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Category — Crowd Follows A Crowd

How Do You Change The World?

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Ok AdSavvyites, it’s time for some audience participation.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, David Friedman’s Ideas, and he had an interesting topic: Ways to promote your political ideology. Let’s say you’re a moderately wealthy and talented individual with a strong desire to promote a certain political viewpoint. How do you go about doing it? What’s the most effective, efficient way to get it done? You want the most amount of change for the least amount of money and effort. I want to hear your ideas.

First, let’s consider some of the more common methods:
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November 29, 2008   2 Comments

Black Friday Bystanders And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

or No One Raindrop Thinks It Caused The Flood

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Almost every year we hear about scenes of consumer chaos and lunatic stampedes as shoppers knock each other down while trying to snatch up quality deals on Black Friday. This year an unfortunate man in New York was trampled to death in a Wal-Mart by a bastard herd of sub-humans who didn’t even look back at his body after they crushed him to death with their very nice shoes.

They have to be sub-humans, right? That’s the only way we can rationalize something like this. This has to be a one-of-a-kind incident where a group of sociopaths were all at the same place at the same time. Real, well-adjusted people would have stopped and helped that man. You would have taken charge of that situation and helped that poor man up and scolded the people who didn’t. Everyone thinks that. But no one ever does that.
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November 28, 2008   2 Comments

Be Prepared For Black Friday and Cyber Monday

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If you’re unaware, have forgotten, or have been living in Soviet Russia for the past decade, step out of your time machine and onto the fertile ground of faux-capitalist America… it’s almost BLACK FRIDAY. The time of great discounts is nearly upon us. Prepare, prepare!

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, and it’s generally considered the first day of the holiday shopping season when stores start their special deals and discounts, and when you can usually get some of the best deals of pre-Christmas season. Cyber Monday, on the other hand, is the online shopping equivalent of Black Friday. It’s the Monday right after Black Friday and is really more of an advertising gimmick than an actual heavy shopping day. Either way, there are deals to be had on both days, and they’re fast approaching, so you need to get yourself together and make sure you’re ready for the traditional ultra-feast of American consumerism.
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November 27, 2008   Comments Off

Understanding The Human Herd Mentality

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Researchers at Leeds University, led by Prof Jens Krause, performed a series of experiments where volunteers were told to randomly walk around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions on where to walk. The scientists discovered that people end up blindly following one or two people who appear to know where they’re going.

The published results showed that it only takes 5% of what the scientists called “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of around 200 people. The remaining 95% follow without even realizing it.
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November 11, 2008   31 Comments

Who Are The Real Monsters In The Monster Years?

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I don’t generally agree with Paul Krugman. Most people in his own profession don’t generally agree with Paul Krugman, but he has a voice and it’s loud in the American scene, so I’ll address it.

He says we just ended “the monster years“; 14 years of monster rule, in fact. I agree with him there, partially. Although I think he completely misses the point. What he fails to address is what caused those monster years. He fails to address the (ir)rationality of the American voter.

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November 10, 2008   2 Comments

The Power Of “Framing Effects” And Other Cognitive Biases

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Human beings tend to think they’re rational creatures, and that they make sound decisions based on all the available facts. They think their memory is an accurate record of things that have happened to them. But the reality is that we all have a slew of cognitive biases that can alter our thinking… and even our memories.

Psychologists have names for all the different fallacies and biases that influences our thinking: cognitive dissonance, inattentional blindness, blind spot bias, better-than-average bias, introspection illusion, self-serving bias, attribution bias, representative fallacy, availability fallacy, anchoring fallacy, hindsight bias, and the one I’ll be talking about here: framing effects
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November 6, 2008   6 Comments

Be Responsible, Be Patriotic: Don’t Vote!

-Some people would say it’s a person’s civic duty to vote
-That’s very much like saying that its our civic duty to give surgery advice…

It’s almost sacrilege to say “Don’t Vote” in the US these days. People are shamed into voting by the loyal minions of mainstream politics. But does a higher voter turnout actually help society? In Bryan Caplan’s book, Myth of the Rational Voter, he explains in great detail, and with extensive citations and statistics, how the average voter has certain cognitive biases that cause him to vote in ways that have a net negative outcome for society (they’re not uninformed, Caplan argues, they’re misinformed, which is much worse). And since the solitary goal of politicians (the successful ones, at least) is to get elected, their policies are based on pandering to the misinformed public. So their whole ideologies, the ideologies of both major parties, have come to represent policies that are damaging to society as a whole. In effect, democracy is destroying the United States.

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October 31, 2008   Comments Off

Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters … or heroes

This is a great talk by Philip Zimbardo about what evil is. Evil, he says, is not a individual condition, it’s the result of circumstances. He cites the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on human behavior, and the Stanford prison experiment and the problems at Abu Ghraib, all leading up to the conclusion that all humans are equally capable of evil.

What does this have to do with advertising? Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works. This is a wonderful video on that subject. Check it out.

October 27, 2008   2 Comments

The Power Of Conformity: How To Actually Change A Persons Thoughts With Advertising

In the 1950′s, psychologist Solomon Asch performed a series of now famous experiments on social conformity. In the re-enactment video above, you can get a good idea of what they were about.

All of them involved a group of participants answering some very simple questions about their perception (for example: which line was longer than the other?, which lines were the same length?, etc.). All but one of those participants were “confederates”, meaning they were in on the experiment, and were asked to give the same incorrect answers. Asch wanted to see how the remaining subject would react to the rest of the participants behavior.

The results were startling: When they were surrounded by participants giving an incorrect answer, 75% of the subjects followed along and gave the same incorrect answer at least once, and 37% of the subjects followed along and gave an incorrect answer the majority of the time.
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October 25, 2008   Comments Off

Obama Wins Ad Age’s ‘Marketer Of The Year’

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Every year hundreds of the biggest marketers, agency heads, and all manner of people involved in advertising get together at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. And every year, they vote on the best advertiser of that particular year. This year Barack Obama won with a pretty substantial 36% of the vote, beating out the two runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Nike, Coors and Sen. John McCain filled out the bottom of the vote.

“I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions “To see what he’s done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it’s created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It’s very easy for people to participate.”
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October 23, 2008   1 Comment