Edison Research

Market Research In Iraq

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:24:12 -0500

Over the years, Edison has built up a substantial portfolio of clients and projects in the Middle East, conducting market, media and political research in countries such as Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and others. By far, the most challenging work we do is in Iraq--not only do the realities of the country make survey work "interesting," but also the very act of opinion research is somewhat of a novelty to the majority of the Iraqi people.

Conducting research in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East is a collaborative effort between the researchers at Edison and a handful of wonderful local partners with whom we have collaborated over the years. Since the challenges of research in Iraq are unique, we thought we'd give you an equally unique perspective on just how market research gets done in Iraq, post-Saddam. Our partner in the field, IIACSS, was started by Dr. Munqith M. Dagher several years ago to address those challenges, and we had the distinct pleasure to sit down with him and ask him why--and how--he conducts research in one of the world's most challenging environments:

Tell us something about IIACSS and its history? Why did you start the company?

IIACSS was established in 2003 after the start of the war. I and two of my colleagues noticed that there was no scientific way to identify and transmit the real Iraqi voice. Actually, the idea came to my mind during the first week of April 2003 while I, as many Iraqis during those days, was sitting in my house in Baghdad watching and hearing the sounds of explosions everywhere from the US forces' attacks on Iraq. I had to show my family how to calm themselves, especially because I have two young daughters in addition to my two older sons. The best way for me to show them that I was not afraid was to continue practicing some of my old habits, like reading. So, I went to my small library and tried to find some books that I hadn't yet had the chance to read. One of these books was Dr. Gallup's book on public opinion surveys. Suddenly, I realized that this could be the best way to bring the voice of real Iraqis to the world.

As I was listening to different radio stations news about Iraq, I realized that those who were giving their opinions about what was going on were either representatives of the Coalition forces, or Iraqi exiles who had come in with the invasion. While all claimed that they were representing the Iraqi voice, I knew that none actually were representing the average Iraqis. To bring my idea to life, I contacted my two partners, who were teaching in Baghdad University with me, and informed them that I wanted to conduct a public opinion survey.

I designed a very short questionnaire, drew a sample of 1200 Iraqis living in different areas of Baghdad, used ten of my students who volunteered to do the field work as well as some of my family to work as data entry workers. I and my two partners sold our cars and used the money to cover some expenses, such as buying small electric generator. We were successful, and as a result I can claim that I and my team have done the first-ever Iraqi public opinion survey, which we published at the end of May 2003.

Did public opinion polling exist in Iraq prior to 2003?

Scientific public opinion polling did not exist in Iraq before 2003. When I told my partners that I wanted to conduct a public opinion survey, their first reaction was to ask me what did I even mean by "public opinion survey," as this was a new term even for those who were in academia in Iraq. After I explained to them, my colleagues told me that I was crazy to even think that this could be done in Iraq during the turmoil surrounding the war. When they saw my insistence, they asked me how we could implement such an idea--who would design the questionnaire and the sample, who would do the field work, who would enter the data, and finally who would analyze and report these results. Though I had an answer for each of these questions, I didn't realize how difficult it would be to carry out the survey until I tried!

Is all research in Iraq conducted through in-person interviews? What are the prospects for research conducted by phone or Internet in Iraq in the future?

Yes, all research in Iraq conducted through face to face interviews. Recently, I have noticed that some international polling companies claiming that they are doing some telephone or internet research, but I strongly doubt that this can be scientific research for number of reasons. First, the penetration rate of land phones in Iraq is less than 20%, and in the rural areas it could be 0%. The penetration rate of Internet is less than 10%. The second important reason is that due to the current unstable security situation and the lack of trust, no one will answer any question by telephone or Internet because the respondent cannot be sure of who is on the other side of the line, and what the interviewer will do with the information that the respondent is revealing. This is very important factor, especially when we ask sensitive questions. That's why we send our interviewers, who should be from the same area that they are interviewing, with formal IDs and formal letters from different authorities to show that we are a legal, trusted firm in order to gain respondents' trust.

What are the biggest challenges IIACSS faces conducting survey research in Iraq? How safe is it for your staff conducting research in Iraq?

The first big challenge is the security situation. On June 2006, we lost four interviewers and found three of them beheaded. We have still not found the other one. Many of my interviewers have been captured and kidnapped by different militia groups, and some of them have been torched because these groups have suspicions that we were helping their enemies or competitors. Due to the lack of a polling culture in Iraq, there are always serious suspicious about the aims and the clients who are using the results of these polls. We have been accused by some militias as helping the Americans against Iraqis, while at the same time we have also been accused by some government authorities as helping the terrorists when we publish the results of polls that show people are not satisfied with what is going on Iraq. Many household masters and some businessmen attacked our interviewers because they thought that we were collecting information about their properties and incomes so we could target them later by delivering this information to some militias or gangs. I could relate many incidents that happened both to my teams and to me personally, but for the safety of my workers I could not reveal all these incidents. One day I'll write a book!

