The ad industry need to embrace its incompetence to get better
In this guest post Eaon Pritchard examines the phenomenon of incompetent people not realising how bad at something they are, and applies it to advertising.
You may be familiar with the case of one McArthur Wheeler. Wheeler was a man who, in 1995, proceeded to rob two banks in Pittsburg, in broad daylight, using no other method to avoid detection other than covering his face with lemon juice.
As lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, Wheeler was certain that it would render his own face invisible, and therefore prevent his face from being recorded by the surveillance cameras.
Wheeler was supremely confident as he had tested his hypothesis by taking a proto-selfie with a polaroid camera and the result had give him an image of only wall, with no face apparent.
Unfortunately he had simply aimed his shot badly.
The story inspired a series of experiments by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University.
The results were published in 1999 and henceforth the phenomenon – If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent because the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you lack in order to know what a right answer is – became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
In the early days of its existence the Dunning-Kruger Effect was also sometimes described as the American Idol Effect.
This was because the hapless yet strangely confident performances in TV talent show auditions were an extremely salient example of the phenomenon – a cognitive bias wherein incompetent individuals mistakenly rate their own competence much higher than is accurate.
This bias is attributed to a meta-cognitive inability of the unskilled to recognise their ineptitude.
Conversely, many people who actually are skilled or talented tend to underestimate their own talent, and wrongly assume that things that are easy for them to do are also easy for others.
As Dunning and Kruger famously note, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others”
For the talent show hopefuls the sweet Mariah Carey tones in their own head bears no resemblance to the hideous cacophony coming out of their mouth.
Part of the problem is the fact that none of the people around our untalented protagonists – family, friends, colleagues – are prepared to tell them the truth.
Therefore the delusion becomes even more entrenched.
(These people, while well intentioned, can be reasonably described as mediocrity enablers. That’s for another post.)
For more on this have a listen to Dr David Dunning himself telling the story of McArthur Wheeler and the development of his theory in this episode of the You Are Not So smart podcast which will download via this link.
Anyway, you now you will start to see how this is leading us into the world of advertising.
There is a point, often labeled ‘Dunning-Kruger peak’ that represents the particular surge of self-confidence one gets upon acquiring some small amount of skill in a field.
It represents the huge leap from novice to semi-skilled amateur.
However the deluded amateur, at this stage both encouraged their new found knowledge yet unable to know the vastness of what they have yet to learn in order to be an expert, begin to imagine themselves to actually be expert.
This period of delusion is common in people who are just starting out in advertising, though by no means exclusive to the young. Based on scant evidence they suddenly believe they are much more knowledgeable about advertising than they actually are.
Moreover, this delusion seems to also happen at a group level, and envelopes people with enough experience to know better, which is why I suggest that a large part of our industry appears to have hit some sort of Dunning-Kruger peak.
The commonly held ideas of those operating in Dunning-Kruger peak mode are some sort of party-mix that contains ‘advertising is dead, everything is now about content, participation and conversation’, ‘creative departments are no longer required as ideas come from anywhere’ and ‘anyone with a smartphone can be an ad agency’ amongst many others.
Dunning and Kruger discovered that people who are unskilled at something — in this case advertising — are often unable to see how bad they are.
Incompetent people will:
1. Fail to recognise that they are incompetent,
2. Fail to recognise how good competent people actually are.
3. Fail to see the scale of their incompetence.
To an extent this story is my own story.
Armed with Twitter and grab bag of Seth Godin one-liners I spent a number of years parroting much of the same ‘advertising is dead’ drivel.
Until eventually reaching that moment of true insight when I realised exactly how incompetent I actually was.
This is where one falls from the Dunning-Kruger Peak into a trough* of enlightened ignorance where you begin to realise that the things you don’t know massively outnumber the things you’ve learned.
(* In photographers’ lingo this is called the Jon Snow trough, after a character in Game of Thrones apparently).
On the upside, despite being in the trough, one is now actually skilled to some degree though conversely now saddled with the tendency to underestimate one’s own skill when compared to the over confident noises made by the mass of incompetents.
For the adperson to hasten his or her descent from the peak, one important insight that is best absorbed sooner rather than later comes from realising that the consumers we have to communicate with spend precious little time thinking about brands, do next to no evaluation around most purchase decisions, and even brands that they use and like are trivial in comparison to the rest of their daily lives.
Rather than engagement, conversations or participation people’s actual buying behaviour is about reducing complexity, reducing choice and making easier, good-enough decisions.
Our job is simply about getting brands noticed, remembered at the appropriate time and then bought.
Just getting that teeny tiny bit of attention needed is hard enough, never mind all the other bollocks.
Like the fella once said, ‘Never make predictions, particularly about the future’.
