The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called – at the time – ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign – created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ’something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It's given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention...]
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Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary – if depressing – reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso retrospective opens at the ICA’ or ‘Proposed Amendments to Digital Economy Bill’: it’s ‘footballer shags team-mate’s wife’. If you’re seeking the Wisdom of Crowds, look away now.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

Even worse is the equivalent list from the Telegraph:

Not to mention the Daily Mail:

Oh dear, oh dear. Showbiz, trivia, sport, sex and weirdness. And these aren’t tabloid publications. The Telegraph, in particular, paints itself as a serious business and politics paper with a concern for moral values. Its readers, on the other hand, appear to prefer sex scandals and weird animals. I can’t imagine its editors are especially proud of these results but ultimately have to shrug and be grateful for the extra page-views.

The Guardian has a similar widget, which isn’t as lowlife as the examples above, but again favours the funny and the odd.

Newspapers and news organisations are in a strange position with regard to these most-popular lists. The short-term value is that they flag up the items that new visitors are most likely to click on and enjoy. They get more page views out of their visitors and thus more advertising inventory to sell. They help the organisation bolster their claims to advertisers that their sites are busy and popular. Readers get what they want quickly and leave happily.

On the other hand. There’s a long term devaluation coming out of this for serious papers. When they sell to advertisers, they aren’t just selling so-many million eyeballs much of the time. They’re selling a certain quality of readership and particular brand values. For readers, there’s a similar brand attachment. They go to a serious news site because they trust the brand and want serious coverage. If they then end up then clicking on the story about a funny-looking gorilla, then that’s their own affair. Maybe, rationally, they should have gone to weirdanimalpix.com, but they don’t see themselves as the sort of person who does that.

What’s more. Papers don’t really have an ad-inventory problem. They generate thousands of new pages and hundreds of thousands of impressions a day and rarely sell more than 20% of what they have to offer. The only real reason for driving page views is the arms-war between the Nationals over who is the most popular. And being the most popular isn’t a great argument to advertisers if you are simultaneously claiming that your readership represents an elite, as is likely for any serious news site.

So maybe it’s a good idea to find a middle-ground; a way for serious news organisations’ websites to highlight popular items that doesn’t make them look like a zoo for morons: for readers or advertisers. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist – launched today – is one attempt to find that middle ground.

The idea is that it blends populism and curation. The most popular stories will appear on the grid, as you’d expect, BUT:

• The different sections of the site – news, features, opinion, sport, etc. – remain balanced in the proportions conceived by the editors. So if 90% of its visitors are looking at Sports stories, it still only occupies 2-3 slots on the grid.
• Like is compared with like. For example, Charlie Brooker’s satirical swipes at popular media are perennially popular on the site, but will only hit the grid if a particular column is more popular than the norm.

Guardian communities editor Meg Pickard explains:

…we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

We’re taking a range of these variables – enough that a single datapoint doesn’t skew the results – and mushing (that’s the technical term) them all together to get a value of “Zeitgeistiness” (another technical term) for each content object.

But – and this is the important bit – each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blogposts against other Technology blogposts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into consideration: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/section also published on Mondays. Because we’ve been storing and analysing this data overnight for a while now, we’ve got a good baseline to work from.

It’s early days for the Zeitgeist experiment, and I’m afraid it’s rather buried away from most visitors to the site, so it will be hard for them to see how popular the idea plays out compared to the regular ‘most-read/commented/shared’ widget. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting project that shows how news organisations might protect their brand at the same time as playing to the cheap seats.

picture credit: Joi
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Err… don’t you mean ‘publically’? ['publicly' if you're American]

No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain.

In the past, there has been an assumption that privacy was the default state of human existence. It was only when you, someone or something else acted on that state that your privacy was broken. You did something ‘in public’, ‘went public’ or ‘published’. But if that was ever really the case – I’d argue that it’s partly a symptom of late C20th urban living – then it most certainly not true at this point in the early 21st Century. There’s a database entry just a few seconds after your birth that stays attached to you for the rest of your life. Everyone has got information on you – lots of it – from the government to the police to the supermarkets you use. And they’ll probably lose it or allow it to be stolen at some point.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Internet: your ISP is monitoring your data stream; Facebook is keeping your teenage indiscretions alive forever; Google is retaining your search history. Our brave new world of mobile applications sometimes seems particularly geared to recording (and judging!) your location to within a few yards using GPS.

So one part of the meaning of publicy is this status of not having privacy, for which historically we haven’t had a single word, so strong is the assumption that privacy is the natural state of affairs.