Another big challenge is the lack of reliable, updated population information that could be used as a sample frame. To the best of my knowledge, my company is the only private company that has access to the last official Iraqi census (1997). After visiting about one million Iraqi households and doing about 250 different nationwide polls, we were able to update our census database. Nevertheless, we still believe that it is not perfect but it is the best available under current circumstances.

The final big challenge over the past few years was the increase in "virtual" polling companies that claim they are working in Iraq. These are foreign companies which exist on the internet only and were mostly established by some officials who were working with the multinational forces and have good access to the potential clients. However, these have no real existence on the ground in Iraq. They get contracts and hire inexperienced people to carry out the field work. Because most of the clients can not check on the field work, they simply accept the results that they get as "public Iraqi opinions." I have discovered many frauds during the last three years which unfortunately affected some very large clients because they were unable to verify the work conducted.

As you may know, in the United States there is a massive amount of pre-election polling being conducted and released before national elections. What is the Iraqi public's appetite for pre-election polling in Iraq and how much is actually being conducted and released?

My company has done a lot of pre-election polls for different clients, but the results have not published. I think they have been used to identify and evaluate the election behavior of Iraqi voters, and also to educate different Iraqi political parties. Iraqi political parties, unfortunately, have yet to really grasp the importance of these polls, which is why all the clients for whom I have conducted pre-election polling have been international clients.

It is not easy to get honest Iraqi opinions about the elections. Respondents in many cases were afraid of giving their actual opinion because they assumed that this information might go to the other side, which could put them in danger due to their voting intention.

Are the Iraqi people skeptical of polling or do they generally trust the results. Are Iraqi's generally forthcoming with pollsters or are they reluctant to express their opinions?

Again, it is not easy to get frank Iraqi opinions for different reasons, mainly due to lack of trust and lack of security. During the last six years, we have become very experienced in dealing with these concerns by using different techniques to give respondents more trust in our work, and to ensure them that nothing of their opinions will be used against them. With our credibility, combined with using the right wording and the right interviewers, we have managed to be very effective--but there can never be a 100% guarantee that all opinions have been expressed honestly.

What is the next major Iraqi election and what are IIACSS plans for polling it if any?

The next election will be for the national representatives in the Iraqi parliament on January, 2010. IIACSS has planned to introduce a new product which has not been used in any previous Iraqi election, for which we will need full technical cooperation with internationally experienced polling firms, and a lot of training and preparation. The only concern that I have is that Iraqi authorities may prevent us from conducting such polling activity. For other pre-election polling activity, I am now trying to find potential clients to purchase this research and hope to soon secure agreements.

What kind of information are your corporate clients most interested in and what types of research are you performing for them?

During the last six years, most of my clients were interested in political and macro-economic surveys. There were few firms, including Edison Research, who were interested in conducting market research. During the last six months, I have noticed that more and more clients are contacting me to do some other types of media and market research. As the pioneer Iraqi polling company, I and my colleagues are planning to introduce many new products to our current research portfolio. We were the first and the only Iraqi company to offer a continuous, bi-monthly nationally representative Omnibus survey, which we debuted in October 2008. Qualitative research is also important for us, and IIACSS is proud to be one of few Iraqi companies to providing this critical research. We have six experienced male and female moderators, and four locations to do focus groups covering the entire country. Our qualitative research team has trained extensively inside and outside Iraq and has done more than 200 different groups to different international clients.

IIACSS is also proud of conducting different kind of market research that could not be found out of IIACSS, including brand image testing, media consumption and behavior, product testing, activities monitoring and evaluation, mystery shopping, media campaign awareness, media coverage and more.

Thank you, Dr. Dagher, for sharing this with Edison's readers!

Social Media Research Must Measure Perception AND Behavior To Be Useable

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:51:33 -0500

Recently, several noted social authorities sat on a panel at the San Francisco American Marketing Association meeting, to discuss how businesses are leveraging web 2.0 tools to help drive sales, improve service and reach out to customers. Louis Gray reported a blow-by-blow account of the panel on his Friendfeed page, and I found the resultant exchange to be a wonderful place to start the conversation, but as a social media researcher I also found bits of it quite frustrating. One of the panelists, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, was quoted by Gray as saying:

We did research and asked consumers who they trust. 90% said "people like them". Under 10% trusted corporate blogs.