Perhaps a wish, then.
A wish that 2015 is the year when all of us in the business of marketing communications – of all flavours – fall from our Dunning-Kruger peak, and recognise that while we have some skills and influence, what we don’t know about human behaviour is so much more than what we do know, and no amount of lemon juice flavour kool-aid can hide this.
Eaon Pritchard is strategic planning director at Red Jelly
Gold, this is the best article I’ve read all year.
User ID not verified.
very good
reminds me of some retired CCOs
User ID not verified.
Awesome post.
Eaon, you’re being kind in not mentioning clients in this article.
Especially the freshly minted MBA clients who suddenly find themselves involved in Marketing… or the over-confident grad trainees… etc.
I still don’t quite get the Jon Snow reference, but I never really got into GoT.
User ID not verified.
Brilliant!
User ID not verified.
Don’t normally comment on this like this, but I have to agree with Fraser, best article on Mumbrella in yonks
User ID not verified.
Best article of 2014.
User ID not verified.
Excellent article.
I painfully see many of my early years in it, too.
User ID not verified.
I might be too incompetent in my Game of Thrones knowledge to truly understand, but I think the Jon Snow trough refers to Ygritte the Wildling’s regular advice; “You know nothing Jon Snow”. Great article Eaon.
User ID not verified.
Spot on.
User ID not verified.
A great read, thanks Eaon.
User ID not verified.
Agree with all of these posts to date – brilliant article. I’ll bet I’m not the only one trolling through my memory bank of people who fit the Dunning-Kruger model right now.
User ID not verified.
Infrared LED light fitted to a cap brim – defeats 90% of security cameras and invisible to the naked eye.
More effective than lemon juice.
User ID not verified.
Love it, don’t go changing mister
User ID not verified.
Great article Eaon! You’ve obviously read How Brands Grow.
User ID not verified.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
It’s rare when we all seem to agree.
In this case we can all see ourselves in the stories, I suppose.
User ID not verified.
About a year ago I was a graphic design intern for an agency in Sydney. I failed to produced a couple of works for their clients, which didn’t fit the agency’s ‘style’. I was made to recognize my area of incompetence and today I consider myself am a better designer for it. I’m always critiquing myself.
User ID not verified.
Very funny and so true.
I think I’m going to use this on Gen Y’ers
User ID not verified.
Great article Eaon
User ID not verified.
Good article. Two other observations: a) no mention anywhere of the advertising industry’s complete disinclination to use data to mitigate the risk of incompetence. Subjective opinion holds far too much sway. b) the idea that brands still need to ‘get that tiny bit of attention’ suggests a complete lack of understanding about how human beings actually make their choices. If you find advertising useful, you clearly don’t have enough friends.
User ID not verified.
Thank you for managing to articulate this. There does seem to be agreement in all the comments. Great!
User ID not verified.
Clever article, beautifully written. In my media career I have spent as much time navigating the egos of the blatantly incompetent as I have encouraging the innocently gifted to recognise their raw talents in this industry. I’ve seen some priceless moments of self-awareness, where staff have stopped mid-sentence to process the idea that perhaps they are not seen exactly the way they see themselves. And sometimes they need a hot chocolate and a warm blanket to help them get over the shock and out of that trough!
User ID not verified.
This is a great observation and simply communicated.
The self awareness evident is so often lacking in the industry.
Nice one Eaon.
User ID not verified.
Your y axis needs calibration before I can fully evaluate your trough.
User ID not verified.
The irony is that most of the commenters declaring the article’s brilliance (probably including this one) are in denial about their own competence and are thinking that must be everyone else.
Brilliant article.
User ID not verified.
Excellent – best piece on Mumbrella all year
User ID not verified.
These are very good points, but the ad industry is not alone in the need.
Any , perhaps all organisations need to check themselves from time to time, to weed out. It is staggering to witness the degree to which some organisations will operate quite smoothly on close to maximum incompetence.
How did that fellow at Queensland health get away with millions? What’s going on within Qantas? How did Latham, Rudd, Gillard and again Rudd get the top job?
Why is Ten still producing Television? I don’t know the answers here.
User ID not verified.
Heaps of honesty here; or is it truth? The importance that many agencies place on winning awards, which are predominantly based on creative content alone, perpetuates the problem. Maybe there should be an award for ‘lemons’.
User ID not verified.
This article helps to explain my year.
I’ve spent it at the bottom of the Eaon P trough, uncomfortable & insecure with my knowledge of the amount I don’t know. In an organisation overflowing with people at the top of the Dunning-Kruger peak, hugely overconfident in their knowledge of f**k-all.
Thank you. Quite a relief.
User ID not verified.