Wallpapering Fog

Rigging the Scottish Independence vote

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:18:00 +0000

Yesterday, Alex Salmond released his preferred wording for the question that will decide whether Scotland should remain as part of the UK.

"Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?"

And immediately, a cross-section of the research community cried foul.

Anyone who works in marketing research will be pretty familiar with the best ways to rig a survey question; it's how PR companies get exciting sounding press releases to plant their client's name in the newspapers. In a previous job, we "proved" that British women would swap a shopping spree for a night of passion and bagged the Daily Star front page under the headline, "Sex? I'd rather go shopping." Was it true? Frankly, who cares? Probably not, but it was a PR fluff piece that got us loads of free publicity and the survey was designed to produce exactly those kind of answers.

One of the more subtle ways to rig a survey is to ask people to agree with something. When in doubt, respondents have a tendency to agree with a statement, particularly if it's a complicated concept that they don't understand, or if they don't really care either way (which is handy if you're trying to rig a PR survey.) It's called Acquiescence bias and Wikipedia explains the issue well, with a few examples.

The Guardian today gives an example that acquiescence bias could easily create a 9% swing in the response to a positively worded question. That's a lot and could easily decide a tight vote.

The first thing I'd want to do with that question above, is to get rid of the word "agree", which loads it towards a "yes" response.

"Should Scotland should be an independent country?"

Yes, or no? That's much better.

Better still, would be not to demand a yes / no response at all. There's still an issue with "Should Scotland..." because you could ask:

"Should Scotland be an independent country?"

Or...

"Should Scotland remain part of the UK?"

You're not asking for agreement, but there's still an element of potential bias. Actually, this time the option to "remain" is likely unfair as it invites respondents stick with the status quo, which they will have a tendency to do, when in doubt.

You could argue that this is pedantry (fun though, isn't it? And if nothing else, you know how to rig a survey now) but for me, it's very important. The one thing that you don't want from a referendum is the possibility that the answer is ambiguous and can be challenged. Alex Salmond's preferred question undoubtedly can be.

For the same reason, politicians shouldn't be allowed to avoid questions about what they will do, for example if the vote is very close, by saying "it's hypothetical". Yes it is, but it's very, very important and we need to know up front what we'll do in that situation, not to argue the meaning of the result afterwards.

The best way to ask about independence is an option that won't sit well with politicians at all, because it isn't a yes or no question.

Which of these would you prefer for Scotland?

1. To be a country within the UK

2. To be an independent country that is not part of the UK

And if you're going to be really thorough, rotate the answers so that remaining in the UK only appears in the top slot half of the time.

Don't get me started on the suggestion of third options and "Devo-max". What are you going to do if they come out with 33% of the vote each? Have a bloody great row, that's what. Which is exactly where we're headed.

And finally... if you really want to know how to rig a survey, ask the experts.

Are you ready for Real Time Planning?

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:50:00 +0000

This is a reproduction of an article I've written for this month's Admap. They've chosen to title it 'Track the data on the dashboard', which I think rather misses the point but there you go. On Wallpapering Fog, I choose the headlines.

Real-time planning is a tactical tool that, through analysis of customer behavioural data, enables the short-term refinement of communications strategy, explains Neil Charles of MediaCom.

Real-time planning is one of those marketing terms that has a danger of meaning different things to different people, so I'd like to start off with a brief definition. For me, real-time planning means adapting marketing schedules on the fly, in reaction to new data about how customers behave.

The challenge that this type of adaptable marketing presents is to process new data and then react quickly enough, to take advantage of opportunities as they are identified. However, too often, marketers expect data on its own to be enough and that deep insights will reveal themselves if only we can bring different data sources together. Analysts have known for a long time that this is rarely the case, but large quantities of consumer data are seductive. Surely we could build a more efficient, more flexible media schedule if we had more up- to-date tracking of consumer behaviour?

Inevitably, the data that has provoked this new marketing philosophy flows from the web. We have faster access to more granular data than ever before, both in terms of marketing response through clicks and traffic tracking, and also the ability to ask questions of large online research panels cheaply, and to see the results in a very short period of time.

In practical terms, the web will largely be the focus for the outputs from real-time planning too. Traditional media - where the creative process and buying deadlines are longer-lend themselves much less readily to the type of quick schedule changes, which allow us to take advantage of new data. This online focus should put real-time planning in context for marketers as an exciting new possibility, but one which must never be allowed to compromise an overall campaign. The Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers put UK internet spend at £4 billion in 2010, accounting for 25% of all advertising spend. So while we may have the ability to monitor consumer behaviour (on the web at least) in almost real-time, only a part of the marketing budget is as agile as the response data that we can monitor. Of course, TV or press schedules can be adjusted, but once a commitment to TV has been made, barring disaster, the ads will run largely as planned.

Crucially, most ads should run largely as planned. We often preach the benefits of consistency in advertising and of seeing a brand campaign through, for its full benefits to be felt. Real-time planning doesn't replace the normal planning process, but is about tactical adjustments to a campaign that has been well planned in advance. If our understanding of new data is allowed to constantly re-shape a brand's proposition then we risk compromising our ability to put across a consistent message to consumers.

So, with real-time planning in context as a tactical, rather than strategic tool, and one that is based on very recent data about our customers, what do we need to do to make it work?

It is easy to generate and to track extremely large volumes of customer data. Over the past few years, dashboard software has become cheap and capable, and for a small IT investment, marketers can easily bring together their sales information every week, their own brands' and competitors' advertising spends, response data from off-line direct marketing channels and web tracking from a count of homepage visitors, right down to the number of clicks on individual Google keywords. We can also incorporate brand mentions and sentiment from social networks, track PR coverage both online and offline and conduct quick consumer research polls.

Collecting this data and visualising it, in the hope that it will provide insight and lead to greater marketing efficiencies usually results in disappointment. Large volumes of data, without analysis, are more of a hindrance than a help and, unfortunately, analytical insights very rarely jump off the page from a single chart.

Even where a relationship is obvious - such as when the number of brand term searches is charted against TV investment - what do we do with this information? It's not enough to know that TV is driving additional customers to search for us on Google. We need to know whether this means we should increase the TV budget, attempt to convert more of the online interest that TV is shown to be generating - both, or possibly neither. After all, the current schedule appears to be working!

Rather than tracking large volumes of data and hoping to generate insights from them that will lead to more efficient marketing, the data that we choose to track should flow from analysis work that has already been completed.We need analysts to identify from the vast quantity of available information, variables which are useful, show how they can be used and then to hand that information to marketers.

A recent client example concerned a business which had no concrete data on overall sales volumes in its market, but many variables that might indicate whether they were rising or falling. Sales in the client's business were rising and they wanted to know whether - as some believed internally - this was bucking the market trend, or following it. The answer would have significant implications for advertising, since if the overall market wasn't getting stronger, then the most likely candidate to have caused the extra sales was a recent increase in marketing spend.

Large volumes of data were available that might provide insight, from a set of total market sales estimates that may or may not have been reliable, through to a number of Google searches for various brand and product terms and government economic data on the health of related sectors. The data contradicted each other and tracking alone raised many more questions than it answered.

A long-term econometric study into the drivers of sales had recently been completed, which identified a few key Google search terms that accurately mirrored market trends. This prior analysis flagged up data that was worth tracking and which could answer the question: No, marketing response didn't appear to have changed, and yes, increasing sales were being led by a market recovery.

