Avoid being iatrogenic by reading about Nassim Taleb's Black Swan Theory - a key to deciding to do nothing rather than something
As featured in August’s Wired Magazine here are some cracking photos of Lego in global use as an alternate building material for re-patching walls. I love it. Look Hove here I come!
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HTML 5 is still under development as the next major upgrade to the language that supports the web. Amongst other things the new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins.
With an impressive credit list the new Arcade Fire video is a cracking early example of what HTML5 can do when it is supported by a browser that can support it’s standards. Right now Google Chrome is the browser to use to get the full effect.
Equally as clever as the interactive animations is the use and integration of Google maps as based on a prompt to enter a familiar address. Check it out below.
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire/
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I posted this on Facebook but it has to be bookmarked here too…
This video is a recording of a dub plate made on the history of 6 second break from the b side of a 7″ single released in 1969 which spawned the breakbeat scene in the UK that was so close to my heart as a rave DJ back then. It’s just extraordinary to know just how far this loop has spread and how it’s still used to this day. Check it out, it rocks.
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I’m reading a 10 page article over on the fantastic Strategy + Business website of the global consulting company Booz & Co. and thought I’d share my thoughts and some snippets.
The article is in reaction to a global survey conducted across the worlds advertising and marketing agencies and speak authoritatively about the challenges the industry faces as a result of it’s meteoric rise.
As Forrester Research foresaw in 2008 agencies are being forced to shake of their established structure and find new ways of innovating that breeds greater collaboration.
Although the study and the article is now a year old and talks about the rate of change, when you are inside the industry as I am it’s the most challenging aspects of the detail in what we need to do next that seem to drag on.
More than half of our marketer survey participants agreed that advocacy is a more important marketing objective than awareness.
While this fact is now understood as a brand requirement there has still been no “moment of truth” on the internet creating a universally accepted way of targeting, cultivating, anticipating, and catering to the consumer.
Indeed it is this paradox – the fact that brands and marketers alike are drawn to digital because of it’s measurability and the fact that analytics is still not capable of properly attributing value – that needs to be resolved to some agreed standard before the true internet gold rush can begin.
It’s one thing to collect digital information; it’s quite another to draw intelligence from it. Leading marketers are building partnerships with digital agencies, traditional media agencies, and media companies to track ad placement, versioning, and effectiveness. And marketers, agencies, and media companies alike are hiring “quant jocks.” Nearly a quarter of marketers surveyed are adding positions in marketing and media analysis and fishing from a new talent pool of digitally savvy mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.
This is why initiatives like Nixon McInness’ founded Measurement Camp are such a great idea. Agencies have always found it hard to share, but collaboration is the only way forward when the need is so great.
However it seems like it is still the biggest agencies that are in with the best chances:
Dell and WPP pursued a different route. Frustrated with the sheer complexity and loss of efficiency associated with coordinating the efforts of some 800 providers of marketing services, Dell put its entire account up for review. It ended up awarding a budget of $4.5 bil lion over three years to a brand-new bespoke agency, Enfatico, that was created, staffed, and fully customized to Dell’s needs by WPP. This agency is devoted to Dell and Dell only for the term of the contract.
The article also touches on divergence in the same context as convergence. It talks about the opportunities publishing are seeking from digital agencies to help shore up failing traditional models. This is also something I have a close interest in with my former agencies sale to Hearst (iCrossing’s Paul Doleman on the Hearst takeover).
Winning marketers, therefore, have shifted their creative and media strategies and aligned their organizations and culture to fully capitalize on the online opportunity. Industry-wide, companies are making digital media a bigger priority in their brand strategies. Mass advertising will continue to perform a role in driving awareness, but marketers will prioritize channels that deliver accountability, relevance, and interactivity.
As we look out on the marketing and media ecosystem and witness its evolution, we will continue to see competitors emerging in new forms and traditional players taking on roles formerly outside their purview when it comes to connecting with consumers. The linear value chain that used to characterize marketing has been replaced with a vast, interconnected commu nity of brands, consumers, and media. Just as no one species is assured success, no one species is necessarily destined to fail. Survival hinges on the ability to adapt. Those companies that convert through conversation, that collaborate in executing and measuring what matters, and that emphasize the medium as much as the message carry a decided advantage.
