My name is David Bridwell and I'm a
People Scientist at Intermark Group and
I'll be talking about the psychology
of digital marketing and my background
is in attention so that was one of the
the first things I studied. I was in
academia before I came into marketing
pretty recently and then I studied
complex human behavior, I looked at brain
activity while they did things like
watch movies and listen to music and
also while they interacted with each
other and so I started thinking about
how two brains align and
interact and I got into playing music,
this is kind of part of my transition
into marketing is that I started playing
music in public and I got really
sensitive about the energy of the crowd
and this notion that this sort of
magic that happens when you engage with
people at these sort of instinctual levels
which is like music and art and just
what we're drawn to and fascinated by
which is a bit different than the sort
of structure of academia and so I
actually kind of came upon this
realization that marketing is one of the
most powerful ways to understand human
behavior because you're right in the
thick of these constant changes that are
happening and you have to adapt to them
very quickly and so this is a field
that's constantly in tune with the
changes that are happening and trying to
be on top of it as opposed to some
fields like politics and and science are
very slow to adapt to changes and
actually change is not even
valued in them, like in politics if you
change your mind a lot that's not
something that we value, so I'm
really excited to be thinking about
these things and just trying to
understand human culture in this
scenario where we don't know how
the human brain is going to adapt to our
modern environment where we have all
these distractions and where we have
this connection to everybody at our
fingertips because it we came up through
an environment where basically the
number of people that we could interact
with was approximately about a hundred
and twenty people, the amount of
people that we can manage who's in
relationships with whom, who owes me
money,
who do I get along with, who doesn't get
along with whom, the sort of complex
relationships and social structure
that exists, our brain is only designed
to manage that for about 120 people
or so, but now we're in a place where we
can express information to a very large
group of people and we have instant
contact and we really don't know the
effect that that's going to have on
society like we think about it a lot and
we talk about it a lot but really it's
gonna take decades maybe even a hundred
years before we can look back and say
look this is how human society operates
in this type of setting, this is the
change in culture, you know there's
supposedly this 10 year
boom-and-bust cycle of economics and
things like that that can all change
based on the way that we communicate
nowadays ok so these are the main things
that I want to be talking, this is
the general theme,
chasing attention and thinking about
attention thinking about engagement
interaction and empathy and intention
psychological solutions and social
connection you know I thought about
doing sort of little separate pieces for
each of these but all of these things
are interrelated with each other and so
there's sort of this underlying
theme or underlying viewpoint to bring
to social media that I think would be
useful because ultimately it's about
connecting with people, that's a
very strong human motivation is to just
socially connect and it underlies a lot of
what we do, so your brain never processes
the same stimulus in the same way, so the
state of your brain in this moment is
different from the state of your brain
ten minutes ago and it's a state that
has never existed previously within your
brain and of all the humans that have
existed the state of your brain right
now has never existed within another
human being, so everybody has this unique
exposure to information and that
means if you present the same
stimulus once and you give it to
somebody again the way that they process
that a second time is going to be
different and all the things that happen
in the intermediate time period
can potentially affect how you process
that stimulus the second time, including
the fact that you've seen the stimulus
before, I don't know if you guys have
ever seen something pop up on Facebook
and you ignore it the first time and
then the second time maybe you're at
home and you have a little bit more time
or and you're like "okay now I feel
like I should click on my buddy's new
song they posted" and you know show some
appreciation for that so this is
just an interesting sort of thought
experiment I had related to that which
is imagine that you had a journal of
every single day that you lived and you
look back 10 years ago on what you did
during that day would you be able to
remember anything that happened on that
one day? There's like a lot of people
saying that they wouldn't yeah and even
if you're prompted like this, this is
very interesting, even if you're prompted
for a very specific strange thing that
happened on that day or is there some
days that went by that literally just
blur together where there's no memory,
and the reason why I think about this is
sort of personal reasons, I have this
fear of not maximizing my time so I
don't know I always think about, I
recognize it if you do something
different then you're creating a memory
for that thing, if you do the same thing
for example if you go to the same
restaurant five times then all those
five instances where you go are gonna
blur together in your memory but if you
go to five different restaurants then
you're going to keep those five
different memories, so this is something
that I'm always thinking about, "go to new restaurants, stay in a new
hotel, visit new cities" because you're
literally creating new experiences for
yourself that you're gonna remember as
you get older, you know if you watch a
