007: Why is persuading people so hard?
[During - Session 2] History, Behavioral Economics and our first guest speaker
The future of advertising is all around us and the floor is beans. Also, AI reads The New York Times? Welcome to the second “During” recap of the Future of Advertising course at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. We’re still in Context mode.
Last week we got the basics of Marketing established and the course underway, so I thought now we should focus on a vexing issue central to Advertising: Getting humans to do whatever it is you want them to.
Persuasion is central to affecting change. But there are several problems.
The first is historic. We humans are not far removed from a life minus electricity, indoor plumbing and choices. As we contemplate the future, we’d be wise to look over our shoulder to understand the pace of change.
As Prof G put it recently, “Our species dates back 300,000 years. For most of that time, most humans lived to their early 30s, as a bad cut or broken bone was a death sentence. Around 1800, things changed: wealth, life expectancy, and the population all exploded. In the past two hundred years, per capita GDP has grown 15x; we now live twice as long as our great-grandparents.”
No wonder the most recent 30 years have felt like a whirlwind. Persuasion was hard enough when literally every competitive act of persuading took the same form of one color ink on newsprint. Now imagine not just selling ideas, but selling the newfangled reality those ideas are supposed to live within. By the way, my parent’s VCR continues to blink “12:00.”
The second problem is rational. In other words, how we’ve been thinking about persuasion; and how it functions. The history of Advertising is littered with all manner of scientific approaches to creating change, often predicated on classic Economics. And it worked, until it didn’t. Which is about when Becker, Taversky, Kahneman and Thaler, et al began to prove we are not solely rational, our decisions are instead strongly influenced by cognitive, psychological, cultural and social factors. Hello, Behavioral Economics. Or as Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy (UK) puts it:
"Emotions are the soil in which all effective advertising is rooted."
In other words, if your aim is to persuade, it helps to understand the emotions, psychology and culture of your audience. The investment in an actionable insight can make all the difference, and advance your career. Sutherland, more than anyone, has done a tremendous job explaining how Behavioral Economics applies to advertising and persuasion. I said as much back in 2018. Here’s an excerpt from another lengthy Sutherland interview. The money quote:
“Advertising can make a product seem more valuable not by changing the product itself but by changing our perception of it.”
Hence the infamous Shreddies campaign.
Or, as Bill Bernbach famously said, “The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”
Our ability to persuade is built upon humanity’s collective embrace of change, and our capability to empathize and unearth actionable insight.
And on the topic of understanding humans the better to persuade them we welcomed our very first guest speaker: Annie Mullins (LinkedIn), Director of Strategy at The Social Lights.
The students were very eager to understand Strategy from a practitioner. As Annie puts it, strategy is about setting an agenda, acting as a guide (not a rule maker). A Strategist learns fast—their strength is their curiosity. “Our job is to learn all day long,” she said. She talked about using social signals to discern and predict how audience behavior drives business impact. What might only be visible first in niche comment threads can grow to persuade tribes, then become a dominant mass cultural narrative. A Strategist has to be able to tell stories with data, quickly. It’s a career for people with a Growth mindset, she told us. (Versus Fixed.)
Given her path across various agencies, I asked how the strategist role is perceived. Annie said the key difference is, “how ‘creative’ you’re allowed or expected to be.”
Annie left us with a brilliant summary of both the future of advertising and the right mindset for that future:
“The job I’ll have in ten years doesn’t exist yet.”
Thanks for illuminating us, Annie!
I’ll send an “After” reflection for Session 2 some time Wednesday.