Fish Food: Episode 609

The power of common knowledge, marketing to gamers, SearchGPT, Nike's value destruction, AI Friends, AI and advertising and Startup Playbooks

Aug 02, 2024

The power of common knowledge in driving change

I liked Ian Leslie's review (from a few years ago) of the book Rational Ritual, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, which focuses on an intriguing aspect of 'common knowledge' which Ian summarises thus: 'For everyone to know something is not enough to force change; what matters is that everyone knows that everyone knows'.

There's an important difference, writes Ian, between shared knowledge and common knowledge. When I know or believe something, and you do too, we may have shared knowledge. But common knowledge arises when I know that you know and that you know that I know. The shared knowledge is made visible, palpable, discernable. And this may happen perhaps through rituals, stories or ceremonies:

'The desire for “common knowledge” - for knowing that I know what others know, and that they see what I see - is deeply human, and what’s more, meeting it is crucial to the organisation of any society. ...We are all partaking of the same reality.'

Our knowledge of what other people know enables us to act together, make things happen, and feel part of a community or group with a shared purpose. We have created many different ways of generating common knowledge because taking part in things that other people are taking part in is a powerful motivation for us as social beings. Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker has spoken about how understanding what other people believe is critical to social coordination (particularly when there is an element of risk involved) and that we've become accomplished at knowing whether something is shared or common knowledge. His experiments have shown that common knowledge supercharges coordination and collaboration.

There are some intriguing examples that Ian gives of the creation of common knowledge including email habits (cc-ing rather than bcc-ing), political and campaigning movements, conspiracy theories, and how ideas can spread on social media. He also talks about the application of this thinking to advertising - the idea of brand 'fame' being at its heart about us knowing that other people know that the car I'm driving is of high quality and expensive for example, or the effectiveness of a billboard coming not only from me seeing it but my knowledge that others see it too.

A clearly distinctive and differentiated set of brand values work to promote a brand because they send the same signal to everyone, not just to me, which means that the brand can benefit from a form of network effects whereby the more people that reference it and use it the more meaningful and powerful it becomes. As Ian says, this is fundamental to the value of brand advertising: 'messages can be targeted but meaning must be mass produced'.

As I was reading Ian's essay I was also thinking about organisational change. When I wrote about tipping points in social convention and change a while back I talked about how so many change initiatives are treated as a marketing exercise - an announcement from the CEO, a presentation and a launch date. But then everyone goes back to the day job and nothing changes.

Far better to think of an organisation as a social system and one where a 'diffusion of transformation' pattern can bring lasting change. Of course it's important to announce a new vision/direction/change to the whole company, but to make change actually happen leaders then need to focus their efforts on early adopter groups that can forge a new path and demonstrate to others in the organisation what the change really means. We might think of these as missionaries, not mercenaries.

As Tom Loosemore said, this is show, not tell: 'Build a broad movement that actually does things differently. Then shine a light on what’s been done, who’s done it, and how it was done.' This approach makes the difference in behaviour or focus more visible to the early and late majority and more likely to then be adopted by the rump of the organisation. And as Mark Earls noted (also in the comments to my tipping point post), to ensure the effectiveness of this progression of change from early adopters to the early and late majority of the organisation, leaders need to manage the optics. To ensure that adoption behaviours become more visible, or helping non-adopters to find their own versions and embrace the change for their own reasons.

But in doing that leaders are actually generating common, rather than shared, knowledge. They are enabling a wide audience to feel that they know something that many others also know. People within the organisation are partaking in the same reality.

One final point on this. Common knowledge can help drive change but the lack of it can also be a barrier to change. Ian gives an interesting example:

'In 2011, Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, led the business into a rash restructuring that it soon had to reverse. Afterwards he discovered that senior executives had expressed doubts about his decision, but not to him, or to each other. The dissent never reached critical mass. Afterwards, Hastings instituted an online internal forum called Farming For Dissent, in which executives share their ideas and invite criticism and disagreement.'

Which goes to show that an environment that supports the creation of common knowledge is essential to change in multiple ways.

If you do one other thing this week…

So many insights into effective marketing to gamers in the latest Google Firestarters, just released, and featuring the LEGO Group’s James Whatley. I loved how James frames his thinking around depth of engagement, understanding gaming environments, and why brands get it wrong. And there was a fascinating thought about how gaming is maturing meaning that nostalgia and past references have become much more of a thing. And of course, his point that the metaverse does not exist, but ‘metaversal activities’ do. Wonderful.

Links of the week

This week OpenAI launched SearchGPT: ‘a temporary prototype of new AI search features that give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources’. There’s a short summary of its features here, which include the ability for publishers to manage how they appear in answers. I’ve been discussing the integration of GenAI into the search experience on my trends webinars for a while now - the implications are potentially profound for two reasons: it could well mean a far more distributed search behaviour as the integration of AI agents into multiple services enable search to be built in to many destinations; plus it fundamentally changes the search engine results page (SERPs) from content links that might have the answer to a SERP that gives you the answer directly - which means fewer referrals, and more of the journey happening on the SERP
This take down of NIKE’s ‘epic saga of value destruction’ by an ex-NIKE Brand Director was widely shared this week, but it was a fascinating look at the challenges around DTC, and an out-of-balance approach to performance vs brand advertising
The new Ofcom Media Nations 2024 research is out, with a tonne of (UK) media consumption stats including some stark figures around the acceleration in the decline of broadcast TV reach, half of at-home video viewing or 16-24s now being on social platforms, and Netflix + Amazon being bigger than all live TV combined
JP Morgan are rolling out a GenAI research analyst chatbot to support 50,000 staff (FT). I think we’ll see a lot more of this. IBM already have Consulting Advantage, an AI services platform that can support tens of thousands of IBM consultants on multiple tasks. A big study of 100,000 workers in Denmark claimed that it found pretty widespread adoption of Chat GPT and anticipated productivity gains but as Caroline Webb pointed out, the striking thing from that study was the gender differences it found
Some interesting data points in Spotify’s latest quarterly results - out of 626m global users, 246m (almost 40%) are premium but they bring in $3.5Bn in revenue compared to $450m for the 390m free users. Which, as Dan Calladine notes, is likely a good reason why Disney+ and Netflix don’t offer a ‘free with ads’ tier.
I’ve partnered with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (the IPA) to run a brand new Advanced Application of AI in Advertising course, which will be in person, at the IPA in London, on September 18th - you can see more and sign up via the link if you’re interested
Speaking of AI in ads, the ongoing WPP and NVIDIA partnership ‘will offer to prompt 3D environments to "shoot" localized ads for brands at scale’. Looks impressive.
There’s something really off about the AI ‘Friend’ idea - an AI companion gadget which is worn as a necklace. It feels like it misinterprets what friendship is really all about.

And finally…

Here’s a fantastically useful 51 page ‘Startup Playbook’ from Y-Combinator, written by Sam Altman . Awesome.

Weeknotes

This week has been a quieter week - it seems as though everyone is away - so I’ve used the time to move forwards on a few longer term projects and also pitched for a new one. And I went to London to see Fawlty Towers which was hilarious. Next week I’ll be travelling to Oman. I’m going to be doing some work with leaders at Omantel, and we’re tagging on a few days holiday whilst in Muscat. So as a consequence there won’t be a newsletter for the next 2 weeks, and the next one will be on the 24th. Have a lovely couple of weeks everyone.

Thanks for subscribing to and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. If you liked this episode do share and pass it on, and do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.

My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.