One thing that’s been fun about watching the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates on CNN is that you get to also watch a scrolling EKG-like graph of how viewers are actually responding to what is being shown.

The methodology appears to involve a live audience, selected by CNN, to manipulate some sort of control that indicates how much they agree with what they are seeing and hearing. When the audience agrees, the meters go up; when they disagree, they go down. It can get a little confusing when, for example, one candidate says “My opponent wants to eat babies!” and causes the meters to go up — does that men the audience approves of eating babies, or that they agree with the the candidate’s indignation? Generally, I think, it’s the latter.

I also can’t attest to the scientific validity of the graph — there are far too many variables in play to put much stock in them (for example, How did CNN pick the audience? How big is the audience sample?). Still, it’s fun to try to find patterns in the graphs, in particular to examine places where different audiences responded differently to the same statements — or when audiences didn’t respond at all.

For the Presidential debate, three different graph lines tracked Democratic, Republican, and Independent voters. For the most part, the red and blue party lines reflected which candidate was speaking, but there were many times when they converged indicating broader agreement with what the candidate was saying.

• Whenever McCain spoke in generic patriotic platitudes (America is the greatest country on earth, etc.) the Republican line shot through the roof and the Democratic graph barely notched above a flatline. Either Democrats aren’t patriotic and Republicans are, or Democrats don’t fall for that kind of rhetoric (and Republicans do). I think it’s a little of both — part of the appeal of Democratic and liberal politics is a sense of independence from systems of authority. Tellingly, Independents did not respond to overt appeals to patriotism.
• When McCain spoke of victory in Iraq, and criticized Obama for what he thinks is a plan for precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, the Independents in the audience barely responded at all. But when Obama spoke of leaving Iraq, the Independent numbers shot up. Republicans and Democrats generally followed their candidates on this question, but I think I remember observing that even the Republican line failed to reflect much enthusiasm for McCain’s emphatic case that we needed to pursue victory in Iraq. People want the next President to get America out of Iraq.
• Whenever either candidate attacked the other, particularly for some obscure or feeble inside-baseball political gaffe, the lines would split along party lines… but the Independent line would tumble. Independents do not want to hear political attacks.

The Vice Presidential debate was even more fun, where CNN selected an audience of undecided voters in Ohio. In this case, the graph plotted only two lines: men and women. Presumably, because they are undecided, most of this audience was not partisan D or R. My observations from this round:

• Anytime either candidate mentioned the word “nuclear” (or, in Palin’s case, “nukular”), the line for men shot upwards — literally at the very moment the word was uttered, like some kind of magic button was pressed in their brains. Apparently men love them some nukes. Perhaps the graph is also something of a Geiger counter.
• Whenever Sarah Palin spoke about her track record and accomplishments in Alaska, both of the plot lines were flat. Apparently nobody gives a shit about her accomplishments in Alaska. Nobody gives a shit about Alaska. If this was intended to bolster her executive credentials, the CNN chart shows that it wasn’t working.
• When Palin spoke of representing “regular Joe Six Pack” Americans, the meters did go up. The back-slapping stuff works.
• When Palin spoke about Iran, she spoke forcefully and strongly, and had some scathing critique for Obama’s (frankly baffling to me) “no preconditions” position. But, interestingly, the audience meters didn’t go up for her. People don’t want to hear belligerence towards Iran.
• When the critical question was asked (one of Ifil’s only really good questions, I think) about how the candidates would handle ascending to the Oval Office if the President were to die, Palin’s chart was nearly flatline. This is one of the few moments in the debate where the audience was asked to seriously and realistically contemplate the possibility that Palin could be our President. Despite her likability, nobody wants to even think of a President Palin.
• When Biden spoke about the death of his wife and child, the graph surged. When he choked up, however, they dropped suddenly but rose back up again. It’s as if peoples’ bullshit detectors went off immediately, only to then declare a false alarm, that indeed his pain was real.
• When Biden went on the offensive against Palin, the numbers did not respond. Fortunately for him he rarely attacked Palin in the debate. Pundits on both sides criticized him for being too gentle, but the numbers, both on the graph and in the post-debate polls, speak for themselves. Biden’s no-attack “aikido” strategy was completely correct, and his self-discipline paid off.
• That said, when Biden went off on Dick Cheney, the women’s line on the meter went through the roof.
• When Palin said “Drill, baby, drill”, the women’s line dropped. Oops!
• Palin’s winking and cute you betchas and goshdarnits didn’t work, either. When she said she wasn’t going to answer the moderator’s questions, and when she joked that she was new to this campaign and hadn’t made many promises, both meter lines dropped. People may like her and may even strongly agree with some of her positions, but they don’t like Palin not taking things deadly seriously.
• When the candidates discussed kitchen-table economic issues, a clear gender gap emerged: Men gravitated very strongly to Palin’s championing of Republican platforms, tax cuts in particular; while women responded to Biden’s empathy for the effects of the economy on everyday budgetary challenges. My theory on this is simple: Men are idiots when it comes to practical money issues. Men have no idea how much consumer prices have gone up in the last year or two (grocery costs are up 10% this year); women know. Men think that they’re going to make over $250,000 next year; women know this is a delusion. Believe me, I fit both of these patterns.
• Overall, Biden seemed to have greater appeal to women than Palin did. His appeal to women often exceeded his appeal to men, too.

