You'll Pay To Know What, And When, To Really Think

Via tech

Here's a small but highly recommended way to seem smarter than you actually are... listen to podcasts. I cycle through a bunch, mostly in a constant effort to find new ways to think about my various projects. Which is how the grist for this week's column came about, which is a new way to think about the next wave of wearable technology.

(Don't worry, I'll bring it around to marketing and advertising eventually.)

Here's the germ of the idea. A research team that was conducting MRI scans of healthy subjects for a baseline study found that, well, it's hard to ask people to just lie still for a long time. Especially in an environment that many people find to be claustrophobic.

So they experimented with a variety of audio programs on headphones during the scan, and found that while music was good, podcasts -- particularly ones that told an engaging story -- were better still.

This probably doesn't come as a striking revelation. From your own day to day, I'm sure you find that when someone is telling you an engaging story, you are more apt to stay still and listen. But what's more telling and interesting is that the actual thought process of listening and learning shows up on the MRI as well.

Here's where I'm going to make two small but defensible leaps of logic. I'm going to presume that the brain is a muscle, and that it does better with routine exercise. And maybe not just the kind that involves sweating, but also the mental kind.

This is, of course, the entire raison d'etre of Lumosity, the "brain games" start up that is, not coincidentally, a frequent buyer of advertising space during, well, podcasts. So it's not exactly a big leap of faith to imagine that properly timed and individually prescribed mental exercises will also help cognitive performance. Also, that we can prove that it's worth doing.

Which brings us to the second leap of logic. A future version of wearables will monitor brain activity, and provide alerts to the user based on various mental conditions.

If you are predisposed to negative potential, you might go immediately to a dark place from this, with thoughts of mind control, exceptional privacy violations, censorship, and so forth. But my inclination is to stay with the personal and the positive, and imagine a scenario in which people struggling with depression are given, well, content at the time when it does them the most good. Or aging patients at risk of mental deterioration are given small puzzles that help them retain and improve. The potential could extend to patients with OCD, postpartum depression, drivers with readings that seem to indicate episodes of micro-sleeping, and so on, and so on.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much untapped human potential would reach the world from people who achieve some measure of additional relief from these conditions. Consider the possibility of lives saved from fleeting thoughts that lead to suicide, moments of regression in fights against addiction, or the more mundane aspects of better awareness and coping mechanisms for stress, and so on. How much more could we achieve as a species, if technology gives us the ability to act without these limits?

Let's bring this back to our bread and butter. So while you are considering all of these possibilities, let's also think about narrow-casting our messaging to people when they might be most interested in buying a product, or most receptive to hearing an advertising message / willing to be distracted from their current task.

After all, a dramatically better human experience?

Still has bills to pay.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

My Trump Media Conspiracy Theory

Preach, H.L, Preach

I'm going to step away from the usual beat (marketing and advertising), because I feel the following point is being missed, and needs to be addressed before it gets wiped away on the whiteboard that is modern history. And for the record, I'd like to think that I'd hold this opinion regardless of my partisan position, but as it's probably going to be pretty apparent to you which way I lean, I'm not going to apologize or hide that.

In the last week of the presidential race, there has been two interpretations of the rhetoric coming from the Trump campaign.

1) That he's speaking truth to power, calling out the timing as well as the veracity of various news stories as suspect, and daring to speak of vast interconnectedness at the highest levels of finance, media, and political influence.

2) He's grasping at straws to spread the blame for a failing campaign, and setting up a future delegitimization of a Hillary Clinton presidency, which will help when he sets up a new media network for those in his influence. This is where Roger Ailes' role in the Trump campaign comes into play. Trump TV as an exit strategy has been more than a persistent rumor.

Now, I'm not going to convince anyone of the merits of either of these theories. We live in a time where convincing anyone about anything requires great tact, data, and expertise, as well as a background where you trust the proprietor of the opinion for past work.

