We know that we are fundamentally dichotomous. Rational decision makers with an engine fueled mostly by our instinctual, emotional motivations. So when we’re making advertisy marketing things, which buttons are we usually trying to push?
IBM created a supercomputer meant only to play chess. They called it Deep Blue. In 1997, after years of failure in the quest to defeat World chess champion Garry Kasparov, it finally won.
But even after the historic win, they had largely still failed at doing what they set out to do.
“The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”
Yes, the computer won. But only because of a superior memory, a natural progression of computing, not the re-creation of the human brain they had originally sought to make.
But perhaps something more interesting is now stirring. Computers are not just built to hold data in a vacuum. They hold and filter our own information. And as the tools to access that stored data becomes more accessible and ubiquitous, are brains are left to accomplish other things. We are quite literally becoming part human and part machine.
“A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It's always there when I need it."
All this means is that those rational decisions will more and more often be ceded to computations, algorithms, and the like. It’ll weigh hundreds of options and combinations, guiding you to the most rational choice. Our brain power will be reserved for the things those algorithms have more trouble solving for. Which is all very interesting when you start to consider the power there is in that.
What this means is that we’ll be consistently playing in much more unstable places, finding relevancy not in a single usp, but in a brand’s ability to find motivations that run much deeper than most of our branding models are capable of accomplishing today.
This means resolving problems far less solvable within a few words on a brief. It means creating things more meaningful and lasting than campaigns. It means not only ceding brand ownership to the audience in the rhetorical, but in the literal. It means not only activating audiences, but providing the space for disparate groups to find commonality.
And it means not only affecting messages, but radicalizing products and services in ways that disrupt simple comparisons. Which is all to say that we’ll look less to slogans and more for purpose.
But I assure you this, this environment will be far more interesting, fulfilling and important than we as an industry have experienced before. Just as soon as we get on with it already.
"It means creating things more meaningful and lasting than campaigns." - Love it. Let the machines do the hard graft - and we get to work creatively on solving the real, human issues.
Posted by: Gavin Heaton | February 02, 2010 at 07:10 PM