For both debates, the pundits rated the candidates’ performances roughly equally. And in both cases, the post-debate polls revealed commanding victory margins for the Democratic candidates. And, as should be clear from my analysis above, the CNN studio audiences were similarly less moved by the Republican arguments. Why the discrepancy between the pundits and the audience?

The GOP strategy seems to be to run the same campaign they’ve run for the last six elections. Normally this would work. But I think things are different now. The American people are different now.

The conclusion I get from these debates is the same as Bill Kristol’s: Americans simply aren’t buying what McCain is selling. It’s a different electoral zeitgeist than it was in 2000 (when America was complacent) or 2004 (when America was scared but cocky). Obama and Biden did not have to be circumspect about their positions (as, say, John Kerry felt obliged to be) because their positions are what the American people want right now. They don’t want America to be belligerent around the world. They’re okay with taxing the rich. They want something to be done about healthcare.

The pundits will continue to equivocate about the candidates’ performances in the debates, and will give McCain’s platform credence from a rhetorical perspective. But the American people are already giving plenty of indicators that they’re just not buying it.

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Using some clever detective work (about which I will say little except that Google was really all I needed), I think I’ve uncovered the master plan behind the Mad Men Alternate Twitterverse that I’ve been enjoying lately.

I could be wrong, but here’s my theory of how this all works:

First, there are a large number of participants in this operation — not a single, lone writer playing many different roles as many suspect. These people are writers, advertising professionals, bloggers, performers, and marketers. Basically clever people.

And few, if any, of them work for AMC. I suspect some mastermind (Deep Focus, it seems) was hired by AMC to manage this campaign. They subcontracted the work to a dozen or more Twitter “actors”, each playing a character from the show or from history. Some actors may be playing more than one role, but I suspect that most actors are assigned to play a single character.

These actors use Twitter in basically the same way normal Twitter users do — updating “what they are doing” every so often, responding to direct messages, having many side conversations. But always in character. The actors tweet each other and they tweet the “real world” people they’ve been following. Each actor has their own writing and Tweeting style — some stick firmly to the 1962 universe, others slip into occasional 2008 anachronisms.

They also socialize differently, with behavior that mirrors the broad range of real Twitter user behaviors. For example, @peggyolson follows nearly 1,800 people — basically following anybody who follows her. She even trolls through other characters’ follow-ees and starts following new people, just like many Twitter users do.