The key point here is that the data we track to aid our marketing efforts, and which we aim to use to refine campaigns on the fly, should already have an identified purpose at the point when we decide to track it. Data that we do not yet understand in detail doesn't allow us to plan in real-time, it raises questions, which first need to be answered. Answering those questions is an analysis process that can take from a few weeks, to several months.

Together with data, which is already well understood, a second ingredient is needed for real-time planning to work. We need to know beforehand, what our likely reaction will be to a change in the data.

Marketing dashboards, metrics and tracking should be like the petrol gauges or the speedometer on a car. When they change, we already know why and so we already know what to do about it. When the petrol gauge gets too low, we stop and fill up, to avoid an embarrassing call for a tow from the side of the road.

A lot of information about your car isn't displayed on the dashboard. Not because it isn't useful at all, but because it isn't useful minute-by-minute and would be a distraction from driving. This sort of information - on engine efficiency for example - is checked annually when the car is serviced. Marketing analysis should work the same way, meaning that we track what we already understand and can respond to, and ask mechanics (our planners and analysts) to react to more complex data once or twice a year. What the analysts discover might increase the scope of real-time planning as different data becomes well understood. To stretch the car dashboard analogy, we might gain new warning lights on the dashboard, but we are unlikely to start visualising large quantities of new data.

Without prior analysis, there is a sub-set of data that is always useful and, realistically, this is where a lot of brands already do 'real-time planning', whether it is labelled as that or not. Based on direct response data from clicks or phone calls, under-performing press insertions, search keywords and display placements can be pruned from a schedule in real-time without any need for further analysis. Their budget will be allocated to ads with a better response rate, and so all we need to know is that there is a better ad where we could be spending the money instead. It doesn't matter what is the true return on investment to a display ad - only that we can move budget from an under-performing ad to a stronger one that generates more clicks for the same money.

I should point out here that I'm absolutely not arguing against collecting marketing data. We have incredible quantities of information at our disposal to track and better understand consumers and we should keep them, because we don't always know what will be useful until later. This article is about reacting to that data in real-time and day-to-day, those volumes of data become a hindrance rather than a help. Once we focus only on the data that we genuinely understand, a lot of available data - from follower counts to web traffic - becomes surplus to requirements until somebody can work out why it's useful and what it means when it changes.

Even a measure of total sales or footfall to a store, is of dubious value to a marketer who doesn't know what impact the brand's marketing activity will have on the metric. A drop in sales presents two immediate possibilities - spend more on marketing in order to restore sales to where they were previously, or cut marketing in response to a worsening business environment. The data only becomes useful and real-time planning becomes possible, if econometric models or other in-depth response analyses are already in place. Then it is possible to estimate what marketing can achieve, given the data that we're tracking and to decide on the best course of action.

In summary, I would argue that real-time planning is a tactical, rather than a strategic tool. It creates efficiencies on smaller parts of an over-arching marketing strategy and allows us to quickly remove inefficient parts of the marketing mix, or to take advantage of short-term opportunities. It also allows us to increase the amount of marketing investment when that money is shown to be working harder than usual. The overall marketing plan, though, should be driven by longer term in-depth insight work and certainly shouldn't be compromised by trying to make too many short-term tactical gains.

To make real-time planning work, we need data and we need to have done some prior analysis. Monitoring data series that start a debate when they change can be helpful, but it doesn't allow us to make rapid changes to a marketing schedule. An upfront investment in statistical modelling, so that we fully understand the data that we monitor, allows us to predict the likely outcomes of making a change to the marketing schedule.

Real-time planning is about investing in analysis and preparing for situations that could be faced in the future, and if you haven't done that prior analysis, then you're not ready for real-time planning.

As a small illustration of these principles in action, Brilliant Media has a retail client where analysis has revealed that strong online sales can be generated, by up-weighting search activity against a competitor's television schedule. The competitor TV activity is largely predictable and the benefits of diverting the online interest that it generates have been proven. As a result, competitor TV schedules are closely tracked and search terms up-weighted to take advantage of the spikes in search volumes that they generate. This adaptable schedule has real benefits in terms of additional sales and has arisen as a result of a piece of investigative analysis that identified data that was worth tracking and could be responded to very rapidly.

In the end, I would argue that real-time planning is something of a contradiction in terms. We shouldn't attempt to plan in real-time; we plan and we analyse, so that we can react in real-time.

Reproduced with permission of Admap, the world’s primary source of strategies for effective advertising, marketing and research. To subscribe visit www.warc.com/admap. © Copyright Admap.

A legal sticking point for Sponsored Stories?

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:52:00 +0000

I'm a keen photographer as well as a data monkey and Facebook's development of Sponsored Stories, together with some comments on this Register article recently, have got me thinking.

If you take a photograph of a person and want to use it commercially, then you need a model release. It's a form, signed by the person who is in the photograph, that gives you permission to use their image and is an important protection. Without model releases, somebody could snap a picture of you in the street - maybe looking a bit tubby post-Christmas - and use it to advertise their diet plan in the national papers. Happy with that? Thought not. Model releases make sure that you get a say in whether pictures of you can be used commercially.

If you decide to try to make a bit of cash from your own back catalogue of photos by adding them to a commercial stock library like iStockPhoto, then you'll find that they're very fussy about photos of recognisable people. You need a signed model release or they won't accept the picture.

Here's a Facebook Sponsored Story.

It's an advert and it's identified as one. Starbucks have paid to have it appear (more frequently) in news feeds. If you ran exactly the image as above in a newspaper or magazine, then you'd need a signed release from Jessica Gronski allowing you to use her image.

You could make the argument that Facebook has so many users, this is impractical, but that argument always sounds to me like "we're breaking the law on such a massive scale that it doesn't count any more".

You could argue that by uploading a picture to your profile, that you've given Facebook implicit permission to use it. I don't believe that I have, but what if you're in my profile picture too? Or if my profile picture happens to be a picture of somebody else?

Model releases are a real nuisance for photographers, but they're required to abide by the rules and I can't see how Facebook using somebody's profile picture to advertise Starbucks is any different. It will be interesting to see if we get a test case in the near future, of somebody (probably a stroppy photographer) demanding payment from Facebook for commercial use of their image.

The risks of social media

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:26:00 +0000

We hear a lot of talk about the benefits of a social media presence, but we speak less often about the downside. However, like every marketing activity, social has the potential to sell a product, or to put across a message and it also has an intrinsic risk.

The risk on a traditional TV campaign is different to social. Unless a brand is being deliberately controversial, it's unlikely that you'll badly offend anybody with your thirty seconds of exposure and so the risk is in the budget that you commit to TV. You spend millions buying airtime and give up another slice of your budget to film the ad and you risk that it doesn't work; that it doesn't prompt people to go out and actually buy the product. We tend to think that this risk is pretty low and as long as your ad reaches some minimum quality, it will at least work a little, just by getting the brand name in front of people.

So what about social media risk? You don't usually commit such large marketing budgets to social and so the risk seems low. You might as well have a social presence - what is there to lose?

On a risk vs. reward basis, there's potentially a great deal to lose.

Ed Miliband's having a bad afternoon on Twitter. Somebody (and a staffer in his office seems to be taking the blame rather than the man himself) tweeted this is response to the death of Bob Holness today.

An odd typo, especially as it follows hot on the heels of Labour MP Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) tweeting that "white people love playing divide and rule" and starting a racism row.

So, a substantial down-side risk of social media. The risk is heightened by the lack of oversight and care in a tweet, compared to a traditional ad that comes with an invoice attached. There's no way Diane Abbott's comment would have made it into an election leaflet to her constituency for example - or you'd certainly hope not - as a proof-reader would pick up on it and she'd choose her words much more carefully.

