Advertising is a strange beast. It seems odd to think that thirty second blips of entertainment would ever actually persuade us to buy products. Surely we’re not that gullible. Besides which, most advertising isn’t an attempt to persuade, but rather an attempt to get the consumer to associate a product with a feeling like being cool or happy. Surely we’re not that manipulatable! So it would seem that simply broadcasting even a well-crafted message should never really be capable of compelling behavior in people. Even the urban myths about subliminal advertising have been greatly exaggerated. Wouldn’t a business be better off focusing on its product design and customer service than spending millions on funny but ultimately goofy cartoons? Or hyperbolic schlock? Do advertisers really think they’re fooling consumers or is something else at work? The answer those questions comes in two parts. First, corperations can afford advertising as a trade-off against the quality of their products. Two, the existence of a recognition heuristic in cognitive science argues that we are subtly susceptible to advertising, albeit not in a way that you might initially suspect.

To the first question, it is useful to know that there are two competing theories about what a corporations motivations can be. On the one hand, a school of management established by Peter Drucker argues that (in his words) “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” Under this managerial view, making a better product, creating a better experience should be the top priority. On the other hand, many corporate executives have come to believe in the arguments laid out by finance professor Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. Their theory argues that a corporate CEO’s number one goal should be to maximize shareholder value. (You can read much more about this clash of ideas in “The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value” by Steve Denning over at Forbes. Definitely worth the read.) The problem that arises from this point-of-view is that there are ways that a CEO can increase shareholder value without concerning him/herself with bettering a product. Most of these involve managing information in some way. The first method is that CEOs can manage the expectations of analysts who make investment advice. Exuberance has been shown to be able to increase stock value. This, to paraphrase Roger Martin in Fixing the Game, is like the coach of a football team managing the spread for the bookies instead of trying to win the game. A second method is to use advertising and product placement in media to manage brand recognition, and that part is important because of the recognition heuristic.

In Psychological Review (Vol. 1, No. 9) Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer put forward a simple mathematical function that fairly accurately predicts subjects’ decision-making. The predictions indicated that, in very general terms, individuals will choose something they know over something that they are unfamiliar with. They call this decision process the recognition heuristic and speak directly to the fact that information transmitted via media has the advantage of appearing before an individual multiple times. What this accomplishes is to make an individual estimate that they have interacted with a brand more often than they actually have, increasing its recognition, and the likelihood that the advertised product will be chosen over the lesser or un-advertised.

Where corporations often run into trouble (Hi RIM!) is that they come to rely on these informational crutches. Playing the spread becomes more important than winning the game. Talking up unproven projects in development becomes more important than actually shipping. Their core advantages and collection of skilled people begins to deteriorate as money is funneled away from design and development and into other channels better used for support. If there’s one thing that annoys talented engineers and designers, it is seeing that the focus of a company is on something other than what is being produced. Before you know it, a company loses its ability to innovate even when executives decide to change focus, because the talent needed to steer the ship has jumped ship. As the vaunted Steve Jobs might say, “Real artists ship”1. In fact, Apple makes an exceptional example in this respect, reducing their advertising budget when compared to their revenue growth, and spending a fraction of what other technology companies spend while dominating multiple markets because of the effectiveness of their design and engineering. Managing shareholder expectations and engaging advertising are important aspects of corporate management, but they are no substitute for creating a product or service that compels consumers to want to engage with it.

He never said this verbatim, but the message was implied. ↩

As a blog concerned with the effect of the media on the mind, it’s hard not to be concerned with the effects of fame on the populace and the individuals that enjoy fame. My niece is currently loving Calvin and Hobbes which caused me to look into Bill Watterson, the author. In a question and answer session, upon the release of his “Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Amazon link)” publication, readers posted questions to him and he answered. The pragmatic nature of the answer to this reader’s question impresses me.

Alan Taylor from Lubbock, TX writes: “You have been very persistent in not becoming a public figure, and I respect that a great deal. Is there anything you would wish to tell the fans who do not understand your wishes and why it is important to you not to claim the spotlight?”

Watterson: My impression is that those who don’t get it, don’t care to get it.”

I wish reclusiveness would become a useful marketing strategy. To not have to hear the Famous pine would be a silence we’ve not known in generations. I don’t think we’d recognize the peace for what it was.

