Short answer? The Gap more than seven times over.

Even a cursory glance at many of the most popular tools –such as Radian6, Sysomos, Lithium– show a focus on volume and activity as metrics for success. If your page, wall, or feed is seeing a flurry of activity, you’re winning. If you have more followers than the other dude, you’re winning. It’s no wonder so many brands focus on volume as a valuable metric for success.

These tools hope to help brands monitor their performance, but they all struggle to account for the objectives a brand is trying to solve for. None provide a range of metrics that are capable of assessing performance in truly meaningful ways – measuring where and how digital executions are succeeding or failing and providing insight into the appropriate next steps.

Imagine if you were VP of Customer Experience for a large hotel. It is hardly a stretch to realize that tailored metrics detailing the average time it took to reply to customer inquiries would be useful in explaining, in part, your performance across digital platforms and the value that brings to the business. To help understand how you stack up against your competitors, this (and other) metrics could then be indexed and benchmarked against data points accessible to anyone who knows where to look for them. To top it off, you’d probably want a notification pushed to your community manager’s iPhone if the response rate dropped below a set performance threshold, so they can respond appropriately. Tailoring and matching the metrics to your business objectives and measurement strategy provides much more actionable insights than measuring for volume alone.

At scale, requests for insight like this become increasingly difficult for general-purpose social media monitoring tools to deliver upon. While great for research, general-purpose measurement tools are focussed on high-level reporting, rather than deep analysis. As a result, most who rely on them alone end up with a muddied analysis of their performance, chock-full of false positives.

Recognizing that social media monitoring tools aren’t delivering the right kind of value often leads to a discussion about rolling out your own tools – not something everyone is equipped to do. It can be challenging enough to design your own data mining tools, let alone retain someone who can do something useful with the data, but doing so can pay dividends. Even if you’re not ready to consider building something from the ground up, here are three questions to help you assess whether you’re set up to successfully measure your online performance.

1. Is your measurement framework connected to meaningful data sets, where the output is a cogent, action-oriented analysis that helps inform the decisions you’re making?
2. Does the social media monitoring tool you’ve chosen allow you to plug in your own data sets (static or dynamic) for a richer, complete picture of your performance?
3. Does your level of analysis extend beyond the reports generated by these monitoring tools? They are a great start, but leave out a level of insight that’s only obtainable through a customized approach accompanied by a quality data set.

What has your business been doing to measure its performance online? Could you clearly articulate the pieces of your strategy? We’d love to hear from you.

Twenty years ago, building a national (or global) brand was a multi-year, multi-billion dollar proposition. And that’s not just because word traveled slower. Everything traveled slower. Today’s digital and social technology has ushered in new opportunities for brand building that operate under a different construct, defined by different expectations.

Despite these new opportunities and expectations, the four key traits of good brand remain the same. The best brands personify core values, offer unique experiences, are remarkable, and deliver consistency, consistently. Surprisingly, the familiar traits and patterns of great brands become more accessible (and more fragile) in a digital age:

1. Connecting your core values with a community. A great brand is driven by a set of core values. Knowing what a brand stands for, and seeing those values manifest in its everyday behavior, helps like-minded consumers create meaningful connections. The internet allows brands to find and connect with shared interest groups (communities that value the same things they do) in significantly more efficient ways. From MeetUp.com to Facebook, major platforms are bringing people with shared values together.
2. Creating an experience unlike any other. A great brand is noticeably different from its competition. In a world of choice overload and decision fatigue, brands need to take drastic action to stand out, particularly in categories where product parity is high. One area many brands have yet to fully explore is the digital functionality they add to their experience. The Weight Watchers iPhone application is a dramatic value add for a user. Every brand has an opportunity to exceed their category competition here, but only by evaluating their users’ unmet needs and going out on a limb to invent something new.
3. Finding out what is worth talking about. A great brand is remarkable. As Seth Godin has been saying for years, people talk about brands that are doing something worth talking about. The unparalleled transparency and immediacy of the web means that brand builders can (if they ask/listen) get an honest perspective on what is or isn’t remarkable about their brand and plan accordingly. The recent McDonald’s #McDStories Twitter debacle demonstrated that many people’s most remarkable story may not be a winner for the brand.
4. Delivering a repeat performance. A great brand experience is consistent, no matter the time or place. People come to count on their favorite brands as a bastion of reliable delight – note the almost cavalier certainty of the Apple fanboys waiting to buy the iPad 3 sight unseen. What’s amazing about the era we live in is that our collective timeframe orientation has been drastically shortened by technology. It is possible, through a series of smart moves in the digital space, to build an incredibly valuable and trusted brand in very short order – perhaps less than a year. It is equally possible to drive a massive brand into the ground just as fast.