In the agency recently, we've been revamping our approach to social and one of the key questions for me is should you do social at all?. The answer is not always a simple yes. If you're not going invest serious effort, or are going to put junior staff in charge of the accounts, then social media is mostly a potential risk, rather than a potential benefit.

That risk is tough to assess and is similar to what disaster planners call a "high impact, low probability event".

The exec you put in charge of the Twitter account probably won't screw up and post something that could be construed as racist. Greenpeace probably won't decide that you're a corporate bad guy and start bombarding your Facebook page. Probably nobody will tell a customer with a legitimate complaint that they're a pain in the neck. Low probability.

But if they do, they'll be doing it in public... High impact.

Taking risks is fine if there's a potential benefit that outweighs the risk, which brings us back to Ed Miliband. I can't understand why he has a Twitter presence at all. @Ed_Miliband tweets once every couple of days, giving the bland Labour Party line on usually fairly dull topics. For me, there is no way that the @Ed_Miliband account can be doing a great deal of good for Miliband or for Labour. It's just there.

Which means it just sits there, generating minimal benefits and waiting for something to go wrong, like it has today. The account it a risk and that's all it is.

If your social presence is a "me too", or a vanity project, or in the hands of a junior exec because what could possibly go wrong? Then it might be time to think about whether you should have one at all. Maybe the only thing it's doing is sitting there, quietly, until the low probability event happens that makes you wish it could just go back to being ignored.

We need to talk about infographics

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:56:00 +0000

I blame Wordle. It's not fair to blame Wordle, but marketing's obsession with infographics got well out of hand at some point and I think it was around the same time that pretty word clouds came within reach of every bored account manager with a slide to fill.

I actually like Wordle a lot, so on second thoughts, maybe we should blame the infographic's leap to fame on marketing's discovery of Wordle rather than the tool itself, which has been around since 2008. A quick check of Insights for Search shows that the world went infographic mad a bit later than that, starting in 2009-2010.

Google searches for "infographic"

That growth line really isn't slowing down is it?

In case you hadn't guessed yet, this post is developing into a rant about infographics. To be more precise, infographics as they are used in marketing. I'm a little concerned though, that I may have just used an infographic to illustrate my point. Except that I'm pretty sure that's not what the image above is. It's a chart. If you're being pretentious, it's a data visualisation.

Data visualisations have a purpose; they exist to communicate data more effectively than text could. But could they still be the same thing as infographics? Maybe infographic is just short-hand for data visualisation?

Here's what Wikipedia thinks an infographic is...

"Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. With an information graphic, computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians develop and communicate concepts using a single symbol to process information."

I really like the idea of the infographic as a sign. It differentiates it from a data visualisation and gives it a purpose. You could list all of the exits on this roundabout, with a paragraph for each that describes where they go, but you'd cause an accident as people tried, at 40mph, to read what you'd written. Infographics - by the Wikipedia definition - are useful to communicate a lot of information at a glance.

Let's be honest though, marketing infographics don't often look like that road sign. In marketing and journalism at least, the Wikipedia entry is out of date and the infographics we see today are a very long way from doing that job.

Let's pick on the IAB. That's not really a fair thing to do either, but they've been known to publish infographics and yesterday, they published this one.

Now that's a marketing infographic! Much more like it. Lots of charts all blended together into one big image and pretty typical of what you can see shared far and wide on Twitter every day.

It's quite pretty.

Probably took quite some time to draw.

My question is why draw it? Other than being link-bait for all those Google searches, what is an image like this for? Maybe it's art? Then it wouldn't need to be for anything, but I don't think it's art.

It needs a purpose, but I can't work out what its purpose is. For the time it takes to make one of these, it needs to be better at communicating than writing a short article and illustrating it with charts, but it just isn't. Infographics like this let you throw unstructured data at your audience (in a pretty format) in the hope that they'll draw some insights of their own from it. You're hoping that your audience will do the analysis for you.

In all honesty, I think this is what's been responsible for the infographic explosion. Facts are easy to get your hands on. They're everywhere. Original insight and analysis is hard and that makes the infographic perfect blog fodder. Take any topical subject, plus a bit of Googling for some relevant numbers, plus a few hours in Adobe Illustrator and you've got yourself some high grade link-bait.

Contrast the infographic above, with this lovely piece of data visualisation from The Guardian.

The Guardian's work makes a vast number of tweets more comprehensible than they would have been if you'd just thrown raw data about them at the viewer. The infographic on the other hand, throws large amounts of almost-raw data at the viewer.

Comparing between these two is undoubtedly unfair, as one is the product of a hell of a lot more work, but what's important for me is the scope what they're trying to achieve. Only one attempts to aid your understanding of a subject. And only that one is worth your time and effort to decipher.

Feedback on this article from The Register, which recently started dabbling in infographics (the modern 'throw a lot of data at the page and see what sticks' versions) make me think that I'm not alone, but maybe you like the current direction? Have you seen any marketing infographics that you still find useful and refer back to? That did a better job than simply writing an article would have? I'd love to hear about them. Somebody's generating all those Google searches too, so if you're a sucker for an infographic, what is it about them that's so appealing?

Right now, the word infographic to me means "presenting data in a pretty format that makes it difficult to use" and until they go back to following that Wikipedia definition, I'll be steering well clear.

The other reason for Google+

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:48:00 +0000

I'll start this one with admission; I like and use a lot of Google's products. I've got an Android phone, have been singing the praises of Google+, Google's my default search engine and GMail is fantastic.

Like US antitrust regulators though, I'm starting to wonder if Google might have too much power. If Microsoft had a case to answer in the way that Explorer was been bundled with Windows, then wouldn't Google have similar issues with the increasing integration between its products?

Google has a large suite of products, despite recently closing down Labs and many of them are tied very closely to its search engine.

Search Google for any term that could reasonably return a map and you'll get a map included in the results. A Google map, naturally.

That's fair enough; I was looking for Leeds and Google fetched me a map of Leeds. Maps can probably be included in a legitimate list of the things I might have wanted. Unless you really want to get picky (and if you're Streetmap, then you probably do,) all Google's really doing is returning a graphical result rather than a text based one.

The trouble with this type of justification, is that you can push it into almost any sphere that the web touches. And the web now touches virtually every part of our lives. If I want to do anything then you can say that I'm looking to do it. Which means I'm searching for it. Which means it's a legitimate product for Google to develop and cross promote from its search engine.

This is exactly the argument that Eric Schmidt is pushing with regulators in the US.

"[W]hat is crucial to understand is that universal search results are not separate 'products and services' from Google.

Rather, the incorporation of thematic and conventional results in universal search reflects Google’s effort to connect users to the information that is most responsive to their queries.

Because of this, the question of whether we 'favor' our 'products and services' is based on an inaccurate premise.

These universal search results are our search service — they are not some separate 'Google content' that can be 'favored'."

(Eric Schmidt. Quote borrowed from The Register)

Google's search market share in the UK is over 90% according to Hitwise. That's a hell of a lot of potential abuse of a dominant market position. I'm not saying that Google is abusing its position - the legal work on my house move is costing quite enough - but if everything Google builds can be integrated into search because it's all one product, then where do you stop? Taking a broad definition of the term, virtually everything starts with a search.

If want to know about a location then I need a map, Google has maps so Google directs me to its own maps.

If I need a flight, Google has a new flights product, so I can be sent there rather than to Skyscanner.

If I'd like to call someone, Google has phones and voice and video chat.