@David_Ogilvy, on the other hand, has over 200 followers but only follows 23 people — just as some Twitter celebrities often do, carefully controlling who they wish to interrupt them.

Lawyers and Money

So what happened last week when the project was briefly cancelled? Well, it seems that AMC’s right hand sometimes doesn’t know what it’s left hand is doing: the lawyers who hunt down copyright violators apparently didn’t know that AMC’s marketing department was behind these fake Twitter accounts. Once this was cleared up, however, Twitter was able to reactivate the accounts — pointing the way, perhaps, to Twitter founder Evan Williams’s projection that Twitter is going to try to monetize through corporate contracts.

Perhaps facilitating alternate universes will somday become Twitter’s bread and butter? Selling official account names for fictional characters across hundreds of fandoms? We shall see.

Why This Matters

In any case, I am completely impressed with this work, if only for the fact that it radically refocuses where and how digital marketing dollars can be spent while still exploiting Web 2.0 social media in a profoundly savvy way.

Think of it this way: How much would you charge to spend a few minutes every few hours (even while working at your normal job) to write snarky, chatty Tweets in the voice of a character from a really good TV show? Even if they pay you as much as $2 per tweet, then the person playing, say, Don Draper would have earned around $500 in the first few weeks of this project (he’s posted about 250 tweets overall).

So let’s do this for all 20-30 characters for a few months, and let’s throw in a supervising editor and a project manager to keep the project humming along. It seems to me that the whole project’s budget couldn’t cost more than $75-100k — a fairly typical, even low, budget for many TV-show promotional mini-sites.

That’s $100k for a PR-generating, sophisticated, far-reaching digital marketing effort that requires no HTML skill, no information architecture work, no programming or server configurations, almost none of the normal digital marketing skills we normally think of as part of this kind of work. All they need is some good writers, a good idea, and an open-minded client.

Well done.

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I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men.

About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first it was just @don_draper, who I first started following based on only a real-world conversational recommendation from a friend. Then @peggyolson befriended me (and for a moment I thought she was a human). Soon I had a dozen Mad Men following me, both from the Sterling Cooper agency and, soon, from their clients and their families.

But that was just the beginning. Soon I had several early-60s Madison Avenue giants following me, too, including @David_Ogilvy and @billbernbach. Clearly the Alternate Twitterverse surrounding don_draper was bigger than I’d imagined.

But now I know what’s happening. The Alternate Twitterverse of 1962 is taking over the real Twittersphere of 2008. With the appearance of Benjamin Spock, it is only a matter of time before Buckminster Fuller appears. And James Baldwin. And Glenn Gould. And Doris Day. And Lenny Bruce, Jacques Tati, Sylvia Plath, Alan Shepard, Jackie Kennedy, Bill Paley, Vladimir Nabokov.

And now I’m name dropping, so I’ll stop.

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As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike.

One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual development of a project. In either case, several creative communication challenges arise:

1. Getting the client to understand our ideas
2. Inspiring the client to give us productive feedback on our ideas
3. Convincing the client that our ideas are good

The first two cases are simply a matter of good two-way communication: every one of our presentations is a conversation between the creative team and the client, and our ideas can and should be shaped by that conversation.

But the third challenge kind of flies in the face of the first two. It’s a sales process, where we need to stand tall and back our ideas with confidence, selling the ideas, convincing the client that our idea is correct — sometimes even if the client’s feedback pokes a few holes in our concept. Of course the best way to keep a client happy is to simply have great ideas and great follow-through on those ideas. But without confidence in your ideas, you’re risking preventing great ideas from succeeding.

All creative people question their ideas — If I thought about it more, would I come up with something better? Has this idea been thought of before? Am I totally off base? But if you can’t stand up for your own ideas, then those ideas wont be given a chance to develop and get better. Ideas are like living things, weak when born but growing stronger as they overcome challenges, learning from failures and mistakes. Without confidence to drive it along and protect it, a perfectly good idea might be nipped in the bud before it becomes truly great.

