Law of Unintended Consequences?

 

I began to question everything in March 2020 Lockdown was their mistake as it gave us all time to investigate the actual world we live in. Gave us time to go down that rabbit hole and WAKE up. My life isn’t and will never be the same there is no going back to sleep once awake

— Bev (@bevscotland) December 4, 2022

Winston Churchill Research

I think it was Tom who mentioned the speech impediment, and that is born out in this TV 1950 re-election piece, of and by Winston Churchill, as it were

The follow up Ottawa 'Piece' is preposterous. Look at the Grand Poobah behind him, sitting in a propitiously large seat (Bless). And bless your little legs as well.

If we meet in real life, and should you be a Winnie expert. 

Ask me about the debunking research. 

It's troubling.

The Facts of Life

Help. My Cock's On Fire

Back when I wrote my statistical bias post I thought I could use Google Insights to track the Mayan eschatological 2012 calendar meme by planet and country. What I didn't factor in was people Googling 2012 not for esoterica but because it was the actual date. I lose sight of the details sometimes. 

Did I mention my cocks on fire? Yeah baby.

US Department Of Justice Researching Secrets In Plain Sight

Who knows, maybe they're tired of framing small time criminals and intend to move up the food chain of power where the big boys play. Secrets in plain sight is an esoteric start but anything is better than nothing. They've sat on their hands since 9/11 while the rest of the planet has woken up.

I get all the agencies recorded through Google Analytics sniffing over my blog in the last year or so apart from the NSA who mask their visits. I'm most popular with the Department of Defence which is really the department of attack but they've long forgotten what words mean.

Too Much Information - Puking On Big Data

Excellent new TED talk by an obviously likeable but neurotic speaker confusing obsession with art and inadvertently highlighting why we're choking on information and starved of wisdom.

Hasan Elahi

When the Feds come after you, you have several options: panic, resist or, if you’re interdisciplinary American artist Hasan Elahi, flood them with information. It all started in 2002, when Elahi was detained in Detroit after a flight from the Netherlands, suspected of hoarding explosives in a Florida locker. Though lie detector tests subsequently cleared him, Elahi – who is an associate professor at the University of Maryland and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, and the Hermitage – was subjected to six months of questioning about his extensive international travels. Figuring once in the system, never out, he decided to turn the tables and cooperate – with a vengeance.

Starting with constant phone calls and emails to the FBI to notify them of his whereabouts, what started as a practicality grew into an open-ended art project. He began posting photos of his minute-by-minute life, up to around a hundred a day, on TrackingTransience.net – hotel rooms, train stations, airports, meals, beds, receipts, even toilets – generating tens of thousands of images in the last several years. Just for good measure, he also wears a GPS device that tracks his movements on his site’s live Google map. And as if to prove his point that “the best way to protect privacy is to give it away,” Elahi – while still being watched by the authorities, according to server records – hasn’t been bothered since.

He says: "By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life."

"He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business."

Lies dammed lies and statistical bias

There are many reasons for wishing to pursue this ongoing theme which could last about three years, so I'm in no hurry. Also we've had sufficient time after the last Google Trends chart embed to find out that it isn't a dynamic script which would have caused extra work as I want those charts to be fixed in a point of time, and not self updating.

I'm also always looking for different interpretations in the comments from people who like this sort of thing or even blunt finger pointing at glaring examples of oversight or bungled conclusion so do get stuck in as this one is more journey than destination. But in principle it's a monologue hopefully interspersed with bits of conversation about how to sensibly approach the world of quantitative research and analysis. I don't think it's any secret that I'm more interested as a planner in brand DNA issues. I'd rather find out more about distribution and assembly matters than a TGI analysis. However that doesn't mean I ignore customer segmentation data. I just happen to think that most is not only badly conceived, it's then poorly executed and to compound matters it's given the sort of analysis that demeans all the work put into it. I also see very little meanings discussion in meetings with clients and even less externally on blogs. That may be because it's boring but even just articulating some of the thoughts and conclusions I've encountered is useful and for you too I hope.

