So, data is the new oil. I have no knowledge of the provenance of this idea but I think it’s apt in many ways and, if you’ll indulge me, worthy of further exploration. It certainly seems to have gained a fair amount of currency.

What troubles me a little bit is the apparent gleefulness that often accompanies the repetition of this  metaphor. Is being the new oil a good thing to be? It’s as though we’ve all been saying data is important for decades and suddenly everyone else is waking up to it and we’re revelling in the new data-fuelled economy. It’s 50′s America and we’re all driving around doing half a mile per gallon in massive Cadillacs with unnecessarily showy tailfins. What’s to worry about? Data is free flowing and plentiful. What could go wrong?

Occasionally there follows some hand wringing about how ill-equipped we traditional researchers are for exploiting this brave new world – our lack of experience and capacity in drilling and refining the new oil.  That’s as far as any critique seems to extend. I haven’t seen anyone (which, of course, doesn’t mean nobody has done it) stop to reflect on the fact that reliance on the old oil (and it’s fossil fuel brothers and sisters) has left the world in a bit of pickle and that consequently being the new oil may not be entirely without negative repercussions.

So, over a series of posts I intend to (try to) do that. I will be stretching the “data is oil” metaphor to within an inch of its life then, just for fun, toying with it a bit and stretching it a couple of inches further. I’ll be reflecting on some of the ways in which the data industries are behaving like the oil industry in ways that are fairly unpalatable. It’s a serious business being the fuel for a new economy, it’s not just more Cadillacs and international jet-setting, with them come  Govcorp control, unethical drilling and extraction practices, spills and pollution, peak oil and the suppression of alternative technologies. If we’re going to be the new oil then we should probably acknowledge and avoid the ways the old oil has fucked us up and how exactly the same things could happen all over again with data.

So, a new year, as is traditional, brings a resolve to behave differently. This time last year I was posting a summary of my top 2010 posts. WordPress recently informed me in a whizzy email summarising my 2011 blog performance that I only managed five posts in the entire year; no point summarising that. One could say that my mind was on other things being, as I was, on my travels for half of the year. Legitimate where the Research Geek is concerned, but I also failed to finish the thoughts I was jotting about our travels – I got as far as our return to India which leaves two and a half months at the end unaccounted for. There’s also the poor old Viceroy. I quite like what I started there, but there’s a good two years plus of life in India thus far neglected. I intend to put all (or more likely, some) of this right in 2012. Starting here and in my little Moleskine of travel thoughts, I will write more. Eventually I’ll get back to the Viceroy too.

I read quite a lot whilst travelling but, aside from over the Christmas break, I’ve read very little since I’ve been back. Easier to absorb the tube’s rays. That too must change. I have a stack of unread books from birthday and Christmas which should soon be read. I’m currently working my way through The Honoured Society by the wonderful Norman Lewis then I have a spoken history of grunge, a biography of Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the surfer-songwriter), an Indian story, a history of German football and, yes, even one about advertising. There’s plenty more on my Amazon list to tackle throughout the year.

All that sitting and Pringle eating has also restored much of the wobbly midriff that six months of wandering around hot places had previously put paid to. Once I have procured some running shoes, I shall be trying to do something about that as well.

Resolutions rarely last beyond February but perhaps by putting them  up here in writing I am not only starting out on the right foot where writing more is concerned, but also steeling myself in commitment to the other two. Maybe you can all help keep me in check. We shall see. Read more, write more, run more. 2012.

Tom’s most recent post over on Blackbeard reminded me of a story I was told by an erstwhile client during my spell in India.

In his younger years, said client had been a lowly agency side man like many of us. He had gone on a field visit for a tracking study to meet with a field head whom he described quite directly as “a real crook”. I assume this was meant in a research context only and he wasn’t an arsonist or a murderer or anything. Anyway, on this field visit it was discovered that the crook was living up to his reputation and allowing his team to flout even the most basic of field controls – no right hand rule, no adherence to the assigned starting points, ignoring instructions on routing and rotating – your basic PAPI chaos. When my client intimated that this was completely unacceptable and that he needed to whip his team into shape forthwith he was met with a knowing smile. “Do you really want me to fix things?” the crook asked, “we’ve always worked this way, aside from the time and effort required to put things right which will be costly, you will also need to explain the radical step changes in your data to your client”. This was where the story ended so I don’t know for certain what call my client took but being a fine and upstanding research man, I naturally assume he did the right thing.

