There's a very good website I subscribe to and often send clients to look at. It's called Our World in Data and it's almost invariably interesting. I can't for the life of me figure out how journalism has gotten so much better than advertising at presenting complex information in a simple and, even, enjoyable manner. Advertising is positively retrograde, like a general only trained to fight the last war.
I like Our World in Data best when it uses data to take apart a commonly held notion that's also commonly wrong. Wrong as in not right. Wrong as in mistaken. Wrong repeated so often, without proof, that the wrong is believed, by many, to be right.
Like using a Sharpie to change the course of a hurricane wrong.
In advertising, we been besieged by wrong masquerading as right for as long as I've been in the business.
Pontification is our style.
So things that make no sense, and make no one any money, become truisms. In fact, whole careers, agencies and countless decks are built on such blather. Let's go "digital first" because some CMO read the phrase somewhere and let's be "agile," I suppose because it rhymes with reptile.
When pontifical pronouncements are eventually proven wrong, they're never apologized for. No one ever says, "I know I said people want to have conversations with brands. It turns out they don't. I'm sorry I fucked up." Or, "It turns out Facebook likes don't lead to ROI. They're as meaningful as stickers on a hipster's Mac." Or, "surveillance capitalism--turns out it destroys more than it creates."
A lot of our embrace of wrongness comes from not recognizing tenets we ought to be familiar with. Like recency bias.
For instance, if you ask people to list the greatest music, movies, meals, presidents, commercials, agencies, or whatevers, recency bias means the preponderance of choices will be things that took place recently, or people you've heard of recently.
Likewise, it's said that if a neighbor dies it will have about the same impact on you as 10,000 people dying in a far-away land. A small terrorist blast in New York has greater meaning to us than US bombs killing one-million in Vietnam or Iraq or wherever else we're killing millions at the moment.
Of late, many people have been claiming that earth is experiencing more disasters than ever before. Certainly the hysteria of our age seems ratify that. And watching the sensational nightly news lends the claim further weight.
My guess is that a graph of great anythings would look roughly similar. People might believe a hot contemporary agency is as important and winning as DDB was in its heyday. Because that contemporary agency is winning awards by the boatload. No one ever considers that there are dozens more shows and categories now than there were not long ago. The chances are very good that that very-hot contemporary agency isn't dominating so overwhelmingly as DDB had.
But as for natural disasters, consider this, from Our World in Data:
"Many organizations, such as the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, have reported on this as a dramatic rise in actual disaster events. Here are a couple of high-profile examples:
- “According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), disaster events have increased from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year worldwide in the past 20 years.”
- UN chief says natural disasters have quadrupled since 1970.
- World Meteorological Organization (2019),said “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period.
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting.”
- These points were repeated in leading media outlets such as the BBC and The Economist.
Importantly, Our World in Data notes that the increase in the reported number of disasters is due primarily to reporting bias. And in the past, smaller disasters, weren't reported at all. They simply didn't make our radar screens.
A look at these two sets of graphs may help.
Looking at "smaller" disasters, it does appear that today things are getting worse and that today more bad things are happening.
But when you look at larger disasters through the ages, our graphs appear relatively unaffected by time period. There don't appear to be more bad things happening today than 125 years ago.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not that things are getting worse, but that reporting is getting better. That there aren't more disasters, we just know of more disasters.
I'm not saying the world doesn't suck or that we don't have good reasons to feel gloomy.
I am saying, chill.
And research before you leap.
And if you get lost in your own enthusiasms and it turns out that Barbie or DTC or the newest newest new thing was really just a temporal flash in the pan, admit you fucked up. And try to be smarter next time.
I think most people want help from brands.
Instead we give them only hype.
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