People aren’t entirely happy about this being the case, of course. And that draws in the second part of the meaning of the word. But first, some background…

We have strong personal, social, professional and political reasons for having an attachment to secrets and lies. While we’re told that we have nothing to fear from lack of privacy; unless we’ve done something wrong, in which case we deserve what we get. That’s not really true. In fact, it’s not true at all.

Secrets and Lies

Most religions and philosophies suggest that ‘telling the truth’ is a moral necessity. But this isn’t entirely the case. Secrets and lies are arguably essential to our psychological well-being. Certainly, they’re essential to everyone getting along without a fight every two seconds. By some accounts, we lie 200 times a day just to keep the peace.

Personal lies: ‘No, of course you’re not fat’; ‘No, it’s great that your mother is coming to stay’.

Social lies: ‘How am I feeling? Really good thanks’, ‘Oh yes, how is [child-name]? Do you have any more pictures?’

Professional lies: ‘great work, Bob’; ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’; ‘we have the utmost respect for [competitor company]’.

Political lies: ‘We will cut taxes and maintain quality of public services’.

Secrets – probably best not to tell your mum that you take drugs, your wife that you fancy one of your colleagues; your boss that he stinks; your wartime allies that you think they are crass vulgarians. The place of secrets in our lives is more difficult to describe than the necessity of lying, but rather than dredge the literature right now, I think we’ll agree to agree (won’t we?) that we all have secrets and that their remaining secret is important to us.

The other difficulty is that this rise in public information has happened a lot more quickly that our society’s ability to come to terms with the consequences of that. We’re not especially good at forgiving and forgetting, for example, preferring instead to remember forever and condemn you for that one stupid thing you did five years ago.

So… Publicy?

Ah yes. The other part of the meaning of the word is very much akin to ‘publicity’. You see, there are two common tactics to coping with the loss of privacy:

Disinformation. Some 50% of teenagers post false information about themselves onto the Net. It’s been observed that if you look at the registration data, 10% of MySpace users are aged over 100, which seems rather unlikely, unless you factor in that you’re not supposed to register unless you’re 14 or over. [see the video below for more on this and other stats I cite]. Apparently, everyone lies on dating sites (men say they’re more successful; women that they’re younger and slimmer). If you counter the number of true facts about you that exist on record with a similar number of complete lies then the reliability of all the data is seriously compromised.

Curation. We make sure that the information that appears is, to the best of our ability, sanitised, presenting our ‘best side’. We untag drunken pictures of ourselves on Facebook; we don’t check in to FourSquare when we’re in McDonald’s and do when we’re in the Ritz; we remove ‘dodgy’ music from our Last.fm profiles. We use pseudonyms when we’re on networks that don’t reflect what we want to be part of our professional reputation. If someone or something is producing information about you, then you make sure to produce more, better quality information.

From the Economist’s report this week on Social Networks:

Research published last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the institute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teenagers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online information about them. Nicole Ellison, a professor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share information with.

This corruption or correction of the information available about ourselves is the other side of the idea of ‘publicy’. Publicy isn’t the opposite or the death of privacy: it is the way we live when it is less available.

These ideas aren’t yours, are they?

No, ‘course not. To my knowledge, the word was coined by Laurent Haug, who founded the Lift conference among other achievements. Stowe Boyd wrote about this being the decade of publicy last month, with some great examples of the way different cultures accept certain pieces of information as ‘naturally to be disclosed’ or private. PR-man Brian Solis wrote about it last week, together with some fascinating data-points (taken from this study) about people’s attitudes to social networks that I’m still digesting. e.g.:

How do you pronounce it?

I don’t know: it’s that new. It’s either ‘publicky’ or [more likely] ‘publissy’. I quite like this ambiguity because it reinforces the dual meaning of ‘living in public’ and ‘generating publicity’. I also like that while it’s an utterly ugly word, this ugliness communicates its modernity rather well.

Anything else to say?

Maybe. Disinformation and curation both seem like coping mechanisms, both of which have drawbacks. Disinformation leaves a trail of lies and half-truths that might make a person seem like some sort of Walter Mitty fantasist when subjected to scrutiny. Curation requires time, judgement and skill – while it’s well-suited to a seasoned PR professional, it’s perhaps less so to those vulnerable people who will suffer most from complete disclosure.

Elements of society move at different speeds, as I’ve already remarked. Until we’re able to guarantee an internet Statute of Limitations on how long being an idiot lasts and under what circumstances it counts, then there will be a disconnect between the abilities of technology to record us and the abilities of the people we deal with to cope with that data. My belief is that it takes several decades – maybe two generations – for this sort of change. Until then, we’ll have to suck it down.

I don’t make any judgement on the fact that we now live publicy and not privately. That’s like railing against the incoming tide.

