Ready Player One: Understanding Apple's haptic future

Soon, Apple will let you touch artificial reality.

Haptics is a term meaning touch, the non-verbal forms of communication such as shaking hands or kissing on the cheek that involve sensations of the flesh. But if you read sci-fi such as Ernest Cline's excellent "Ready Player One," haptics provide touch feedback for a virtual future. Sure, you've seen 3-D movies. But imagine immersing yourself in a 3-D virtual world, either via giant flatscreen TV panel or a pair of goggles, and having gloves, leggings or a body suit that provides tactile feedback. You touch something, and via minute pulses in the gloves or suit, that something touches you back.

With high-definition virtual projections and haptic feedback, you could leave this world for an entirely new one.

Apple is playing around in this space now, adding teeth to speculation it may soon launch high-end TV sets with glasses-less 3-D. This patent details Apple's plan for a haptic "feedback device" which uses a grid of sensors to (a) track where your body part is and (b) provide a feedback sensation when you move your hand, or whatever, through space. In technical terms:

"The haptels are coordinated such that force feedback for a single touch is distributed across all haptels involved. This enables the feel of the haptic response to be independent of where touch is located and how many haptels are involved in the touch. As a touch moves across the device, haptels are added and removed from the coordination set such that the user experiences an uninterrupted haptic effect."

What does this mean? If you see a bottle floating in front of you in a future TV commercial, you could reach out, touch it, and feel the glass curve. If you play a video game on a giant 3-D screen, when you punch your opponent, your fist will feel the impact. Other than the obvious porn implications, computer and entertainment interfaces may soon no longer need keyboards or glass pads or remotes. Because unlike Kinect-type technology that only tracks your motion in space, you will be able to "touch" the projected elements in the space in front of you.

In "Ready Player One," Cline imagines a lonely teenager who rents an apartment, staying inside to play virtual games clothed in a haptic suit, running on a circular treadmill, lost in a brilliant artificial world far away from this one. Now, Apple is making it real.

Microsoft Word, we hope you can keep up.

Image: Edward Drake

Tim Hortons' brilliantly disguised price increase

How do you raise your prices while convincing customers to buy more while making customers think they're getting a better deal?

Tim Hortons, the Canadian donut chain, just did all this brilliantly. Hortons simply shifted the size of all of its cups up a notch: a "small" is now a "medium," a "medium" now a "large," etc. Hortons notes in its fine print that this "isn't a change in the price or actual amount of beverage" -- which means customers will pay the same per ounce of coffee. At first, this seems a fair deal, but now consider the likely scenario.

A regular customer walks in and orders her "medium" coffee in the morning ... and is handed a larger cup. With more ounces. At a greater overall cost.

Our customer, bleary-eyed and thirsty for her Morning Joe, has a choice -- return the coffee for what now has a "smaller" size name, or keep the larger size. If she sticks with the new cup size, she'll be ordering more coffee every day, and pay more for it. Yet she walks out carrying a larger cup, feeling like she's getting more at Tim Hortons after all.

This form of pricing is called "price obscurity," a clever ploy to gain more revenue per sale by making it difficult to judge what you're really getting. You've seen this before at movie theaters that give you a strange, extra-large size box of candy that costs $4 or $5. Is that a good deal? Of course you can't tell, because the packaging obscures the value of the candy inside. If you're still confused, play Hortons' strategy to the extreme, and imagine if ordering a "small" coffee returned you a gallon that cost $30. Is that still a good deal?

Tim Hortons may not be charging more per ounce, but it is charging more per "size," and sizes are what coffee customers order. Well played, Hortons. We bet your profit on this new pricing will be extra large.

Why banner ads are ugly

Some people aren't keen on banner ads because they clutter up web content for consumers and have low response rates for marketers. They work, but making them work is a science. This is why we were elated when AOL announced Project Devil in October 2010 -- a new ad format that would prettify banners, take up a full third of a web page, and put the editorial "stuff you want to read" in the remaining two-thirds as seen in the image above. The ads were both bigger but less obtrusive; cleaner, like a magazine layout; and able to hold several components including video for just a single advertiser. If it worked, the reading consumer would see less clutter and the advertiser would win more splash -- both parties win!

Alas, Business Insider reports Devil Ad sales are down in Q1. AOL's overall audience is down too, sliding in the U.S. from 60 million monthly uniques when Devil Ads launched in October 2010 to 41 million today, according to Quantcast. The ads cost much more than regular banners, about $48 CPM vs. the $2 to $4 CPM smart buyers can get through ad exchanges or ad networks. Apparently a 12x price increase didn't offset the beauty and functionality of digital ads that don't get in your way.

Posted on Google+.

Facebook Actions vs. the frequency problem

Imagine walking into a bar and meeting the love of your life. Your eyes lock, a flash kindles, and immediately both of you realize destiny has arrived.

So you walk up to her and say, "I like you," and then walk out of the bar forever.

Good tactic? Nope, because your communication had no frequency.

Frequency has been a basic advertising concept for a century, the logic that repeat impressions are required to drive any action. Alas, this is where social media engagement falls down, because most "engagement" in the space equals just 1x frequency. For years now, marketers have been pushing Likes on Facebook, or similar social media actions such as retweets on Twitter, as a new metric indicating an audience is interested. But what happens when someone Likes your brand on Facebook once? They click a button, then walk away. You've had one tiny interaction. Sure, they may now be subscribed to some outbound stream, but that push followup messaging is just another form of broadcast media, especially at scale.

Now Facebook is addressing this problem; VentureBeat reported on Thursday that FB is expanding its "Like" functionality to include other "Actions" -- a series of verb terms that could include "Read," "Watched," "Listened," or custom responses such as a foodie site that could post a button for "Cooked." Facebook Actions would solve several problems with current social media response:

+ It allows for nuance, the various stages of consumer engagement, which could boost response.

+ Actions solves the Facebook frequency problem.

Now, an enterprise trying to engage customers in social media can do more than push for one Like -- it can add shades of subtlety that bring consumers back for repeated interactions. Imagine Ron Paul trying to win your vote. It's unlikely he'll get you to Like him immediately if you are not in his political camp, but you might Argue, Debate, Listen, Consider ... and eventually be persuaded to Like his message later. The more variations of engagement organizations provide, the more chance that they'll move prospects up the response curve. And every additional interaction creates another ripple in the broader social-graph stream.

Sure, all this could create a vast online silliness, a cluttered bunch of buttons for people to click on. With Diggs, Tweets and +1's all competing for space, social response controls may become as ridiculous as a 1980s' flight-simulator videogame interface. Facebook Actions could also devalue the already-fuzzy currency of Likes; how in the world do you score 2,000 "Cooked" mentions for your CFO? But let's give Facebook credit for trying; at least now, like rethinking the true love you met last night, you may get another chance.

