apg romania news

Many cool news about APG Romania.

Together with Evensys, we're having a first important event: Masterplan is a marcom planning and strategy 2-days event, which will not only gather the masterminds of local research, strategy and brand management departments, but will also bring Jeffre Jackson, who already impressed at the Napoleons conference, as well as Alain Thys, from the Future Laboratory.

If you're a student, then you have a very good chance to attend the event for free - all you have to do is win this contest, which invites you to have fun while trying to figure out solutions for a small firm that produces pencils.

Besides, there's an open season to APG subscriptions now. So, if you care to receive all kinds of enticing benefits, just contact apg@planning.ro for details (that is, if you haven't already received a mail from us with all the details).

suburbia

the brief talk at the Czech Center on Monday proved to be a far more exciting and interesting experience than i first anticipated.

First of all, the project itself. It all started when Monika and I were talking about advertising, as we sometimes do, until we reached advertising for the new residential projects. I complained about how annoyed i was to see those huge advertising outdoors brilliantly showing a sort of "promissed paradise", when in fact the reality of many of those residential neighbourhoods was far worse. And she brought into discussion "The end of the suburbia", a documentary she wanted to screen anyway during one of the Documentary Mondays. So she invited me to somewhat "open" the screening by making some points about the differences between advertising and reality in today's new suburbias. I talked to Raluca about it and she proved willing to join me on field with her camera, to look around and take some pictures of the new suburbias.

The more we got into the subject, i realised that the initial thought was kind of redundant. There was no point in simply showing that reality is not like in the commercials, cause that's a sort of a truism. Just like there was no point in simply attacking one residential project or another, because it was far better to simply show people how many of the new suburbias actually look like, as well as what potential problems they have. We talked about how buying a new house in one of the new suburbias didn't mean just buying a piece of land, it actually meant far more than that, and each person should evaluate the context of that piece of land before making the aquisition. Together with our guests, we discussed about the need for urbanistic regulations, as well as potential problems such as the developer, the surrounding environment, traffic conditions, people around, utilities, facilities or deceitful advertising. And we tried to get a bit into the core of this "Monopoly" (the game) standard of living, discussing how we could make people aware of what they should be looking at before becoming the inhabitant of one of the new suburbias. People in the audience also brought into discussion examples from the Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and New Zealand. And this is how everything actually became the starting point of an extensive study we'll carry out during the next year, one that looks at the new human typology and lifestyle present in the new suburbias, as well as at the development and evolution of these suburbias.

The video below is the trailer for The End of Suburbia, a very interesting case study brought to the Czech Center by John Ketchum.

if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left", said Einstein

The feeling of getting back in mental shape is a very pleasant feeling - just like waking up from a very long, disturbing and torturing bad dream and realising that not everything is lost.

Anyway, i spent some time today reading various research studies, some of which revealed some really interesting or thought-provoking points (such as that search engines dominate modern epistemology, and that we suck at judging the quantity of food we're eating, because we're regularly tricked by size illusions).

One of the most interesting i've read, however, is related to mobile phones and a weird effect that the latter might actually have. I mean everybody keeps on having endless discussions with no clear result about mobile phones affecting people's health one way or another. But while most such human effect-related research remains inconclusive, another very interesting (movie-like) possibility is beginning to be taken into account: mobile phones might have something to do with the mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees. The Independent article talks about the results of a small study carried out in Landau University, which shows that "bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby". These conclusions have also been supported by other researchers who think that "radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops".

not everything that's called "therapy" is actual therapy

One of my best friends has been going through hell lately, and part of his recovery involves some group therapy. His sharing his experience made me think about various forms of therapy (especially since i'm becoming so interested in film therapy) and i ended up thinking about the concept of "retail therapy". Even though people sometimes do this because they perceive it as a form of dealing with depression, as well as a helping hand towards feeling better, "shopping with the primary purpose of improving the buyer's mood or disposition" or "retail therapy" might not actually be "a cure for the modern blues", but rather one of its causes, according to a 2001 study quoted in "The Guardian".

The short-term satisfaction that shopping gives one doesn't apparently compensate for the degree of regret and even remourse aroused when the person realises having spent money unnecessarily. Lucy Purdy, one of the research who carried out the study, said that "for significant numbers, dissatisfaction is now part of the shopping process; it's adding into the dissatisfaction that causes many people to go shopping in the first place. Shopping is offering a short-term buzz, but as a society we now recognise that and we're getting fed up with short-term emotions." And she also said that "unhappy people are most likely to be trying to change their lives through purchasing. They will be changing their diet, or their appearance, or their homes. And it does appear to be younger, more affluent people who are doing the most dysfunctional shopping for things they don't really want or need."

