A Society Of Picky Eaters

Inspiration for this post (a.k.a. the longest post ever) came from a book that a good friend recently gave me. The book is called The On-Demand Brand by Rick Mathieson, and it deals with the implications of today’s consumers tuning out marketing initiatives that don’t appeal to their increasingly connected, digital lifestyles. Naturally, I couldn’t get past page 1 without reading deeper into the words and being inspired to blog (I actually didn’t even get to page 1 – I’m still in the Roman numerals).

Today’s consumers are inclined to tune out what they don’t care about because new, emerging media gives them the means to do it. This is anything from recording shows on TiVo to choosing who to follow on Twitter. Like most things, if we didn’t have this media we wouldn’t know the difference.

I’m going to discuss why this new customizable media revolution is potentially dangerous to us as a society.

Then I’m probably to go off on a complete tangent and not even try to fight it.

*

Overall— we don’t have time. We’re impatient. We want things five minutes ago. We long for any product, service, or technology that offers convenience.

But dig deeper into the true meaning of convenience.

Convenience encompasses anything that eliminates time wasted– i.e., time that we would rather be doing something else. Therefore, when we are dealing with services, messages, and products of no importance to us— we are wasting time.

So, by virtue of our desire for convenience, the most attractive feature to any product today is customization. Anything customizable is an added convenience to us, because we are choosing factors that only add value to our own lives.  Personal choice is something that’s been around for— well, forever. However, it has never been so pronounced and emphasized as it is today; customizable media is infiltrating our lives.  As a result, today’s brands are expected to provide personalized experiences while only a few short years ago, personalization was just an added bonus.

Uhm.. so what’s the problem?

One could argue that brands and new technology are causing us to become picky eaters– people that know what they like, so they stick with it and screw trying anything else. But then they miss out on food that could potentially become their favorite.

Media is becoming more customizable and relevant to our wants and needs, and we become even more inclined to ignore other things because it's the easy way out. We expect relevancy- it's convenient. But along with the picky eater metaphor, How do we know if something is interesting or of potential value to us if we’re tuning it out? 

Are we slowing our own growth as a society?

A personal anecdote: when I was in 11^th grade, I had an absolutely ridiculous American History teacher (Ray Edelman – a genius on another level). He used to fail us on every single assignment we turned in (on purpose), but our saving grace would be the “extra credit TV shows” that we could watch in order to pass. The program was usually The American Experience on PBS, with topics that ranged from The Battle of Bushy Run to The Kent State Massacre of 1970. These freaking 3-hour specials were usually on during ridiculous hours of the night (12am-3am) and we would be forced to tape them or suffer through them.  Then, we had to take comprehensive, insightful notes on the show, and turn it in. It was dreadful as a 16 year old when I didn’t give two shits about history– but I had to do it to pass the class.  

After doing the first couple shows, I became obsessed with it. It was suddenly interesting to me, and I found myself watching the programs when they weren’t assigned. Then I started watching The History Channel, just for kicks. The adrenaline rush from discovering a new interest carried over to finding more eclectic hobbies that I never considered.

I completely and utterly digress.  

What happened here was that my history teacher forced us to try something new. We didn’t have a choice. If we did, we probably would have asked him to assign episodes of a show we already knew we liked— maybe Saturday Night Live or Friends. But if we did have a choice, we wouldn’t have learned about the Battle of Bushy Run or discovered other interests.

I’m relating this back to today’s technology and brands increasingly attempting to cater to what we say we like, because we don’t have time to deal with our non-interests.

The brunt of my argument: Would our society be better-rounded if there was no customization?

Emerging technology and media is providing the illusion that there is no time in today’s world to give “irrelevant” experiences a chance. It is forcing us to think we should only pay attention to what matters to us. So we do. And it’s a vicious cycle.

Are we inhibiting our own intellectual development?

Thoughts?

Haven't Posted In A While... But My Apartment Is A Dump.

I found a really interesting quote that I think can apply to many things and people I know.

"Someday, someone will write a book explaining why so many pioneering enterprises, including the Walt Disney Company, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple, were born in garages... we can speculate on why great things are often accomplished in dull or tacky surroundings. Perhaps a bland or unattractive environment spurs creativity, functioning as an aesthetic blank slate that frees the mind to dream about what might be. Maybe a great view and chic decor are distractions and thus counterproductive when important work is being done. But the truth is that most people in great groups spend very little time thinking about their surroundings. They have wonderful tunnel vision."

--Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman

This quote is pretty old. However, it sounds strangly applicable to a couple revolutionary online platforms that were recently developed out of dumpy college dorm rooms...

