2012 (2): The House Always Wins
The most memorable conversation I had at the ESOMAR 3D conference this year wasn’t about research at all: it was about poker. Josh, from BrainJuicer’s marketing team, is a keen online poker player, and explained the extent to which online poker in particular is a percentage game – playing for incremental gains on multiple virtual tables. All the regular players, he said, are using apps and algorithms to automatically calculate their odds and are adjusting their play accordingly. Which leaves the newbies and the suckers who want to see poker as a social game, or imagine it’s a game allowing for flair, or employ a range of other losing strategies which are generally based on individuality rather than trusting the numbers.
Earlier that day I’d heard Dominic Harrison of the Future Foundation give an entertaining talk on consumer trends. One of the things he pointed to was the rise of automated consumer apps, particularly in the worlds of personal finance and spending. A robot extension of you analyses your spending patterns and automates your finances to a degree, looking for the best available deals and trying to minimise your excess spending. This surrender of control, Harrison says, initially seems terrifying but is likely to gradually become normal, especially since it’s an extension of things happening already - the successful price-comparison model. People increasingly see themselves as “system beaters”, always on the lookout for deals, offers and so on. Automating this will extend from high-importance but low-involvement areas (utility bills, etc.) down through other: consumers will become cyborgs.
Harrison’s vision makes a lot of sense in the “big data” world I outlined yesterday, full of algorithms waging invisible war over billions of tiny micro-slices of personal expenditure. Also existing in this algorithmic ecosysyem are Harrison’s automated finance and shopping apps – scavenger algorithms weighing up the temptations and offers thrown up by big data, trying to spot genuine advantage. What he’s describing is the same dataverse from a consumer perspective.
“We got these helmets via a Groupon offer.”
So what does that have to do with poker? As in poker, the profit against serious opponents is to be found in the grey efficiency of numbers play, but tasty bonuses come from suckers who think they know better than the numbers. So too with this future: a consumer who doesn’t trust the apps and who imagines themselves a good decision maker, a rationalist, or a person of discernment – someone who agrees to play but wants to keep their autonomy - will be a useful source of extra revenue. The future for consumers in a world of big data is a cavaliers vs roundheads one - the difference, as 1066 And All That so memorably put it, between being “wrong but wromantic” and “right but repulsive”.
Next: Shock data - are we being too nice to respondents?
