Chris Writes.

It sounds rather similar to the intellectually uninspired P2P/MPAA/RIAA/EMI/ETC rhetoric: no matter how hard enforcements are pushed, and no matter how many technical and legal barriers are enacted, some clever (and often-but-not-always-young) punk will find a way to screw it all up by, say, holding down the shift key, and then publishing to the internet detailed instructions about how to hold down the shift key. This is basically the situation that many companies will face at the ‘2008 Olympic Games’ (a term I am not technically licensed to use).

If you’re not disastrously rich, marketing your company at the Olympic games in Beijing is nothing short of an effort in futility, even if you’re there: according to this article in the NY Times, 12 companies have paid a total of $900 Million for the privilege to be a marketing partner at the games.  For any other company in the world in any way associated with the games, telling stories related to the games is humorously forbidden.

At Specialized, where I work, we’re a personal sponsor to a flock of competing athletes, contributing their bikes, equipment, and often salaries.  Yet we are limited to rules such as not being able to say the words “2008 Olympics” when we try to tell the story of our involvement.  No matter how many athletes ride our bikes, we are faced with pages of legal jargon that tries to tell us to, basically, go home. This ironically seems to work against the IOC, and I suspect will only get worse in two ways:

1. more small/medium companies will find new, nimble ways around the rules, and
2. bigger companies will cease to see value in $100M advertising entitlements that are increasingly circumvented by these nimble small/medium companies.

Other comedic blunders along the way, also from the afforelinked NYT article: you can’t drink a competing beverage at the games.  Reporters cannot use laptops of non-sponsors unless you tape over logos.  Dutch fans may not wear pants.  The list goes on.

So, while the IOC heads on their merry way to the plush viewing seats in Bolgia 5, the marketing folks up in the Bolgia 10 cheap seats will probably start to entertain some or all of the following ideas:

-  Crowdsourced mass media via twitter, flickr, and any other service that can be populated and broadcast to via any cell phone.  Imagine a campaign where every camera phone image from the 2008 Beijing Olympics that showed the Speedo logo won a new Speedo swimsuit (the maybe-illegal one that already has people talking – and no, they’re not an Olympic sponsor, but like Specialized, they expect to kick ass on the podium).

-    Replacement Marketing via Social activism *inside* China – imagine what Coke’s $100M in marketing entitlement fees could accomplish if it were instead put towards humanitarian relief efforts.

-    Podcasts, v-casts, and other forms of individual commentary that can hit the web faster (and with fewer censors) than official channels.

-   Post-olympic celebrations that utilize photos and videos licensed from the public sector, and/or from CreativeCommons

There is a long list of other clever new toys out there that could also cause havoc in ways that very likely might get people arrested (so no, I’m not going to go there – let’s not put anyone at risk of prison terms, k?), but regardless, the point is that the world has changed in even the last two years since the games in Torino, and certainly has changed since the last summer games in Athens.  Yet the IOC and the Beijing organizers insist that they can regulate their way to “protect the rights of sponsors”.

Fact is, the harder they try to resist the clever ways that marketing can infiltrate any gathering of people, the harder people will try to prove their efforts futile.

First off, what a great title for a solid day of insightful discussion. When was the last time you thought about ways to think in better ways? This whole day was about updating your sharpening tools, rather than sharpening your axe. That’s pretty unique, and valuable as it improves not only the one new thing you might do, but potentially everything you do next.

So, a brief recap on the day:
Part 1: Jane Fulton Suri from IDEO. A brilliant and photo-rich monologue about “informed intuition” – the process by which we make small micro-decisions every day, and the ways in which we improve our surroundings by micro-tweaks that suit our individual needs. And the important punchline: these subtle behaviors are windows into what we actually care about, even if we’re not aware of them consciously to point them out in the next focus group.

She had an extremely compelling section on role-playing, once showing a photo of a hospital ward ceiling, pointing out that *this* is what a patient looks at all day, and not the blinky machines that look so very hospitaly. Can we get some reassurance on the ceiling please? Additionally on the topic of role-playing: if you can reenact a customer scenario, what would a neutral non-involved observer say if they watched it unfold?

And her conclusion, which I love: “Stay curious, and reconsider the things you know well.”

Part 2: Gerald Zaltman from Harvard Business School. This guy kinda blew my mind a bit. At the heart of his discussion was the idea of ‘Deep Metaphor’, related to his assertion that ’surface thinking’ is not the same as insight or deep understanding (can I get a high five & a ‘hell yeah’ for that? Couldn’t agree more). More lucidly: observation only tells you *what* happens, insight is knowing why it happens, and deep insight is knowing why it happens when the subject actually being observed couldn’t tell you why it’s happening.