movie you'll see somebody go into a pub
and you'll be like oh that pub reminds
me of that one pub I went to at that one
place, so it all adds to the richness
of your experience, so you never process
the same stimulus the same way. This is
the Santana album cover that we had growing up, 
and it just sat there among all the
records and you know it's a lion but do
you guys see anything else besides the
lion in there
I guess most people yeah we didn't see
this for a long time it was months
and we were just sitting there and we're
like whoa look at that record you see
everything, there's like seven
faces you know first there a face, there's the folded arms that are
the mouth of the lion and then the legs
coming through and the skirt is like the
jaw and there's two faces jutting out
from that and then the little eyes
each have a face in it and then there's
three faces above that so once you know
that those aspects exist about the
picture you never process that picture
in the same way, you can never see it and
just see that lion again and that's sort
of how information accumulates in our
brain is that we can see something one
time then we can learn a new piece of
information and then we'll never see
that thing the same way and you know in
marketing we often come up with some
really great clever idea and then you do
it and people talk about it and it's
really great and then six months later
you want to do it again and people are
like oh that's just what marketing
looks like it becomes standard and so
it's not interesting anymore and it just
blends in with everything so I think
that this example you guys are probably
aware of, once you realize that
there's an arrow embedded in the FedEx
logo it's hard to see that logo without
the arrow in it and you know that those
are examples that are based on easy
sensory processing simple sensory
processing but I want to extend that
example to more complex things and so
the structure of the culture and the
structure of your environment dictates
the way you view the world and the way
you operate in the world so in this book
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, a lot of these ideas
come from these various books I put
pictures of them in there, just having
access to a vehicle changes your own
perspective on your self and your
individuality and so you know in our
culture when you grow up
typically kids have their own room but
there's many cultures who would never
put the kid within their own room
and we have this mentality that your
own opinion of yourself is the key thing
the key factor not what the group thinks
of you, that's sort of how our culture
views it and you have control over
your outcome as opposed to this is your
sort of rigid position in society based
on some hierarchy, other cultures are
more based on the sort of social
collective hierarchy that you're
supposed to fit into, so when countries
have to think about if they're going to
introduce a vehicle to the population
it's not just introducing a vehicle to
the population it's introducing a change
in their potential psychology that
affects the way they view themselves as
an individual and it can potentially
change culture, so marketers
you're affecting the information that
people see and this can also lead to
changes in culture and these large scale
way the people view themselves
I've been thinking a lot about what was
the function of the trip to the
moon, if you believe it happened, which I
do, so in 1969 they went to the moon, what
was the purpose of that? And a lot of
times we think about it was about
technology, we invented these new
technology or we thought that we were so
great that we were able to do it, there
used to be a cliche that was like "we
went to the moon so we should be able to
do all these other things" like "how could
we go to the moon but we can't solve
this other problem or build the right toaster"
But I actually think
that the main function of going to the
moon might have been psychological, which is that when we went to the moon and we
psychologically thought about the fact
that other humans went there we saw that
they stepped foot on the moon and they
put their footprints, they put down the
flag but they took a picture of the moon
from a distance and viewing that picture
might have been the biggest impact
because it allowed us to see our
position in the universe from a
perspective we hadn't seen before,
and so the impact of going to the moon
could have been simply that as a species
we were able to appreciate who we are on
this planet and potentially that
could be related to why we're so
concerned about the environment today
there's a lot of discussion
and concern about the environment and
that could be related to that, it's
interesting to think that
the people who didn't
grow up experiencing the actual moon
landing might not be as tied to that
concern for the environment as those who
were born after that, so another example
is computers the analogy that we view
about ourselves and the brain is that
it's like a computer and the reason we
think that is because computers are so
prominent in society, so when you have to
think about yourself and your purpose
you just draw from what you
have available and 
when computers weren't around we had a
different way of viewing the brain and
artificial intelligence going forward is
going to be one of the big influences about
how we view ourselves, I want to push
back against artificial intelligence and
focus on social connections because I do
think they're fundamental, so this is
just further drawing on this notion that
you can change the way people think by
their experiences and in our Alabama
tourism work we displayed a lot of media
where people would view scenes from
Alabama like little River Canyon and
we used use landscapes that were meant
to stimulate all your senses,
like your sight and your touch, there was
even some taste involved and physical
movement, and these all force you to
experience the world in a more