It's difficult to think of any service-based category that Google couldn't decide to enter, develop its own product, cross-promote it from search and use that same Eric Schmidt argument as a justification. Google Legal? Google Estate Agents? Music? News? Why not? You're searching for information and content.

As much as I like Google+, I missed one of its primary benefits to Google the first time around and it only became clear when the black product bar arrived, that now sits on top of just about all Google products.

By closely integrating their product offer - essentially by making it all one product - Google are playing the same game that Microsoft tried to play with Internet Explorer. Compare Schmidt's argument above, with this Microsoft justification for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

"Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free"

(Wikipedia link)

Sound familiar?

Microsoft ended up in a compromise with regulators, that was likely a much better outcome for them than if they'd just stubbornly refused to un-bundle Explorer from Windows.

Google seem to be playing the same strategy: Integrate your products so closely that you can argue they're not actually separate products at all. In that context, Google+ needs to be a window onto everything that Google does. It also explains why you'd ruthlessly kill off Labs, which might otherwise be cited as hosting examples of off-shoot products that have nothing to do with search.

Google won't get away from an antitrust investigation completely unscathed but it seems to be a good strategy to ape Microsoft and try to avoid a ruling that's heavily weighted against what they want to do as a business.

For their part, US regulators need to recognise Google+ for what it is: not just an aggressive move into social, but a very clever defensive move to counter a future antitrust ruling.

Book Review: Moneyball

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:59:00 +0000

Continuing Wallpapering Fog's series of occasional book reviews, we have Moneyball, a book about baseball statistics and a team called the Oakland A's that I picked up on the recommendation of @AdContrarian.

I know very little about baseball, other than that I watched a game on TV in a hotel room in New York once and found it quite dull. Before reading Moneyball, I'd never heard of the Oakland A's, but none of that matters. Moneyball is a stunning piece of work.

Baseball is the background for a story about how to change a business. The huge number of games that get played and the set-play nature of the games make baseball a statistical goldmine, where a few amateur analysts had noticed that a lot of long-standing, established wisdom about the game, was wrong.

One team - The Oakland A's - take this knowledge, which was freely available to anybody with an interest and set about building a team based on what they can prove about the tactics and the types of players that win games. They turn on its head the idea that the team with the highest paid players will always come out on top.

Michael Lewis works potentially dry statistics into a fabulous narrative, interspersed with the life stories of Oakland's oddball players, who don't look like athletes and would be rejected on any traditional evaluation of whether they're suited to the game. Overweight, old, injured and with bizarre throwing actions, they're mainstream baseball's rejects, but they've got stats that say they can hit...

As I read Moneyball, comparable problems from business, marketing and other sports kept jumping out. You find that you break from the page to wonder if the management at Stoke City FC have read it, or to curse (having worked for a year at EMI) that more people in the music industry haven't. You can't help wondering how many of our own established marketing practices are wrong and which ones we could prove definitely are. Baseball's brimming with statistics and yet the task of breaking established ways of doing things is incredibly hard, even when the evidence is staring you in the face. Marketing's a black art at the best of times, where it's much harder to produce the battering ram of hard stats that at least point the right way.

For me, as a statistician, Moneyball inspires, by showing just what can be achieved by dispassionate analysis and is daunting in its illustration of just how hard you have to work, to make the changes you've proved need to be made. Baseball went thirty years before anybody with money and control of a team paid attention to the hard evidence that established tactics and the usual metrics that were used to value players actually harmed your chances of winning.

Once one team picked up this knowledge and started to apply it (via a General Manager who couldn't care about who he needed to fire, intimidate or cajole to get his way), years went by before other managers started to ask how they were being consistently out-performed by a team with only a third of their player budget.

In short, read Moneyball. You don't need to know anything about baseball (though a little understanding of a few key terms, like base stealing, helps) and I promise by the time you've finished it, you'll want to make changes to the way that you work. It's the best non-fiction book I've read this year, by miles.

How to increase your marketing blog traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:28:00 +0000

Want to know the secret formula for writing successful marketing blog posts? Then you've come to the right place.

If nothing else, this graphic might explain Wallpapering Fog's frequently disappointing traffic figures...

Chase success

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:24:00 +0000

You see this deceptively simple marketing question rear its head a lot, both in agencies and client side. I'd love to know what answer is taught on marketing courses, or even if a straight-forward answer is taught at all, because marketers seem to jump to the wrong conclusion so frequently.

The basis for my answer comes through in statistical models of marketing response, but also fits with a simple view of what can be achieved by marketing. For me, these are all fundamentally the same question:

"We've got a loyalty card and our card-holders don't often redeem their points for certain of the rewards on offer. Should we feature those rewards more prominently in the brochure to boost their take-up?"

"Most of the shoppers in this store come from the east side of town. Should we run some marketing in the west, to let those people know we're here?"

"Some of the holiday packages that we offer are selling much faster than others, should we 'fix' the under-performing ones by marketing them?"

The question being asked in all three of these is, "should I try to persuade people to do something that they don't seem to want to do, by marketing to them?"

The answer - nine times out of ten - is, "no; absolutely not."

It sounds obvious when the question is phrased like that, but think about how many times you've been asked to market an under-performing product, in order to 'fix' it.

Whether a product is selling or not is the single, best piece of market research that a marketer can lay his hands on. If it's not selling to a group of people, then they don't like it. Telling people about products that you already know they don't like, is just throwing your money away.

The basis for trying to boost an under-performing product comes from an over-estimate of the magic that marketing fairy dust can sprinkle onto a product and also a belief that the product you're selling should fundamentally appeal to a wide audience. Both of those come from being too close to the product that you're selling. People who aren't close to your product, who really don't care about your product but are being asked to buy it, have already told you what they think.

The only exception to this rule is if you can genuinely say that people might not be buying your product because they don't know about it. Before you decide that lack of awareness must be the issue and splash the cash on some marketing though, look at the products you've got that are selling. Do people really know that much more about those?

The reward card example I used above is a real one; the marketing team thought that more people should want to redeem their loyalty points for music CDs and wanted to push that message. Unfortunately, up to that point, music CDs hadn't been starved of marketing coverage compared to the other options available and people still weren't choosing music in large numbers. That's a loud and clear piece of the best market research money can buy. You offered free CDs to millions of people and only a few said "yes, please."

It's the same for the store that appeals to only one side of town. People on the other side either can't get to your store easily, or they don't want to. You can tell them all about where you are and they'll just keep on ignoring you.

For me, when a product is under-performing, you've got two options.

1. Save your money and stop pushing it.

2. Find a way to change the appeal of the product. (That's likely to be a product solution before it's a marketing one)

The reverse of all this gives a key piece of marketing advice. If you haven't completely saturated the market, then always chase success. Support your biggest sellers and make them even larger. People are telling you that they like these products - not just by saying nice things in focus groups, but by spending their own money on them. Your marketing will be much more effective if you listen.

Never let anyone tell you that it's too complicated to explain

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:14:00 +0000

Sayeeda Warsi was on BBC Question Time last night, giving the Conservative viewpoint on quantitative easing.

Baroness Warsi has a remarkable ability to get my back up at the best of times, but after an explanation of QE that didn't really make sense - to this economist at least - where she said that it "feeds demand... will keep interest low, mortgages low... and gets this country moving again," she went on to conclude that "it's complicated".

A lot of things are complicated. Dark Matter is complicated, but I saw a perfectly watchable Horizon programme about it last night. Econometrics is complicated too, but I don't try to sell it to clients, by rambling something about statistics and then saying "it's complicated".

