second brain

who is the prettiest of them all?

From a stimulating little piece about mirrors in the NYT:

For that matter, humans do not necessarily see the face in the mirror either. In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive.

planners need to get out more

I visited my alma mater JWT last night to attend its Planning At 40 event, a celebration of the day Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt invented account planning. Industry luminaries, including Jeremy Bullmore, John Grant, Jon Steel, and JWT's Guy Murphy, made speeches on the future of planning. The event was held on JWT's extraordinary Knightsbridge terrace, under blue skies. Drinks and canapes were served, and there was plenty of time after the event itself to catch up with some of the lovely people that have passed through and around JWT in the last forty years. So the whole thing was very nice.

As to the content, well. I'm probably not the best person to judge. I'm interested in a long list of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of that stuff relates to brands and communication. But I have to say, the future of planning languishes somewhere near the very bottom of that list. I suspect I'm not the only one. Several of the speakers seemed a bit bored by their own speeches. I don't blame them.

I wish one of them had reflected on the possible connection between the decline of the traditional agency network and an inward-looking culture that results in agencies holding seminars on their own internal processes, rather than on things that clients - or anybody outside of agencies - actually care about. Stephen King may have invented planning. But I'm sure even he got more excited about brands than he did about planning itself.

Apart from the unimaginative choice of theme, I was struck by how nearly all the speeches could have been made at any time in the last five, or even ten years. None of the speakers got stuck into the intellectual, cultural, and social trends that are shaping the way we all communicate. For instance, the influence of 'wiki' thinking and social networks were barely mentioned. For the most part, 'Planning' was discussed in a kind of timeless bubble in which capacious, wind-tunnel nouns like 'ideas/creativity/strategy' stood in for real thought. There were many fond glances to the past, and few wide-eyed stares into the future.

It's all very well to criticise of course, but what, if forced to speak on this subject, would I talk about? Well, I think I would have at least nodded to a few of the current fields of discussion about how human beings relate to each other, all of which have huge implications for what brands do.

For instance, the burgeoning fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which are opening our eyes to the enormous power of our unconscious selves to shape our behaviour; in particular the way in which emotion shapes our rational decisions. There are revelations and data here to delight any curious planner.

Or behavioral economics and social psychology. Books like this and this will shift the emphasis in communications from how we get people to think or feel things to how we get them to act.

Or, as mentioned, the pervasive spread of social networks and social media in general.

Plenty of stuff for planners to get their teeth into. And all of it a hundred times more interesting and important than 'planning'.

marketing to the long tail

Chris Anderson's book has spawned a lot of guff about what the long tail means for marketing. A new epilogue to the book outlines his more considered view on this topic:

if you're selling things, you don't necessarily need to massively expand your product range to tap LT markets. You can instead just reach the "long tail of customers", which is to say all the potential pockets of demand that don't necessarily lie within your normal marketing channels. This is the smaller potential customers, the ones you don't know about, the ones you never considered and the ones who didn't even think they were potential customers until they heard about your products from someone they know.

people like us

The UK ad industry is enjoying a rare fit of self-righteousness over Heinz's decision to pull this ad after a few hundred complaints from the public, or at least from a well-organised pressure group.

There is a near-universal consensus - evident in the pages of the industry's trade mag Campaign - that Heinz have supinely succumbed to the aggressive lobbying of a bigoted but vocal minority. But why are they so sure that discomfort with male-on-male action is a minority 'issue'? A few commentators refer to such discomfort, contemptuously, as Daily Mail thinking. As if the Mail is some fringe pamphlet read only by the crazed few. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, the consumer isn't stupid. She's a Daily Mail reader. I think most people outside of Soho are probably uneasy with this kind of thing being repeated daily in prime time. Not everyone is as marvelously enlightened as we are.

One Campaign commenter gives the game away when he says "I'm offended that Heinz was forced to take it off. It says a lot more about the British public than it does about the ad or the industry."  The reverse is true of the industry's commentary on this event.

The Beatles and Harry Potter

Daniel Hall at The Economist ponders why music consumption seems to be following the law of the long tail, whilst book stores rely, more than ever, on blockbusters:

One of my friends proposed a theory I find compelling: Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from "individual" to "collective". Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distrbitution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

netflix for magazines

A brilliant idea

god we're such assholes

Flynn asserts that immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer.  However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient's eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases.  Although there are several potential reasons for this discrepancy, one possibility is that, as time goes by, the memory of the favor-doing event gets distorted, and since people have the desire to see themselves in the best possible light, receivers may think they didn't need all that much help at the time, while givers may think they really went out of their way for the receiver.

From Cialdini via Cowen