interactive way, they engage more parts
of the brain so that's the motivation
there but there's actually recent
scientific studies on awe, this notion of
awe as a distinct emotion, I don't know
if you guys can remember feeling like
things in your life that made you feel awe,
like going to a concert, probably
going to the football game
when you guys are doing really well, when
you see political figures give speeches
like prominent figures give compelling
speeches that invokes awe and these type
of landscapes, and it turns out that when
people feel these emotions they become
more pro-social they become less
individualistic and they become more
collective, it's like they
see everything from a
larger picture than just themselves so
you can create an environment for
yourself that actually changes the way
that you view the world and the way that you
view yourself, so I'm gonna try to go
hiking soon, so again thinking about how
culture changes, the term designated
driver,
you know a lot of times when a word
comes up and becomes popular that has a
big impact on culture and the way that
we view things, and I'm also
fascinated by actually creating new
words and changing your words so you
know if you you don't want to just
copy what everyone else is doing you
want to think a little bit about what
type of new phrases and new ideas can I
generate, what new hashtags can I
generate, as well as the popular
ones, that could potentially catch on and
promote the type of changes that you
want to try to make, so designated
driver as a term in the
United States started by a group at
Harvard who wanted to promote the notion
that it's okay not to drink when
everybody else is drinking and make it
socially acceptable, so they
actually came up with the term and they
put it in popular culture they put it in
movies and things and now you know we
all know that we can go out and if you
tell somebody that you're the designated
driver they're
not going to hassle you at all it's
gonna be socially acceptable, so fake news is a new term deepfakes is
fascinating to me when I talk about, okay
here's the psychology of how just seeing
the Earth from a large perspective
changes our psychology, what's the
psychology of seeing videos that are
fake that we don't even trust videos
that we see online anymore,
and of course the term fake news is
related to how culturally we're trying
to process that but this hasn't even
caught on yet deepfakes where you can
overlay other people's faces on
your own face and videos, we don't
even know the impact of that, are we
gonna lose trust in other aspects of
society or not, I don't know
that's a fascinating things to think about,
do you guys have questions I feel like
I'm just going full speed ahead here, to clarify you said that deepfakes is when somebody overlays a face with somebody else?
in video? yeah. Ah okay, they can say whatever? Yeah
Have you guys seen those
Does that work for voice too? My understanding is that voice is more difficult
more challenging to do that but I think
they're working on it and getting better
What's the
purpose of deepfakes?
Imagine being able to create an entirely fake video of Trump saying whatever he wants
And posting it on social media
you could say, look at this video of some senator cheating on his wife, or it could be real and we're like "clearly that's fake"
it's not real, yeah, so do you trust people, do you not trust people
Our last election could have been
the last one where we see a video of
incriminating stuff and we actually
believe that video it could be then in
the future every other major political
election we don't even believe it or put
a value to it and you know the whole
thing with fake news is that I don't
people don't necessarily care if it's fake
is one one read I'm getting on it, I
don't know if you guys use reddit but
when there's a fake thing on reddit
people say oh it's fake and then
somebody will almost always say yeah but
it doesn't matter because it's
conveying information that should be
conveyed, it's real in
some capacity even if this one wasn't
real. We're all heavily
interconnected right now and one of
the fascinating things to me is that
it's possible that people can be experiencing the world in
completely different ways if two people
are using Facebook they can see entirely
different Facebook feeds and have two
entirely different views on what reality
is and obviously that
impacts how we interact with each other
and how we don't understand how other
people view other things in the world
and just going to potentially keep increasing
because there's no more gatekeepers now,
it used to be that whatever TV decided
to put on will be what everybody watched
and now everybody has access to talk
about what they're passionate about and
potentially find people who are
passionate about that thing
so social media is social currency
because when you have people's attention
then you have value to them and you can
influence them and that's like currency
the way that we view it in
our heads is
similar to how we view currency and so
you've got situations where even teens
are coming back to school and they're
Tiktok-famous and
there's actually, if you look up Gen Z
we've been talking a lot about Gen Z and
thinking about them just really thinking
about people who grew up in this
world and how they can view the world
differently, there's actually 20 year
olds who are on speaking tours and you
know getting speaking and
consulting gigs to tell companies how
gen Z thinks and this is a fascinating
thing to me to see these super young
kids who actually have an entryway based
on the fact that they actually have that
unique perspective, they actually lived
through it, so you know it's important to
have this big picture viewpoint because
then you can get a picture for
how these sort of things that you put
out there can influence society, so this
is a billboard that we did for Alabama
tourism, news 5 at 6 o'clock, Alabama tourism officials score
