At a recent set of focus groups –  you know where a small group of subjects is quizzed on a particular subject while being scrutinized through one-way glass by a smaller group of people hoping for insight that can be extrapolated across thousands — I heard confusion arise.  The facilitator said: “6 cents in every 100 dollars,” but it kept being played back as “6 percent in every 100 dollars.”

Big difference.  How come?  For nearly 60 years we have seen the meaning of numbers and percentages overtaken by the importance of the argument they are used to promote.  The focus group insight is: we are all guilty.  One reason may be how the apparent objectivity of numbers lends credibility to any argument no matter how contorted the equation that produced them.

Go back to 1954, when Darrell Huff and Irving Geis published “How to Lie with Statistics.” It kicked off a trend of adding math to marketing.

Here is how the book opened:

“‘There’s a mighty lot of crime around here,’ said my father-in law a little while after he moved from Iowa to California.  And so there was — in the newspaper he read.  It is one that overlooks no crime in its own area and has been known to give more attention to an Iowa murder than was given by the principal daily in the region in which it took place.

“My father-in-law’s conclusion was statistical in an informal way.  It was based on a sample, a remarkably biased one. Like many a more sophisticated statistic it was guilty of semiattachment: It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of a crime rate.”

Guarding against the urge to confer credibility on every random column of numbers that “foot” — add up correctly — puts a burden of all of our five senses.  If extra sensory perception is the ability to see things without evidence or experience, it may take that sixth one to protect us from ourselves.

Share

Plug the word “context” into the Google News search box today and you’ll get 33,495 results.  This is a serious uptick — 15 percent — since the last time we looked.  That is good news.

Some of the total is driven by the fight between Juan Manuel Marquez and Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas.  More was due to the renewed attempts by the Obama Administration to instigate peace in the Middle East and initiate health care reform.

My favorite story may be the one from the Motley Fool which looks at whether the much reported “housing recovery” is hype or reality.  Here is the story, in context.

Share

When I saw this bit — “One of the most important lessons I’ve experienced over the years, though, is to build something worth noticing: A product that is the first to simplify a big problem or entertain a user’s important passion.” – in a VentureBeat post by Venrock entrepreneur-in-residence Sean O’Malley, I thought: that is a pretty good high concept for innovation.

O’Malley takes aim at building the only kind of products worth building — “remarkable” ones.  In marketing and public relations, we’ve always sought to exploit the ability our products had to solve big problems.  In fact, the bigger the problems a company solves, the easier it is to get the world (media included) to pay attention.

Share

When Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, uttered his famous, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” assessment of a popular spot, it was merely an ironic twist.  These days, it may be read as an epitaph for any business — retail, entertainment or travel — that needs people to get up and go.  More than a bad economy, more than changing fashion and more than the TSA, the reason we are staying put is technology.  It is delivering on the experience without the inconvenience.

That retail space is going begging is no new story.  The 10 percent drop in air travel in the United States is also well-documented.   But when the NFL reports that the opening game of the season played by a team in the last Super Bowl is not sold out and so may be blacked out, well, that is news.

Long viewed as the most popular sport in America, the NFL has sown the seeds of its in-stadium problems by aggressively courting new technologies that make the in-home experience different to the point of betting better.  After all, in high def, with DVR pause and playback, the action is more real — and controllable — from the couch than the loge level.  In fact, this beat is continuing with the emergence of 3-D.

But more than just planting the seeds, the NFL has fertilized and watered them by making the trip to and from its stadia difficult and time-consuming, its ticket prices expensive and its arenas unruly.  If CDs and movies are better bought online, and shoes no longer need to be tried on before purchasing, then it should come as no surprise that football fans feel better bar-be-que’ing at home than tailgating in the parking lot.

Sports have become software for our domestic entertainment hardware.  The die was cast 35 years ago when Ted Turner, anxious to turn his Atlanta UHF television channel in the nation’s first satellite-delivered superstation, bought the Atlanta Braves so he could broadcast every one of their games nationwide.  It wasn’t a deal driven by the sport, but by the hardware — the television — and the advertising it could sell.

The trend will continue.  So too will NFL black-outs (a policy adopted, in the first place, to get people to go the the game).  But if site-based businesses can’t make going different enough to be better than staying home, another of Yogi’s phrases might apply, “It gets late early out there.”

Share

“Balance” in the name of objectivity continues to give the media a black eye.  Nowhere has the battle been as one-sided as it has during the national health care reform debate.  But rather than serve as a call to recommit to a safe discipline of “one on hand, on the other hand,” the outcome of the argument this time would best be an end to our commitment to what can never be achieved.

Author Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times described the problem this way:

“To look at this in a larger context, journalists would no doubt say that it isn’t really their job to ferret out the ‘truth.’ It is their job to report ‘facts.’ If Palin says that Obama intends to euthanize her child, they report it. If Limbaugh says that Obama’s healthcare plan smacks of Nazism, they report it. And if riled citizens begin shouting down their representatives, they report it, and report it, and report it. The more noise and the bigger the controversy, the greater the coverage. This creates a situation in which not only is the truth subordinate to lies, but one in which shameless lies are actually privileged over reasoned debate.”

If reporters know better, they feel constrained to say it because, well, that would not be “objective.”  The result is not insight but intensity — and anger.  Just look at the videotape.

I think it is time for the reporters to set aside antique notions of objectivity. They should write their stories not in some artificial balance but weighted by the evidence, information and history they bring to the piece.  Ultimately, it is all about advocacy.

A company is an advocate for its shareholders. A public relations agency is an advocate for its clients. Elected officials are advocates of their re-election. In these cases and many more, the media ought to be an advocate for the companies’ customers, agencies’ audiences and a politician’s constituents.

In each case, reporters are (generally) paying closer attention to the corporate practices, marketing programs and public policy than are the rest of us. We ought to have the benefit of that insight, not have it lost as they turn themselves in pretzels trying to present “balance”.

Share