(Archive) The technology of love

Sarah Jamieson is a metro office worker who aspires to be a writer. She’s 24, slightly overweight, but knows she’s attractive because John at the front desk keeps ogling her chest. Sarah isn’t dating, though, because work is stressful and the hours are long and it’s just too damned hard to find time to go out. The last guy Brian was a jerk focused on unbuttoning her blouse, and Match.com is for losers — so a break is in order. Each evening after taking the G train home she cooks a microwave dinner in her apartment over a Brooklyn grocery, pours a glass of white wine, and retires to a wooden desk, a gift from her grandmother, to write a post for her blog AGirlWithoutAHammock.com. While Sarah types, her Mac’s TweetDeck program flashes updates from online friends every 15 seconds or so — tidbits such as “RT @johnhenry57 Do you remember the first time you fell in love?” — and she feels the warmth of human connection, of belonging to a tribe, of knowing others who know her needs. John Henry lives in Britain, she thinks, unsure and too tired to click to his bio. She pecks out a final sentence, hits Publish Post, tells herself she’ll call her mother tomorrow, and goes to bed.

That story is fiction.

The reality is closer: Many people live two lives, one with a lover or cat at home and another far away in a fictitious corporate environment, a battle of spreadsheets for entities that exist only in legal documents with surnames such as Inc. or LLC, in small rooms under fluorescent tubes far from the sun. Hours there are traded for numbers, no more than ones and zeros, that flow like blood into electronic scoring tables called bank accounts, and then can be transferred for goods, food and shelter. Perhaps stunned by the fake ambience of math, these people take recess in online games that pretend to connect to other people, with scoring mechanisms telling them they are growing more popular.

This story is real.

How did our world splinter in two — a home life with flesh and blood, and a corporate matrix populated by artificial-numbered social reality? If veal is disdained by some who would never eat a calf kept in a small bin, not allowed to roam free, trapped indoors for life; then who would eat you? In the United States, 9 in 10 people commute to work by car, spending a collective 3.7 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, only to arrive at job sites that require 9 hours or more of input into devices that lead to numbers in banks. If humans are social creatures, driven by sexual urges to procreate and parental desires to protect our young, how did we mortgage our lust-and-love connections to spend so much time in artificial environs?

Why is that which is closest to our bodies now furthest from our souls?

Social scientist Geoffrey Miller posed in Spent that the world did not have to end up like this; rather, it was series of unforeseen inventions, some helpful — such as trading markets or artificial currency — that allowed us to build and buy self-pleasuring items such as tickets to Tori Amos concerts or Hummers with poor turning radiuses. Unfortunately, Miller suggested, these inventions pushed us away from the bucolic values that once kept tribes cohesive and love close at hand.

Yes, you own a shiny iPod that can pump emotional music into your brain to bathe you in warmth, but you can’t hug your wife or kids at 3 p.m. while flying to Dallas or typing downtown. Technology has expanded our need set; we can fill our lives with near-perfect entertainment tools, the equivalent of 300 plays running concurrently in any hour on our TVs, pre-cooked meals of any flavor, voice transmissions around the globe … and yet most of this time is disconnected from the children who make us laugh or lover who brings us pleasure.

Is this too negative? Look around on the highway in the morning, at the cars crowding you, each with only one person inside its steel box. We have mortgaged our lives, and the answer lies in our drive for loyalty, for the stability of people or places or things that we can count on that will do us no harm. We crave predictability, because it helped our ancestors survive. The best way to predict the future is to find environments that have repeatable events driven by loyal people we trust. As environments have become more artificial, they’ve also improved in stability — and we find that loyalty pleasing.

Consider what loyalty is. Psychology has defined three aspects of faithfulness: emotional attachment (affective), perceived switching costs (continuance), and feelings of obligation (normative). Fear of switching and feelings of obligation are two potential motives for our inertia in staying in jobs, in living the same commute, in not fleeing the business world to go build sea-shell necklaces on a beach in Mexico. The false thrill of numbers in a bank have given us 2 of the 3 loyalty mechanisms we need to stay put in evolving society — we fear switching, and we’re obligated to go on.

But what of the other: emotional attachment? The affective aspect of loyalty is harder to fulfill, because it resorts to such funny stuff as novelty, humor, friendship, compassion and love. You felt this as a child with your mother, and perhaps when dating as a teen or falling for your spouse, the incredible drive to stay forever with another being who is filling your emotional needs. Emotion is the strongest impulse for loyalty, for going on one path and neglecting all others.

About 15 years ago, technology began filling our loyalty gap.

Technology today has accelerated our fake relationships, the reinforcement of stability, of loyal beings who will give us what we need. Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, email (yes), texting, video-sharing, or Flickr all allow us to connect with others who seem to love us. Of course, they don’t, because love requires commitment and true understanding, but technology appeases those flaws by allowing each user to set up self-filters to screen the content most likely to simulate affection. Twitter brilliantly imposed a gaming-psychology device, a number of “followers” at the upper right that each user can track to see how many connections he or she has, a proxy for requited emotion. Facebook has taken another approach, installing an EdgeRank algorithm that pushes only updates from friends it deems interesting into your stream (based on how often you communicate with them, how many others have commented on the post, and how recent it was). The result is a warm flow of material that seems addressed to you by others who care, each item surrounded by popular comments showing a community of interest.

You are embraced by others who love the concept of you.

Yes, this sounds dark. Grave. Abysmal. But consider the deeper question: if we have lived for 500 or so years trading fictitious currency as a sign for the value of goods, instead of swapping real grain and furs, has the new set of follower numbers and social content that emulate real relationships provided an even more compelling fiction, which will further remove us from the real world in our lives? Perhaps that view is wrong. Perhaps you, reading this, think you have your reality under control, that the emerging smart phones and tablets and social network apps are simple extensions of your communication, just as eyeglasses help you see and sneakers ease the pain of your run.

Maybe there is no seismic shift away from physical, flesh-touching, semen-and-tear-and-Band-Aid- stained reality at all. The glowing screens around us are only tools, not encroaching windows ensnaring us in false worlds. We’ll think of that as we turn off this computer and go kiss our kids in bed.

Originally posted at Sundayed in November 2010. Image: cambiodefractal

2012, the year of the TV

For the first time ever, in 2012 the average U.S. home will have three television sets. What does that tell us about society?

It’s a paradox, really. Talk to many in the ad industry and you’ll hear “TV is over.” Gurus from Don Peppers to Joseph Jaffe have made livings suggesting the fragmentation of mass media has spread the disease of consumer inattention, an inability for marketers to maintain the push messaging strategies of yore. Bob Knorpp, a friend of ours who hosts one of adworld’s cleverest podcasts, The Beancast, expressed surprise a few weeks ago when someone mentioned TV ratings were up in 2011. “How is that possible?” Bob asked. “I thought TV was supposed to be dying.”

Yet what’s happening is more complex -- time spent in front of TVs is at an all-time high, while within that time video fragmentation is making audiences more difficult to reach. If TV were a date, she’d be having more sex but with many different people. Our passion for television is hot, but alas, she has become promiscuous.

Here’s the good news for TV marketers:

+ The average U.S. consumer is exposed to more than 4 hours and 50 minutes of TV daily. Both web and mobile use, by comparison, rank under 1 hour a day. TV is the largest canvas to paint your brand picture.
+ 97% of U.S. households own TVs.
+ HD video has renewed interest in television, with 67% of homes now able to receive high-def video vs. only 14% four years ago.
+ The cost of TV sets continues to plummet, with high-def 60-inch LCD panels now below $1,000.