a big win in Mobile with a series of ads
aimed at promoting Mardi Gras the signs
take direct aim at the carnival in New
Orleans with signs in the Big Easy, News 5 
has the story
signs like these have been making the
rounds online this one snapped in
Louisiana it's one of ten signs spread
throughout the I-10 corridor telling
drivers they are X number of miles away
from mobile alabama
and you can see that it got a ton of
engagement, so that's the whole
point of trying to understand human
psychological perspective and
understanding society so you can be in
touch with it and you know to me it's
about having conversations and initiating conversations,
because now people know that mobile alabama, was
the original Mardi Gras, you
wouldn't have known that otherwise, so
you're actually conveying information, so
the whole notion of no more gatekeepers,
the amount of things that you could
do to potentially be successful is
wide open and YouTube is one potential
platform where you can be creative with
what you want to express and communicate
so on YouTube they have these auditory sensory meridian (ASMR) videos, it's
where you whisper and people listen
to it, we don't really know what it
is about the brain and why we get
attached to these really subtle
whispering things, some people report
that it gives them chills, unboxing
videos, these type of videos get hundreds
of thousands of views and in
traditional media with the television
nobody would have ever said, well for
slow TV actually they did it, slow TV
started with the Yule Log
somebody had to sit there in a meeting
and say hey let's put a Christmas log on
the TV for hours and people are gonna
tune in I promise and that was the
first start of that, more people watch
minecraft than they watch the Super Bowl
more people are engaging with minecraft
but you don't know it because it's just sort
of just happening on the side and
there's actually elevator enthusiasts
and 80% of this group is
autistic, so this is a group with a
very specific taste, you're really
getting into the full range of human behavior
and they have a place where they can go
and engage and communicate
so "really changing
people's lives involves focusing in on
that really narrow appeal", Kevin Allocca, and we can do
that nowadays and you know thinking
about advertising and marketing you can
with Facebook for example you can target
cities you can send ads to specific
cities and say hey Birmingham and
"hey Atlanta" in the introduction and
just adding that touch of
personalization of the city name can
increase engagement with that city so
I've been thinking about this a lot too
about how information is the new gold so
it's really interesting how valuable
information is right now and the way
that we talk about it and think about it
parallels with the
gold rush or you know stock market booms
they're like "oh this is the
thing do this right now" and then
everybody does it and then it busts and
goes away and so when people talk about "hey
everybody's using Instagram these days"
it's like talking about "everybody's into
this stock" and you should buy the stock
and then when it goes away
And the
driving force for why there's these
changes is related to social
currency, it's related to if you have
information that's valuable that can
positively impact people's lives then
you are motivated to communicate that
information, so this is another thing
that we think about in marketing is
that we know that people are going to
talk about things that bring value to
other people and a lot of the ways that
we influence other people is by word of
mouth just talking to them so when you
talk to your parents or you talk to your
friends the things that you'll often say
is there there is a new restaurant
that opened up or there is a new TV show
and so on and that's because you're bringing
value and that person will
psychologically connect with you more if
you say things that are interesting and
usually those are things that are
different, things that things that are
changes in society, this is David Berrmann and he is
invested heavily in
facebook ads and he
feels real anxiety when his facebook ads
fail because he's invested everything in
this one idea of Facebook ads and this
is the whole thing it's like
"they told me there was gold here",
I came in there and the gold isn't quite
there like I thought it would be, know this is this is a Google trend
interest in Facebook and it peaked a
while back and it's declining and so
again just thinking of how these ideas
emerge in our heads and peak in
popularity and then decline in
popularity and it's it's so powerful
it's kind of like a stock market at that
point
We have these preconceived notions of how
the world works and how things work but
it's constantly changing and so even the
website being this respectable
place, it might not always be like that
it might be that the way that we
visit websites declines
and continues to decline, some
countries when they get a phone they
don't even get internet search on the
phone they just get facebook they just
get social media accounts so social
media has almost overtaken the way
that we find and the way that we look
for information, one potential thing
to think about too is the fact that
people can come across
information through voice search in the
future this is the Google interest in
Alexa and just like Google search
you know it's not this library this
official thing it's dictated by many
factors and it has to provide value in
advertisements and make itself have
value so being at the end of an Alexa
search is a valuable thing to think
about if you can be the answer to what's
the nearest fast-food restaurant then
you're gonna increase the amount of
people that go there. Do
you guys have Alexa? Does anybody?
You have one.
does it talk back to you? do you say hey
Alexa? No, I use it for one purpose which is rain noises while I sleep
does it know what you want to hear? Is that how it works.
