Guard Against Oversimplification

This is the main cause for our specieswide tendency to oversimplificationLike the dichotomania that reduces every phenomenon to only two polar opposites As if there could only be two political positions When in fact there are even more political positions than sexual positionsEinstein was concerned that oversimplification was even creeping into science He of course knew Occamamp8217s Razor the practice of leaving out variables that appeared to be unnecessary of inclusion He also knew that scientists are like artists and love elegant solutions amp8211 more impact created with less As contrasted with solutions that are only accurate when there are mathematical amp8220fudgeamp8221 factors included for exampleEinstein weighed in by famously writing amp8211amp8220Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpleramp8221Most of what has gone wrong with marketing and advertising has to do with oversimplificationThis has been exacerbated by a general tendency to never change marketing and advertising shibbolethsAt the core of the rigid conservatism of the marketing and advertising industries is a notsohidden suspicion that it is all hooey anywayIt isnamp8217t hooey at all Marketing science is an applied science branch of the science of psychology There is no reason to act as if one might safely ignore all of the complex thinking that has been done in marketing in the past hundred years This pervasive Luddism is costing the Earthamp8217s human race trillions of dollars a year in wasted effortsWasted efforts also have extremely negative side effects including the reduction in force readiness for the human race as measured by decreases in attention span book reading educational standards cooperativeness tolerance and increases in suicide depression attention deficit disorders divorce social media hatred statements and the potential for civil warsThe oversimplified understandings and behaviors of marketers and their media and agency partners are the root cause of the misuse of great media for low endsSome people have asked me recently if I am down on attention I am not down on attention any more than I would be down on communication or persuasion All those things are necessary for advertising to have sales and brand love effectsI might appear to be down on attention only because of the oversimplification problem which has caused thousands of intelligent people to act as if the only cognitiveaffective dimension they have to be concerned about is attentionBefore the 29 companies now measuring and predicting attention the traditional copytesting companies measured and predicted attention along with communication believability understandability emotion motivation meaning persuasion and other dimensions They as a group did not oversimplify although as individuals they often fell prey after all it is built into the brain reward system and the desire to please clients whose tendency to want oversimplicity far exceeds that of the research groupsA 2011 paper entitled amp8220The Power of Inertia Conservatism in Marketing Resource Allocationamp8221 in the Advertising Research Foundationamp8217s ARFamp8217s Journal of Advertising Research amp8220shows that mindless amp8216aversion to changeamp8217 continues to lead marketers to consistently make precisely the wrong decisions about how to advertiseamp8221 states Kirk Cheyfitz in amp8220How Refusal To Change Keeps Killing The Advertising Industryamp8221One of the points made in the ARF amp8220Power of Inertiaamp8221 paper based upon a rigorous series of marketing mix modeling analyses across many industries is thatamp160amp8211amp8220In each industry the most popular marketing vehicle receives the largest share of the marketing budgetamp8221 The paper goes on to prove that a more dispersed campaign would have increased return on advertising investment ROAS in every single caseThis behavior goes back to our point above about marketing and advertising being hooey If one has a strong suspicion that is the case amp8211 andor if one wishes to insure oneself against hooey exposure in a campaign for which one is responsible amp8211 the perceived safest course of action is to follow the client and the herd Whatever the lowest common denominator in terms of intelligence considers to be the most popular investment vehicle is where the mob will park most of its moneyThis amp8220strategyamp8221 is rationalized further based on the lowest CPM which one can get by pumping the most massive volume of dollars into one sellerConsidering CPM above all else is the ultimate proof that the party involved has a strong fear of marketingadvertising being hooeyWe can also see traces of this in the World Federation of Advertisers WFA taking the position recommended by Google and Meta to use virtual IDs and to base reachfrequency on oldfashioned GRP curves which ignore the huge reach effect of dispersion across many sellersBecause marketing and advertising sciences are not hooey all those behaving in these archconservative ways always lose market share to the few that take the enterprise seriously and use disciplined rigor to optimize considering all of the variables not an oversimplificationThe reality however is that each of the smart money advertisers takes years to learn how to take advantage of all of the variables and therefore in the short run they behave like the rest of the herd and often study one variable at a time taking several years to assimilate and accommodate each variable While they are doing that the technologies of both media and advertising race forward and overturn what the slowmoving advertisers have just learnedAttention became the focal point specifically because someone told the advertisers pumping monstrous amounts into Google and Meta et al that in these digital media the ads scroll by in less than a second in most cases and sometimes can go up to 5 seconds in the Skipin54321 video contexts The logical reaction might have been to cut back the percentage of media going in this direction However thatamp8217s not what happened right up to the last quarter these digital media categories all have continued to go upInstead of avoiding lowattention environments the approach taken while generally spending even more in those lowattention environments is to strap on filtering technology which can programmatically filter out the really low end of the poolamp8220Okay I guess that makes senseamp8230amp8221 says the fearful new marketing employee smiling engaginglyThe really promising light at the end of this tunnel is that with the ARF now leading the charge to ensure the utmost realism and rigor in attentionrelated practices the methodologies will evolve and become multidimensional optimizing not only for attention but also for advanced audiences motivated by the motivations in the campaign ads specifically and context resonance with those ads And by any other signals which are scalable in economic terms and can be made to fit within existing workflow that are validated by the ARF to increase incremental sales lifetime value and brand love The sales part is right around the corner It usually takes a little longer to validate longterm effectsThe story has a happy ending to the degree that we support and help guide the ARF effort so that it is truly an industry effort It has already gone beyond attention on its own emotion is also being measured and some measurers are measuring everything Phase 3 of the ARF Attention Measurement Validation Study is about to begin The industry can ask the ARF to include the kitchen sink just so long as it pertains to the use case attention data that are being used for now which is mainly programmatic filtration with a side of copy pretestingPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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Guard Against Oversimplification

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Bill Harvey

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Guard Against Oversimplification

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