Today’s digital and social technology has ushered in new opportunities for brand building, operating under  different constructs and defined by different expectations.

What this all means is that your brand, any brand, is just a few months away from a major reputation boost. You can identify the audiences that share your values, listen to them talk about your brand or category to find out what’s worth talking about, develop a clear strategy for setting yourself apart, and make a series of quick successive digital investments that will dazzle your customers. We’ve seen State Farm take similar action recently, and the future looks bright for them.

While manufacturers revealed countless Internet-enabled TV sets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), YouTube’s VP of Global Content Robert Kyncl announced the Internet-streaming giant wants to remake the online video world to look more like television. In 2011 the service announced a $100 million investment in original content, targeted at studios and big name creators as well as home-grown YouTube stars. At CES, Kyncl confirmed YouTube’s vision of a future that goes beyond cat videos, and involves curating a hundred or so channels of professional content targeted at niche audiences. In short, YouTube wants to remake its streaming video service to look like the cable world.

Google’s video streaming site now delivers 4 billion video views per day and claims an hour of video is uploaded to the site every second. As Kyncl pointed out, many of YouTube’s highest performing channels would rank among the top 20 cable channels in terms of viewership. Machinima.com for instance, a channel focused on young men who play video games, enjoys “125 million viewers watching more than 1 billion of its videos a month,” reports the LA Times.YouTube wants to double-down on this success, increasing the quality of content and curating channels that would more specifically target niche audiences.

Many of YouTube’s highest performing channels would rank among the top 20 cable channels in terms of viewership.

The assumption behind YouTube’s new licensing venture is that they can bring back appointment TV — something the DVR and the Internet effectively killed off. The rise of multi-set households in the 1980s and the expansion of cable in the 1990s fragmented the television audience, splitting viewers across multiple viewing locations and an increasing number of channels. The spread of the DVR and TiVo in the early 2000s, finished the job the VCR had commenced by allowing people to efficiently time-shift their viewing, meaning not only did they not need to huddle together in front of the living room set, but they no longer needed to assemble at the same time to enjoy their favorite programming.

In effect, these developments broke the power of the television schedule — while live sports, news events, awards shows, reality TV finales, and certain programming blocks (Fox’s “Animation Domination” and Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” serving as two contemporary examples) can still assemble reasonable numbers of viewers simultaneously, the bulk of television’s viewers consume when and where they desire. The development of effective online streaming offerings from the major networks and Hulu have further fractured the schedule’s draw.

By investing in high-quality content targeted at specific audiences, and transforming itself into a place viewers approach as a set of channels rather than a space they engage with as a searchable patchwork of content, YouTube’s new channel venture could bring back appointment viewing by restructuring the online video experience as one that regularly delivers audiences reliable bites of content.

In effect, their investment aims to create more compelling content, and their restructuring as a series of channels serves to deliver video in an fashion that resembles an RSS-feed. Figures from Nielsen reported by USA Today suggest that “The average person now watches a half-hour of online videos a week, though that number doubles among 25- to 34-year-olds.” YouTube’s restructure aims to position itself as the provider of that regular half-hour or so in an “appointment” model that conforms to the Internet-era logic of personalization and pull-style access, rather than television’s time-sensitive push model.

Time will tell whether YouTube is successful in re-inventing itself, and whether this reinvention means major content creators play nice with it. If successful it would organize the myriad of viewers who engage with YouTube daily into something that more resembles the manageable “audiences” of television than the diverse and active “users” of the Internet. If it fails, there are always more cat videos.

—Ox, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

One thing you can be fairly certain about when it comes to marketing and digital is that your competition, by and large, relies on the same measurements and near-term goals that you do. These goals predominate because they are simple to understand and commensurate with traditional measurements and goals. But rarely do they reflect the changing fundamentals of marketing, which results in a status quo that feels somewhat disconnected from the best new opportunities, despite the ever increasing speed with which marketers adopt new buzzwords (usually from a “guru”) that talk to changes wrought by digital. It’s become hard enough to keep up, in other words, but the value of thinking differently about digital has increased, not diminished.

