whispershout

Yahoos Facebooking: What's 1.5% of your life worth? (Reprise)

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:10:00 +0000

With Facebook's announcement today that they passed the 500-million user mark, I thought it might be worth revisiting a post on the value of time spent with social media outlets.
-JSH

Forget segmentation + stereotypes for a moment. Forget our differences. Where we are all absolutely the same is in the number of hours in our day. 24 of them at last count. Each of us granted about 44,000 minutes a month to do with what we can or must.

And while that is certainly where we are all equal, where we are different is how we choose to invest our time.

Which brings us to the question? What’s everyone doing with that time?

If you believe some of the headlines on Nielsen’s June (2009) report (here), then apparently, we are all Yahooing and Facebooking our lives away…and Googling and Microsofting too. Or not.

Using Neilsen’s numbers, I ran a quick calculation and found that the online user universe spent a mere 1.5% of their total hours of life visiting, viewing or otherwise engaged with the Top 10 online properties in June (*see math below). That’s good, right?

So What?

Even at only 1.5%, the top 10 online brands, as defined by Neilsen, capture an extraordinary amount of the total time available in a life…some claim time online is a waste of time, but that’s usually a statement about someone else’s time. Even allowing for the generalizations that come with averages and big numbers, a few questions stand out for marketers:

How important is an online brand in one’s life? The top online brands are insufficient descriptions of what people are actually doing with their time: information seeking, instant messaging, commerce, socializing and games are just a few of the long tail activities that marketers must manage when opting for online engagement…and as big as Google is, it still only captures 0.002 of it’s typical user’s life each month.

Is timeshare market share? Increasingly, the top online brand look to me like information utilities: aggregating ever greater numbers of services and properties, but maxing out the upper limit to the eyeballs they can captivate. Google gets 75% of the universe as an example. Monetizing time spent--rather than impressions or clicks--might encourage incumbents to carve up the online universe as part of a regulator-approved truce, not unlike energy and telecommunications. Still, if the biggest brands online together account for only 1.5% of our time, it’s no wonder some of them are struggling to monetize what they offer.

Figure: Timeshare by online brand (with apologies to E Tufte)

Is there an online-only marketing strategy? As in any endeavour, the 98.5% of time not currently captured by the top 10 online brands will be the source of highly fragmented interests…including those that have no apparent online component (for instance, eating dinner with your family). Marketing that misses the mark will include marketing that forgets there is a lot of life beyond the network AND the top 10.

What should we actually take from the numbers? Numbers on aggregated online usage should probably be viewed with healthy skepticism: it remains incumbent upon marketers (as humans) to question numbers that purport to describe how or why ‘people’ behave a certain way. Looking at Neilsen’s numbers for top 10 and eMarketer’s numbers for time spent online, the average active user is apparently spending 17.5% of their online time with the top 10 brands. The top 10 may be an easy media buy, but it isn't a majority understanding of what people do about anything.

In the end, it's incumbent upon all of us as marketers to remember that one's life is not merely a marketing void to be filled.

*The Math (All errors are mine)

Total active online universe: 195,974,309 (per Nielsen)
Total Monthly Hours Available: (30.41dx24hx195,974,309) = 14.3billion hours
Total Monthly Hours of time spent on Top 10 Online properties = SUM (Nielsen unique visitors per property x Nielsen hours per month per property) = 208.6million hours
Percent of life consumed by Top 10 brands: (14.3billion / 208.6million) = 1.5%
Percent of online life consumed by the Top 10 brands: (top 10 brands total time)/(2h per day x active online universe).

Three things they ought to teach in marketing 101

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:07:00 +0000

Back in the 60's, marketers in undergraduate programs learned all about the four P's--pricing, promotion, product and...positioning. Then, in the early 1990s Integrated Marketing added the four C's to frame how marketing was supposed to work in niche markets.

With the emergence of 'teh webz', everything about marketing's control and role changed. Making good on 'customer insight' suddenly meant that the cool kidz in marketing had to add the obvious if long-neglected P to their marketing mix: People.

And not just implicitly, via concepts like SIVA or persona's or other behavioral generalizations that describe people more like cattle than as self-determined actors.

The challenge with understanding people as people, of course, is that you often have to use behavior as a proxy for psychology. And unfortunately, people misbehave consistently. Which makes group think about people's intentions based on observable behavior a, shall we say, incomplete errand.

So what's a marketer to do with people who refuse to follow the rules we'd like to believe they live by?

Here's three concepts that might help marketing graduates in the class of 2011:

The Long Tail: Hard to believe this already seems old school to some, but the reality of most brands (i.e., you won't be adored by millions) makes this look into niches and the marketing potential worth the (re) read. Where we are different is where we are often most engaged...Long Tail looks at how our differences can provide marketers with insights into where the real opportunities lie.

At worst, incorporating long-tail thinking reminds us to push back on the grossest generalizations about segments and audiences. At best, it helps define more relevant customization of the four P's based on the relationship that the long tail helps us define.

Systems thinking: When marketers talk about brand experience, of course we know that encompasses more than the product. But the reality of marketing's influence in most situations is that it ends where sales takes over, where customer support begins, or at the point that customer experimentation drives product development and innovation. Understanding how marketing is part of the system of an enterprise and its relationship to customers can help marketers fill a more meaningful role for the individual that is the customer.

Networking. Not computer systems, per se, but rather the way that people join with one another for a task, for a time, for a life. How we network with others--in spheres as disparate as entertainment and finance (or as Jim Cramer would say, as financial entertainment)--is the subject of study by physicists, psychologists and politicians as the emergent behavior of individuals sums to a value greater than its parts...think open source software...or YouTube memes like dramatic chipmunk or...pants on the ground.

A network map showing the influence of 5 social relationships among 14 runaways living in 4 cottages. The four largest circles (C12, C10, C5, C3) represent cottages in which the girls lived. Each of the circles within the cottages represents an individual girl. The 14 runaways are identified by initials (e.g., SR).

Pants on the ground you say? Lest you were one of the 300 million Americans who did not see it, here you go:

Calculating marketing's odds of success

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:47:00 +0000

Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something.
-Wilson Mizner

We all play the odds. Sometimes the gamble is unconscious--as when we board an airplane, drive to work, or eat a Twinkie. We may recall fragments of statistics comparing the odds of death from eating dessert to being struck by lightning or meteors.

Ok, well, maybe we don't think about the odds of death by death-by-chocolate, but you get the idea: we understand that there are statistical risks to all of our actions...and mostly we ignore the cold, quantitative heart of risk assessment in day-to-day living: we have lives to live afterall!

But what about in our professional lives?

What's so odd about risk?

No self-respecting executive invests resources in pursuit of an objective without having considered the odds of success, right? Shoot, even gamblers generally know the odds of success associated with the game they play...and then they play it anyway!

As planners, though, marketers are usually pretty good at identifying objectives and aligning appropriate measures. In some quarters, we even make regular eye contact with return-on-investment forecasts. But what about risk?

Or put another way: how do we calculate the odds of success in our plans to pursue and deliver the perfect brand experience?

Here's one way for marketers to cut through unaccountable hyperbole and promises written in air: use a table of combined probabilities.

What are the odds?

Combined probabilities is simple really. We've used this technique with clients to help identify program risks and to frame investments in new programs. It consists of 5 general steps:

1. Identify the individual critical events or activities that must take place to create the successful program or experience. These can include granular elements like advertising, sales, customer support and distribution or they can be higher level activities like Demand Generation and Fulfillment, Regulatory Approval or Research and Innovation.

2. Assign a best estimate of success for each event or activity. In other words, what do you believe to be the realistic odds of success. You can base this on prior, similar experiences, industry benchmarking data or the best instincts of your colleagues.

3. Repeat step 2, only this time be pessimistic.

4. Repeat step 2, only this time be optimistic.

5. Multiply the odds of success (as a percentage) for all activities and events in each of your baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic scenarios to get your combined probability of success.

You'll quickly notice how quickly the odds move against you...even when you are 85% certain that each and every required activity will be successful.

So what?

The point of the exercise isn't to keep us from taking risk, it's to put the risk that exists into perspective. Some prefer to throw things on walls to see what sticks. That's an approach. This isn't for those situations.

Combined probabilities are for marketers who want to understand risk in a broader context that helps focus investment decisions among competing areas. In the process, activities whose success or failure might place an entire endeavour at unreasonable risk can be identified and supported in ways that increase the odds of success.

Like any quantitative tool, combined probabilities is no substitute for critical thinking. If marketing success were as easy as plugging numbers into a spreadsheet, then marketing wouldn't have a seat at the adult table.

But when one sits at that table, knowing your odds of success can improve them.

To download a simple (i.e., five events or activities, no weighting) spreadsheet version for you own use, click here.

What marketers can learn from game design: The essential experience

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:06:00 +0000

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing
-Oscar Wilde

Games rule! We all play them. Some of us play Bridge, some of us play Call of Duty. Some, like Lindsay Vonn, ski down mountains at incredible speed. A few (?) of us can even make a game out of other people's confidence or a country's currency.

No matter what the game, there is something that speaks to just about every human when it comes to getting your game on.

Theories abound as to why we play games--from prime-evil competitive instincts to ego- or sensory gratification to a way to while away the time with friends--and everything in between. Beyond theory, one thing common in the practice of gaming is that game playing creates an experience.

