This is Johnnie Cochrane on The people v OJ Simpson, American Crime Story. The jury he’s talking about are of course those picked for the famous controversial murder trial in the 1990s. But could he be talking about any jury? Including those who are about to judge the awards for the upcoming, packed, 2016 awards season in media and advertising?
It’s been my honour to be in awards juries at several awards over the last 5 years. First it is important to stress that results are always discussed and a lack of them, or a sense that they’re smoke and mirrors, is usually a deterrent to a win.. usually but not exactly always.
Starting with smoke and mirrors. The number of times the word “engagement” is used in the results section of a paper is arguably in direct proportion to the robustness of actual outcomes in terms of the client’s objectives for their business. Here’s one anonymous example that I remember from a recent paper: “we demonstrated significant engagement with the brand, all with a modest media budget”. This kind of factoid is increasingly a rarity but definitely is to be avoided.
So assuming that a paper has proper results, a great insight and a good logic to the activity, surely it should be a winner. Here’s where the other guy comes in. The highly competitive nature of our industry means that you’re not just convincing the awards jury that your campaign was successful, you’re out to convince them that it was more successful than any of the others in the category.
In some instances this might be a very broad competitive framework. So in 2015 Campaign Media Awards categories were divided largely by sector, and some sectors are very varied. Fashion, healthcare and beauty as a category might pit Nike versus Rimmel versus Piriteze. Media Week’s large medium and small categorisations obviously have other brands smashing up against each other – one category might include Clarins v Heinekin v Birds Eye. Your entry has to cut through, and you don’t even know what the competition is that you are up against when you write it.
Here is Cochrane’s point then. Your narrative needs to be compelling. And to overcome the fatigue of the jury member (who might have read 23 entries before they get to yours) and any bias that they might not even be conscious of.
Daniel Kahneman, the nobel prize winning behavioural econometrician, writes about system 1 and system 2 thinking. System 1 is gut instinct. System 2 is logical thought. In a fight for dominance system 1 wins every time. We like to think that we are in control of our decision making, in fact we decide most things on instinct and then rationalise our decision. Awards juries do not do this on purpose. They are usually very diligent and conscientious. Most have entered themselves over the years and really appreciate the effort that goes into crafting your award entry. But there are a set of biases that are part of human nature that a winning entry has to overcome. There’s the “cheerleader bias” where you are drawn to join in with one enthusiast on the jury even if you don’t agree in private. There’s the “less is better bias” where one strong result will convince a juror more than a list of seven positive metrics can. There’s the “rhyme as reason bias” which of course Cochrane exploited with “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”.
Good luck with awards entries for this season. The winners will have triumphed not just in the clarity of thought that went into the campaign but additionally in the story telling narrative of their entry.
Adblocking: A Darwin Wedge?
Friday, April 29th, 2016Economist Robert H. Frank coined the term Darwin’s Wedge to describe situations where stuff evolves to benefit the individual but actually is bad for the species overall.
Look for instance at the elephant seal. Bull elephant seals are huge. They can weigh as much as 6 thousand pounds. They’re 5 times bigger than female seals. They’re twice as heavy as the average car. During the mating season this is to the individual’s advantage. Mature bulls battle each other for hours. The victorious bull claims exclusive access to the female harem of as many as 100 cows.
As a species this is a disadvantage.
As a species it makes them far more vulnerable to sharks.
The bull elk is another case in point. Similarly the bull elk must battle against all other bull elks in his tribe to gain access to lady elks. In the battle the size of the antler is key. The bigger the better. Furthermore, since the winning bull elk will be most likely to have bigger antlers, his descendants will acquire the big antler gene. There’s a generational antler race (like an arms race). The largest antlers of the North American bull elk measure over 4 feet and weigh more than 40 pounds. Again, this is terrific for an individual, sex starved elk. Not so terrific for the species because it makes it much harder to run away from wolves, especially through woods.
This situation is Frank’s Darwin’s Wedge.
If you judge success for online ads in a short term way then the better your ad is at generating clicks the better it is for you. It doesn’t matter much that you’re annoying people. You couldn’t care less if people are clicking on your ad by mistake when they really just wanted to check the weather, and end up instead on flappybird. You’re counting clicks not sales and anyway a .0001% conversion might be your business model.
What’s great for the individual (the specific ad) is not so great for the species (ads in general). Because if you get really annoyed with your inability to avoid ads on your mobile (because they’ve got better at tricking you into interacting with them whether you intended to or not), you might start to consider installing an adblocker.
Stats abound about how big the threat is from adblockers. Deloitte’s TMT 2016 report is relatively relaxed about it. Deloitte Global predict just 0.3% of all mobile device owners will use an ad-blocker this year. At the recent Guardian conference on the other hand stats were quoted that over 80% of German millennial men used adblockers (provoking a huge gasp from the audience). Many publishers are furious about the situation.
Most people may well not bother with adblockers. But the better the algorithm performs or if you like in Darwinian terms evolves to deliver a short term metric like click through, the more annoying the website will seem. Whilst few consumers ever openly admit to loving ads (though I still know loads of people who get to the cinema in time for the ads), most people don’t go out of their way to avoid them actively all the time. They just don’t have the energy. But point out to them that with an adblocker the page they want to read will load 5 times faster, or how much they’re paying for data that ads are eating……
Robert H. Frank’s solution to Darwin’s wedge problems in business is tax. Tax annoying adverts? Imposed perhaps by the IAB? Can’t see that happening anytime soon, but the IAB’s LEAN initiative is to be encouraged.
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