Taylorisms

Video Killed The Video Star

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:12:00 +0000

Whatever you are doing right now, you need to stop and go check out this amazing web experience.
An interactive short film by Chris Milk. Featuring "We Used To Wait" from Arcade Fire. Created with the help of Google, this is a very interesting experiment using HTML5 to showcase the Chrome browser, Google Maps and Google Street View. It works perfectly well on any browser that supports HTML5...

Did You Say Gold Mine?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:22:00 +0000

The recent article in the Wall Street Journal appeared to me to be so fundamentally flawed that I would have to write something about it. Fortunately, my former colleague and current friend, Len Ellis beat me to it and wrote a far better response than I would have done....

There’s an old PR saying—“Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.” So, I won’t post this comment on the Wall Street Journal’s web site but will share it here.

Its research on user-tracking software, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” reported in three full pages of its July 31-August 1, 2010 weekend edition, is solid on facts but conceptually flawed. After introducing the types of user behavior collected by cookies, Flash cookies and beacons, it asserts (fifth paragraph) that this data is packaged into profiles about individuals.

That’s simply not true. Individual-level data are stored in what’s called a record inside a database and there the data just sit as raw material. When someone queries the database, the software scans the data inside each record and sorts the records into groups that conform in greater and lesser degrees to the query. The resulting group portraits are profiles.

Typically, the software is designed so that profiles express a probability. Measuring the variability of individuals on one or more attributes (the raw material), it differentiates these persons as more likely than those persons (the profiles) to behave in the way desired by a business marketer or a government administrator (the query). This statistical differentiation then becomes the basis for real-world discrimination: treating these persons differently from those persons, in the service of business profits or government efficiency. Social statistics at birth and all its descendants since including user-tracking software can parse populations into probabilistic groups. The method cannot say—and does not want to say—anything at all about individuals as such.

That’s why consumers, despite telling pollsters that they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about online privacy, don’t use the privacy protecting tools that have long been available. They know that this surveillance does not threaten them as individuals. Scare-mongering about privacy by the media and activists only perpetuates the belief that individuals are important to business and government. Fortunately, we aren’t.

Len maintains a blog here and is the author of a remarkably thoughtful yet accessible book around the same subject: Silicon Similacra: Post-Humans Of The Machine Worlds which is available from Amazon.com here.

What Price Differentiation?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:59:00 +0000

Google has just released a suite of competitive analytic tools to allow AdWords advertisers to compare their performance against an anonymous set of their competitors. Analyze Competition will allow you to look at your activity for the previous two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you're advertising. Categories are based on actual search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. The report shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

Great. This update will certainly make the auction more efficient (if I remember my A Level Economics, the more information that is available the more perfect the market, or something like that...). But, will it make you a more effective search marketer? On one hand, the tool will help you identify the most relevant key words, but it won't help you understand anything about your ad copy or the relevance of your landing page.

Search is still too dependent on one of the dimensions of relevance, "What" (the expression of intent). The most effective way to stand out from the crowd and really make inroads into the competition is to understand the drivers of your audiences' choices, in other words understand the underlying factors that motivate their behaviour. Understanding this will allow you to craft your ad text and landing page copy around a second (and potentially much more powerful) dimension of relevance, "Why".

Consumer is Boss

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:04:00 +0000

P&G has launched a direct to consumer ecommerce site called The eStore. There are a few interesting elements to this, firstly the focus here is on insights. The site was developed with input from more that 5,000 P&G consumers who defined their ideal experience for researching and purchasing products online. Secondly, the direct nature of the business will once again give P&G access to the customer insights that they surrendered to retailers years ago.

"Our “Consumer is Boss” focus means we must be available to consumers when and where they seek to research or purchase P&G products."

P&G themselves define the central purpose of the eStore to be a living, learning lab. Shopper behaviours and other insights will be integrated into the evolution of the experience and will inform testing and delivery of offers, tools, features and expertise along with existing P&G capabilities in the CRM, mobile and personalized product consultation areas.

P&G has provided (or supported) many of the innovations in on-line marketing dating back to the 90s when the company gave it's agencies a clear reminder that online marketing needed to be a focus for them. Around the turn of the century, they described themselves as moving from being the "loudest shouter" in marketing to the "best listener". Many of their moves since then (including this one) confirm the intent.

Happy shopping...

Google Me Better

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:59:00 +0000

A survey conducted in April 2010 by Capstrat and Public Policy Polling, found 22 % of respondents consider Google searches influential in seeking health information. How significant is this? Well, doctors were credited with 44% reported influence, and the search engine was cited more than twice as often as nurses, pharmacists, advocacy groups and friends or family members.

The survey also asked about the confidence the respondents felt in the information they harvested from different sources. Health advocacy groups emerged as a particularly trusted source of online health information: 71% judged Web content of such groups "somewhat reliable" or "extremely reliable". While more than half (59%) felt that way about organic Google searches.

