Infomagination

Lessons from the game makers

If you're going to learn new stuff, you have to look in new places.  And one of the most interesting places around at the moment is the computer game industry - especially since it's become bigger than the music and film industries combined.

So, it's perhaps unsurprising that one of the best speeches I've seen for a long time should come from a video games conference.  DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is held yearly in Las Vegas and this particular speech comes courtesy of Jesse Schell, games designer, Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-Disney imagineer. 

Watch and learn why...

...Facebook knocked the gaming world on its ass last year

...Games companies are making millions by playing with our natural instincts

...Gaming is busting out of fantasy and into reality

...Authenticity rules, in a bubble of fake bullshit

...Avatar might actually have something profound to say after all

...Technology will continue to diverge, not converge

...Disposable technology could turn daily life into an RPG

...And why all that might just help you become a better human being

Enjoy!

Makes you wonder what the true potential of Tesco Clubcard points is, hey?

Stalin, booze, food & the power of re-framing

As Stalin once said, "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

And when he did so, he highlighted one of the biggest challenges we have with information: making it meaningul. You may know your numbers are important, but if you don't present them in the right way, people won't connect with them - let alone take action.

Re-framing information in a meaningful way is the idea behind this lovely little app on the BBC website, which aims to make people think as much about what they drink as they do about what they eat.

The app is based on a simple insight: whilst many of us wouldn't spend an evening shovelling junk food in our mouths, we'd quite happily put away half a bottle of wine and a few pints without really thinking about it.  Yet, alcoholic drinks contain as many calories as some of the unhealthiest food out there.

The solution:  don't just tell people how many calories they've been drinking, tell them how much crap they've been "eating"...

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So next time you're presenting some numbers, think about how you could make them mean something to your audience. And next time you're sipping on a pint, don't forget that you're also munching on a donut.

Why it pays to be fun

Recently, there's been a lot of chat in UK advertising circles about behavioural economics - a field which combines psychology, philosophy and economics in order to understand how people make decisions.  One of its tenets is that because value is subjective, intangible value IS real value.  This means simple changes to experience can affect the way we make choices. 

The important intangible value that I'm going to talk to you about today is FUN. 

Designers like Philippe Starck have long known about the value of fun.  After all, why would you part with £40 for an Alessi lemon juicer, unless it was shaped like a space rocket?

Now, Volkswagen have sprung up with a nice little site, espousing "the fun theory" as a way to encourage good behaviour in the world at large, from encouraging people to walk up the stairs to making a game out of doing the recycling.

As a marketing professional, I'm not quite sure how all this fits in with Volkswagen just yet (car-based fun theories seem strangly lacking at the moment). As a human being, however, seeing brands trying to make the world a better place makes me happy - and if VW are lucky, a bit of that extra, intangible happiness value might just rub off on them.

Could this wedding entrance change music videos Forever?

Jill and Kevin Heinz met when Kevin’s childhood friend, Jeff, married Jill’s college friend, Ann, in 2005. Jill couldn't resist Kevin’s wit and charm. Kevin couldn't resist Jill’s intellect, not to mention her remarkable dance moves.  This year, they got married and this video of their church entrance has clocked up over 30m views on Youtube, for one reason and one reason only:  because it is AWESOME.

So far, so heartwarming, but the story gets even more interesting when you realise that the video is actually something of a landmark in music video history.  That's because Chris Brown's record company decided to put that little overlay to buy a copy of the song at the start of it, rather than kicking up a fuss about the fact that their song had been used without permission.

The results have been astounding, with double average click through rates of other Click-to-Buys.  Interest in the song also seems to have rubbed off on the original music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x at the end of July. Most importantly, however, the song has rocketed up the US music charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon's best selling MP3 list over a year after its release.

The result is a whole heap of lessons about branding today and here are just three:

1.  Throw away your dictionary:  old definitions of things like "music video" and "advertising" are being re-written fast.

2.  Context is king:   a little nudge at the right time can make a big difference - and our data rich, hyperlinked world is is full of opportunities to grab people with the right message at the right moment.

3.  Remember that the public has the last laugh: Chris Brown may have seen his chart position rise off the back of his record company's ad, but the decision of the happy couple to add their own overlay - for a charity that campaigns against domestic violence - is a healthy reminder of where the balance of power lies when it comes to reputation.

Want to know whether your kid will be successful? Just use the marshmallow test...

If you've got 5 minutes, check out this awesome (and frankly hilarious) video from TED.  In it, Joachim de Posada suggests that the ability to resist a small short term reward in favour of a larger long term benefit is a fundamental skill of success that starts at an early age - and which can easily be tested with a humble marshmallow.

Worth remembering the next time you're agreeing a business deal.  Not to mention the next time you buy some sweets for your kids...

Smile power 2: smiley faces save the planet

Road signs aren't the only places benefitting from smiley power.  According to the New York Times, electricity companies in 10 major metropolitan areas of the US are now sending their customers bills that compare their energy use to that of their neighbours - with low consumption rewarded with a smiley face.

The Sacramento utility who piloted the scheme found that customers who received these statements reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard bills.

