There are many talented chiefs in our industry. One of them is literally a magician.
A highlight of any meeting with Trinity Mirror boss Simon Fox is that he might just make something disappear and reappear. He’s a member of the magic circle, and the last time the Trinity Mirror roadshow hit our agency he did the most awesome piece of magic involving Claudine Collin’s phone and the regional press.
(Who can say how much his magical skills influence the business performance – but latest results showed growth in profits of 24% – some good news in a challenging sector. Results aside, the magic show at MediaCom was a treat.)
The reason we love magic is may be because we live in a world where our core senses are constantly performing magic tricks every day. When we see something, we don’t see what we think we see. Every day and all the time.
Humans experience a time lag.
It takes a fifth of a second for an image to go from your eye, to your brain to be processed, and then for you to act on it. Because you don’t feel that time lag, your brain is also constantly making up for the time lag by constantly predicting the future a tenth of a second ahead at a time.
Most of the time that doesn’t matter, (unless for example you’re a bike rider commuting in London then you’ll know how important a fraction of a second can be in terms of surviving.)
This is what a magician exploits when he does a card trick. It is misdirection. Very clever misdirection, but it is, of course, science and not magical.
Magicians use misdirection to manipulate our attention. It works because we don’t ever see everything that is in front of us. Our brains couldn’t possible analyse every stimulus or every detail. There are loopholes in cognition because that is how we cope with the world. We cannot process everything and so we choose, unconsciously, what is most likely to fit an accepted pattern.
Goldsmith University Dr Gustav Kuhn studies the impact this has on our daily lives. Kuhn is a cognitive psychologist who researches human perception and cognition. Or put in a way that sounds like much more fun: he studies magic and how magicians allow you to experience the impossible.
Kuhn says: “magic happens to us all the time — our whole experience is a massive illusion, we’re just not aware of it.”
It is one of the key differences between you and a robot. Robots can’t believe in magic, and they don’t have gaps in cognition. They can process more information faster and more accurately than is possible for you in a split second. As the pace of real time business decisions continues to increase, understanding how our brains compare at making split second judgements is crucial.
As we come to assign roles differently in the cyber future, there will be significant shifts in how money is spent when it’s the algorithm that decides, based on processing every bit of data that is available, not just the information that we can grasp.
We will need to decide which decisions require strategic reflection and which will be made by the machines.
Hate change? Read this.
Friday, March 24th, 2017“You get an ology….you’re a scientist ”
Some adverts enter the language, and sometimes last there long after the product they were plugging has dropped the campaign.
The BT ology ad featured Maureen Lipman as a grandmother, told by her grandson over the phone, (incidentally played by Josh Krichefski’s brother by the way), that he flunked his exams, passing only pottery and sociology. (The ad featured in Lindsey Clay’s survey of the portrayal of women in advertising over the last 50 years in the UK here).
The BT ad was to encourage people to use the phone more, not to drive market share as this wasn’t an issue in the 1980s. Driving more use of the phone these days – hardly a requirement of any telecoms provider today – haven’t times changed?
Most of us use our phones unimaginably more frequently than the admen at JWT could have thought in 1987.
This is a change that most of us have taken to happily. There’s other changes around that can take more getting used to, such as the rise of the robots in customer service or AI’s impact on retail.
Maureen Lipman also has had a long career as a comedian. In one of her stand up routines she described how after borrowing her dad’s car for a week she got back into her own car and discovers it just wouldn’t go properly. She called the car rescue services, waited 2 hours for them to turn up. When the chap from the AA arrived, he started the car and drove it round the block. It was perfectly ok. It was simply that her dad’s car was an automatic and after only a week of driving it, she’d forgotten how to drive a geared car. She just couldn’t work it out. Even though she’d been driving one for a decade.
There’s a lesson in this for everyone who’s is change averse – and many people hate the idea of any change that they aren’t in control of, and haven’t chosen.
Firstly that you can get used to a change ridiculously quickly. There’s a world of difference between an innovation that we take to like a duck to water (such as checking phones dozens or hundreds of times a day), and those that feel alien. When a change in work practices is mandated, or becomes inevitable in your business, then it’s good to remember that some change may feel so instinctive that a week in, you won’t remember what work was like before.
Secondly that you can’t really buy into any change until you fully understand what it means specifically for you. So if you’re in a company meeting where the new vision is being presented and you’re just not feeling inspired, don’t worry.
Don’t expect to love the change till you can feel and see what it means for you in detail personally. And give it a go, it might just be the new way forward you’ve been missing, just as much as you’d miss your mobile phone.
Posted in MediaComment | No Comments »