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:

1. Political – You can try to work within the existing political framework. Find a candidate who agrees with your views, and work to get that candidate elected by donating and buying advertising for that candidate. You may even try to run for office yourself, although that has a pretty low chance of success relative to the amount of money you need to spend.

The thing is, when they make it to office, most politicians don’t do what they say they will on the campaign trail. Barack Obama is a good example of that. Many of his supporters are starting to realize that his policies won’t be as radical as they seemed to be, and he will end up just another American President, doing exactly what McCain would do, although for different reasons. So, judging from history and what you can see even today, the political route is the least effective way to spend time and money if you really want to political change.

2. Intellectual – You can work outside the political framework and try to use advertising or media. You can write a book, or in a blog, a newspaper, or magazine; or try to spread your ideas to people who are more influential than you are, so they can reach a wider audience.

Traditionally, this is the easiest way one person can make a change in the world. David Friedman wrote “The Machinery of Freedom“, which is one of the most influential books in the history of the whole anarcho-capitalist movement. He’s done more with that book than he ever could have with donations or political advertisements.

Ideas are powerful things.

3. Indirect – Instead of trying to spread an idea or working within the political framework, you can actually do something that may encourage changes in the world. An example of this is Kiva.org, founded by Matt and Jessica Flannery back in 2005. Kiva.org is a microfinance institution that allows regular people to lend money via the Internet to other regular people in developing countries.

An example that David Friedman uses in his blog post is the invention of the birth control pill. Apparently, the development of the pill was funded by a donor who thought a safe, reliable form of female contraception would have the social benefits that she wanted. Another great example is the Seasteading project, initiated by Patri Friedman.

The idea behind seasteading is to develop fairly inexpensive technology for floating housing and eventually small cities. The theory is that it would make citizens more mobile, and that would make governments more competitive. When the cost of switching governments decreases, governments start to operate more like businesses, since there is more competition, and that increases the quality of governments.

Now, my question to you is, what else is there? Are there any other ways that one man can promote his politics and change the world? Let’s hear them, AdSavvyites.

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.

This is one of the dark secrets of the human mind. It’s in all of us, the potential for this kind of disgusting, deadly apathy is part of every single human being. It’s been shown time and time again: the death of Kitty Genovese, where a dozen neighbors heard a woman screaming as she was stabbed to death, but did nothing; the Milgram experiment, the famous study which showed that average people will give what they believe to be fatal electric shocks to a person as long as another person in authority tells them it’s ok; the stampedes of Black Friday which happen almost every year and almost always end up with some poor unfortunate person trampled underfoot, although not usually killed; and, of course, the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, the most striking example, where a whole country of seemingly ordinary people followed along with it’s leaders brutal “politics”, and did nothing while six million Jews were killed.

In psychology, these things are called diffusion of responsibility or the Bystander effect. In economics, there’s a similar effect called the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a well-known problem of the human experience and it’s important that we look at it directly and realize it’s there so we can attempt to avoid it in the future.

Advertising is all about influencing the crowd, and the more you learn about it, the more you realize how easily the crowd is influenced. Use this knowledge to avoid the perils of conformity and obedience. Take responsibility for what happens around you, don’t fall for these cognitive diseases. You’re better than that. If just one person would have stopped to help that fallen man at Wal-Mart, maybe it would have inspired another, and another, and then the people who didn’t help would have felt the pull of conformity drawing them to actually help. In situations like that, one knowledgeable person can make a difference. That person can be you.

A former customer of Classmates.com has filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, saying their claims are fraudulent and they tricked him into upgrading to a gold account. Sound like a simple false advertising case, but if the case progresses, it could force Classmates.com, and other websites like it, to change they way they advertise.

Anthony Michaels signed up for a free member of Classmates.com last year. However, with only a free membership, Michaels couldn’t interact with other members or do anything interesting at all. He said that he began receiving emails from Classmates.com claiming that old classmates of his had been looking at his profile and trying to get in touch with him through the site. The thing is, he had to sign up for a paid membership to gain access to any messages his old classmates were trying to send him.

It’s tempting, like a ringing phone – people are drawn to answer. So Michaels eventually paid up hoping to see all the messages and profiles of his old classmates. When he finally did, he saw that his inbox was empty and the only people that had viewed his profile were complete strangers.

That’s when he filed his lawsuit against the company on behalf of not only himself, but others who have subscribed because of these emails from Classmates.com. Michaels accuses the site of intentional misrepresentation, negligent misrepresentation, negligence, and fraudulent concealment. He also says that the site is in violation of the California Business and Professions Code.

The complaint reads:

“(Classmates.com) knew at all times that the individuals, members, and/or users who were making attempts to contact Plaintiff and the Class were not former classmates when they… made false representations regarding the attempted contacts… The Defendants… intended to deceive, and did deceive Plaintiff and the Class by concealing and failing to disclose the fact that the individuals, members, and/or users who were making attempts to contact Plaintiff and the Class were not former classmates.”

Michaels is hoping to be awarded general, special, and punitive damages; and also wants injunctive relief against Classmates.com, as well as restitution, attorney’s fees, and pre- and post-judgment interest. Sheesh.

