It seems an unhappy side-effect of our always on media age that research is increasingly driven by the marketing department. Sure you're familiar with the kind of research I'm talking about here. Y'know, the kind that nearly always seems to support the services offered by the company doing the research. Security companies will provide research showing how dangerous things are, or training companies will tell us how much better things would be if only people were more qualified.
The sad thing is, this works. We're living in a media age where news is now a 24/7 activity. Publishers, be they bloggers or multi-national news agencies, are crying out for content as there generally aren't enough newsworthy stories to fill a whole day, especially when you have print and web properties to keep updated.
Quite often this research will be packaged up in the form of an infographic. There seems to be a belief that if rubbish data is put into an infographic it somehow compensates for the anodyne nature of the 'research' and it's findings, making it cool enough for us all to want to publish. Ugh.
Sadly I can't see this charade stopping any time soon, because as I said earlier, it does get results. As long as publishers talk about these poor excuses for research, the marketing department will continue churning them out as it represents relatively low hanging fruit.
Do the public benefit from these findings? Heck no. Do the companies customers benefit? It's hard to see how. But it does get column inches, so the bad science continues. Ho hum.
The Daily Mail seem particularly guilty of doing this. I wonder though if it actually does the sponsoring company any good. I mean sure it gets them 'column inches', but it's such mind candy that I doubt anyone remembers anything about the company the next day.
Having worked for companies that do this sort of thing, the evidence would suggest it doesn't work at all. People aren't stupid and can generally see through thinly veiled PR stunts like this.
The frightening aspect is that pharmaceuticals and doctors doing paid research are all part of this sorry state of affairs. They sell their medications or "scientific research" to us guinea pigs. It's content marketing gone way wrong! Nice thought provoking article.
Big pharma are probably at the better end of things as at least their research has to get past the FDA. So called research for purely marketing purposes has no such difficulties, and as a result some of the science behind it is very dubious indeed.
Hi Adi – Great article – you certainly share the same sentiment I have. The 2010 book by Chalres Seife calls this phenomena "Proofiness" and the most enjoyble blog by Ron Shevelin (Snarketing 2.0) refers to this as "quantipulation".
Hi Adre, thanks for the recommendations and welcome to the blog. I hadn't heard of Snarketing before but have added it to my Google Reader (here's the url if anyone wants to check it out – http://snarketing2dot0.com/), and will check out the Seife book too.
Love the title for this post! I would add that 3 out of 4 readers never make it past the title, while 42% of readers had their second cup of coffee before making it to the 10th email in their inbox. It's true, I read it somewhere… in an infographic… 😉
Cheers Adi,
Frederic
Reminds me of the famous Abraham Lincoln quote "90% of all statistics found on the internet are made up" 😉
People might be entertained by these puff pieces but they're not stupid enough to swallow the statistics enough to buy from the companies sponsoring the research. At least I'm not.
Hopefully the latest thoughts from Matt Cutts at Google will dampen the enthusiasm for producing rubbish infographics.
http://www.stonetemple.com/matt-cutts-and-eric-ta…