Funny then, that gaming and marketing should have something so fundamental in common. And while great instances of marketing fun and games can be found, there's something more essential about the connection: designing a game has much in common with designing a brand.

personal branding

The Art of ~~Game~~ Brand Design

Books have been written. Quite a few even on game design! Beyond how-to's and theoreticals on flow, structure, narrative, action and scoring (including our own game example here ) a new book entitled The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell could just as easily be titled The Art of Brand Design.

The book takes a decidedly different approach to a discourse on games. It looks at what makes games worth playing by seeing game design through various lenses, including the lens of the designer; the lens of the team and the lens of the player among others. You could easily substitute 'brand' for 'game' and much would be equally applicable.

For instance: Just as gamers expect to unlock more value from a game as they develop skills, brands may have customers who have developed as much (or more) knowledge than the original product designers. Communicating with highly skilled users as if they were brand n00bs isn't likely to engender the loyalty or positive word of mouth one would want from these influencers.

Brands, like games, can design a pathway to increasingly robust experiences by balancing challenge and skill
(from Art of Game Design)

Essential skills

Schell lists the more than 15 skills game designers should have some experience with, from Anthropology to creative writing, mathematics to sound design and visual arts.

These skills should all look familiar to marketers: they are the broad skills required of the best marketers who operate in a complex, technology-enabled social marketplace firmly under consumer control.

But the most important skill according to Schell is listening: to clients, to oneself, but most importantly to the gamers themselves. Focus groups, panel discussions and proxy surveys all hold value to marketers. But listening to customers, in all their variety, through direct channels like social media, customer service and sales is another skill the best marketers among us possess.

Essential questions

Other connections in the book that might just as easily address brands as games include the importance of iteration and testing, the interface, measuring interest, clients and users. But of all the lenses, there is none so relevant to marketers as the first: The lens of essential experience.

Brand designers--like game designers--do well when they remember that the brand is not the experience: it is a means to an experience. A very personal experience that resides in the mind of the customer.

Which brings us to the essential questions (not to be confused with these Three Questions Marketers Should Ask Themselves!) brand experience designers can take away from the Art of Game Design:

What experience do you want the customer to have?
What is essential to that experience?
How can your brand capture that essence?

By constantly assessing the experience you want to create against the one you have created, brand designers stand a chance at being in the game. Confusing or unhelpful product support, interruptive or annoying attempts at building loyalty, inconsistent and insensitive pricing or quality...are all essential brand experiences that no marketer would intentionally design.

Foreseeable experiences, however, are not unintentional ones. By focussing on the essential experiences that can be foreseen, brand designers can ensure that customers find their game worth playing.

For a loosely related musical interlude on the games people play:

The Future of Marketing: Three Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Themselves

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:59:00 +0000

The condition of learning is most fully engaged when we undervalue that which we think we know and overvalue that which we think don't.
-Anonymous

Ken Fisher manages investments...a lot of them. As son and heir to one of the post- 1930's investment legends, he's had a first hand look at nearly a century's worth of market cycles, successes, and failures. You'd think someone like that could teach investors a thing or two...or three.

But marketers?

I think so. Fisher has written an entire book on the subject of three questions every investor should ask. I've seen the questions. They are not small. They don't ask you to consider whether Ben Bernanke is a hero or villian...nor do they ask you to contemplate the future social influence of generations of teens, tweens, X's and Yer's with vampire and zombie obsessions.

In spite of that, I think theses questions can do more than guide investors. They are useful inquiries for the larger lives we all lead, beyond investing...big picture life questions worthy of....marketing!

And so...The 3Q's

What do you believe that is actually false?
What can you fathom that others find unfathomable?
What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me now?

So what?

The obvious element of all three questions is that they ask one to self-reflect. And that's their power.

In a time where social media seems on the surface to be so chock full of ourselves as to provide all the insight into all of us that any of us might need, one senses there is often a very blurry line between indulgent navel gazing and meaningful self study.

These questions, on the other hand, ask us to challenge what we know, personally, and to know ourselves better in the process.

More than a handful of bloggers have asked what the future will hold for marketing, marketers, and the brands we serve. Many thousands have offered their answers with variations on wishful thinking themes or dramatic doomsaying.

But while facts certainly are not personal, truths often are. The personal truths about marketing's future will exist as thousands of variations in individual marketer's minds...some will be satisfied to co-opt the truths of others.

For the leaders, though, these three questions can help us discover our own truth about marketing...usually in the form of new questions. For example:

If I believe that online display advertising is useful for branding, what if that is false?
If I can fathom a world in which privacy is routinely exchanged for added service, what opportunity does that present my brands...and my customers?
If I'm focussed on using social media for my PR, what larger societal trends might I be missing in my planning?

For marketers--just like investors, politicians, parents and every human ever born--the first step to understanding the truth in others often comes in the form of a question...of ourselves. Ken Fisher's three are a great start.

For a mysterious question mark with an answer of 96 tears, check it:

The customer satisfaction prison: When one becomes a five

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:54:00 +0000

I am not a number: I am a free man!
-The Prisoner

Back in the late 60's, British Television aired a series called The Prisoner. In it, a British Intelligence officer abruptly resigns, and finds himself kidnapped and held prisoner in an isolated, seaside location where he is known only as...Number 6.

He finds himself amongst hundreds of other nameless but numbered individuals living tranquilly in a surreal Orwellian resort village. The perpetually sunny space is outfitted with the dark shadows of surveillance, hypnosis, and mind control schemes, administered by a series of nameless Number 2's who want to know, on behalf of an unseen Number 1, but one thing: Why did he resign?

I bring this up as a loose link to a new number 1 in the quest to quantify customer satisfaction: Number 5.

Number 5 being the number expected when asked to rate our satisfaction with whatever customer experience we've had. It goes something generically like this:

'Hi, On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being completely satisfied, how would you rate the service you just received?'

The Likert-ization of customers serves a valuable data capture and analysis purpose. I've worked with clients using five-point thinking to:

identify directional trends in collective pools of product feature and attribute feedback;
gather a point of objective reference in a world of subjective customer service nuance;
and occasionally, to provide actionable insight on pricing, promotion or positioning.

But, like the seemingly tranquil village in The Prisoner, a look below the surface of 5-point customer satisfaction surveys sometimes reveals a dark undercurrent: when the Number 5 becomes an end unto itself, we risk transforming people into numbers.

Turning constructive feedback into an unsatisfying feedback experience

Here's a story. I recently had my car serviced. I was handed a two-page survey to complete when I left. I set it aside...in the recycling pile.

Five days later the phone rang and, soon regretting my decision to answer the Toll Free number, I spent 5 minutes answering ten questions from a polite corporate representative about my local dealer service experience.

In the course of asking me 10 questions, I rated one area a 4, rather than a 5. I also mentioned that my service rep was helpful and professional. End of story. I had provided honest feedback on my mostly excellent experience. Or so I thought.

A day later, I got a call from my local dealer service rep. He seemed a bit nervous. My 'not 5' rating on 1 of the 10 questions the day before had already made it back to him. He implied that he needed 5's, even though the 4 I provided was in an area beyond his direct responsibility (scheduling).

It was very personal to him: Because, as I found out, his job performance was evaluated based on whether his customers all give all 5's.

He mentioned that the same corporate entity that called me, would be sending me a more detailed survey via the email address on file and hoped that if there was anything he could do to get all 5's he sure hoped I would tell him.

I spent 5 minutes on the phone telling him what I told the corporate surveyor. When I got the email survey it said it would take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Right.

So what?

The story I relay above is meant to illustrate, in real terms, how good intentions in seeking completely satisfied customers sometimes go awry. To borrow a phrase, let me be clear: I believe in research and I believe in customer survey data. The modern world is built, afterall, on that which can be quantified. But it's also built by that which, perhaps, ought not be quantified quite so easily.

Quantifying one's perceptions, for instance, doesn't magically make them anyone else's.

As marketers, we understand that a good customer experience can be undone pretty easily and a bad one can be hard to overcome. So why let the otherwise useful act of satisfaction surveys be a risk to the very satisfaction they survey?

Four principles for putting quality in the quantity

Here are four general principles--derived from being both purveyors and party to hundreds of customer survey initiatives--that I believe will help create a good feedback experience:

1. Align time + value: Ensure that the time requirement you ask of the customer is only a small fraction of the time invested in the actual experience being surveyed. In other words, a survey on a 2-minute transaction should probably take far less than 2 minutes. Likewise, align what you invest in measurement with the value of the customer.

2. Identify what's being evaluated: If you are asking about an overall experience, state that and mean it...and be comfortable with the limits of generalized conclusions. If you are asking about a specific aspect of the experience, then clearly state that. Knowing what you are asking requires a clear understanding of your satisfaction survey objectives. In other words, why ask? Broad based questions seldom result in specific feedback. Using general responses to draw specific conclusions is risky. Likewise, using specific feedback to draw generalizable satisfaction conclusions can easily eliminate any relationship between effect and cause.

3. Use data first to learn, then to confirm: Learning often comes from failure. If the point of a customer satisfaction survey is to confirm what you already believe or hope is true, save everyone their time and let it be true because the organization believes it is. If the point is to learn, then something that is not a '5' should be embraced as an opportunity to do good.

4. Keep it personal: Behind the numbers are real people...customers and associates...who defy descriptions in 5 shades of gray. Incorporating some facility for open-ended response helps keep people present in the analysis.

Customer satisfaction surveys need not create a prison of numbers. Applying a few reasonable considerations helps ensure that people are Number 1 in the customer satisfaction show.