If this is indeed an accurate transcription of Forrester's stats (and question wording), then I am not sure what you can really learn from this. First of all, of course more people are going to trust "people like them" than they will trust businesses. I should hope so! So simply making the comparison is irrelevant. But more sinister than that is the wording of the question itself. Even the word "corporate" is loaded with connotations that imply "faceless" or "bureaucratic" or worse. Does anyone trust anything "corporate?"

The question points out two clear areas for further research--better measures of perception, and better measures of actual behavior. The two must be linked together. Simply measuring clicks tells you little about the motivation behind them, yet asking for those motivations directly is often fraught with complications.

Still, I'd love to know the real answer to Forrester's question. Here's one way to fix it--drop the abstractions and test specifics. When I ask you how much you trust what you read from your friends, you have a specific image in mind of individual relationships and the years of specific interactions that have led you to trust your network. A simple way to replicate this and create a better question design would be to ask respondents to name their favorite brands--the ones that they recommend to friends--and ask the respondents if they are aware of any social media efforts by each of those specific brands. For those brands with a perceived social media presence, respondents could then be asked how much they trust that presence. Finally, "control" brands could be used with which the respondents have no relationship (and also brands with no social media presence) to really get at the delta created by blogs and other social tools.

And The Oscar Goes To...Bruno?

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:31:26 -0500

Interesting news from Hollywood this week, with word that the Academy Awards will expand to ten Best Picture nominees in 2010. Why the change? While the Oscar telecast actually had an uptick in viewers last year, overall ratings have declined dramatically in recent years -- from a 1998 ("Titanic"-fueled) high point of 57 million viewers, to just under 37 million in 2009. The hope of the Academy is that the five extra movies will add in more mass-appeal films that will ultimately boost interest and ratings. The Academy may also be hoping for more suspense for the telecast with the winner presumably being harder to handicap with ten candidates in the mix.

The change also brings a lot of unknowns to the process. While the Oscar contest may soon look somewhat like an Israeli election -- with the top party barely cracking 20% -- there will be no horse trading to reach a coalition majority win. In Oscar-land we could conceivably see an Oscar going to a movie with a small but devoted following -- but one that the majority of Academy voters (and TV viewers) gave a thumbs-down. How might the new realities of minority rule play out?

While this change will indeed likely add more blockbuster (and presumably ratings-boosting) films like "The Dark Knight" to a nomination and possibly a win, another likely scenario has a true dark horse being nominated and sliding by to victory. The new ten-nominee format may very well allow documentaries and foreign films to land on the nominee list. Could "Man on Wire" have been nominated or even won the award in 2009 with nothing else remotely like it on the Academy ballot? Animated movies, often mentioned on the "almost-nominated" list each year, will now easily see the best of their breed being nominated. "Wall-E" would seem to have been a shoo-in for a nomination had there been ten nominees in 2009 -- could nine live-action movies have kept a popular and well-reviewed animated film from a winning plurality, and with it, Best Picture?

On the other hand, while handicapping a winner will be tougher, conventional wisdom may still be inevitable, even with ten nominees. In 2009, much of the lack of excitement for the Oscar broadcast stemmed from the widespread assumption that "Slumdog Millionaire" would win the prize. And if the opinion of moviegoers was any indication, the vote was indeed anything but close. The 2009 Edison Research Academy Award exit poll survey conducted for AMC Theaters last March indicated a clear preference for "Slumdog Millionaire." Among our sample of moviegoers who had seen all five nominated films, 45% chose "Slumdog" the eventual Oscar winner as their favorite (trouncing #2 Milk with 26%). Would adding another five films to challenge "Slumdog" have made a difference in its ultimate Oscar win? Who knows how extra nominees would have shaken things up, but given its dominance in the Edison poll, it seems unlikely another movie lurking on the sidelines would have denied "Slumdog" a win.

Still, the new rules will mean some interesting nominees at the very least...and a near naked Bruno flying in from the rafters to begin his thank yous is not a complete impossibility.

TiVo: Not Just A Verb!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:10:47 -0500

In the 2009 Edison/Arbitron Internet & Multimedia survey, while one-third of respondents age 12+ reported using any type of Digital Video Recorder, only 9% of those DVR users said they use the TiVo® brand.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last decade or just generally paying no attention whatsoever to technology, you know about the wondrous and life-changing capabilities of the DVR (and of course by "life-changing" I mean more efficient use of one's time spent with TV.) The first time a DVR newbie sees “live TV” being paused often elicits a moment of wide-eyed euphoria -- not to mention a realization that their TV viewing habits are about to change dramatically.