Never has the opportunity been greater to create new ways to create customer interest in products or services. The chance to generate the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development is more open than ever. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves. As such the definition of marketing hasn’t changed, but the means and methodology is there for the taking.
Digital Darwinism – by Christopher Vollmer, a partner with Booz & Company in New York
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The Lego Group provides a good example of innovative marketing with private-label media. The company has built an extensive set of consumer touch points using its own digital media: a fan club, a social network, online games, message boards, online movies, and soon its own massive multiplayer game. On www.legofactory.com, consumers can design their own products. By joining a network of approximately 120,000 self-identified volunteer designers, fans interact, suggest product ideas, and become “ambassadors” to spread the word about new offerings. In this way, Lego facilitates direct conversations between the company and its consumers as well as conversations among the brand’s devotees.
For Lego, the private-label media strategy is paying dividends. Lego has become a major digital brand in the U.S., rivaling traditional media players such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network Online in its core demographic of boys ages 6 to 11. This digital marketing innovation is one of the contributors to Lego’s recent success — the company posted a 19 percent increase in annual sales in 2008, despite a declining market for toys global.
Taken from Harvard’s wonderful Strategy & Business Blog: The Promise of Private-label Media
And while we are on strategy here is another great quote from the same article:
Everyone in media and advertising knows that creativity is critical to a high-quality branded environment. But creativity alone does not drive conversion or return on investment. Successful private-label media efforts are grounded in insights into how consumers navigate digital media, the types of utility or services they associate with a marketer’s brand, and the kinds of experiences they willingly seek out. Furthermore, an effective private-label media strategy also fits into a marketer’s overall game plan for digital innovation. It’s not a stand-alone effort.
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A book I have just added to my Amazon wishlist is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here’s the synopsis from Wikipedia:
The Black Swan Theory or “Theory of Black Swan Events” was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain 1) the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology, 2) the non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to their very nature of small probabilities) and 3) the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs
…and in the New York Times, Taleb himself summarises:
What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.
In a recent article for the Sunday Times Taleb draws some logical conclusions from the theory in relation to the financial crisis and how we managed to get here. He suggests that humanity currently has a psychological hang up about accepting advice that sounds negative. For him success should consist of avoiding losses rather than deriving profits. How do you live long? By avoiding death.
Linked to the path to success we are compelled to follow by all the self help books on the bookshop shelves is the preference that we have to do something rather than nothing, even (as he states in the article) when doing something is harmful.
Something my father would like is his assumption that the improvements in life expetency have come about not by the “random” discovery of antibiotics, but more by the improvements in sanitation, or (as my father has said) “the distance man has put between him and his excreta“!
Taleb also teaches us a new term: iatrogenic – harm caused by the healer. Historically and because of progress doctors spent a long time killing patients as doing nothing (or “therapeutic nihilism”) was deemed unscientific.
In the Times article Taleb concludes that the regulators are the iatrogenics of the financial system and that not admitting the limits of human understanding but enforcing more regulation is a negative step that could be avoided by an understanding and admittance of what we learn from this theory.
One warning, from an Amazon review about the book if you are also interested:
Content: makes insightful points on limitations of our knowledge, human temptation to identify false trends and narratives, follow herd mentality, blindly follow ‘experts’, and so forth. He calls this ’skeptical empiricism’.
PS Not to be confused with Occam’s Razor, and reminiscent of a possible new Cubeworks strap line: Making the complicated. Simple. …what do you think?
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Here’s a new concept that I hadn’t heard of before – Lerdahl Law. I read about it in the Times but of course can’t link to the article as it’s behind the paywall (here is the link if you have subscribed).
The Times article is about a new phenomenon in cinema as pioneered (sic) by Inception, that which encourages a second viewing. The film is suitably complex, fast paced, and with what has been described as an ambiguous ending that, ever since it was first shown to Warner Brothers executives, has had people wanting to see the movie again (straight away in the case of the aforementioned execs).
Lerdahl’s Law was formulated by Fred Lerdahl and originally based on hyper-complicated art, suggesting that some modern classical music cannot be understood once, even by a classically trained mind.
No doubt everyone in cinema will aspire to this new trend that Christopher Nolan seems to have sparked but I wonder if this trend will ever bridge the divide and be embraced by web design. The technology is getting there, but will the theory translate in a way that is still user friendly.
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