But what I can assert, and maybe even reach some minds across the aisle from mine, is that there is some suspicion in the timing, but it's not necessarily due to a favoritism towards Clinton, or away from Trump. Rather, it's toward, well, profits. Ratings. Also, that a democracy that serves these needs in front of informing the populace seems more than a little dangerous.

There has been ample time in this campaign (we're going on what, the second or third year of it?) to vet the candidate from all of his various issues, without anything new coming out in the last few weeks. The bus tape that started the latest avalanche is over a decade old, and many of the women who have come forward with allegations could have been published some time ago. Sure, some of the client's own statements may have caused some to move forward, but a persistent journalist or staff could have, perhaps, gotten some of this out earlier in the calendar year. The graphic and easily understood nature of the tape gives it more red meat than, say, the Trump University issues, or some of the more racier stories about overtones of organized crime in the Atlantic City days, or past instances of adultery, but that's not what concerns me here.

Rather, what seems to be the case is that the media wasn't as dogged in pursuing those stories during the Republican primary, not when there was such a fountain of ratings and takedowns of various candidates to fill the news hole and bring in casual viewers. Some blame must also go to Trump's primary rivals, who clearly didn't do the same level of opposition research (witness Alicia Machado) that the Clinton team did. While it's clear that any single Republican rival that went that strongly against Trump in the primary would have suffered a direct counter-attack, it's also clear that the entire field would have been more likely to end the insurgency had all of the countering forces come out earlier, when support for him wasn't as entrenched.

Much about this campaign has seemed unprecedented, unique, and straight out of an over-ripe screenplay. But what it's also been is highly lucrative for a media industry that has done as little as possible to talk about differences in issues or policy, and has profited mightily from lowest common denominator news stories.

While we can hope that lessons have been learned, and this kind of phenomenon will get faster vetting in the future, it's hard to argue with money. Perhaps even more depressingly, that this is the new normal, where scandal and malfeasance is what will rule the day, now and forever more.

Also, the eternal, true and depressing adage that you learn very early in political science class, which you can also call out for the ratings being so high...

The people get the government they deserve.

And in the words of the late great H.L. Mencken, they'll get it good and hard.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Even The Losers

More Losing Might Be In Order

Last weekend, I took my mom, a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan (OK, I am too) to a road game for our annual birthday tradition. So far, we've been to Cleveland, Indianapolis, Chicago, Tampa, Green Bay, St. Louis, and now Detroit. (We're 4-4, and my beloved team lost this last one by a point. We had a good time, because we always do, but it could have been better. Alas. Moving on.)

On the way to our parking spot, I saw the following PSA, which just made my day on many levels. Let's dive into it, shall we?

1) As a fan of a team that is nearly as futile as the Lions in terms of time between championships (1957 for them, 1960 for my laundry), I kind of like that this headline is a few blocks from the stadium. I'd like it more if it were close to Dallas, Washington, New England and New York, but you take what you can for smart aleck snarking moments.

2) On first blush, the ad pops and makes sense... but if you look at it more than five seconds, you'll catch a rather, um, glaring mistake. (I apologize for the image, but we were in the car and I had to rely on Google Earth for the grab.) Take a second look. See it yet?

Namely, um...

If you are losing, dude in the hoodie with the hands up in obvious distress...

Why do you have the mountains and mountains of chips?

Which you clearly have not lost, or at least, not yet?

Look, I get that outdoor ads are hard. You can't go for any concept that takes more than three seconds, the copy has to be pretty much header online, and you need obvious graphic relevance and stopping power. They cost real money and take significant industry, and even PSAs get real attention in the community.

But, um, how hard would it have been to show the chips being raked away, to back up the whole idea of Losing?

Or just not show the chips at all, since the hoodie, green felt and copy might have gotten the point across?

Which leads me to the following and final point about any marketing and advertising project like this one...

Maybe run it past someone who is actually in the target demographic of, well, actually having gambled in their lifetime? Before you put the damned thing up?

Play me out, Tom Petty...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.