Wagging the dog: Using collaboration to shorten time-to-traction

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:15:00 +0000

One of our partners at the world's largest management consultancy used to channel William Gibson to remind us that 'The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed'.

Now, Bill Buxton, a researcher at Microsoft, describes The Long Nose of Innovation as the path that the real world of innovation takes in its journey out into the world. The path is largely through an interative process of idea refinement over time...usually much more time than we might think. Here's the chart he uses:

What's obvious, even if the words 'Long Nose' hadn't been used, is that it's the mirror image of Chris Anderson's popularization of statistical power laws, the Long Tail :

And while it might be tempting to relate these graphs as handing off to one another (ideas that enter through the nose exit through the, um, other graph), I believe it would be erroneous to do so.

Why? Because while Buxton's Nose describes an idea's 'time to traction', Anderson's Tail describes a distribution of the markets for an idea...and many ideas will stand tall only under a very short ceiling: Tongue piercing for example.

So what: Letting the tail wag the dog

The two views can be joined in the context of collaboration.

In the Long Nose, the time that an idea spends in the refinement and augmentation phase can determine market potential. For those companies whose business strategy is built on large-scale adoption of innovative products or services, shortening the time to traction would seem to present an opportunity for competitive advantage.

And what better way for product developers, researchers and marketers to move quickly through the iterative refinement and augmentation phase of complex products and services than by engaging the long-tail interests of collaborators?

How?

Something happening and something being made to happen are two different things. Aside from reading this rambling post (which might generously be characterized as part of the refinement and augmentation phase of Buxton's Long Nose idea!), marketers and their bosses can make reducing time-to-traction a planned process using cost-effective, long tail approaches to collaboration.

A post on creating The Collaboratory back in May contains some details and further examples, but the gist is this:

1. Engage lead users first
These are the user scientists who have a need for something other than a homogenous service/product offering. They are recognizable because they already have adopted or modified a product/service to fit their needs. Most importantly, they have a bias for collaboration, experimentation and persistence...and they are already your customers.

2. Structure the participatory process:
Participatory design requires structure...how much or how little will depend on the expectations of the output and the size of the community. But in general the structure should focus on four stages...

Identifying issues/opportunitities (in other words, the questions to explore)
Prioritizing the issues/opportunities against criteria (what comes first--or last--based on what success criteria might look like. The hypotheses if you like)
Ideation/Solution building (the actual design/create activities)
Test-Modify-Retest (validating innovation against the outcome criteria)

3. Reward participation:
The reward can be monetary--or it can be the emotional notion of ownership and contribution to community. The expectations should be honest, transparent and upfront...which is to say, you'll have to work with a lawyer on issues of ownership and licensing, but tread lightly lest you trample the trust inherent in effective collaboration.

Personally, I find occasional comfort in the cultural myth of the lone visionary locked in the garage, only to emerge holding the revolutionary, next big new thing we all need. In the very complex real world, though, I know that a better mousetrap usually comes from refining the diverse collective experiences with the current mousetrap: the domicile in which it will be used, the disposal practices of the local environment, cultural beliefs about the sanctity of mouse life...

Collaborating with niche groups of people who are highly engaged around the many contexts within which every product or service is used is one way to accelerate the learning required for real innovation to take hold ...and begin to embed itself in the collective imagination.

What's in your inbox? 10 questions on the difference between email + efail marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:30:00 +0000

I checked one of my email accounts on New Year's day...late in the morning. In the account I set up for all manner of automatic notifications, I noticed five retail email offers, sent in the wee hours of the morning of January 1. And these weren't mainstream spam promising enhanced verility, hot dates, or internet riches.

image source

No, these were offers for clothes, household goods, electronics and books from name-brand retailers: The same ones who'd been 'engaging' my inbox every other day for the 10 months leading up to--and flying through--Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every other special day in between.

I've worked with some great people on email and direct marketing campaigns...the best solutions were, of course, always about asking the right questions first. So, in that spirit, I have a few questions:

1. Was I seriously considered a prospect to purchase a sweater...or a kitchen appliance...on New Year's day?

2. Did the daily deployers figure that 60% of the email offers that are clicked are clicked in the first 24 hours and that failure to click meant I needed more frequency?

source

3. Was I really a target or was this mass media mail in disguise? I hadn't bought anything from two of the five retailers in more than 2 years; my total lifetime value at one of the five was less than $100. What made them think I would purchase a $1500 TV?

4. How did the 5th get my email? Do they know they got the one designed to collect trash?

5. If retail emailers see 'everyday' increasingly as the most popular day to send retail email, when will they ask me what day is the most popular day for me to actually receive it?

6. If the going rate for spam distribution is $0.08 per thousand [here], why do these retailers also spend on direct mail, newspapers and other vehicles to reach me when the cost is orders of magnitude more in CPM terms?

7. Does a consumer survey by the Chief Marketing Officer Council that found 22% of respondents saying they had decided to stop purchasing from a company because of too many or irrelevant e-mails, and that another 41% would consider doing the same, speak to a hidden cost of email marketing?

8. Does the fact that "...only six percent of consumers feel that the promotions received through loyalty club communications are based on preferences or past purchasing behavior [here]" say anything about the current state of integrating marketing, data, and customer loyalty communications for a majority of consumers?

9. Does the fact that the typical email user receives 12 promotional emails a day mean that email marketing risks a run down a rabbit hole to irrelevance or, worse, to relevance only as spam?

10. Can retailers do better with analytics to know what works, and what doesn't, for which customers and prospects? Do they want to?

I'd like to believe that the answer to this last question is 'Yes'. Sometimes failure is an option, though.

Celebrating celebrity endorsements: whose personality is it?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:17:00 +0000

Pop celeb marketing quiz (answers at bottom):

What was the make and model of the car Tiger Woods was driving when his wife-at-the-time smashed the back windows to 'save him'?
What soda pop does aging soccer star David Beckam drink?
What underwear brand does alleged domestic abuser Charlie Sheen wear?
What brand does punk-pop icon Iggy Pop use to insure his, um, car?

What's your brand's TMZ personality?

Where's the logic in employing celebrity endorsers? If you're Accenture or Gillette commenting on the unfortunate implications of your paid relationship with Tiger Woods, you've stated something like 'the original intent was to align with a person who embodied the personality attributes associated with our brand.' And like Nike, who made a cultural meme out of 'Be like Mike', it all made sense...until it didn't. And it usually doesn't at the point when the celebrity is aligned with all manner of human behaviors the brand would rather not embody.

Juiceman

What does LeBron James know about lawn tractors?

I've participated in a number of brand personality exercises. They always start with good intentions...and a list of synonyms and adjectives. Inevitably, though, the question gets put to the group by the moderator: so, if you had to pick some famous fictional character that embodies these attributes, who would it be?

Inevitably, the client says Chuck Norris or some other kick a$$ persona. The account executive, who sees the brand as nuturing, picks, well, Martha Stewart. And then the creative director says Steve Jobs. I'm joking, of course. The creative director knows that Steve Jobs isn't a fictional character. She actually picks Larry the Cable Guy, because her team already has a hilarious NASCAR-related theme in mind for the campaign.

The point is that, often, the 'celebrity persona' reflects more of what the marketing team aspires to than what a customer would ever realistically believe...market research 'affinity' scores notwithstanding.

Does a celebrity endorser ever make sense?

I'm no expert (no wait, this is the Internet. We're all experts!). But from my admittedly narrow point of view, here's three prerequisites for celebrity endorser sense:

The brand is aligned with what the endorser is known for: If you make soccer balls, get a soccer player. If you make razor blades, find a common man or woman...or find niche endorsers for those niche shaving ~~fetishists~~ audiences.
The brand can tolerate 'sin' risk: if you're Las Vegas, vice in an endorser might be a virtue. If you have a brand (or customer base or corporate culture) that is utterly paralyzed by the moral failings of people, then a potentially flawed human may be more risk than reward. Pick an animal instead.
If you can't find a suitable celebrity, make one. The World's Most Interesting Man does exactly what Dos Equis wants him to...and only that.

But wait, there's more?

I actually think most celebrity endorsers are funny...in a good way. Peyton Manning makes me laugh. But entrusting a brand's equity, in part, to a celebrity endorser won't overcome a crappy customer experience. And celebrity endorsers can't magically create customers out of fictional customer segments.

An endorser may buy a brand awareness or even an initial, fragile perception. Usually, the campaign ends up making the celebrity seem more human. For marketers who choose the celebrity route, the decision certainly needs to be aligned with a reasonable--and measurable--expectations and objectives. It probably also makes sense to have a crisis communication plan in place.

Is another definition of celebrity required?

The Real Celebrity Endorsers of Orange County, the ones worth entrusting a brand to, might just be the real people who have the attention and respect of much smaller audiences...primarily their families and friends.

These endorsers are the one's whose loyalty and passion--or disdain--for a brand are born out of the peer-to-peer relationship of buyer and seller in a free market. Engaging these microcelebrities as brand endorsers has always been part of the marketing mix...it's never been as easy as it is now using media in the networked, social way it enables.

Andy Warhol figured we each got 10 minutes...problem was, he figured our 600 seconds of celebrity required a mass audience. With an audience of a couple hundred Facebook friends, each of us has a lifetime of celebrity to celebrate.

For a look back at 10 historical oddities in celebrity endorsement, see here

Have examples of great celebrity endorsements? Feel free to share them in the comments...

