I've read Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" a few years back, and while his writing style left me unimpressed (this always happens when academics are trying too hard to sound street), I thought the analysis was fine enough. For some reason, I got reminded of this book some weeks ago in relation to marketing campaigns. The main rationale for my thinking was that it's no wonder that so much campaigns fail when people suffer from such a giant fallacy in predicting the future. And campaigns are - in most cases - predicting what's going to work (and then wishing that that prediction was correct). Even the most experienced of agencies and professionals can't really tell for sure what's going to become a success, because, as it turns out, "we cook the facts".
That is, these professionals remember what worked in the past, and then use that information to predict the future. And as Gilbert elaborates, we remember the past selectively. Furthermore, we then use our own imagination to relate this past to the future, and make yet again wrong predictions. Under these circumstances, it's really amazing how anything works out at the end. The effect of the fallacy of predictions is then multiplied by interpersonal influence, as this paper on Google Prediction Markets I 've recently come across claims. The researchers, who experimented with prediction markets at Google in order to track how an organization processes information, discovered a ton of biases - and most notably an optimistic bias (what a surprise). These biases were the strongest among employees who sit within a few feet from one another and employees with social or work relationships. All of these is not terribly new in organizational research, but I found it strangely amusing when thinking about marketing agencies. We usually work in teams on campaigns and spend ton of time in close social and physical proximity with them while doing so. Also, different teams sit together, which can account for often strong organizational friction between interaction designers, visual designers, technology, planners, etc. But fun part here is that 1) we tend to think alike as people we are physically/socially close to; 2) that there's a strong optimistic bias; 3) optimistic bias comes from imagining what is going to make us and the client happy in the future; 4) those predictions are, as Gilbert claims, regularly wrong.
In this awesome sequence of events, I would say that even 50% of advertising working is a real stretch. But, what is more interesting, and actually pretty true, is that different agencies are often going to deliver solutions that are consistent with solutions they delivered in the past (also called organizational inertia). For example, Razorfish is never going to deliver anything newsworthy, and Anomaly is never going to fail to surprise. Crispin's campaigns are always going to create buzz in the industry (good or bad), and R/GA is probably going to go for "design a system" solution. That is, no matter what the client's challenge is, these agencies are going to stay consistent to themselves. After all, they have their own memories and their own (limited) imagination.
Finally, a few days back I came across Mike Arauz great post, which I somehow found related to my thinking above. He says that "... we convince ourselves that our own ideas about the way things should be are beyond question. We fall into the trap of believing that our theories, for some reason, no longer warrant proof." Mostly because there's really no one near us to question them, stress them out, prove them wrong, and as a consequence, make them more robust than they are now. Or, make them more hypotheses, less imagination.