I have just finished Paul Adams excellent book "Grouped". You can read selected Chapters at Paul's blog here .
Grouped concisely and persuasively gathers together a wide body of research with the aim of showing readers "how to rebuild their business around social behaviour and create products that people tell their friends about" At the heart of this is a fundamental challenge to marketers and creative agencies to rethink and re purpose advertising and content:
''Creative agencies the world over try to make content that people will spread. In order to do so, they need to understand what people share, and why. The vast majority of ''viral'' campaigns don't spread at all and this is often because the content is factual. Many research studies have shown that people don't share facts, they share feelings"
Adams pulls together a rich and accessible array of evidence that challenges our over reliance on models that grossly exaggerate the role of rational thought and significance of brands in peoples everyday thoughts and social interactions. From this, and a wealth of other material Adams builds to a strong critique of 'ineterruption marketing':
"there are two main problems with interruption marketing. The first is that it is a terrible experience for people....in social settings we don't like it when people interrupt our conversations and research has shown that we don't like it when marketers do it either. The second problem with interruption marketing is that people have a limited amount of time and attention. Because more and more marketers are vying for this attention, fewer and fewer of them are heard. Instead we ignore everything and walk away from all of the choices''
Adams continues:
"Both of these problems are becoming worse. We are being bombarded by more and more information yet our capacity for remembering and processing this information remains the same."
He sums this up with this graph:
For me, this is where Adams much needed argument for re purposing marketing falters slightly. As he clearly recognises elsewhere in Grouped, in order to move things on you need to start with a realistic assessment of where things are now. But I don't think the narrow characterisation in this graph acurately describes how "interruption" or any other form of marketing actually works. It's simply not all about attention.
Here I think Adams may have been tempted into an over simplification to set up his advocacy of permission marketing. There is no doubt that a great deal of marketing still hangs on to an overly rationalised view of the world. But all advertising has worked, and will continue to work, in much more expansive ways beyond attention and conscious message trasfer whether practitioners, and its critics, recognise it or not.
Paul Feldwick's excellent paper 'Exploding the Message Myth', primarily written using examples from classic UK TV advertising (read it on the ThinkBox website here) argues powerfully for an entertainment based, 'everything communicates', model which would support many of Adams requirements for socially focused content.
Before I quote from Feldwick, here are another few key quotes from Adams on how "environmental cues bias us" :
- We talk about and are influenced by the things that surround us- we can influence peoples behaviour by cuing them with a specific perception. This is called priming and can be done by words, sounds or things in peoples environment
- We are influenced by how things are presented- every decision we make is framed in a certain context and this framing can radically change our perceptions and behaviour
In "The Message Myth" Feldwick argues that the message paradigm is more a description of the culture of business (hard wired rationalism) and less about how things actually work- successful campaigns happen not because of this model but in spite of it: the message is incidental in most successful brand-building TV commercials-
"What people are experiencing and responding to is a wealth of material, visuals, music, dialogue, timing, colour, entertainment, emotions.... ads can influence our behaviour without getting our conscious attention, and without us being able to consciously remember them"
But it is Feldwick's thoughts on the work of Paul Watzlawick and "how communication works in the context of human relationships" that is particularly pertinent to Adam's objectives of re purposing creative content around social behaviour.
Feldwick focuses on 3 of Watzlawicks ideas:
- It is impossible not to communicate. "Whatever we do or whatever we don't do, intentionally or unintentionally, we are sending out signals for others to make sense of. In fact everything we do then is communication. So everything about a brand communicates and every aspect of a commercial communicates"
- Human communication is both digital and analogue: (NOTE: FELDWICK IS REFERENCING WORK FROM 1967 SO THESE TERMS ARE USED DIFFERENTLY THAN WE WOULD USE THEM TODAY) Digital communication is precise, it's either verbal or numerical. It's logical, conscious explicit and intellectual. We couldn't do without this clarity and precision in many contexts, but it's not the only kind of communication that we do as humans.Analogue communication might be verbal too, but it could also be visual, audible, gestural or tactile and the power of an image, or a poem or a story or a hug or a piece of music is that we're not immune to it. It's non-deniable. We experience it to a large extent through our unconscious
- All communication is about relationship as well as content. "And analogue communication, which includes image, gesture and tone of voice is especially crucial in influencing relationships. That's why if we see the task of advertising as building and strengthening a quasi-personal relationship between the consumer and the brand, this is going to happen predominantly through the analogue mode"
Using this broader communications context those engaged in creating "content that spreads" can actually learn a lot from some classic "interruption" based traditional marketing. The examples Feldwick uses in his paper (PG Tips Chimps, Budweiser Whaaats Up etc.) and other popular favourites like the Smash Martians (I still have a birthday card from my mum with the Smash Martians on the front....) and Compare the Meerkat transcend their message and work by framing on a grand scale, becoming part of our culture and changing the context in which we make decisions. Just for fun, here are the Chimps and the Martians
And here is Aleksandr Orlov, perhaps the recent gold standard for integrated creative ideas. This ad has been viewed 525,855 times on YouTube and Aleksandr has over half a million fans on Facebook and 40,000 followers on Twitter. Apart from those last couple of social media stats how much has really changed since the Chimps and the Martians....?
So interruption is not only about attention and message transfer. And it is not necessarily incompatible with social influence if the content is rich and interesting enough. As Shiv Singh from Pepsi recognises in his recent Harvard Business Review blog, marketing will be welcomed if it is entertaining and offers a ''narrative arc'' that ads something to the conversation:
"Increasingly, consumers care most about items like what's trending in pop culture, what's about to become really important, and what music, entertainment, sports or celebrities they need to care about. All this typically breaks online today. Reflecting that and sharing it with wider audiences in ways that correlate to the brand's objective, is going to become a new role for TV advertising. It's going to give street credibility to the brands. It's going to start with those 15-second spots but soon all advertising will cover this"
Adams concludes Grouped by arguing that "we need to move away from interuption models, and towards permission models". He feels this is the only way to deal with the increasing breakdown in trust he sees between people and marketers.
Trust is a real issue. But I don't think the solution is so obvious or dichotomous. Marketing definitely needs to move from monologue to dialogue and pay more attention to people's real lives and what matters to them.
But the truly skilled conversationalist doesn't only speak when he has been spoken to, and he doesn't build trust by merely agreeing with or reinforcing the prevailing opinion of the group. He challenges, offers new perspectives by connecting with the group through what he is saying, but also the way he is saying it.
In this context I still see a legitimate and important role for "interruption"marketing. It certainly needs to be rescued from the reductionist tenets of the rational messaging paradigm. But when it is working at its full, expansive, potential as an "aesthetic whole", providing a "narrative arc" for the brand in peoples wider day to day cultural lives, it still has a key role to play in social influence.