Combating the malaise of this status quo and the inertia behind it requires organizational chutzpah — the willingness to question accepted wisdom and behavior, and to entertain unconventional ideas. Startups typically overflow with chutzpah, but it dilutes as they grow. Today’s most competitive businesses embody it through adulthood, however, and Amazon’s Price Check app constitutes a recent and succinct example. The Price Check app rewards users for scanning merchandise prices in retail stores with their phones, allowing Amazon to offer a lower price on the spot while collecting valuable competitive intelligence. This attack on the biggest remaining advantage physical stores possess caused no small amount of outrage. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) decried Amazon’s incentive-driven promotion to encourage use of the app as anticompetitive: “Small businesses are fighting everyday to compete with giant retailers, such as Amazon, and incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far.” Implementing the future at someone’s expense alway results in backlash, and you have to be particularly fearless to do it to a sacred cow like small business, of course.

Combating the malaise and inertia of the status quo requires organizational chutzpah — the willingness to question accepted wisdom and behavior, and to entertain unconventional ideas.

As a counterexample, startups are also falling victim to incrementalism and the status quo and now behave much like anyone else. Let’s call this “Grouponitis.” The symptoms include a laser-like focus on maximizing revenue and market share with nary a thought given to the eventual profitability of it all, combined with a lack of a distinct offering to consumers (despite leading the market, there’s little to distinguish Groupon from its competitors in the eyes of consumers, a fact that is diminishing their first-mover advantage rapidly). Many startups now just amount to new forms of advertising, audacious only in trivial ways. This is the same kind of convergence prominent in established industries, but it is taking place in nascent ones faster than before.

Organizational chutzpah requires committing to a vision of the future you want to see. Developing a marketing strategy based upon that constructed future is a delicate balancing act between recognizing and adapting to the inevitable while remaining distinct and uniquely valuable. Furthermore, lots of marketers trip up and actually end up reinforcing the status quo by trying to derive a sense of the inevitable from an examination of the competition: we rarely see a sufficient level of insight about the future arrive from analysis of the immediate competition. A broad and lateral analysis is essential to determining how the cards are going to fall.

Instead of focusing solely on catching up with the competition (although by all means do that too, if you can afford to), think about what distinguishes you in the eyes of the consumer, and how that unique part of your value proposition will be changed by digital and the impending future. It’s not as hard as you’d think for one major reason: unlike Silicon Valley, which places risky bets on early adoption of truly untested ideas, marketers at established firms have a bit more breathing room before the future arrives. William Gibson said it best: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Maintaining the status quo is no longer an acceptable strategy in a world where you could be on the waning side of an unevenly distributed future. We believe the most successful firms will have a broad view of the future, a narrow view of themselves, and the organizational chutzpah to begin enacting that future as soon as possible.

If you spend a day shopping, you’ll repeatedly hear the question, “Are you a member of our loyalty program?” Loyalty programs are expanding, which is not surprising given that today’s highly competitive marketplace has made having one a no-brainer. Most, even the most ill-conceived, tend to produce small, single-digit gains which, at scale can add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, loyalty can mean different things to different people. To industry insiders, loyalty largely means how often consumers visit and how much they spend. But loyalty is also an emotional state, one that is earned (not bought), and based on real world experiences.

Loyalty programs need to evolve beyond pure economics. They need to begin to recognize the power of emotion in the equation.

For example, Moe’s Southwest Grill pushes a fairly standard buy-nine-get-one-free program. Meanwhile, Chipotle is one of the fastest growing and most valuable fast casual restaurants in the world - with no loyalty program whatsoever. Does that mean Chipotle is beyond loyalty? Absolutely not. But a punchcard won’t do much for them. A brand with real loyalty is going to want a more complex and nuanced loyalty program that can trigger more sophisticated and valuable behaviors. Every brand should want those things. In that spirit, here’s a list of four ways most traditional loyalty programs leave money and love on the table.