And this video?

It’s Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel, talking about secrets and lies on the Internet at the 2008 Lift conference. I’ve cited it before, but it’s well worth a second look. Don’t forget to leave a comment, though.

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It’s a 70-page PDF, but don’t worry too much about the apparent weight – it’s all microchunked into big charts and easily-digestible 500-word thought pieces from the leaders of a number of digital agencies.

Overall, the outlook is bullish:

• 81% of Brand Execs expect an increase in digital projects for 2010
• 50% will be shifting funds from traditional to digital media
• 78% of global participants believe the current economy will actually spawn more funds allocated to Digital

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

hat tip: iboy
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As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them.  Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although – interestingly – their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third – another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.

picture credit: Avlxyz
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Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So – in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube
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The diagram was changed to add in users of Twitter and other ‘status-update’ applications, most notably Facebook. Author Josh Bernoff notes that this group has a different demographic make-up to others:

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

He also explains that people don’t just belong in one category. That’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100 – people take on a variety of roles at different times – the rungs are behaviours rather than groups. I’d argue that all of us are Spectators at least some of the time – people who continually contribute tend to be a bit annnoying, to say the least.

It’s clearly appropriate that Tweeters be included, and understandable that they weren’t perceived as a meaningful description two-and-a-half years ago when the chart was first published. But why are they placed higher than Joiners, Collectors and Critics? It surely doesn’t take any more commitment or engagement to publish an update than it does to join the site in the first place?

I guess the problem is that Twitterers are a broad church. Some people are using it as a microblog or lifestream; some use it to share or republish cool links; some just offer a daily ‘I’m doing this today’; some have conversations.

This was a problem with the ladder analogy in the first place: it’s a little too coarse. Owning a blog doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more ‘engaged’ or ‘participatory’ than someone who doesn’t.

picture credit: Anne Oedolfhirsch
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The video argues that certain forms of digital/social media practise offer the hope of personal and communal redemption. When we publish stuff or make things online or get together with others in a common cause online to do practical things, then the value of that activity goes beyond the intrinsic value of whatever artefact is produced: we’re connecting with other people and increasing our social capital. We’re making ourselves happier as a consequence and establishing or reinforcing communities that might do social good. Becoming a member of wikipedia or getting together with others to do some guerilla gardening are new opportunities that help us get over the cultural, spiritual and social slump that constituted C20th mass media. That era is characterised as one of consumption rather than creation, the renewed promise of the C21st through the magic of digital.

I love all this and a big part of me would like to leave this post here. But then I’d have to rename this blog twopointhappyclappy. This is terribly unfair, I know, given that Gauntlett’s book is only half-finished. but meh.

My main issue is that I’m tempted to say ‘so what?’

So what if some people become more happy, productive, social as a consequence of this? That’s all lovely but there’s no challenge to power in any of this. There’s no real change to the world. The mandarins at Whitehall aren’t going to be shaking in their boots. I imagine the scene:

Bernard (rushes in breathless): Sir Humphrey!?

Sir Humphrey (for it is he): Yes, Bernard (arches a brow)

Bernard: It’s the internet people, sir. They’re making things!

Sir Hunphrey: What’s this? Barricades across the Mall? Million man marches into Parliament Square?

Bernard: No, sir. It’s something different.. It’s…

Sir Humphrey (exasperated): Spit it out, Bernard.

Bernard: They’re making community gardens on disused land and infographics about motorway jams.

Sir Humphrey (sighs): Oh, Bernard. Why on earth do you think we spent all that money on data.gov.uk?

Getting people involved in creative community and personal projects is clearly a good thing. I have no argument with that. I agree that this change will probably make things better. And happier. But I want more better. An intelligent networked commons has the opportunity to make government, parliament, business and international affairs work differently: to be more accountable, changeable and responsive; to empower people to do as much as they can, and find other people so they can do more; possibly wreak radical change to the whole system*. I feel a little short-changed by Gauntlett’s account, in short. I think our expectations can and ought to be higher.

picture credit: Kelly Sue

*(I remain vague on this – sorry)
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CMYK embroidery is a hand-made printing process, based on computer generated halftone screens.

Images are halftoned according to conventional screen angles: Cyan 105, Magenta 75, Yellow 90 and Black 45. Dot screens are the transformed into cross-stitch screens, printed on paper and marked for embroidery. I use cotton threads in CMYK colours; the intensity of colour depends on the number of strands used. The final outcome is a printed page created by hand.

and

More pictures on Evelin’s site. Increasingly, I see people wanting this sort of thing. cf: the newspaper club.

picture credit: ernesto lago
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