroneous platitude in the history of creativity.

Thinking inside the box is the real tip. Restrictions, constraints, parameters, boundaries – whatever you call them - create a box that keeps ideas salient, and surprisingly more creative.

“Give me the freedom of a tight brief” Ogilvy.
In the case of an advertising brief, it guarantees whatever idea you come up with (inside the box), it will achieve one of the main objectives of any campaign: to be remembered.
Advertising works by getting your brand stuck in your audience’s minds, so when they’re in a buying situation next they’ll be more likely to buy you.

This means for your ads to be effective, they need to be loaded with memory cues that make it easy for this to occur - like the little hooks on Velcro, each cue makes your idea more adhesive and easier to remember.

How do you make sure your ideas are stacked with said cues? Simple. You think inside the box. It’s impossible to introduce random or un-ownable objects, environments, symbols or ideas if your thinking’s focussed inside the world of the brand.

And not only does it make your advertising more effective; it also makes it more creative. Which achieves the other essential ingredient to effective advertising: to get noticed.

If your advertising doesn’t get noticed it may as well not exist. And to be noticed it needs to be creative. Thinking within the box achieves this, too.

A team of researchers (2009) looked for patterns in highly awarded ads – trying to crack the ad code - and what they found was that the best ads all had something in common:

They worked in the ‘closed world’ of the brand. In other words ‘the box’.

What does this all mean for creatives, and the suits and clients that brief them?

If we know an advert needs to be conceived inside the box to be effective and creative - to get noticed and remembered - then it gives us all a new starting point.

The suits can outline the box in their brief, it gives clients something to judge the ideas on (other than what their partner/dog/goldfish think), and it lets creatives start with more than just a blank sheet of paper.

“When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” TS Eliot.
‘Thinking outside the box’ is a bum steer. It will only lead you away from the solution to your brief. And if that happens you’ll end up wasting a lot of time reigning your ideas back to relevance – that is, instead of making magic.

Think inside the box. Not outside.

Goldenberg J, Levav A, Mazursky D, Solomon S. 2009. Cracking the Ad Code. Cambridge University Press.

Buyhaviour 7: Fight or Flight Heuristic

March 14, 2016

It's three thousand years ago. You're out hunting; you spear an antelope. You edge towards it, but as you approach you spot a stranger. He's stalking the same prize, ready to maul you should you try and take his dinner. What do you do?

Fast forward a few millennia. You're in the boardroom selling in your ideas to your CD, suits and planners. Another team, who're after the same prize, take aim and, like the spear to the antelope, tear it apart. What do you do?

With both, you have two options. Fight or flight. An instinct passed down from our ancestors' jungles to our modern boardrooms. And, now, possibly our single biggest barrier to creating great work.

Without friction there's no fire. And, like Yates said: "education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire".

We've been hardwired to avoid conflict. To think it's bad. To take it all personally. We're all haunted by this lingering instinct that gets our necks up.

Bill Shakespeare explored it in Hamlet, too: Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms and by opposing end them.

In other words, to say nothing and consider yourself noble (take flight with the excuse that you're the bigger person), or to fight for your work and end any disagreement.

With conflict groups in qual research, finding two groups diametrically opposed to an issue results in impassioned thrusts and parries - making them a goldmine for insights.

But, here's the thing: now that we're civilised - and because we're all grown ups - it doesn't have to be one or the other. This instinct that served us so well for so long is now obsolete. Worse, it's a handicap.

Conflict is where thinking gets sharp; tension where insights found, and chaos where creativity is cradled.

I can't find a reference of it being referred to as an heuristic before, but it certainly has all the hallmarks. It's an irrational system 1 shortcut we have to overcome in an evolved world.

And it's the people that shed it first - who don't take everything personally, or make things personal - who'll enjoy an upper-hand over the rest of us.

So, next time you feel that lump form in the back of your throat, your stomach start to swell and that nagging in the back of your mind getting louder; spear it dead and speak your mind.

Is Feldwick's benign conspiracy really benign?

February 21, 2016

We open on a vain king and a pair of tailors (you've heard this story but stay with me). The tailors promise to weave the finest suit for the king; with one catch: the garment can only be seen by the smartest of people.

The king agrees and the tailors spin him the suit. And, to prove he was smart, the king absolutely adored it. So much, in fact, that he promptly paraded his new suit through town.