The killer punch for me though was when he said “A tennis ball is round. A plate is also round. So why, when a child tells you that he knows the earth is round, do you assume you know which one he means?”. Just when I thought I had this whole “research as a means to understanding” thing worked out, the one-two punch of context and the english language come back to haunt me with a litany of uncertainties. And I probably don’t even see them. As Zaltman said in his closing remarks: “All methods of market research are compromises with reality.” As a marketing guy, that troubles me. It’s true, of course, but it troubles me.

Part 3: Roger Martin and Malcolm Gladwell. This fireside chat between the Dean of my B-School and the venerable king of pop-marketing theory was a wildly entertaining and sometimes inside-joke riddled affair, full of cleverness and wisdom both. A discussion with Gladwell doesn’t seem to center on much of anything, instead attacking a topic as a fog might. But in the midst of the hazy focus, they battled against the epithet of “reliability” and championed the cause of “validity”.

In short: we businessy-types love things that are reliable, such as linear regression that we can repeat over and over to the same result, despite the fact that they’re not necessarily a valid measure of anything. In contrast, we loathe the murky waters of validity, because no matter how correct it is, we can’t always measure it or repeat it, and so validity-driven efforts don’t typically suit the best interests of our compensation schemes (ie: people do what you pay them to do, which is often to focus on reliable things, not valid things).

Some favorite quotes:
Gladwell on the lack of validity in business: “This is a cultural bias towards an intolerance for ambiguity.”
Martin on why we like reliability: “Business likes measurement.”
Gladwell on MBA’s: “As people get ’smarter’ we expect more reliability. This can be called an unfortunate outcome of a generally positive trend, and might be an indication of why MBA education is where it is today.” (Laughter)
Gladwell on IQ: “Any IQ above 120 isn’t useful. Other things matter at that point.”

They then discussed further on the ‘BMW-ization’ of the auto industry, and how the auto industry is trending towards a measurable norm (how close to BMW are you?), which is reliable but probably not valid. Robert Parker’s wine ratings are similar: wine makers are making wines to suit the tastes of a select few esteemed reviewers, in the hopes of a good ranking that will allow them to charge more. Reliable, not valid (especially if you like soft, round red wine!). So I wonder, in areas like these: are niche markets examples of validity showing through the reliable bedrock of an industry or industry segment?

Part 4: Anita McGahan, a new professor at Rotman. With the aid of a few charts, Anita postulated that we’ve got ‘about 46 to 91 years of oil left’. And then asked the interesting question: “which 19th century industries will be revived when we run out of oil?” It’s kind of a joke, but not really.

She offered a litany of questions about how we’ll actually deal with the end of oil, and a great many stats about oil consumption (there are 1500 litres of oil used each year to manufacture the food that each of us eats. That’s roughly a gallon per day of oil, per person, just to produce the food we consume.). But inside this, and the pictures of landfills full of plastic bags, plastic bottles, and discarded cell phones, she pointed out that bicycle commuter traffic in London England has increased 70% in recent years, since the congestion charge was implemented in the downtown core. After the talk, I asked her in the hallway what bike companies like Specialized and others could do to help move this needle. Her answer? “Make more cheaper bikes. A $50 bike would be good.” Alleviate the fear of theft, and make the bikes more accessible to everyone. The only trouble here I see is that this seems to end up in dumpsters full of discarded $50 bicycles, cheaper to throw away as trash than they are to repair. Kinda like cell phones.

Part 5: Dan Ariely. This guy is my new favorite superhero. Speaking with excerpts from his book “Predictably Irrational”, Ariely stunned the audience with anecdote after anecdote about how humans are basically terrible at making decisions, and there are several very counter-intuitive ways to increase the chances that people will make a clearly irrational choice.

Examples:
1. Doctors recommending hip replacement are asked to reconsider their diagnosis: hip replacement, or ibuprofen. A majority choose ibuprofen, which in some cases works. Second: some docs in similar situation asked to reconsider between hip replacement, ibuprofen, or another fancy sounding drug. Most overlook both drugs and go straight to hip replacement. The complexity of choosing between two drugs makes the default choice more likely.

2. Free trip: rome or paris. people polled are mostly split even between the two. Then add a third option: Rome, Paris, or Rome without coffee. Now the vast majority chose Rome, because it is clearly better than one of the other choices (Rome > Rome without Coffee).

Of all the speakers, Ariely’s book is the one I’m most looking forward to reading.