Canvas8

Remember that one episode where…?

Now here’s an interesting Metafilter thread, spotted by Things Magazine; a request for experimental episodes of TV programmes. The post reads:

“I’m not so much looking for entire series that were/are experimental by their very nature (Twin Peaks, Community), nor “very special” episodes, but rather instances where the tone of the show dramatically changed for one episode in an interesting or unusual “event” sort of way.”

It’s had 88 replies so far, with users reminiscing about the musical episode on Buffy, the black and white episode of Supernatural, or “that whole two-parter for the Star Trek series Enterprise that was all about “what the future’s like if the Nazis won in World War II”.” (Iron Sky, anyone?)

The purpose of the research is to try and work out whether shows are being subverted more or less than they were in the past - a fascinating line of enquiry given the social media-influenced formats we’ve seen of late.

Wheat free foodies

Free from options are really kicking off, aren’t they? A growing number of restaurant chains, including major brands like Domino’s, have now introduced gluten-free items on their regular menus. These brands recognise that while only a minority of people actually suffer from coeliac disease, a growing number are adopting a gluten-free lifestyle because they think it’s healthier.

But, as we wrote in our 2009 report ‘Winning over the food intolerance market’, removing offending ingredients isn’t enough - there’s a high expectation of quality, too. So who better than France, nation of McDonald’s-loving foodies, to provide a gourmet haven for allergy-sufferers. ‘Mon histoire dans l’assiette’ (My story on a plate) in Lyon is the country’s first entirely allergen-free restaurant. One insight from the owners is that, when big groups book tables, allergy sufferers are often in the minority - it’s just that everyone wants to enjoy the experience together, without worrying about the details.

How to change people’s behaviour

Many marketers are challenged to create entirely new behaviours for entirely new products. New thinking suggests that behaviour change is far more succesful when it aligns with a habit we’ve already formed, which, apparently shape nearly half (45%) of the choices we make every day. The New York Times’ Charles Duhigg’s new book The Power of Habit offers a simple methodology to better understand these habits. Called the ‘habit loop’, it comprises three parts:

1. Cue
2. Routine
3. Reward

Brushing your teeth is a perfect example. When you run your tongue over your teeth and feel the rough plaque, that’s the cue. This motivates you to brush your teeth - routine - and the smooth feeling of your teeth on your tongue concludes the habit as the reward.

Think about Febreze. Febreze is the billion dollar product that nearly never was. The product masks smells. One would assume the cue is obvious - bad smells. 

Cue - Bad smell
Routine - Spray Febreze
Reward - No smell

Wrong. Febreze though that opening the front door and smelling Lassie, the family dog, would suffice as a cue. In turns out that bad smells tend to become invisible to the home-owner over time. No cue means no habit. Contemplating failure, P&G sent a team of researchers to meet people who were actually buying the product to observe out how they it. One lady led to the insight that would transform Febreze into a success:

“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal cleaning — a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”

She used Febreze as a reward. Instead of spraying Febreze to cover bad smells, she used the product (perhaps counterintuitively) to reward herself after cleaning the house. To her, this ritual reified her effort. For her Febreze was not the routine, Febreze was the reward for a pre-existing routine:

Cue - Dirty house
Routine - Clean the house
Reward - Febreze

Rather than create a new habit, Febreze found a way to make their product part of an unfulfilled, but already existing habit. A year later, the product brought in $230 million.

Behaviour change can be difficult. Understanding and tapping into pre-existing behaviours is the key. Instead of trying to invent new behaviours, why not be a little more resourceful with the ones that are already there.

(via NYT) 

Rule Britannia

An article in yesterday’s Guardian reports that only 22% of respondents say that Britain would be better off without the monarchy versus 69% who say the country would be worse off. According to the Guardian, this 47-point royalist margin is the largest chalked up on any of the 12 occasions since 1997 on which ICM has previously asked the identical question. Affection for the Windsors, it seems, shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

Canvas8 explored last year just how amorphous our notions of Britishness are, but with both the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 London Olympics just around the corner, there is, for now at least, a palpable sense of patriotism in the air. Ever sensitive to public opinion and keen to win hearts and minds, brands are getting in on the act, covering their products in special edition Union Jack packaging and cheering on Team GB in their ads.