It seems like an easy case on the face of it. The company said one thing to get him to pay, and it wasn’t true. But this case could set a precedent since so many sites, especially dating sites, use the same types of advertising tactics to get customers to sign up or bump up a tier. Michaels’ case could change everything, for the better, in my opinion.

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

The way a question is “framed” often has an influence on how people answer that question, that’s what the term framing effects means. For example, look at this classic study done on framing:

Let’s say you work for the Centers for Disease Control and there is an outbreak of a deadly disease called “The Mojave Flu” in a town of 600 people. All 600 people in the town are expected to die if you do nothing. Let’s say you have come up with two different programs designed to fight to the disease:

With Program 1: 200 people in the town will be saved
With Program 2: There is a 1/3rd probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3rds probability that no people will be saved.

In the study, 72 percent of the subjects picked Program 1. Now consider the same scenario worded differently:

With Program 3: 400 people in the town will die
With Program 4: There is a 1/3rd probability that nobody will die, and a 2/3rds probability that 600 people will die.

Now which do you pick? In the study, 78 percent of the subjects picked Program 4, even though the net result of the second set of choices is exactly the same as the first set (Programs 1 and 3 mean the same thing, and Programs 2 and 4 mean the same thing).

In Aldert Vrij’s book Detecting Lies and Deceit, he describes an even more interesting example:

Participants saw a film of a traffic accident and then answered questions about the event, including the question ‘About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?’ Other participants received the same information, except that the verb ‘contacted’ was replaced by either hit, bumped, collided, or smashed. Even though all of the participants saw the same film, the wording of the questions affected their answers. The speed estimates (in miles per hour) were 31, 34, 38, 39, and 41, respectively.

One week later, the participants were asked whether they had seen broken glass at the accident site. Although the correct answer was ‘no,’ 32% of the participants who were given the ‘smashed’ condition said that they had. Hence the wording of the question can influence their memory of the incident.

That example highlights an unsettling aspect of framing effects, the fact that they can actually influence our memories.

This concept is used in advertising all the time, but the most fertile ground for framing effects is politics. Buzzwords and political terms are constantly changing and being invented to try to stay on the positive side of public opinion.

Frank Luntz is a well-known example of a political consultant who has tried to work with Republican candidates on framing various talking points and buzzwords to make them more appealing to the general public. Among other things, Luntz is responsible for the re-framing of the term “global warming” to “climate change”.

Framing effects are powerful, they have a profound influence on people, but when we recognize that these biases exist, we can gain some measure of control. We all have to understand how fragile our brains and memories are, and that will strengthen them. If we know these biases exist, it’s easier to try to avoid them. So the next time you hear a politician speaking or an advertisement telling you to buy some product, listen closely to it, and try to decipher it’s real content. It’s one more step toward the eventual goal of overcoming bias.

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.

American Apparel doesn’t do high gloss sexy like Abercrombie or Calvin Klein. There’s no silicone or collagen or Botox. There’s no major Photoshopping or retouching the models. It’s a reflection of our idea of what sexy is as a society.

The perfect blonde on the beach is leaving our collective fantasy; our idea of sexy isn’t defined by film or by print anymore, it’s defined by the internet. Our generation has unprecedented access to smut, and it’s infiltrated our definitions of beauty and our everyday fantasies. Gonzo porn is our sensual fantasy now. Set in some freaks house as a 19 year old meth-addicted girl with low self-esteem knocks on the door. “I’m here for the party.”
Hott.

Arguably, both American Apparel and Calvin Klein ads show the same amount of skin. AA’s ads are so much more intense because they remind us of the filthy business we look up late at night. That’s why they’re so successful. These are the images we associate with sex now, and American Apparel copies them perfectly.

We’re jaded to all the Calvin Klein ads set in tropical locations and shot in sepia. We need real color regular girls who look like they’re about to have sex. We need barely legal.

Check out the ads:

There seems to be some confusion over whether these “Tibet” Amnesty ads are official, unofficial, or a viral stunt.

Regardless of their source, they are cleverly made and hard-hitting. Each highlights a human rights issue, targeting the Chinese Olympics and focusing attention on stories such as Tibet by using variations individual competitions as themes.

View the ad after the jump

See more about the back story here

You know you have a successful ad when people send it to their friends without realizing they are promoting your brand!

On the face of it the concept is simple. Tom Dickson (founder of Blendtec) shoves something into a blender and see what happens. The result though has really hit a nerve, to the point where the ad has spawned a catch phrase often repeated on the holy grail of nerd traffic, Digg.com

Part of the appeal (and search juice) is from clever choices of things to blend, the Apple iPhone, an iPod, Halo 3, Nintendo Wii … and of course it is just plain fun to watch!

See more at the official site

But does this really prevent one from “getting a firm grip on social media”? At AdSavvy we have quite a bit of experience with social media and the one lesson we’ve learned is that to be successful, you need to 1) Adapt quickly 2) Get a feel for the psychology of users of the social media platform (learn what they like) 3) cater your content to the users and 4) network like hell with other social media users.

With these 4 steps, social media actually becomes quite predictable and can even be mastered. But that doesn’t mean being successful 100% of the time. Rather, it means building failure into your system, while doing everything in your power to minimize it. Michael Jordan can be said to have “gotten a grip” on the art of basketball, but that doesn’t mean that every shot he took went in.