Freakonomics Radio - 216. How to Make a Smart TV Ad

Episode Date: August 20, 2015

Step 1: Hire a Harvard psych professor as the pitchman. Step 2: Have him help write the script ...

Hello my friends. I don't always watch TV, but when I do, I see a lot of terrible commercials. Sometimes they're sophomoric. Hey Ralph, can I have a Dorito? Sure, when pigs fly. Sometimes they're earnest. It's a golden opportunity to turn every ride into a thrill ride. This is the pursuit of perfection. Sometimes the ads are just delusional.

Look again. The tickets are now diamond. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse. Occasionally, you will catch a truly clever TV ad. Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. Gesundheit, you okay? No.

Last year, there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs. So, you just cried this morning. I think I got a crash. But almost never, you see one that's actually interesting. 65 years old. When that became the official retirement age back when my dad was a kid, life expectancy was about 61.

Almost never, I said, but not never, never. Luckily, things have changed. To see how, we went out and asked people a simple question. How old is the oldest person you've known? The ads I'm talking about feature a Harvard psychology professor named Dan Gilbert. Hi, Dan Gilbert. Dan Gilbert here, Stephen. It's very nice to make your acquaintance on the telephone line. And I feel like I know

you because I see you on TV like every five minutes. The ads are interesting in part because they drop miniature bombs of academic research. Psychologists would usually refer to unrealistic optimism. And also because they feel weirdly authentic. I say weirdly because they are, after all, TV ads. In these commercials, I've utterly been allowed to be myself. There's not a single word in them that I don't write. And they've helped make Dan Gilbert famous.

Although for what, people aren't always sure. Yes, I get recognized on the street all the time. The most common recognition is, aren't you some guy? Next, it's, aren't you the guy who does the commercials for Fidelity, United Airlines? And eventually, don't you do those ads for Prudential? From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Dan Gilbert first got on my radar and a lot of other people's radar with his book, Stumbling Unhappiness. Here are the first few sentences.

What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in 10 minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Stumbling on happiness was a plain spoken but potent blend of psychological insight and common sense. Gilbert went on to give some hugely popular TED Talks and do some stuff on TV, including a short PBS series called This Emotional Life. And he's done all this despite having dropped out of high school. I might even say because rather than despite. Tell, do tell. Yes. A checkered history. I think I have all the degrees except the high school diploma.

And why did you drop out and where were you living? Well, I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. My dad was a professor at Northwestern University. And somewhere around the age of 16, I had the epiphany that adults had very little to teach me that I wanted to know. And my high school thought that was a pretty bad attitude. And so we had a parting of the ways. I left. I went hitchhiking around the country, playing my guitar, writing poetry, teaching myself philosophy and ended up living in Denver, Colorado.

And I was a science fiction writer, as a matter of fact. And so I was starting to write and publish my science fiction. And it occurred to me that without a high school diploma, I'd never learned, you know, about spelling or logical progression or other things a writer might want to know. So I wandered down to the local community college to take a course in creative writing. And by the time I got there, they said the course was full. It had been a very long bus ride. And so I said, well, what's open? And the nice lady looked down the list of open courses and said psychology. I thought, you know, psychology is not a bad thing for a writer.

Why don't I try that? And, you know, the rest is dominoes falling. I got interested in the subject and here I am. Do you think that many, most, any of your psych students that you've taught at Harvard knew that you were a high school dropout? Well, you know, they're quicker with the internet than I am, and I think that's probably out there in Wikipedia or someplace. So if they have any interest in me whatsoever, I think they know all about my sordid past. You know, you're the second person we've spoken with on this program in the last, I guess, few months who taught for many years at Harvard and is also a high school dropout.

Can you guess who the other one was? I'm going to guess Al Roth. There you go, Al Roth. Very good. And I know that because when you get to Harvard, they do a little puff piece on you in the Gazette. Oh, I thought you were going to say when you get to Harvard, they post a list of all the high school dropouts among the faculty. No, but I said something in my first interview like I'm probably the only full professor at Harvard who dropped out of high school and I got emails from the others and Al was one of them. Stumbling on Happiness was published in 2006. You write quite explicitly in the beginning of the book that Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. This is not a guide to being happy, right? But I'm curious, do many people still read it looking for some kind of a happiness formula?