Answers to pop quiz:

What was the make and model of the car Tiger Woods was driving when his wife-at-the-time smashed the back windows to 'save him'? [Cadillac Escalade...not Buick...or Nike!]
What soda pop does aging soccer star David Beckam drink? [I don't know. He endorsed Pepsi, but given his physique, I suspect he doesn't drink alot of soda.]
What underwear brand does alleged domestic abuser Charlie Sheen wear? [I don't know, but he endorses Hanes...or is he endorsing Michael Jordan as endorser of Hanes?]
What brand does punk-pop icon Iggy Pop use to insure his automobiles? [Swiftcover...hmm...weird]

2010: It was a new day yesterday

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:46:00 +0000

Now that 2010 is here, and everyone has their 2010 predictions out of the way, here's another 10 cents' worth of road ahead. Unlike predictions, which derive from gambler's instincts, forecasts are supposed to be based on probabilities. Probabilities are more formal versions of 'probably's', which in turn are closely related to the gambler's instinct.

Generally in scenario development, I try to assess the impacts of the probably's in four very human dimensions: technology, society, culture and government. And while big time, ongoing trends like privacy, dumb networks, cheap processors, and the singularity are covered ad nauseum elsewhere, here's a list of a few practical probablys from these dimensions.

Listed in no particular order then, with no particular certainty, I present a few of the probably's that, finally or surprisingly, will impact marketers for the next 359 sunrises...all in the form of questions I hope you will feel free to answer for yourself.

For a look at 2009 themes (and an assessment of their come-to-passedness), see here.

Location, location, location!
It still matters in real estate. Will it matter even more to marketers precisely because it matters less to customers and prospects, though? With the explosion in smart phone deployments, GPS-enabled and everything, people will expect--and have access to--rich information on product, pricing, promotion, and customer experiences wherever they are...including right there...in your store. Combined with realtime search, that low price guarantee may mean competitors can outbid you one customer at a time. Customer service and sales staff will need to be empowered as many customers may know more about what's right or wrong with a product right now than the company does.

Have you or have you not?
And what is it that you have, exactly? Two decades of conspicuous consumption are ingrained in many levels of US society. In 2010, will debt destruction, unemployment and a general trend to be more austere impact the perception of brands that appeal to 'staying ahead of the joneses'...especially if the joneses are recipients of taxpayer money? Will anyone have sympathy for the homeless housewives of Orange County? How closely will marketers tie their brand's personality to flawed (but wealthy!) celebs in the hope consumers will want to 'be like Mike...or Tiger...or Charlie...or Khloe Kardashian?'

Social media as plumbing?
Will the features + functions that tools like The Twitter and The YouTubes enable disappear into the background as utilities? Will feeds + streams continue to migrate behind the scenes of aggregator interfaces like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? "Follow us on Twitter' might be replaced with facebook.com/OurCompany...which will end up in a Google search right below a customer discussion of your company. The plethora of icons attached to every item of content to digg this or favorite that will be flushed out...or built in. Plumbing isn't sexy...unless you are a plumber.

Timeliness is next to godliness
As Google (and Bing) incorporate realtime data into search results (and give added prominence to timely content), will SEO consultants and corporate communications departments be forced to engage the feed? Whither goes the investment in the staid, static corporate ~~brochure~~ website? Does analysis of the news have more value than timely delivery of headlines? And if it does, is it news? And if it doesn't will anyone pay to wait for it?

Deep diving in a sea of ambient intimacy
With nearly 17 million people not working in the US, there is a lot of time on alot of people's hands. For many, this time will present an opportunity to play Mafia Wars or Farmville. For others, it may present an opportunity to redefine the meaning of what constitutes a relationship. Marketers and PR professionals may need to define influence in more nuanced ways. How meaningful and influential is a relationship with 20,000 people you've never met? How much revenue potential is there in a single person without an income that exceeds their debt?

Mac vs. PC
Who cares? We're all Googlers now. This year, it's Google versus everyone...Apple, Microsoft, AT+T, NewsCorp, the FTC. Curiously, it's also Google with everyone...especially the user base.

Making an impression
Will impression-based marketing continue its deflationary spiral? Experiments in paywalls and increased licensing fees will continue to demonstrate that the value of an action is worth more than the promise of one. Marketers may decide once and for all that the pricing of a CPM is commensurate only with the value of awareness. Content providers may find that their content is a priceless commodity...with revenues to match.

Welcome to the Jungle

Will tribalism continue its rise? We all certainly belong to multiple tribes that defy simplistic black and white, red-blue comparisons. "If you aren't with me, you're against me" might be replaced by "hey, I know you" as a basis for trust. Long tails aren't just for animal interests. In 2010, they may become THE market segments of first resort.

FAB: What's in it for me?
In a noisy sea of brand sameness surrounding green, smart, innovative, inspired, aspirational notions of consumption, will real features and benefits become the only differentiators anyone pays attention to?

What do you think?
Will "what do you think?" replace "Let me tell you something". Can an entire industry of communications, advertising, marketing and PR professionals built around telling evolve to a viable business built on listening in 2010? Should it?

Grading 2009 Marketing Forecasts

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:50:00 +0000

It's that time of the year...when the wonders of the world wide web and its infinite storage give us the chance to review what we said...as it was typed. Mostly for fun.

Back in January, I posted themes for marketing in 2009 [here]. Let's take a quick look, shall we? Grading is, well, subjective. Your scores and comments--using whatever rubric you prefer--are welcome.

Theme 1: Wearing other people's shoes

The era of the simulacra in marketing--whereby we substitute a representation of what is real for what is real--will further resolve itself in 2009. Defining a customer's values by using a marketer's representation of those values will be discredited by...the customer. Unauthentic marketer monologues that rely on self-referencing notions or that characterize people as collectivist definitions based on gender, race, age, income, or as...consumers...will be cast aside. In their place, favor will rest with real conversations among real people that enable the real people in marketing to catch a glimpse of the real world as it exists where someone else stands.

Grade: B+
Certainly all manner of social media has enabled people to talk with or at one another. I'm not sure if Coke Zero's conversation with 2000 followers on Twitter [here] is a good example of authentic dialogue, but many marketers now seem to be seeking the real thing on social sites like Twitter + Facebook and on open forums like blogs. Even conservative industries like agriculture are taking the plunge to actually, you know, engage customers, critics and competitors...see Monsanto here and here. The conversation isn't always pretty. Unfortunately for some industries (notably ad and news), the point of recognition seems to have not yet arrived en masse.

Theme 2: Increasing the discomfort index

The tools and techniques that have gotten marketers where they are will be unable to sustain them going forward. In a year when many long held beliefs--from capitalism to consumption--are being questioned, people in marketing will need to question whatever makes them feel comfortable. If it's easy, if it's table stakes, it probably needs to be questioned.

Grade: B
With continued weakness in advertising spending, online even feeling the pinch, discomfort is high. In addition, the challenging economics of The Great Recession make Price and Promotion the predominant P's for many marketer's [here]. Clients are asking for more causation in marketing ROI discussions and this continues to challenge investment in the tools that are broad based and hard to measure in realtime. Volume and value in advertising would seem to have a new inverse relationship [here].

Theme 3: Testing the real world

Along the lines of themes 1 and 2, the idea of market-testing ideas will continue to evolve toward a ready, fire, reload approach. With one-size-fits-all focus group and field studies too slow, too expensive and too generalized, creative and product testing will take place in realtime using clickstream data to inform evolution and variation in low cost, perpetual prototypes...much as direct mailers have practiced in paper space for some time.

Grade: C

Examples of crowdsourcing like Netflix' prize demonstrate the concept of the collaboratory in high profile. But on a more granular level, the deployment rates of social media is a broader indication that marketers are testing their ideas in the real world [here] [here]. Whether they are finding that their ideas reasonate is a different question, but the trend would seem clear: everyone continues to know that they must pursue innovative ways of competing against ignorance, apathy and genuinely good competitors. Unfortunately, too many marketers still rely on the 'please let us know what you think by taking our survey' solicitation on receipts, web pages or followup phone calls.

Theme 4: Detailed online impressions

After years of ignoring the online space, many people in marketing have rushed in to fully embrace it...using the traditional models of impressions-based media, intrusion, and branding that they comfortably carried with them from meatspace. In 2009, impressions-based pricing online will continue its deflationary trend and be replaced by pricing models that pay only for performance. Intrusion-based ad units such as rich media and popovers will be ignored routinely. People in marketing roles will focus on the nuances of online brand experiences as defined by a long-tailed view of customer preferences and interactions with a brand. Usable, useful, and desirable will be the criteria against which meaningful brand experiences will be designed and delivered online--and off.

Grade: A

Annoyance with intrusive ad units online remains high. And though some predict huge gains in new video-based advertising online, the only continuous uptrend in online spending even during down times, is with search [here]. Performance measurement is still a way off for traditional TV models, but even Google is getting into the game using DVR data [here]. Customers are in control and if there isn't a clear reason to engage, people won't...no matter how intrusive you try to be. If impressions are paid for without follow through to engagement, then the price can only continue to deflate as value continues to align with what is directly measurable.

Theme 5: Time as a risk to manage

Time is the one commodity everyone has in equal portions each day. People in marketing will increasingly confront the reality that wasting a customer's time is a brand risk that must be actively managed. Engagement will be defined more precisely in terms of positive and negative engagements where efficient use of and respect for a person's time becomes the expectation. Whether it's call center catacombs, unusable information, spam like solicitations, or irrelevant pitches, marketers will find that a risk premium comes standard with every touchpoint.