Not wanting to appear stupid, all the townspeople admired the king. That is, before a boy yelled: "He's got nothing on!". Spell broken, the crowd saw the truth - the king was naked.

If the king was our client. Are we (advertising agencies) the tailors, the crowd or the boy?

I'd say some agencies act like the 'tailors', hustling illusory and concocted ideas of how advertising works - which they know the client will buy. Rosser Reeves' USP is a great example.

Others are the 'crowd'. The ones who read the top 10 advertising books (i.e. Lovemarks) full of hunches, and blindly believe them without needing any evidence. Most social media agencies (peddling that growth comes from hyper-loyalty) are a good example.

And finally, there's the 'boy'. Which, thanks to the Ehrenberg Bass institute and the IPA's research into effectiveness, there's been a recent surge. I.e. Bob Hoffman, Byron Sharp, Martin Weigel.

But, as Paul Feldwick observes in his phenomenal book 'The Anatomy of Humbug', it's not black and white. Typically, agencies aren't one or the other. In reality, they're all of them.

He calls it 'the benign conspiracy'. Which hypothesises that all three characters are happening complicity inside an agency.

The planners are the 'tailors' (telling the client what they need to hear to get an idea up), the suits: the 'crowd' (being obsequious to the king/client), and the creatives: the 'boy' (dropping truth bombs - putting ideas first).

Like Van Damme doing the splits between two Volvo trucks, this is a delicate and dangerous balancing act. How do you think the king felt when the penny dropped he was naked?

Probably the same way our clients will feel if we persist with the (airquotes) 'benign' conspiracy. So, what do you think, is the benign conspiracy really benign?

Christopher Ott

The force is strong in this placement

October 27, 2015

On Monday night last week it was as if millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced, in delight. Like the Millennium Falcon out of hyperspace The Force Awakens trailer finally dropped.

To an audience that, if hundreds of American high school flicks about jocks and nerds have been correct, are generally not science fiction fans. And contrary to received Kotlerian wisdom, this was a masterstroke.

For brand growth - increased market share; sales - it's imperative to reach non and light buyers. Precisely what Disney did by showing the trailer during ESPN's Monday Night Football.

Where unthinking marketers would've intuitively played it during DC's Arrow or Flash tv shows, or at the start of a Marvel film as Disney did with the teaser - fishing where the fish are - Disney did not.

Christopher Ott

The only reason to ever rebrand

October 13, 2015

Brands are no more or less than memory-constructs in people's minds. When you rebrand you choose to shatter these memories. In other words, start again. So, why do it?

The Tropicana rebrand is a text book example, literally. From the familiar orange-with-a-straw image to a plain glass of juice, along with a logo change, Unilever rebranded their orange juice wholesale.

And the result: It became unrecognisable. Its repeat buyers (or loyalists), as well as light and non-buyers couldn't find the brand they, at different levels, all knew. And, within 6 weeks, sales dropped 20%, or roughly $33 million.

More than we'd like to admit (in focus groups), why we buy is intuitive over rational. We shop on autopilot with an inherent draw to the familiar, or memorable (Buyhaviour 1: Availability Bias).

Which makes the role of advertising, including branding: to lodge your brand's distinctive assets - logos, colours, design, fonts, tone - into the mind and memory of your audience.

Which can only happen if your brand has a consistent, unique identity. Of which, rebranding is the antithesis. So, save yourself mega-bucks. Refresh, reframe; just don't rebrand.

Unless, of course your brand's been hijacked by an international terrorist group. Then, you should probably rebrand.

Jason Derulo is a better marketer than you

August 25, 2015

What's the point of advertising if your audience doesn't know it's your brand doing it?

If you're like me, you've never heard a single Jason Derulo song (except that one about trumpets). But, also if you're like me, you sure as hell have heard of him. His brand is salient.

And it's salient because - unlike what the majority of content-marketers would have you believe about your own brand - he isn't ashamed or embarrassed to put his name on his work.

In an era where pop music is an homogenous sea of sameness - like the established market categories we work on - this goes a long way in keeping his brand (Jason Derulo) mentally available.

How advertising works (including content marketing) is pretty simple: Get your brand noticed, remembered and, as a bonus, liked.