I ask for the weather too, those are the only two things, I don't ask for the nearest fast food restaurant
Actually, I have seen old people, it is really interesting, they use
their phones for voice search, I don't know if you guys have
seen this but yeah I don't know I'm not
sure where that's coming from I guess
they don't like typing on their phone, so you know
records out sold CDs last year nobody
ever would have predicted that that
could have happened, we never would have
thought that we would be getting rides
from people in cars, strangers in cards
our staying in strangers houses
When we were growing up it was, beware of strangers don't get in strangers cars
Now we literally summon strangers to us and get in their cars
Right, the whole thing is trust, as long as you can have that trust
it can work out really so that's why
there's so much accountability online
with uber reviews and just even Yelp
reviews in general like so important to
get positive reviews the whole thing
about taxis the reason we trust taxis is
because there's such a long process
to become a taxi driver so if you've
invested hundreds of hours of time and
money into becoming a taxi driver then
you're not gonna risk that by stealing
somebody's money or being a criminal
against them because then you lost all
of that time and effort that you put
into something and so even creating
those barriers if those barriers aren't
related to actually like driving a taxi
they filter out people and they they
give trust to us
and that's actually one of the main
importance of branding itself is that it
it gives responsibility to the company
and it gives us our trust it's not
necessarily about having a product
that's terrific it's actually more
important not to have products that are
terrible that's really what we don't
want is to have terrible products it's
great if the food is good but it's
really bad if you get food poisoning and
and mostly we'll be happy if we can
avoid food poisoning this is satisficing
we're interested in just being satisfied
satisficing, we said okay retail
stores are going to go away and then
these articles pop up to say they're
coming back and again this is the
whole thing like we always need to
understand the importance of human
connection and word-of-mouth and
face-to-face interaction because the way
we value retail stores is based on the
experience, we need you
to create an experience for us and and
now there's actually tourist locations
that become really popular on Instagram
is like a place where you go to get
Instagram photos and then the tourist
location actually emphasizes that
we used to get excited when people knock on
our door and now if somebody knocks on
our door we freak out because texting
is so prominent and calling somebody on
the phone in their early stages of
dating, if you call somebody on the phone
they freak out you have to text them and
it's just a part of recognizing
where we are as a society and how you
operate in it and being in touch with
that I haven't, I don't even know
how to check my voice messages in my
phone so I've never listened to them and
I don't answer it unless it's the number
that's the problem, the
most important things and also the
least important things come through the
same
points, I don't know these
businesses, just send me a text
message if you could, I hate checking my mail
but the most important
things sometimes pop up in your mailbox
we had a cultural change in just our
view of straws, that is fascinating
and I don't know how that happened but
all of a sudden everybody came on
board with the ideas that plastic straws
are really bad
among all the other plastic that we
could potentially be talking about and
so just thinking of how these
changes happen and recognizing that we
don't understand what the future is
gonna look like but staying on top of
that, I actually have a theory that one
day seeing people doing this on their
phones is gonna be socially shamed like
I'm just putting it out there that it's
a possibility that you're gonna be
socially shamed for doing this motion
just like how smoking used to not be
socially shamed but now it is, I mean not
so much in Alabama I think but in general
and it could be because of
the app it could be that the app that
makes you do this becomes out of
popularity and they know that this
motion is associated with that app and
so that'll make you feel bad for doing it
in public, I actually took a class a
year ago but besides being out of the
University for a long time before that
like eight years or something I don't
know yeah but um it was amazing in the
breaks during class everybody was on
their phone and this is a chance to
talk to people I talked to people about
the information that you've learned that should be kind of one of the
main functions of the classroom setting
and that's why we have classrooms is
because engaging with people in real
life is just more compelling than
engaging with somebody that you can't
interact with
you know we process videos on YouTube
differently when we know that we can
comment on them and pause them and move
ahead than if it's something we can't
interact with, there are no rules
actually, there are rules you have to be
in touch with what the
psychological cultural viewpoint is on
things and so here's Hulu they put this
big emoji for America's Funniest Home
Videos and it's just strange. Have you guys  experienced that recently,
it happened on my Facebook feed
yesterday there's a surfboard company
and they were like yo bro check out the
waves and I couldn't tell if they were
joking at first it's like what is going
on it's so strange, so there
actually are rules, so turns out lit is
no longer considered cool and you know
the first thing when I saw this on
Twitter I thought if a company is
telling you it's not cool it was not
cool way before that by the time it
reaches the level of the company it's
already lost its coolness and while I
don't agree with everything she said,
I like the notion of what she's saying
here she says it's the culture
and the people that create the lingo
that will let you know when it's cool or
not but I'll note that in her response
she did not use the word lit she used liddy which I've come to know is actually cool
still
So here's here's a
viewpoint that I think is useful
people expect advertising to add to
culture, so think of people's
cultural viewpoints on things as if
they're on a swing and your
advertisement and your media, the
information you're putting out there is
meant to push the swing and if you're
successful then you observe the swing
and you see how its swinging and then
you find the right time and you say okay
I'm gonna give it a push and if you fail
that's when you push the swing at the
wrong time you know it's still coming
back too hard it's going the wrong way
so you need to think about how you can
optimize the timing and the content to
maximally impact people. So people value
authenticity and actually it's
interesting the emphasis on authenticity
