Too Good To Be True: The Trust Problem In Our Recruitment Hackathon
HACKATHON CONSIDERS ROLE OF PAYMENTS IN INTENTION ECONOMY
As described previously, InvenTrust’s hackathon challenges participants to build tools for applying digital incentives to recruitment, specifically the recruitment of participants for medical clinical trials. The intuition underlying the hackathon is that incentives may be useful in targeting audiences defined by having the valuable intention to respond to a call to a desired action. What we call the Intention Economy is built on these audiences: purchasers, actual voters, and donors (of both time and money). Responding to a call for recruits is the focus here. Toward that end, a development site for applying incentives to clinical trial recruitment will be made available to hackathon participants, as a guide in their work.
SHOULD PEOPLE BE COMPENSATED TO REVEAL THEIR INTENT?
One underlying rationale of applying “paid intention” to clinical trial participant recruitment is that those with the intent to enroll in a clinical trial — by revealing that intent — provide valuable information, and should be compensated for doing so. Recruiting is in large part a marketing problem. For a marketer, combining searches as revelations of intent with a stream of subsequent actions creates the most valuable click stream on the Web — paid search traffic. However, at the moment, few consumers (or intenders) receive any compensation for revealing what they are in the market to buy or do, even if they can subsequently prove that they did in fact buy what they sought or do what they indicated they would do.
CONSUMERS DON’T TRUST GETTING PAID TO BE PITCHED
Most of the time, people look for the catch. They squint for the fine print. They see the bait, but fear the switch. If I offered to pay you to be pitched — to take a job I was looking to fill, to make a charitable donation, or to enroll in a clinical trial I was conducting — you’d likely be looking, squinting and trembling. If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Years of training as a consumer have taught you to know better.
That’s side A of the trust problem in paying for intention. The people whom you want to incentivize just don’t believe in your incentives.
CONSUMERS AS FREE RIDERS AND FREELOADERS
This trust problem has a side B: marketers hate compensating consumers to do anything, other than to transact with them. Discounts, coupons, rebates, loyalty programs — sure, those are commonplace. Only once the consumer is forking over the purchase price is the seller willing to make a post-purchase reduction in price, or give some other type of reward.
Propose paying a potential customer (or recruit) to do anything short of purchase from (or enroll with) the marketer, such as look at an ad, and old pros typically will laugh you out of their office (if you even make it that far). Beyond having a bedrock belief that this approach has been tried and failed before, the skeptics reason that, however much benefit may come from enticing some of the persuadable to consider a pitch, these benefits will be overwhelmed by the costs of paying to pitch the tire kickers (i.e., those not in the market to transact) and the freeloaders (i.e., those who may transact, but have no interest in the marketer’s particular offering). Paying shoppers to look at ads would be like having a store with no cashier, trusting consumers to pay for items on the way out the door (never mind that this type of store is not so far-fetched as you might think — see the figure below).
DESIGNING INCENTIVES TO MANAGE TRUST IN A TWO-SIDED MARKET
The above attempts to take a clear-eyed view of some of the fundamental challenges involved in intention incentives, as background for considering some specific design issues in the hackathon. These issues include:
- If incentives to suppliers of intention are used, what actions and circumstances should trigger the obligation to pay these incentives by the demanders of that intention?
- How should incentives be priced, so that the incentivized traffic delivers an attractive return to marketers (and recruiters)?
- Should validation of intent be incorporated into settlement of incentives, and if so, how should this validation be implemented, while keeping the consumer value proposition clear to potential prospects (e.g., by avoiding excessive caveats and conditions to payment)?
- How can the traffic attracted by the incentives achieve scale, such as by optimizing the attention the incentives attract?
- Could new technologies or protocols help to enable incentives for intention? Students of blockchain are by now familiar with its promises to solve trust issues in many sets of circumstances, but we do not pre-judge whether the incentives involved in this hackathon are one such set.
After practicing corporate and securities law, I began my career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst in the technology media telecom sector at Deutsche Bank in 1999. Since 2017, I have advised clients on media investing and fundraising, blockchain applications, and the use of digital incentives in advertising. I have a BA in Economics and an MBA from the University of Chicago, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and am a CFA Charterholder.
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