ADVERTISING AND BREAKING THE FORTH WALL

The quest? A single big idea that works across every media. An idea that can draw the consumer out and compel them to spend some time with the brand, and maybe even some money. The problem? Millennials apparently hate traditional advertising. This is apparently documented by multiple studies. But, as the largest living adult generation in the US now with $200 B in annual spending, Millennials can’t be ignored.

The Solution? One tactic increasingly being employed is a brand explicitly acknowledging that they are advertising to you — essentially making fun of themselves in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. This feels akin to breaking the fourth wall, the same technique you’ll see in a movie or play when the character speaks directly to the camera, acknowledging that it is a movie or play. 

One of the more subtle goals of advertising is to make the brand topical and most importantly a part of pop culture. Social currency and social relevance are integral to advertising today. Another thing that often distinguishes a great ad today is a sly, self-awareness that lets the consumer in on the pitch. This, in the parlance of performance arts, is known as breaking the fourth wall. The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes, the actors act as if they cannot. This can be done through either directly referencing the audience, the play as a play, or the characters' fictionality.

“Breaking the fourth wall” is defined by a character in a story who essentially tells the audience that they know they are a character in a story, hence breaking the imaginary “wall” that separates performance from real life.

It's a technique best known for its use in films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, and American Psycho, breaking the fourth wall goes all the way back to the days of William Shakespeare and ancient Greek theatre. Although it was originally criticized and looked down upon, TV shows like 30 Rock and Netflix’s House of Cards have been using it more and more frequently.

Breaking the fourth wall works because it’s unexpected. Consumers expect brands to be nameless blobs spewing pithy taglines at them, and instead, these brands are acknowledging truths they know about their consumers and thus, trying to feel more relatable. There is no avoiding the fact that they have to advertise anyways, but they have to try to grab attention in a different way. Their business metrics will dictate whether it works or not.

Some examples include:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=TfIjbGIccOg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p3XjPiCAe4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Gi7BxriuE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQa9Xbvm6XU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUqNTqK7VNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YWqf3QO0To&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=TMAMHbhDQMw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=_112uihcDng

WHAT MAKES A GREAT AD?

What makes a great ad? Ensuring the creative idea drives the attention, tells the brand story, communicates the main benefit and sticks in the consumer’s mind is a start. Here are some important questions to ask:

1. Does it demand your ATTENTION?  Does this take a creative risk to earn the attention of consumers within the cluttered media world?  Is there something creatively different from what consumers expect, does it entertain, take advantage of the media, and is it shareable for consumers to influence others?
2.  Does it create a strong BRAND LINK?  Does this ad connect your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story? Is the execution through the eyes of your consumer? Does it resonate with vulnerable consumer insights, make your brand central to the story, and then solve the problem?
3.  Does the ad communicate the PRIMARY PRODUCT BENEFIT? Does the ad focus on the one benefit that moves consumers? Does it creatively amplify the benefit, tell the story behind your brand purpose, use extreme demonstrations or powerful visuals? Note:  Focus on the benefit, not a feature. Whenever you focus on a feature, you leave it up to the consumer to determine the functional or emotional benefit. In a cluttered media world, lazy consumers move on before figuring it out.  
4. Is there something within the ad that is STICKY (and memorable) enough to move consumers? Does it engage emotionally and will it build a deeper love with those who already love you? Do you love what the ad has the potential to do? Does the ad match the brief? Will you be proud of this ad as your legacy?
5.  Does the ad deliver the brand idea? Does it leverage your creative assets? Does the ad fit with the tone of the brand? Does it use functional or emotional benefits to distinguish the brand and own a competitive space that is motivating to consumers?
6. Does the ad match up to the objective of the brief?  Will it drive the desired consumer response? Will it have an expected market impact and brand performance?
   Does the ad build a bond with the consumer? Does the ad speak directly to the consumer target? Does it leverage consumer insights to connect? Will it deepen our bond with our consumers? Can the ad help build memories and rituals? 
   
   
   CREATIVE ADVERTISING CHECKLIST
   
   
   

THE QUEST FOR THE NEXT BIG IDEA

What a BIG IDEA is not?  It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and keep drawing on.

The new model of marketing is to do stuff for people and then tell everyone else about it with advertising (solutions, not propositions). Advertising used to tell you how brands could solve your problems. Now it needs to solve problems and tell you about it because everyone knows how most products work.