Grade: A-

While time is a risk to manage for marketers, it would seem they are losing the battle in capturing it. With Facebook now occupying more time than any other online activity, and games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Sorority Life becoming major time sinks online, one wonders where marketers will find room to compete. That's why salaries are earned I guess.

Regardless, marketers are confronted with the idea that even their products are, in fact, services [here]. And where there is service, there is a time risk to manage. The good news is that customer service options are now being deployed in online, call center, and in person channels that are more integrated and efficient for all involved. Usability and human factors are more broadly recognized as critical components of service design.

The bad news is that many marketers still seem to think that their customer's time isn't their concern. Whether it's once a day email promotions blasted to thousands of inboxes or 12-step phone menus just to talk to someone, their remains a great deal of customer time to stop wasting.

Volume vs. Value: The zettabyte generation

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:09:00 +0000

Say, 'Zettabyte'. Let it sink in for a second, then say it again. 'Zetta-byte'.

Like 'one trillion dollars', a zettabyte is a really big number...and yet, it is the amount of data each of us average Americans consumes annually...3x!

Using the faded power of worn out analogies, if a zettabyte were printed on paper, it would bury the continental US AND Alaska in a layer of paper 7 feet deep...a number 9 zeroes more, even, than all the dollars in the national debt!

National debt: $7,938,000,000,000
One Zettabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

At least, that's the total information consumed according to three researchers at UC San Diego in their report 'How Much Information: 2009 Report on Consumers'

The report's headlines include a deluge of data on media consumption, broken out by bytes, hours, and format.

TV, for instance, occupies 41% of our daily hours, 44% of the daily words we encounter, but only 34% of the bytes we, um, consume. Perhaps hot selling HD video screens will boost our appetite for bytes?

Here's a just a bit (or rather 450,000 bytes) of some fun numbers from the report (click to enlarge):

But beyond the numbers showing:

a +5% annual growth rate in the amount of data we consume,
the decades-long relative increase in the amount of reading by Americans (albeit not using the ungreen paper format,) and
the huge amount of data consumed playing video games vs. radio, phone, and print media,

the report provides an important, mostly obvious, caveat: measures of quantity, whether in hours or bytes, are not measures of value.

Overfed and underread?

The report uses the example of Lincoln's Gettysburg address to show that volume (as in exposures, bytes or costs) does not equate to impact in the general human sense of more-is-more.

For instance, Lincoln's 2.5 minute speech, scrawled on paper, heard by few, but repeated repeatedly to schoolchildren throughout the years, turns out to have more impact--both quantitatively and subjectively--than the much more expensive, high-volume, TV series, 'Heroes'. And yet, looking at Heroes through the lenses of hours of content and bandwidth, one might (mistakenly) conclude the opposite.

Which brings us to a point in all this data masquerading as information...

So what?

For marketers, the message supported by the report would seem clear: as the volume of data consumed by modern Americans--measured by time, volume or format--continues to measurably increase, there is one clear means of breaking through the data noise in a way that leads to measurable informational value: interaction.

And while the move from passive to active engagement in marketing has been underway--at least rhetorically--for some time, it is surprising that so much of our media consumption is paid for based on volume-based models rather than action.

Increasingly, spending on pay-per-action models that support the business and marketing objectives would seem to be the demand of engagement marketers. Engaging one's attention in what marketers have to say comes with the demand that there be value to you. That's hard when you don't know someone by more than their zip code, demographic or gender.

The value of engagement is something that's been evident since before anyone knew what a kilobyte was. Somewhere along the way, we've started to re-discover that our tools alone are poor measures of the ends to which we apply them.

YouTube video showing one type of engagement with our tools (ads included)...for better or worse:

Tapped out consumers: what's a marketer to do?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:40:00 +0000

'Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have on something they don't need'
-Will Rogers

With credit continuing to contract, unemployment high, and The Great Recession wobbling between green shoots and brown leaves, the macro-level challenges to the consumer's spending habits seem apparent for the near term: Less is more...more or less.

In fact, when one looks at the income quintiles of US Households, the extent of the Great Debt Deleveraging taking place should be obvious:

Household debt as a percentage of GDP has reached 100% only twice in US history...1929 and 2007. Much of what US consumers bought over the last two decades was bought on credit. Much of it, perhaps, because advertising was so successful at convincing people in the way Will Rogers said.

But if thrift and living within one's means is the new required reality, what can advertisers and marketers hope to do going forward?

image: zazzle

I took a look at this question by asking myself the following question: if everyone were to live within their income means, what is the value of a consumer's time in terms of their prospect for consumption? In other words, what is the absolute customer value built in to each minute of engagement and attention?

Rather than focus on the cost to reach someone, I thought I'd focus on the potential spending value of that person's time (and thus, the potential revenue value).

The answer? 5 to 22 cents per minute (depending on which income quintile the consumer inhabits)...total...for everything...including water, taxes and energy.

See table and assumptions (click to enlarge):

An adjustment to the per minute income value is made by multiplying the unadjusted value by 1.33 This adjustment is meant to account for the one-third of a person's time that is presumed to be unavailable for engagement (e.g., sleep, hygiene). Income conservatively based on lower bound for each quintile. All data from US Census 2004

So What?

Of course people will still make use of some credit. And most customer value calculations would use a multiyear or lifetime value. But whatever you think of the math and the assumptions, the new reality of living within one's means means that advertising, PR and the larger world of marketing have a hopeful future...in using media in a social, engaging way.

I don't mean to imply that every brand has to swap it's marketing dollars from print to a Facebook Fan page. I do mean to imply that there are new, lower absolute values to the return one might expect from an investment in communications that seek only attention or delivering impressions.

Many in media have been slow to embrace planning approaches that went beyond broad-based awareness building, focussing primarily on the spend necessary to get a debt-fueled consumer's attention. In that world, sales lift was generally a sufficient measure of advertising impressions success.

But that approach may be done. In an era of thrift, engagement becomes a primary objective for brand communications. Social approaches to brand awareness through engagement, done well, have among their qualities:

Low cost per minute of engagement relative to the value of the person's time (due in large part to the ownership of the engaged in building awareness and interest among their social network)
High relevancy (due to personalization and ownership of the message taken by those engaged)
Tight audience focus (self-selection by the engaged reduces the inefficiency of audience descriptions based on gender, age, and race stereotypes)
Trust (resulting primarily from the interaction of people with one another rather than one-size-fits-all, one-way brand abstractions).
Learning (derived from observation of and interaction with the people who incorporate brand engagement into their lives in different ways).
Measurement against predefined value objectives (available from the firehose of data available in near realtime).

For more on social media measurement see here, here and here. For more on assigning a value to a social media visitor, see here.

Taken together, engagement-based approaches to communications may provide corporate marketers the best chance of realizing realistic revenue impacts in an era of less consumption.

No group or organizational unit owns engagement around a brand. In every company, though, there are leaders and those who would be led. Communications, customer service, sales and marketing professionals are all potential leaders along a path of customer engagement.

The leaders who emerge will be recognized by their obsession with asking questions and listening to the answers.

Truth vs. facts: The sequel

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:39:00 +0000

Back in April, we commented on TiVos impending challenge to the Nielsen TV rating hegemony in influencing advertising rates: Truths + Facts: Belief systems being challenged [here].

Now, the worst fears of those who extract value through an opaque relationship between TV ad impressions and ad performance may be realized: Google is entering an agreement with TiVo to use its data on ad-skipping in a pay-for-performance manner [here].

So What?

The implications of better data on which TV ads are being seen (as opposed to skipped) exist on a plus or minus scale of positive to negative impacts...if you sell ads based on extrapolated audience deliveries (e.g., based on Nielsen Household Survey data) it may weigh negative. If you want to pay for performance, you'd certainly think it was a positive to have data supporting the invoice.

Of course these are the self-evident truths we hold when stereotyping TV as an old school sales game and Google's pay for performance model as the all knowing oracle of answers to questions we haven't even thought to, er, Google.

Here's three reasons I think TV networks will find a deal like TiVo-Google a good one:

TV networks can objectively support their advertising value in the pay-for-performance era and define themselves as a viable part of that mix.
Knowing under what circumstances ads work (i.e., which ads don't get skipped) can help networks create more flexible ad packages around second-by-second behavioral data...a single advertiser with a consecutive series of 2, 7, and 50 second spots in a pod might make as much sense as multiple advertisers in a single pod.
Flexible pricing models that enable auction-style bidding (similar to pay per click search marketing) may bring new advertisers to the networks by removing cost barriers.

Certainly there are many other positive implications to be realized. And while it's easy for some to incessantly describe the imminent doom of Big Media, the reality is that knowledge, accountability and transparency are good for everyone in the long run. The alternative---ignorance, irresponsibility and trading in secrets--has no productive place in a social construct--like advertising--that relies on trust.

More than meets the eyeballs: seeing differences through social media

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:31:00 +0000

Much is made of growth. Growth is about energy and possibility. It's heady, exciting, and fun. In life, growth defers hard questions about the future to...the future. Which, for some, has the distinct advantage of always being tomorrow.

In business, likewise, growth sings a siren song of temptation...putting off hard questions about profitability, efficiency, and change in the name of doing it, scaling up, gaining critical mass! People jump on the bandwagon, join the fad, and ask each other "hey, have you seen and heard?". Marketing is genius when growth is the mode. And this all works...until it doesn't. What then?

