Guard Against Oversimplification

This is the main cause for our species-wide tendency to oversimplification.

Like 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 positions.

Einstein was concerned that oversimplification was even creeping into science. He of course knew Occam’s 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 – more impact created with less. As contrasted with solutions that are only accurate when there are mathematical “fudge” factors included, for example.

Einstein weighed in by famously writing –

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Most of what has gone wrong with marketing and advertising has to do with oversimplification.

This has been exacerbated by a general tendency to never change marketing and advertising shibboleths.

At the core of the rigid conservatism of the marketing and advertising industries is a not-so-hidden suspicion that it is all hooey anyway.

It isn’t 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 Earth’s human race trillions of dollars a year in wasted efforts.

Wasted 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 wars.

The oversimplified understandings and behaviors of marketers and their media and agency partners are the root cause of the misuse of great media for low ends.

Some 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 effects.

I 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 cognitive/affective dimension they have to be concerned about is attention.

Before the 29 companies now measuring and predicting attention, the traditional copy-testing 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 groups.

A 2011 paper entitled “The Power of Inertia: Conservatism in Marketing Resource Allocation”, in the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF’s) Journal of Advertising Research “shows that mindless ‘aversion to change’ continues to lead marketers to consistently make precisely the wrong decisions about how to advertise,” states Kirk Cheyfitz in “How Refusal To Change Keeps Killing The Advertising Industry.”

One of the points made in the ARF “Power of Inertia” paper, based upon a rigorous series of marketing mix modeling analyses across many industries, is that –

“In each industry, the most popular marketing vehicle receives the largest share of the marketing budget.”
The paper goes on to prove that a more dispersed campaign would have increased return on advertising investment (ROAS) in every single case.

This behavior goes back to our point above about marketing and advertising being hooey. If one has a strong suspicion that is the case – and/or if one wishes to insure oneself against hooey exposure in a campaign for which one is responsible – 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 money.

This “strategy” is rationalized further based on the lowest CPM, which one can get by pumping the most massive volume of dollars into one seller.

Considering CPM above all else is the ultimate proof that the party involved has a strong fear of marketing/advertising being hooey.

We 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 reach/frequency on old-fashioned GRP curves which ignore the huge reach effect of dispersion across many sellers.

Because 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 oversimplification.

The 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 slow-moving advertisers have just learned.

Attention 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, that’s not what happened: right up to the last quarter these digital media categories all have continued to go up.

Instead of avoiding low-attention environments, the approach taken while generally spending even more in those low-attention environments is to strap on filtering technology which can programmatically filter out the really low end of the pool.

“Okay, I guess that makes sense…” says the fearful new marketing employee, smiling engagingly.

The 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 attention-related 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 long-term effects.

The 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 pretesting.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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