Lucky Strike

This clip exemplifies all of these challenges. A little background: Don Draper, in typical Mad Men fashion, has been, shall we say, distracted from work and has arrived at this pitch meeting completely unprepared (I don’t advocate this, but hey, that’s Don Draper). The client is the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The year is 1960, and America is just starting to learn that cigarettes are actually dangerous to your health. Many people forget that cigarettes used to be marketed as great for your health, helping you stay slim, fighting infection, and all other manner of ludicrous medical claims.

First, let me say that I love watching the dramatics of Sterling Cooper’s pitch meetings, which happen in almost every other episode of Mad Men. As it is with Behavior’s pitches, the Mad Men agency team has a functional dynamic — one person focuses on the company’s credentials, handing off the creative proposal to another. Unlike at Behavior, however, Sterling Cooper’s creative team is embroiled in a cutthroat competition as Don Draper and the young Pete Campbell. I suppose that’s life at a large agency.

In this pitch, the client is given a chance to explain their situation to the agency first. Don Draper listens intently, but when he steps up to bat he immediately strikes out. Okay, so far Draper’s lack of professionalism here is unforgivable. Pete Campbell has a backup idea. But his idea is even worse, and doesn’t take into account the client’s profound belief that cigarettes are wholesome.

Draper, however, has been mulling over his client’s concerns. His initial thinking, when he finally unleashes it, is inspired completely from what his clients told him about their product — that they are really no different from their competitors. But that’s just the start. He immediately engages the client in a conversation about his concept, looking for something meaningful to latch on to, to complete his idea.

After a rapid brainstorming exercise with the client, the idea crystallizes: It’s Toasted!

Then, critically, Draper stands behind this idea 100%. He’s even willing to argue with the client over the idea. “They’re all toasted,” says the client. Draper’s argument makes no logical sense. But he believes in it, and will argue passionately for it, because the idea is a quintessential Don Draper idea, one based on emotion instead of logic. He has transferred the conversation from one about medical health to one about happiness and assurance.

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep these copyrighted — but used here under journalistic fair-use — videos posted here. And please stay tuned for more!

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Barack Obama’s speech was tremendous. He was strong, forceful, and honest while fighting tooth and nail for most of the fundamentally liberal ideals that I share — arguing them openly instead of filtering or even hiding them as most liberal Democratic candidates have in the past. And in the several places where he strayed from liberal orthodoxy, there were three or four times where I actually found myself changing my mind a little bit.

The most interesting example was his statement about the right to bear arms. He said:

The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

My reaction was, hey, you know, I think I now realize that I don’t give a fuck if people in the sticks shoot the hell out of each other — as long as I can be damn sure that handguns are 1000% illegal here in New York City, I’ll feel safe enough.

Obama let me imagine a future where the Second Amendment isn’t a national issue at all except to the extent that localities are permitted the right to choose their own paths.

The idea that an adult in Montana should be forbidden from carrying a gun in their pocket just so I can feel safe walking home in Red Hook, Brooklyn now seems like more than just idealism or even ideology — it now feels like a kind of petty pedantry.

This is, of course, something enshrined in the United States Constitution, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find a middle ground where Brooklyn and Montana can still have different rules. The Second Amendment’s words are, in fact, ambiguous enough (notoriously so) for both approaches to be able to survive simultaneously in the same nation’s legal landscape.

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”… Flexibility is strength. Is it my deep concern for the safety of Montanans living in a gun-saturated state that made me so uncompromising about the 2nd Amendment? Or was it really just my own desire that I and my loved ones can feel safe in a crowded city with a history of staggering crime? I have no doubt it’s the latter.

(I know this issue is more complex than I make it seem — the lax legality of guns in one state may of course negatively affect crime in a neighboring state where they are contraband… and of course if I had a relative in Montana I would be less flippant about their safety.)