One example I'd like to give is when working with NOKIA who really do have an awful lot of love from me for reasons they dont like to talk about (durability) but nevertheless around the time I was in orbit to a fair chunk of Helsinki's GDP the global market share for NOKIA was around 40 percent. Profits were dizzy and breathless, the manufacturing plant in Beijing looked like the most progressive work environment in the People's Republic of China, R&D in Oulu, Finland was staffed by the kind of people who weren't just boffins with a surplus of cash, there were even a few cool people paid to be imaginative. I blogged about it over here.

But it seemed to me at the time that NOKIA were on the precipice. Difficult to explain but it felt like there was little upward trajectory left ahead. There simply wasn't that much more room to grow given their handset segmentation strategy. Too many phones, too many segments and a notable absence of wow or excitement. The iPhone had just come out (mine was conveniently stolen at the IPA awards about 24 hours after I bought it) and the market for apps hadn't matured sufficiently so the future wasn't as fertile as it now looks. The single largest potential for increased market share was the rapid decline of MOTOROLA for reasons I wrote about over here. Other than that Palm and Blackberry were cranking up their game and a number of the Asian competitors were increasingly improving their products. That's HTC (Now the Google Nexus manufacturer), ASUS, Samsung, LG and all the other Asian posse, who do mobile marketing hygiene really well.

Having the conversation about how to defend market share rather than retail obsessed new product launches was not on the cards with NOKIA. To be fair, by the time you''re in a meeting discussing the launch of a model that looks suspiciously chunky despite it's geo utility specs they're just into selling the product so it doesn't gather dust on shelves and so macro discussions of how to spend the marketing budget more wisely aren't on the table. We have however since seen NOKIA's profits tumble and it's difficult to see how they can resecure their formidable market advantage again. A situation that was pointed to by the statistics long before they got there and mainly on a common sense hunch. I'm reminded that at that time I found their purchase of the mapping company Navteq for 8 billion US Dollars as really interesting and yet we now see that it's given away for free to match up against Google's mapping offer - That's a lot of money turning on a dime. This is further evidence that strategic planning is increasingly diminished in a fast moving world.

And it's on a hunch that I want to go back to the topic of 2012 as a search term. My assertion (completely my own and thus riddled with uncertainty, error and naturally intellectual hubris) is that the 2012 search term will become a byword for a sort of post pre millennial tension not unlike the sort we experienced from the Y2K bug. I'd completely forgotten how angst ridden a lot of people were at the time but the 2012 search term works well on a similar level because it's a numbers based term and thus transnational, which is really important. And also it's a sort of third party projection for every conceivable worry over the next three years or so. I've started rereading my Black Swan again and Taleb reminds us that in the Pleistocene period, the sort of randomness we experience on an almost daily basis through sheer human activity simply didn't occur. There's a hint of the singularity  that emerges here too, but in short I think the ride get's wilder as humanity progresses.

You can quote me on that.

To paraphrase my new favourite Irishman, Terrence McKenna "we're caught in a white knuckle race between education and extinction" so I assume the 2012 search term will serve as an indicator for quantitative analysis of the unquantifiable. That sounds about right doesn't it? However as I've blathered on a fair bit I'm going to return to the topic afresh and will only embed a fresh update of the previous chart which shouldn't have any significant changes. I'll be taking a look at country breakdowns of 2012 search terms. It's not only interesting, it's hugely misleading time and again in most surveys I read but let's go step by step. For the time being. Here's latest chart update. Anybody got anything to say you're most welcome to fire off anything you wish in the comments, as I've begun to reveal more of my initial premise.

Research

I got talking to a creative friend of mine who has just finished a big shoot in China, and we veered onto the subject of dross-quality Chinese advertising in mainland PRC. But don't let me shape your opinion go to Youtube or Youku and see if you can dig out something that has anything to say. 