1. The program comes with a physical burden. The average consumer has thirteen loyalty cards. It’s impractical to carry that many, so loyalty programs lose. Even those who offer to look up accounts by phone number suffer from the path of least resistance (consumers decline). Luckily, many signs point to loyalty moving to mobile phones with NFC or specialized apps.That future can’t come soon enough.
2. The program is (mostly) an economic agreement. ”Ten punches and the next one is free.” “Five percent off future purchases.” “One point per dollar spent.” It all adds up to the same story: sign up and come back, and in return we’ll give you a small discount (in many cases so small it is eclipsed by existing coupons). While catnip to bargain hunters, our instincts tell us many consumers are engaging simply because it’s the economically rational thing to do (why not save a little money?). Loyalty programs need to evolve beyond pure economics. They need to begin to recognize the power of emotion in the equation. For instance, how many major loyalty programs allow the cashier to welcome the consumer by name? The strength of social reinforcement in games like FarmVille tells us this recognition is worth more than its weight in gold.
3. The program offers many rewards, but only one action. Imagine a game of chess made entirely of pawns moving one square at a time or Monopoly with nothing but passing Go. As a system designed to incentivize certain behaviors, loyalty programs are pretty one-dimensional. Yet, they all posses the basic building blocks of a more game-like experience. That means thinking carefully about expanding the actions available to the player. More actions means more decisions and more engagement as the player tries to maximize their upside (while also maximizing beneficial behaviors). In the absence of more ways to “play” a loyalty program, members may invent their own game on top of one (note the forums where frequent fliers share their relatively banal strategies for maximizing points).
4. The program has unintended consequences. Many airlines have moved to a model where checking bags costs money, unless you’re an elite flyer. The result? Hundreds of people trying to cram their bags into overhead bins that are routinely overloaded. This delays departures and costs airlines money. Turn this scenario on its head and you’d have overhead space reserved for loyalty members, and bonus loyalty points awarded to each cabin of people whose flight boards and deplanes faster than the airline average. Good loyalty design requires a lot of systems thinking, and keeping it simple doesn’t discount the complexity inherent in human systems.

What positive or negative trends have you seen in loyalty lately? What is your business doing to evolve its system to meet new consumer expectations? We’d love to hear from you.

Like most large institutions (and despite their best intentions), many museums have found themselves unable to adapt their value propositions, experiences and business models to address the complexity and constant change they face. Some appear frozen in time, while others try to change, only to be held back by old paradigms that constrain how they understand and deliver value.

Of course, not all museums are struggling. Many are experimenting with great success – be it in social, online video, mobile experiences or even virtual spaces. We love seeing the brazen tinkerers thrive. Unfortunately, they seem to be the exception, and may only be skimming the surface of opportunity when what they need is real digital transformation.

Museums should start by challenging head-on the assumptions they’re making that may limit their evolution. Some of the more problematic ones include:

• That museums are buildings
• That their role is to curate
• That the core experience they offer is passive
• That they must be constrained by geography

Regardless of what museum leaders think, each of these assumptions is being challenged on a daily basis by the digital behaviors of their most passionate patrons. The idea of a digital commons for museums has emerged, casual experts are bubbling up across the globe and, despite being urged to “not touch the art,” visitors can no longer suppress their desire to get in on the action.

If museums can challenge their underlying assumptions about their role and embrace the emerging behaviors of their fans, they’re already half-way there.

With these assumptions in check, here are four provocations for our favorite museums to ponder:

1. Stop thinking of yourself as a building. The meaning you create extends far beyond the walls of your physical space. Start to think of yourself as a service – an enabler of connections between the patron and your area of cultural expertise. While your value proposition broadens slightly, the ways you deliver it expand enormously. Think online courses, interactive learning guides, content production, expert networks, wikis, and global partnerships with other institutions and experts in your cultural ecosystem.
2. Think outside of the visit. Museums spend plenty of time trying to build engagement, and not nearly enough to sustain it. The most critical moment in a visitor’s experience is in the hours after they leave. Think of every visit as a missed opportunity to create the foundation for a broader set of interconnected behaviors. Museums must re-orient as ubiquitous learners, and leverage momentum from peak experiences to establish direct, personal relationships that are continued after people leave. This means capturing permission to communicate, individual preference data and investing in event systems and CRM. (Check out Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry SciPass for inspiration.)
3. Evolve from curation to co-curation (and connection). While curators (like film critics) can be forgiven for feeling threatened by digital, they’re missing an opportunity. The smart ones realize they belong to a broader network of people with expertise, and that they can play a crucial role in facilitating conversation and connection among that network. The museum’s credibility will help them attract and lead these communities of interest, resulting in more advocates.
4. Tone inside the museum = tone outside the museum. If you don’t cultivate interaction inside the museum, how can you expect it outside the museum? You’re great at inspiring visitors to think and feel – now it’s time to implicate them in the action. Traditionalists will argue this, but the truth is that expectations about museum experiences will continue to shift. This doesn’t mean you should let people rub their faces on a $100 million painting, but it does mean you should find ways for people to go home feeling like they were participants in something.