One example of this way of thinking is Domino’s ‘Turnaround’ campaign. The campaign starts with real customers expressing why they don’t like Domino’s pizza. This leads to a new pizza recipe and an advertising campaign centred on finding the original research attendees and taking them the new recipe for their honest response. While obviously a staged experiment, it is a dramatisation of a reverse polarity approach.

This spread to the packaging, where pizza proverbs from customers were inscribed on the boxes and the menus, which incorporated pictures submitted by customers, rather than staged food shots. The critical thing is for brands to listen to what people are saying and then incorporate what they say, and solutions and surprises to delight them, into content and behaviour.

It raises the question, how do we create value? How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels? How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just brand utterances? We must remember that all aspects of brand behaviour are communicative, and human communication is always about relationships, and less about message transmission than we believe.

The types of ‘meta-communication’ most successful in building relationships are reciprocal (solving problems for people) or imitative (creating behaviours that can be copied). The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an infinite media space are likely to require an understanding of participation – users rather than audiences – and context.

Remember, people are not merely customers or prospects because customers are not the same as people. Customers are to people as waves are to water. ‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people. Successful ideas create customers by modifying behaviour. Conscious or subconscious attention, therefore, needs to be aggregated at scale to change enough behaviour to create significant commercial impact. Ideas spread or die in the attention market.

So, do things for people – solve a brand problem by solving consumer problems. Introduce intermediate behaviours for imitation. Create content that people find valuable, give them tools they can use. Leverage advertising creation and distribution to help disseminate – ‘ideas that can be advertised’, not just advertising ideas.

THE SCIENCE OF BRAND ENGAGEMENT

A brand, from the point of view of a person, may be considered like a memory: every brand experience builds to develop a specific and evolving pattern in a person’s mind called a ‘brandgram’ (also called a somatic marker.)

This ‘brandgram’ is triggered by encountering additional brand cues, and these cues combine to create a new experience. This final experience at point of purchase, when the cue of the product itself combines with the brandgram, will ultimately drive a purchase decision.

Procter & Gamble, for example, calls this the ‘first moment of truth’: the three to seven seconds when you first see a product on the shelf in the supermarket. This instant is one of its most important marketing opportunities as it is at this moment that the totality of all previous brand interactions either pay off or don’t.

So, the nature of the experience is what needs to be considered – what does the consumer require when making this purchase decision? Consumers need different brands to do different things. The vast majority of purchases do not adhere to a purchase funnel at all – they are made impulsively.

When confronted by innumerable choices while shopping at the supermarket, we use brands as heuristics to shortcut decisions. Heuristics are a problem-solving method that uses shortcuts to produce good-enough solutions given a limited time frame or deadline.

Since there is, or there is perceived to be, functional parity among the primary competitors, we need to have only a very slight preference for a brand to aid the decision. Other purchases may have different contextual needs that brands help to fulfil. High involvement purchases, such as consumer electronics and cars, have a longer purchase cycle, although there are indications that it is decreasing thanks to better access to information.

There are always a combination of rational and emotional needs that brands satisfy. Engaging communication that helps to build stronger brand affiliations, a more developed sense of the brand, can help to provide the consumer reassurance, both pre and post-purchase. The needs of consumers and the drivers of their behaviour are variables. Ultimately, by looking at some of the veiled aspects of attention and cognition, we can begin to better understand people and brands, and how they interact.

LUBRICANTS OF REASON

It’s not emotion or reason, but always both. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but without the heuristics of emotion to help us, we would never be able to decide anything. So, it is not that there are emotional and rational sides pulling us in different directions, but that emotions are the ‘lubricants of reason’ – we can’t think without them.

Real-life decision making usually involves assessment, by cognitive and emotional processes, of the incentive value of the various actions available in particular situations. However, often, situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives, with a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. In such situations, cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process.

This suggests that the role of communication could be simply establishing or reinforcing the somatic markers in association with brands so that when consumers encounter the decision of which toothpaste to buy, the somatic marker’s kick in and lubricate the decision. Savvy brands take away the consumers need to choose by covertly biasing cognition, thus making consumers lives easier.

To succeed in marketing, we need to:

• Win prospects’ attention (point A)
• Help prospects create a memory and form an intention
• Get them to act on their intention when decision time comes (at point B).