started with popular culture, we
started to have these shows like The
Office where they actually acknowledged
the camera, they acknowledged that
they were on a TV show
I guess maybe sitcoms did that too
when they had people laughing and
applauding which acknowledged that a
crowd was there. Do you guys post
videos of yourselves on social
media? yeah what is it
Instagram? okay Instagram videos does
anybody use YouTube for that? It's
interesting, the barriers of
posting videos of yourself is relatively
low and in some case it's actually
beneficial to have cellphone
quality videos in some case, it
sends a particular message and you can
have usefulness so culturally the fact
that that's acceptable is nice so
here's an advertisement that directly
acknowledges authenticity
don't thank me thank the savings you
can't skip this geiko ad because it's
already over
Geico 15 minutes could save you 15% or
more on car insurance
so that is an ad acknowledging that we
have five seconds to get your attention
so we're only gonna talk to you in the
first five seconds
because after that you could skip the ad
and they're acknowledging that they're
an ad and sometimes that can be
helpful in terms of connecting with
people it's just to say hey look this is
an ad and here we go we're doing our ad
thing, so and when we're engaged we don't realize that
we're being marketed to you and that's
the thing is when I talk
to people about being in marketing their reaction is not always positive
they see it from a manipulating people
sort of viewpoint but we're being
marketed to in all aspects of our lives
including every politician,
they have some type of marketing team
and they think about how people are
going to respond to what they
put out there and when it's effective we
don't realize that it's marketing, people like Kanye
West and Dolly Parton, they all
are super smart and most likely if they
come across as being not super smart
it's just part of their branding
because to get to that level you have to be pretty smart so Gary
Vaynerchuk here he's actually getting
people voluntarily sending him a bunch
of text messages. Typically
when we get asked for a text message
it's like okay like you might provide
this useful PDF document but you
begrudging do it, this is somebody
who's getting them completely
voluntarily, people actually want to
do it and it's because he's responding
to them back and I'm not sure how many
companies are are doing that if you
actually send them a message through
their Facebook account or through their
Twitter that they're just gonna
respond back and answer your question but it's a
very interesting sort of alternative way
of thinking about doing things, so if
you're a company that wants to tell
people about how powerful your blender
is you could do a 30-second commercial
where you talk about how powerful your
blender is and how great it is and put
it on TV or you could do what Blendtec
did and start a YouTube channel where
you just blend things will it blend that
is the question
yeah it's super cheesy and that's super
interesting and it's very simple and you
can interact with people so you have
people in the comments saying hey can
you blend up some golf balls,
getting creative, and you know the whole
notion of content marketing. So Intermark Group  is
now trying to build up a conversation
about the psychology of marketing and
we're putting that out there on our
YouTube so I encourage you guys to check
it out if there's any topics that
interest you leave some comments and you
we'll respond to the comments and
the goal is to continue learning
about society and processing the world
that we live in so we talk about our
social tribes and word of mouth won't go
away which is something I was talking
about authenticity trying to understand
that these are ongoing conversations
that we're having even looking at
specifics like Dogtown and Z-boys is a
skateboarding team, and Meow Wolf, these are groups that impact culture
and society so yeah social listening is
a really popular concept of just paying
attention to what people are responding
to and that's actually been going on for
probably forever, you know since
humans have been using language but some
early examples include in the 1900s
somebody owned a railroad car and they'd
learned that they would make more money
by turning it into a restaurant than
they would by using it as a railroad car
and that's how the modern diner came
about, the original diners used to
be in old railroad cars again we still
have some of that in today's culture we
have the old shipping containers
that people are using, somebody also
around that time period started selling
soap and then gave away free samples of
baking powder and then by paying
attention they learned that they were
buying the soap for the baking powder so
they started selling baking powder and
they gave away free samples of gum and
then they learned that people were
buying it because of the gum and so they
started selling gum
and this is Wrigley's chewing gum and
that's super smart, just to be like
hey, maybe we have an
idea, maybe people would be more
interested in this thing, let's give it
to them for free and see what they think
and then you can change the direction of
what you're doing
and we see that happen all the time with
these companies like Facebook just
recently announced some dating feature
that they have, YouTube actually
started out in dating a lot of these
things I think did because that's kind
of a fundamental way of how people
are social and what they're interested
in, but you know Facebook tries to get in
the video space, they're constantly
trying to keep your attention and
they're trying to make new ways to do
that and this is something I'm really
interested, in another great book by David Meerman Scott, but
you'll learn more by emulating successful ideas outside your
industry then by copying what your
nearest competitor is doing and there's
tons of other industries that have super
interesting ways that they're changing
things that the people can apply, the
biggest one is music I think in
particular the hip hop industry which is
in Atlanta but the way that they are
creative with their marketing and the
way they think about marketing I think
is probably the most innovative way
that people are thinking about it and a
lot of people aren't aware of that like
a lot of people don't say hey let's look
at what these hip hop artists are doing
and what they think to to shape how we
market all of our range of other
products but this is interesting because
Nipsey Hussle actually read this book
contagious by Jonah Berger, where he learned that this
restaurant was selling hundred dollar
cheesesteaks and so everybody is like
okay we have to go and try this
hundred dollar cheesesteak because that
gets people talking again it's a change
and this again points to irrationality
of people's behavior which
is that they will sometimes buy things
when they're more expensive.