Shortly after our ability to understand quantitative easing was dismissed with "it's complicated", @Natt tweeted this little gem.

"It's not complicated. You're just devaluing everyone else's money to keeps banks afloat."

And in one short sentence, swept away a tidal wave of bullshit.

Never, ever let anybody tell you that something is too complicated to explain. They're either avoiding telling you the truth, or as Einstein famously said,

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”

Do you ever see a TV ad...

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:01:00 +0000

... and suspect that a creative had an idea that they've been just dying to dying to use somewhere? Anywhere? Pitched all over the place before finally, a brand agrees that a cartoon lady adrift on the ocean, who finds her cartoon twin on a desert island just screams "you really want to buy our tea."

It is a nice cartoon. Maybe I'm just too cynical.

Dashboard software - why we chose what we chose

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:14:00 +0000

Some time ago, I wrote a post that laid out what I want from a piece of dashboarding and data visualisation software. We had just finished going through the process of selecting a software platform and I'd intended to lay out over a series of posts the different options that I looked at and explain how we made our final choice.

Apart from a review of Excel Services (summary: it's sort of ok, but you can do much better for the money), the series didn't get very far. ~~Due to the overwhelming volume of emails~~ Despite a complete lack of emails accusing me of being a lazy so and so who doesn't finish what he starts, I'm going to quickly wrap up the conclusions here.

First, the contenders. Some of these I looked at for longer than others and I can guarantee a few first round knockouts.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner etc.

Tableau

Spotfire

Qlik View

Excel Services

LogiXML

Microsoft Analysis Services

Pentaho

Microstrategy

We'll start with where I started the process - looking for a cheap but capable solution, that would work for a medium sized business. I'm not looking at six figure software budgets here, or at running the back end for the Tesco Clubcard.

With that in mind, I went looking for an open source solution and found Pentaho. There are other 'free' platforms, including customized Google Docs, but all require programming and we need a drag-and-drop front end that analysts can use to build dashboards. For that requirement, Pentaho seems to be what's available.

First impression is that it's not bad at all. A little rough around the edges as you might expect from an open source project, but I had some simple dashboards up and running on a demo server pretty quickly.

These demos were enough to show a few senior managers and to explain why we should be buying a dashboard platform rather than building our own, but then things started to go wrong. If you're going to do anything more than a few simple charts, then you're going to end up doing some programming, which means as an analyst that you need IT's help. IT's help brings change requests and (long) development time-lines and all the joys of not being able to put data labels on a bar chart by yourself. Scheduled refreshing also looked like it was going to be trickier than it needed to be.

Once you're building and customising with your own IT department, you're incurring extra costs, so it was off to the commercial software world to see if off-the-shelf was a better idea. It was.

When you head for a commercial piece of dashboard software, you find out that there are at least tens available and probably hundreds. Most are rubbish. You also get into some very frustrating conversations with salesmen about licencing costs, but more on that later.

Let's eliminate a few contenders quickly here, pretty much as quickly as I dropped them during the assessment process.

I've already reviewed Excel Services in detail so won't go through that again. For the price, it isn't good enough and it's awkward to use.

Analysis Services is much more capable, but it's got that Microsoft feel. You know what I mean; it makes things hard that should be easy. Options are hidden, it's all tied into SharePoint (which I hate) and you end up writing loads of custom SQL - which will be a nightmare to maintain - in order to work around things that Microsoft either doesn't want you to do or hasn't included as standard. The final dashboards also feel like a tool for analysts rather than a tool for marketing managers and if you're not at least a little geeky, they can be quite intimidating. Rejected.

LogiXML and Microstrategy were very much the also-rans in this race. LogiXML, because it's bloody awful and Microstrategy because it's just not good enough to be up with the front runners.

Here's a LogiXML demo dashboard. Apparently they're proud of it and if you can't see why that's a problem then go ahead and buy a copy! I'm being deliberately harsh because they keep sending me junk email. Petty revenge is sweet.

Microstrategy sounds pretty exciting when you read the blurb on their website. The demos aren't front and centre on the site though and you have to dig a bit to find them. That's a warning sign for me. If a software company knows that it has a good product, you'll find links to the product itself featured prominently. Microstrategy has a lot of claims about what it can do on the homepage and then a few clicks and some searching around takes you here...

I'm sure it works ok, but the looks are five out of ten at best. I did download the demo but it took ages to install and the dashboards are slow to load on a browser too. All in all it just didn't feel like a smooth, slick piece of software and I couldn't see the visuals impressing a marketer. Another one bites the dust.

Now we're onto the serious contenders: Spotfire, Tableau and Qlikview.

Spotfire first, because it didn't make it quite as far as the other two. Spotfire is undoubtedly a tremendously capable piece of software but at Brilliant Media, we're building dashboards for marketers and they need to present data, more than they need to make it available for investigation by an analyst.

With that purpose in mind, Spotfire suffers from some of the same issues as Microsoft Analysis services. It's less awkward than Analysis Services, but in use it feels like it was built for an analyst. It's the sort of software that would be great to sit on top of a loyalty card database for an analytical team to use as their tool for day-to-day interrogation. It's not what we need to present relatively top-line data to marketers.

Take a look at the demos and you'll see what I mean. It's good software, but not for us.

Spotfire has another major problem and that's Qlikview. If I wanted what Spotfire does, then I probably wouldn't buy Spotfire, I'd buy Qlikview. It's an amazing piece of software.

I've been playing with Qlikview demos on and off for a few years and it has a few stand-out characteristics. It runs like lightning and the data engine is fabulous - importing your data quickly and making intelligent guesses about how it's structured. You need ten minutes guidance to get used to how the dashboard front ends work, but once you've got it, then Qlikview is very simple to use.

Admittedly there are a lot of options for customising views and you get to them via large, complex options windows, rather than by a quick right click on the thing that you want to change, but fairly quickly you get used to where to find what you want. The positive side of all of these options is that you can create virtually any view that you might need.

Qlikview was a runner up though, based on cost. Actually it might have been dead last based on cost, because I never managed to find out how much it is. One of my criteria for software was transparent pricing and Qlikview's reps are a nightmare to talk to (I've had a few friends in IT back up that opinion too.) They want meetings; they want to know all about your business; they promise free copies of the software. What they absolutely will not do is give you a figure for how much it's going to cost to deploy the software onto x analysts' desktops and allow them to publish to a server.

It's a shame, but Qlikview was rejected on those grounds, even though I loved the demo.

Which brings me onto our winner. Tableau. Of course it's Tableau.

Tableau seems to be a well kept secret for now among analysts who've done their homework, but I can't see it staying that way for long. It's a joy to use - simple, fast and powerful.

The software's actually quite restrictive in the way that it will allow you to present data, but that's a very good thing. It's like a best-practice data visualisation engine. No you can't draw 3D pie charts. Dashboard creation is simple drag and drop and the best way I can describe it is as if somebody took Excel Pivot Tables, made them nice to use, made them look good and then gave you the ability to publish them to the web.

Pricing is transparent (and very reasonable.) The desktop dashboard builder software has a simple cost per user. Not an ongoing licence fee, but a one-off cost, although you can pay for ongoing support if you want to. The server also has a one-off cost per user and that's it. No OEM nonsense and easy to work out pricing for scale, buy it once and do what you want with it. Perfect.

Other dashboard vendors really need to take a leaf out of Tableau's book on pricing. It's so much easier to pitch the idea to management of investing in software when you've got a clear idea yourself of exactly what it will cost over the next three years. If the dashboards you build are a runaway success then how much is an extra five desktop licences and twenty server logins going to be?