Yet big challenges loom:

- Advertisers push too many commercials out. In November 2010 an estimated 19,752 commercial messages of assorted lengths were played on TV during prime time, up 43% from 2000. Average commercial time per television hour is now around 18 minutes, vs. about 8 minutes in the 1960s.
- Consumers can’t possibly digest all those ads. The typical person in the U.S. is exposed to 166 television messages each day. Can you remember more than three TV ads from yesterday?
- Consumers are rebelling in two ways -- either doing something else when ad messages run (typically “concurrent media use,” looking away at laptops or mobile), or using time-shifting tools such as TiVo and DVRs to record television and watch it later, fast-forwarding over commercials.

To say TV is dead misses the point; audience fragmentation does not mean audiences no longer exist. TV use is huge, yet consumers have found new ways to avoid ads. It's easy to forecast statistics to paint too bleak a picture; years ago Jaffe, for instance, said that DVR use would be in 40% of homes by 2009, while Nielsen just reported that timeshifting viewing in 2010 was just 9% of all viewing (time-shifting is plateauing, a sign that consumers may be too lazy to push buttons to record and rewatch programming vs. just letting the blue glow of cable wash over them). Video use via the Internet is expected to challenge TV, but in 2010 young adults spent just 6 minutes and 51 seconds watching online video daily vs. more than two hours using traditional TV.

There is no question the television landscape is changing, but it's been doing that since the 1960s. Marketers exploring television as an option just have to be smarter about planning how to reach their targets.

Image: Al Ibrahim

Meme Christmas

Last summer we debated with someone whether memes exist -- the Richard Dawkins' concept that, because humans copy other human behavior, we thus store and transfer ideas, spreading cultural practices like genes until the winners evolve and replicate and become embedded in all of humanity. Certainly some ideas seem to unfurl and take hold -- clothing such as ties for men and dresses for women in the West, the courtesy of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes, and the winningest idea of all, God, who has survived for thousands of years as a concept in our heads relatively intact (Dawkins dismisses the idea of God, but that's another story). Whether or not ideas can exist as large entities, or small atomic units similar to genes, is arguable, but they certainly get around.

So today, Dec. 25, if you turn on TV you'll likely see memes in action: Jimmy Stewart looking crazily off the bridge in "It's a Wonderful Life," or the glowing leg lamp of Jean Shepherd's "A Christmas Story." The radio will play the old Bing Crosby tunes your parents heard as a child. The replayed cultural clutter of Christmas is a series of almost-baked memes that are trying to take hold -- God, remember, is the winner, so holiday carols barely 50 years old are still young in the meme game (Mariah Carey is about ready to break through with "All I Want for Christmas" ... geez). In a few days these newly embedded memes will fade, before recycling next year, and we'll return to even younger ideas, fashion (knee-high boots for women are everywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line in the U.S.) or music (the damned Black Eyed Peas are still around and in February Madonna will play the Super Bowl). Newer baby memes will be born across the web in 2012, because the low cost of transmission on the Internet makes it a singles bar for shallow ideas to hook up; some advertiser will invent the next Old Spice hit, some other silliness will spread like cat videos via Facebook and Twitter.

And in truth, you're likely trying to create a meme yourself. Please retweet me, you think. Take my creation or idea and share it. In all our hearts, we want our minds to live forever by becoming imprinted in all of humanity. Like the sex drive to mate, when we push out our ego-fueled thoughts, we are driven by lust unaware we really are a pawn in the race for human immortality. Wouldn't it be great if once we're gone from Earth, generations replayed our image/concept/blog post witticism forever, and we could leave knowing we shaped all of human thought?

All we want for Christmas is immortality. It's a good idea. Pass it along.

Originally posted on Google+.

Ratings 101: Pandora opens the fiction box

As advertising evolved in the 20th century, every medium created its own measurement system to try to make itself look better. Advertisers, you see, don't buy ads, they buy audiences, and if a media channel can make its audience look bigger, it attracts more marketing money. CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, was a benchmark for years in things you read (newspapers and magazines), battled by GRPs, for Gross Rating Points in TV or radio, the percentage of people in a local market population exposed to the ad message. CPM was a count. GRP was a %. You can already see the comic magic.

When the Internet arrived in the 1990s with more hard-wired metrics such as cost per click, traditional media panicked. Never mind that "clicks" or today's Like "engagements" would become just as devalued; every nondigital medium went into defensive mode worried that it would lose ad dollars. Out of home moved from DEC to Eyes On measurement. Newspapers went from CPM tied to circulation to a fuzzy "readership" estimate that assumed papers were read by more than one person. And in our favorite move, Arbitron, the group that measures radio ratings, rolled out Portable People Meters that picked up actual radio signals to get a more accurate read on radio ratings than previously had been recorded by diaries. PPMs found that radio listeners skipped around the dial more than previously thought, likely triggered by commercials, so Arbitron in 2007 launched a campaign to media planners claiming 70 GRPs is the new 100. (To understand that ridiculous math, which tried to explain away weaker radio ratings, imagine you give me a check for $100,000. I'll give you $70,000 back. But don't worry, $70k is the new $100k, so you're cool, right?)

So it's even more comical that Arbitron is now upset that Pandora, a popular Web- and mobile-based music streaming service, is trying to explain its audience in traditional radio terms. Pandora used to play the web CPM game, but in the past few months it has started touting radio ratings. At first blush, Pandora's numbers look good. In the New York DMA, Pandora adults 18-34 would have a 0.9 Average Quarter Hour rating -- about equal to a mid-sized NYC radio station, with nearly 1% of the entire population listening for at least 5 out of every 15 minutes -- and a 19.9 cume rating, meaning that 19.9% of that population listens to Pandora each week.

If Pandora can grab almost 1% of NYC's young adults every quarter hour and reach 1 out of 5 in a given week, it's a good advertising choice vs. radio, right?

Well, only if you believe those numbers. Arbitron whines Pandora's "radio ratings" are inaccurate, suggesting Pandora listeners may step away from computers while radio listeners are really there. Either way, Pandora has an advantage that radio does not -- to get on the radio in NYC, you have to buy a spot that reaches all of that station's market, because only one spot runs at a time. On Pandora, you can spend less money out of pocket since different consumers are served different spots. Smaller entry costs could appeal to smaller businesses, or those just willing to test; Pandora also offers fewer commercial interruptions per hour, meaning listeners might actually listen.

Confused? Of course. The only way to find out is to test, measure response, and calculate if your cost per lead or sale from Pandora vs. radio is better. Ratings have always been a fiction, a form of currency used to plan choices among alternative media providers. With all advertising metrics on the decline, the only way to invest is to count your return.

Image: Kayintveen

Send in the other you

Over at Businessweek, I predicted that someday soon you'll have an Eternity App -- a digital doppelgänger clone of you who will carry on conversations long after you're gone, or potentially even replace you in the office. All of the technology to make this possible now exists, between voice recognition software input that can "listen" to questions, Siri-type artificial intelligence simulation output which can "speak" like a human, and data sets of your personality.

