Gambling, Punting, and Unnecessary Risk

I enjoy listening to sports radio, but I have not done so often lately. I have preferred the quiet to the talk.

When I do listen, I notice that they spend quite a bit of time talking about betting on sports. That's wasted on me. I'm not a gambler. Moreover, the entire idea of gambling is foreign to me.

We live in West Texas, and I drive to New Mexico a couple of times per year. Usually around Roswell we see a billboard for Powerball lottery. Texas is not a Powerball state, so the jackpot amount usually is a surprise. When it's large, we usually drop a dollar.

People call the lottery a tax on people who are bad at math, but I would argue that these are exactly my kind of odds. I won't miss the dollar, and I'd be a lot better off with an extra $200 million. So spending an extra $3 a year is no trouble.

Conversely, doubling my money holds almost no interest. Whatever spare money I have has a purpose. And losing it for no good reason seems, well, stupid. And doubling it won't buy me a new house, a new car, or anything I really want. Thus the risk-reward ratio is quite poor.

This guiding principle extends to sports. I love Big Ten football. Woody Hayes. Three yards and a cloud of dust. And although I enjoy watching Texas Tech football, it is against my entire nature. I would have made a boring football coach.

I believe Jim Tressel when he says that the punt is the most important play in football. I believe that defense does win championships. I grew up watching Marty Schottenheimer's Kansas City Chiefs win 16-13 slugfests.

There's nothing like a tenacious defense and an ability to run the ball. You can close out games.

Last night, watching the Red Raiders get pummeled by Mobilehoma, coach Mike Leach's propensity to go for it on fourth down failed. Giving such a skilled opponent a short field was extremely costly.

This itself is an interesting study in risk. If you've ever played video game football, you occasionally find yourself ahead late in the game trying to protect a lead. Faced with certain defeat, your opponent is forced to repeatedly go for it on fourth down.

In my experience, this is almost impossible to defend. It seems that so much of football is designed to keep most runs short. So for the entirety of the game, holding your opponent to three straight 3-yard runs spells victory. They punt on 4th and 1.

However, nursing a 3 point lead with 2:30 to go, your opponent is going to try for that yard every time. And it's incredibly effective.

Yet so few take this gamble when it's not absolutely necessary. Imagine how difficult it would be to stop a team with a solid running attack and play action passing that always went for it on fourth and short. I'm not saying it would be effective in the long run, but I would hate to defend it.

In the end, it's a function of probabilities, and a well executed punt has better odds.

And these coaches are gambling with millions of dollars: their lucrative contracts.

Which brings us back to the entire issue of gambling.

Although I don't have the patience to fact check this, ESPN radio's Colin Cowherd said this week that sports gambling increases when the economy is bad. When you and your family need the money the most, you're most likely to flush it away.

In our lab, we spend a lot of time studying appetitive and aversive processes. Good things feel good, and bad things feel bad. This is universal. But for some people, good things feel so good that risks are ignored. And for others, bad things feel so bad that no risk is tolerable.

To me, gambling is simply a function of appetite and aversion. I don't have a high tolerance for risk, so it logically follows that I am not much of a gambler. But it also explains why people might be more likely to gamble during times of economic strife.

Imagine that you're a little bit hungry, but you'd have to run across a busy highway to get food. You probably would sit out the human Frogger. Now imagine that you're starving. No amount of traffic would prevent you from risking the highway. Eat or die. So the traffic does not increase your risk.

Perhaps you need that extra $100 so bad that you cannot see the folly of losing the $100 you do have.

So Las Vegas remains a mystery to me. It's a monument built to a god that I just don't understand.

Remember This: Your Brain Is Cool

I spent much of Friday night and Saturday in the office analyzing data for a study we conducted on in-game advertising (the lead author is Harsha Gangadharbatla, now of the University of Oregon).

During the course of the racing (car) game, participants drove under five billboards. They were not told anything about the billboards, and the idea was to check whether they noticed. We measured physiology to determine whether they were subconsciously noticing (they were), and we later measured their memory to see whether they actually stored the brand names.