What’s clear from this story is that Tom has something of a point. There’s no doubt that historical trends, databases and norms are, at times, invoked as a defence against change even where the established order is spectacularly wrong. The order being established is all the validity it needs. And of course this is a very extreme example, the simple weight of inertia can easily discourage those of us with far greater scruples than our protagonist above from making changes that untether us from the warm comfort of norms.

But I’m not convinced it’s as bad as all that. In my view, norms have the potential to raise the bar for innovation and change. You cannot make change for change’s sake. You do not flit around on the short-lived breeze of fad and fashion. If you are going to make a change to a research architecture built around norms then you have to demonstrate clearly that what you are moving to provides a genuine, substantive improvement over what currently exists. More than that – better looking architecture is easy to find, checking the structural engineering is up to the job requires the real stress testing that norms help provide. What norms predicate against is incremental tweaks around the edges (the research equivalent of feature creep) and the roll-out of ill thought out, half baked ideas. Houses built on the sand.

Saying norms are ‘tenacious’ is certainly right, but that tenacity need not be allied with enmity. Norms can perform the role of Devil’s advocate always probing with the questions ‘why is that better than what we have?’ and ‘can you prove that it is?’. If you have constantly asked those questions then not only will you always have a powerful rationale for any change but you will also have reinforce the validity of what you were doing previously.

These two ads stand out because of the way they use jingles. Given that when I talk about jingles in the UK you probably think of terrible local commercial radio ads from your youth (in my case, T.C. Harrison and Stechford tiles, I’m sure you can think of your own examples) or at best the sort of Go Compare! and WeBuyAnyCar.com stuff that makes it to the national TV stage, it seems almost disparaging to describe the music in these two ads as mere jingles. They’re certainly “short tunes used in advertising and for other commercial uses” and whilst they may not go so far as to include “one or more hooks and lyrics that explicitly promote the product being advertised” - there’s some pretty heavy hooks with implicit promotions going on which is probably as close as it gets for service brands.  Whilst irritating memorability has long been the raison d’etre of jingles like those in the UK ads above, these ads go way beyond that, seeking to use a jingle to for genuine brand impact – repositioning and strengthening the brand as opposed to just making people remember it.

The first is from Airtel:

Now, Airtel are India’s biggest mobile network providers. They were amongst the first movers and had long been associated with having the best network coverage and all those boring but essential type of things. They felt fairly austere to me. They seem to have been aware of this and with increased competition in the market started to push the relationship button. They did so in what I felt was a fairly gentle, wishy washy and ill defined touchy-feely family kind of way (e.g this and this) – all very nice but not especially coherent nor consistent. India’s demographic is such that there is quite a rush to target the “youth” market. It’s a sensible policy seeing as there’s so many of them and for a brand like Airtel they’re far and away the heaviest users. So in comes the beast of an ad above. All of your friends are important. They might be cheeky, gossipy fucks some of the time, but they’re still your friends and that matters. It does ‘relationships’ in an instantly more engaging and resonant way than the earlier efforts and shakes the Airtel brand back to life. It does so almost exclusively through a catchy jingle which manages to sidestep irritation which even manages to incorporate and refresh Airtel’s sonic brand mnemonic.

The second example is an altogether more epic affair from Hero Motorcorp:

Hero-Honda was India’s largest motorcycle brand. Hero took the decision to end the joint venture and fly solo and needed to relaunch.  To help them do so they convinced legendary singer-songwriter AR Rahman to take time off from helping to besmirch the reputation of one of my heroes (no, not Joss Stone, Jagger, you cheeky scamps) and pen them a tune. He did not disappoint with this number that gradually builds and suggests more before eventually resolving itself with a lovely drop around the 1:38 mark (or course, we get there much sooner in the more oft seen cut-downs). The lyrics talk about there being “a hero within us” – stirring up India’s easily inflamed patriotic fervour. Alongside the images of everyday Indians rising heroically to various personal challenges it makes for pretty powerful stuff. It’s also nice because it eschews the typical macho stuntsmanship of this category in India. Even when Hero motorcycles are featured they’re not pulling mad stunts, they’re enabling the bravery and heroism of the rider (cf. the bloke edging across the dodgy bridge) rather than themselves being the hero.  Again, the jingle here is an absolutely integral part of the story-telling – with the brand a direct and memorable reference point throughout it.

