Patrick Fagan, one of our behavioural economics experts, explores what makes the MailOnline the world’s most popular news site and how the subconscious mind loves a juicy tidbit.

In January 2011, much was made of the ComScore data which placed MailOnline at the top of the internet news tree: it had just beaten The New York Times to become the world’s most popular news website. Since then, the Audit Bureau of Circulations stated the website’s unique visitors were up from 66 million in March 2011 to a striking 106 million in August 2012. For perspective, BBC News received 60 million.

So why is the site so popular?

The answer, perhaps, can be found in a study by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman which analysed the popularity of New York Times articles published online over a period of 3 months. Controlling for how surprising, interesting and visually salient the articles were, the researchers found that virality correlated significantly and positively with the emotional valence of the story. In other words, stories with strong emotional arousal (e.g. awe, anger, anxiety) were much more likely to be read and shared.

Consider also a study by Chip Heath of Made to Stick fame. They found the extent to which an urban legend was shared could be directly related to how disgusting it was. Have you heard the one about the woman who ate a taco containing spider eggs, and the eggs burrowed into her gums before hatching? Of course you have.

At Future Foundation we have first-hand experience of this (not the spiders in gums, the study of engagement via arousal). At our UK conference in May, head of research Katie Toll unveiled a brand new nVitro, Brainstorms at Bedtime, which studies the growing use of connected devices at times previously reserved for relaxation. The story was picked up by the press and went somewhat viral, but only after the Mail had taken the story and worked its magic, saying that “half of 16 to 34-year-olds would rather check their emails in bed than make time for love”. There is not much that is more emotional than sex, and sex sells.

This is where any insight professional outside of publishing says, “That’s great, but so what?”

Insights such as these speak to a new, burgeoning world of marketing; a way of engaging and nudging consumers with a level of efficacy marketers could only ever dream of before now. It tells us how to get brands noticed – and bought. BrainJuicer’s John Kearon, talking at Digital Shoreditch 2013, recently summed up the most successful adverts in two words: “pure emotion”. Think the Cadbury gorilla, the Three moonwalking pony or the Guinness horses. These adverts make no rational sense, yet they have been inordinately successful thanks to their profound use of emotion (and surprise and curiosity, but that’s another blog entry).

The most powerful marketing strategies are formed by those who understand Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 distinction – and by those who realise that System 1 (conscious, deliberative processes) makes up a tiny fraction of attention and judgment. The popular figure states that our brain consciously processes 40 bits of data out of every 11,000,000; the rest happens under the surface of awareness and control. The effective strategies of MailOnline, Cadbury, et al. demonstrate the awesome power of understanding the unconscious mind.

The Future Foundation recently expanded to the USA – and meeting many US brands has given us an insight into a marketing trend that is shaking the foundations of the industry stateside and globally. One of the strongest sentiments is an emphasis on the need for immediate results, despite the recognised need for innovation. These two seem to be mutually incompatible. Surely innovation can only come from a proper and extensive investment in generating insights, with a properly constructed programme of ideation, with product or service prototyping to establish which ideas will actually work?

At a conference I chaired recently in Boston, I heard how Eli Lilly work on multibillion dollar new drug investment programmes over at least seven years; and that Campbells’ spent years researching how the brand could transform itself to appeal to a new younger audience. How does this sit with the intense pressures of greater short-termism borne of five years of continuing economic uncertainty?

This is something that most western markets have been facing, however many predicted upturns and positive indicators are unearthed by the soothsayers of economic forecasting – we have lost our faith and are now even more wedded to the treadmill of quarterly results, if not weekly trading figures, as so many retailers are. We need to maximise the value of our investment in innovation just as consumers need to maximise the return on the cash in their purses. So, how can firms innovate whilst keeping their eye on the short term? Surely that is a recipe for disaster?

As in so many things right now, it is the digital space that is proving to be the answer, particularly the smart mobile devices that are spreading like wildfire through the populations of the East and West and almost everywhere in between. And anyone can get into the App game – big players, small players, established brands or new. Arguably it has been easiest for the young businesses and fleet-of-foot to capitalise immediately on the new technology, but now big brands are beginning to realise that this is a playground for them too and a plethora of new services, extensions and engagement devices are multiplying.

Some recent examples include:

• Fujitsu launching Hada Memori, a smartphone app designed to help women monitor the condition of their skin. To use the app, individuals simply hold a card featuring a 15 millimetre hole to their face and then take a photo. Subsequently, the app records and analyses data about the user’s skin – allowing them to track areas such as skin tone, blemishes and pore size

• In the US, Triad Energy introduced its Triad Wall – a wall display which shows the real-time energy usage not only of the owner’s household but also that of others in the local vicinity to promote social norms constraining excessive use.

• Branches of US department store Nordstrom have been equipped with iPod Touches in an effort to reduce check-out waiting times.

