Emergent Systems

A New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, “Tools for Thinking”, piqued my interest in the sense that I am interested in the way people process information. Selfishly, I am interested in ways to make me think “better” and “smarter” than everyone else.

Below is the link to the piece.
Tools For Thinking

The bits about Path Dependence and the Einstellung Effect were interesting in their own rights. (I vaguely remember these concepts from some article long ago.) What really interested me was the concept of Emergent Systems.

I work in Advertising, in Media to be precise. Eh, to be even more precise, I work in a Media Agency. Unless one is already familiar with the Advertising industry ecosystem it is possible to have never heard of a Media Agency before. It’s ok. I didn’t either until I started working at one.

What made me have a further think is that as I was reading David’s summarization of the concept it reminded me of my industry. Upon further investigation (i.e. Wikipedia search on the terms “Emergence”. Here is the link.), I realized that this concept is not new but its relative application to the internet is new. Now, what if the argument was extended further to try to describe advertising today?

I'd venture to say that the advertising world is complicated.

A thought experiment...
- 1. If I watch a TV commercial for McDonald’s during my morning news check, and then
- 2. I see an print ad for McDonald’s while reading the paper on my way to work, and then
- 3. while I’m updating my status in Facebook in my local Starbucks I notice that my Google maps on my iPhone shows a new McDonald’s near my office, and then
- 4. my office mate and I go to that new McDonald’s for lunch....

Which exposure to McDonald’s branding deserves the credit for me buying my lunch? Does it matter? (Well, yes. My industry depends on this information.)

Traditionally, measurement has had a very top down approach. Let’s build a model. Let’s see what the model says to do. Let’s do what the model says. With the advent of the Internet (and really the movement towards consumers actively choosing what content they will consume and when), there is now a gluttony of bottom up measurement. The Internet is trackable. Now we can have a lot of information (in aggregation, of course), about how users are choosing and consuming content.

So taking the concept of Emergent Systems, how do we begin to better understand this complex system knowing that it is basically a consumer seeing some kind of advertisement of some brand somewhere? What does it mean that more and more content is being delivered digitally? Is it possible that the steps towards a solution are within the realms of biology? Or maybe the humanities?

I see steps moving in that direction but they are baby steps. It is my hope that someone else in my industry has read the opinion piece and is starting to think twice about how we approach of these problems. Either way, the article was interesting to me.