Fight for the Future

Obama also brought the campaign fight back up to a respectable level (if only for the next 24 hours until the Republican campaign starts slinging the mud again). He was harsh in his attacks on McCain, but he explicitly asked us to judge John McCain not based on the consistency or inconsistency of his ideas, nor on whether his policies are driven by sincere conviction or crass political expediency, but rather to debate him and judge him based on on what his policies actually are right now. To do any less would be undignified and cowardly.

(What’s more this argument undermines the misguided faith many independent voters seem to have that McCain is secretly less conservative than he says he is. The reality is that there is no secret maverick freethinking post-partisan John McCain hiding under his sleazy Bush-style right-wing campaign — the election is for the kooky throwback ultra-right-winger he says he is right now and that he says he will be as president.)

Obama threw down the gauntlet and made this campaign about what happens next, what happens tomorrow. The future.

After the first day’s speakers, Democratic talking heads Paul Begala and James Carville thought this convention desperately lacked a single, simple message. They compared it to the 2004 GOP convention where the formulation “Bush is Strong, Kerry is Weak” was the resounding theme. But in my mind, all throughout the convention a theme was emerging: “Obama is the Future, McCain is the past”.

So in the spirit of that future, I include above this iPhone screenshot in which an Obamabot summons me to help the campaign via a pre-speech SMS text message, and wherein I respond immediately after the real Obama’s closing words. And wouldn’t you know, the SMS conversation resembles a traditional call-and-response sermon, from the lectern to a rapt hall, where the speaker’s call to action is echoed by the audience uttering a single simple cheer in response: Yes We Can! VOL [NAME] [TOWN]!

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Upon a friend’s recommendation, a couple of weeks ago I started following don_draper on Twitter. More precisely, I’m following whoever is Twittering and playing the role of Don Draper, the main character and fictional creative director of a 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising agency on AMC’s critically-acclaimed series Mad Men, now in its second season.

What’s more, over the last two weeks Twitter has notified me that I am now being followed by peggyolson, bertram_cooper, and several other personages from Mad Men’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper. I assume this is all part of an AMC-blessed ARG-style internet marketing campaign, and because of that I feel a little bit snookered.

You see, I at first assumed that don_draper was some kind of individual fan’s Twitter-based writing project. Also, don_draper the Tweeter is, unfortunately, not nearly as interesting as Don Draper the character. Sucks to learn that I was pwned by marketers.

I do feel better about the fact that this campaign is limited to Twitter, however, where the characters’ chatty tweets feel like time-warped, ghostly, telepathic musings from the past, voices from characters long gone. Thankfully, too, http://www.sterlingcooperadvertising.com simply redirects to AMC’s Mad Men site instead of presenting us with some kind of anachronistic web site from 1962 (although a non-anachronistic, modern 2008 ad agency site, complete with a contemporary client roster and profiles of Sterling Cooper executives past and present would be a fun promo).

Why did I follow don_draper in the first place? Because as a creative professional — even though I work in a (slightly) different industry and even though it’s 45 years later — I find his character absolutely inspiring and thought provoking. And a good deal of my fascination revolves around his professional skills and talents.

So what is it about Don Draper? In the first episode of season 2, Draper’s boss Roger Sterling tries to explain to a colleague, “Duck” Phillips, what Don Draper is all about. Sterling tells Duck, “Imagine he knows everything you do about this business but thinks like a child.”

Indeed, Don Draper the philandering husband is certainly childish in his tendency to always indulge his immediate desires. But Sterling was talking about Draper’s ability to see advertising as an emotional appeal, based on our most basic childlike emotions of love, safety, desire, and fear. Draper’s gift is his ability to understand these emotions while being a cunning businessman and a strong leader. He finds people’s emotional buttons and presses them, whether it’s understanding the hearts of his client’s customers, tapping into his own clients’ fears, coaching (or disciplining) his team, or drawing on his own pain and heartache — or all of these at the same time — he is able to devise, over and over again, advertising creative strategies that are simultaneously calculated and heartfelt.

