SD#18: Elastic thinking, sad songs and Peckham’s formula
May 15, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more. As the newsletter is still in it’s infancy I will experiment with the way I send you ideas. Do let me know if you like or dislike something you see.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) Billions of dollars are spent every year on display that either reaches bots or reaches fake websites The adtech industry is the crème de la crème benefactor and victim of all of this. Billions are being wasted due to ad tech fraud and poor data being used. When Peter Weinberg, Global Lead of LinkedIn B2B Marketing Institute, asked Dr Augustine Fou, the world’s leading expert on ad fraud, the simple question: ‘‘If the situation is that bad, is it true that digital marketers are reaching the wrong people?’’ Dr Fou said “No, it’s much worse than that. The problem isn’t that marketers are reaching the wrong people. The problem is that marketers aren’t reaching people at all.” To solve the above, marketers need to shorten their supply chains. As evidenced by the ad tech industry, the further away from the publisher you are – the more the chances are that your data will be a product of fraud. You have to move towards first-party data. Secondly – and I know this might be a hard one – talk to real human beings. Thirdly – accept that a portion of your data will become outdated every year. |
2. (Psychology) Most hapiness and the experience of peace is the result of a subtractive process “Happiness is best dealt with as a negative concept… the ‘pursuit of happiness is not equivalent to the ‘avoidance of unhappiness.’ Each of us certainly knows not only what makes us unhappy…but what to do about it.” – Nassim N. Taleb in his book Antifragile. We are terrible at predicting what will make us happier but it’s obvious what makes us unhappy so rather than pursue something that likely won’t actually improve our well-being, focus instead on eliminating the things that make us unhappy and the net result will be increased happiness. |
3. (Psychology) Elastic thinking is what you need when the circumstances change and you’re dealing with something new Logical analytical thinking is good when you’re trying to solve a problem you know or have seen before. Elastic thinking is about stretching your mind and using ‘bottom up’ processing in the brain rather than the top-down executive functions that drive analytical thinking. It encompasses a range of processes including, but not confined to, neophilia (an enthusiasm for novelty), schizotypy, imagination, idea generation and divergent thinking. BBC |
4. (Marketing) In a business culture which is obsessed with measurement, there is a risk that the need for accountability makes marketing valueless Marketing sits at the crossroads between creativity and analytics. Storytelling and data. You can find all sorts of people within marketing departments and I think that makes it great. But… there is a change within the wider business environment that is impacting marketing as well – the obsession with measurement. Such obsession is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve become better at measuring what works and what doesn’t. We’ve become pretty good at predicting future prospects. We’ve even built AI algorithms to elevate our data usage beyond what humans can do. That is all amazing. But marketing has a part of it that operates in the unknown. In the words of Les Binet: ’advertising increases sales & margins by slightly increasing the chance that people will choose your brand by making the brand easy to think of and easy to buy and creating positive feelings and associations via broad reach ads that people find interesting and targeted activation that they find relevant’ Some of the above can be measured quite easily. A lot cannot. But we know it works. And the moment we become obsessed with measurement, that pushes marketing to a dangerous area of valueless. |
5. (Psychology) People listen to happy songs 140 times, to sad songs 800 times. We as humans are drawn to to other beings suffering as we want to help them We as humans are drawn to other beings suffering as we want to help them. Susan Cain’s new book Bittersweet explores our relationship with melancholy. Sometimes it’s the melancholic nature of the singers’ voices that opens us up. The artists can succeed in transforming pain into beauty, and there is a profound joy in that. |
6. (Marketing) Peckham’s formula – your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share of year 2 Peckham’s Formula posits that when you launch a brand you should set its advertising budget based on your desired share of market. Specifically, your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share you want to achieve by the end of the brand’s second year. The Formula itself is based on some pretty significant empirical analysis. Peckham spent almost 20 years studying the relationship between what grocery brands spent on marketing communications and the subsequent market share they achieved. And, as such, Peckham was the first marketer to connect the dots between a brand’s share of voice and its share of market in a formal, prescriptive way. Mark Ritson via Marketing Week |
7. (Marketing) Most people know how and where quality brands advertise and what quality brands feel like One of the biggest tasks of advertising is instilling trust in brands in the people. It is also the largest benefit of advertising. People look for signs of whether they can trust a brand. Just like you look for signs if you can trust a restaurant won’t give you food poisoning – e.g. if there are loads of people in it, it gives you a good indication that you won’t be throwing up the food a moment later. Advertising gives that social sign and humans are surprisingly good at distinguishing quality ads and where they should be. If you see someone advertising in the London underground station, you know that they had to pay a decent chunk of money to get there and they won’t waste it by producing a crap product. |
Fun things to click on:
This artist’s series of countryside GIFs are perfect for spring. A monster length Twitter feed of hard-to-believe facts. 10 things we learned from the world’s largest study on kindness.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.
Speak soon,
Tom