I got a mentor that has put me on
books and literature, Big Bob Frances is one of them, and so on you know
he told me about this book called
contagious, contagious, yes so I got to
the second chapter that was just
talking about heart this restaurant
owner in Philly started selling Philly
cheesesteak four hundred dollars at his
restaurant and it just was like it set
off all type of conversation everybody was
talking about it's and all type of 
influential people came to him and just
want to check out why 100 dollars like
Oprah came through and bought one, David
Letterman bought one he got all type of
exposure and publicity and then it became like a staple
and everybody started
coming through supporting and buying $100 cheesesteaks
so i put the book down and I was like yo I'm about to do that with the
album yes so there so there's artists
who put out like thousand dollar
mixtapes I think just these
unconventional ideas and I kind of want
to do a talk on how to social media
like a rock star because I do think that
taking this mentality of producing
a single and the lead-up to the single
and things like that can be taken and
applied in many domains you have to it's
like you take your idea and then you
package it in the way that is most
compelling to people and I think
that's how Old Town Road became popular
is that they took a meme just some video
and they overlaid the song on that video
and so people wanted to share the video
because it was cool and then they
hear the song and it just gets stuck in
their minds so one of the things that
we've done just adding a third dimension
you know billboards don't have to be
two-dimensional for fiora you know they
have advertised 30% more toilet paper so
we put our old toilet paper coming down
off the billboard for the southern
Museum of Flight we depicted somebody
some skydiver who had dropped down on
the Billboard creative ideas that get
people's attention and get people
talking building anticipation, for Alabama tourism we
had a mural go up but we had it go up
over the course of a number of days so
that they would be curious what's going
up
they would ask that you know that can
lead to them talking lead to
word-of-mouth, for the Birmingham Zoo we
also did that where they had a dinosaur
exhibit this sort of animatronic
dinosaurs and instead of showing a
commercial of the dinosaurs we just
showed a reaction of the animals of the
zoo's reaction to dinosaurs, there and so
that'll build your curiosity and when
you build people's curiosity when you
sort of give them incomplete information
there's this psychological need to
have that information completed so it's
much more compelling so if you
want to title your YouTube videos it's
really popular to ask a question because
we have this drive this
sort of immediate need to have that
question answered when we see it like
that yeah so interaction increases
engagement, we went to New York for
Alabama tourism and used virtual reality
to get people into the viewpoint of an
Alabama brewery and they drank from
the beer as well so they had the vision
they had the movement they had the taste
we put out we put sand and they got to
relax on the sand and ever since I've
been seeing these I've wanted to go to
the beach so I dunno I need to go down
there at some point this is the virtual
reality of Little Rover Canyon
and again you know this is multiple
things it's also these positive
psychological feelings that people
get when they view nature that you're
also tapping into, we had people in for
Toyota Carolla they design their own
vehicle they could choose all these
aspects of the vehicle and then if a
vehicle came in that aligned with what
they were interested in and what they
created then we would let them know and
there's a psychological effect that
when you devote time to something it's
the commitment principle, when
you
devote a lot of time and
resources to something it gets in your
brain and then you sort of want to see
that thing to completion but ultimately
it's about just engaging with people
like you're actually learning about what
they care about with vehicles and
what they're interested in a vehicle
so advertising is more than advertising
let's see actually in this book Spent by Geoffrey Miller
they talk about this notion
of advertising isn't always efficient
kind of like the analogy of
the peacock tail, so a peacock advertises
its fitness advertises, its good genes by
the how fancy its tail is but the
tail is actually detrimental to the
peacock because predators can see it and
it slows them down and so in some sense, this cynical perspective the
purpose of advertising is to show that
you have the capability of hiring the
people who can do it and the ability to
make the video and all these things
which if you're able to do that then
you're most likely able to succeed to
satisfy me with a good meal or whatever
your services is. People,
they will trust that
a plane is going to take them to
point A to point B more when there's
good quality snacks on the plane and you
know because like at the end of the day
we care about things that are sort of
instinctual and fundamental to us and
these indicators and in the book
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland he talks about when they
invented typewriters it didn't enhance
people's productivity because
somebody had to write it down first and
then they had to type it out so it
actually doubled the amount of work
but if you're a company that wants to
demonstrate that you're a compelling
productive company you had to
demonstrate that you owned a typewriter
you had a secretary, somebody who could
do that, when they put BMW ads on the
Super Bowl they're not designed
to sell people who watch the Super Bowl
BMW's, that's not the function of them
they put that ad on the Super Bowl for
the person who already owns the BMW who
needs other people to think that they're
a fancy person who owns BMW they need to
continue to convey the notion of how you
think about a BMW owner and when you put
chairs out at a coffee shop you're
demonstrating that you believe that
people are going to show up to your
coffee shop to sit in the chairs and
that you have the resources to put them
out in the morning and take them out so
the fact that it takes effort is
actually a useful thing so putting on
chairs at a coffee shop is a form of
advertisement.