This outpouring of national pride has come at the right time. In the last few years, the national mood has become considerably gloomier with first the MPs’ expenses scandal, then the banking crisis, and finally last year’s riots making us wonder whether our society truly was broken beyond repair. So it is a good thing that a country so badly in need of a lift has finally got one. But whether the good feelings will last after the fun and games are over remains to be seen.

Facebook Statistics

15 Facebook stats courtesy of Experian

1. Facebook.com received 9% of all US Internet visits in April 2012.
2. Facebook.com received more than 1.6 billion visits a week and averaged more than 229 million US visits a day for the year-to-date.
3. 1 in every 5 page views in the US occurred on Facebook.com.
4. Facebook.com has received more than 400 billion page views this year in the US.
5. The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes.
6. The Facebook.com audience skews more female (56%) than male.
7. Facebook.com became the #1 ranked website in the US on March 9, 2010.
8. The term ‘Facebook’ is the most searched term in the US and has been for the past three years, starting the week ending July 18, 2009.
9. Facebook-related terms account for 6% of the top searched terms in the US and Facebook-related terms made up 4 of the top 10 US searches (among the top 100 search terms for the 4 weeks ending May 12, 2012).
10. Facebook.com users are highly loyal to the website; 96% of visitors to Facebook.com were returning (defined as visited within past 30 days) visitors in April 2012.
11. 10 states account for 52% of visits to Facebook.com – California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina based on year-to-date average.
12. The top states where users are more likely to visit Facebook.com versus the online population are: West Virginia, Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Alabama based on year-to-date average.
13. The New York City DMA provides the largest volume of traffic to Facebook.com and the Charleston, WV DMA is the area where users are most likely to visit compared to the online population.
14. Facebook.com is the top social networking site in the US, Canada, UK, Brazil, France, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore markets.
15. Facebook.com is the top overall site in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. Facebook.com ranks 2^nd in the UK, Brazil, France and Australia.

Piracy or democracy?

The independent musician, journalist and recording engineer Steve Albini has been providing forthright, insightful and often scathing commentary on the music industry for the best part of 30 years. In a recent Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A, he was asked ‘What is your opinion about music piracy?’ His response highlights how the internet has stripped power away from major labels and placed it in the hands of musicians and their audience, hints at how artists who know how to work the system can use it to their advantage, and explains how the new paradigm has opened up fresh worlds of musical discovery to audiences who were previously sidelined and neglected:  

I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd. […] There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.

Additionally, places poorly served by the old-school record business (small or isolated towns, third-world and non-English-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries.

Your past, monetisable

“The goal is digital revisionist history — products injected into our memories. Tweaking photos on Flickr and Facebook to change the drink we are holding to a can of Budweiser, the billboard in the background to Samsung’s, your friend’s T-shirt to Abercrombie. It might be Facebook’s next billion-dollar business model. And it might not always be so inane as infecting your buying habits — it may include your political views.”

Aza Ruskin, former creative lead at Firefox in Wired

Scary or logical progression? Read around the fears and hopes of our extended digital memories in our recent TABS report Forever Now.

Is bad taste good?

Nearly every day we hear of new atrocities taking place in the Middle East. For years dictators such as Saddam and Gaddafi have been demonised in the media, but since their demise, they are also patronised and ridiculed, and as a result the sheer magnitude of their power and influence reduced to caricature.

The new Sascha Baron Cohen film ‘The Dictator’ is a perfect example, with the  protagonist ‘His Excellency Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen’ presented as an unthreatening buffoon. This Guardian article asks the very relevant question - is it right to find them funny?

But it’s not just films that have reduced dictators to a pantomime figure. Nando’s recent television advertisement features Mugabe, Saddam and Gaddafi frolicking around with water pistols and reminiscing about the good old days.