There may be more seasoned ad-watchers than I out there who can think of British work that has jingles that transcend the traditional understanding of the form in the way these two examples do (please shout if you are one) – personally I’m stumped for anything that comes close. I strongly suspect the reason for this is that the India’s film syntax beyond advertising relies so heavily on music and dance as storytelling devices. Songs in Bollywood movies are often employed to suggest (regularly without much subtlety, but still) what cannot be said explicitly due to cultural sensibilities. People are used to hearing and decoding from narrative songs in a way our audiences aren’t. There are also fewer people around who could execute songwriting for ads of this type credibly and of those that could fewer still would agree to do so.

Hello. I can’t help but think this won’t be the most talked about comeback announced today (see picture above).

Those of you who follow me on twitter will already be aware that I’ve been back in good old Blighty for several weeks now. You may also be aware that I’m back in the office and, therefore, back to being a Research Geek. Five and a half months worth of travelling was pretty wonderful and I’m still thinking and writing about that (currently with pen and Moleskine, but it will eventually find its way to the Viceroy, I’m sure) so I might not be too prolific on here to begin with. But as I’m back thinking about research, ads and brands there will no doubt be certain thoughts I feel like sharing.

Work-wise, I’m still with Millward Brown. My neuroscience role was specific to the region so having moved from dusty Delhi to leafy Leamington Spa I’m not doing that any more. Instead I’ve joined the Global Innovations team where I’ll be getting all kaizen on our existing tools and also working on some shiny new stuff. Should be interesting.

Whilst I’m not in a ‘thinking about research’ frame of mind, I’m very much in a thinking about India frame of mind. I am keen to get my writing on India more or less up to date before I head off an have 6 months of further experiences to add to the mix – so expect more activity over on The Viceroy over the next few weeks and please do have a read, if that’s your sort of thing.

So, thanks for reading whatever you have over the past year. Hopefully you’ll be around for my glorious return towards the end of the year.

Hello everyone, Happy New Year!  I haven’t posted for a long time due to a nice long trip back to the UK.  I was more or less snowed in for a week so I did have ample opportunity to write a couple of posts, I just wasn’t really in that frame of mind.  Anyway, I’ll be back with a proper shiny new post shortly, for now, here are the top 5 posts of my debut year based on popularity.  Thanks very much for reading in 2010 and I hope you continue to suffer through in 2011.

1. Neurofocus and the New Scientist: Don’t Believe the Hype - A relatively rare sojourn into the realms of the day job proved a popular choice.  One rather fruity comment from a disciple of said hype spiced things up a little.

2. Social Media and the Simulacrum of the Self – Dusting off some cultural theory from my undergraduate degree and having a bash at applying it to social media.  I wasn’t sure I was clever enough to write this one, but I think just about got away with it.

3. Hiiiiiiii Dr Nick! – A short overview of the talk Nick Hall from Stanford gave at a symposium on Behavioural Research where we both spoke at XLRI here in India.  I think ‘Dr’ Nick promoted this one a fair amount himself so I probably have him to thank for it making the top 5!

4. All the Young Dudes – My first ever post on why we don’t hear many/enough young (under 30) voices in market research.

5. Apple: a threat to diversity and innovation. – Finally, a post on Apple’s continuing attempts to sew up the entire music industry value chain and the threat this poses to diversity and innovation in that industry.

Whilst we’re at it, my least popular post of the year was this one – I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition.  Apparently, nobody else agreed.

Thanks again for reading.

It's not the tool, it's what you do with it that counts.

In my last post I wrote about the ethics of using neuroscience techniques for market research.  I’d like to broaden that out to make a wider point about the nature of tools.  Any type of tool, research tools included,  is value-neutral – they are neither moral nor immoral.  Morality only comes in to play at the point at which we, as humans, make use of the tool.  The manner in which we use it determines the morality of the action rather than the nature or utility of the tool itself.  Morals are, after all, rules that judge the acceptability of human conduct.

Of course, moral absolutism is  a dangerous thing, even if the absolute proposed is that an object is without moral valence.   Some would argue the tools of warfare are a clear exception to the rule – if a tool is specifically designed to cause death and destruction in the most efficient way possible then it’s harder to argue the value neutrality of all tools.  However, the tools of war can also be used to defend yourself against crazed invading ideologues trying to impose a morally corrupt way of life on a population (like Hitler in Europe or the US in South East Asia).  There are also those who argue that the military industrial complex acts as a deterrent and, ergo, the tools of warfare actually prevent death and destruction.  I don’t necessarily agree with all that, but as there’s some debate around it, it seems that even for a tool actually designed for a fundamentally immoral purpose is only really immoral if we use it to that end.

