The surprising finding, however, is that people look to high profile sources for answers, but paradoxically prefer more abstract types of messaging from these high-profile people or businesses.
It's based on the theory of the Long Tail, in this case the idea that the most high profile sources of traffic to your site actually make up less than the total sum of all the traffic from small sources combined.
"When Sánchez finally saw Romer's video talk, he saw that this was a high-profile source of external validation that could help push their ideas through," he wrote in an e-mail.
By Mr. Lamo's account, Private Manning bragged about this "as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks".
Why would Energy In Depth want to hide its high-profile sources of funding? .
To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.
It has produced a polarizing battle between the BBC and the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair that is being played out in the current high profile inquiry into the death of the source of the report, apparently by his own hand.
The identity of the missing princess was the source of a high profile disagreement between Russian and US forensic anthropologists: the Russians were convinced that Maria was missing from the mass grave, while the American experts believed that Anastasia was missing [2].
Of course, all this is nothing new: Universal Credit has been the source of a series of high profile screw-ups and criticisms.
A proof of concept as well as advocacy from high profile people were needed to persuade funding sources that machine intelligence was worth pursuing.
That is especially true of high profile athletes.
