They’re back.

A healthcare advocacy group run by physicians is preparing to file a petition calling on President Obama to stop eating hamburgers, hot dogs and other unhealthy foods before cameras. “As role model to millions of Americans, the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public,” said Susan Levin, nutrition education director with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

We saw this crew in Iowa at a Bacon Festival, trying to gin up any attention to their cause by stepping into somebody else’s spotlight. That apparently didn’t work well so the PCRM is moving up in weight class to the President.

Who is funding such lame work? Good grief. Look at their budget! Nearly $11 million in operating expenses for 2011 with over $14 million in assets! And the best they can do is that Bad Bacon Persuasion or petitioning Obama to eat hot dogs behind a curtain?

Perhaps a Peitho nomination is in order after all . . . you just have to know the TACT and the Other Guys.

This is just a haphazard sampling, but with an Effect Size this Stupendous, even a focus group will demonstrate it. Start with a recent article about the Obama re-election effort.

CHICAGO — With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all.

Now, the popularity of hiring statisticians in business.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick. Computing has become cheap and available enough to process any number of formulas.

Finally, a scientific breakthrough for data mining.

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

You’ve read variations on the Big Numbers theme. There’s Truth in them thar Hills of Data and if you know how to Mine Them, you can Change the Other Guys, win elections, earn trillions, and sit at the Cool Table. Particularly among aspiring persuasion mavens, Big Numbers with Big Data and Big Statistics is the New New Thing. Since everyone is living in Web 2.0 everyone has torrents, tides, and tsunamis of information about Other Guys which has got to lead to Change. Right?

While there’s a ton of nuance in the answer to that question, the First Nuance for me is:

Numbers without Theory is just a million Monkeys at the Abacus.

Just as those monkeys at the typewriter won’t produce Shakespeare, neither will these monkeys at the abacus produce Fishbein and Aizen or Petty and Cacioppo or, to be more famous about it, Kahneman and Tversky. Yet, the New New Thing rush to Big Numbers pretends you can drop the theorist and as long as you have monkeys with degrees from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon armed with quantum computers, you can discover like Einstein.

You see my bias. I’m a theory guy and that reflects both my nature and nurture. Without a schematic, a blueprint, scribbles on a paper cocktail paper, you will not find Truth whether for elections, business, or science. Theory is the One Ring that binds all other Rings. And the better your Theory, the better everything else about your persuasion.

Sure, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. But remember.

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You Can Change It.

The New England Journal of Medicine reports great science with bad outcomes. A team of researchers recruited over one thousand pregnant women who smoked and gave them a 15 hour behavioral counseling treatment and then randomly assigned half the women to get a nicotine patch or – and this is the great science – to a placebo patch. The researchers then counted who quit smoking through delivery. Here’s the bad news.

Of 1050 participants, 521 were randomly assigned to nicotine-replacement therapy and 529 to placebo. There was no significant difference in the rate of abstinence from the quit date until delivery between the nicotine-replacement and placebo groups (9.4% and 7.6%, respectively; unadjusted odds ratio with nicotine-replacement therapy, 1.26; 95% confidence interval, 0.82 to 1.96), although the rate was higher at 1 month in the nicotine-replacement group than in the placebo group (21.3% vs. 11.7%). Compliance was low; only 7.2% of women assigned to nicotine-replacement therapy and 2.8% assigned to placebo used patches for more than 1 month. Rates of adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes were similar in the two groups.

Even with behavioral counseling (the persuasion part) and a drug (the power part) fewer than 10% of pregnant women were able to quit smoking until delivery. Worse still, the drug delivered through the patch produced no gain in behavior change over a mere placebo. You’ve got to figure that pregnant women would have to be more motivated to quit compared to other smokers and yet given persuasion and power, you’re lucky to get 10% quit rates over just a few months!

Some TACTs resist all persuasion and smoking is one of them. The presence of addiction destroys all proven persuasion plays and even most power plays like drugs or money. When determining your strategy, you must understand the possible TACTs and all the factors that drive them. Addiction overwhelms the effect of persuasion past simple plays like Quit Now! or, better still, implementation intentions. Sure, keep persuading, but realize that communication is a weak intervention, so control your costs.

Getting smokers to stop is worth the smallest persuasion effort you can offer (like Implementation Intentions). Doing more is a waste of resources. Instead, use expensive persuasion to maneuver Other Kids away from starting.

Here’s an interesting WSJ article that looks at American health care delivery and divides it into two well known camps: Best Practices or Market Forces. The Best Practices approach argues that experts should acquire scientific knowledge, evaluate its quality, then define Best Practices that should be delivered throughout the system for both providers and people. Market Forces argues instead that delivery should be based on what people want and will pay for with providers who decide what they want to give and at what price.

You can see metaphorically the two approaches to persuasion in this case. Persuasion can take either a Source or a Receiver orientation. With the Source approach everything depends upon how the Source thinks and acts, the process and the outcome flow from Source creativity and action. The Receiver orientation is just my Rule, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matter whether the Other Guy changes.

The Best Practices approach to health is that Source orientation. The Source is the expert and drives everything else. By contrast, Market Forces hit that Receiver orientation and the emphasis upon the Other Guys.

Sure, it takes two to tango and you always have Source and Receiver mixed in every persuasion play if only because we’re talking about communication and those parts must always play. This isn’t Either-Or. It is emphasis.

My bias from both experience and research is on that Receiver, Other Guy orientation. I was never smart enough and could not find enough smart enough partners to get close to the Queen of Tomorrow solution where a bunch of us experts Made It Happen. As long as I kept my own supreme intelligence and efficacy in a straightjacket and maintained a laser beam focus on Other Guys, I could occasionally find success.

Given the size of the persuasion problem here with over 300 million Americans and a couple of million providers of various types, I don’t see how any expert or group of experts can possibly arrive at a solution that actually works. Sure, you can pretend like the Obama Administration does with their health and safety interventions, assuming, of course, you can get them past a court – whodda thought persuasion had to be legal? But even when legal, they don’t produce much Change in Other Guys.

And, isn’t that the TACT?

Coming soon.

WANTED: Highly motivated, sincere, and passionate Institute seeks Persuasion Professional with skill and experience in changing public opinion and voting behavior on health and safety legislation. We want to pass the first State law that bans Driving with Dogs, DwD. When we achieve this vision we then will pivot into the National scene to obtain Federal legislation. Qualified candidates must work with talented amateurs, small budgets that encourage innovative thinking, and persistence past constant external derision, internal civil war, and outcome failure. Pay with benefits, an air-conditioned corner office, access to liberated version of Photoshop, and a stack of tested Warning Labels are only a small part of this attractive, compelling, and unique opportunity at a job with lifetime tenure regardless of performance. We seek passionate people of color or pale people who glow when inspired. Text or tweet your application if you Like us on Facebook.

Coming later.

Seeking: Registered (currently) lobbyist group seeks stone cold maven to wreak havoc on Dog Hating activists. Must die like Iago if things go badly. Large budget, no office, and access to teams of professionals in deep cover. Only those without fingerprints need apply. Must pass for any ethnic, racial, language, or gender group. Evade normal application and security processes to secure an interview.

Look to persuasion on animal issues as the next New New Thing in Lifestyle legislation. Lots of persuasion opportunities on all sides.

Seriously. I remember a number of years ago working with a talented group of tobacco control mavens just as the Master Settlement was being negotiated. One of them related that as soon as the lawsuit was in place, everyone should get ready for the Food Police. We all scoffed. Food is like tobacco?!?