But the term at the end of this quote caught my eye. "Tunnel vision." I take a look around my room and realize I still have suitcases sitting on the floor not unpacked yet from January. There are three half-full coffee cups apparently serving as decorations for my dresser. What the hell are these receipts from, why is my cell phone from 2001 still sitting on my desk, and I'm going to gouge my eyes out when I have to sift through all of these unnecessary papers on the floor next week.

My apartment is pretty unaesthetically pleasing, and I've always been jealous of those who can make their living space look like the model bedrooms in Ikea.

But this quote gave me hope for my scatterbrained way of existing. And I can say the same for many other people I know that function this way. Some people express their creativity by making their surroundings a work of art; others are satisfied with indecipherable post-it note scribblings serving as wallpaper.

There's really no point to this entry. Irony.

HQ

Pagers, Beepers.

With all of these new technologies emerging (of course not without consumer reviews spackling the internet) I can’t help but wonder what people were saying 15 years ago about the technology coming out then—cell phones, internet, the proliferation of online advertising, etc. I used PSU’s library database to search for old news articles, and I’ve decided to share some of my findings…

(Sidenote: I sometimes have anxiety attacks about how much tuition I’m paying and I get overwhelming urges to collect everything I can from this institution.)


Here are some quotes I pulled.


Advertising Age, 12/23/96:


“I see a lot of crap and poorly thought-out stuff about to emerge,'' said a top exec at one company involved in the Web device market. “We do like the idea of combining the TV and the Internet in some way, but this early iteration probably won't get Joe Consumer to log in.”


“Real-time chat generates up to 70% of total revenue for commercial online services. Regardless, companies like Electric Minds, HotWired Network WebGenesis and iChat are plugging along with big plans to turn chat into a major ad medium.”


“Silent sponsorships, staggered ad rotations and user-only chats are ways that sites are attempting to keep advertising as unobtrusive as possible. But we think the jury is still out on chat as the next great ad medium.”


Advertising Age, 6/24/96:


"Advertisers are just beginning to think about this concept of building Web sites to meet marketing objectives," said keynote speaker Bill Harvey, president of Next Century Media.


PC Magazine, 2/15/99


Their Palo Alto-based company is just five months old but is already receiving mail from would-be investors. "Our goal is to bring a really great search tool to as many people as possible," said [Sergey] Brin. "It's a great environment to be on the cutting edge."


--In reference to Google.


And people… THIS is my favorite one:


Chicago Tribune, 12/16/94:


These days, some shoppers with busy schedules and limited patience are going high-tech, arming themselves with cellular phones, beepers, even two-way radios to ease the pain of holiday crunch time.


"It has gotten to the point where it's almost amusing to see so many people in the mall using their cell phones," observed Paula Guiliano, marketing director at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.


"We look like nerds talking on these things in the store, but they really work great," Gilbert said.


And a customer's ringing cellular phone can create a touch of chaos, sending store salesmen and other customers scurrying for their own mobile phones, said Johnston at Sharper Image. Not to mention the fact that a ringing mobile phone might sound uncannily similar to a store security alarm.


"It can be quite a scene when someone's phone goes off in the store," Johnston said.


Quite a scene.


HQ

Haiti, McLuhan, Impulse, and Mobile Devices.

The recent tragedy in Haiti has opened my eyes to the incredible, selfless efforts of Americans scrambling to “chip in” and help. Millions of dollars have been donated to relief efforts— but what’s fascinating to me is the function of technology and social media in this situation. According to a recent article on CNN.com,   

“the most impressive part of social media's impact on Haiti has to be the charity text message campaign that has already raised more than $10 million for Haiti victim relief. Social media spread the word. Technology made it possible.”


The ease of donating via this medium (mobile phones) made it a click away to aid the efforts in Haiti. The texting campaign provides opportunity for everyone to feel as though they’ve done something to help.


So, my thoughts on the campaign: texting is second-nature to us. It’s effortless and familiar. And $10 million is an amazing contribution. These results never would have existed if the message was to “mail a monetary donation” instead of sending a text message. Even if the message suggested for people to “go online and donate,” this still takes more effort than texting.


I’m not saying people wouldn’t have donated, but I can’t help but to think deeper into this. I’m talking about the immediate gratification of tapping a button on a screen, with that screen attached to you 24/7. Convenience. Ease.


I’m going to revert to something I learned in my first COMM class at Penn State. Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “the medium is the message.” Certainly this is true, that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message—- creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. However, is it possible that the context of the medium (as WELL as the message) is even more powerful?