If you haven't tried Tableau yet, then give it a go. There's a free version for bloggers that's great for trying out some data vis and publishing it to the web. I feel like I'm giving away a trade secret here, but what the hell, you're going to hear about it from somewhere soon anyway. Tableau has very quickly become an essential analysis tool for me alongside Excel and if you try it, I'm willing to bet that it will be for you too.

Winning awards is winning sales

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:39:00 +0000

For anybody who missed it, James Aitchison at WARC has published a great summary piece contrasting all of the entries to this year's Cannes Lions with those that were shortlisted (paywall link)

As an analyst, these two tables were really heartening to see. David Ogilvy famously stated, "We sell, or else" and objectives for the shortlisted entries are dominated by sales metrics and by proven uplifts to those metrics.

78% of shortlisted entries had "Increase sales" as an objective, compared to only 40% of entries as a whole. Unless combined with a sales link, "Increase Awareness" - the most common objective for all of the entries - is dangerously close to that classic woolly objective, "make a noise", which to be honest I usually read as "waste some money".

We sometimes think that award winning ads and effective ads aren't necessarily the same thing, but it looks from this paper as if we sell, or else don't win awards too.

Top 5 objectives from all entries to the 2011 Cannes Lions (% of entries.)
Note the relatively low number that target increased sales and also social / non profit creeping in at #5.

And top 5 objectivesfor the shortlisted entries.

Social media as a source is a dangerous game for newspapers

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:59:00 +0000

Many commentators have described the conditions currently facing the UK newspaper market as a 'perfect storm'. The increasing share of advertising budgets taken by the web, rising print prices and a recession are combining to put pressure on printed news as never before.

Alan Rusbridger recently explained The Guardian's price rise to £1.20 in these terms,

"All newspapers are being buffeted by a number of forces, not least the digital revolution, which is competing for attention and sucking advertising, especially jobs advertising, out of print. If fewer people buy newspapers (and our bit of the market has shrunk 9% over the past six months) that's less revenue. If, because of a tough economic climate or changing technologies, fewer people advertise in print, that's less revenue still."

I'm not going to try to claim I have the answer to these problems. However a trend is emerging in the digital versions of our traditional news outlets, which I'm certain is not the answer.

I reviewed the excellent Flat Earth News a while ago and that book makes a fantastic case for the churnalistic echo chamber that our news outlets have become. If one paper reports a story, then all can report it as fact, referencing the first that ran it. If it's sourced from a wire service, it's gospel and need not be checked, even though wire services are under huge financial pressure themselves and so are cutting back on their own checking.

Traditional news outlets are trying to use their presence on the web to position themselves as a higher quality source of information and debate than social media. You'd expect more reliable information and a better standard of debate from The Guardian or the BBC, than you'd find on Twitter. It's a sensible strategy.

Unfortunately, cost cutting and a desire not to miss out on information that people can source from outlets like Twitter is also seeing their quality eroded.

At the moment, this is largely visible in news outlets' Live Blogs. Take this example from the BBC's football transfer deadline day coverage.

Transfer deadline day is very much silly season for rumours, but if I want pure speculation, there's plenty to be found on Twitter. If the BBC's only bringing me the same speculation I can find elsewhere, then what is its purpose?

An example on a more serious story appeared on The Guardian website yesterday in their coverage of the Dale Farm eviction case.

Several commentors on the article (inlcuding me) had argued that even though plenty of reporters were present at the site, we'd heard very little from local residents' on their opinions of the planned eviction. Plenty from lawyers, politicians, celebrities and the travellers who live on the site; almost nothing from their neighbours.

Eventually, the writers of the Live Blog cobbled together a few opinions from people commenting on the article who 'claim to be local to the site'. It was a weak solution to an element of the story that the reporters could see they needed to cover. Crucially, it's only the relatively low volume of comments on Wallpapering Fog that stops me from doing exactly the same thing here. If I hit any one of the multitude of current affairs forums and nicked a bit of content, I could do exactly the same thing here. For The Guardian to stand above social media, it needs to do more.

It's a small symptom of a growing problem. When our news outlets just serve commentary that they've sourced unchecked from social media, what is their purpose? I can visit social media directly and I can't easily check the claims made there either.

This sort of tactic will work for a while as organisations like The Guardian are able to live on their reputations, but gradually, those repuations are being eroded. Like a brand that becomes addicted to price discounting, they buy cheap sales now, at the expense of the future value of the company.

Our traditional news media need to cut costs and to adapt, but if they don't set themselves apart from social media by differentiating on quality then they'll have no future at all.

The elevator pitch for analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:51:00 +0000

I tweeted a link to this thread on Linkedin last week. It asks, "What's the elevator pitch for analytics?" and quite a few of the answers are a disaster.

A few gems include...

"foresights" based on statistical analysis of data for proactive decision making.

and

Identify exceptional insights and value through measures derived from business initiatives.

Well I don't know about you, but I'm sold. Where do I send the cheque?

It's language like that which scares marketers. It should scare anybody! Plain English is a beautiful thing.

Actually, I think the question makes a fundamental mistake and a lot of the confused, jargon filled answers in the thread stem from there. We should never, ever try to sell analysis. Analysis is a means to an end and you sell the result, not the method. If you don't know what end goal you're trying to achieve, then you can't sell the work that's going to be needed to get there.

So as a marketing analyst, what's my elevator pitch?

I'll make your marketing budget work harder, so that you have the choice to either win more customers for the same money, or spend less on marketing without harming your business.

I'll do that by measuring how your customers react to the advertising that you run now, and then forecasting what will happen if you make changes.

And that's about it. For a Marketing Director rather than a CEO or FD, you might even want to leave out the bit about saving money. I've never met a Marketing Director yet who wants to prove their budget could be cut without damaging sales...

The chart you should never see on a dashboard

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:04:00 +0000

This chart communicates two data series pretty well. It's not cluttered and it's definitely not a pie chart.

Unfortunately, it's also an almost guaranteed sign of a dashboard that's looking for a purpose and that hasn't been designed with a task in mind. A dashboard that won't help you.

Dashboards are for monitoring data that you already understand. Data, which you very likely already know how you'll react to when it changes. This chart is for analysis - it compares data, looking for a relationship.

Take the term 'dashboard' literally for a minute and think about the data that's displayed on the dashboard in your car. Your speed is shown on there, because you need to know it and because you already know how to make it change when it's too fast or too slow.

You have a petrol gauge too. That's useful data to avoid an embarrassing call to the AA from the hard shoulder because you've run out of petrol. Again, when the gauge drops, you already know what to do.

A lot of data about your car isn't on the dashboard. There's no report on the mix of gasses coming out of your exhaust for example.That's useful information to know whether your engine is running efficiently, so why isn't it there?

It's not there, because if it's out of line, what are you going to do about it? If you're like me, then you probably don't even know what out of line might look like. It would be a distraction from driving at best. There might well be a warning light on the dashboard that says 'see a mechanic' when the exhaust gasses aren't right but that's a very different concept to showing you all of the data and hoping that you draw the right conclusions.

Back to the chart then. It's a classic sign of a dashboard that's trying to be used for analysis, rather than for keeping an eye on indicators that you understand. We had a client recently ask for a chart of their sales vs. the weather and it's very much that kind of chart. The client didn't really want a chart of their sales vs. the weather; they wanted to know if their sales were affected by the weather and they thought that the chart might tell them.

It wouldn't.

You need a mechanic for that. In marketing, we call mechanics analysts.

Dashboarding large amounts of data that you don't already understand in detail, won't help to improve your marketing. It will distract you from driving.