I’ve got a few more blog posts lined up to talk about some of Don Draper’s specific speeches and how they resonate for me as an interactive user experience designer. Stay tuned.

(UPDATE 8/26: Turns out the whole Twitter thing was an unauthorized project after all. And what’s worse, AMC stupidly shut it down. Duh. I hope they don’t shut me down after my next posts!)

(UPDATE 8/29: Looks like all the Sterling Cooper Twitterers are back up again. Yay AMC!)

UPDATE: Part 2 is now posted. Enjoy!

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Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy journalism:

[Panasonic President Toshihiro] Sakamoto said he has a “dream” of seeing a newspaper presented beautifully on a television. (I hate Internet news, he said; it’s just a series of small sound bytes and quick updates. He’d prefer to see the entire paper).

I have to ask: Exactly which InterWeb is he looking at? Certainly not the one I am used to getting my news from.

My entire experience of Internet news has been deep and substantive, the polar opposite of this stereotype. All of the major news services have moved gracefully and effectively into the Web, IMHO. The most avid news consumers, too, now voraciously consume online news, including the new citizen journalism of blogs. So why does this myth persist?

I mean, it’s not like there’s any evidence. Newspaper web sites include not only the exact same full-length stories featured in their print editions, but they usually also contain tons of deeper content than their paper counterparts, such as background information, raw reporter’s notes, news from other news services, plus more photography, audio, and video. Even TV news web sites run AP and Reuters news stories, not to mention uncut transcripts of their TV reportage, and go far, far beyond anything they show on the air.

Web news is everything print news and TV news is — and more. There’s simply no way you can argue that Internet news isn’t in every way superior in depth and quality to the news delivered in other media.

The only reasonable conclusion I can make is that people who argue this don’t actually read news on the web but want to sound like they do. Maybe they watch short videos clips of news stories now and then, or read the home pages without clicking to read the actual articles. But they can’t possibly be reading real news web sites and contend that the journalism is lacking in depth and quality compared to other media. I suppose they can’t even conceive that the real news on the web is delivered in a traditional but time-consuming medium: Words.

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A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the press, and to (b) stop performing meaningless research themselves.

Ultimately my objective is to end the cycle of requiring designers to back up their recommendations with the kind of research or data that cannot be accurately or meaningfully collected, a cycle that forces designers and consultants to produce mountains of bad research. Either do the research correctly and make decisions based on sound science, or don’t do it at all and make your key decisions based on wisdom and experience. No research is better than bad research.

Today’s episode attacks addresses the field of advertising research.

Making Up Numbers

I am a man of very little faith in most quantitative research — not because I don’t believe in numbers, but because, usually, when you scratch the surface of a quantitative research report you will find blatantly subjective or qualitative data being used as the basis for the quantitative data.

Don’t get me wrong, I love qualitative research. But for execs who seek cold, hard numbers, qualitative research is often meaningless and untrustworthy. It is seen as fluffy psychobabble or artistic/creative posturing. So when a designer or a researcher wants their insights to be taken seriously, they often feel the need to “translate” their extensive subjective insights into objective numbers, a process that I think is just another flavor of bullshitting.

Here is a simple made-up example of what I mean by “translating” qualitative research into a quantitative report:

I conducted a study on the subway this Monday morning. I examined 50 people’s faces to see if they looked happy or sad. 15 looked happy, and 35 looked sad. Can I say, then, that 30% of the commuters in my study were happy? Sure. But only if you trust my judgement in reading people’s faces. The numbers are a smokescreen — the real insight, the real magic, is occurring in my personal examinations of people’s faces. My own opinion is the linchpin of the whole “study”. If that one part of the process is unreliable — and you have no way of trusting that it isn’t — then the final numbers are also worthless.

