• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 11, 2008

There’s nothing that kick starts a conference about a new movement in digital media like a couple of old sepia-toned black and white photos. But there was a reason why OMMA Behavioral conference chair Steve Smith put photos of two 20^th Century figures up on the screen to get things going. First he asked the audience if they could identify the figures. One was B.F. Skinner. The other was John B. Watson, who Smith described as “the father of American behaviorism.”

“After his career in academia, what did he do,” Smith polled the OMMA conference crowd? No answer, Smith supplied his own rhetorical response: “He worked at J. Walter Thompson, and in fact, during the 1920s introduced behavioral science to Madison Avenue.”

While that may seem like a good thing to attendees today, Smith pointed out that both Watson and Skinner were reviled by society for introducing the equivalent of social “totalitarianism” and that they left a lasting negative legacy about behaviorism.

“The term behaviorism has never served any social movement well,” Smith noted, suggesting, “We may want to consider a new term in terms of our own branding.”