Rupert Murdoch is going to take his ball and go home. In a recent interview, he informed all that he intends to eventually block Google and some other search engines from indexing his News Corp. sites and then start charging for content. Apparently, Murdoch has been taking a nap for the last some odd ten years. More ridiculous still, Murdoch seems to have a problem with fair use itself, making claims towards dismantling it. I think it would be a good psychology study to look at what number of billions of dollars actually makes a person completely lose their grasp on reality—it can’t just be one billion. Cory Doctorow’s analysis of the situation is dead on over at BoingBoing along with the best quote I’ve read in weeks:

“So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet…”

I’m going to do something I don’t often do on this blog and that is jump on the blogging band-wagon that is the discussion of the Google Chrome OS announced today. From MacWorld to the Washington Post, Google has clearly made an impact on the world with its announcement that it will be working on a new operating system that will largely be centralized around the web and Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. But one idea, that’s been fairly pervasive in the conversation: that file systems and other “onboard” applications might go away—seems to point to a new paradigm to computing, and it’s spawned a lot of metaphors in the discussion. It’s also wrong.

My favorite metaphor so far hails from Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast. In his editorial he mentions that the current desktop regime that got its start in the late 70s and early 80s was a development akin to road-makers requiring new cars and car manufacturers requiring new roads. The hardware got faster, so the software got more bloated, so the hardware needed to be faster. On that point, I would have to agree. There’s no question in my mind that some software bloat is totally out-of-control as well as overpriced—so much so that I made a concerted effort to opt-out about a year ago. To this day, Adobe’s software is the only software on my Mac that regularly (and predictably) crashes and I can’t stand that I can’t find an alternative for Illustrator even when I’ve found a great alternative for Photoshop. However, I digress.

The software got more bloated and sloppy and especially-so among some camps but it didn’t have to. There was very little market pressure in the OS industry and that really just made for a feature-focused attitude (read: Vista), rather than a fine-tuning attitude. Snow Leopard (Apple’s latest Mac OS version) will actually decrease the memory footprint of the OS, as well as speed it up during wake up and shut down. So it’s not by necessity that software-makers let their software get bloated, it’s that the bloat stems from misplaced incentives. When your the dominant player in the market, the incentive is to use your economy-of-scale (read more coders) to out-pace the other guy in innovations and features, not clean house. Google won’t escape this incentive. People have already hinted that as the company as moved away from its core technological expertise (search!) the search results are not as good as they used to be.

But this positioning of Google Chrome as an OS, and it’s focus on the network, still overlooks the fact that people view their own media as valuable (and as property) and keeping all your photos on Flickr is not as good as sharing photos on Flickr while still having them in some file archive on a local machine. I would predict that’s never going to change.1 However, I also don’t think that the netbooks that Google Chrome will most likely end up on are any different than iphones (with the exception of being much, much less slick)—they’re not anyone’s first and only computer–they’re certainly not going to become the hub of the media center in a household. And just like with the iPhone and iPod, the model that naturally evolves is a cloud-desktop hybrid. There are layers of privacy to these sorts of hybrids and as people become more and more aware of threats to their media, they will want more protection. That means that some stuff, meant for my eyes only, stays on my computer, in my vault, while other material (like my twitter messages) gets pretty much permanently embedded online.2

I think the metaphor that best suits what will happen because of the Google Chrome OS is not really much of a metaphor at all. It will be a component in an iTunes-like world. I have my music (without DRM now) all on a personal machine. I can back that up. Occasionally, I allow some of it to be streamed to others in my office. I can move it up to an online back-up resource or I can move it to my iPod. (I even occasionally—with the permission of the artist—host a file for Blip.fm.) It’s not all in the cloud. It’s not all on the desktop. It is however rarely on only one device.3 Google wants to run software through the browser and that makes some sense. I think it will force software developers to re-consider their design strategies and worry more about reliability and speed and be more tentative about new features (though I hope they learn how to come out of a beta phase). But I don’t think that will at all change the fact that people will run want to run programs offline. I see no point in an online version Illustrator where I create my art (in utero) entirely online. I don’t want anyone looking at my work in its middle stages. I will want to store things locally and only locally and I don’t think Google plans to stop them.

To understand why I predict that, ask yourself why the DRM dragon has largely been slayed. ↩

That is to say, much like email, if I wanted to pull down all my twitter messages, I’m not sure that I could. There’s liable to be copies in lots of places. ↩

Also, despite some “walled-garden” naysayers of Apple, iTunes has always played mp3s and there are lots and lots of places for my to buy music, other than on the iTunes store. ↩