{"id":75862,"date":"2025-02-08T13:27:33","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T13:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/advertising\/the-ad-contrarian-puzzles-and-mysteries\/"},"modified":"2025-02-08T13:27:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T13:27:33","slug":"the-ad-contrarian-puzzles-and-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=75862","title":{"rendered":"The Ad Contrarian: Puzzles and Mysteries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"post-body-1358102554578758744\" itemprop=\"description articleBody\">\n<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><i>I was rummaging through old blog posts and came upon this one from almost 13 years ago. Since no one read my blog 13 years ago, and I liked this post, I thought I&#8217;d re-post it.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">An article by Malcolm Gladwell in <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The New Yorker<\/span><br \/>\n leads me to believe that advertising people can learn something from<br \/>\nspies about solving<br \/>\nbusiness problems.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Gladwell tells us about a national<br \/>\nsecurity expert, Gregory Treverton, who distinguished between two kinds<br \/>\nof problems: puzzles and mysteries. His distinctions have great value<br \/>\nfor us.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Puzzles, he wrote, are problems for which there<br \/>\n is not enough information. An example of a puzzle: Where is Jimmy Hoffa<br \/>\n buried? If we had more information, we would know the answer. If<br \/>\nsomeone told us \u201cJimmy Hoffa is buried in New Jersey,\u201d we\u2019d know a<br \/>\nlittle more than we know now. If they said,\u201cHe\u2019s buried in northern New<br \/>\nJersey,\u201d we\u2019d know even more. If they said,\u201cHe\u2019s buried in the<br \/>\nMeadowlands,\u201d we\u2019d have an answer to our puzzle.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">On the<br \/>\n other hand, there are mysteries. Mysteries are problems for which we<br \/>\nhave <i>plenty of information<\/i>, but no accurate analysis. An example of a<br \/>\nmystery: Why do inner-city schools do such a crappy job of educating kids? There are<br \/>\nthousands of studies. Every education department of every university in<br \/>\nAmerica has done a study on this; every committee of Congress has done a<br \/>\n report on it; every editorial writer has a theory about it, and every<br \/>\npundit has an opinion. And yet, we have no definitive answer. More<br \/>\nstudies and more information are not likely to yield an answer. What is<br \/>\nneeded is an accurate analysis of the voluminous information that<br \/>\nalready exists.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Gladwell gives a wonderful example of<br \/>\nthe importance of distinguishing between puzzles and mysteries. In 1943,<br \/>\n during World War II, the Allies were concerned about Germany\u2019s boast of<br \/>\n having developed a \u201csuperweapon.\u201d Did they really have a superweapon,<br \/>\nor was it just propaganda? There were two ways to deal with this<br \/>\nproblem. It could be dealt with as a puzzle, and spies could be sent out<br \/>\n to gather more information. Or it could be dealt with as a mystery, and<br \/>\n information the Allies already had could be analyzed.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Fortunately,<br \/>\n American intelligence had a bunch of brainiacs who were known as \u201cthe<br \/>\nscrewball division.\u201d They were \u201cslightly batty geniuses\u201d who were<br \/>\nbrilliant at analyzing information that was readily available to anyone.<br \/>\n So instead of sending out spies disguised in mustaches to infiltrate<br \/>\nGerman munition factories, the intelligence community gave the brainiacs<br \/>\n German newspapers and radio broadcasts. These guys pored over the<br \/>\ninformation that already existed and accurately predicted that the<br \/>\nGermans had, in fact, developed a new weapon, the V-1 rocket. And they<br \/>\nalso accurately predicted both that it had been stalled in development<br \/>\nand when it would be ready.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">As a matter of fact, in<br \/>\nretrospective analysis, these guys had been correct an amazing 81% of<br \/>\nthe time in their analyses during the war. A success rate many times<br \/>\nhigher than the spies.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">How does this apply to us? We ad<br \/>\n people are almost always tasked by our clients with solving some<br \/>\nvariation of the following problem: How do we sell more stuff? Sometimes it is a subset of that question like &#8212; who is our target<br \/>\ncustomer? or, what should our primary ad medium be? or, which of these campaigns<br \/>\nshould we go with? or, what should our brand position be?