Monitoring a lot of statistics and hoping to spot relationships between them won't work. You need to be a mechanic, or at least to want to learn to be one.

Dashboards are for metrics that you understand. That you already know how to respond to. Everything else is analysis and it doesn't belong on your dashboard.

Chasing the ball

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:27:00 +0000

England seem to be quite good at cricket for a change. That's assuming India aren't very bad at it anyway and all the press coverage reminded me of a nice marketing cricket analogy.

Cricket fans sometimes talk about captains "chasing the ball". It means that when your team is fielding, you constantly rearrange your fielders to cover where the batsman hit it last time.

It's not a good strategy.

Captains who do it, tend to find that the ball will keep finding the spaces between their fielders as each gap you cover, opens up a new one for the batsman to exploit.

A good captain on the other hand, analyses the strengths of his bowlers and the strengths of the batsman, then forms a plan to force the batsman into playing the loose shot that he wants. He works the opening over a number of balls, knowing that his fielders are placed correctly for when his plan delivers. If it's not working after a few overs, fine, you might change the plan but you don't abandon it just because one ball found a gap.

It's very, very tempting to run your marketing by chasing the ball; seeing sales drop this week and running tactical press ads to try to recover, or piling your budget into a product that's selling well this week without understanding why it happened.

A good marketer is like a good cricket captain and analyses his and the competition's strengths, forms a plan and then gives it the chance to succeed. Statistical analysis of the past - a few years' past, not just a week - can give you insights that help to develop a good marketing strategy, in the same way that analysing a batsman's play over a season will give you a better chance of bowling him out than chasing where the previous shot went.

In marketing, just as in cricket, analysis is rewarded, while chasing the ball is ineffective, frustrating and ultimately, will lead to defeat.

There's something special happening in the PS3 store

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:21:00 +0000

I like the occasional computer game. Not as a hardcore gamer - more as somebody who likes to drop in and be entertained now and again for an hour.

With that in mind, it's been a gripe for a while that there's very little originality in console gaming. Games are such huge investments now that they retail for £40+ and like Hollywood blockbusters, studios aren't willing to risk multi-million pound budgets on weird ideas.

In film, we have indie studios and I've been wondering where the indie game studios are? Where's the weirdness?

Just another great looking first person shooter or just another driving game seems a waste when you have an entire world to manipulate. It's a console - you can create any world you like, free even from the constraints of film - and with that freedom, doesn't creating a faithful reproduction of a Porsche seem a little, well, unimaginative?

There is an undercurrent of strange and occasionally brilliant flash-based games but they're far from well known. Try Today I Die as an example. Better with sound, so if you're at work - dig out some headphones.

The online Playstation 3 store is giving smaller developers a route to market, with products that typically cost £7-8 rather than £40 and something rather special has happened.

A series of games like Flower and Limbo provide experiences beyond frenetic arcade action that are geared to an emotional response. They're strange, surreal and feel more like art than what we're used to as games. They have a common theme with the flash games in that they usually don't come with instructions. They drop you into an unfamiliar world and then draw you further in, by making you work out their rules without help.

I think we could be looking at the creativity that will lift games to a new level and to a new audience. The most popular of these smaller low priced games will be re-made with bigger budgets in the same way that Hollywood has aped indie successes like The Blair Witch Project.

You'll also see some of their creativity and themes 'borrowed' into online marketing campaigns.

For now, I'm just enjoying the diversion. If you own a PS3 and you haven't tried Flower or Limbo yet, give them a go. Give them to somebody who doesn't 'do' gaming to play and see how they react. It's a world away from lapping the Nurburgring with slightly improved graphics in a slightly more realistic Porsche in yet another driving game.

The ad-man has a crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:20:00 +0000

A day in the life of ~~a British Prime Minister~~ an ad-man during a crisis.

9.00am
Woke up this morning to beautiful Italian sunshine. Lots of messages on the work mobile saying there's some kind of client crisis back home.

9.45am
Breakfast. Croissants and coffee. Cheeky dollop of strawberry jam on the pastry.

10.30am
More email messages from work. The back office staff are getting twitchy, saying several of our big clients have had a PR disaster and that they're snowed under with requests for information from the press.

11.00am
Back to bed for an hour and then I think a walk in the Tuscan hills and we might hit a cafe for lunch. Nice bottle of white and a pasta something.

12.00pm
I'm starting to regret saying the entire board and all of the senior management could all go on holiday at the same time. It sounds like things back home are getting pretty hectic and the account execs are struggling to cover for them.

1.30pm
Lunch was good though. Had my picture taken with a pretty Italian waitress!

2.00pm
OK, I'm going to have to phone the office. Wife not pleased.

2.30pm
Christ, they're panicking back home. The campaign we're running has caused a huge PR disaster and most of our clients have had their offices smashed by chavs on the rampage. I'm sure the execs can cope though - they've got interns to help.

3.00pm
Organised a day trip to Rome. Should help get me back in the wife's good books after that waitress photo.

4.00pm
The police have been in touch. Large groups of youths are gathering to go and smash up our clients' head offices. They say our recent campaigns might be the cause.

4.30pm
Call Marketing Week. Tell them the ad campaigns won't change and I've got no plans to come home.

5.00pm
I'm going to have to fly home. Wife furious.

6.00pm
Sod it, if I'm having my holiday ruined then the rest of the board can jolly well come home too. Set up a board meeting for a few days' time. No sense in rushing.

6.30pm
George (our FD) has decided to come back too. In an unrelated crisis, apparently the agency might be bankrupt. If that's true, then to be honest I'm not sure he should have gone on holiday in the first place.

7.00pm
Open the emergency scenario plans and set up a meeting for tomorrow morning back home. 9.00am. Damned if I'll go in early - I'm supposed to be on holiday.

8.00pm
Head of our London office tells the press we should change our campaign in the light of all the violence. Floppy, blonde haired, attention seeking pillock. Never liked him anyway. I'll cut his budget when I get home, that'll teach him.

9.00pm
Quite a few clients are talking to the press, saying the whole board shouldn't all be on holiday at the same time, it's all our fault and they're seriously thinking about re-pitching their accounts. This could be a problem.

10.00pm
It'll be fine. Few handshakes, some free press inserts and a couple of good dinners (on the client's expense account, obviously) will smooth things over.

10.30pm
Late supper and a good bottle of wine. Feel better. At least advertising's not that important in the grand scheme of things. It's not like I'm running the country

The looting brand index

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Look out Millward Brown, I've got an idea. Here's the Wallpapering Fog 2011 Looter Brand Index. Which advertiser's branding has created the most looting intent in Britain's underclass yoof?

It's a work in progress and we're still working out how to update for 2012 without inciting a riot.

(With thanks to newquaysurfer.org)

Quick conclusions from the riot coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:23:00 +0000

I watched the riot coverage across a variety of outlets until too late last night. Here are a few thoughts...

The rioters didn't organise using Twitter, they used Blackberry Messenger. People watching used Twitter.
Did you hear that Daily Mail? BBM and Twitter are not the same thing.
During a developing story, Twitter > Sky News > BBC News
During a developing story, you're better off following interesting journalists on Twitter than reading the content of theirs that makes newspaper websites
If TV news channels haven't got helicopters up, they won't be showing any coverage that you haven't already seen
Somebody really needs to tell our news outlets about UStream
What happened to webcams? I swear there used to be more.
If it was truly Armageddon, somebody would still be posting marketing news to your Twitter feed.