Online communities continue to trail significantly. Only 12% of respondents used online forums in their last search for health information, and only 37% considered forums reliable.

The survey revealed significant differences in the way various segments of society use online communities. African Americans and Gen-Xers are significantly more likely to consider them reliable sources of information. Younger respondents were also much less likely to see pharmacists as reliable sources of information, perhaps reflecting the more impersonal relationship they have with chain pharmacists compared to their parents¹ long-standing reliance on the mom-and-pop operations that used to dominate the landscape.

"We found it interesting that popularity and trust don¹t always go hand-in-hand. People are quick to search the Web for health information, just as they use it for most other questions today. But when it comes time to make a decision, their trust resides where it always has in people. This insight can be instructive to organizations working to combine health expertise with new strategies for communication." - Karen Albritton, Capstrat.

Data points:

32% of African Americans cited Google as the most influence source for health decisions, compared to only 15% of Hispanics who found Google influential
63% of women considered Google reliable on health, compared to 53% of men
53% of respondents ages 30 to 45 found online forums to be reliable, compared to only 37 percent of respondents ages 46 to 65
65% found a phone conversation with a nurse to be somewhat or extremely reliable.

Another example of the power of search in the healthcare arena, there are many more where these came from...

The Times They Are A....

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:52:00 +0000

Every year the MIT Technology Review produces a list of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change things up for us in the coming months. This years list has just been released and includes two of particular interest (to me that is). The first is Real-Time Search and the impact that social networking will have on search. As web content changes (the proliferation of micro-posts), the trick will be to give the same credence and authority to those fleeting slices of different users current attentions (Twits etc.) that can be associated with the more permanent content and context that fuels the Google algorithm. Google and Microsoft are working hard on bringing this to life.

The second is Social TV. Which brings together the passive experience of watching TV with the active one of sharing comments, observations and ratings about shows, events and, yes, even commercials with the viewer's networks... For the TV companies, this is a way of fighting back against Hulu etc and developers and some cable companies are working on ways to enable a seamless connection between the TV and the social graph. An interesting extension from here will be personalised TV, as content that viewers may find interesting gets highlighted by their networks...

The full list of what's on the horizon is here.

Good Cause - Good Execution

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:39:00 +0000

BBH London created an interactive billboard to raise money for Barnardo's Children's Charity. Nice, and very effective use of interactivity...

Disloyalty

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:11:00 +0000

The owner of popular London coffee house Prufrock Coffee (and the current World Barista Champion), Gwilym Davies, has come up with what I consider one of the best retail marketing programs I have seen for a while.

He calls it his disloyalty card. the objective is to have his customers taste the coffee in 8 different, high quality establishments in the area, getting the card stamped at each. Once the card is full, he will give you a free cup of coffee.

Lot's of things here, obviously this states pretty clearly the confidence in the product. Perhaps more importantly though is the element of breaking the mould that most loyalty programs have conditioned consumers to tune out (do you have a Nectar card?..)

Excellent idea...

Giving Your Segmentation An Attitude...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:50:00 +0000

CRM - Customer Relationship Management (or more correctly Customers Really Manage), has always been founded on a complete understanding of your customer. The tailor that knows instinctively what kind of suits you would wear and therefore which to propose, because he knows "who" you are as well as what you have bought previously. This level of understanding cannot be generated from transactional data alone. So many programs are based on this one-dimensional, behavioural approach to understanding the customer.

To really derive value from such programs, it is essential to understand the attitudes of your customers and prospective customers:

How customers relate to your category,
How customers think about you and your competitors,
Why customers purchase from you, and crucially,
Why they don't

Adding the "why" to the "what" that your data already provides will generate exponentially better campaigns that lead to significantly better business outcomes.

More here...

Photo: Adweek

Confusing Data With Insight

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:35:00 +0000

I have been using this long-form ad created for Microsoft Advertising for a couple of years to illustrate the failings of so-called customer insight. The truth is, if all we have is customer data then basing any kind of meaningful (and I mean relevant) messaging and communications on them is a losing proposition. Insight can come from data - data (however much of it one has) is not insight. The film is excellent, a refreshing, irreverent look at customer intimacy based on data... The film was made by Openhere a Belgian agency. Enjoy...

My Favourite Search Story...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:58:00 +0000

Exceptional idea and execution from a Google employee...in creating an example of what Eric Schmidt called "The last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America."

Social Shopping

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Social networking is now the most popular Internet activity. According to Hitwise, visits to social networking sites now account for more than 13% of all Internet traffic.

