We Think You Need This

Nobody likes commercial breaks, but advertising is what keeps so many of our beloved products like Wordpress, Gmail, and ABC's The Bachelorette online and available. And it's not just a necessary evil, it's a really interesting and really valuable opportunity for creative thinking. Advertisers have a fascinating problem: how do you convince someone that they should purchase a product, given that they're likely bombarded by around 5,000 ads per day and that even if they do notice you they'll probably resent your interruption? Google goes for data. With their giant suite of products they're able to capture ever more data about you, and if you read up on their business plan it's to (eventually) present ads that are so targeted and so relevant that you're glad to see them. In conventional media, ads can be bright and flashy (Sunday Sunday Sunday!), loud and annoying (Head On! Apply directly to forehead!), or downright subtle.That's the idea behind product placement, which is designed to sneak past your anti-advertising filters and make you think, "yeah, Doritos really would be good right now." Companies can appeal to childhood memories (Coke), sports heroes (Nike), heartstrings (SPCA), or national pride (Bud). But the ones that I find most exciting are those that engage our minds and our curiosity.

The Sony Bravia series from 2008 is a favorite. How do you show someone how beautiful a high definition TV can be when they need one to understand? Answer: immerse them in an iconic city, then add some soulful Jose Gonzales and a million colorful bouncy balls.

The result is, well, beautiful. Four years later I still think about this commercial; I haven't bought a Bravia, but they definitely succeeded in standing out from the crowd (and there's even a Facebook fan page). Given the size of the industry and the amount of talent out there, it's easy to name hundreds of memorable ads. What are your favorites?

Grab a Drink: It's Time to Get Creative

What did Beethoven, Poe, Hemingway, and Jackson Pollock all have in common? First, they're considered to be among the most prolific and creative minds in history. Second, they all had more than a bit of a fondness for the drink. And that's probably not a surprise to many people: "altered cognitive processing", brought on by insanity, sleep state, or substance use, has long been linked to creativity in artists and problem solvers. But will grabbing a beer really help you or me tackle tasks more creatively? That's exactly what three researchers at the University of Illinois recently set out to test. Their paper, titled "Uncorking the Muse" and published earlier this year in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition, has got to be one of the funnest studies ever printed. Here's the punchline: intoxicated individuals solved a test of creative problem solving more completely, and in less time, than their sober counterparts. They were also more likely to have confidence in the creativity of their solutions.

To test the effect of alcohol on creativity, the authors recruited a target sample of forty male social drinkers aged 21-30 through Craigslist and the University community. The subjects were "administered" a succession of Smirnoff vodka cranberries and shown the movie Ratatouille. Once they reached peak intoxication, the participants completed a battery of creative problem solving tasks known as the Remote Associates Test (RAT), while also undergoing occasional breathalyzer tests. The control subjects did the same routine, minus the Smirnoff.

Not only did the intoxicated subjects complete a greater portion of the RAT items, but they did so faster and more creatively. The underlying intuition is that alcohol reduces ones ability to mentally focus and control attention. Laser focus may help a lot on structured analytical tasks, but actually inhibits creativity by discouraging associational, divergent, and nonlinear thinking. By limiting the ability to keep one's thinking straight, alcohol can therefore encourage creativity. In this sense, it acts just like grogginess or sleep deprivation, as I discussed in an earlier post.

Now, this doesn't mean that getting smashed is going to make you more creative, but it does suggest that having a beer before your next project might not be a terrible idea. And hey, it's Friday.

Check out the paper here. Thanks to Brooking for the heads up!

Friends With(out) Benefits

You've stumbled on an amazing opportunity, or maybe you've been working tirelessly to bring it to life. But now you need help. Who are you going to choose to help build your idea into a viable business? It's a simple question without an easy answer: there are issues of expertise and availability, trust and goals, working styles. There's also a wealth of research suggesting that choosing the right partners makes a world of difference for both firms and individuals. And that's what makes a recent study of the venture capital industry by three Harvard researchers so interesting. Paul Gompers, Yuhai Xuan, and Vladimir Mukharlyamov assembled a dataset of 3,500 early stage investors and the 12,000 deals they collaborated on. The goal was to determine what factors made investors likely to work with one another, and how that affected their financial performance.

Their first big finding is that investors prefer partners with whom they have something in common: having worked together in the past made them 60% more likely to co-invest, and having the same alma mater or belonging to the same ethnic group each gave a 20% boost. These findings are in line with a general theory in social networks known as homophily, which refers to the fact that we generally like spending time with people who are like us. Homophily governs a lot about everything from how people find friends to how firms make alliance decisions, and it makes sense: having similar backgrounds and cultures allows for more effective communication, increases the likelihood of having common goals, and cultivates trust between partners.

But it's also dangerous. After all, as we've discussed in earlier posts, diversity is a big component of creativity and innovation. Homophily, by virtue of pairing similar partners together, limits access to diverse information and skills. And that's exactly what our Harvard team finds: the odds of a startup having a successful IPO are 22% lower if the investing pair are from the same university, and 18% lower if they share a past employer. Ethnicity has no impact on performance by itself, but when a pair of investors are from the same ethnic minority their startup is 25% less likely to succeed.

What this means is choosing partners is no simple task. On one hand, we need to find collaborators that we understand and trust. On the other, we need to find partners with complementary skills and diverse perspectives. Performing well, be it on a collaborative music project or a VC investment, means balancing these two factors. And that may take some creativity.

Check out the full paper here, or the brief Economist writeup that led me to it here.