Good afternoon everybody.
I am doctor David Williams.
I'd like to say that the video you just saw
was some wonderful work this week with my team
and a team of volunteers from Hong Kong PolyU.
Give it up! Hong Kong PolyU.
They've been all over Hong Kong, asking people about fun.
What is fun?
I have been posting that online through Facebook.
So if you've been following the TEDx Facebook page,
you would've seen some of these wonderful activities going on.
And it's interesting when you talk to people about what is fun,
they pretty much have a good idea. Right?
Fun is something we all know what it is.
Somehow, and as a psychologist I made my career studying fun,
particularly the effect it has on people.
Okay. So today we are going to be talking about advertising.
Now my company Asia Digital Mojo is an advertising company.
And we gonna move on the next slide.
Okay. Here is a picture.
Is this the future of advertising?
Do you remember this movie? Minority Report.
And actually Minority Report has figured in TED before.
The two guys who actually designed that use to experience it.
Tom Cruise, you can see Tom Cruise there at the bottom.
That gesture based experience where he's using his hands
to moving formations around and find the criminals
that was actually developed in MIT in the media lab.
And there was a presentation,
if you go way back in the TED achieves you can find this presentation.
But I am more interested in the scene at the top.
If you remember Tom Cruise is on the run, as he often is,
he goes into a GAP store,
and the billboard in the store says,
"Hey Tom, welcome back to the GAP".
Do you remember that? "Welcome back to the GAP.
Maybe you'll be interested in our latest line of clothes."
The billboard talks to him.
The billboard knows him
at exactly the time when he doesn't want to be known.
Coz he is on the run, okay, he has been accused of murder.
And now every billboard he stands in front of,
every newspaper he reads knows him.
My goodness that would be terrible.
Imagine trying to hide from all of that.
Now when I talk to people about the future of advertising -
and that is really what my company is doing -
they say to me, we don't want Minority Report.
They always use this as an example.
So it's a really pressing image to put up as a first line.
So before we talk about the future of advertising,
it's always good to talk about what things are not
before you talk about what they are.
We're going to play a game, I am a psychologist, right?
So we have to play a psychology game.
Now all of you are in therapy, right?
You're going to see your therapist every week.
You must be if you are working in this industry.
And maybe your therapist will give you a little game to play,
a word association game.
He'll say a word to you, and spontaneously
as quickly as you can, you have to speak words back to him.
And through that choice of words he or she will profile each of you.
Oh interesting.
Mother... interesting and he'll jot in his little book.
Maybe make a few connections between information you've said.
So we are going to play this game.
Every Friday I teach psychology at PolyU.
Okay.
This is why I have this little bit of a lecturer tone.
So I apologize for that.
But we've got to play this game.
Let's start with the word.
Now I want people to call out
because my company is all about interaction.
Okay? So I want some people to call out.
Now we have lots of Americans in the audience.
For you guys, no problem.
But for the rest of the world maybe calling out is not so comfortable.
So look next to you. Is there an American next to you?
If there is, whisper to them a word and they will call it out for you, okay?
(Laughter)
So here we go.
The first word: advertising.
Let's have some words out here, some word association.
What does advertising mean to you?
Evil! Good.
Pervasive.
Invasive.
Blood suckers!
You are talking about my clients, does it?
Okay. Brain washing.
Wow, you guys have got some serious bad feeling
inside about advertising.
You all should be in therapy.
Let's try some words.
I play this game with myself everyday.
That's the beauty of psychology:
you can study yourself everyday.
Advertising.
What you need when your product is bad?
Right? How many startups have you spoken to and you say
"Hey, you've been running now a year? What's your marketing budget?
How do you advertise?"
Oh... we don't have time for that.
Word of mouth. That's what everybody says.
Referral. Word of mouth. That's all they need.
Because our product is good, right?
People will talk about our product.
And all of the wonderful applications that we use like Instagram, for example,
started through word of mouth.
That was absolutely no marketing, no advertising for this.
So marketing and advertising
is what you do when products are bad, right?
Another one.
About brands not humans.
And you going to any advertising agency, going to a pitch,
and they will build a temple for that client's brand
and they will worship at the temple.
And the poor consumer,
you know, that guy who pays the money
that pays the company,
that pays the agency's bill,
nowhere to be seen.
Now as a psychologist I find that quite sad
because actually each of us is the most important thing
in the advertising equation.
We are it, we are it.
So forget us at your peril.
Next one, overcommunication.
Go into Hong Kong station
and walk to Central station
and count how many advertising messages are put in your face.
Try it tomorrow. Try it this afternoon.
Count the number of different ways the brands are in your face
from digital billboards to light boxes,
to promotions going on, to boards outside 7-11.
Just count how many messages are being pushed into your face.
And that's just one place in the city.
Overcommunication.
Okay. So we don't sound too positive about advertising huh.
Fun. Much better.
Now, in the beginning you saw that wonderful video.
We went around Hong Kong
and we asked people what is fun to you.
So we're going to do it here
because I don't think any of you are interviewed.
"Where were you?
We were in Mongkok, we were in time square,
where were you?"
You could have been interviewed by a wonderful team.
Fun.
Smiling?
Right? While we are having fun we smile.
