Neuroscience And Pseudoscience

Yesterday, The New York Times published an interview with Dr. Eric R. Kandel, the Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist and researcher at Columbia University.

One subject of the interview was the early overselling of psychoanalysis. Dr. Kandel put it this way...

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation and that its therapeutic potential was significant. It was seen as the treatment that solved everything in the world... It’s amazing how it was oversold...

There are many fantastically interesting components to it that are worthwhile. The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory...but the fact that it... never tried to test its ideas."

As I was reading this I couldn't help but draw a parallel to what is currently happening in the world of marketing.

While there are certainly aspects of digital advertising and marketing that present fascinating new opportunities, our most militant digital advertising advocates make the most cocksure assertions with a minimum of evidence; they are either reluctant to or incapable of verifying their assertions with reliable data; and when data that repudiates their assertions are presented they often respond with ad hominem attacks.

Mostly they lack that most valuable intellectual asset -- the one attribute that separates the inquisitive from the gullible -- skepticism.

When I read Dr. Kandel, the wonderful comment of President Harry Truman comes roaring back at me, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."

A Simple Allegory About Music, Marketing, And Storytelling

Every evening after work I get off the Bay Area Rapid Transit system near my home in Oakland.

Often there is a saxophonist standing outside the station playing for contributions. He is  a talented musician. He plays very difficult scales and very complicated jazz runs.

His collection box is usually empty.

Being the know-it-all that I am, I have an uncontrollable urge to grab the guy by the lapels and holler, "Schmuck, you want to make money? Play songs, not scales."

Farcebook

Facebook is like the telephone. It's great for chatting, but not terribly good for selling.

One of the most remarkable things about it is the blind faith that marketers continue to have in it despite its questionable record as a marketing vehicle.

For people who are marketing things, there are two ways to use Facebook -- the free way and the paid way.

Making a Facebook site is the free way. People can interact with your brand and, presumably, act as advocates. This is called "engagement."

Buying ad space on Facebook is the paid way. Facebook provides paid advertising space on other peoples' Facebook pages. This is how Facebook makes money.

The only problem is, both of these methods of using Facebook for marketing are seriously flawed.

Let's start with "engagement." Engagement -- like "branding" and "conversation" -- is one of those dreadful cliches that means whatever some hustler decides it means. Social media jargonistas throw it around like awards at an advertising conference. They start from the position that social media participation is de facto evidence of brand engagement.

According to Ad Age, researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (whatever that is) did a study to determine the true level of engagement of Facebook fans.

They defined "engagement" as actually doing something other than just "liking" a brand. People had to either share something from a Facebook page, or comment on something to be counted as "engaged."

They studied 200 of the biggest brands on Facebook. The rate of "engagement" was less than one half of one percent. What this means is that someone in a fit of unbridled enthusiasm may have clicked the thumbs up button one day, but the chances are less one in two hundred that she has ever commented or shared anything from the site.

According to Senior Research Associate Karen Nelson-Field...

"The significance here lies in the very tiny rate of engagement across all brands in a big sample."

Next time you get the "engagement" argument for social media, try not to get a hernia laughing.

Then there's paid advertising on Facebook. There has been substantial uproar about Facebook's intrusion into the private lives of its users. They know everything about us -- from what kind of dog we have to who gave us that nasty rash. All this information about our behavior and our preferences and our personal lives is supposed to allow advertising on Facebook to be uniquely effective.

In fact, advertising on Facebook is uniquely ineffective.

The click-through rate for online display ads in general is an alarmingly low one click in a thousand. If you think that's bad, the published click-through rate for ads on Facebook is 50% below this. And according to insiders, I am told that Facebook's true click-through rate is actually 80% below average.

In summary, as a medium for "engagement" Facebook doesn't seem to be very engaging, and for paid advertising its effectiveness is mostly a rumor. So how in the world can it be worth $100 billion?

Simple. The marketing industry has bought into the magic of social media marketing lock, stock, and pixel and nothing, including factual evidence, is going to change that.

No marketer in his right mind would pay to be ignored by a small number of people. But there is apparently great appeal in being ignored by hundreds of millions.