Think of an axe.  An axe can be used to chop firewood and sustain your life.  An axe can also be used to hack someone you don’t like very much to bits, or even hack someone you do like to bits for kicks.  Now forget the axe, it’s the 21st century.  Think of a chainsaw.  You can use a chainsaw to do both the wood chopping and the person hacking with significantly greater efficiency.

There are two things I’d like to draw from this and, hopefully, you’ll see the parallels to what I was talking about in my last post.  Further, we should also be reflecting on what this means for advertising and brands as tools (this value-neutral business is actually something I trot out more often to people who argue brands are evil that it’s something I say to research haters).

First, both axe and chainsaw are morally neutral.  You can use them both for good or evil and any number of layers in between.  In essence a chainsaw is a more efficient axe.  This means that it can be more effective for doing good or for doing evil but it doesn’t make the chainsaw itself any more of one or the other.

Second, there is another interesting effect of the chainsaw being more efficient.  I am of course using the wood chopping to represent the  ’good’ extreme on my moral axis – but once you mechanise and industrialise wood chopping and you’re not just chopping the firewood you need to sustain yourself, the moral waters become much more muddy (or at least, they get filled with logs, making them equally hard to navigate).  It’s still the human action that’s at question, but a more effective tool facilitates excess and thereby brings questions of morality to the fore even when considering actions where previously there were none.

So in short, what I was trying to say in my last post is that if you think advertising and brands are evil then of course the research tools that help facilitate them will make you equally uncomfortable.  They’re not evil, but the way we use them is where we should stop and think about ethics.

If you have a new research tool that is more effective in exposing people’s desires, then the chances of a chainsaw massacre of consumption increase exponentially.  If neuroscience is giving us more effective (indeed, more  mechanised) access to thoughts, feelings and emotions, even if we don’t think the every day wood chopping of building brands is morally questionable, the questions around how we implement neuroscience techniques ethically are still valid as mass deforestation won’t be good for any of us.

When I wrote about the barriers to neuroscience adoption a while ago there was one issue I skirted which probably could have been fleshed out a bit more – ethics.  When I did the talk at XLRI I basically lumped it in with ‘Scpeticism’ but I got asked about it again in a meeting yesterday so thought I’d note a couple of thoughts.

The reason that neuroscience/biometric methods are appealing to researchers and marketers is also the thing that makes people unsure as to whether it’s ethical to use them.  It’s well known that people don’t know why they behave the way they do and find it hard to talk about the way they feel about things – so cutting out the middle man and going direct to source for that info is pretty valuable.  But those worried about this stuff would say that the middle man we’re cutting out is sort of the bit where our  humanity resides.  People may, justifiably, want to keep some things under wraps for any number of reasons (although most often we’re learning things that people can’t tell us rather than things they won’t).  As a result, those who doubt the ethics of biometric measurement would argue that we are taking knowledge that people have not volunteered and, like black magic, using it to control them.

Those are potentially valid concerns.  My argument, however, is that they are not concerns specific to neuroscience/biometric research but to all research and, by extension, any advertising that draws learning from that research.  If you have an ethical problem with research and advertising generally (which some do) then fine – but people raising these concerns with me in meetings are usually people spending a lot of money on advertising and research, so I assume they don’t.

Let me illustrate my point.  As Tom Ewing has ably pointed out, what those critics of research who roll out the ‘all research is wrong‘ line fail to understand is that we already know that it is (in an absolute sense).  As such, we have all kinds of ways of finding stuff out about people’s thoughts, feelings and desires without asking them directly.  Take one of Millward Brown’s many hundreds of tracking studies, I don’t ask people to rank the associations they have with brands by how important they are because I know they’re not very good at it (and often, they just don’t know whether sexy or easy to use is more important to them).  Instead, given that I also ask them about their preference for brands, I am able to run myself a lovely regression model from which I can infer which of these associations are the stronger drivers of preference either within the category as a whole or for specific brands.  They haven’t told me why they like Persil better than Surf, but sneaky researcher that I am, I’ve found out – and maybe Persil will use that information to better target them and people like them.