(Or, Pain Point > Solution > Call To Action)

Note:  It’s hard enough to win buyers’ attention with content at Point A. However, it’s much harder to get buyers to remember your content when they make a decision at Point B.

Great marketing helps buyers identify their own intentions or clarify new intentions at Point A. Make your messages repeatable and frequent, filled with strong emotions, short and simple, and able to easily roll off the tongue. 

BRANDED BREAKTHROUGH - NOT ALL ADS ARE CREATED EQUAL

The best ads are enjoyable. They educate, entertaining, and inspire. They are memorable, capture our attention, and connect with the consumer on an emotional level. They make the brand central to the story.

That said, in 2018 analysis of the Adtrack database from Kantar shows that in 2018, 77% of ads failed to resonate with consumers. Incidentally, the categories which consistently had the highest recall are carbonated soft drinks, fast food (QSR) restaurants, CPG, banking, and alcoholic beverages. What’s clear is that, while capturing the consumers attention is imperative, it must result in brand recall. 

To ensure ads are optimized, focus on the following:

1.     ATTENTION

2.     BRAND LINK

3.     MESSAGE

ATTENTION

Consumers do not remember the expected. Therefore, educate, entertain and/or inspire -- but defy convention. Do something different. Take a risk. Most brand managers shy away from this path because it has higher-risk. That said, with higher-risk there is higher reward.

A timeless example of this was DDB’s (1959) Volkswagen campaign “Think Small”. At the time there was a notable trend towards larger cars in the United States and “thinking big”.  Bigger was definitely seen as better. We have previously discussed truth and authenticity as brand attributes, but this campaign is an excellent example. This campaign was in effect, the exact opposite of how cars were marketed at the time.

Speaking of entertaining, another effective technique to gain attention is to provide (someone) with amusement or enjoyment. It’s why consumers engage media in the first place. So, make your ad part of the entertainment. Incidentally, humour is not the only way to connect with consumers. A great, inspired example is Canadian Tire’s “We All Play for Canada” Olympic (CSR) campaign’s “First Skate” ad which tells the touching story of a father fashioning a sledge for his paraplegic son.

Brands need to remain ‘top of mind’ - so find ways to drive popular culture. Budweiser’s ‘Wassup’ commercial is an excellent example. Originally premiered during NBC’s Monday Night Football in December 1999, the campaign became a pop-culture catchphrase and won the Cannes Grand Prix award and was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.

The ad creative also needs to be matched to the appropriate media. If you knew, for example, that 78% of all engagement with the video you created would be via mobile on Facebook, would you not optimize the video for that channel?  Alternatively, if you knew your print ad would only be extended to billboards, would you not optimize for vehicles speeding by at 80 kms per hour? Of course you would.

You should also be thinking about virality. Specifically, what makes something sharable? There is a wealth of information available of the science of making things go viral and even a great TED Talk by BuzzFeed's Publisher, Dao Nguyen. As an aside, there are a number of (largely unconscious) variables involved in what makes brands stand the test of time, which we have previously discussed at length.

BRAND LINK

The highest brand link comes from connecting your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story. By brand we ideally mean USP or brand truth.  So, don’t just make your brand central to the story - make it the driver of the story itself. 

Another useful way to tell a compelling human-interest story is to connect with your target audience using a meaningful consumer insight or find an emotional story to demonstrate how the consumer engages your brand.

But arguably, the single most important element in telling your brand story is to amplify what sets you apart from everyone else. Call it whatever you like - USP or brand truth, consumer benefit (or insert the buzzword du jour.) The point is to identify what makes your brand unique and different and weave that into your story (with a strong visual cue.)

MESSAGE

You probably already know this, however, when brand equity is measured it is based upon what the consumer believes (not what you want them to believe.) To this end, communication is not what is said, rather it is what is heard. The best brand communication therefore occurs when you focus on the one benefit that moves consumers.  It’s about telling the story behind your brand purpose.

Ask yourself, if you could tell the consumer one thing about your product or service - what would it be?  Remember also that the more messages you put into your ad, the less likely it is that consumers recall your primary message. *Millward-Brown data demonstrates that when an ad has more than one message the consumer recall drops by 37%.

Ultimately, try to move from a functional to an emotional benefit. Why? Because triggering an emotional reaction, whether joy, sadness, humour or sympathy, should be the goal of any creative.