Take social media. Here's Compete's comparison chart of 12 month's traffic for Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

What's notable isn't that Facebook continues to grow. Rather, what seems notable is that MySpace is in essentially the same place it was back in February 09. It ceased to grow sometime ago...and now it seems to have stopped shrinking. Of note, it has double the unique visitors of the now-flatlining Twitter.

The stats are here to make one point only: Growth is good, but it seldom lasts forever: and when it stops, that's when marketing gets harder.

What about that isn't obvious?

Danah Boyd has an article in the November issue of Interactions titled "Implications of User Choice: The cultural logic of MySpace or Facebook?" The article speaks to what isn't always obvious in marketing's social media embrace: there is more to marketing online than meets the eyeballs.

Though not specifically addressing marketing, Boyd's interviews and research illustrate the many ways online audiences define themselves and how these definitions affect where they engage with social media: often in different terms than marketers use.

For instance, how many Nielsen or MRI reports identify social media audiences as Wangsta's, Emo's, or Honors kids for instance? And yet, it's precisely this type of engagement around cultural differences that is driving many choices about social media selections among teenagers. Is it such a stretch to think that an adult accountant by day might be a hipster online?

So What?

The promise of teh interwebz has been described, among other ways, as a great force for democratization of communication. Online, noone knows your a dog. Or a dork. Well, ok, you can probably figure that out pretty easily.

The good marketers take steps to avoid letting their own biases drive decisions about who and where their customers are online. They recognize that their brands have to be wherever their prospects are...and in a context that reflects who they are online...it's not so much the other way around.

It's easy to see a world of hip, middle income, early adopters using iPhones to update their Facebook Walls, clicking on ads when that's you. It's important to remember that customers online engage with others around powerful long-tail self definitions of their own making. Definitions that may look nothing like what we see in the mirror.

And that's when marketing through social media gets harder than it already is. Because growth isn't a strategy...it's an outcome. And eventually, when growth flattens, every one of those self-defining prospects + customers becomes precious.

Question is, were you there for them...and did they see themselves in you?

Thinking different: products as services

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Back in the day, as part of the world's largest management consultancy firm, one of our partners used to routinely invoke the following pointmaker: People don't buy drills, they buy holes.

The thinking was like this: everything about a drill is configured around the idea of a product...if you are the manufacturer, the distributor or the retailer. You may have entirely separate business units for design, marketing and service of the drill. You most certainly have product beauty shots in your advertising.

But if you are the customer, the drill is a provider of a service...it is part of a larger life experience...building a kitchen, assembling a swingset, hanging a mirror...drilling a hole. Experiences too numerous and rich to be captured in a single company department or in an advertising image with a mere 10,000 words in its vocabulary.

The partner's point was that reconciling these two views is important. Because if a product plays it's part in the customer's experience poorly--through ambiguous or incompatible relationships to the other parts of the system--then all the marketing and advertising in the world can't prevent a single product from suddenly carrying the entire burden of a poor customer experience...fair or not. Just ask Microsoft.

Now before you accuse me of going down the rabbit hole to pop-marketing-wonderland, please let me explain: I'm not suggesting that marketers abandon product thinking, or that every manufacturer of nails needs to contemplate architecture in its marketing...I'm only suggesting that incorporating broader thinking about the customer system into which a product fits is an imperative for marketing.

Many of you already do this, and I'd be grateful for any thoughts and experiences you can share that would do a better job of explaining this matter than I can. For the rest, here's my shot:

Why should I care?

It's how people experience most of our products...Chemicals, couches...product choice is not what customers typically lack. Customers have a multitude of choices among a sea of oftentimes indistinguishable features and benefits. 8 megapixels, 12 megapixels...all that is lost if you can't figure out how to get the image from the camera to grandma. That's the system the product exists within...the service it is expected to perform.

Our colleagues are already doing it. An iPhone isn't a phone, it's a service for every occassion from finding red light cameras to evaluating the risk of your midnight sushi. You don't have to be Apple though. Mattress Firm takes mattresses into the broader world of sleep. Business-to-business companies often design and deliver products as part of a service package that may include access to experts, supply or distribution services, financing or end user support.

No product exists in a vacuum (with the possible exception of vacuum bags). At the most basic level, all products are tools...whether they help build self esteem or tear down a wall, tools exist in service to the task against which they are applied. As the nature of our tasks grows more complex and interrelated, products that provide service to the larger system will find new ways to stay relevant: they may even end up being used in ways originally unanticipated...as when a search engine suddenly creates the opportunity to become an advertising company or a computer enables a company to become a TV station...or movie theater.

How?

The tricky part is tricky because it's easy to understand but difficult to implement. Systems thinking means changing the way the product organization works. Here's three of the biggest challenges I've observed for marketers:

1. Everyone owns the customer experience: Marketing has long professed to represent the customer. But product design + engineering, sales, and especially customer service are all responsible for understanding and delivering on the brand promise in the customer service system to which a product belongs. Cross functional teams may be better at owning the total experience than more traditional, specialized business unit silos. In all cases, specific and accountable individuals should be aligned and empowered with the experience. If you can't deliver beyond the product, don't let your advertising and collateral say you can.

2. Think of everything, act on some things: No organization, with the possible exception of the GoogleBorg, can successfully manage the entirety of a customer's experience. The first step, as they say, is admitting that. The second step is figuring out what can be managed. This happens when as much of the total system as possible is identified. What does the customer want to do? How do they do it? What other products are used (beyond the one we're selling)? Who do they interact with? Formally and thoroughly identifying and mapping the total experience system enables an organization to identify opportunities and priorities on which to focus. Marketers already have access to many of the tools, such as ethnographic and other market research, for helping to map the system.

3. Be yourself: Behind every marketer, product manager or engineering title there is a real person. And every real person in any capacity at a company has a story about a product's failure in their personal experience. From the home entertainment system with five remote controls to packaging that requires a jackhammer to open. Asking how one's own products can remove unanticipated angst from the customer's lives isn't being cynical or negative...when it's accompanied by ideas for improvement, that's innovation. And like the customer experience, we all own innovation.

Marketers have a critical role to play in helping their organizations move beyond product thinking alone. Fulfilling that role might require marketers to think like someone other than marketers on occassion.

How do you think different?

Calculating combinatorial explosion: a tool for word of mouth marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:53:00 +0000

I am not a big fan of the term 'viral marketing': the swine flu pandemic (or H1N1 for those who think pigs are being unfairly singled out) has certainly reminded us that 'viral' things haven't historically been perceived positively...especially by those who are infected. And yet, some in marketing and PR circles continue to let the term fly when discussing why social media should matter.

Word of mouth, on the other hand, seems to focus more explicitly on all that is wunderbar with social media. Influencers tell influencers who tell influencers...and so on and so on...and when it's digital, it's free!

Of course, when everyone is an influencer at some level, marketers might wonder just how many influencers it takes to get a critical mass of pass-alongers. One tool to help in the planning stages uses simple factorial math to calculate the reach that a ~~viral~~ word of mouth approach might achieve.

I've posted a simple spreadsheet version of the tool you can download on the Dialogue Marketing website, here. (MS Excel file)

The idea is relatively straightforward: capture a few assumptions and see how many people you might actually reach.

The assumptions in the tool include:

1. Number of initial influencers (or seeds) the campaign will contact
2. Expected pass along (i.e., retweet, email, linkback) percentage
3. Number of people these influencers will reach
4. The number of pass along cycles (the 'and so on' part)

By structuring the capture of assumptions, enabling easy development of goal scenarios, and keeping the math in the background, the tool provides campaign planners with an easy to use expectation setter.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Newsprinter circulation: a vehicle driven to tears

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:52:00 +0000

Freedom of the press is limited to those with the ability to run one
- A. J. Liebling

What's black and white and ~~read~~ in the red all over? The newsprinter business apparently. Well, not actually. In fact many newspapers are more profitable than the evil health insurance companies (here + here).

The Audit Bureau of Circulation released newspaper circulation numbers a couple of days ago...the Washington Post and other walking-dead media continue to bemoan the accelerating decline in paid circulation for America's newspapers (here and here for example). For a complete roundup, check Newspaper Death Watch (here)

And while the Newspaper Association of America tries to convince itself of the successful migration of newsprint to digital (here), it would seem that everyone also understands why the economics of the move online are not working in a quid pro quo manner:

"Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins."

That's generally what happens when you apply technology to something...it gets cheaper.

So What?

What the decline in the nation's largest newsprint organs means is anyone's guess, but here's mine:

1. Journalism isn't dead: If the NY Times (and other big media) disappears in a sea of red ink, the republic will survive. The issue of newsprint's decline is one of inefficient media...not content. Investigative reporting doesn't really have anything to do with distributing a crossword puzzle, Paul Krugman, or the Yankees. Those are legacies of big media's bygone mass attention monopoly. The economics of the NYT investigative reporting is still built on the presumption that the book reviews matter...and that the newsprint that carries them matters too.

2. Print isn't dead: At least, it isn't if you are relevant. Like politics, the most relevant news is local. The same ABC statistics show that small dailies seem to be doing ok. Newsprint subscribers seem to find the cost of a printed newspaper reasonable when it covers news that is local. Thinking smaller, though, isn't generally in the nature of an organization that thinks it's already printing all the news that's fit to be printed. And even local news organizations get that print has to be integrated with low cost online outlets.