The only real variable is immediacy - time and ability.

But, whether one click to purchase, or years later in the case of cars, your advertising has to, at a bare minimum, achieve some familiarity.

If your brand wants to acquire new customers, the very first thing you have to do, before anything else, is get said non-users to know it exists.

If your brand wants to get lapsed or existing users to buy you more frequently, the first thing you need to do, before anything else, is refresh their awareness of it.

Especially when you're spending your finite budget on reach; not to mention production.

It's common sense. And here's the evidence from Karen Nelson-Field's book, Viral Marketing:

“We found no evidence that an obvious brand presence hampers sharing, nor that it restricts your ability to achieve high arousal positive emotional responses. The popular notion of the need for a low-profile approach is a myth.”

So when marketers and populist adpeople tell you: "Don't brand because it puts people off watching your content", simply say: Jason Derulo (see video above for appropriate intonation).

Because if he can do it and enjoy more number-ones than any of us would be comfortable knowing, It's probably good enough for your brand, too.

Christopher Ott

What does Frank Underwood know about advertising?

April 28, 2015

Says Frank Underwood, "You can't turn a 'no' into a 'yes' without a 'maybe' first". When your strategy is aiming to turn a non-buyer into a buyer; advertising is the 'maybe'.

There's an endemic belief that, as Ogilvy said, "advertising is selling". Even our vernacular - USP, reason-why - stems from the idea that "advertising is salesmanship in print". But it's (largely) not.

Arguably advertising's role is to make brands mentally available. For this, our ads need to get noticed; then become salient in our audience's minds so they're remembered when it counts - in a buying situation.

Irrespective of the lag between ad and checkout. Whether it be a few clicks and a couple seconds, or a whole week when you next pay a visit to the shops, advertising is the seduction not the selling. The taste, not the transaction. It's the 'maybe', not the 'yes'.

The immortal Stephen King even knew the importance of Frank's 'maybe', when he stated: "advertising isn't about sales, as much as saleability".

In other words, advertising works best as a nudge (a maybe), not a shove (a yes).

Buyhaviour 6: The Matthew Effect

April 7, 2015

Originally published in Mumbrella 31 March 2015.

Why is it that agencies or brands with momentum seem to be more successful? Christopher Ott explains the Matthew Effect.

When an ad achieves success at one award show it generally goes on to receive more success at other shows. As though its fame feeds its future success, ad infinitum. There’s an unfair advantage, right? The same unfair advantage big brands enjoy over small ones.

It’s called the Mathew Effect – named after a verse in the Matthew Gospel, which goes: “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance”.

And, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the inverse is also true. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

The Effect was first observed within the scientific community. They noticed that the more famous a scientist was, based on past success, the more credit they’d receive for other work, even when that other work was the same as an unknown scientist.

Andrew Ehrenberg, the Don of evidence-based marketing discovered an uncannily similar finding in marketing, too. He coined it The Double Jeopardy Law, and found: Brands with a larger market share benefit twice. They have more buyers, and those buyers are more loyal. Conversely, brands with smaller market shares suffer doubly. They have fewer buyers, and these fewer buyers are also less loyal.”

It only takes a moment’s thought to get why. Buyers of small brands will also buy big brands as they’re mentally and physically available to them (they do more advertising and can be purchased in more places). But buyers of big brands, conversely, may not even know the small brands exist.

The implications are groundbreaking. The Matthew Effect or Double Jeopardy Law (whatever you call it) means: The size of your brand can only ever be proportionate to its market share. Wholly bankrupting the concept of niche marketing.

If you want your brand to be big, you need lots of customers. Not a few heavy loyal ones. You simply can’t have a small brand that’s big through its buyers being more loyal if its buyers are inherently less loyal because the brand is small.

Which means the popular practice of growing a brand through loyalty is utterly fictitious. Yet, how many agencies and marketers create campaigns that try and do just that?

If this is hard for you to digest, take heart knowing that Columbus’ peers would have felt a similar indignation finding out the world was round. Science has a way of doing that.

The good news is if you’re quick to understand it, you have an extraordinarily rare opportunity.

While your competitors remain spellbound by the over-promise of loyalty programs and over-invested in targeting a niche few, you can focus on getting more customers by talking to your whole category, getting famous, and increasing your market share to grow your brand.

And then get richer.