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THE FOUR LAWS OF BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE

There is a four-step ‘habit loop’ that underlies all of human behaviour: cue, craving, response, and reward. When repeated, this neurological feedback loop leads to the formation of new habits.

THE FOUR LAWS OF BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE

1.     Cue: Make it obvious.

2.     Craving: Make it attractive.

3.     Response: Make it easy.

4.     Reward: Make it satisfying.

Note: These four laws can be applied to make any behaviour easier (and the inversion of each law can be applied to make any behaviour harder). In business, these same principles can be used to create more effective products and services and also help employees establish more effective habits.

THE 1ST LAW

The 1st Law of Behavioural Change is to make it obvious. This law is connected to the cue, which is the first step of the habit loop. A cue is anything that gets your attention (or your customer’s attention) and signifies what to do next. As you might expect, cues that are more obvious will be more likely to get a person’s attention and, as a result, are more likely to be acted upon.

This is one reason why advertising often feels intrusive. Many ads are loud, bright, glaring, and eye-catching—even if they are gaudy—because they are trying to be as obvious as possible.

The dozens of notifications that light up your phone, computer screen, social media networks, and software programs are an example of “making it obvious” for the user to know what to do next. In fact, many companies have found that the more notifications they send (text messages, email blasts, alerts, etc.), the more users will engage with their product. Many companies have realized that each reminder makes the product or service obvious again and the user remembers to come back to it.

As a user, this can be incredibly annoying: companies often appear to be in a race to the bottom to grab your attention and the app who interrupts you the most wins. The converse is also true.

In support of the 1st law, we would expect behaviours that are less obvious or prevalent to be less likely to occur. The ad placed below the fold is obviously clicked on less than the banner running at the top of the page. The products stored on the bottom shelf are less likely to be purchased. And so on. When an item or an action is invisible, it is often forgotten. This is one reason software companies hide buttons like “Cancel Account” and “Log Out” in hard-to-find places, nestled deep within the settings and menus.

Additionally, whenever possible you want to make anything that could distract the user from the desired behaviour invisible. It’s no surprise that many of the most habit-forming behaviours—like playing a slot machine at a casino—are solitary. There are no windows, very few distractions, and nothing but slot machines surrounding each player. It’s very easy to get into “the zone” and continue playing because distractions are invisible and the desired behaviour is obvious.

Businesses can utilize the 1st Law of Behavioural Change in many ways. Put your most profitable product in the front of the store or in the most visible locations. Include instructions with each product that prompt users to display your product in a prominent place in their home or on the home screen of their device. The most obvious cue is often the one that captures your attention. And the cue that gets your attention is the one that can initiate a habit.

THE 2ND LAW

The 2nd Law of Behavioural Change is to make it attractive. This law is connected to the craving, which is the second step of the habit loop. As we discussed in the 1st Law, you want your product to be obvious (e.g. at the top of the email inbox or on a huge billboard or sitting at the front of the store), but once it’s in an obvious location, you need the image it creates in the customer’s mind to be attractive.

Remember that every behaviour is preceded by a prediction. When it comes to business, this means every purchase is preceded by a prediction. This is a key point. The customer does not buy your product; they buy the prediction it creates in their mind. They look at all of the soda bottles in the vending machine and predict Coke will taste the best, so they buy it. Or, they choose the service with the best reviews because they predict it will be the most satisfying experience.

For many products, “making it attractive” comes down to explaining the benefits in a clear and compelling way. Choosing the correct words makes the message attractive and the product “beautiful” in the customer’s mind.

Personalizing the message can also be an effective way to implement the 2nd Law of Behavioural Change because products are often more attractive when they seem relevant to the customer’s life. If you’re a freelance writer, for example, it is more powerful to read a sales page with the title, “Exactly How to Double Your Income as a Freelance Writer” than to read, “How to Double Your Income.” It’s the same pitch, but the first one feels like it’s made for you.

Note: This strategy is even more powerful if you can use the person’s first name. Imagine if the freelance writer mentioned above was named Olivia and she received an email with the subject, “Olivia, here’s exactly how to double your income as a freelance writer.”

Similarly, many online retailers create offers that are highly personalized. Rather than offering a product for “managers,” they display different text on the sales page depending on who is looking at the screen. Depending on their title, one person sees a product for “chief financial offers” and another sees the same product pitched for “marketing managers.”