3. News is a commodity: Newsprinters trade in information and information is a commodity. Analysis and opinion, on the other hand, are the stuff of differentiation. They also tend to engender polarization. The newsprinters who reconcile their ability to draw an audience around their opinion may survive, albeit as smaller enterprises. But smaller is where their headed one way or the other.

4. Economics matter: Advertising is subjected to the same forces of cost efficiency, measurability and effectiveness as every other industry. As long as newsprinters rely on advertising, their cost structures will have to reflect the declining value of advertising. This may mean that those who want print have to assume more of the cost of print. And of course, the major newsprinters aren't losing money just because they aren't selling ads. They sucked from the same debt trough as so many of their readers...buying baseball teams, buildings and trucks with low cost Greenspan dollars for example. The bills have been coming due for quite some time. What the profitable papers are figuring out is that, like everyone else they have to reduce costs or raise prices...or both. How that works out in an era of deflation is anyone's guess.

And let's not even start on the environmental considerations of newsprint...in the meantime, I'll wipe away my crocodile tears and continue looking forward in the new age of news.

Free vs. Paid content: Hulu becomes the next small thing

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Not one to usually value unsubstantiated rumors, I will occassionally pass along rumors that seem substantiated. In this case, it's the rumor that the video sharing site Hulu intends to start charging for access to it's content sometime in 2010.

I say substantiated rumor because Hulu owner Newscorp's very own Chase Carey says it thusly:

“It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online,”

Full quote via TVWeek here

Of course Hulu isn't the only new-legacy media outlet online attempting to find a way to get paid for what's previously been free. Newspapers, like the NYTimes, have gone free online, tried a paywall, then torn it down, only to reconsider it again.

The long, slow decline of ad revenue at Big Media has driven the best and brightest they have to offer the usual and customary response: raise prices.

So what?

The obvious challenges in charging for broadcast content (or news, or opinion, or entertainment) online include:

How does customer behavior that has been groomed around free access online suddenly change to a paid model?
What value must be provided beyond what is currently available via the free model?

How do you define broadcast content competition online that includes the myriad other channel options people have for spending their time and interacting?

Broadcast content offline is subsidized by advertising...does charging customers for access online presumes that advertising is not required?

Beyond these questions, the reality behind the online subscription model rumblings is this: traditional broadcast models are based on a cost structure that is under duress...because the models are based on big. Big audiences, big production, big ad revenues.

Paper pays for infrastructure (printing presses, distribution, etc.) that is not able to be cost recovered. Broadcast content producers and their network distributors pay more than their audiences are willing to pay to watch (and, increasingly, more than the advertisers are willing to subsidize).

Applying technology to most human endeavours does two things: it decreases the costs associated with doing the same thing the old way and it enables things to be done in a new or different way.

Until broadcast models do something new and different, their only option will be to reduce costs and prices to reflect the long-tail reality of their customer's interests...the challenge is that cost cutting ends at zero. Ultimately, I think this means Big Media will have to think smaller...smaller audiences, smaller segmentation, smaller budgets...in aggregate, they may become something bigger...but they have to start by thinking smaller.

Ultimately, Hulu will probably deploy a mix of paid and free access...all-you-can-eat and on-demand packages. As with any endeavour that has near commodity status, the challenge will be in setting a price that marks to a market of one--not to what Hulu wishes a market of millions would bear.

With any luck, small thinking might--finally--become the next big thing for Big Media.

Doing more for less: Unmasking display ad effectiveness research

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:16:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, comScore and Starcom released a study showing that display advertising online continues to find fewer and fewer people willing to take the click (here). To boil it down to the essence, a mere 8% of internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks. So much for the legendary 80-20 rule.

This means that display ad click-thru rates for the other 92% of internet users are actually much lower than the oft-quoted figure of 0.05%. So low, in fact, as to be essentially the same as, well, zero.

Some, perhaps with a vested interest in impression-based online media, react to the comScore report as one might expect. With vague assertions about online branding + awareness. Others quote 'research' about the additive effect of display advertising on the effectiveness of performance-based formats like search (example).

But when one actually reads the research (when it can be found, like this one from Microsoft's Atlas Institute) one gets the distinct impression (so to speak) that these studies are often just marketing POV's dressed up in a mad-scientist Halloween costume: nice white lab coat, institute clipboard...but no research methods. No explanation of controls. And no causal explanation of why 27% of the results were in opposition to the fundamental conclusion of the study: that display ads provide a lift when used with search.

So What?

I'm not trying to trash display ads...or even self-referencing research (though the decline of display ad effectiveness is something predicted in the Themes for 2009 post). Heck, I'm not sure there's really a fundamental difference between an ad vehicle displayed based on the site a user visits and an ad vehicle that is displayed based on words a user types into a search engine.

I'm only suggesting that, as a group, advertising professionals quit fighting losing battles about 'changing client perceptions on the value of an impression online'. Clients understand paying for an action. Shoot, we all should understand that we get paid for doing something, not for the impression of doing something.

We're not serving clients, their brands, or the profession if we quote laughably biased and nonrigorous 'research' findings in support of impression-based buying online. Instead, let's propose online media plans that incorporate at least of few of the following components:

1. Driven by practical and directly measurable audience action on each impression

2. Demand a creative unit that has a call to action for each impression

3. Priced on performance against the action.

4. Prioritized in a media mix based on the action's value to the client (or their customer).

Plans for action online don't require a belief system built around ambiguously demonstrated offline ad concepts or research that helps us see what we already believe. Plans for action online do require a commitment to transparent measurement and to a definition of value that serves all stakeholders' needs...especially the client's.

Child, please! Agency compensation and the suspension of disbelief

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Any explanation is better than none. - Nietzsche

The 4A's (Amer Assoc of Ad Agencies) have a salary survey out ($350 for members) that, according to Advertising Age, shows top creative 'talent' billing out at $978 per hour [here] with lesser talent averaging $400 and up. I put the word 'talent' in parentheses because it takes quite a bit of talent to convince someone to pay you $978 per hour...for anything.

If you were working 2000 hours per year, that would value your labor at $1.95 million. Of course, it would also mean that 4A's members only have to work for 21 minutes at that rate to pay for a copy of the 4A's confirming survey.

But what is it that makes America's top creative talent worth that much? In the spirit of Nietsche, here's an explanation:

These talented men and women are creating campaigns that, as a directly measurable result of their efforts, sell at least $1.95 million worth of something.

How else to explain these rates? Some people might use terms like 'great' or 'impactful' to describe the work product that warrants this type of agency compensation. Others might throw in 'award-winning' to modify the noun 'work'. But those are not business terms.

One other explanation does come to mind, but that would require something less noble. Maybe these rates aren't justifiable? Maybe they don't actually exist at all except in a world where reality is suspended in favor of imagination? Maybe they are reported, like capitalized billings once were, as a way of creating the impression of importance...of shoring up an industry pricing structure under duress.

Whatever the explanation for the incredi-rates being reported in the 4A's study, the buyers of creative talent can always ask for a measurable explanation of the return on the investment.

There are quite a few highly competent creative talents and agencies who are compensated at a fraction of the 4A's-reported levels...here's a few ways to recognize them:

they embrace discussions about campaign measurement + can show you how they've worked with their clients to create measurement at every level of campaign (not just using awareness studies!).
they are able to work with value-based or milestone-driven, fixed fee billing approaches that minimize the financial risk inherent to the client in spending on any campaign.
they can define 'the work' with specificity around deliverables, costs + support for business objectives.
they use the word 'strategy' in the proper context of accomplishing objectives rather than as a separate creative exercise and thus expect client involvement in the creative process.

HT to Chad Ochocinco for inspiring the headline...and for delivering measurable results in the Dog Pound!

Gambling on Twitter: Dollars to cents?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:41:00 +0000

Q: How do you make $1 million in Technology?

A: Start with $100 million

Some have called Twitter narcissistic. Others, blogging for the attention deficit disordered. Many techies have called Twitter nothing more than a feature. Google's Eric Schmidt called it, the greatest social media tool since, well, email [not really, he called it "a poor man's email"...which I guess means all of us who aren't billionaires like Eric, Serge and Larry! Or was he talking about a deficit of substance? hmm]

But I digress. How about Twitter as a gamble? As a firm believer in the wisdom of the marketplace, I'll refer to what some ~~gamblers~~ venture capitalists have decided to call Twitter: a $158 million investment. [here]

What's Twitter really worth? Better yet, what's a follower for your brand's Twitter feed worth?

Following up on last week's calculation of web visitor worth [here] I apply the same misguided logic to the Twitter investment to conclude that a Twitter follower is worth...wait for it...$0.21 per month! (see math below)

At least, that's the revenue Twitter will have to generate off each unique visitor to pay back the VC investment over 3 years.

So What?

To get a 10x return on their investment over three years, the ~~gamblers~~ venturesome will need Twitter's unicorn-like powers to magically tweet $2.31 of additional cash money per user per month. Where do you think that $2.31 per month per visitor is going to come from? Subscription fees? Micropayments per tweet? The Federal Reserve?

Or is there another source? Say, hmm, I don't know, maybe, ADVERTISING!

Of course advertising is always the easy answer. It's probably the one VC's are counting on.

For a user, what kind of advertising am I paying attention to while busily crafting each and every one of the 140-character Twitter treats I'm tweeting to my tweet-toofed followers?

For a marketer, why would I pay to advertise on someone else's feed when I can engage potential customers directly on my own? Maybe that's what Twitter will do...charge companies a fee based on followers. If that's the case, then a marketer might want to look at $2.31 as an upper limit cost for a follower on Twitter.