If dictators are fair entertainment fodder then I wonder what effect the same advertisement would have if the figures were replaced by Hitler and Bin Laden. Would it still be funny, or just tasteless and insensitive?

Of course, as humans we relate to our own cultural context and so the magnitude of any atrocity only becomes real and relevant when it becomes personal. But is there an ethical question to be asked by both consumers and advertisers in the parodising of dictators for the benefit of brand endorsement? Or is bad taste sometimes good when it’s not about us?

Horror Vacui and when more is less

Coined by the Italian critic Mario Praz, horror vacui (‘fear of empty space’) is a term which describes an aesthetic in which every piece of available space is filled obsessively with detail. The results can be overwhelming, disorientating and suffocating. Contemporarily it is often associated with outsider art – and even the Where’s Wally books – but in the past it was one of the defining characteristics of Victorian design, and can be found in the works of painters such as Breugel and Bosch.

In terms of contemporary design, the general consensus is that less is more. The message – and this is particularly so in the case of advertising and branding – is thought to be obscured when it is surrounded by ornate details which force the eye to wander, making it difficult to focus on any particular thing. The use of white space is encouraged, and the mantra that ‘less is more’ is repeated ad nauseam.

However, as advertising encroaches further into the urban landscape, and public spaces become battlefields over which brands skirmish to get their messages seen by as many people as possible, is horror vacui seeping into advertising – not in terms of design, but in terms of prevalence? While the nightmarish neon glare of Tokyo and the chaotic sensory overload of Picadilly Circus are extreme examples of this, anybody who’s recently been on the Tube, visited a sports venue or even clicked on a banner-laden website must surely have noticed the silent scream of ‘buy, buy, buy’ which surrounds them.

Graffiti artists understand as well as brands that co-opting a public space implies ownership and authority. The walls of railway sidings and concrete underpasses are adorned with modern examples of horror vacui in a vernacular of braggadocio and playful humour that is not dissimilar to many adverts. Do people ‘tag’ public spaces to prove to us – and themselves – that they exist? Are they trying to exert some kind of power over the observer? Do they want our respect as well as our attention? Ask the same questions about brands which advertise in public spaces, and the answers will most likely be more or less the same – with the addendum, of course, that they want our money as well. But is this desire to be seen everywhere, constantly bombarding potential consumers with your message really such a good idea? Or does it seem… well… a bit needy?

Multi sensory deliciousness

A fascinating article in the Financial Times Life and Style section today delves into the expanding field of materials science, specifically, how it relates to the food we eat. Dr Zoe Laughlin and Professor Mark Miodownik, co-directors of the Institute of Making at University College London have published new research into the science of how using different metals in cutlery can add to or detract from the taste of various foods.

The research is reminiscent of the popular conception that caviar should always be served from a non-metal spoon, since metal supposedly imparts a metallic flavour to the delicate eggs. However, rather than focusing on avoidance, Laughlin and Miodownik’s research suggest that specific metals can actually be used to enhance the taste of certain foods.

When the spoons were tasted with food, there were some surprising revelations. Baked black cod with zinc was as unpleasant as a fingernail scraped down a blackboard, and grapefruit with copper was lip-puckeringly nasty. But both metals struck a lovely, wild chord with a mango relish, their loud, metallic tastes somehow harmonised by its sweet-sour flavour.

Further on in the article, we learn that another contributor to the spoon project has taken the research in another direction, one that explores the effect that other senses have on the way food tastes.

Professor Charles Spence of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, another member of the spoon research group, has shown how playing crunchy, crackly sounds to people eating crisps makes them taste crisper, and that increasing the weight of spoons makes the food they carry taste better, sweeter and more filling.

Context is clearly powerful, and brands would do well to pay attention to new research into the complexity of sensory perception. For example, Sunchips recently found that for many people, the loud noise of their new bag detracted from the experience of eating the crisps. But companies could learn from examples like this and design things around food to make it taste even better. For example, could a slightly different carton be used to make your morning glass of orange juice taste extra sweet? Or could the music played in an upscale restaurant be specifically designed to make the diners’ meals even more exquisite?