Only slightly bent

Relating to my basic advertising-studies, the next book in the queue was the best-selling “Contemporary Advertising” by William F. Arens. I thought it would provide a thorough basis for understanding advertising from many different angles and I’m pleased to report that it did that job well.

While Contemporary Advertising is generously sprinkled with example ad campaigns, it takes a very methodological and theoretical approach to teaching advertising – much more so than the “Advertising is dead – long live advertising” that I reviewed some time ago. Still, on the example-side, lots of campaigns are given a superficial glance and some covered in more detail – most chapters begin with a case study. In particular, Mastercard gets good coverage in the epilogue of the book which is entirely dedicated to their priceless “Priceless”-campaign.

Contemporary Advertising is physically a very big book and at over 600 tightly-packed pages, there’s massive amounts of information in there; as someone without a work history in advertising, I’d want to say it covers everything you need to know about advertising. Obviously it doesn’t, but I think there’s more stuff in here than even many people who work in advertising know.. Seriously, there’s that much stuff. However, at least the tenth edition I read (being from 2006) was understandably a little light on the cutting edge technologies like mobile advertising – but then again, some areas of that are so new that authoritative books are impossible to come by on that topic. Other new but already entrenched things like Internet-related topics were covered decently and links to further information are plentiful.

Starting from the background knowledge of advertising like history, the socioeconomic impacts, regulatory aspects and evolution of advertising, Contemporary Advertising then covers the entire process of advertising in striking detail. From basic consumer behavior and the models of consumer perception processes to market segmentation and product positioning, from quantitative and qualitative research methods to the importance of IMC (Integrated marketing communications), from media planning to meticulously covering all the basic media, there’s definitely more information than you can immediately chew.

One thing I especially liked was the existence of small sidebars on ethical issues in every chapter; they brought in some very welcome viewpoints on some of the less respectable facets of advertising – for example, covering topics like exploitation of consumers, political advertising and sex appeal. Something that I would’ve wanted more of were international examples; there are some, but there could be even more. As it stands now, the book is still very much an American book about advertising and not everything will be directly applicable to all other countries.

One of the more memorable (to me, anyway) of the ad examples used in the book was this great billboard by Chick-fil-A. Probably doesn’t appeal to everyone but I thought it was rather funny

Overall, I would say Contemporary Advertising is a wonderful book for anyone who wishes to get a solid foundation for dealing with the world of advertising. It’s not a guide to fully exploiting the cutting-edge technology per se, but the theoretical background, the lingo learned and the processes described will inevitably help in that, too. It’s not a light and quick read by any standards, but it’s nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting book on a topic that’s becoming more and more important as the underlying business model for many new services is ad-based – therefore, advertising is something that’s crucial to thoroughly understand in the modern economy.

And even if you’re not in the business itself, it brings some kind of comfort as a consumer to be able to decipher and understand the methods, motivations, processes, reasoning and influence attempts of anything the advertisers throw at you. Therefore, Contemporary Advertising is highly recommended reading if you can stomach a substantial introduction to the topic.

I was reading the paper today when I ran into a disturbing piece of statistics; according to Hesari (apparently quoting the Finnish Pulmonary Association, from where I was unable to find the original source for this) people in Finland spend on average 87% of their time indoors. The remaining time is split between commuting and being in transit (8%) and only 5% for outdoors. 5% translates to 1 hour and 12 minutes spent outdoors, which I feel is a very short time, even shockingly short (says the guy who is writing this indoors with a perfect spring day outside). Here I was thinking that Finns spend relatively much time outdoors, but clearly that’s not the case.

So I was convinced that the time spent outdoors must be significantly higher in countries that have a climate more conducive to outdoors activities. Like, say, in Australia. But it turns out people in Australia are not much better – even there people spend only an average of of about 1.5 hours a day outdoors (incidentally, people in Melbourne are more outdoorsy than those in Sydney), which is unbelievable considering the plentiful outdoors opportunities there. Somewhat surprisingly, a study from US revealed that people spend more time outdoors there, especially those over the age of 60.

From my small sample it seems that the time spent outdoors is horribly short in all industrial countries. Work and sleep are obviously indoor affairs for most people, but still.. Wow. No wonder people have coined terms like nature deficit disorder. The television is one of the main culprits here since people spend a LOT of time watching TV every day; 169mins in Finland, 156mins in USA – seriously, apparently Finns watch more TV than Americans!

But now, in the interests of improving the Finnish figures, I’m going to quite literally get out of here.

References & resources:

• Finnish Pulmonary Association (Heli): Air quality
• Australian government: BTEX personal exposure monitoring in four Australian cities
• Australian government: Human settlements
• Chodick, G. et al: Agreement Between Contemporaneously Recorded and Subsequently Recalled Time Spent Outdoors: Implications for Environmental Exposure Studies
• NY Times: Growing up denatured
• Leech, JA et al: The Canadian Human Activity Pattern Survey: Report of Methods and Population Surveyed
• Bureau of Labor Statistics: American time use survey.
• Finnpanel Tutkimustuloksia (time spent watching the TV in Finland)

Globalization is supposed to be all about free movement of goods and people and all that stuff. Free movement of people is still a far-fetched dream and even casual intercontinental movement of people is inconvenienced by the US-driven security theater. Anyhow, in the face of all the talk about globalization, it’s amazing that even free movement of bits can’t be done. It’s bad enough when thanks to some obscure, stupid rule you can’t order stuff to an overseas address from the US, but it gets really annoying when even digital goods face stonewalling or blockage at the borders. What I’m talking about here is, of course, digital media content.