(Before you say so, I know that’s not perfect, I know my model is only telling me about the relative strengths of relationships between claimed brand preference and a set of associations that I chose to put to the sort of people I chose at the specific point in time, by now already in the past, that I deigned to ask them. But I’d ask you to focus on the matter in hand, this isn’t a question of which [if either] of these approaches is most valid it’s about whether or not they are ethical).

So research has, for many years, generated insights into human behaviour without people necessarily volunteering them directly.  People are no more aware of my regression models and how brands are using them to sell them more soap powder, than they are of the brainwave outputs they voluntarily hand over and how clever boffins run those through an algorithm to give me something I can use to understand advertising better.  Is either of those things deceitful and insidious?  Maybe, but if so, I say they are equally so.

Further, some perspective is required.  We may be increasingly tapping into people’s deep, unspoken desires – but we’re not homing in on a magic bullet that lets advertisers push a button that has a definitive and predictable consumer response at the other end.  We are gaining a better understanding of why an ad has worked when we do get it right of course and therefore narrowing the odds of us being able to repeat it – but we’re a long way off complete mind control.  People still have agency.  That’s not going anywhere.

As long as the usual rules apply – we’re doing this at an aggregated level, we’re not using it to target the specific people involved through direct use of their personal details or data, they have given us their express, informed permission to collect whatever data we’re collecting through whatever method and so on – I really don’t see how neuroscience and biometric research is any different from ‘traditional’ methods.  If you object to one, you object to it all.

Another of the keynote speakers at the XLRI conference was Dr S. L. Vaya.  Dr Vaya works at the Directorate of Forensic Sciences (DFS – though I’m not sure if they have a permanent sale).  At DFS they use biometric measurement on suspects in criminal investigations to try and demonstrate whether or not these suspects have been involved in the crime of which they have been accused.  Clearly issues of guilt and innocence are, in stark contrast to making advertisers better able to sell brands, fairly essential issues for a civilised society to get right.  The standard of proof is also, of course, far higher when you’re interested in whether or not someone was involved in the Ahmedabad bombings (a case DFS had inputs into) than it is when you’re simply interested in whether an ad is making a general population feel warm and fuzzy in all the right places.  They’re not convicting people on this basis alone, but they’re using it as a part of the investigation in the same way that polygraph tests have been used for years.

There are ethical considerations here – there’s a long standing legal truth that people should not be required to reveal their own guilt (if they are guilty, it should be up to us to prove it so).  Given that you can’t control your brain activity you could easily implicate yourself without realising you had done so.  For this reason, there are pretty stringent controls on when and how these techniques are to be used in a criminal investigation.

1. There must be a High Court order in place to allow it.
2. The suspect must give their express, informed consent.
3. Results will not be seen as conclusive in themselves, but can be used as supporting evidence for a case.
4. It must not be used against the suspect.

This last point Dr Vaya mentioned and didn’t elaborate on and I forgot to ask her to clarify it when we were speaking later in the evening.  As it stands it doesn’t make much sense to me as if, even as secondary evidence, it is being used as part of the case against the suspect I can’t understand exactly how any test could qualify under point 4.  Perhaps someone in the know will read this and clarify – but anyway, the point that this is being used in a considered and sensible way is hopefully made.

So how does it work?  Basically a series of questions are designed and posed to the suspect whilst they are wired up to a full EEG headset.  Dr Vaya mentioned that the design of the questionnaire is absolutely crucial in the process if you are to get meaningful results, which sounds pretty familiar.  The questions are about the details of the case.  The nature of the brain response to these questions informs us about both the knowledge of the events asked about but also, crucially, about the intent of the person if they were involved.  By way of an example Dr Vaya showed us the brainwave response for a suspect (later convicted) in an investigation and one of the investigating officers.  The investigating office knew the details of the of the case very well, but his (or her, Dr Vaya didn’t specify, but let’s be honest, almost certainly his) response was distinctly different, even to the untrained eye, to that of our later-proven-to-be-guilty suspect.

I have a B in A-Level law, so I’m sure you’ll agree I’m something of an authority in this area.  Many of the world’s legal systems have two elements to crimes – actus reus (did the perp actually do it) and mens rea (did the scoundrel do it on purpose).  The latter is generally much harder to prove than the former.  A glimpse inside the criminal mind can help with that.

The same is true with brands – people’s behaviours are fairly easy to observe.  Finding out why people are behaving the way they do is much more difficult.