Well, I assume they do, and that's probably the source of any bad reviews, people who are horribly disappointed because they expected one thing and got the other. On the other hand, I get a lot of email from people who say, I know this wasn't meant to be a guide about happiness, but by understanding more about how my mind works, it indeed has helped me achieve greater happiness and fulfillment in my life. So I'm delighted that that happens even though it wasn't my intention. Okay, so ignoring that the book is not meant to be any kind of prescription for happiness, if someone does want to learn a shortcut or two for being happy, I'm curious what you tell people because surely you get asked that.

Look, the answer to your question, what are the shortcuts, could fill many books and it does. But if you asked me to stand on one leg and say in just a sentence, what's the single dominating factor in human happiness, I would pull up my leg and say, we're a social creature, care about and be interactive with other human beings. A common theme throughout the book is how bad we are at predicting our own future selves, what will make our future selves happy and secure and confident and so on. And it strikes me that that's the idea that gave way eventually to this set of commercials we want to talk about. Is that, would one be right to commit to that being the central theme of the book essentially? Yes, it is. In fact, it's the central theme of my research. I never was and still am not a happiness researcher.

My interest has always been in errors of prospection or in English, why we look into our futures and make mistakes about what will happen and how we'll feel when it does. It turns out that if you're interested in prospection, you immediately become interested in happiness because happiness is the reason that people prospect at all. I want you to unpack that a little bit more. Well, if I asked you why should an animal have evolved all of the extra neural machinery it takes to think about and look into and plan for the future, surely the answer is that it can make better decisions in the present

when it can envision different futures and figure out which one it would rather be in than not. That's really just a fancy way of saying we can look into the future and figure out which things will make us more or less happy and then take one road rather than the other. It's what prospection is for. It's to optimize our happiness because happiness is a signal that the brain gives us that we are on track to doing the things that evolution wants us to do, namely surviving and reproducing. It's no accident that if you take all the things that make human beings happy, almost all of them are conducive to survival and reproduction. And the opposite for those that make us unhappy. That's not a coincidence. That tells you what prospection is for.

Hearing Gilbert talk, you can probably imagine why it might have seemed like a good idea to cast him as the pitchman for, say, a financial services firm. Someone that makes their money selling life insurance, investment products for retirement plans. When that became the official retirement age, back when my dad was a kid, life expectancy was about 61. The ads feature Gilbert, identified as Professor Daniel Gilbert, looking professorial indeed.

Wire-rimmed glasses, a trimmed beard, button-down shirt. We went out and asked people a simple question. How old is the oldest person you've known? And the ads are shot in documentary style. Gilbert being himself, average people being themselves. The oldest person I really know is probably my grandfather. He's 93. 94. 104 years old. But each of the ads also has a visual trick, data visualization, in fact, writ very large. In

this case, a huge white wall set up in a beautiful grassy park in Austin, Texas, with some skyscrapers in the distance. The wall is marked with age brackets, 60 years old, 70, 80, 90, 100. And the people come to place on that white wall these beautiful blue stickers to represent the oldest people they know. And you see the stickers reaching their peak well past the 90-year mark. Soon we learned a lot of us have known someone who's lived well into their 90s. And that's a great thing. But even though we're living longer, one thing that hasn't changed? The official retirement age.

The question is, how do you make sure you have the money you need to enjoy all of these years? You know you're being sold to, but the experience still feels very real. Almost every line there was dubbed in the studio after because there was death metal playing during filming. Okay, the experience feels relatively real. It is a TV ad after all. Here's another one. This one is called Magnets. This time, there are two big walls. One labeled past, the other future. We asked people all over the country, what's something significant that's happened to you in the last five years? Bought a house.