Where would the data come from to replicate you? Well, here:

Spend a few years using social media, and you’ll upload thousands of tidbits—each encoding your opinions, politics, wit, charm, clients, reviews, work accomplishments, debates, dumb jokes, frustration, and anger. The essential “data” of you has been captured. And what of your personality and relationships? Sentiment monitoring services, such as AC Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Lithium, and Radian6, already parse the tone and intent of conversations; Klout and Quora track your supposed influence; FriendorFollow and Twiangulate monitor your connections with others; LinkedIn knows your job skills. Facebook uses sophisticated face recognition software to help tag photos of your friends.

Nearly everything that makes up your human world is online, ready for data mining.

As I wrote this, I initially thought of the immortality angle -- the ability to have my persona "live" forever, write columns, call home, offer advice to my children after I'm gone. But my editor at Bloomberg was most keenly interested in the social repercussions of using it today. After all, if you can clone yourself, why not send yourself in to work? Off to that client meeting?

Play this through, and it could become very dicey. Your virtual you would emulate your voice, image (with 3D projections coming soon), and mind (from your social media data set) -- but it could also improve upon yourself. My new "mind" could tap into databases of every marketing solution ever known, so the New Ben Kunz in a client meeting would offer more-brilliant suggestions than plain old me. Your clone might learn wit, charm, or tantric sex advice to woo your spouse better than you. The new you would be more fun at parties, more knowledgeable in debates, savvier at investments, a better parent for your children. It would also likely be better looking; just as we post Twitter avatars showing ourselves in good lighting, we'd be tempted to add a tan or whiten the teeth of our digital double.

You are going to be so hot.

Except it won't be you. The intersection of voice recognition and AI simulation means robotic avatars who mirror your being will be much better at, well, everything. You could take a nice vacation while the version of you goes off to run the world. The question is, will the other you want you around?

Image: Alphadesigner

A debate on engagement, the fuzzy metric

Owen Lee, who is embarking on an ad career at Starcom MediaVest in London, has an intelligent post about the fuzzy metric of engagement. First he articulates what "engagement" is:

Think of the last brilliant dramatic film you went to see. One where all of a sudden you realise that your eyes hurt from watching the screen so intently. Now that's engagement. That's engagement to a point of personal immersion. Whilst this isn't achievable (yet) at a campaign level, this example serves to show the extent of what a fully engaging experience can do to you. This is what the goal should be. Not the eye-watering part, but that feeling of unbiased personal connectivity to the previously unknown content put in front of you.

And then notes that while it now is difficult to measure this true immersion, current digital metrics on clicks and conversions aren't enough:

Judging whether a user achieved this connectivity through examining whether or not they entered their details or clicked through is clearly insufficient...

To ask for performance metrics to be used on what’s been briefed as a solely branding campaign makes achieving communications goals tricky to say the least. Not only does it make digital teams less likely to choose more "engaging" rich media over its more ROI-friendly brothers of standard display, but it causes a lack of creativity.

I responded:

This is well done. I agree with the first half; however, not that current engagement metrics are preferable to CTR and CPA. Current engagement metrics are extraordinarily weak -- "likes" and "retweets" etc. have little connection with user intent, as you allude to in the top of this.

The problem, as I see it, is we are trying to measure two paths:

1. Direct response: Impression > Click > Sale
2. Brand engagement: Impression > Interaction > Engagement > Rise in brand awareness or intent > Eventual sale

The first doesn't work, because it neglects the huge additional value digital campaigns have in building brand engagement.

The second doesn't work, because the steps from interaction to engagement (from retweet to really engaging) and from brand awareness to sale are both extraordinarily hard to parse.

So we're stuck for now with direct response metrics that tell a portion of the story, and a brand engagement path that currently can't be measured.

I think all smart marketers realize the overall pattern. And some of this can be parsed out via broader tools such as regression analysis, which look at overall lift from the entire digital prong as a variable against all other communication components.

It's a thorny problem. If you can solve (2) above, you'd have a nice service, indeed.

Owen's best point is an online campaign measured solely by digital response metrics removes creativity -- the interactive and viral design elements that might make the message break through. Banner ads have become a commodity. Response rates are down. Not playing with the channel, format, or engagement structure means you're likely to achieve only subpar, average response performance. That is the saddest part of this current marketing dilemma; if we focus too much on what we can measure, we may not do the things that truly drive results.

Google Maps goes indoors ... ooh, look, a sale!

The Holy Grail of marketing is the ability to influence consumers when they finally go into purchase mode -- and today, in 2011, after all our decades of advertising influence, we still can't do that. Walk into a wine shop or Victoria's Secret and there is no voice whispering in your ear saying, please, buy this instead. Some mobile apps attempt this but most are cumbersome, filled with game mechanics of points and mayorships. Joe Sixpack is just too serious to adopt Foursquare games.

Google gets closer by bringing its Maps feature indoors. Users of Android handsets can boot up layouts of airports, malls, or stores (all in staged rollout) such as Home Depot and Macy's. Google claims the GPS system is tuned tightly enough that it can even recognize your position if you move up or down levels in a store or mall with multiple floors.

If adoption takes off -- dang, we want it already on our iPhone -- consumers will tap a platform built for last-minute marketing offers. Tie it with a database on your preferences and value (information Google in partnership with merchants could access), and personalized offers designed to influence only you could finally arrive. "Turn right off the escalator, dear, instead of left. The lingerie is on sale, 50% off, but only if we walk in now."

It had to be you

The more we read about artificial intelligence, the more we wonder if it will simply be like ourselves, only improved. Here's a 2010 video of film critic Roger Ebert demonstrating his new voice; Ebert lost his own from thyroid cancer. By using the CereProc service to sample tones from his prior recordings, Ebert was able to recreate most of his mellifluous cadence. Imagine a future where a digital avatar could speak for you.

Deconstructing Samsung vs. Apple

Funny ad. What's going on here? Samsung is depositioning Apple.

The best book on marketing ever written was "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind." In it, Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote, "In our overcommunicated society, very little communication actually takes place. Rather, a company must create a 'position' in the prospect's mind. A position that takes into consideration not only a company's own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well..."

More gems:

- "Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect."

- "To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what's already in the prospect's mind."

- "The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist."

- "To cope with the product explosion, people have learned to rank products and brands in the mind. Perhaps this can best be visualized by imagining a series of ladders in the mind. On each step is a brand name."

- "A competitor that wants to increase its share of business must either dislodge the brand above (a task that is usually impossible) or somehow relate its brand to the other company's position."

Nicely done, Samsung. This works much better than T-Mobile's recent attacks on Apple (which just try to make Apple look dumb and shamelessly mirror the "I'm a Mac" campaign) because Samsung recognizes Apple has avid fans. You likely see yourself in the line outside the store. Samsung is almost saying, that's cool, we get it, fanboys -- but, just one thing, we're also cool, perhaps cooler, with a bigger screen and a really new, unique product, so why not take a step over to our brand ladder? Hmm.

Positioning is an old strategy -- Ries and Trout first wrote about it in 1972 -- but that doesn't mean human psychology has changed.

