In his latest column for B&T, global CSO and award-winning strategy leader Leif Stromnes unpacks the tunnel vision that can cloud our perceptions while working on a project. Advertisers and marketers would do well to balance realistic outcomes with ‘insider passion,’ a balance that isn’t always easy to strike. By unpacking spectacular failures as well as successes, Stromnes shows how brands can set themselves up for a winning formula.
In April 2020, as the world locked down and people desperately sought entertainment from their couches, a new streaming service launched with unprecedented fanfare.
Quibi promised to revolutionise how we consume video content, offering “quick bites” of premium programming designed specifically for mobile phones.
The company had raised $1.75 billion in funding, the largest amount ever for a pre-revenue media startup. Hollywood’s biggest names lined up to create content. Veteran executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, with decades of success between them, led the charge. Industry analysts called it the future of entertainment.
Eight months later, Quibi shut down permanently, burning through nearly all of its funding and becoming one of the most spectacular failures in media history.
What makes this collapse particularly fascinating isn’t just the speed of Quibi’s demise, but how predictable it was to outside observers.
Media critics had questioned the concept from day one. Market research showed limited consumer appetite for premium short-form content. The timing, launching during a pandemic when people were stuck at home rather than commuting, seemed catastrophically wrong.
Yet none of this deterred Quibi’s leadership team. They remained convinced their vision would succeed, even as subscriber numbers flatlined and competitors like TikTok dominated the short-form video space with user-generated content.
This phenomenon has a name in psychology, the “inside view,” identified by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman. It describes our tendency to focus on the specific details of our own projects while ignoring broader statistical realities about similar endeavours.
When we’re on the inside of a project, we become captivated by our unique circumstances, our superior team, our innovative approach. We construct elaborate narratives about why our situation is different, why the usual rules don’t apply to us.
The outside view, by contrast, looks at base rates – the historical success and failure rates of similar projects. It asks: “What typically happens to ventures like this one?”
For Quibi, the outside view was damning.
The vast majority of new streaming services fail. Consumer attention is increasingly fragmented. Premium content requires massive ongoing investment. Mobile-first video platforms struggle to compete with free alternatives.
But Katzenberg and Whitman weren’t looking at base rates. They were inside their own story, focused on what made Quibi special: their Hollywood connections, their innovative technology, their massive war chest of funding.
The inside view feels more compelling because it’s rich with specific, vivid details. Katzenberg could point to his track record of revitalising Disney’s animation division. Whitman had successfully scaled eBay. They had A-list directors creating content. They had partnerships with major advertisers.
These specific factors feel more real and actionable than abstract statistics about industry failures. Our brains are also wired to give more weight to concrete, available information than to numerical base rates.
Kahneman discovered this bias through a painful personal experience.
In the 1970s, he was part of a team developing a new curriculum for Israeli high schools. The team was confident they could complete the project in two years. When Kahneman asked a curriculum expert on the team about similar projects, the expert revealed that comparable initiatives typically took seven to ten years, and about 40 per cent were never completed at all.
Despite this sobering outside perspective, the team continued with their original timeline. They were convinced their project was different, special, destined for success.
Eight years later, they finally completed a curriculum that was never widely adopted.
The bias exists because evolution has wired us to be optimistic about our own prospects. Our ancestors who believed they could successfully hunt mammoths, find mates and survive harsh winters were more likely to attempt these challenging tasks and occasionally succeed. Those who accurately assessed the low probability of success might have given up before trying.
Optimism bias served our species well when the cost of overconfidence was manageable and the potential upside was survival itself. But in modern contexts, the insider’s view can lead us astray.
Despite the abundance of high-profile failures (think Pepsi Crystal, Apple Newton, Google+ and Theranos), what makes the inside view so persistent and sticky is that it occasionally produces spectacular success.
In 1977, a 29-year-old film school graduate named George Lucas pitched his space opera script to every major Hollywood studio. The concept was simple: a farm boy saves the galaxy with the help of mystical powers and a band of rebels fighting an evil empire.
Studio executives were baffled. Science fiction films were box office poison. The previous year’s sci-fi releases had all flopped spectacularly. Market research showed audiences wanted gritty, realistic dramas like Rocky and All the President’s Men. Even Lucas’s own mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, advised him to abandon the project.
The data was overwhelming: space movies don’t sell tickets.
But Lucas had an unshakeable feeling that Star Wars would succeed. Despite every rational indicator pointing to failure, he pressed forward, eventually convincing 20th Century Fox to greenlight the project for a modest budget.
Star Wars became the highest-grossing film of all time and launched a multi-billion-dollar franchise that continues today.
There are other high-profile success stories. Netflix revolutionised entertainment. Uber transformed transportation.
These outliers become ripping yarns and the stories we tell ourselves about why our situation is different.
But for every Netflix, there are hundreds of failed streaming services. For every Uber, thousands of transportation startups have disappeared without a trace. For every Star Wars, there are many more movies that went straight to DVD. The inside view makes us focus on the winners while ignoring the statistical reality of the losers.
So how can marketers combat the inside view bias?
Research by psychologist Chip Heath suggests that the most successful decision-makers actively seek an alternative, independent perspective. They deliberately step back from their emotional investment to consider base rates and statistical patterns relevant to their situation.
For marketing teams, this might mean regularly consulting industry benchmarks for campaign performance, studying the success rates of similar product launches, or seeking input from colleagues who aren’t emotionally invested in the project.
The key is balance.
Pure insider thinking leads to unrealistic optimism and poor resource allocation. Pure outsider thinking can result in missed opportunities and excessive conservatism.
The most effective approach combines insider passion with an outsider perspective.
Smart marketers harness the motivational power of the insider’s view while building systematic checks against its excesses. They encourage creative teams to believe in breakthrough possibilities while also demanding rigorous testing against objective criteria.
After all, someone has to be the exception to the statistical rule. The question is whether you have genuine reasons to believe it’s you, or whether you are simply seeing what you want to see.
As George Lucas proved, sometimes the force really is with you. But as Daniel Kahneman learned, it usually takes way longer than you think.