This strategy can be used in nearly any area of life. Everyone is “selling” something, even if it doesn’t feel like sales. Doctors sell healthy lifestyle changes to their patients. Coaches sell teamwork to their players. Parents sell life skills to their kids. Making your message personal—something as simple as saying the other person’s name—helps connect with people in a meaningful way and is one way to make change more attractive.

Amazon utilizes personalization every day. The company often used collaborative filtering to showcase items a customer has viewed recently (or products that are similar to what they have purchased in the past.) It becomes very attractive to spend money on Amazon because customers are always seeing what is relevant to them.

Of course, individual personalization is not always possible, but businesses can often “personalize” at scale if they pair the product with a strong identity. For example, Toyota has been able to connect driving a Prius with being environmentally friendly. If you are the type of person who believes strongly in helping the environment, then buying a Prius is a way to signal your identity to others.

The product instantly becomes more attractive to a certain type of consumer because it feels like an extension of their identity. This type of connection can be incredibly powerful, which means it might be useful to highlight the identity your product represents.

Another strategy that can increase the attractiveness of a product is highlighting social norms. Humans are heavily influenced by the crowd. If you can show a customer that other people like them use your product or service— people in their zip code, from their hometown, on their team, etc.—they will be more likely to find it attractive themselves.

There is an important caveat here that deals with framing: If people think the behaviour your product or service requires is rare, you should frame those who have it in a positive light (achieving status): “60% of millionaires read one book every day. With our new product, you can too.”

If people think the behaviour your product or service requires is common, then frame those who don’t do it in a negative light (deviating from the norm): “75% of people in your neighbourhood are paying less than you on their energy bill. Click here and learn how to not miss out on these savings.”

Finally, you can make any product inherently more attractive by employing the 3rd and 4th Laws of Behavioural Change. Behaviours that are “cheap”—easy to do, low social costs, immediate payoffs—are attractive. Behaviours that are “expensive”—hard to do, high social costs, delayed payoffs—are unattractive. Let’s talk more about how to get those two laws working in your favour.

THE 3RD LAW

The 3rd Law of Behavioural Change is to make it easy. This law is associated with the response, which is the actual behaviour or habit that you perform. Behaviours are more likely to be performed when they are easy—that is, when they can be accomplished with ease.

From a business standpoint, perhaps the most effective way to employ the 3rd Law of Behavioural Change is to map out the chain of behaviours that a customer must perform to purchase your product or use your service, and then search for any possible area where you can reduce the friction associated with the task.

Imagine the first ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft. When they were launching, they could have mapped out the chain of behaviours a customer had to perform to get a ride across town: walk outside, wait for a taxi to pass on the street, get in, ride across town, arrive at destination, pull out a credit card or cash, pay for the ride, put the credit card (or any change) back in their purse or wallet, get out of the car, etc.

Then, the company could look at each stage and ask themselves how they could reduce the friction associated with the task (or eliminate that step entirely):

• How can we make it easier to walk outside? What if users could download an app that would summon a car from their phone and didn’t have to walk outside at all? 
• How can we make it easier to wait for the ride? What if we told users how long it would be until a ride arrived? Then they could just walk outside at the right moment.
• How can we make it easier to get in the car? No change. 
• How can we make it easier to ride across town? Rather than leave it up to the driver’s memory, we could display the route on the user's phone and the driver’s phone. Now the user can make suggestions if they want to go a different way and the driver can rely on the GPS for up-to-date information and routing.
• How can we make it easier to pay for the ride?  We already have an app on the user’s phone. What if we asked users to upload their credit card information? Then, they could pay automatically and just exit the car once they arrive. And so on.

Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion. The idea is to make every phase of the process as convenient as possible.

Consider the timeline of Amazon’s shipping policies:

• 1994: Amazon founded. 
• 2002: Amazon launches Free Super Saver Shipping with free shipping on orders over $99. 
• 2005: Amazon launches Amazon Prime with free two-day shipping on all products.
• 2014: Amazon launches “Read While Your Book Ships” so people who bought the print version of a book can read the Kindle version instantly while they wait for the purchase to arrive in the mail. 
• 2018: Amazon launches free grocery delivery within two hours.