But not all DVRs are created equally. To my eye, and many other DVR users I’ve talked to over the years, TiVo has an elegant and easy-to-use interface that most people would choose time and again over the offerings of local cable and satellite TV companies. Penetration is higher with these “generic” boxes than TiVo due primarily to their differing sales models. While cable and satellite rent out a box on a monthly basis (providing both the hardware and software for a single monthly fee), the TiVo model involves the selling of a box upfront, with the addition of a monthly service fee. Today, cable and satellite boxes lead the penetration battle despite the fact that they have generally fallen short in terms of the user experience and usability with their clunky menus and navigation.

Despite many deals with content providers such as Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Video on Demand, TiVo has mostly struggled to break out and become successful financially. Today, however, TiVo is looking to further build on a recent favorable court ruling backing its recording patent, and muscle that aforementioned elegant software onto more and more of those non-TiVo DVRs.

Undoubtedly DVR penetration will continue to grow, but will TiVo’s turf battles lead to a larger share of that pie?

You Can Take My Dial-Up When You Pry It From My...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:24:52 -0500

The Pew Internet and American Life Project just released some new numbers on home broadband adoption that dovetail very neatly with our own figures from the Edison/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series, reported earlier in 2009. Our data (below) revealed that 15% of American residential Internet access continued to be dial-up access, and we speculated when we released this data point that this figure was not likely to change significantly over the next few years.

The new data from Pew shows a bit of a bump in Broadband penetration overall (which, our data suggests, is actually a bump in residential internet access period.) Broadband appears to be somewhat recession-proof, with many consumers choosing to cut back on other areas of their cable or telecom bills rather than cut their broadband access. The interesting bit, to me, is Pew's snapshot of the reasons why "Dial-up America" won't be switching to high-speed internet anytime soon:

While 17% of dial-up and offline Americans report that broadband is unavailable in their area (and thus not part of their decision set), 50% of this subset bascially have no interest whatsoever in broadband access, and another 13% report that broadband is either too difficult to use or perhaps even a waste of time. Only 19% quote price; however, at least some of those respondents are actually referring to the price of a home computer, and not specifically broadband. Pew now says that 7% of all Americans use dial-up only at home; given the stats in the figure above, it is hard to see that number declining significantly again unless dial-up access is forcibly pried from America's fingers.

Exit Polling Iran's Northern Neighbor: It's Not The Voting, It's The Counting

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:11:00 -0500

In November 2005, I was part of a team that conducted an exit poll for the Parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan (Warren Mitofsky and I wrote about our "Adventure in Baku" shortly thereafter.) It became clear to us on election night after the polls had closed that the Azeri authorities, who had originally seemed to be promoting a fair and open election with three separate exit polling operations to help verify the vote, had abruptly changed their minds once the vote counting had begun in order to make sure that certain opposition party candidates for parliament did not end up winning the official vote. In Thomas Friedman's op-ed column in yesterday New York Times, he quotes the playwright Tom Stoppard as saying that democracy is not the voting, "it's the counting." That is definitely true in Iran and I can also say that it was definitely true in the election I observed in Iran's neighbor, Azerbaijan.

Over the past 10 days, much has been posted on the circumstantial statistical evidence of electoral fraud in the results published by the Iranian Electoral Commission. Pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com have been providing an excellent summary of links to detailed statistical analyses of the suspicious nature of the election returns, including articles from the University of Michigan, Chatham House, Cornell, Princeton, and Juan Cole of the Global Americana Institute. However, all of this statistical evidence will remain circumstantial until the Iranian government provides more detailed results by polling location (if they ever do), or if any eyewitness accounts of how the electoral fraud was perpetrated become public, as they did in Ukraine in 2004.

Let me relate what I observed in Azerbaijan in 2005, and speculate on how similar tactics may have been used by the Iranian election officials this year. Up to and including election day in Azerbaijan, the electoral commission was very open with us and our exit polling team. We were given full access to the voter lists at each polling location and full access for our interviewers at our more than one thousand sample precincts. Warren and I even paid surprise visits to a half dozen polling locations during the day and were allowed to observe the voting process as well as talk with citizens who had just voted. The process seemed open and above board. Citizens marked their paper ballots in private, folded them up and placed them in clear plastic ballot boxes so that public observers could see that the ballots had been cast.