Citizen Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:10:00 +0000

Our news outlets are all running around today, trying to source pictures and video of the bit of North London that was on fire and being looted last night.

If you've got a fuzzy shot of a burning bus, then I can understand mailing it to the beeb. If I had anything better than that though, I'd be on the phone to newspapers selling it - not giving them great content for free.

News outlets aren't charities and they want the pictures to sell papers. These are the terms and conditions for uploading to the BBC news website and frankly, I think they're taking the p*ss. You're lucky even to retain the copyright.

In contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way that we want, and in any media worldwide. This may include the transmission of the material by our overseas partners; these are all reputable foreign news broadcasters who are prohibited from altering the material in any way or making it available to other UK broadcasters or to the print media. [See full Ts & Cs]

It's important to note, however, that you still own the copyright to everything you contribute to BBC News and that if your image and/or video is accepted, we will endeavour to publish your name alongside it on the BBC News website. Please note that due to operational reasons this accreditation will probably not be possible with video. The BBC cannot guarantee that all pictures and/or video will be used and we reserve the right to edit your comments.

The value of teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:24:00 +0000

I've been learning to play the guitar for years, on and off. I picked it up at university because I had loads of free time and even as a student, there's a limit to how much of your day you can spend drunk, or asleep.

I learned the basics from a couple of beginner blues tuition books.

I learned a lot more by trying to work things out and by using tablature (written music for people who can't read music) from books and the web.

Over the first few years, I learned a lot and improved very quickly, but after about five years, I stopped improving and only played now and again because there was nothing new to learn.

Actually, re-phrase that; there was loads more to learn - I'm still average at best - but I didn't know how to get better and was bored with just learning more songs, without improving my technique. There are loads of resources on the web (of varying quality) for beginner and intermediate guitarists, but very little that can take you to the next level.

A month ago, I decided to pick up playing again and try a new tack. Getting lessons. Radical way to try to learn something, I know.

Today, I'm excited about playing again, practicing almost every night and have learned more over just the past few weeks of lessons than in the past few years of self-teaching via books and the web.

There's a similarity here with how we learn to do our jobs. With how we learn about anything really, but this is a marketing blog and needs a marketing angle. Marketing people are also very fond of the internet. Surely you can learn anything online?

We have lots of courses and resources for complete beginners, via organisations like the IPA and MRS. From a standing start, somebody new to marketing or market research can learn a lot by self-teaching, and using online resources.

That will keep a new graduate occupied for the first couple of years of their career. They'll enjoy themselves and progress quickly.

Then what?

Marketing courses for people who've been in the job for more than five years are, by and large, crap. Or they're non-existent.

Management technique and presentation courses are all the same. With a very few exceptions, seen one - seen them all. There's always a bit on personality profiles, maybe a memory game or two, if you're lucky a little bit of presentation structure and job done.

Advanced Excel training? The syllabuses I've seen are shocking and it's the same for most other software training. A one-day training course isn't teaching either.

Teaching works, so where are the quality teachers? They're certainly not offering evening classes.

You can find them on the web, blogging and speaking at TED and you can be inspired. That's like watching a skilled jazz guitarist on Youtube though, or downloading a piece of complex sheet music. Amazing to watch and makes you want to be able to play like that. Absolutely no use at all in helping you to get there.

The best teachers are mentors. Unlike in the world of musical tuition, in marketing their experience is largely not for sale. To a client it is; to an aspiring graduate, not so much. Maybe it's because marketing as a day job generally pays better than music. Rory Sutherland's not going to help you refine a pitch for £25 an hour on a Wednesday evening.

You can only improve by working with the people you find inspiring. Otherwise, you get bored after a few years and start changing jobs looking for something different, or leave marketing altogether.

The web is a valuable learning tool, but it will only get you 50% of the way and the web is much, much better at inspiration, than at teaching.

If you want to know who are the best people in the industry and what is the best work, the internet can show you. You can be the music fan who sends amazing new stuff to their mates, that they haven't heard before.

If you want to learn to be the best in the industry and to produce the best work, only a good mentor can show you. Seek them out, in real life, not online and make them teach you.

Five improvements for Google+ v1.1

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:16:00 +0000

I'm still backing Google+ and rapidly finding that I post there now, rather than on Facebook. That said though, there are a few things about it that need a tweak, so here's what I'd do next if I was in charge at Google HQ.

Incoming!
Incoming just doesn't work for me. Random people add you and then shout about whatever's on their mind, which is usually some waffle about social media being awesome. If they were interesting, I'd put them in a circle.

I can see what Google were trying to do and there's a good idea hiding in there, that you might like to have a place where you can see posts from the people who follow you, but you don't follow. The trouble is, people who follow you but you don't follow, tend to be the sorts of people who spam out social media and marketing links to every story they can find. They follow everybody! I don't follow them back because they're not adding value - there's no opinion, no insight and no personality.

Incoming in its current form doesn't work and once the platform's open to all, it's going to be a recipe for spamming. I'd be tempted to combine it with Sparks, which brings me on to...

Sparks
Anyone use these? Thought not.

If Incoming can be a little annoying, Sparks is pretty much irrelevant. It's a news scraper and tracker in a social network, which ignores the principle that Google have got so right with Circles. I like to keep my news and my friends' opinion about the news separate. Sparks should just show me what Google+ users think. Google have got a great product already that can find me mainstream news stories.

From these first two points then, I'd

- Restrict sparks to just contain posts from users of Google+

- Then add filters to Sparks, to select either posts from all of Google+ (including brands), just personal users of Google+, only your circles or from your extended network.

- Now you can dump Incoming. You've got the pull model for topics that the web is so brilliant at, so you don't need people to shout at each other.

Hashtags, please
They work on Twitter and they'll work here. The updated Sparks will work better if people can flag up topics and then search for them with tags. How about a little plus sign in front of a word, if you want to announce it as a topic? That would be lovely.

An API for photos and video (and other things creative people make)
I like Picasa, so Google+ using it as a photo hosting service works for me. I don't use Google's video hosting because I like Vimeo (paragliding videos anyone?) This is a mistake Facebook made but Google can go one better. Don't only allow people to post things to their feed that they store in other places. Build an API and tie them in to profiles, so that it doesn't matter where I choose to host my content.

As clever as Google+ might turn out to be, it can't be a one-size fits all solution, because people are different. Let them be different and then pull the results of whatever they make into your platform.

As well as photo or video, with the right API, I could have a music tab on my profile, for music I like and music I've recorded. You've just jumped into the only territory that has kept Myspace staggering along for the past few years. Open your content platform up and see what people invent. Be the network that joins it all together.

It's time to let everybody play
If Google aren't just about ready to open up access to Google+, then they launched it too early. I like that it was launched with an invite-only wall as it helped to create a buzz around the product. It also made sure everybody had somebody to share with when they first arrived. If you're going to avoid people drifting back to what they did before, then you need to let everybody in now.

Spooky Gmail

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Charles) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:03:00 +0000

I've been mailing back and forth on Gmail this morning, discussing bids on a house that my girlfriend and I are looking at.

Google sent me a calendar invite for this afternoon, suggesting we up our bid and meet them "in the middle." My girlfriend didn't send me that. Google did. It's taken us a little while to work that out.

It's very, very clever (and not a little spooky) but I think it might have got the wrong end of the stick on this one.

Here's the email that sparked off the Google machine

"Or we say we'll meet them in the middle at 210, but we cannot go any higher. If they say no to that then we just leave it with them (and dare I say it, walk away if we need to.)"

And what Google did!

Google just passed the Turing Test. Even if it didn't realise it was joking.