Amazon is continually looking to give customers what they want in an easier, faster, and more convenient fashion: Get it shipped. Get it shipped free. Get it shipped free in two days. Get it shipped free in two hours. Get it right now while you wait for us to ship it to you free in two days.

Great businesses remove every point of friction they can think of to make the desired behaviour as easy as possible.

THE 4TH LAW

The 4th Law of Behavioural Change is to make it satisfying. The final stage of the habit loop is the reward. If there is a reward associated with a behaviour—that is, it feels good and has a satisfying ending—then we have a reason to repeat it in the future.

The first three laws of behavioural change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behaviour will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavioural change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behaviour will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.

In business, making your product or service satisfying increases the odds that a customer will return next time. It is the fourth stage that closes the loop and encourages your customers to use your product or service habitually.

The speed of the reward is also a crucial factor in the 4th Law of Behavioural Change. Customers need to feel immediately successful—even if it’s just in some small way—each time they use a product or service. At a minimum, the product should solve the problem (i.e. resolve the craving they experienced in Law 2) and, if possible, it should do so with some surprise and/or delight as well.

Creating a satisfying experience requires a balance between the 2nd Law (make it attractive) and the 4th Law (make it satisfying) because your level of satisfaction is directly linked to your level of expectation and desire.

The danger of making too big a promise is that you’ll get people to buy once, but they won’t have a reason to buy again. Think: massive discounts that aren’t followed with great experiences or the sales team making a promise that the product team can’t deliver on. Huge expectations might trigger a single sale, but you’ll never create a buying habit.

One way to employ the 4th Law is to drop in little bits of satisfaction throughout the experience. For example, car manufacturers have begun to add fake engine noise to their cars and trucks to create a satisfying growl when the owner punches the accelerator.

Behaviours that make you feel good—that is, behaviours that are followed by an immediate sense of satisfaction or praise or encouragement or pleasure—are exactly the kind of behaviours you want to repeat in the future.

SUMMARY

An example of an addictive product is the slot machine, and indeed you’ll find that they employ all four laws of behavioural change.

Make It Obvious: Slot machines are extremely profitable and casinos know it. That’s why the first thing they do is make them obvious: slot machines outnumber table games 100-to-1 in nearly every casino.

Make It Attractive: Many electronic slot machines strategically employ the near-miss effect to create a false sense of reward. A near-miss occurs when the winning symbol appears just above or below the pay line. Imagine tapping the spin button, watching the wheels rotate, and seeing two cherries line up—but the third cherry narrowly misses. You almost won the jackpot.

That “almost” feeling tricks your brain into predicting the reward is now closer than before. With a little more work, you might be able to get it. After a near-miss, the reward system in your brain will light up with anticipation. Many machines are intentionally programmed to deliver near-misses more frequently than would arise by pure chance. By teasing a jackpot, the designers make the game more engaging, but they are also deceiving users by making them feel like a win is closer even though the odds of winning are no better than before.

Make It Easy: The entire experience of playing slots is designed to be easy. The chairs are comfortable enough to sit in for hours. Most machines don’t even require you to pull a lever anymore. Playing another round is as simple as pressing the SPIN button. When you run out of money, casinos make it as easy as possible to get more. Many slot machines allow you to pay directly from your seat. ATMs are always easy to access, and cash advance and debit withdrawal options are available when your account is empty.

Make It Satisfying: The only unsatisfying part of the experience is losing money, and slot machines are designed to hide this as best as possible. They make it difficult to tell how much money you are spending.

The traditional slot machine is just a lever and one wheel, but electronic slot machines allow users to play multiple wheels at the same time. Imagine a screen with one hundred tiny slot machine wheels spinning at once. Each time you press the spin button, you bet one hundred pennies—one per wheel. Say you win on thirty wheels during this particular turn. The machine will highlight your thirty wins. Flashing lights go off in celebration and the machine plays the sound of coins clinking into the dish. It feels as if you won thirty cents, but you really lost seventy cents. The machine frames a loss as a win.

The results? Casino patrons bet more than $37 billion annually—more than Americans spend attending sporting events ($17.8 billion), going to the movies ($10.7 billion), and buying music ($6.8 billion) combined.

This is the remarkable effect you get when you employ all four laws of behavioural change at once. When all the levers are pointed in the same direction, the likelihood of a given behaviour is amplifies exponentially.