As this activity has grown, social networks have become an increasingly important source of traffic for major retailers - year on year figures indicate a 37% increase in upstream traffic. Beyond the traffic flow, there also seems to be a measurable degree of intent. Hitwise conducted an analysis of internal searches on Facebook during the '09 holiday season finding that over 2% of the traffic to Facebook (that's 2% of 132 Million according to Compete.com) visited a website in the Retail 500 immediately after. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Bath & Body Works (and others) all appeared within the internal searches taking place on Facebook signifying that consumers were actively seeking their content and offerings.

There have been some early attempts to preempt the normal (flawed) conversion circuit by enabling social networkers to purchase directly from their pages (Resource Interactrive for The Limited for example). Expect to see a serious push in this area during 2010.

Creative + Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:27:00 +0000

McDonalds advertising in Europe is generally much more interesting than anything I have seen from them in the US. For me, this is as true online as it is for their outdoor and TV efforts. Their latest online campaign, a tie in to the Avatar phenomenon, was created in conjuction with Oddcast a creative technology shop. The experience of turning yourself into a character from the film is well designed and fun -most importantly, the campaign has produced some pretty significant engagement metrics. The Avatarize Yourself" campaign was lauched in 18 counries and 7 languages accross the continent and has so far produced:

4 Mllion user sessions
9 minutes, 45 seconds average session time
25% of all sessions results in sharing via email or social networks
Generating almost 1.2mm earned sessions

Not bad...

Google Mail

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:16:00 +0000

The old adage that Google never advertises is no longer true.

Indeed, it came as something of a surprise when, a couple of weeks ago I received a direct mail piece from the online advertising giant. Surprising in some ways but not entirely... I have long believed that direct mail, as part of a coordinated multi-channel campaign - far from being dead - is a powerful weapon, a great way to cut through the clutter that is my email inbox and to capture my attention.

I read and retained the mail piece - the offer and call to action were good, but the fact that Google used a different channel to reach me really made the difference. I have told so many friends and colleagues about this that it may be the first viral direct mail piece in the history of DM...

Biting The Hand?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:46:00 +0000

Google's inclusion of an Ad Blocker into it's Chrome browser seems incongruous when you consider that Google is the largest broker of on-site advertising in the world. The company takes a (at least explicitly) different view, Google engineering director Linus Upson said recently at Add-On-Con :

"We think about this a lot at Google, because we make [just about] all of our money from advertising. It's unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying."

The question would be more pertinent and potentially troubling if Chrome had a dominant market share (it is currently just above 4%). Nevertheless over time, ad blocking will become more prevalent and that will in no way ease the pressure on marketers to make their advertising more relevant (on all of the dimensions of relevance: contextual, temporal and experiential) and therefore more welcome.

Company Culture & Customer Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:54:00 +0000

Zappos quirky, fun-orientated culture is the internal reflection of (and reason for?) its legendary customer experience qualities. I have referenced this before - they really have turned customer relationship and experience management into a major differentiator as they have integrated it into the fabric of who they are as a company.

For a while now, Zappos has offered tours of its Las Vegas headquarters. 16 times a week, groups can visit and get an understanding of how they are set up and how they operate. Going a step further, they have now packaged their approach into a set of services that other companies can buy. For example you can now purchase a seminar for 4,000 USD per person on how to recreate the essence of its corporate culture... They have further recently launched Zappos Insights, a website which proposes management videos and tips on creating a similar corporate culture from Zappos employees at a cost of 39.95 USD a month. The subscription offers:

"A comprehensive source of in-depth information, including video interviews with senior management of Zappos.com where we answer all of your questions and allow others to capitalize on what we've learned as we've grown from $0 in 1999 to around $1B in gross merchandise sales in 2008.
We are constantly asked for input and ideas to help many companies (or divisions within companies) get to the next level. Over time, we've found that many business leaders have the same (or very similar questions). We figured this could be a great way to share our learnings, and also allow your peer network to learn from questions others may have.
With so many management consulting firms charging such high rates, we wanted to come up with something that's available to all businesses".

More here...

Marketing Technology - The Next Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:05:00 +0000

A report by Booz & Co highlights the advantages of creating the requisite infrastructure to enable truly personalized marketing campaigns that are relevant to consumers needs whilest being efficient to run and optimize over time through the use of next generation platforms.

In a world overrun with marketing messages, the next wave of marketing technology will cut through the clutter, building automated marketing campaigns that address your customers’ wants and needs individually. The result: greater customer intimacy, improved loyalty, and higher revenues.

Sound familiar? It really does echo the promises made by the original CRM platform vendors doesn't it - so what is different this time? The report outlines familiar areas for improvement (the often dysfunctional relationship between IT and Marketing departments), it also proposes a rational road-map from the present, transactional, siloed and sequential platforms to a more organic application eco-system where the customer interaction is governed centrally whatever the channel...

.