The media industry is constantly whining that online piracy is destroying their profits (a stand that has been belied more than once but keeps on living, kind of like an urban legend), but instead of taking some actions to offer consumers alternatives they have been suing their customers. Cute. Anyhow, in US there has for some time been encouraging, albeit still small, movements towards delivery methods that actually start making some sense. For one, you can buy movies and TV series etc from e.g. BitTorrent, which is great.

But there’s a small catch. You can do it but only if you’re in US. Oh, and only if you use IE. And only if you have Windows Media Player. And only if… the list goes on, but apart from the useless DRM-stuff, the most limiting factor is, amazingly, the user’s domicile. What exactly is so difficult in allowing anyone, anywhere, to buy the digital content? The delivery costs for the sending party are, under current business models anyway, usually the same no matter where the customer is.

The end result is that the legal content is blocked at the borders, but spam and all the illegal stuff certainly isn’t. So the situation in the digital domain is essentially the same as it is in the physical world: the only product that knows no borders is pollution.

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And in other news roughly related to global commerce, the VATT (Government Institute for Economic Research) in Finland had yet another gem for us some time ago; namely they’re basically trying to scare people to leave the country by appealing to their research stating that the tax rates will have to be significantly raised in the coming decades in order to pay for pensions and other costs of an aging society.

So the only idea to financing something are tax hikes? That’s just so representative of the thinking of certain factions in Finland.. But hey, since tax hikes would promote globalization as people start leaving, I suppose in the grand scheme of things it’s good! Right? Oh, it isn’t? I don’t know if it’s something they’ve eaten or what, but it seems VATT has been on a scaremongering crusade lately.

If I had a penny for every drunk I’ve seen..

Someone was upset and whining in the Sunday’s Hesari (in letters to the editor) how the guards and cops didn’t do much when she called the emergency center because of a drunken, passed-out guy. She was worried who will take care of all the drunks left outside. Okay, how about themselves for starters? Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t get so drunk that you’ll pass out in any random location.

Right, so anybody who’s been in the… well, country, knows that that doesn’t really work in Finland. But her wish of someone caring for them has a huge problem of scale – if everyone called 112 (the local 911) every time somebody passed out in Finland from drinking too much, we’d need to hire like a thousand new people to the emergency exchange just to answer the calls, let alone haul them somewhere warm.

Google and Search … don’t mix after all?

I’ve been using Google Reader for my RSS needs for some months now and I’m generally very happy with it. What it’s missing, however, is search. And then I ran into an article in the Irish Independent with a quote from Google:

Search is still our core competency and you will see that through whatever products Google unveils in the future.

Ehh? So why not trying to put your money where your mouth is and give Google Reader a search function!?

Update October 2nd, 2007: Google Reader now has a search function. Sweet!

Hey YLE, ever heard of scalable platforms?

We had the parliament election today here in Finland (sidenote: the preliminary results don’t seem too bad. Or, well, let’s just say they could be worse). It seems a couple of people tried to browse through the YLE pages or the news videos therein, as the pages practically came to a screeching halt on Sunday evening. A halt, in this case, is defined by their 512kbps stream not being delivered up to snuff and pages taking forever to load.

It’s not like this was an unforeseen situation. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. So what exactly does it take before YLE figures out how to scale their systems to support the occasional (and very minor, in global standards) flood of users?

I much prefer trees in their living, natural state, but since paper is so far a way more convenient format for reading stuff than any current e-paper, I unfortunately tend to consume a lot of dead trees also.

I’ve always been of the opinion that I read quite a lot, so I decided to make a list of everything that I read during one week; well, everything that fulfills two preconditions: a) it has to be public information and b) it has to be in the dead-trees-format – i.e. physical paper. The latter limitation comes from the simple fact that thanks to my customized Google and Factiva homepages (which include sources such as NY Times, FT, WP, WSJ etc.) and the 200+ RSS feeds that I follow, the online reading list would simply be too long to list.

So, below is the result from the past 7 days and I find it a bit surprising in two respects. First, it is very non-fiction-centered. Maybe I should really make an effort to read some fiction more often than the current rate of two novels per year. Second, the list is surprisingly short, but perhaps it’s because increasing amount of reading now happens online. Note that (especially with the books), I have not finished reading all of these, but it’s just a list of everything that I did read for more than a couple sentences.

[News]papers

• Helsingin Sanomat, the mandatory breakfast-table reading. Not so much new news actually make into the physical papers, but I still like reading a good paper in the morning and Hesari is as good as it gets here – but I sorely miss Boston Globe.
• Kauppalehti, although I’m growing exceedingly tired of this one. The contents is not of very high quality.
• Metro & Uutislehti 100, the free newspapers which are good for, umm, reading the comics during the short commute.
• City, another free paper though not a newspaper. I’m not convinced I’m in their target audience (anymore?) but it’s still a good read occasionally.