The lesson of the story is the power of social norms.  As Herd animals, each of us is programmed to follow the crowd.  This makes telling people what everyone else is doing a convincing way of getting them to adjust their behaviour. 

Not all behaviours (e.g. energy consumption) are immediately obvious to people, but as this example shows, the data we capture often allows such norms to be revealed - and shared.  It would be interesting for a bank to try something similar to encourage saving, or a mobile phone company to migrate people between contracts.

Since customer complaints also led these energy companies to stop publishing sad faces on their bills, however, it also goes to show that whilst a bit of social nudging is good, obvious pressure from the brands we pay our money to is rarely appreciated.

Smile power 1: smiley faces save lives

Quick bonus bit of behavioural economics from Rory's talk last week, showing the power of the smiley.

In South Lanarkshire there are 226 Vehicle Activated Signs that don't just tell drivers their speed, but show them a smiley or sad face, depending on whether they're under or over the limit. 

 

It's a basic rule of human behaviour that we enjoy making people happy and prefer to avoid making them sad (with the possible exception of Simon Cowell), but it may still surprise you how effective a reward a smile can be.   Thanks to these little faces, the number of people exceeding the speed limit in the Lanarckshire area fell by 53%.  And when you realise that these things operate at about 2% of the cost of a speed camera, there's even more reason to be cheerful.

So there we have it.  Smiley signs: an effective, context driven, personalised piece of communication (driven by on the spot data capture).  Just the kind of solution our industry should be coming up with, hey?  And I think that was Rory's point entirely.

An introduction to Behavioural Economics - Rory Sutherland at the IPA 44 Club

This time last night I was at a fascinating talk by Rory Sutherland, who explained why one of his missions during his IPA presidency is to get us all excited about Behavioural Economics - a field which combines psychology, philosophy and economics in order to understand how people make decisions.  Since understanding people and changing their behaviours is pretty much at the heart of what we do everyday, it's no surprise that the IPA has a series of sessions planned on it. 

Last night's talk was a great introduction to the field.  And, just for you, here are my notes:

Media, metrics, models, markets, morals

- Rory's definition of our job = using human understanding to business advantage.
- Our current metrics and models have evolved to cover a narrow range of media and businesses and be attitudinal not behavioural - they narrow amount we can do and charge.
- Spreadsheets drove excessively numerical obsession that's been deleterious to brands.  Hyper-rationality = maths wrongly applied to reality.
- People have never made entirely rational purchase decisions but it's been a handy defence against anti-advertising folk (cf the hidden persuaders).
- Behavioural Economics studies how behaviour affects major economic topics.  It's the hottest topic in economic world.  We can't ignore it because it's what we're trying to do ourselves. Applying it gives you fresh understanding and new vocab to use with clients.
-  Old way of thinking was that changes in attitude preceed changes in behaviour.  In reality, attitude often changes after behaviour .  A shift in sales often preceeds a shift in likeability.

Behavioural Economics has three main themes:

Heuristics: People often make decisions based on approximate rules of thumb, not strictly rational analysis. We suffer from cognitive biases and often only apply our rationality after having greatly simplified the choices available.

Framing: The way a problem or decision is presented to the decision maker will affect their action.

Market inefficiencies: There are explanations for observed market outcomes that are contrary to rational expectations and market efficiency. These include weighing up the options wrongly and non-rational decision making.

Examples of Behavioural Economics in action: the sorts of ideas that we should be coming up with...

1.  The save more tomorrow pension.  When people were asked to join a pension scheme uptake was slow, as people are loss averse and they have time bias (over optimistic about future earnings).  However, when they were asked to sign a pledge that 10% of their future payrises would be put into a pension pot uptake rose by over 200pc.

2.  The most efficient way to get people in hotels to re-use their towels is to establish the appearance of a social norm - say that most people do it.

3.   When people in Australia where told their water consumption relative to the population, total water use was cut by 25% because people didn't want to be above the norm.

(there are a few more here but I might make them separate posts :)

Conclusion: stop obsessing about attitude when behaviour is key

- Simple psychological insights into behaviour can change behaviour
- The folly of integration is that everything says the same thing.  We shouldn't be producing matching luggage but using different media for different jobs.  E.g. the DM drives sales but the ATL changes attitudes that allow the sales to happen (creates saleability)
- In many cases behaviour is more driven by the channel in which you do it than attitudes
- A lot of communication is becoming context based.  Google is not about target audience but target moment - your now, not your who.
- 4Ps have become 4Es - experience, everywhere, exchange, evangelism (create an interface)
- Comms change product experience.  Intangible/perceptual value IS real value: value is subjective
- The best way to get people to finish their antibiotics might not be to advertise but to turn the last 5 blue and tell people to take the white ones then the blue ones.  These are the kinds of chats we need to be able to have with our clients...

Further reading/watching:

-  Read:  Discover your inner economist, marginal revolution, animal spirits, adam smith, keynes, marx, wikipedia, nudge, herd
-  Watch: deal or no deal as an illustration of irrational behaviour.  People factor in the pain of potential loss into their behaviour.  People who've had a big loss tend to gamble furiously, massively affecting the stock market.