Advertising: Necessary or Unnecessary

I heard an interesting but misleading axiom: that if a product needs to be advertised, then people probably don't need it.  It's interesting in that it holds a glimmer of truth - most people will buy the things they know that they need, and if you must push a product, it's often because people don't see a need for it.   It's misleading in that it is based on the premise that people are omniscient and industrious - that they know what they need and are willing to invest effort into getting it - both of which are false.

People are not omniscient.  Even those who are smart about some things are painfully ignorant about others, and they live with problems that they could quite easily correct if only they recognized the problem and were aware that a solution existed.   Advertising that helps to recognize problems and discover solutions is selling something that's very much needed.

People are not realistic.   In general, they tend to think that they can achieve things very easily and that problems will not arise.   And in some instances things do not work out as they wished, are harder to do than expected, and sometimes there are very negative side effects.   Advertising that helps bring them in touch with reality is selling something that's very much needed.

People are not industrious.   They are very economical, seeking to get the most benefit from the least cost or effort, and will often abandon goals if the effort seems too great, preferring to live with the problem rather than undertake the effort to solve it.  Advertising that identifies better ways of accomplishing goals is selling something that's very much needed.

But on the other hand, advertising goes awry when it misrepresents the truth: to suggest that there is a problem when it really is not, to suggest a product is efficient/effective when it really is not, and so on.   In essence, deceptive advertising to sell unneeded products is entirely unnecessary, and quite harmful in that it leads people to invest their time and money into something that does them no good, consuming resources that might have otherwise been used to achieve something necessary that is neglected.

So in the end, advertising is as necessary/unnecessary as the product it is advertising for the specific individual to whom it is being advertised.  And ultimately, it is the right and responsibility of each consumer to determine his own needs.   Critics of advertising are no better than advertisers in this regard: they presume to know what people really need, and wish to meddle in the lives of others.  If it is the right of an individual to choose the goals he wishes to pursue for himself, then it is the responsibility of an individual to consider whether any offer is worthwhile given his own priorities.  “Caveat emptor,” is not a phrase that expresses indifference, but respect for the individual consumer to make his own decisions.

Operation and Project Management

Traditional organization structures were built around ongoing and permanent tasks: the "marketing" department was staffed by individuals who perform marketing functions that are done as a matter of course.  And in such a department there is likely a person whose task it is to manage the weekly newspaper advertisement, which is a task they perform each week on an ongoing basis, in the same way they have always done it.   This work is performed over and over and is never expected to end: that is, the company will always place a newspaper ad each week and the clerk will always need to attend to the necessary tasks to do so.

Such an organization gravitates toward stasis and myopia: for the sake of efficiency and reliability, nothing is ever expected to change.   People settle into jobs in which they become very efficient, but it becomes the scope of their existence: it is "my job" to do this task, and they lose sight of its context and meaning within the bigger picture.   This is particularly true among the people who perform hands-on tasks, but also is evident in the attitudes of those who manage them.

Project-oriented teams within an organization depart from this: their work is to implement a solution to a problem for which there is no defined and existing pattern of behavior.  In many instances, they explore the problem and define a solution before implementing it.   Such teams in traditional organizations are ad-hoc - they effect a change on the rest of the organization and disband once that change has been made.

There have also been entire companies that are project-oriented, but this has traditionally been rare.  A construction company, for example, would assemble the personnel required to build something and manage the construction project.  When the building was completed, the company would move on to another project.   Its people needed to be flexible because no two days involve the exact same tasks, and the skills needed might change from one project to the next (building an office building or building a bridge require different skills).

Design consultancies operate in the same manner: each job they do for clients is a project that has a specific beginning and ending with work that tends to vary (that is, unless they are doing the weekly newspaper ad or some other repetitive job for a standing client) such that the agency must define the work to be done and then perform it.   In such an agency, an employee's responsibilities vary, and their work is better defined by the projects they are supporting than a job title or role.

Management in these organizations often consists of "putting our fires" - which is to be expected.   In a workplace where every project is unique, there are no regular duties.   The workers are specialists who do not merely perform tasks, but define the tasks to be done, and they are capable of doing this without much assistance - but when problems arise, management must step in to smooth out obstacles that to keep the work on track.  The problems will be as unique as the work.

The project-based model emphasizes collaboration - authority over a task is maintained by the person who performs the task.   There is usually a project manager who attempts to keep track of the work and overcome impediments, but because there is no formal process that drives the work of the team, there is not a management function to ensure people are doing what they are supposed to be doing - because there are no suppositions.

