NASA engineers suspected this could be a problem and produced a slide deck to communicate the gravity of the situation. This was one of the slides they produced:

Ambiguously written slides like the one above helped reassure NASA officials the damage was inconsequential and it was safe to attempt re-entry. On February 1st, 2003 Columbia re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at a blistering speed of 5 miles per second. Super-heated gases seeped into cracks in the damaged wing, eroding the wing’s structure and at 9:05 a.m. a loud boom signaled Columbia’s demise over Texas. All crew members were lost.

An independent review board concluded that the ineffective slides were one of many contributing factors leading to NASA’s flawed decision to attempt re-entry.

In what follows I’ll improve on the above slide with 4 rules to ensure clarity in every marketing presentation.

1. Summarize Your Key Point In The title

One of the easiest ways to make slides better is summarizing the key point in the title. Too many slides have generic, less descriptive titles. The goal should be if someone drops in during your presentation for only 5 seconds, she should know what you’re trying to say from your title.

The NASA engineers did some simulations, but the results were inconclusive, as their historic data didn’t contain pieces as large as the ones that hit Columbia’s wing. So they wanted to say that they actually didn’t know if there would be a problem or not. They needed extra information in the form of in-orbit photos. So let’s put that in the title: We Need Additional In-Orbit Photos Of The Wing

2. Working Memory Can Only Hold 3-4 Chunks Of Information

Many presenters are cursed by their knowledge and put everything they know on a slide and just expect the audience will grasp everything and make conclusions by themselves. Our brain’s working memory can only hold 3 to 4 chunks of information at once. So when presenting we should make sure we never bombard our audience with more than 3 to 4 things.

On the NASA slide, there are 4 core messages:

1. The simulations predicted a complete penetration
2. The results however are inconclusive because there’s no historic data on chunks of insulation of this size
3. If the heat tiles were hit, there wouldn’t be a problem
4. If the wing is struck, there would be a problem

3. Bullet Points Add Drama, But Don’t Use Sub Bullets

In a lot of “how to make better presentation” guides you’ll find that bullet points are evil. But actually bullet points are helpful to make your core points stand out. The reason bullet points are considered evil is because many presenters overuse them and overload the working memory. So don’t be afraid to use bullet points as long as you have 4 or less, but avoid sub-bullets.

Let’s combine the three rules on the NASA slide and we come up with this revamped slide:

4. Picture Superiority Effect

Pictures always resonate better with audiences when giving a presentation. Use them as much as possible.

The NASA engineers could have started with a slide like this to introduce the problem:

As information design expert Edward Tufte later noted, all of the necessary information to understand the danger was there; it was just impossible to follow. One of the recommendations that came out of the investigation into the disaster was that NASA scientists should never again rely on PowerPoint alone to present important data and scientific information. In the business world, we do nothing all day but present gobs of data with PowerPoint. NASA forbids its use for that purpose.

Effective marketing is effective communication. The messenger and the receiver see, hear and feel the same thing.

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The term was coined by Colin Cherry, a cognitive scientist at Imperial College London, who recognized that social situations provide important insights. He realized that while our conscious minds only register a small proportion of the information around us, we subconsciously process far more.

Why Are Ads Like Background Pub Noise?

We are exposed to so many ads clamoring for our attention, that, like other peoples’ pub conversations, we screen most of them out. This process can be demonstrated by a simple experiment – try to recollect the ads you saw yesterday.

One, three, ten? Even the higher number is a meager proportion of the 1,000 or so you were exposed to.

This widespread screening out means that a brand’s biggest task is to be noticed. Luckily, the cocktail party effect demonstrates how.

Make ads relevant.

Localizing: A Simple Route To Relevance

There are many ways to boost relevance but perhaps the simplest, and most effective, is localizing the message. Jenny Riddell and I quantified the impact of localized ads by surveying 500 nationally representative consumers about a fictitious, new energy tariff. Half the participants were told the tariff offered a £100 saving to the average UK household; the other half were told the same saving applied to households in their city.