Bar Codes on Bars

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:07:00 +0000

QR codes are essentially 3D bar codes that can be read by the camera on your mobile phone. They have become increasingly common on products and print ads in the US over the last year or so. Google take the idea one step further and will begin sending out window posters to over 100,000 businesses over the next few weeks. each of those posters will contain a QR code that will allow mobile phone users to obtain additional information about the business on their mobile device. Once users have passed the logistical steps and assuming that they have the correct reader application for their device, they will be taken to Google's Place Page (example above) for that location and presented with detailed information including user reviews and ratings, a map and contact information. Google is also allowing businesses to uses the system to provide coupons to customers.

Look out for codes on your local...

Social Collectivism

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:44:00 +0000

To help celebrate the 40 year anniversary of the Internet, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) set out to learn how quickly people could use online social networks to solve a problem. More than 4,000 teams participated in this national balloon hunt.
Effectively 10 balloons were deployed across the US and a 40,000 dollar prize went to the team who first identified all 10 locations correctly. That team was from MIT and was led by Riley Crane from MIT's Media Lab. Another example of the applied power of the social networks which were abuzz all over the weekend as the different teams applied different strategies to garner the location information.

Targeting Offers

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:30:00 +0000

Interesting article in the NYT on a company I did some exploratory work with a couple of years ago with my previous company. Next Jump is a stealth e-commerce player who have built a data rich platform over the last several years that (according to the NYT) may soon rival Amazon.

The things I specifically about the company are their modest approach to building a robust business model based on consumer insights and their realization (in both senses of the term) of the "value exchange" that needs to exist between consumer and marketer. Next Jump claims to have 90,000 corporations, 28,000 merchants and over 100 million consumers active on their different platforms which include employee discount portals, loyalty rewards redemption and the Yahoo! Deals' Personal Offers platform
Next Jump also delivers a significant - 60% - click-through rate. Not bad when compared to the 5% average...

Augmented Reality The MIT/TED Way...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:52:00 +0000

More fun stuff from TED. It's quite long and the really amazing demonstrations start at just after the 6 minute mark.

Who Stole The Cookies?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Google (the guys that know more about me than just about anyone else) recently rolled out a single page view of my settings and user account information for the different Google services that I use (15 and counting ranging from Alerts to YouTube). Called Dashboard, the service is aimed at alleviating some of the privacy concerns that the enormous amounts of data that Google collects present. The dashboard also indicates publicly available data with a small icon representing people - I have to go into each individual application to do anything about those settings though.

From the Google Blog:

"In an effort to provide users with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings."

This is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of providing users with more control over the data they share with Google. It's still some way from allowing users the fine tuning and control that a true user-directed privacy dashboard would provide - like transparency in terms of the cookies Google uses to target me for example...

Happy Birthday Banner!

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Interesting article from my old friend and colleague at Euro RSCG, Frank D'Angelo appeared in AdAge last week. October 27th effectively marked the 15th birthday of the first banner ad which appeared in hotwired.com (the online version of Wired magazine).

Read the article here...

Putting It To Work

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:17:00 +0000

Much has been said (and written) about Web 2.0 technologies and how they are shaping the future of business - it's not all about marketing you know - on the Internet. Incidentally, there are 352,000,000 citations on the subject in Google results pages today. The best definition is still probably that from Tim O'Reilly back in the dark ages of 2005 - a good article can be found here.

Over the past several years McKinsey has conducted a Web 2.0 research initiative led by Michael Chui. As part of theis the team surveyed more the 1500 business executives on how their companies are using the different technologies, how that usage maps to the trends observed in the development of the tools and what future investment plans the different organizations have. The study focuses its attention on 12 tools/technologies/techniques that have found some level of penetration if not critical mass in the general population:

blogs
mash-ups
microblogging
peer to peer
podcasts
prediction markets
rating
RSS
social networking
tagging
video sharing
wikis.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, (I think it's all about harnessing data and making it usable and useful) McKinsey has developed a nice data visualization tool that allows one to look at how these technologies are being used against different business objectives over time.

More here...

Statistical Personalization

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Taylor) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:24:00 +0000

That's what the technology that powers Adchemy is called by its inventor.

Accenture (hot on the heels of the announcement that Accenture Interactive would be handling display advertising on the P&G websites) just announced that they will be joining two venture firms in taking a stake in Adchemy.

Adchemy is one of a number of emerging companies (MediaMath is one that my company very successfully works with) that use multiple sources of dis-identified consumer data to present more relevant display advertising on websites. Using inventory from a broad array of Exchanges these solutions are designed to be able to seek out high value niche segments based on demographics such as the Prizm data. They also provide marketers with a way to nuance a buy in near real-time based on changing market dynamics and priorities.

With Forrester predicting that the display market (who said display was dead again?) will rise to 21% of total ad spend over the next 5 years - up from 12% today - the market for a smarter, more relevant form of display advertising will become a little more crowded.