<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">One hundred<br \/>\npercent of the time these problems are dealt with as <i>puzzles<\/i>, not<br \/>\n<i>mysteries<\/i>. We always assume that one more study will yield the magic<br \/>\nanswer. Research is commissioned. Spies are sent out to live with<br \/>\ncustomers, or to interview them, or hold group discussions with them.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The<br \/>\n results of these endeavors are all too frequently disappointing. The methodologies are usually dressed up to appear scientifically bullet-proof. But the initial enthusiasm for the process often recedes when the answers aren&#8217;t conclusive or unimpressive real-world results start rolling in. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">On the<br \/>\nother hand, most companies have stacks of research and reams of data<br \/>\nabout their customers and about their industry. This mountain of<br \/>\nexisting information is almost never consulted. In my<br \/>\nentire career, I have never seen or heard a marketing problem treated as a<br \/>\n<i>mystery<\/i>. I have never once heard a marketing officer say,<i>\u201cYou know, we<br \/>\nhave all this research we\u2019ve done over the years and all this data from<br \/>\nthe industry. Before we do more research, I want someone to go through<br \/>\nthis stuff and tell me what it means.\u201d<\/i><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Why do we prefer<br \/>\n to deal with business problems as puzzles rather than mysteries? Because it&#8217;s easier. Going through thousands of pages and discerning patterns is hard work &#8212; the important patterns are not usually visible on the surface. It requires a special intelligence to<br \/>\nbe able to examine imprecise, unfiltered, inconclusive, often contradictory<br \/>\ninformation and come up with a correct analysis.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">It is much more comforting to send a<br \/>\nresearcher or planner out with a fake mustache and give her six weeks to<br \/>\n come back with an answer. Unfortunately, as we all have experienced, an alarming amount of the research we do yields little of actionable value. The following year the report becomes part of the<br \/>\ndusty heap of poorly analyzed information sitting around adding to<br \/>\nthe mystery.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">So what are we to do?<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The<br \/>\n key is to break down the tyranny of titles and find out who our<br \/>\n&#8220;slightly batty geniuses&#8221; are. Simply because an individual has the title<br \/>\nof \u201caccount planner\u201d or \u201cresearch director\u201d or &#8220;global strategy guru&#8221; or \u201cCMO\u201d doesn\u2019t make him an expert detective. In my experience, planners and<br \/>\nresearchers tend to be puzzle doers, not mystery solvers.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">However,<br \/>\n there are people who are just naturally good at solving mysteries.<br \/>\nThey may come from the<br \/>\naccounting department or the creative department or the media department<br \/>\n or the sales department. We need to identify these<br \/>\npeople in our organizations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Before spies are sent out, these people<br \/>\nneed to be exposed to all the information that exists and allowed to<br \/>\nweigh in on the questions we\u2019re all trying to solve.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The hard part of solving marketing problems is not getting more<br \/>\ninformation, it\u2019s figuring out what the information we already have<br \/>\nmeans.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was rummaging through old blog posts and came upon this one from almost 13 years ago. Since no one read my blog 13 years ago, and I liked this post, I thought I&#8217;d re-post it. An article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker leads me to believe that advertising people can learn something [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12023],"tags":[14239,8397,14214,17676,8402,5781,2485,1679,17677,5393],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-75862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advertising","tag-ads","tag-advertising","tag-branding","tag-contrarian","tag-marketing","tag-mysteries","tag-online","tag-puzzles","tag-television","tag-web"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Ad Contrarian: Puzzles and Mysteries - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=75862\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Ad Contrarian: Puzzles and Mysteries - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was rummaging through old blog posts and came upon this one from almost 13 years ago. 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