We always talk about how
people buy Tylenol more than they buy
the brand competitor, the generic
competitor even though by law they're
supposed to be the exact same thing but
one other thing like I mentioned earlier
one of the things brands do is they
build trust, they allow trust to happen
because for whatever reason if they
don't give you what you need for your
headache that company is gonna suffer
the consequences like tylenol has put
their name on it they've invested all
these resources in their brand and so
they have to have something at stake if
they fail but a generic brand doesn't
have anything at stake they could just
become another generic brand I'll just
wrap up by just highlighting these
points that I think all of these things
sort of connect together in the way that
we need to think about the media that we
put out in order to most effectively
engage people so yeah thanks so much
Any questions?
About the material that we've covered?
How do you think that marketers in general and Intermark Group specifically
Will start responding to facebook's lawsuits recently
that they have been inflating their views, will that change advertising strategies
Facebook probably is just going to
decline it and I think it's been
declining in its effectiveness so we'll
have to pay attention to where the
new avenues are of getting people's
attention, there's an
early stage, there seems to be like this
progression so that the new thing that
comes on like Instagram, they have to be
successful to a certain degree first to
even put effective advertising out even
to build that infrastructure so you can
also target very early level things like
Instagram still have
that organic reach and organic growth
possibilities, yeah, going back to your
analogy earlier with the stock market thing, within the stock market it's hard to
predict what the next big thing is going
to be you know it's like in advertising
how can you try and predict for the next
Instagram is going to be or Tiktok
if it blows up to a higher level
just noting how people are engaging with it
know my perception of Instagram for
example is that it's very superficial at
least the way I use it is, I need to
like all these things so that I pop up
on their page so they know I exist, and it feeds their algorithm to show me to
other people
so personally I'm not engaged my
attention isn't really going into it but
I see it as something valuable but
things like YouTube actually incentivize
people's attention and it's not just
how many likes did it get its what
percentage of your time did you actually
devote to watching this video and
sometimes I can like sit back and let it do it's thing
I'd just sit back and it shows me all these suggested videos and
I get super into it and I'm like wow
it's really powerful when
something like that can get your
attention for an hour, how far
do you think is too far with the
advertising that is like almost a waste
philosophy like putting chairs outside
your coffee shop when they might not be
full, is live streaming your CEO
playing ping pong and drinking mimosas
all day also good yeah
are you talking about Gary Vee or is it
just like because he's a person who
tries to document his entire life okay
yeah let's see yeah you have to be
sensitive and I am I think it's a little
bit of both you know sometimes I do
think how are you gonna
compete if you're not on social media
and so you have it's almost like you
have no choice but then you know what I
didn't talk about was the notion of
ROI which is that if you spend a dollar
you should have some notion that you're
gonna get two dollars back
and if that's the case then you just
keep spending it doesn't matter cuz you
you have an ROI on that
Do you have a target audience in mind with a billboard, the same way you do
when you do VR or a mural? you just
consider who's likely to drive through
there and so the Alabama tourism one was
on these are roads that go to New
Orleans,
and so that's that's sort of the
demographics then that we would think
about making sure it's an area where
people would stop and go so it's harder
to target in terms of like age
if you don't know who's going to be driving through there ,
there but I'm just kind of wondering
about the toilet paper one because I personally haven't seen that
What was the goal behind that? For brand awareness, to get people to think of Fiora when
they go into a store and buy that over Charmin or whatever, they are like, oh remember that billboard
now let me try this
Do you guys have a strategy, I just noticed this this summer that when I drive
first time I won't notice a billboard but if you put back to back within a
certain amount of time then I notice it
not for a client that I've worked
on particularly but definitely
repeating things makes it stand out in our memory. Have you seen the laywer? Yeah Alexander Shunnarah
the more times you see something the more times it gets into your brain so
that's his strategy for spending a bunch of money on billboards
know that everybody knows name
Thank you so much