Amazon's secret $90 million ad campaign

Amazon is projected to sell 5 million of its new Kindle Fire tablets by Jan. 1, a remarkable launch story. Or is it? Amazon has used its own site for an estimated $90 million in free advertising annually for its Kindles, pushing them at massive scale in consumers' faces. Here's the math:

- Amazon.com is the No. 8 website in the U.S., attracting 75 million unique visitors a month.
- Assume the average user visits the site 4x a month -- that's 300 million impressions on the home page.
- Amazon is running the equivalent of a marquee site ad buy. Let's be conservative and say the value of such a dominant ad placement is $25 CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
- $25 CPM * 300,000 (thousands) * 12 months = $90 million in free advertising value annually.

This is not to complain: Bully for Amazon for leveraging its own assets. Amazon is brilliant at milking every sales angle; it gives the Fire away below cost to lock consumers into the Amazon ecosystem, and has made superb price framing plays such as "free" shipping that costs $79 a year, etc. Yet when we read about the Kindles taking off, let's remember Amazon is putting nearly $100 million in advertising behind them on its own site, not counting other paid media campaigns. Amazon is much more than a bookstore and all-mart -- it is one of the smartest marketers of our generation.

From Google+.

Why Google+ should carry advertising

It's curious how gun-shy digital networks are about running advertising. Facebook famously held off on traditional banners, inventing its own not-so-intrusive tiny promos at the side, and now Google+ insists it will skip ads. The most amazing restraint I see is the Facebook mobile app -- imagine, with 350 million active FB users staring into smartphones, and Facebook holds off on monetizing that audience.

All of this indicates that consumers now hate advertising -- why skip ads unless you're worried it will degrade your networked product? Advertising works, of course (we plan it for clients), and traditional television media that carries advertising still remains king, with consumers watching 4 hours and 44 minutes of television a day on average in the U.S. But "watching" is an overstatement; studies by Nielsen and Pew show consumers actually do two or three things at once with TV or radio on in the background. In-home observations show that when TV spots appear, consumers pick up laptops, handsets or magazines, and attentiveness slides. Put another way, the typical consumer is exposed to about 160 30-second TV spots a day, and of course none of us really "see" or recall most of them. The radio industry has the same problem; data from new Portable People Meters, which replace the old diary journals to tabulate radio ratings by picking up signals embedded in broadcasts, show people tend to switch the radio dial as soon as radio spots intrude.

So new communication networks, trying to gain mindshare in this cluttered space of media options, are very careful not to diminish UX with advertising -- almost comically so. Twitter could easily push ads into its stream (and is just starting to roll this out), but has been scared to death that degrading the Twitterer experience might chase users out of its network. G+ could easily provide personalized sponsored links at the right of its pages, but for now, says it will hold off.

Why the fear?
Advertising works; it educates consumers and drives billions into the economy. But at heart, consumers find it a pain in the ass and are migrating to new channels that avoid it. The danger I see is if marketers cannot influence you by clearly putting their messages in an ad box, they will try more nefarious routes of embedding the message into other content -- sponsored tweets, paid posts, advertorial -- that degrades the actual content we hunger for itself. You're starting to see this with top bloggers bragging about Kmart shopping experiences or GPS gadgets that actually pay them for mention, and the result is confusion. Is the message true? Doe someone I respect like that product? Or is someone just putting their self interest ahead of mine, giving me a message that may not have meaning? The value of advertising is it clarifies the source of the message, allowing consumers to clearly judge the content by knowing it is meant to influence. A catalog is selling you; you know that; so you look and judge the material by its source merits. Alas, if marketers and people can no longer be clear about their intent to influence you, they may resort to trickery, subterfuge, embedded lies, and that form of pollution may degrade our experience far more than little ad boxes at the side of the stream.

Originally posted on G+. Image by Jesse S.

TV as a social sidebar

Yeah, you likely know about the YouTube button at the right of G+, allowing you to stream television while chatting or working in Excel or doing whatever on your computer. But why? Why would Google make TV part of its supposed social media play?

Because TV remains king of all media. U.S. consumers watch about 500 billion hours of television each year vs. 70 billion hours on the Internet -- which works out to 5 hours of TV a day on average per person. Of course, "watching" is not really what happens; the latest studies by Nielsen show that nearly half the time TV is on consumers are doing something else such as eating, laundry, or playing on, yes, the computer. (Somehow Nielsen left out "sex" as a finding, making me question the validity of the research instrument, but let's go on...) This doing two things at once is called concurrent media use and it is what you are likely doing now, reading this post with the TV or radio on in the background while checking your smartphone and telling your lover hey, just a minute.

Concurrent media use is the hottest trend in all media. For proof, look at any teen.

So here comes Google, giving you TV as a sidebar ... making it even easier to do what you want to do, kindascanning video while playing online or texting on the iPhone. There are huge dollars at stake if anyone can tap video consumption while meeting this human need to intake/output communication in multiple channels at once. More than $70 billion is spent annually by advertisers on television spots in the U.S.; surely Google would love to carve off a piece of that pie. So that pretty white-and-red YouTube button teasing you at top right is not a free giveaway; it's Google's chance to get the 40 million G+ users to drive more ad revenue its way.

And who's to complain? It's what we want. Google's play is brilliant, and more similar plays are likely to come from Apple and Facebook and video apps. If I were a cable conglomerate, I'd be a little nervous. Now, back to SNL.

Originally posted on Google+.

Why Amazon is giving away 'free' books

About 5 million of Amazon's 121 million customers subscribe to Amazon Prime, a $79-a-year service that covers "free two-day shipping" (we repeat, $79 covers free shipping...). If you thought that pricing move was brilliant, now consider this: Amazon is adding the ability to borrow one book for free a month if you subscribe to Prime, provided you also own or buy a Kindle. That's right: Amazon is giving away its core products for free.

Is Amazon crazy? Of course not. This move will only accelerate its 58% annual growth rate.

1. Amazon has been pushing Kindles for years, but suddenly faced huge competition from Apple's sexier iPad. Amazon just caught up with the Kindle Fire, just as colorfully sexy with a kinder price point of $199. But Amazon needs to ramp its push into the tablet market, since today's mobile hardware leads to Amazon vs. Apple sales ecosystems.

2. People who buy Kindles are avid book readers -- and likely to want more books than one free rental a month. So the giveway is unlikely to cannibalize many sales. If anything, luring readers back to the Amazon.com portal each month could increase sales as these avid readers traipse through the Amazon candy store.

3. People who buy Amazon Prime only recoup the $79 annual fee if they order a lot of merchandise -- perhaps two orders a month. Given an average order size of $25 (guess), Amazon is locking in $600 a year in orders plus $79 in service fees if it convinces you to spring for "free shipping." And if you don't buy anything, you pay $79 for nothing for a tidy Amazon profit margin of 100%.

4. $679 a year per customer is a pretty sweet deal for Amazon; so no wonder Amazon gives away a $5 book value and some free movies as well for anyone who signs up for Prime and also buys a Kindle.