So I guess nobody is having fun here right.
That's better! Now I can see people are having fun.
So generally we can't help smiling.
It's actually good for us.
You go see your therapist.
The first thing he will say to you is you should smile more.
Right? Because actually through the smiling
through those strain contortions of your facial muscle,
you actually generate positive chemicals in your brain
that make you feel good,
make you feel good about your life.
And the most important chemical is this one: dopamine.
Look at that. Thank you.
Dopamine.
What is dopamine?
Dopamine is the happy chemical.
But it's also the addiction chemical.
It's the way your brain makes your body go and get what it needs. Okay?
So dopamine somehow is very importmant in this fun equation
because all of your psychology, all of your perception of brands
is based on this stuff in your head called "your brain".
And the thing that makes your brain work are brain chemicals
and dopamine is a very important one.
Vivid memories.
Have you ever notice that when you're having fun
you remember.
You remember when you're riding on the fair ground ride
or your first kiss.
Does anybody remember their first kiss?
Susan you remember?
You see? Vivid memories.
It's the dopamine that's making those vivid memories through amygdala,
this wonderful little piece of flesh in the middle of your brain
which sits between your senses and your memory.
And that's triggered by this wonderful chemicals
of which dopamine is one.
So vivid memories are part of fun.
So as an advertiser, hey wait a second,
I want people to remember my brand, what do I do?
Make them have fun.
Simple. Fun creates dopamine.
Dopamine creates memories. Memories what do they do?
When you're standing in front of that supermarket aisle
with 500 different toothpastes,
how do you make a decision?
Well, you don't. Your emotion chooses for you.
Your memory chooses for you.
And I really recommend reading
Antonio Damasio's work, University of Iowa,
about emotions and decision making.
Very, very interesting.
Last one, the future.
The future, some words for the future.
Come on, you're on the couch.
Give me some words about future.
What is the future?
Change.
Unknown.
What did Alan Kay say?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Any others?
Adventure. You have to be young to say that.
Adventure. The rest of us are all like,
"Oh no! Enough adventure already!"
Okay so let's look.
Hopeful. Now everybody here is hopeful about the future.
We are hoping that China's economy doesn't cave in, right?
We are hoping that the new government will give China a good direction.
We are hoping
that Hong Kong doesn't disappear into the ocean in some freak tsunami.
We are quite hopeful about the future.
It's coming at you fast. Okay?
Every morning you wake up, you get your RSS feed,
you go onto Facebook,
you've got your twitter,
you've got your Weibo.
Oh my God,
there is so much happening in the world and I don't know what it is!
Aaah! A big stress.
It's coming at you fast
Your better hang on, you better know what's going on.
Now does anybody remember Alvin Toffler?
Does that name mean anybody to anybody? Anything to anybody?
Alvin Toffler. No?
He wrote this wonderful book called Future Shock.
Anybody was born before 1972 might know that book.
Okay. Alvin Toffler predicted that technology, the change,
the pace of change would make us all very unhappy.
And he called this condition "future shock".
It was his first book, he wrote many more.
The Fourth Wave, The Fifth Wave, The Sixth Wave, whatever.
He wrote many books.
But his first one, the most captivating one
and please do go and read it.
I have the PDF and I can give it to you, it's free.
(Laughter)
It's really bad quality, that's why.
He thought that the psychology,
your psychology based on the way technology was developing,
you would have problems
because your brain is designed for the Suvarna in Africa.
Your brain is not designed for the society we are creating now.
It is not designed for this Minority Report world.
Our brain evolved a hundred thousand years ago,
it's designed for the Survana.
So all of these stuff all of these madness we're creating
is going to cause us to be very unhappy
unless we have more fun.
Now in Toffler's book written in 1971, note "1971",
he had a chapter called "Experience Economies".
Do you understand? 1971.
Was anybody else using the term "experience"
in interactive design, in any kind of design?
No. Toffler coined that phrase.
Unfortunately nobody knows that
because he didn't market that phrase very well.
The experience economy,
he figured if people are having a good time
this future shock wouldn't be so bad.
So what's the future of advertising? Well I think you can guess.
The future of advertising is fun.
And that's what my company does.
We make you guys, us, have fun with advertising.
We have a very clear aim for that.
We want to create this positive feeling.
We want to help people get over the future shock,
the trough I talked about.
We want to create those strong memories,
so when you stand in front of the toothpaste counter,
you buy our client's toothpaste.
Yes we are evil, yes we are evil,
but we are having fun doing it.
(Laughter)
So let's just watch a video and you can see what we do.
This part is less fun.
Where's the video?
Woh. Where is it... There it is, okay.
Can I have the lights down maybe?
Thank you, it'd be good.
It's a potato. Yes.
It's a potato-driven vending machine
but also recognizes your face.
Hello, what flavor do you want?
Okay, you can choose 5 flavors with your face.
So that's what it's all about.
It's all about giving people fun with advertising.
So when I talk about what is the future of fun.
If we can cut back. Go! The next slide.
The future of fun is of cause advertising.
And advertising is the future of fun
So thank you very much.
I don't want to hold you up from your lunch.
So enjoy lunch and let's keep talking
and let's keep having fun today.
Thank you. (Applause)