Advertising that “Works”

So now here’s a real-world example with similar underlying flaws: An advertising industry study released recently contends that ads that “tell stories” are more effective than those that do not. Sounds interesting. The methodology sounds pretty science-y, too:

Thirty-three ads across 12 categories—from brands like Budweiser, Campbell’s Soup and MasterCard—were analyzed by 14 leading emotion and physiological research firms. The research tools varied from testing heart rate and skin conductance of the ad viewer to brain diagnostics.

The study was looking for patterns among those ads that work better than others. Here’s an example conclusion:

One such pattern was that a campaign like Bud’s iconic “Whassup” registered more powerfully with consumers than Miller Lite low-carb ads that essentially just said, “We’re better than the other guys.” Why? Because Bud told a story about friends connected by a special greeting.

There are many bells going off in my head reading this. Who is to say that “Whassup” tell more of a “story” than the Miller Lite ads? I remember those ads, and they hardly meet my definition of “story” (a story is something in which, you know, things happen). So it begs the question of “what is a story?” We have to trust the researcher’s opinion on that, I guess.

Secondly, how do they know one ad “works better” than another (this, of course, is one of the advertising industry’s biggest existential questions, right after “does advertising work at all”)? What does “registered more powerfully” mean, exactly? Is that even measurable?

This study used “heart rate and skin conductance”, presumably to mitigate the kind of subjective judgement in my face-reading example above. But what exactly do those physiological conditions have to do with the effectiveness of an ad? If my heart rate goes up, for example, does that mean that I am supposed to be more inclined to buy something? Or is it the exact opposite, that physical excitement indicates hostility to the brand while calmness indicates receptiveness to the brand’s emotionally-compatible values?

It sounds like we’re supposed to assume that there is a meaningful correlation here, but I am extremely skeptical. We must question every little aspect of the so-called scientific studies we read, because if any single part of a study is fundamentally flawed then the whole thing is worthless.

Fundamental to the advertising study is the theory that a person can watch an ad and that researchers can then determine if the ad “worked”, in the same way an opthamologist can put lenses in front of your eyes and determine if you can read the eyechart or not. This idea that an ad “works” when it makes you more inclined to buy something is called “purchase intent”, and it is an industry standard term:

In Campbell’s “Orphan” ad, it is about bringing together a mother and her foster child.

Ad research firm Gallup-Robinson, Pennington, N.J., found that the spot, which showed a little girl’s sadness and anxiety melt away into a soft smile once she was given a bowl of soup, generated 80% purchase intent. Most viewers measured said it was believable.

A similar study from Ameritest, Albuquerque, N.M., found it received 42% purchase intent compared to a category norm of 33%.

Okay, big alarm bell here: 33% is the category norm for purchase intent. WTF? Is that supposed to mean that 33% of people who watch the ad actually intend to buy the product? This defies all credulity. The ad industry, of course, loves to pat itself on the back, but 33%? (Maybe I’m just projecting, but I can’t think of more than one or two ads in my life that have ever succeeded in producing a “purchase intent” in me at all.)

What’s more, how do they determine “purchase intent”? Is it from simply asking the test subjects “Do you want to buy this”? If so, maybe the fact that an ad is funny increases the likelihood of answering the question positively, but ultimately has no effect on whether the purchase actually occurs. Is there any evidence that “purchase intent” has any bearing on “purchasing” at all?

Probably not. My favorite paragraph is the last one:

The study does not discuss the ROI of the ads for their marketers. Mark Truss, director of brand intelligence at JWT, New York, said the storytelling theory is correct, but the industry still lacks a way to prove it. “Without the tools to measure and link back to business metrics, marketers and advertisers are not going to embrace [this approach].”

In other words, it’s all crap. Cheers to Mark Truss for, in essence, openly arguing based on his own experience and wisdom instead of relying on the junk science. I’ll always put more trust in imperfect but honest people than in dishonest or meaningless numbers.

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