Magazines & journals

• Harvard Business Review, semi-mandatory reading, but with perhaps only one really good article per issue.
• Wired, something I don’t usually read but bought one issue to have something to read on a flight.
• The Economist, which I maybe should subscribe to if I just had time to read it more.
• Fakta, a fluffy and a bit “light” Finnish management magazine with some translated articles from HBR.
• Blue Wings, Finnair’s in-flight magazine with the occasional interesting story.

Books

• The Long Tail – it’s about time I read this one and wrote a review of it as Chris graciously sent me a copy, umm, like sometime last year..
• The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers – PS CS2 is one great piece of software and this is one great guide for it.
• Brainwashing – The Science of Thought Control – see the previous post for a review.
• At Blanchard’s Table, one of the best cookbooks ever. The hit rate in terms of delicious recipes has been a perfect 100% with this, a figure that no other cookbook even begins to approach.

Is this a lot or not? To answer that, I need some comparisons – how does it compare to your list?

Since I had just read a book about advertising, I thought Kathleen Taylor’s Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control would be a good semi-detour to take on my to-read list. Turns out it was a fascinating and enlightening one.

Brainwashing is not, despite the ominous title, a “How To”-book by any means. Almost on the contrary. The first part of the book starts off by explaining the often mis- and overused word, the grim history of brainwashing and the basic social and other characteristics that underlie the term and the methodology. It then goes on to cover the basics of group psychology, power of persuasion and also handles topics like the highly homogenous nature of our mass media. It also becomes apparent that influencing people is not an on/off-phenomenon but takes place on rather a long, sliding scale with everyday events like advertising at the other end and the likes of closed, destructive cults at the other. What can be called brainwashing, then, is a difficult question as the theory of an unmalleable “diamond” mind is effectively proven false.

The middle part of the book, appropriately titled “The traitor in your skull” very skillfully brings out fascinating issues within our brains and how they function. It provides much of the required background information on our brains in relatively few pages, even delving into the concepts like the idea of freedom or the illusion thereof. For those not familiar with the workings of the brain, one is given a sufficient introduction to the functions and roles of the PFC, ACC, SC (prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, superior colliculus) and many other brain areas so that one can at least begin to appreciate how brains process information, feelings, our (fallible) memory and other functions. Topics like the importance of cognitive dissonance, schemas and the constant hypothesis testing our brain calculates are explained in an easy-to-understand way.

Like is often the case with such fascinating books, it’s quite impossible to even mention everything interesting that was in it. Many methods of influence are covered from the everyday tactics of salespeople (such as artificially restricting availability, exploiting our tendency to reciprocate, “social proof” and so on) to the lethally dangerous and sometimes physical methods used by destructive cults, interrogators or the military. Plenty of real-life case studies and examples, some of them rather grim and disconcerting, bring the text to life.

One of the most important concepts in brainwashing is the existence of “ethereal ideas”, ideas that sufficiently vague so that they cannot be rationally challenged (though not all ethereal ideas are harmful). To mention just one thing: it was interesting to notice that though religions are often blamed for much of the “brainwashing” and evil in the world, atheists and scientists are by no means immune to promoting their own ethereal ideas (see excerpt below). Take for example Maoism, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, Communism and Nazism – none of them are exactly known for their religious fervour but still they managed to rack up millions of deaths.

Faith, in the sense of ideological conviction, and religion are not at all the same thing. Tolerance and dogmatism can both be found as easily in a lab or university as in a church, mosque, or synagogue. Nor does the scientific method guarantee immunity against ethereal ideas and the excesses they can lead us to. Challenging the old gods where they do harm is fine, but not if the result is that science itself gets set up as a replacement deity. Because of its exaltation of human reason, its divorcing of facts from values, science-as-authority makes two dangerous claims: that morals are irrelevant, and that scientists have the strongest claim to truth. Easy then to extend this authority to whatever prejudice the scientists happen to hold, because there is no longer pressure on them to examine their beliefs. [...] Science-as-authority, worshipped without the moral restraint, self-knowledge, and humility which most religions are old and wise enough to demand (if not always receive) from their adherents, lets scientists off the Socrates hook of self-examination and allows them to treat their personal bigotries as accepted truths.

There is also a “how-to” part in the last section, but it deals with how to resists brainwashing and influence technicians, not how to exert influence. From how diet and drugs affects the brain to how we can develop a better ability to “stop and think” – also, a “FACET approach” is introduced, a framework for how the risks of brainwashing could be substantially cut in societies. While the principles aren’t new to any western society (e.g. freedom of press, enforcing openness etc), even the best liberal democracies currently fall short of the FACET approach in more than one way.

Brainwashing is another must-read book for everyone navigating our increasingly complex world of seemingly everyone, everywhere trying to exert their influence on us. Taylor’s writing style is pertinently scientific but occasionally witty and even funny; the extensive references will provide more than enough additional information to the readers interested further in any particular topic. As far as reviews go, I can only give it 5 out of 5.