• Marriott International is using Twitter as an online concierge-style service, responding in real-time to complaints or queries posted by guests. By offering responses in real-time, it hopes to offer instant assistance to those who have been frustrated by their experience of the company as well as demonstrate the premium it places on customer service.

And this expanding territory doesn’t have to be insight free, inhabited purely by the geeks and hipsters who were leading the wave. We are finding that the ‘fast’ trends which Future Foundation works to identify at the rate of two per month, combined with the latest global examples of where these have been recognised and put to work as a the basis for a new commercial offer, can be a powerful basis for sparking ideas and generating immediately testable prototypes in workshops with clients. Also we noticed that many software vendors are selling community management systems designed to create and manage innovation panels and agencies have theirs lined up for instant use – the smartly-named Collaboratory by Sterlying Brands, for example, providing qualified and usable feedback on ideas from anywhere in the world.

Fast innovation is going global and requires a more immediate and rapid response set of tools. We don’t think it is going to replace the longer established approaches and programmes that exist or the need for deep insights on which to build category-busting ideas and market creating products, but it is a necessary approach in choppy waters.

nLighten is our new book review service, designed to summarise the books we are reading at the moment and bring some of the key insights to you in bite-sized format. First up is Andrew Keen’s Digital Vertigo, which focuses on the potential negative consequences of our increasingly public and increasingly Social lives.

As Social seeps ever more into consumers’ lives, shaping our interactions and relationships, an increasing number of social analysts are taking a critical look at what this change in human relationships means – how will it shape the future for the construction of personality?  What will it mean for the future of creativity, inventiveness, entrepreneurship…? And, if gone unchecked, could it be the undoing of us all?

Hitting on our Murdered by Modernity trend, Digital Vertigo warns us about the potential downside to our increasingly public lives, arguing that we need a new way of explaining and seeing the human connection at a time when our lives are “literally all becoming data”.  He asserts that social media has, for the first time, combined two opposite human desires – “radical individualism” and“social inclusion”. Through our social networks, we can now be both individualist, while at the same time remain socially included and connected. Keen cautions that we have been tricked into thinking that everything social is Good. That collaboration, sharing, complete transparency… is the path to a better, more inclusive world.

However, Keen asserts that humans need a counter to our access-all-hours world, a bit of anonymity and privacy – a) to allow us the freedom to think and be creative and develop ideas, products, movements; and b) for the development of personality. The more we live our lives in the public space, Keen argues, the more fragmented we become – the result leading to weak individuals and weak societies.

He asks the question, are we falling in love with something that doesn’t really exist? In the Social world we are not human or connecting in a human way; we live in a reputation economy (see FF trends Accumulation of Social Capital / Performative Leisure) and are thus self seeking, only tweeting, blogging, liking or sharing things which will in effect enhance our own social status among friends and strangers. Would we genuinely share something if we did not get some sort of societal kick-back in return? Andrew Keen is not so sure. He thinks we have been conned into believing that we want it, love it and now, to a certain extent, need it to help us organise and live our lives.

Social is increasingly stealing our ability to remain unknown, unseen, but is this openness the good witch or the bad witch? Should internet companies, social media, holders of cosmic amounts of consumer data, be held responsible to do ‘good’, to be The Good Company (see nVision passim)? Is that what businesses, in the business to make money, should really be about? Or, should consumers take the reins and be active in controlling what personal information they will allow to be used by such companies? Will we, as consumers, strike a balance? Find the middle ground between unending public posting and display of our lives and the actual, real, value it generates for us? And, should government have a role in herding consumers towards this balance / keeping companies in-check until we arrive?

Last week, The Marketing Store celebrated its 25^th anniversary with an in-depth look into the next 25 years of shopping. Based on a specially commissioned report from the Future Foundation named The Future of Retail, The Marketing Store hosted an interactive exhibition in Shoreditch showcasing 7 future shopping scenarios where visitors could explore the implications on their business.

The first scenario ‘Data as Currency’ builds on the expansion in the collection and exploitation of data. In the future, data will be the foundation on which the personalised, seamless shopping will grow. Retailers will assess customers based on their digital footprint and influence and reward them accordingly, and consumers will expect to benefit from sharing their information with retailers.

The second scenario ‘Me-tail’ looks at the ability to personalise or customise everything from the price of a product, the service they receive, to the product itself. Retailers will merely become customers’ agents, building customer loyalty by offering an umbrella solution, a personalised lifestyle including a number of brands and products.

Scenario three ‘Shops, Shopping & Shoppers Merge’ envisions a future where everything will be for sale, everywhere, and by everyone. Thanks to mobile technology, transactions happen on-the-go but will be nonetheless controlled, as impulse buys will be automatically checked, reviewed and verified against the customer’s datasheet stored in the cloud.

For the remaining 4 scenarios: Re-humanisation of shopping, RIP RRP: the end of fixed pricing, What’s next for marketing?, The Try Street: new visions of the high street, contact Anna Gyllenkrok, Acc Dir Retail & Leisure, Future Foundation.