While digital can’t solve every challenge faced by museums, there isn’t one typical hurdle (e.g. funding, relevance, loyalty or advocacy) that can’t be met more meaningfully with a clear digital strategy. If museums can challenge their underlying assumptions about their role and embrace the emerging behaviors of their fans, they’re already half-way there.

Two lessons: first, make your media dollars do something for your target audience, not just for you; second, look to inspiration from currently successful digital things when you design your own.

In the category of amazing media buys, here’s an offering from Chevy for the Volt. It’s called “Chevy Volt Journey” and it takes fairly simple (if old-school and frequently shitty) digital implementations – frames and expandable banners – and turns them on their head.

NB: I pitched this internally at a previous job and was vigorously shot down by the media department. That was a big bummer. “NB” ≠ not bitter. Anyway.

Click the banners and you get something you’re probably interested in. Amazing.

The nuts and bolts of it are as follows:

1. Chevy has purchased media and development across the network of Federated Media (FM) sites
2. For their dollars, they get to put FM content into a branded, expandable frame that doesn’t send you to a Chevy Volt microsite or configurator, but rather to something else you’re likely to be interested in
3. If you expand the frame-banner-jobby, you get a set of sliders that allow you to customize the content that appears in the the frame, thus personalizing your “Journey”
4. The sliders relate to key attributes of the Volt, and you can’t turn all of them on at the same time. Because that’s not the way content works:
   • Environmental
   • Tech
   • Mobile
   • Design
   • Volt (of course)
5. And because FM has so many awesome sites for the somewhat affluent, interested-in-design-and-digital-and-the-environment types, you’re highly likely to click into something excellent

This post originally appeared on Clay Jones’ own blog. 

It’s hard to predict the future, but we know the Web is no longer viewed through rectangular screens; it is now something that can be felt, touched, engaged with, and enjoyed via the interconnectedness of everyday objects. Here we share a few of our favorites.

Go ahead: engage with the the ambient network at your fingertips!

In Your Home: 

Lockitron

With Lockitron you can replace your keys with your phone. Their tech networks your home locks, allowing you to lock and unlock your doors from anywhere in the world. Not only offering the convenience of being able to unlock doors while you’re not physically proximate, Lockitron allows you to offer and revoke virtual keys, providing greater flexibility and control over who can access what, when.

[Full Disclosure, I’m an investor.]

Botanicalls

The plants in the Undercurrent office tweet when they’re ready for water. Yours can too. Botanicalls (recently acquired by MoMA for the permanent collection) is a simple set of sensors that registers the moisture of plants and lets you know when they’re running dry. Not only does it help those lacking a green thumb keep plants alive, Botanicalls also works to “open up a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.” Better yet, the sensor kits are DIY.

With Your Body:

UP

Despite some early quality control issues, we’re still huge fans of the UP bracelet. A new health product from the creators of Jawbone, our UP bracelets wake us at the optimal time in the morning, track our sleep on our iPhones, count our steps, and remind us to stay active.

Wi-Fi Body Scale

The UP bracelet is just one venture into the networking of health devices. In a similar vein, the Wi-Fi Body scales from Withings graphs out your weight, BMI and fat mass so you can access it from your smartphone or web browser anytime. (Check out their iOS integrated Blood Pressure Monitor, too).

With Your Car: 

Waze

A crowd-sourced traffic-fighting application, Waze is a great demonstration of the innovative solutions to problems (traffic jams) coming not from the incumbents (GPS companies, car manufacturers) but from the startup community. Download the application and you get plugged into a mesh network that provides navigation and real-time traffic updates, harnessing the power of the crowd to improve your journey.