It's pretty much all pants, which for a nation of 1.3 billion people and a LOT of ads says something doesn't it? I talked about it bluntly over here, but there's a few more reasons why "safety first" is king of the mill. You might also find something in my Asian research posts over here, here and here.

In any case we got talking about a particular BBDO style of blockbuster commercial that uses a method I don't want to specifically mention here but which was researched by the client in China and amazingly the answer was that it wasn't as effective as real ideas.

Well of course we know that but it's amazingly hard to prove this because one would need a parallel universe and an A/B split to see which one is most effective to prove beyond doubt which is more effective but in any case I thought that it would be wise to point out that we can make research prove anything if we want and in the case of quantitative methodologies it's nothing more than a cloak for mediocrity to rule.

This Youtube clip is not new but I want to bookmark it for future reference on my blog so I can just share it with people who aren't convinced by what I'm trying to say in the hope that they will take the road less travelled. It's riskier but not if a proper conversation about how to solve any fears takes places. But that's a conversation that takes both time and courage. I'm also not anti research but a cookie cutter approacher gives cookie cutter advertising.

Are You Tooled Up?

I did bookmark this a day or so ago on delicious and subsequently discovered that Katie has done an excellent presentation which we can now share. It's great if only for further stimulating the debate on social media metrics but equally opens up the increasingly important conclusion that the elusive measurement methodology we seek, may well not be the cast iron approach we've been used to in the past with frequency and reach.

It should involve some common sense, creative problem solving and untried combinations of quantitative data, with in my mind, qualitative classification of engagement too.

I think one of the Tweets that Gavin or Katie gave out was something about social media measurement being as "easy or as difficult as you want". This sounds eminently sensible to a creative planner more interested in execution than spreadsheets of what are invariably inconclusive and contradictory data (That we often see nervous clients can never get enough off).

I've been mulling over an approach that any day now is threatening to materialize into a seminal (and wildly popular) post about the topic and which I've mentioned, here and here in the comments.

It might well include an unusual methodology for combining pre-billing and post communications efficacy measurement. Recombinant invoicing if you will.

This of course is a wild and probably foolhardy attempt at publicly committing myself to actually spilling some of the stuff that has been going on in my head apart from the the notion that scarcity of disposable income theoretically shreds the need to advertise in the ways we have been programmed to accept as the norm during the 20th and early 21st century.

In the mean time check out the presentation that Katie has done for us.

Social Media Monitoring Tools Evaluation

View more presentations from RCM77.

Daily Stats

Depressing really, my own colleagues don't find me Interesting at all! Or maybe it's because Blogspot has only recently been allowed in China! Seriously though the unsung secret of Blogging is Google Analytics. It's the only quantitative evidence I am hopelessly addicted to. It'sa deep diving internet analytical tool that has taught me a lot about how to think through e-commerce, click through and bounce rates, search engine optimization and all the other features and benefits that will appeal to even the most creative planners amongst us. The numbers above don't reflect the RSS subscribers I have, although I intend do a post about Feedburner (and/or Feedsky for China) soon because its interesting and also the political implications of RSS readers and subscribers are quite considerable in places like China where pluralism of opinion is often anathema.

Dangerous Data

Issabella Valentine

Jason Oke of Leo Burnett Toronto pretty much demolishes the idea that people tell the objective truth during quantitative questionnaires in a post today. It blows up the myth of veracity by demonstrating one of the most flaccid of urban legends. Any study which suggests that men are more promiscuous than women flops miserably by failing to acknowledge two really important factors. Firstly it takes two to tango and secondly many men exaggerate their sexual activity. Or maybe the figures have been 'inflated' by other elements? There's a time and a place for quantitative questionnaires and so in the interests of trying to make them workable I always say quick and dirty is a good rule of thumb.

I make no excuses for making a post with the most puns on this occasion.