The questionable activity occurred once the voting ended and those ballot boxes were spirited away to the central counting locations. We had been promised reports of the actual vote returns from each polling location as soon as they had been counted that evening. We received reports from the first 200 to 300 polling locations and these reports basically matched what we had found in the exit poll. Suddenly, the reports stopped, and our contact at the electoral commission (who had been very cooperative up to that point) stopped answering our phone calls. Finally, in the middle of the night, we were told that the vote returns by polling location would no longer be available. The press conference that the government had set up for us to announce our results was attended by just one journalist, from the official state news agency. When we showed our client the results that we were going to post on the internet, we were told that posting those results would cause civil unrest. We stayed in Baku for one more day following the election and the mood of the entire town had become tense. I attended a packed press conference where U.S. and European observers reported on suspicious activity by the electoral commission. Warren and I boarded our plane the next day and posted the full exit poll results on the Internet as soon as our plane left Azerbaijan air space.

There were indeed protests on the streets of Baku. None were as violent as the ones we have seen in Tehran, but hundreds of thousands participated and dozens were arrested. The Electoral Commission finally agreed to investigate the results and threw out the returns from 108 polling locations in 14 parliamentary districts, all districts in which the exit polls showed opposition candidates winning but the official returns showed supporters of the government winning. Eventually, new elections in those districts were scheduled, but the opposition boycotted the re-election and the protests died down.

There seem to be many similarities between our first-hand experiences with the election in Azerbaijan, and the election just held in Iran. First, the election and the voting itself, which seemed open and fair at the time, turned out to be mostly for show. Once the initial results in Azerbaijan showed opposition candidates winning in certain districts, the electoral commission took steps to make sure the official results matched what the government desired, which is probably what happened in Iran. Basically, the authorities were fine with an open and seemingly fair election as long as their guy won. Once that outcome became less certain, procedures were probably put in place to make sure the official results matched what the government desired. The fraud is probably not universal, but, as in Azerbaijan, concentrated in the areas where the opposition was doing better than expected. This would explain much of the statistical evidence showing Ahmadinejad doing well in the official vote returns from provinces and towns where the reformist candidates did well in the 2005 election.

The electoral contest in Azerbaijan was between two groups of former Soviet authorities competing for power in a post-Soviet world. The current electoral contest in Iran is between two groups competing for power within the framework of an Islamic Republic. While supported by reformists and protestors in the streets, Mousavi is a former Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic and one of his main supporters is Rafsanjani, a former two-term president. This is basically a battle between two factions where the stakes have been raised because one side changed the rules in the middle of the game.

Now that there have been protests in the streets, the Iranian government is responding in a similar fashion to how the Azerbaijan government responded in 2005. The Iranian government today admitted that there are at least 50 towns where more votes were counted than people who actually voted. As in Azerbaijan, this will probably lead to some sort of admission of small voting irregularities, but not enough to have affected the outcome. The government in Azerbaijan in 2005 got away with only re-doing elections in 14 of the 125 parliamentary districts because there was little pressure from the United States, Russia and the European Union, all of which feared that any further disturbances in Azerbaijan would have risked the continuing supply of oil through the pipelines to the West.

My guess is that in Iran there will be considerably more external pressure, and government attempts to admit to only partial electoral fraud will not ease the situation. The stakes of this electoral game have been raised too high for a compromise solution.

As Search Goes Mobile, Consumer Research Must Follow

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:05:51 -0500

Today’s Center for Media Research brief ran some new statistics about the rise in mobile search. As you may have guessed, the percentage of mobile subscribers who are using their phones to search for information about goods and services has risen dramatically year over year, with growth figures ranging from +51% to +83% depending on the mobile search application used. Two of the largest genres searched via mobile device are restaurants and movies--in short, local goods and services. Mobile IS local because the mobile device can be accessed while the customer is in transition--i.e., exactly in a position where a call to action, offer or compelling proposition to do something locally can be most effective.

Marketers might be able to measure searches, but gauging the efficacy of mobile search campaigns is something else entirely. Where in the purchase continuum did the search occur? Was the mobile search merely used to identify where the already-decided consumer was going to make their purchase? Or was the purchase decision made as a result of the search? Undoubtedly, there is a spectrum of possibilities here, and simply measuring clicks won’t get to them. With mobile phone research costs (at the time of this writing) in excess of four times the landline costs, and with an indeterminate amount of time likely to pass between the search/purchase and the customers’ likely ability to take any kind of online survey about their behavior, catching up to the mobile consumer is a thorny research challenge, albeit an intriguing one.