Moreover, a continent-wide survey into addictive spending carried out in Europe and published by The European Union found that 33% of consumers displayed a "high level of addiction to rash or unnecessary consumption", a tendency which often led to indebtedness. The funny thing is that this retail therapy might actually be just the starting point for a far more severe form of psychological disorder, which has been receiving a lot of media attention lately.

As an editorial in "The Age" states: "Just because you may not have heard of the term does not mean you are not suffering from oniomania (compulsive shopping syndrome). It is not yet clear, however, if a definitional upgrade of retail addiction will in any way help those shoppers who slip out with the credit card as a way of dealing with depression, who buy objects they don't need and cannot afford, and who hide their debts and purchases from loved ones. And other questions trouble us: is oniomania a medical condition or a symptom of a society that places an undue emphasis on shopping as entertainment, and on consumer choices as a form of self-definition? Is it a sickness or an unavoidable consequence when advertising everywhere urges us to shop till we drop - in the same way that anorexia and bulimia sufferers are influenced by the rake-thin images of models draped on billboards and magazines."

on being sane in insane places

Jean-Philippe Charbonnier's Psychiatric Hospitals exhibition, indicated by Chestionabil, reminded me about one of the most interesting experiments i've ever heard about. The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment conducted by David Rosenhan in 1972, which challenged the assumption that specially trained professionals have the ability to make reasonably accurate diagnoses when it comes to mental illness. Published in the journal Science under the title "On being sane in insane places", the experiment's conclusion clearly shows that "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals".

Starting from the question "if sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?", the experiment consisted of two parts.

The first involved the use of healthy associates or 'pseudopatients', who
briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12
different psychiatric hospitals in 5 different states in various locations in
the United States. The second involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to
detect non-existent 'fake' patients. In the first case hospital staff failed to
detect a single pseudopatient, in the second the staff falsely detected large
numbers of genuine patients as impostors. The study is considered an important
and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.

Both the description of the experiment, and the reactions are fascinating, especially for people who spend qite an awful lot of time trying to figure out how people think, feel and behave.

publishing science, accelerating research

I have always been fascinated by reading pieces of research in different areas, and trying to understand them, or at least make something out of them. I think this might be a reminiscence of highschool times when i used to have endless discussions with my Philosophy teacher (who's a brilliant guy), my Maths teacher (who is in fact a proffesor teaching in the University of Bucharest) and my Physics teacher (who trained the Romanian team taking part in international olympiads). It was absolutely fantastic to tackle such issues with them, and i felt really lucky i was challenged to understand and reflect upon really complicated things.

However, with entering advertising and not actually having any such pro around to provoke me and so on, i didn't exactly stay focused enough on such matters. Until this winter break, when i talked to Space a lot about neuroscience, and with some other friend (PhD in Physics, in Romania for holidays only) about, well, physics, and with another bunch of smart people about science in general and astronomy...And i got the old flame back. Which is why it was a thrill for me to discover PLoS One: Publishing Science, Accelerating Research. The site, in beta, is "a new way of communicating peer-reviewed science and medicine" - basically, an open source of research in various domains. As prof. Lon Cardon, of University of Oxford, says: "PLoS meets a crucial need. By providing scientists from different disciplines with easy and free access to high quality research papers PLoS should actually enhance scientific progress itself."

false-memory effects of advertising

Collision Detection is a very interesting blog written by Clive Thompson, who collects weird and interesting pieces of research of all sorts. Such a research was developed by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington, and will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The study proves that interactive websites can produce false memories, the result being people who think that a certain product has features/can do things which are actually "false". These results came out of a simple experiment: Schlosser had two groups of people check out two websites devoted to the same digital camera, one static, the other interactive; and then, she further tested their ability to recall details about the camera. It turned out that people in the group who had played with the interactive site were far more likely to "remember" certain details which were false, but plausible enough to have been true.

The reason why Schlosser believes this happens is partly because interactivity encourages more "certainty" in our memories, and thus increases the likelihood that we'll believe suggestively false details to be true. The conclusion is that "These findings suggest that marketing managers should test their campaigns for both true and false memories. Although it may seem advantageous for consumers to believe that a product has features that it actually does not have (e.g., by increasing store visits and purchases), it may ultimately lead to customer dissatisfaction. Because false memories reflect source-monitoring errors—or believing that absent attributes were actually presented in the marketing campaign—consumers who discover that the product does not have these attributes will likely feel misled by the company."