When the message was regionally tailored, more than 10% of participants thought the tariff was great value, compared to only 4% for the national message. The tailored ad was more than twice as impactful as the control message – one of the largest boosts to effectiveness we’ve seen for a minor copy tweak.

The Advertising Implications

It’s true that some advertisers, like Google, have run high-profile localized, campaigns to great effect. However, these campaigns are rare. There’s an opportunity for brands to boost their effectiveness, and distinctiveness, by cheaply localizing their digital copy.

And the benefit for marketers? Well, next time you’re having a pint, perhaps you can put it on expenses. After all, it’s purely for research purposes, isn’t it?

You can find more ideas like this in my new book The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioral Biases That Influence What We Buy  (Recently named the #1 book ever written on Advertising by BBH)

The Blake Project Can Help: Make your messaging relevant in The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

It took some simple financial data to wake up much of the business world to the overlooked economic clout of non-Caucasian consumers. The combined buying power of African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans was $1.4 trillion in 2007, a gain of 201 percent since 1990. Meanwhile, the economic clout of Latinos rose by 307 percent, to $862 billion, over that span.

Predictably, as the word got out advertising agencies began to fall all over themselves to develop or acquire multicultural specialists who could talk to nonwhite consumers. Soon we were blanketed with targeted ads, shows and products that spoke exclusively to African Americans or Hispanics. The “Not Interested” segment splintered into very specific ethnic and racial groups, each with its own unique subcultural advertising references and images calculated to heighten identification with mainstream brands. Suddenly there were a lot of categories to contend with. Each segment was put it into its own tidy little silo and pursued by specialized agencies.

Finally these overlooked markets got the attention they deserved. But ironically, it looks like many American consumers – even minorities who were ignored or rejected before – are growing weary of the silos in which the marketing industry has placed them. They are starting to crave more of the “melting pot” vision of America than a neatly compartmentalized world where each group gets its own separate (even if equal) attention. A recent study that surveyed over 2,000 people reported that 80 percent of parents like to see diverse families in advertisements. Sixty-six percent said that brands that showed reverence for all kinds of families was an important factor when they chose among competing options.

The Shift For Brands

The U.S.A. is coalescing as a multicultural society, despite the political rhetoric about the impact of immigrants on our economy. We’re far from consensus on this shift obviously, but there’s cause for optimism. When Cheerios ran a controversial commercial featuring a biracial family in 2013, the company had to shut down the comments section on its YouTube channel due to racist posts. In sharp contrast, General Mills ran a sequel featuring the same family in the 2014 Super Bowl, and the ad was a huge success with over 5 million YouTube views recorded.

The rapidly growing diversity of American culture is one of the most important drivers of change in this century. The U.S. Census Bureau projected that this year it would not be possible to place a majority of children under the age of 18 into a single racial or ethnic group. That helps to explain why about 6% of people who filled out the last Census didn’t select one of the race categories the form provided.

The Census Bureau also predicts that by 2050, people who identify themselves as multiracial will make up almost four percent of the U.S. population. Among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, since 2000, making it the fastest growing youth group in the country. The number of people of all ages who identified themselves as both white and black soared by 134 percent since 2000 to 1.8 million people. As you can see, people aren’t just thinking outside the box. They’re jumping out of it!

The walls that separate ethnic and racial subcultures continue to come down, as Americans increasingly regard themselves as members of multiple groups. The millennial generation is the most diverse our country has ever seen. Consumers increasingly take for granted that products and advertising will blend these identities rather than cater only to a specific subculture. Don’t be afraid to blend subcultures in your brand messages.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Michael Solomon. Excerpted and adapted from his book “Marketers, Tear Down These Walls!.”

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Well, an experiment from Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist at Stanford, suggests not. She split participants into two groups: ‘tappers’ and ‘listeners’. The first group chose a song and then, without revealing its name, they tapped out the rhythm for the listeners to guess. The tappers estimated the probability of the song being recognized at 50%. They were wildly wrong. Of the 120 songs in the experiment only 2.5% were identified correctly.