Reaching consumers in transition is, of course, a job tailor-made for research techniques like consumer exit polling. It may be that the best way to narrow the gap between search and purchase decision is to--literally--catch the consumer in the act (or at least shortly after the act) with out-of-home measurement tools like consumer exit polling. When marketers and brand managers can tie the “what” and “how many” measures of search metrics with the “why” measures enabled by methodologies like consumer exit polling, mobile marketers will finally be able to understand how consumers behave relative to mobile search, and where mobile search really fits in to the consumer’s decision process. Only then will the savvy mobile marketer truly have an edge on leveraging--and monetizing--this powerful emerging platform.

Edison's Joe Lenski Quoted on the Iranian Elections

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:57:00 -0500

Edison Research Executive Vice President Joe Lenski was recently quoted in the Seattle Times on the validity of the recent elections in Iran. Referring to the rapidity of the vote count and other reports of irregularities, Lenski commented: "The results definitely look suspicious, but you need hard evidence to know the election was cooked. We may never find hard evidence here."

Read the entire article here.

Sirius XM: What's it Worth To You?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:07:14 -0500

Sirius XM continues to struggle as we hit the midway point of 2009. After dodging bankruptcy earlier in the year, the satellite radio provider keeps pushing forward and looking for ways to make ends meet. But that begs the question, "Is it wise to ask for more money from subscribers during a troubled economy?"

Beginning at the end of July, subscribers to Sirius XM will see a hike of $1.98 in their subscription fees as the company passes along the cost of increased performance royalty rates. While it is being rationalized as a 'tax,' and not as an increase in the base subcription cost, this doesn't change the fact that it will cost more money to listen to satellite radio. If it was a tough sell at $12.95, that increase could be a deal breaker.

Even the highly anticipated streaming audio program through Apple's App Store (which arrives today) will not come without an additional cost. The details may change when it finally hits the marketplace but to enjoy streaming Sirius XM through your iPhone, be prepared to add another $3.00 to your regular fees or subscribe to the "Streaming Only" option for about $13.00 per month.

In theory, this new app should be widely accepted with the continued growth of mobile media and the recent reduced pricing of the iPhone 3G, but on the other hand it may prove to be too much on the wallet when competing against other discretionary expenses.

Will fans of satellite cut back other entertainment based spending on movies, downloads and the like in order to make room in an already tight budget for this new app? I suspect that many will do just that--but only if Sirius XM can make a strong case for its value over other streaming apps like Pandora and Slacker that are offered for free and have an advantage of being first out of the gate. The marketing will be key and it would have been wise to coordinate its release with the new iPhone to generate more appeal on both sides.

When the new app is finally released, it will be telling to see if the proposed subscription prices hold or if frugal consumers will force some lower price points. It could shed some light on what value consumers really place on satellite radio.

One Negative Kindle Effect

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:57:25 -0500

I am officially Kindle addicted and find that it has me reading more and reading...well...'better.' It really has been that kind of transformational device for me.

That said, I've been trying to ask myself what all the ramifications of a post-book world will be.

And I thought of a new one I hadn't read about before: the ability to do market research while walking the aisle of an airplane is going away.

Only a few years ago I would walk down the aisle and see up to a half-dozen people reading The Da Vinci Code. I eventually relented and felt I had to read it too. Many times I've seen an interesting cover or been reminded of a book I've been meaning to read while on the plane. This will be gone when we are all on our Kindles or other e-reader device.

Doubtlessly, this effect from technological change will lead to some new marketing tool or device to make up for it. Maybe someone will sell a 'wrapper' for your Kindle to read while you are reading that book? But I for one will miss this vital source of 'what to read' information.

Corzine The 'Underdog'

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:15:50 -0500

When Jon Corzine won election as New Jersey's Governor in 2005, he hardly seemed destined for the "most vulnerable incumbents" list. After retiring from the U.S. Senate, Corzine had won election as Governor by a 10-point margin. But the obstacles to Corzine's re-election in 2009 began soon after he took office, if not before. Despite his comfortable win in 2005, Corzine has had consistently sub-par approval ratings from New Jersey residents.

When Corzine decided to vacate his U.S. Senate seat and run for Governor, New Jersey already had a very popular incumbent Democrat in office who was well positioned to win re-election. Richard Codey had inherited the Governorship after the resignation of Jim McGreevy and after a few months on the job enjoyed very strong approval numbers (59% Approve, 9% Disapprove, according to Quinnipiac in January 2005) . Codey seemed to have a clear path to election in November 2005. In fact, Codey did as well or better than Corzine against potential Republican opponents, winning hypothetical match-ups handily. Despite the absence of any clamoring for a new candidate, Corzine indicated his intentions and Codey played the good party soldier and decided not to run, resuming his role as President of the State Senate.