First, participants were asked to freely recall the brands that they saw. Performance on this task was not especially good (16%). Later, participants were asked to recognize the brands among other brands in the same product category. Performance on this task was about 40%.

The main points of the study are pretty interesting; however, one little observationt that will not make it in the final paper was pretty interesting.

For each of the five brands, participants could either recall it or not. Furthermore, they could recognize it or not. Obviously, some people were more likely to pay attention to the driving (gamers, it turns out), and some people were more likely to pay attention to the billboards (nongamers, it turns out). Harsha knew this would be the case, but I did not.

For each brand, we could examine whether the probability it was recalled was related to the probability that it was recognized. Perhaps participants good at recall were simply good at recognition.

But this was not the case with our data. For each brand, the probability that it was recalled was significantly correlated with the probability that it was recognized. Furthermore, for each brand, the probability that it was recalled was most strongly related to its own probability of recall.

It could be the case that recalling Brand A was most strongly related to recognizing Brand B -- perhaps even by random chance. But this was not the case. In every case, A was most strongly related to A, and so on.

In many ways, this should be the case. But the fact that it was consistently the case suggests that our measurements of recognition and recall were indeed indexing how well these brands were encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved from memory.

One kind of memory for each brand was strongly related to another kind of memory for that same brand and only weakly related (at best) to memory for other brands seen perhaps a minute before or after.

When you're trying to understand this limited-capacity attention and memory system of ours, such data are helpful.

Although this, too, will not make it in the paper, visual inspection of the physiological data (cardiac response curves) suggests that participants had an involuntary reflex associated with sensory intake for the brands the recognized but not as much for those that they did not recognize.

This tidbit is pretty awesome, but it will also not make the final paper due to how we analyze data. Although the most appropriate statistical test backs up the "story" told in the preceding paragraph, the highly specialized nature of that particular test makes it seem as if we are being disingenuous in looking for statistical significance. Thus, it is easier to omit than to justify.

All of this continues my respect and love for the human brain. What an amazing device.

In-Game Advertising Not So Bad

From Mediaweek.com:

IGA: Most Gamers Cool With In-Game Ads

Ads pack more wallop for brands than ads appearing in traditional media

June 17, 2008
By Mike Shields

The vast majority of gamers are fine with seeing ads placed within video games, and those ads pack more wallop for brands than ads appearing in traditional media, according to comprehensive new study released by top vendor IGA Worldwide.

IGA, which works with game publishers such as EA and Activision to insert both permanent and rotation ads within video games played via an Internet connection, last year tapped Nielsen BASES and Nielsen Games to conduct a in-depth six month examination of the impact of in-game advertising using traditional brand effectiveness measures such as awareness and recall.

The report, Consumers’ Experience with In-Game Content & Brand Impact of In-Game Advertising Study, includes responses from nearly 1,300 gamers surveyed using IGA’s proprietary software while playing games in their homes, with participation from the advertisers Taco Bell, Jeep and Wrigley.

Industry, Academics Still Not Talking

I am increasingly frustrated by the chasm between academic research about the media and industry research about the media.

The chasm is in readership, not interest or topic. We could learn a lot from each other, but we don't. We cannot learn from industry because their research is proprietary, and, frankly, they won't share.

Why they chose not to learn from us is another matter.

Reading today's Daily News from Advertising Age, there is an interesting story on video game advertising.

One of the subheadlines reads, "Interactivity, motion work best."

Yup. I could have told them that. I've done a little bit of research on video games, and I've done quite a bit on various forms of media. These two principles are pretty much gimmes. Obviously people more senior than me have done far more research.

But it has been my experience that industry does not pick up the phone. They do not pick up the journals. They just reinvent the wheel. And although we can be eggheads in our ivory tower, we have the added benefit of time and perspective.

We can take the time to build theory. We can look at the bigger picture. This is seldom the case in industry, where researchers have to satisfy this client on this day.

There are so few actual obstacles that preclude working together, yet so many seem to remain nonetheless.