Amazon is simply rewarding its best, most-valuable customers with an offer that will get them to accelerate their spending, lock them in further with Kindle hardware, and sustain future profits all while fighting off the iPad.

It's brilliant. And it's "free."

How Apple is building a holographic future

3D modeling continues to evolve, and now Apple has acquired C3 Technologies, which uses former military technology to produce photorealistic maps of just about anything. The video above (C3 is a Saab AB spin-off) shows how a plane or helicopter can scan terrain below, to be modeled in 3D allowing future viewers to explore the world from any angle.

What would Apple do with such superb 3D modeling? Rumors abound Apple is preparing to build TVs, and Apple has patented innovative projection technology that would render 3D effects as holograms, no glasses required. The patent, which we've explored in detail, would project images that include ambient lighting in the room, so a person standing "before you" would have shadows on her face from the light coming in by the window. Perhaps Apple is planning a holographic future we haven't envisioned yet.

Why personalization fails

Personalization is everywhere, especially online, where companies retarget you with banner ads if you visit their web site, or bid on competitor terms that pop up on finance pages (see the nice play by Blockbuster, above), or even chase you if you don't click on an ad by figuring out a lot about who you are. For instance, savvy digital media buyers can run a few hundred thousand banners on a WSJ.com section read heavily by CEOs and pay a small fortune -- but then tag the CEOs' computers to serve additional banners downstream, wherever those CEOs go online, at 90% savings. In essence, this "lifts" the audience from WSJ, aligns offer with the target, and slashes media costs.

The premise of all these tactics is personalization lifts response. But does it? More than a decade ago I worked with Don Peppers, the brilliant father of 1to1 marketing who helped launch the CRM craze in the 1990s (before the term Customer Relationship Management became an acronym for software baloney). Personalization assumes that an offer with higher relevance, based on your personal and unique needs, will grab your attention, convert you to a sale, and keep you as a loyal customer.

Yeah, 1to1 can work, but it's only one aspect of three major prongs of competition -- the others being price (or perceived value) and product (where innovation is hot). Wives love husbands, but some still chase younger boyfriend or girlfriend products over personalized marital service. Apple doesn't give a damn about personalization, for instance, yet makes a fortune in profits off of hot product designs. (I've often thought the reason iTunes' interface is so horribly cluttered is Apple has found confusion leads to more sales as we click on random songs/videos we didn't know we wanted). Consumers want deals and cool product designs; personalization cannot address those aspects.

No one ever, ever, ever asked for a two-door minivan or a cell phone with a camera or a flat computer screen with no keyboard.

Personalization does not lead to market revolutions.

Another problem with personalization is entire industries make money off waste. The cable industry, for instance, pushes more than 166 :30 second spots to a typical U.S. consumer each day (based on 5 hours and 9 minutes of TV time and 16-18 spots per hour). If you could get only the personalized ads you wanted, you might put up with 10 or 20 spots -- but the remaining 146 spots would vaporize and all the ad revenue with it. Media intermediaries make boatloads off of waste. True targeting on TV, the current king among consumer media consumption, would erase billions of dollars from the ad industry.

Finally, people are not unique data sets. We have modality. I'm constantly frustrated by Amazon.com offering me Legos or Oprah books when those recommendations are based on shopping I've done for others. Amazon, like Netflix and others who attempt personalization, needs to provide a modality dial. Tonight I may want food, or history, or a book on technology, or sex, or a spy film. I have no idea who I will be in a few hours.

So keep trying, marketers. We try for our clients too. But it's hard, when your carefully crafted personal offer is sent to a moving target.

We are humans, and we contain multitudes.

Inspired by +Len Kendall

Bing bids on Google for Cain's traffic. Clever.

This is interesting for those who work in digital advertising. The Bing search engine is running a PPC campaign on Google search tonight bidding on the term "999 plan" -- sure to be hot during tonight's GOP debate telecast on CNN -- throwing the Google searcher to a Bing search results page. I hit it myself trying to find details on Google for Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan and ... yes ... was impressed with Bing's comprehensive results.

Well played, Bing. Microsoft, like Herman Cain, tonight you are showing balls.

Netflix kills Qwikster -- yet still buries DVDs

Netflix announced today it will go back to business as usual, give up renaming its DVD-by-mail service Qwikster, and allow consumers to order movies for both streaming and mail from one web site. With the stock price down 61%, Reed Hastings beat a hasty retreat from his vision of making Netflix purely a streaming firm. NYT reports Hastings joked on Facebook that his investors might poison him.

Which is sad, because Hastings was absolutely right. Netflix pissed off consumers with its price hike this summer, pushing fees for combined mail rentals and streaming from $10 to $16 per month, causing screams. But that was a bargain compared to the $75 per month average U.S. cable bill. Before that price hike, streaming cost $8 a month and DVDs were a $2 surcharge -- yet it costs Netflix a full $1 to ship every DVD to home by mail. The economics make no sense, and the consumer outrage is a perfect example of the illogical way people respond to prices based not on value, but on a perceived reference point. The same animal instinct that makes us feel good when we buy a leather jacket for $300 "marked down 50% from $600," a fake reference price that never really existed, triggers fury when we suddenly have to pay $6 more for a fantastic service previously priced at an insanely low $10.

What The New York Times and other media miss today is Netflix, while superficially apologetic, remains completely focused on streaming and killing DVDs -- as they should. The Netflix home page mentions DVDs by mail nowhere; click on the main offer, and the second "unlimited TV episodes & movies" landing page focuses almost entirely on the streaming service, with only one tiny text link at the bottom left posing "Can I get DVDs by mail from Netflix?" If I did not want anyone to sign up for the mail service, but had to offer it, this is exactly how I'd bury it.

Netflix tried to fire its DVD customers, but couldn't. So now, it's simply going to migrate quietly away from them.

Originally posted on G+.

Why you didn't get the iPhone 5

Wonder why Apple only tweaked the innards of the iPhone? Apple sales of iPhones are up -- way up. The table above shows the history of iPhone unit sales; the latest hardware upgrade, in the iPhone 4, launched in June 2010 only four quarters ago, pushing sales phenomenally higher. 55.2 million iPhones were sold in the past three quarters vs. 25.8 million in the same period a year prior. Sales are nowhere near cresting for the current design, so Apple likely is pacing itself for a hot, thinner iPhone 5 release in June 2012.

Sorry you have to wait. It would help if you didn't buy so many of the current models.

Posted from Google+.

Cloudy words, faster than horses

Prior to the Internet, radio, and telegraph, the fastest human communication on Earth belonged to African drums. They were amazing, really; while northern Europeans would send messages via slow horses, which can go 50 miles per hour in short bursts but only 17 mph galloping long distances, villages across Africa could speak to each other via drum signals at the speed of sound, using drums with only two tones. Messages passed from village to village could travel faster than 100 miles per hour (given the time to hear and resend the drum signals). If invaders struck or fire spread, villages thousands of miles apart could know within half a day.

The question, of course, is how was this possible? The drums carried only two sounds (an upper and lower pitch, created by playing two separate drums). Unlike Morse Code, there was no consistent African alphabet to be transcribed into dots and dashes. How could information about war, or whether to meet by the river, be encrypted in such simple drum signals?