My mom passed away. First really serious relationship. I graduated college. Then we asked them what might happen in the next five years. The good things were put on yellow magnets. And the bad ones on blue. The results showed us something interesting. It turns out the past was a pretty even mix of good and bad, yet the future was almost all good things. Now that you've seen the results of this experiment,

what does it mean to you? We all want to think about positive stuff. Realistically, there will be down times. Definitely prepare myself for anything that could happen in life, not just the good things. It's great to think optimistically, but let's plan for whatever the future might bring. It's great to think optimistically, but let's plan for whatever the future may bring. So, Dan, what is the psychological concept or what are the concepts that that is getting at? Well, we know that people are wildly optimistic

about the future. And when you ask them, don't you think that's a little over-optimistic? They say, no, I think all these good things are gonna happen. The best way to disabuse them of that optimism is simply to point to the past, to remind them that their past has been a fairly even mix

of good and bad events. There's really no reason to believe that tomorrow will be remarkably different than today. When you put that up in color on two walls, it's a truth that's pretty hard to evade. And when you show them, what is the common response to that? Is it that, well, those were accidents or those were mistakes that other people made or those are things that I've learned and won't do again. In other words, why do we not square the future with the past?

Well, I think there are certainly those reactions. But a very common reaction is, oh, crap, you're right. And that's really the point. The reason we don't square the future with the past is nobody puts our future and our past on two walls that are within one foot of each other and says, hey, look. We don't do the very – this exercise that we're doing in the commercial is one that people don't do. But it's one that as soon as it's done in front of you, you immediately grasp the logic and understand the lesson.

Aaron Powell Now, I can see how as a research scholar, you would like to disabuse people of a fallacy like that. On the other hand, as a research scholar who is a psychologist, I could also see how you might want to say, you know, life is tough for a lot of people. And if their optimism is unduly pronounced, let them have it. Let people have that kind of rosier than realistic view of the future because for a lot of people, maybe that's what it takes to get moving forward. Yes, that's true. You're pointing out an age-old tension in psychology between seeing the world as it

is and seeing it as we wish it were. Which of these things should we do? The answer is neither. The answer is neither. When we see the world utterly realistically, we can be depressed about it. It's a hard place. But when we see the world utterly fantastically, we don't take the kinds of actions we need to take in the present to ensure ourselves a good future. I love the metaphor of rose-colored glasses.

That's the way to view the world. They're rose-colored, meaning there is a tint. You are seeing a rosier future than we will really experience. But they're glasses. They're not opaque, right? They're not blinders. You actually are seeing the world. And if there's a train coming, it's a little bit rose-tinted, but it's a train.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, how did Dan Gilbert get put in these ads anyway? Yeah, well, I mean, it first started from just our fascination with behavioral science. We can't just have another actor from Law & Order, you know, come in and pitch these commercials. And how does an ad agency triangulate between its financial services client and its Harvard professor spokesman? Yeah, it's funny. you call it a triangle. I might call it a rock in a hard place. And one more thing. This podcast now gets more than 6 million downloads a month,

which is a lot, and for which I thank you very much. But here's the thing. I've never really liked the number six very much. Don't know why. Just never had a feel for it. But I do like seven. Do me a favor, will you? Help us get to seven million downloads a month.

Tell your friends, your co-workers. Hell, tell your in-laws if you have to. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Lucky seven. Thank you. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. I never thought I'd make an episode of Freakonomics Radio extolling the virtues of a series of TV ads for a financial services firm. But the ads are, to me at least, tiny, behaviorless masterpieces.

We ask people a question. How much money do you think you'll need when you retire? Each one of them takes a psychological insight, distills it to its core, and matches it with a visual stunt. Then we gave each person a ribbon to show how many years that amount might last. I was trying to, like, pull it a little further. You know, I was trying to stretch it a little bit more. The presenter is Dan Gilbert,

a psychology professor at Harvard. It's just human nature to focus on the here and now. So it's hard to imagine how much we'll need for a retirement that could last 30 years or more. Okay, so I want to know first about the process. How did it happen? Who came to whom? What were those early conversations like? Were you reluctant?

Were you eager? Et cetera, et cetera. I got a phone call from someone at Droga5 who said, I wonder if you'd have any interest in doing a television commercial. Yes, my name is Ray Del Savio. I am a group creative director at Droga5 here in New York City. And since I'd been asked that question many times before from other agencies about other products, my answer was, of course not. Why would I want to do something like that? He was not going to be a shill for Prudential. I think that I could actually put quotes on that and Dan could agree to having said that multiple times. I'm Colin McConnell. I'm the chief branding officer for Prudential Financial.