After a short period of decent poll numbers subsequent to his election, Corzine's favorable rating reached a net negative just three months after taking office. An April 2006 Quinnipiac Poll showed 35% approving and 42% disapproving of his performance. Starting from these low levels of support, a series of events have largely kept his numbers in the danger zone. Right after becoming Governor in 2006, Corzine faced a huge budget mess and no politically popular options for dealing with them. A 2007 budget battle with the state legislature shut down the government for a week and set unpopular tax hike and spending cut plans in motion. And, of course, the current economic crisis trumps all previous crises the Governor has faced. The economic crisis has set every Governor's popularity a step lower than it would normally be. As Roger Simon writes on Politico.com, "being a governor these days is like having a target on your back." Which is one reason why the latest polls
show Corzine trailing the Republican candidate by around 10 points.

But despite all this, and his undisputed underdog status, Corzine has a decent chance of pulling out an upset victory. Beyond the so-so poll numbers and the economic problems, New Jersey is now a firmly Democratic state where an incumbent Democratic Governor has a lot of inherent advantages. The Democratic Party has a long winning streak of nine statewide elections since 2000 winning three straight Presidential elections (56-40, 53-46, 57-42), four straight U.S. Senate elections (50-47, 54-44, 53-44, 56-42) and two straight governor elections (53-43, 54-44).

And though its electoral value can be overstated, there is Corzine's personal wealth, available to outspend any Republican opponent - Corzine spent over $63 million in his 2000 election for Senate and approximately $40 million in his 2005 campaign for governor. Corzine also has the advantage of a relatively unknown opponent in Christopher Christie. As Joshua Grossman noted, "No matter how much of his ample fortune Corzine spends on his re-election campaign, he's not going to become suddenly popular in New Jersey. But Corzine still has a shot to win if he can become just popular enough and Christie's negatives can be driven up significantly by a hard-hitting campaign against him."

When the election comes on November 3rd, Edison will be exit polling throughout the state. It will be interesting to see if Corzine can rebound from his rocky relationship with New Jersey's voters, and to learn what issues mattered most in whatever judgment they hand down.

Teens Still Going Strong to the Mall

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:57:33 -0500

Even with a tough economy, teenagers continue doing what they've always done--hang out at the mall. For advertisers, the mall is the place to be to reach those all important teens and tweens. According to recent data released by Scarborough Research and Arbitron, 62% of teens reported that they visit the mall at least as often as they did six months ago. On a typical visit, 68% of teens spend 2 or more hours at the mall.

According to the Teen Mall Shopper Insights White Paper, not only are teens going strong to the mall, they are noticing advertisements while they are there. A whopping 95% said they notice some type of mall advertising, with poster display ads being the most noted (91%).

Even for a younger crowd who doesn't know life without the Internet, DVR and other technological perks, traditional poster displays and hanging banners win out over projected moving images and interactive kiosks, which were noticed by 31% and 48%, respectively. Even with the vast majority of teens spending more and more time with social networking, video games and other technology-enabled pursuits, good old paper and ink continue to deliver eyeballs--and wallets--to marketers seeking to capture teens in exactly the right environment to spend money.

Republicans "Have No Clear Leader," But That's Not Big News

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:15:29 -0500

Much has been made of a recent Gallup/USA Today poll that asked respondents to name "the main person who speaks for the Republican Party today." The USA Today headline read "Poll: Most don't know who speaks for GOP" and showed that Republican respondents mentioned Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich most often with 10% each, followed by Dick Cheney at 9% and John McCain at 6%. Many pundits have cited this poll as cause for great alarm among Republicans. The numbers, they say, are evidence that the Republicans are hopelessly (and unusually) rudderless. Worse, the few names that pop up are not actual potential future leaders or presidential candidates, but a talk show host and several confirmed or suspected has-beens.

But are these numbers really so alarming or unusual? The out-of-power party very often finds itself without a clear spokesman. Congressional leaders rarely have the stature among the rank-and-file to be consensus candidates as party leaders. Even former presidential candidates usually see their clout fade rapidly after an electoral defeat. In the case of Dick Cheney, the former Vice-President is seen as having no future in electoral politics. So its not surprising that no one person rose to a clear lead in this poll. Given the fact that many talk shows and magazine covers had mentioned Limbaugh as a party leader before this poll was conducted, Rush's 10% isn't surprising either.

Finally, the question design itself made a lack of clarity on a "spokesman" a foregone conclusion. More than half of respondents (52%) could not name any person when asked this question. There is nothing like an "open-ended" question without the benefit of a clear set of choices to contribute to an inconclusive quantitative answer.