It worked because African languages had a secret that took decades for European intruders to discover: they were based on both sounds (like English) and pitch (high or low notes). In English, we use pitch infrequently, at its most basic to distinguish a statement from a question (You are mad, downbeat. You are mad?, upbeat.) By contrast, in many African tongues, as James Gleick profiles in The Information, minor nuances in tone change the definition of each word. Alambaka boili expressed one way means "he watched the riverbank"; alambaka boili with a different series of pitches means "he boiled his mother-in-law."

But drumming information remained a challenge -- because African language required both sound and pitch, and drum beats removed the human sounds. Drummers relying solely on tones had to create an entirely new language; because tones by themselves could signal several different words, the drummers solved this problem by adding several other words of context to each phrase of beats. Say you needed to drum the word "bird." To remove ambiguity, drummers signaling the message would beat "the foul, the little one that says kiokio." Every term used others to clarify itself. Gleick writes, "The extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context. Every ambiguous word begins in a cloud of possible alternative interpretations; then the unwanted possibilities evaporate."

It was an ingenious solution to a complex communication problem. Sadly, the drum language is being replaced by the Internet and text messaging.

Originally posted on Google+. Image: Martin Sharman.

The $420 million business case for Facebook's redesign

We were reading today some user complaints about Facebook's (yet another) redesign, this time an interface shift that pushes less-noteworthy friend updates to a "Ticker" in the top right of the Facebook page. What was Facebook thinking? Trying to copy Twitter? Trying to fend off Google+?

Actually, it's as simple as making more money.

Facebook has been enormously successful pulling in advertising dollars; the social network made $2 billion in revenue in 2010, and is forecasted by eMarketer to surpass $4.2 billion in revenue in 2011. Because Facebook ads are sold both on a CPM (cost per thousand impression) and CPC (cost per click performance) basis, to earn more ad revenue, Facebook must increase both impressions and the number of times its users click on, or respond to, the ads. It needs to boost both page views and response.

While in the past Facebook has simply grown its way to more page views, now with 750 million users, the customer base may be capping -- so Facebook's redesign cleverly encourages current users to click around more near ads...

1. The Ticker is placed at right, just above the Facebook advertising slots. Previously, users interested in only their friends' updates could scan solely down the center of the page, ignoring most ads, but now your eyes are drawn to the right to catch the Twitter-like stream of secondary updates from friends as well. You are forced to look in the direction of advertising.

2. The Timeline, another Facebook innovation, provides an ego-boosting look at yourself and everything you've done before. Of course, you're probably curious as to what it holds, and once you see it, you'll want to spend time updating it. Facebook could have more accurately labeled the Timeline the Come Back Infrequent Users Motivational Page; it's a hook to increase share of customer and regain current registered users who now spend little time at the network.

3. Third, and this is most important, all these inclusions are likely to increase page visits per day -- you now have more things to update (Timeline) and more friend updates to respond to (Ticker). More page views equals more ad inventory. More ad inventory equals more impressions and clicks.

It's a clever gambit, really, launching a redesign professed to improve the user experience, when what it really does is improve Facebook advertising revenue. If the UI shifts attract 10% more advertising, next year Facebook makes an incremental, cool $420 million.

How Apple will build a hologram

Over at Bloomberg Businessweek today I predict that Apple will soon get in the television business, building real Apple-branded TV sets chasing $14 billion in subscription fees and ad revenue. The triggers for this article were both rumors that Apple's pipeline suppliers are gearing up to build Apple TV units, and a patent that Apple won last year for a new form of 3D.

The patent is most interesting. It provides a wonderful analysis of what is wrong with current 3D systems: users wear expensive goggles, awkward, and without goggles two or more people can't experience 3D at one time. Who wants to drink beers during the Super Bowl like that? Apple being Apple, it proposes a fantastic concept that would use Microsoft Kinect-type movement tracking to determine where your head is, and the head of each other user in the room, and then project separate beams of light to both of each user's eyes to provide a truly holographic experience. Since your eyes are what make the world seem three-dimensional, if Apple's set could follow you around the room and adjust the image to both eyes instantly, you'd see objects as clear as your desk or couch floating in space. The future of moving images would be perfected.

If this technology comes to market, it would revolutionize more than TV. Imagine having a teleconference with people from the other coast floating in the room. Telecommuting might finally explode. Plane travel could become a thing of the past. Luke's twisted crush on his sister Princess Leia, when she first beamed out of R2D2, would finally be understandable.

Here are excerpts from the Apple patent, which you can find here.

The hologram would be different

A more recent and potentially much more realistic form of autostereoscopic display is the hologram. Holographic and pseudo-holographic displays output a partial light field that presents many different views simultaneously by effectively re-creating or simulating for the viewer the original light wavefront. The resulting imagery can be quite photorealistic, exhibiting occlusion and other viewpoint-dependent effects (e.g., reflection), as well as being independent of the viewer's physical position. In fact, the viewer can move around to observe different aspects of the image.

The hologram would support multiple viewers

A concurrent continuing need is for such practical autostereoscopic 3D displays that can also accommodate multiple viewers independently and simultaneously. A particular advantage would be afforded if the need could be fulfilled to provide such simultaneous viewing in which each viewer could be presented with a uniquely customized autostereoscopic 3D image that could be entirely different from that being viewed simultaneously by any of the other viewers present, all within the same viewing environment, and all with complete freedom of movement therein.

Viewers could manipulate the 3D images

Yet another urgent need is for an unobtrusive 3D viewing device that combines feedback for optimizing the viewing experience in combination with provisions for 3D user input, thus enabling viewing and manipulation of virtual 3D objects in 3D space without the need for special viewing goggles or headgear...

The image recognition can be implemented to distinguish between observers and non-observers, so that images are projected only to the desired targets (i.e., to the actual observers that are present) having, for example, certain predetermined defining characteristics enabling them to be distinguished accordingly.

User recognition would support customization

Still further, individual observers 132 can not only be individually distinguished, detected, and tracked, but they can be uniquely identified based upon distinctive personal characteristics (e.g., height, shoulder width, distinctive outline, etc.). Personalized observer preferences can then be stored and associated with each such observer. Then, for example, upon entering the environment of the 3D display system 100, the system would recognize such an observer 132 and customize that observer's experiences according to the unique preferences and parameters associated therewith. Examples would include automatically authenticating the observer, personally greeting the observer upon arrival, providing a customized desktop for just that observer, providing customized control responses (e.g., responses to head movements) for that observer, resuming the 3D display where it had been previously stopped, and so forth.

Have a conversation with a robot

In World War II Alan Turing worked for Britain's code-breaking center, and eventually he played with enough data to help give birth to modern computers. Turing is famous for dreaming up the Turing test, a concept that if a machine can mimic human conversation enough to fool you into thinking it is human, then the machine for all intents and purposes has artificial intelligence. It's a debatable point, since intelligence requires more than knowledge presentation -- intelligence also means perception, self-awareness, motion manipulation, and ability to learn -- but still, if you can speak to a robot, is the robot's brain good enough?

