Soul Researching

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Heard at country clubs and gun ranges across America: “Relax, if the scientists who are unanimously predicting climate change and rising sea levels are using the same scientific rigor that was used to predict Hillary Clinton’s rise to the White House, then we are in good shape.”
• Conservatives are gloating with gusto these days.
• They are coming out swinging.
• Whatever you party affiliation is, they are right about one thing: scientists have a lot of splainin’ to do.
• It is undeniable that many of the supposedly scientific market research tools we used to hold in high regard in the media, marketing and advertising business are experiencing a crisis of credibility.
• Many methodologies to measure reach & performance we use in our industry are in question: from Nielsen ratings to Facebook analytics.
• The jury is out on metrics.
• How could the opinion polls be so wrong?
• Who knows.
• One explanation is the so-called “Bradley effect (less commonly the Wilder effect) … a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some voters who intend to vote for the white candidate would nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections. The Bradley effect posits that the inaccurate polls were skewed by the phenomenon of social desirability bias. Specifically, some white voters give inaccurate polling responses for fear that, by stating their true preference, they will open themselves to criticism of racial motivation…” (source: Wikipedia)
• Still, this is no excuse.
• Professional pollsters should’ve taken this issue way more into consideration to properly factor it into their models and projections.
• If we were to translate the Bradley effect to non-political market research we could call it “The Economist effect”.
• See, the venerated British magazine The Economist has a surprisingly high readership to circulation ratio.
• Meaning that an awful lot of people claim they read it yet the circulation seems, by magazine industry standards, relatively modest.
• How come?
• Do people read it at the dentist’s office?
• That’d be most surprising because everybody knows that there are very few dentists in the UK.
• Or, in any case, few people seem to go to the dentist in the UK.
• Wink wink nudge nudge.
• Are The Economist readers reading it stealthily on the Tube over other people’s shoulders?
• Well, no.
• People are obviously lying.
• It just looks good to say one reads The Economist.
• “My favorite magazine is TV y Novelas” said no one ever.
• Yet the little supermarket glossy literally flies of the shelves.
• A similar scenario manifests itself with Discovery Channel and its sister brands.
• You guessed it, it is pretty easy to be a sales rep for Discovery Channel.
• In comparison to, say, Fox News.
• Donald Trump benefited from the Bradley effect in reverse: an awful lot of folks were hesitant to admit they were voting for him.
• The Howard Stern effect.
• Or the internet porn effect.
• It is wildly profitable yet nobody seems to consume it.
• The silver lining? At least there still seems to be a space of privacy in modern life.