Yeah, I mean, we chose to go with someone from academia for several reasons. I mean, we can't just have another actor from Law & Order, you know, come in and pitch these commercials. And, you know, a company spokesperson, you know, actually having an employee of the company, you know, I don't think would have been our first choice either. We broke down our behavioral challenges into five challenges, ranging from procrastination to instant gratification and all these different things that are getting in the way of us planning for our financial future. So we put this huge packet together. You know, we had to be ready. If we're going to talk to a Harvard professor, we want to have all of our ducks in a row. They said, well, wait a minute. This is a different kind of offer.

We're really interested in producing a set of think pieces. And then we went up to Harvard and sat down with Dan and shared a bunch of the work with him. And in true professor fashion, he was critical of some things, but then championed other things. And he really was in line with a lot of our messaging. They said, we're interested in doing data visualization and bringing to life the very thing

you've been thinking about for most of your career, namely errors of prospection. Why can't people think well enough about the future to provide for themselves in it? Well, that got my attention. All these ads, there are five of them so far with more on the way, they all point to something we've talked about on the show repeatedly.

Most of us are pretty bad at forecasting the future and planning for the future, especially when it comes to money. We asked people a question. How much money do you have in your pocket right now? I have $40. $53. $21. Do you think the money in your pocket could make an impact on something as big as your

retirement? Not a chance. I don't think so. Probably not. It's hard to imagine how something so small can help with something so big. But if you start putting that toward your retirement every week, and let it grow over time for 20 to 30 years, that retirement challenge might not seem so big after all.

Well, human beings have a lot of trouble imagining in or about time, and particularly the power of time. You may remember being a child and being told that about time, and particularly the power of time. You may remember being a child and being told that over time, a drop of water could weigh a mountain. And you find it hard to believe. You may remember learning about the theory of evolution. Somehow amoebas became people. It's all the power of time. But it's something that's very hard for us to simulate in our imagination. And so we underestimate the power that time has. So we should say that those big booms that you're hearing and you can't see are these big dominoes that are made of, I don't know,

styrofoam? What are they made of? Oh, no, they're made of steel and wood. Yeah, this was by far my favorite shoot. This was maybe two months, three months before we shot this thing. We were sitting with one of the CMOs of Prudential, and I kind of just half-wittingly said, oh yeah, we're planning on breaking a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest domino topple. So that domino, that last domino was over 30 feet tall and weighed over, I think, two or three tons. And the crowd that we're hearing then? The crowd, that is legit. That's for real.

That is for real. I mean, even the noise of that last domino falling, I mean, you could almost feel it in your chest. It was like, you know, a small building toppling over. And actually, a guy from Guinness was there to make sure everything was legit. Because, you know, there was ways that we could have faked it. But we got the trophy to prove it. The ads are so interesting that you almost forget that, of course, they're trying to sell you something.

In my interviews with them, both Gilbert and Del Savio said the ads feel more like public service announcements than anything, with a prudential title card stuck at the end. And that's the way Dan Gilbert likes it. Here's Del Savio. So I think when it comes to Dan giving financial advice, that's not his realm. And so he would kind of, you know, occasionally bring that up in some of our scripts. It's like, listen, I'm more than happy to talk about how we can't picture our future selves, but I'm not going to tell you that you need to put such and such amount of money away in order to pay for that future self. You've got Prudential, which pays a lot of money to an agency like you and need to sell their product.

Then you've got Dan, who's kind of devoutly not selling. And there's you guys as the third point of the triangle who need to make that bridge happen. I'm just curious, how does it work between you and your client and your messenger, in this case, with a message that you're obviously shaping, but he's got some input in? Yeah, it's funny. You call it a triangle. I might call it a rock in a hard place. But I think it actually makes for better work, I think, because Dan has, I don't want to call it an agenda, but Dan has things that don't want to call it an agenda,

but Dan has things that he's comfortable saying and things he's not. And then the client has things that they really want to push. And then as an agency, we say, well, you know, maybe it's not great that we just come out and say, hey, buy life insurance. You know, so there's a fine balance that we try to find where we convey the message that the client wants to convey while at the same time making Dan comfortable with what he's saying. So it's tricky. I mean, we write scripts. When we write scripts for, say, for dominoes or for ribbons or for magnets, those scripts are changed up into quite literally, they say, action. And I sit with Dan in the morning with one of our clients,