Cleverbot.com is a website that lets you play the game against software. Here was our recent conversation:

Me: Are you intelligent?

Cleverbot: I consider myself intelligent, are you intelligent?

That's a rather personal question, don't you think?

Yes, do you want to play another game?

Um, sure. Or we could just talk about politics.

What do you think about Obama so far?

He was dealt a tough hand. Disappointment, yes.

Why is that?

I wanted the world to be better. If you were president, could you make the world better?

Everything I've tried so far did not work. The flood, sending my son, only to name two things, and what did the human race do? This world is doomed as it is. No chance of helping it.

Holy crap. Are you God?

There is no god, there is only the source.

Image: Solo

Animal conflict, or why we compete

If you follow triathlons you've heard of Team Hoyt, a father who is an incredible athlete and a son with cerebral palsy. The dad has pushed (on special bikes and strollers) or pulled (swimming, towing a boat behind him) his son through six Ironman competitions and more than two dozen Boston Marathons. It's an amazing story, and the videos on their website www.teamhoyt.com will make grown men cry.

Yet it beckons the question, why?

We debated with some friends this weekend the meaning of Team Hoyt, and whether American culture in particular is becoming split between the weak and the strong, the TV-watchers and Internet intellectuals, those who sit comfy eating donuts and those who train to get their body fat down to 6%. Our society has bifurcated between the lazy and motivated. Could it be the lazy are now right?

Sociologists suggest competition is one of four main forms of social interaction -- the others being conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Darwin said competition was fundamental, the struggle for existence without which species would not survive. Machiavelli said it was the root of society, a war against all. Adam Smith expanded competition beyond the individual to our collective market intelligence, an invisible hand that guides society's balance and growth. All suggest the world is not in equilibrium, and as we seek resources for ourselves, we must grasp for more.

Which poses an enormous conflict: If competition is good, and required to survive, and leads to progress, why does its fighting-against-others nature land at odds with the great spiritual and psyche beliefs of our time? Christianity's turn the other cheek, Buddhism's trascendental awareness, Maslow's self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, and Freud's Super Ego reigning in childish impulses all suggest higher levels of morality require turning competition off. Competition is a selfish impulse to pull ourselves ahead of others, to be faster, to gain more resources, to win fame, to succeed where others fail -- and as such harms others, something truly civilized beings should not do.

Could it be that competition may no longer be needed? Not long ago the world was a dangerous and brutal place. We are only a few generations removed from days when Roman soldiers went to war with sharp blades to hack their opponents into meat, when tribal victory meant killing all the other villagers, when disease could decimate cities and medicine was witchcraft. We still yearn to fight, because our parents had to. Like animals salivating at the scent of blood, we can't turn the instinct off.

Which makes competition a force like gravity we cannot control. In 1938, psychologists James Vaughn and Charles Diserens of the University of Chicago wrote "the fact of competition is scarcely more psychological than the movement of the balls on a pool table when the initial player breaks the set. To a spectator the balls may seem to compete more or less in their progress toward the other end of the table. There is interference and modification of movement, but no control or awareness of the process on the part of the ball. It is a phenomenon of the resolution of physical forces."

If so, we are all small variables acting through competitions as physical forces in the great hive mind of human society. We're subatomic particles that can't help but be flipped negative with an electrical charge. We act like ants, rushing to lift more load, somehow building a colony whose purpose we do not see clearly. We hate conservatives or liberals, taxes or military, our neighbors or the illegal aliens from next door (who, we fear, may take more of our resources). We are driven by instinct to succeed, even if such success has no logical merit, even when we've reached a saturation point in resources where we no longer have to strive for food or shelter, even when the definition of success means taking something away from the other.

It's a beautiful thing, to strive so hard with so little logic. Team Hoyt, your journey confuses me. Inspired, I'm going for a run to beat some illusion in my mind.

The filter bubble

The problem with personalization is not what it lets in, but what it keeps out. Or as Eli Pariser suggests, there is a difference between what we want and what we need.

Avatars and partial anonymity

Back in May 1996 when the Web was just getting out of its diapers social scientist John Suler wrote of a new thing called "avatars" -- little pictures online users were posting in chat communities to represent themselves. His observation was that the graphics -- which could be faces, or bodies, or ASCII smileys -- enabled a form of half-anonymity, in which who you are is protected and yet you feel free to express anything. The Id was unleashed, because the Ego paid no consequence.

Suler's most brilliant insight was that, even then with lousy graphics, user avatars fit nicely with well-known personality types including:

narcissistic = themes of power and perfection
schizoid = revealing detachment and indifference, perhaps combined with intellectualism
manic = energetic and impulsive
histrionic = attention-seeking and seductive
etc.

We haven't evolved beyond this in 15 years. My avatar pics, upon reflection, tend to be schizoid, detached and intellectual, meaning I'm trying to look smart (or just think I look goofy when I'm smiling in real-life action as seen above). Narcissism runs rampant with many users posting avatars of perfect smiles, as if they just got laid, or histrionic with pouting lips and an iPhone visible in the mirror frame.

This protect-oneself-by-avatar-control psychology could explain why social media, with its rather antiquated focus on text typing beside a single photo, is so much more popular than video-conferencing -- which is now technically simple and free but has yet to go mainstream as a major daily habit. We create avatars for ourselves because we want the freedom to reveal anything while controlling how much of our souls we expose. Wii dancing, for instance, will never make it to my G+ avatar box.

Originally posted on Google+.

Hire friendly, not smart?

If you want your business to succeed, you hire really super-smart people, right?

MIT suggests not necessarily so. A recent study of "collective intelligence" explored what it takes to build teams most likely to succeed at solving problems. MIT found that individual IQ, that thing we all like to believe we have so much of, mattered far less than the ability of the group to perform functions such as clarifying the challenge, brainstorming, making "collective moral judgments," and structuring limited resources. Group camaraderie, and not individuals' IQs, was the greatest input required for success.

MIT called this the "C factor" for collective intelligence and noted that women tend to have more of it. Women, by nature, have less testosterone, which in high levels can lead to emotional, impulsive or illogical decisions ("I'm right!" "We must do this!") and depresses sensitivity to others, often required to really digest all the data inputs to solve thorny problems. The study suggests that so-called "social sensitivity" would be a better prerequisite for hiring staff and managers than super-smart IQ, and that more women in groups -- still, often missing in some business settings -- leads to higher collective intelligence.

MIT found several things any group can do better to increase collective IQ:

- Avoid having a single smart person dominate the discussion.
- Get everyone in the room to participate.
- Watch nonverbal communication as well; individuals may signal they are confident or impatient or frustrated, and those are all elements that can be drawn out to improve the group's decision -- what does the confident person know, or why does the frustrated person believe the team is on the wrong track?

It's an intriguing concept, that what makes one individual burn bright (aggression and brains) could increase the odds that a team will fail, while friendliness drives success. Obviously strong leaders are needed and can thrive; Apple and Steve Jobs may be the best case study. Yet powerful leaders and bright people might crank up their empathy a bit and assess whether the dynamic of their supporting groups is friendly enough to allow the best chance for success.

Image: Paco CT