And in figuring the metric, if I spend $5000 on my Twitter media presence, then I might consider 2164 followers a goal number...that's where the ~~gamblin'~~ smart money seems to have it valued anyway.

Of course, if you can get a follower to do more than follow (say visit an eCommerce site or Retweet for you) then you can figure your return on Twitter in a more nuanced manner. Which is to say, a manner driven by objectives, informed by measurement and, thus, a manner that has less of the appearance of a gamble.

Doing the math (please feel free to challenge this...I was not a math major):

Total VC investment: $158,000,000 [here]

Unique Monthly Visitors (Aug 09, comscore): 28,100,000

One month breakeven return per visitor: $7.68

Monthly breakeven return required per visitor, 1Year: $0.63

Expected breakeven term: 3 years

Expected Return on Investment: 10X

Necessary Revenue Enhancement per visitor per month to meet investment objectives: $2.31 (gotta pay back the original $0.21!)

Breaking the Law...of averages

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:55:00 +0000

Hear the one about the statistician who drowned trying to walk across the river because he determined the water was, on average, only 3 feet deep?

It's a humorous little example of how trusting averages can be dangerous to your health. Here are some other averages...ask yourself if this is you. You are 5'6" tall, you weigh 176 pounds, and you make $42,028 per year

Close?

So what?

Ok, so there is no way you are all three, exactly, right? For one thing, we know that there are easy filters around gender that change these averages. And as marketers, we also know that there are numerous other filters we can finesse--like zip or fips codes, age, like...well, like a personality type?

However a marketer might filter it, we're still just toying with what's average so we can speak in an average way. An average 20-something votes for Obama, uses an iPhone, and hooks up with friends using Facebook. But what about the exceptions? Do we right them off as outliers? What if the outliers become the rule?

By dealing primarily in averages, do we run the risk of missing what's extraordinary about each and everyone of us?

As marketers, we've always been keen to find the insights that lead to delight. But perhaps we've been a little too delighted with our own views of what, it turns out, is merely average. Average spots appealing to average instincts on average channels used average amounts of time.

But how are we to go all Lake Wobegon and make every marketer above average? The good news is simple: treat people like a person and the averages disappear.

Treating someone like a person is easy...it requires only three basic things:

1. Treat people as individuals...people are only a member of a group when they decide they are a member of a group. People don't usually define themselves primarily by your brand. And if they do for the moment, it's because they decided so.

2. Listen to what individuals have to say...Listening is a process...to listen, you can't be doing all the talking. Of course, listening sometimes starts by asking a question, but it ends when you decide you don't want to hear what's being said. Deciding not to listen, though, doesn't mean the conversation ends, it only means you won't be part of it.

3. Trust people...yes, we're all flawed, but if you can't trust in people then you can hardly expect people to trust you. From the call center operator to the salesperson to the executive suite...trust earned is trust that must be repayed. Trust expected is an opportunity for trust to be earned.

The technical tools at our disposal enable each of us to engage people as individuals on an unprecedented scale. From email to Facebook to instant messaging to 800 numbers, it's not the tools we wield that do the marketing but the marketers that use them in an unaveraged way.

For a decidedly unaverage version of leather-clad metal odes to breaking the law, check it:

What's a visitor worth? A house of cards market and an end in mind

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:22:00 +0000

Having been bombarded recently by cable and telephone direct marketing offers for TriplePlay and Three-fer bundles, I figured, why can't I make a triangular offer? So here's part three of the September online ad posting bundle. In it, we attempt to answer the generic question: What's an online visitor worth?

image source: HHMI

For those new visitors, which is most of you according to my Google Analytics reports, Part 1 and Part 2 dealt with the numbers surrounding online advertising on social networks and Nielsen's impending inclusion of online TV viewing numbers in their ratings reports, respectively.

So what is an online visitor worth? $41.06*

*based on the current value of the US dollar. So don't delay...lock in your pre-devalued-currency pricing today!

How's that?

In a recent issue of Forbes magazine (09/07/09), they examined online advertising data from eMarketer and EquityThink. Looking at the top 4 online properties (Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL), which collectively represent 27% of online ad revenues globally, I looked at their ad revenues against their monthly unique visitors (adjusted for US visitors derived from comscore data). The table looks like this (all revenue and visitor totals are for Top 4 properties):

So advertisers are, collectively, valuing a unique visitor to the top 4 portals at $41 worth of online advertising.

Of course, the math is neither precise nor accurate given that many sites represented in the 73% that are not Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL don't have advertising revenues reported very accurately. And of course the total unique visitors in the remaining 73% surely are mostly the same as those in the top 4.

In other words, ad revenue and unique visitor numbers are estimates built on top of estimates with assumptions integrated. Think of them as the metrics equivalent of Collateralized Debt Obligations...as long as we all agree to buy into the same assumptions and estimation methodologies, we may find a consistent market value to mark to.

So What?

The point of this exercise, beyond occupying a few minutes this morning attempting to bring a Golden Triangle-like completion to a week's worth of postings, is to highlight a means of benchmarking answers to questions about investing in online advertising.

If you are thinking of running multiple campaigns for search or display, how much are you willing to pay? What's the value of getting someone to click? The answers depend critically upon what your objectives are, what a transaction value is, what loyalty or revenue goals are. But for online branding campaigns, social media experiments and acquisition campaigns, it may be helpful to at least have an idea of what the market says a visitor is worth.

You can divide unique visitors anyway you like. You can factor in deflating ad costs, assign factors based on each visitor's time spent, or you can adjust for the special value of the unqiue visitors you think your campaign will attract.

The bottom line is that to answer what a visitor is worth in terms of ad spend, you have to start with a reasoned sense of what the marketplace says a visitor is worth. But you must end with what you think the visitor's value is.

Leaving an impression, eye contact + making time matter

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:19:00 +0000

The self appointed senior deputy official accounters of anytime, anywhere media measurement, Nielsen, announced that they will soon provide data for online TV viewing. This, it is said, will complement their 'people meter'-derived homes data, which currently calls the hits and the misses for traditional tv viewing (i.e., the kind that actually requires a television set). Nielsen release here.

On the surface, Nielsen's claim that it is important to account for online TV viewing seems reasonable. Multiple data sources, including Quantcast, Google, comScore and Nielsen are in violent agreement that more and more of us are watching TV shows on our computer screens. Unfortunately, Nielsen's move to more ~~accurately~~, er, comprehensively account for tv viewing just isn't that big of a deal.

Say What?

The Nielsen approach attempts to take that which no longer is distinct (the TV) and treat it as if it were. Not to 'dis Nielsen, the same challenge presents itself in the way many traditional media interests have viewed the move online: they've taken the analog vehicle (e.g., TV set, newspaper, album) and tried to move that model online as if it were still distinct. Newspapers, music publishers, books...moving them online integrates video, text, images and audio behind a single, digitally-enabled vehicle...one screen to rule them all...with speakers...and a keyboard.

So the idea that Nielsen's online TV viewing measurement matters much would require that traditional television programming must matter. Of course it does, just not as much as the salad days when we had less to do, with fewer tools to do it. Because now, our friend's silly video of their kid's soccer game matters more than primetime TV. So do our Twitter grunts and Facebook statuses. And we don't like it much when MadMen try to get between us and our context with interruptive, irrelevant advertising online.

So What?

Of course, like healthcare, we all want everything free: free media that is free of advertising and subscription costs. But unlike healthcare, we're willing to pay for ad-free viewing when we upgrade to OnDemand or TiVo-like equipment.

So, let me propose a measure that matters: time spent. It's the common currency that we all share equally...just 24 hours in everyone's bank.

Rather than treat us all as eyeballs and charge for impressions, let's get the best and brightest at Nielsen to track time spent...and where...did we watch 2 videos and read a status on Facebook? Did we watch 10 minutes of The Office on Hulu then 5 minutes of EpicFail?

Each online property can price it's minutes of engagement commensurate with individual's willingness to engage there. Rather than pretending that only 250,000 of us matter when it comes to measuring online media, let's pretend we all do. And rather than pretending that there is 'an audience' let's get content whereever there is one or more audiences.

Spend alot of time commenting on your friend's wall? Sending hundreds of Tweets a day to your sheeps on Twitter? Let your preferred screen sell you based on your time spent...not the number of screens you refresh. You can even let your preferred screen know what you are worth by bidding your time back. Willing to sell your time short? Tell your preferred screen what you are willing to tolerate. I'll tolerate one 60-second ad for every 15 minutes of ad-free experience.

Better yet, give me a bank of earned 'ad-free' time that I accumulate by watching ads...then when I really want to watch a show, visit a site or watch my Friend Feed refresh, without added interruption, I cash out my ad balance by changing my expereince profile to 'ad-free'.

In such a manner, Nielsen doesn't care what show gets billions of eyeballs (because none of them do), they care which sites get millions of minutes...or hundreds of minutes...of attention. And like a utility, sites can price their user's attention individually, variably, and in realtime. The user has a say in how durable a site's demand is by their willingness to accept or cash out ad-free credits.

In the end, the networks matter as either content networks or distribution networks. If the former, you want to be wherever, whenever their is a willing audience on the latter. If the latter, you have to price on what the customer will pay (i.e., your users).

In the end end, Keynes says we're all dead. So as advertisers and consumers let's make the most of the time we spend together rather than being satisfied with mere eye contact.