Project teams generally proceed through a number of phases in which the nature of the work fluctuates.  The problem-solving phase defines the criteria by which a solution will be assessed to be a success or failure.   The design phase hypothesizes a solution that is compared to the problem until consensus is reached that it is worth pursuing.  The development phase implements the solution that has been agreed upon.   After that is complete, the project is over, though it may result in follow-on work to provide continued support for the solution.

Thus considered, traditional firms are in the "continued support" phase most of the time - and this has been the historical approach to doing business, which can be maintained in a relatively unchanging environment, such that the same operations can be counted on to produce the same results consistently.   But in the present day, the environment constantly shifts, such that the problem-solving work cannot be a periodic task, but an ongoing necessity to remain functional and relevant.

Crowdsourcing Revisited

There is great potential in networked technology to bring together the ideas and work of millions of minds to accomplish substantial things – but to what degree has that potential been realized?   In over two decades, examples of successful mass-collaborative efforts are very few, which begs the question of whether the potential is real, or merely has not been realized.

Granted, the wave of enthusiasm about “crowdsourcing” has largely died down.  So it’s likely a good time to reconsider it from a more sober and less starry-eyed perspective – because there does seem to be a great deal of untapped potential, though not quite so much as the fanboys would have us believe.

With this in mind, I’ve read a couple of books on the subject and considered what the authors have to say:

• Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing speaks directly to the phenomenon – the author attempts to be objective, but is still rather an enthusiast who goes on long tares about what should be possible (but hasn’t been accomplished) and trots out “success stories” of businesses and projects that have failed since the book’s publication.
• Gustave LeBon’s The Crowd was written a few hundred years before the Internet was invented, but remains a valid exploration of crowd psychology.  And the behavior of crowds online, like that of people online, is very similar to their behavior in real life – albeit a bit worse given the ease of participation and the expectation of anonymity gives people the sense they can behave very badly without consequences, and they often do. 

Considering what Howe claims a crowd is capable of doing and what LeBon says about their habitual behaviors and cognitive capacity, it becomes clear that the crowd is good at a few things, but bad at most:

The crowd is very good at gathering

When it comes to collecting things, the crowd is a very good resource.  Expedia, YouTube, Pinterest, and similar sites that aggregate a huge amount of data benefit greatly from crowdsourcing, on the premise that many hands make light work – with the caveat that the work will not be particularly good.

The crowd is not good at creating

There is a significant difference between gathering and creating, in that creating requires effort and talent to produce something whereas gathering does not (it’s merely bringing together things others have created).   User-generated content is notoriously awful – and while there are members of the crowd who have the talent and the willingness to contribute it, they are few and far between.

Consider Sturgeon’s Law, which maintains that “90% of everything is crap.”   It’s more like 99%, and maybe 99.99% - but the Law of Large Numbers reminds us that if there are ten million contributions, the 0.01% of quality contributions means there will be a thousand good items – though finding them in the mass of inferior works is difficult.  This brings me to the next point …

The crowd is fairly good at moderating and organizing

Finding needles in a haystack is another instance in which many hands make light work.  Crowds are good at flagging inappropriate content or suggesting which items among a multitude are worth giving closer intention.   However, the reason a crowd is only fairly good at moderating is that opinions differ as to what constitutes quality – and the crowd is only capable of reflecting popular opinion, which may be inaccurate (see the later point about knowledge).

Sorting things into categories is rather more complicated than moderating.  Whereas moderation requires sorting them into two categories (good or bad), organizing often has an open categorization system, and the crowd must develop its own taxonomy – which again is a task that requires knowledge if the system of categorization is to be meaningful.

The crowd is very bad at anything that requires talent or knowledge

From the previous points about creating, moderating, and organizing, it becomes apparent that crowds are not good at anything requiring talent or knowledge.   Ask a crowd to paint a mural, and you get graffiti.   Ask a crowd for medical advice, and you get highly questionable and potentially dangerous folk remedies.   You’re better off commissioning one artist or consulting one physician for those things – and the same is true to some degree of an task that requires talent or knowledge.

The crowd is not very good at predicting

The financial markets are ample evidence that when people fall in line with a herd, they do not think very clearly about the future – they tend to be emotional and move en masse based on very superficial evidence.  Hence, there are bubbles and crashes.   They are also highly subject to groupthink – a person stating an opinion is prone to agree with the opinion stated by someone just before him, or express what he thinks will be acceptable to others.