Let me unpack this a little more.


Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland makes a great point about contextual communication, leading me to think that McLuhan really should have said, “The context is the message.” How he puts it is this:


“B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is ‘persuasive technologies.’ He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently.”


I’d say the Haiti texting campaign is using this tool pretty intelligently; however, Sutherland also makes another great point about human impulse:


“Now, marketing has done a very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. If you did this, more people would save more. It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions. And the very nature of the decisions changes.”


The interface fundamentally determines the behavior. One institution that takes advantage of this psychology is PNC Online Banking for Gen-Y (the “Virtual Wallet”). There is an animated piggy bank on the personal banking Virtual Wallet homepage. Every time you “punch the pig,” you can indicate how much money you’d like to transfer to your savings account, and it completes the task in a half-second. It’s so satisfying to punch that pig. Impulse saving does exist.


BOTTOM LINE: Combining these thoughts together, wouldn’t it be marvelous if there was an “impulse savings” button on our mobile devices? It would most likely take the form of an app. I haven’t looked far enough into it to see if this already exists.


I pitched this idea-trail to my roommate and she even expanded on it, saying, “That would also be a great habit-kicking app. For people that tend to waste money on things. For instance, kicking a smoking habit, excessive Starbucks buying, or even impulse shopping in stores—you could just press the button every time you were about to buy something you REALLY probably don’t need. Then you could see how much money you’d save if you weren’t buying that one thing all the time.” (credit: Victoria Wolff.)


This is too genius to not already exist—I may be behind on the times. Someone take this idea and make the app.


Now that you’ve read my lengthy rant, why don’t you do this:


• SMS text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts


• SMS text “YELE” to 501501 to Donate $5 to Yele Haiti’s Earthquake Relief efforts


• SMS text "GIVE10" to 20222 to donate $10 to Direct Relief


Wasn’t that satisfying?

 
HQ

Optimism: Opt In

I'm an optimist by nature; perhaps that's why I still feel positively about working in advertising after I graduate.

True, it's a scary world out there. However, what I'm learning is that your perception of how bad the job market is depends on your general approach in life. In other words, the entrepreneurial personality will always rise above even the worst of economies. Creative? Create your own job. Invent something. Work hard to find a job, and kick it's ass-- innovate. Take some (educated) risks.

It's easy to take advantage of adopting this mindset while we're in college. People expect us to mess up anyway-- I mean, seriously. We're young. Rather than it looking like we're stupid, taking (educated) risks will just look like we're curious. Enthusiastic. Trying to learn. Any higher-level position will tell you, as young emerging talent, that it's better than having no opinion at all.

Like challenges? Can't get enough of being busy? Bursting with energy? Go into advertising.

I've found an optimistic paragraph in a AAAA "State of the Advertising Industry" article, and I'm going to repost it here. It made my heart swell with joy.

What is your advice to students considering a career in advertising in such a challenging environment?

Advertising can be a tough business to break into-- regardless of the economic environment. However, I can honestly say that there's really no better time to get into the business than today, especially for students who are creative, passionate and technically inclined.

It's a business that thrives on new ideas and fresh talent, and there will always be openings at the entry level for those who are willing to learn the ropes, work hard and prove themselves.

For students and recent grads, I'd say: Forget about "Mad Men" and think of advertising as an open invitation to everyone -- regardless of background. There's a place for virtually everyone in advertising -- from anthropologists to mathematicians to creatives to zoologists. Plus, bone up on your PowerPoint and PhotoShop skills. You'll need it.
 
-- David Prince, SVP, Talent Development, 4A's
 
 
Also, for all you brave souls who love advertising, more things for your reference:
 
I left a question/comment on Steve Schildwacher's Blog (Senior Vice President, DraftFCB) asking him what kinds of talent large ad agencies expect out of entry level, recent college grads. He kindly posted an answer for me.
 
 
"To answer your question, I see two "specialties" that are and will be in demand. The first is anything Digital. We can train almost anybody to succeed in general advertising or in retail and promotions. We can train people in digital, too, but the learning curve is much steeper because that discipline is so technical. Moreover, agencies need digital experience right now -- there is little or no time to train. So if you have or can develop any skills or experience, you'd be quite marketable to a large agency.


The second "specialty" is one that most agencies don't know they need: Data. I've blogged a lot about Data and will continue to do so. In the past three years several large agencies have started to understand the possibilities here and a very small number have taken big steps to exploit those possibilities."
 
 
If there was ever a time to be optimistic about advertising, it's now. So much potential in the industry, so much room for innovation, I can barely sit still!

 
HQ