Probably the best way to refute the notion that this poll is, in itself, a cause for Republican alarm is to examine a survey taken the last time a new President took office, also by Gallup for USA Today. That survey, conducted in August 2001, asked a similar question and produced a strikingly similar conclusion, complete with this USA Today headline: "For The Democrats, No Clear Leader". The 2001 survey had 51% of respondents failing to come up with any name at all--almost identical to the 2009 poll. Among Democrats, the most mentioned person as party leader was Al Gore, and his percentage of the mentions was 10%.

As future star Democratic operative David Axelrod said in that 2001 article, "It's the nature of being the party out of power." In other words, we are very likely to see this headline repeated yet again when the next shift in power occurs.

New iPhone Pricing May Encourage Continued Growth in Placeshifted Video

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:24:13 -0500

Apple's new third generation iPhone 3GS was announced this week, and it's being touted by the company as "the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet," with enhanced speed over the second generation model in launching applications and loading Web pages. Apple also cut the price of the existing 8GB iPhone 3G in half, from $199 to $99 (for new users or those qualifying under their AT&T contract). The first generation iPhone television ads were billed as "the Internet in your pocket," and now that mobile Internet is even faster and more accessible than ever with the 3GS. Apple has also added video recording with on-the-fly editing capabilities to boot.

The annual next-generation delivery of the iPhone that we've come to expect continues to help drive the utility and wonder that is the mobile Internet. In the 2009 Edison/Arbitron Internet & Multimedia survey, 36% of respondents said the Internet was the "most essential" medium to their lives, just behind TV at 40%. The lower cost iPhone (3G) will put the mobile Internet into more pockets while the more feature-rich newer iPhone (3GS) will further enhance the experience (and expectations of what mobile Internet can do). With the growing usage of mobile entertainment and media, and the amount of non-traditional TV viewing we are observing -- Podcasting, Slingbox/placeshifting, Mobile TV -- to name a few, might "the Internet" have already overtaken TV as "most essential" and we just don't know it yet?

Deeds Beats McAuliffe And Moran - Another Classic Example Of How An Underfunded Underdog Can Win A Three-way Primary

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:44:50 -0500

Yesterday, Creigh Deeds (R) beat two well-known and better-funded candidates - Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran - to win the Democratic Nomination for Governor in Virginia. For a candidate who started in the early campaign polls in third place with just 11% five months ago, it seems like a stunning turnaround. In the end the vote wasn't even close - Deeds ended up just shy of 50% with McAuliffe at 26% and Moran at 24%. Deeds won 10 of Virginia's 11 Congressional Districts and 125 out of Virginia's 134 counties and cities.

Pundits have been telling us for years that money and name recognition are vital for winning elections. So does the Deeds victory shatter those rules? Not really. There is one election situation that is the exception to the rules - three-way elections where the top two candidates go negative against each other.

We are familiar with two-way races where candidates pummel each other with negative ads with virtual impunity. Voters are often given the choice of the lesser of two evils and that is all. In a three-way primary, however, there is a third non-negative option and that candidate often charges from the back of the pack to win on election day going away.

The Deeds candidacy followed this pattern - McAuliffe and Moran battered each other for months and then in late May the Washington Post endorsed Deeds. From that point on undecided voters felt they had a legitimate third choice and moved to Deeds. The Pollster.com summary of the polls shows the rise in Deeds corresponding to the drop in undecideds in the last three weeks of the campaign.

I've stored numerous examples of this dynamic in my mental archives, and it's refreshingly more common than you might think. In the 1987 Louisiana Governor's race, Buddy Roemer parlayed a late endorsement from the New Orleans Times Picayune to beat better-known candidates Edwin Edwards and Bob Livingston in a come-from-behind victory. In 1992, little-known state senator Russ Feingold won 70% of the vote in a three-way Democratic Senate primary against two well-funded opponents (Joseph Checota and Jim Moody) who destroyed their candidacies with negative advertising. In 1998, Jesse Ventura became the choice of Minnesota voters for Governor after Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Hubert Humphrey III battered each other with negative ads. In 2002, a little-known state senator named Mike Rounds won the South Dakota Republican Primary for Governor after his two better known and better financed opponents - the incumbent Lieutenant Governor and incumbent Attorney General - damaged each other with negative campaigns. And in 2007, city councilman Michael Nutter started at 8% in the polls to win a convincing victory over two incumbent congressmen, Chaka Fattah and Bob Brady, and businessman Tom Knox, who had spent millions of his own money on negative campaign ads.

So keep an eye out for this election pattern. It only occurs once every election year or so but it is satisfying to see voters actually choose the little guy when the two big guys go negative against each other.