This has been discovered in the field of marketing research: while it is easier to interview twelve people in a focus group, the results are less accurate than interviewing them individually and aggregating the results because the interaction causes them to normalize, and generally to the lowest common denominator.

The crowd is very bad at sustaining interest

Crowds are prone to get excited about doing something that is simple and quick, but they tend to lose enthusiasm and disperse very quickly – and this is the main reason they fail to accomplish much.   They follow fashions, which change rapidly, and have the attention span of a hyperactive teenager.   So if a task requires more than a few moments’ effort, or engagement over a long period of time, it will be left undone.

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All things considered, crowdsourcing is an idea that should be considered – but before getting into the details of how the crowd can do something, it’s very important to consider whether the crowd is capable of doing it sufficiently well.   In many instances, it is not, and you’re better off hiring an expert (or assembling a team of experts) rather than throwing your project to the mob.

Reinforce, Optimize, Innovate, Destroy, or Let it Be?

This is the inherent difficulty when attempting to resolve a problem in an existing process: is it necessary to completely replace an existing solution with something new, or merely to make a few minor adjustments to an otherwise perfect existing solution?  The way to settle the dispute between innovators and optimizers exists, though it is very much neglected: as-is analysis.

The as-is analysis considers the present solution, acknowledging that it was put in place to solve a problem, and conceding that the present system was designed by people who were intelligent and insightful – but that even the most intelligent and insightful people make mistakes that lead to failure or partial success and it is possible for the people presently involved, equally intelligent and insightful, to find a way to improve.    Said another way, as-is analyst answers some basic questions:

• What was the existing solution instituted to accomplish?
• Are those goals (still) valid and worthwhile?
• Is the existing solution being implemented as designed?
• Is the existing solution effective in accomplishing its goal?
• Is the existing solution efficient in accomplishing its goal?

The answers to these questions help define the scope of the present effort: to reinforce existing solutions, optimize them, replace them with something innovative, or leave it alone?   It’s an important decision to make to put sufficient but not superfluous effort into the effort.

If the goals are no longer valid or worthwhile, then the solution should be to desist and destroy the processes – they are merely rituals that likely render no benefit and entail expense or inefficiency.

If the existing solution is not being implemented as designed, then reinforcement is necessary, as the evidence does not warrant changing or replacing it.  If it can be done properly, it may work.

If the existing solution is not effective in accomplishing its goal, the innovation is needed to replace it with an entirely new solution that will be more effective.

And if the existing solution is effective but inefficient, optimization is necessary because the solution is valid, but adjustments are necessary to improve upon it (get greater results with less effort/expense).

My sense is that a though as-is analysis is seldom done, particularly when there is a proposed replacement for an existing solution that has generated great enthusiasm, or a significant amount of resentment or dislike for the existing solution.   These are more psychological or political factors that have nothing to do with functional improvements.

Needs Precede Technology

I stumbled across an interesting idea that was written down in 1832: a network of posts and pulleys driven by steam engines that would deliver bags of messages among cities.   It was a slightly preposterous idea even at the time, and totally unnecessary in the modern world - but I was stuck by the notion that the author recognized a need and conceived of an idea to address it.

This stands in contrast to the practice of dreaming up some new technology and attempting to convince people that they need it.   I see this all the time in television infomercials (Have you ever wanted a square hard-boiled egg? What if there were a way to polish your doorstops?  That kind of thing.) It's also common among promoters of zany website and mobile applications.   They all offer a new way to do something that nobody wants to do in the first place - and most of them fail to have sustained success as a result.

Products that find sustainable markets generally serve existing human needs, and typically needs that are already being fulfilled by inferior methods.   The mailbag network described was certainly an improvement over human couriers ... though it would have been commercially unfeasible and made obsolete a few decades later by the telegraph.   But at the time it would have been a faster way to do what was already being done.

It goes back to the notion that human needs have been about the same since the species evolved - it's just that the means by which we fulfill these needs is constantly improving.   There are very few technologies that enable people to do things they had never been able to do before - the vast majority enable us to do it faster, better, or with less cost and effort.  Those are the innovations that thrive, survive, and make their inventors rich until someone builds a better mousetrap.

In the end, this leads to a critical questions for any new technology:  What does it help people to do better than their current solution?    If it's not better than their current solution, it's not going to take.  And if it is proposing to do something that people don't want done badly enough to have already figured out a way to do it, it's likely to be a failure as well.