Catalyst S+F: Blinded Me with Technology - Chris Arens - MediaBizBloggers

Thank you Thomas Dolby for the loose inspiration for this article.

If you haven't seen the Terence Kawaja chart yet, then tell me what rock you are hiding under, but if you have then this discussion will feel quite prescient. Over the past 15 years the advertising industry has gone through a monumental change, and we are now securely focused on the prize at hand…technology. Technology is the Holy Grail to all of our deficient scientific practices in the advertising arena. For the sole purpose of trying to surgically slice our audiences into consumable, actionable subsets we have turned to the vast array of technology that is at our fingertips, and this has made sense. Although, I might argue that while we use technology to gain efficiencies in targeting our audiences, we have failed in the incorporation of technology into the workflow… but I digress. Now don't take what I am about to say the wrong way, I am a proponent of using, creating and inventing new and different ways to reach consumers, however, it is my assertion that with the abundance of shiny new objects currently in existence, we have all but forgotten the path we were traveling.

Advertising or communications to audiences is NOT about technology. Technology is only a delivery mechanism and cannot replace the simple fact that human behavior is still largely misunderstood by our industry. While we continue to hire more and more CTOs, my bet is that we need to refocus our efforts on the CPOs and CBOs, or Chief Psychology Officers and Chief Behavior Officers. To take a thought from Brian Greene, Author of The Elegant Universe, we as an industry have been given a toolbox that works fine and allows us to do our daily jobs, but the inner-workings are largely not understood (much like Isaac Newton's theory on Gravity, it had been in use for centuries, without the absolute understanding of what and how gravity truly worked; that is until Einstein helped us).

Psychology is the observational measure of human behavior. There are debates about its preciseness in scientific circles, because it largely doesn't deal with mathematics, therefore it can only be proven through rigorous trial and error research, which inevitably has certain flaws. But by and large, our industry relies on these research methods as a way of gaining insight into human behavior in the pre-planning stages of our efforts. And most importantly we spend millions of dollars on self-reported measures that we could all write a dissertation on the inadequacies and limitations of the methods, yet we make billion dollar decisions from them.

So what if, the next revolution in advertising isn't technology-based, but its human behavior based? What would that mean for our industry? How would we rewrite our current workflows and processes? What if the model for understanding and predicting behavior, was actually quite easy and somewhat intuitive? What if, like Newton's Law of Gravity suggests for our physical world, that there were unseen forces existent within a brand, that are currently not quite understood, that had a gravitational pull for certain consumers, almost regardless of the communications? Wouldn't this truly be the Holy Grail, and not the sharper surgical scalpel that technology brings? Again, don't get me wrong, having this level of information about consumers layeredwith the advances in technology seems science fiction cool to me. Each having its defined role, of course, whereby consumer behavior is our decision-engine and technology is our delivery-engine.

Now, and last set of rhetorical questions I promise, what if I told you that level of understanding actually is available? That someone, somewhere has been working on a model that make's Maslow's hierarchy seem complex and unrelatable and that makes Myers-Briggs seem so last year? How would you spend your time? Me, I would focus on understanding why consumers act the way they do, rather than target someone who appears to be acting the way I want. This to me presents the dichotomy of our current advertising system, where our traditional agencies are still focused on the planning models of consumer behavior and the digital agencies are focused on the delivery mechanism of reaching current behavior. Neither is wrong, but I would argue that our traditional counterparts are better suited to take on the next revolution in our industry.

So my call to the industry - Seek truth in understanding consumers; this will be the way in which brands can bestow true value to their constituents. As we brace ourselves for the coming decade of fine-tuned targeting practices, remember that in its current state their value is only in identification, not in understanding. If you are okay continuing to tell your clients what happened, without a precise answer to why, then go on with your bad self, but remember there are efforts available today that answer that most basic and difficult of questions - why?

Chris Arens is a Partner and Head of Client Services at Catalyst S+F. He can be reached at chris@catalystsf.com

Read all Chris' MediaBizBloggers commentaries at The Marketing Capital Report - MediaBizBloggers.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger

.