and we go through scripts pushing words and making sure everybody's comfortable with what we're saying. We asked people a question. How much money do you think you'll need when you retire? Then we gave each person a ribbon to show how many years that amount might last. Because you, Dan, are such a kindly professorial presence that this doesn't feel like it's saying, hey, you're going to be eating cat food in your retirement if you're lucky. Right. Somehow you're able to convey the fear factor without being, you know, fear mongering at all. But I mean, OK, so let me not put words in your mouth. What concept are you illustrating here? What we're trying to get people to understand with this ad is that the amount of money they think they're going to need for retirement is almost surely an underestimate.

Now, you can tell them that by asking them to generate a number and then telling them which number is actually accurate, and they'll understand the difference. But seeing it, by seeing two ribbons that don't line up, that's very powerful. The part of your brain that does subtraction and looks at the difference between two numbers is not the part that does perception and sees the length of two different ribbons. Aaron Powell, Jr.: The final question of course is do the ads work? As compelling and inviting as I may find them, do they make TV viewers do what Prudential wants them to do? Colin McConnell from Prudential says the ads are certainly popular.

I think I can say now that based on syndicated studies from third-party research that each of the commercials in this campaign has at one point gone to number one in our competitor set. Most of them have gone to number one and stayed there for quite some time. So they're all very, very strong performers. And you can see why a firm like Prudential needs to be thinking up new ways to sell life insurance. In just a decade, the number of individual life insurance policies sold has fallen nearly 30%.

That said, the average face value of these policies is up. It's above $150,000, which suggests that fewer but richer people are buying life insurance. We did find out that at least one person was inspired to buy life insurance based on prudential ads. Droga 5's Ray Del Savio, who was intimately involved in making them. I'm curious if it changed the way you think about your own life. How old are you, Ray? I'm 35. Yeah.

So did it change the way you think about your past versus your future and whether you're kind of assessing the future wrong or under, you know, underestimating the likelihood of bad things? Yeah, I think working on this stuff over the past couple of years has changed a lot of what I think about. Right. So have you bought life insurance in the past couple of years? In the past couple of months, actually. Really? Yeah. What's funny is I think your recent podcast about the economics of sleep,

I have a baby coming in about a month. So I think between the life insurance and my what is going to be a sleep-deprived dad seems pretty relevant. Did you buy your life insurance from Prudential? I did not, no. Okay. Why not? I would think. Yeah, I mean, no. Okay. Why not? I would think. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I went through just a good friend who works for Northwestern Mutual.

I went through them just because it was a comfortable decision. Coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, we envision a whole different kind of insurance idea. We call it the Glorious Sunset Plan. We all want to take care of mom. But the doctor says her treatments might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even so, she'll never fully recover. And we've got two kids to put through college. Millions of families are struggling with these same decisions. Now, a new health care plan puts you in control. You can decide if medical treatments are right for you or your loved one and if you decide to forego the standard treatment we'll put the money directly in your pocket to use for whatever you need. College tuition, a new house, or to take mom on one last adventure to soak up some glorious sunsets.

Thanks to Glorious Sunset Healthcare Option, mom won't have to suffer, and we can make decisions that make sense for our family. Isn't it time for you to think about a glorious sunset? Enroll today. Could the Glorious Sunset plan actually fly? It's so cold-blooded. It's so calculating. It would be a public relations nightmare. I love that idea.

Rethinking end-of-life care. That's on the next Freakonomics Radio. And one more thing. We need your help in an episode we're making about the economics of boredom. We want to know what makes you bored. How often do you feel bored? Do you have a boring job? If so, what do you do to alleviate the bored topic, please record it. Make a short voice memo on your phone. Use whatever app you have and email it to us at radio at Freakonomics.com. You can also throw in your name, your age, roughly, where you live, what you do, that kind of stuff. Thank you so much. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions.

Our staff includes Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, Merit Jacob, Christopher Wirth, and Kasia Mihailovic. We had production help from Nathan Rossborough, Matt Fidler, and Cameron Drews. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.