On Your Bike: 

Copenhagen Wheel

The Copenhagen Wheel transforms your regular bike into a hybrid “e-bike” that acts like a mobile sensing unit. A project from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, this simple bicycle wheel captures pollution levels, traffic congestion details and information about road conditions in real-time. This data can be shared privately or with communities — the more people using it, the better the information about your town or city gets.

The Web is no longer bound by the screen, but something to be touched, engaged with, and enjoyed via the interconnectedness of everyday objects.

Each of these projects demonstrate some of the potential and possibility of a networked future. What remains unclear is what happens when the collapse between offline and online worlds is complete. Will the proverbial dust ever settle? Will robots named Siri make us coffee and take our temperature when we’re sick? Will the next generation of youth carry keys? We love asking those questions, but even more, we love participating in the future as it unfolds — and we encourage you to join us.

First, the Netflix meltdown. While speculation about what actually happened behind the scenes persists, one thing is clear: this streaming gorilla lost some major steam in 2011 and may have permanently damaged its otherwise stellar reputation with customers and shareholders alike.

Next, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This legislation, focused primarily on curbing copyright infringement among international content sites, also has implications for domestic U.S. sites including service providers, search engines, and ad networks. Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain offers a thorough analysis. 

In the midst of these events, Hulu has been strangely quiet. Steadily growing their user base and revenue in methodical fashion, the Hulu team hasn’t seemed phased by the ebb and flow of their category. Don’t mistake their lack of scandal for a lack of strategy though. In February of this year, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar penned a long treatise on the business’s overall strategy, and unlike others in the category, their model is crystal clear:

• Be the future of TV
• Offer asynchronous content on any device
• Offer fewer ads
• Make those ads twice as effective
• Make those ads more profitable for the content creator and Hulu alike
• Offer premium content and services to users willing to pay for them

Sounds pretty good, but now is the time for capitalizing on Hulu’s stable position. As I reflect on their business both as a user and a strategist, I see several opportunities for Hulu to gain some advantage in 2012:

Push social harder. Hulu offers a free month of Hulu Plus for users who connect their account to Facebook. But post signup, social functionality is decidedly absent from the Hulu experience. Only by visiting Facebook directly and hunting down the Hulu application does social functionality really start to emerge. Hulu should take a page out of the Spotify playbook here, pushing social features hard, and upon signup, offering immediate social proof in the core interface: Here are your friends and here is what they are watching.

Lead the way on social viewing. Hulu puts comment streams under almost every episode on the site, and now Facebook is plugged in. The next step is logical. Rather than starting from scratch, why not partner with Skype to bring social viewing to life? Watching the latest episode ofHouse? Your brother is online, why not invite him to join you?

Hulu offers advertisers an opportunity to do something new around television content, tailoring experiences based on rich data about viewer behavior.

Offer content syncing. One of the major frustrations of any streaming service is the lack of connectivity when you need it. For many Hulu Plus subscribers, a train ride or a cross-country flight is the perfect time to enjoy the service, but a lack of connectivity makes this impossible. Hulu should once again look to Spotify, and allow Plus members to sync a few hours of programming to any device. Not only would this dramatically increase the value of the service, but might also justify a price increase (Spotify charges $9.99 vs. Hulu’s $7.99). You can save up to 4 episodes of programming for later.

Let users level up. Users everywhere are looking for ways to be rewarded for their actions. Hulu has an opportunity to track user behavior and loyalty, and apply some basic game mechanics to increase engagement. Users could be rewarded for daily viewing, completing a series, sharing videos, commenting, and trying new shows. Within a single show, users might want to earn status. With opportunities to level up, Hulu could offer the sort of engagement the television industry has desired for a long time. You’ve watched more consecutive episodes of The Colbert Report than anyone in New York. You’re a level 10 viewer and have early access to episodes.

Finally, one message for the savvy advertisers currently utilizing the Hulu platform. Stop using Hulu like traditional television. In a cable lineup that parades 1,000 ads you can get away with one 30-second spot. On Hulu, that spot is going to be recycled ad nauseam. After 10 repetitions, retention is through the roof. But after 30, some real contempt exists. The Hulu team has been committed to giving users more choice in advertising since the beginning, but it’s clear they lack the inventory to make ads interesting again. Help them out. Dear viewer, we know you watch ~5 hours of television programming a day, so we’re not going to subject you to the same exact ad 60 times during that session. Instead, we’re going to weave a more complex and benefit-rich narrative. Enjoy!