States Of Mind

So what causes the gap between prediction and reality? Well, when the tapper beats out their tune they can’t help but hear the song play through their head. However, all the listener hears, in the words of the psychologist Chip Heath, “is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code”.

The tapper is suffering from the ‘curse of knowledge‘ – the difficulty of imagining what it’s like not to know something that we know. It’s hard to recreate others’ state of mind. This is problem for brands as it leads to inappropriate communications.

Think Like A Customer

Consider posters. Many posters are approved after poring over mock-ups in a meeting room, a scenario far removed from that of the consumer. This process results in posters being legible when scrutinized, but not when viewed from afar by distracted pedestrians.

Ifan Batey, a researcher at ZenithOptimedia, conducted a small, albeit unscientific, experiment to quantify the problem. He walked around London’s West End and categorized the legibility of posters from the other side of the street. He found that 4% were illegible and for more than a third, only the headline was easily read. This represents a significant waste of money.

The solution is to recognize that we struggle to empathize and instead change the context of evaluations so that it mimics the customer’s experience. This can be achieved either by pre-testing copy on an actual billboard or monitoring consumers’ response using excellent mock-up tools like Posterscope and JCDecaux’s ‘Virtuocity’.

Illegible copy is just one example of a broader problem. Marketers’ experiences are unrepresentative because they spend far more time thinking about the brand than their customers. It’s crucial, therefore, that they don’t assume that consumer reactions to their messaging can be predicted just through reflection.

Instead, the main lesson from Newton’s research is that we need to spend more time bringing a consumer perspective to bear on the message and media at the start of the planning process. Otherwise our communications may be as confusing as a bizarre form of Morse code.

Richard Shotton is the author of The Choice Factory, the best selling book about applying behavioral science to advertising.

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Or it might be because the claquers have been well paid.

Claquers are audience members paid to clap at appropriate moments. The practice has petered out but still occurs at high-profile venues, such as the Bolshoi in the UK.

Once common-place, audience stooges were so widespread in 19th century French theater that specialist roles developed.

There were claquers, but also rieurs, (who focused on laughing), pleureurs (who could cry on demand) and even bisseurs (who bellowed “encore”).

Theater impresarios paid handsomely for these services as they realized that a great performance didn’t just come from the stage.

“The audience does not trust itself, it trusts someone else,” the ballet critic Vadim Gayevsky told the New York Times. “If they hear someone applauding very aggressively and intensively, they think that something extraordinary is going on.”

This is an example of what psychologists call social proof – the idea that people are consciously, or subconsciously, influenced by what others around them are doing.

A study by two University of Houston psychologists, Yong Zhang and George Zinkan, explored the effect of group size on humorous ads. They recruited 216 people to watch soft drink commercials, either on their own or in groups.

Their key finding was that ads watched in groups were rated as 20% funnier than those watched alone.

What Can Brands Learn From The Social Nature Of Humor?

The main point is that the wit of an ad is not just a creative issue but also one of context and media placement. The perception of humor can be boosted through channel selection or implementational tactics.

One such tactic is to run copy in programs or genres which tend to be watched in groups. For example, films, documentaries and news are around twice as likely as TV as a whole to be watched in groups according to Infosys data.

From a channel planning perspective, running humorous copy in cinema is another opportunity as it means the ad will be consumed in much larger groups.

Millward Brown undertook research that quantified the impact. In their experiment an unnamed brand ran the same piece of copy in two regions. One region just aired TV while the other just had cinema.

Those who saw the cinema ad enjoyed it considerably more than the TV ad – with 61 per cent saying they “enjoyed the humor” compared to 52 per cent of the TV viewers.

Applying these approaches won’t make a mediocre ad side-splitting but it might just give it an edge over copy bought in a more generic manner.

Contributed by Branding Strategy Insider by: Richard Shotton, the author of The Choice Factory, a new book on how to apply findings from behavioral science to advertising.

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