Zillow.com predicts next move for behavioral targeting

There are three basic ways to advertise online: Pay-per-click search ads on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft; banner ads on brand-name sites such as iVillage and USA Today; or behavioral targeted ad networks that run your banner on hundreds of sites, but only to users who fit a specific profile. We've found behavioral targeted banner ads outperform regular banner ads with click-through rates 400% or 500% higher.

Still, many clients are uncomfortable with behavioral targeting, and often push media planners to take a "safe route" with a well-known site. We've had clients insist that iVillage.com (a very strong site, yes) is the best place to run banner ads that target women. iVillage may be the No. 1 property for women on the internet, but in a horse-race, behavioral targeted ads that match specific women profiles generate click-throughs above 0.70%, while iVillage click-throughs fall below the industry average of 0.14%. It all points out the trouble with online advertising--chasing specific sites is no longer as powerful as chasing specific consumers.

Zillow.com points to a new way for advertisers to get both the brand-name site and the targeted benefits. Zillow is launching a behavioral targeting service online within its web site--which lists 80 million home values in the U.S. and has become a popular pastime for homeowners checking out their neighborhood property values. Zillow claims it has gathered enough data to now predict when consumers are about to buy, sell, or remodel a home.

Industry analysts say this is a new class of online advertising: vertically targeted content meets behavioral targeted demographics. If it works, you can now pinpoint only the web site users that fit a very narrow profile--say, women in their 30s with young children who are about to move into a home--and put your ad within the vertical content that best matches your brand.

Essence magazine's 6.8 million invisible readers

Are The New York Times, USA Today, and Essence magazine making up fictional readers? They say it's not fiction, but simply "pass-along" readership. Critics charge publications are playing with math to try to hide the truth: that many readers are moving online, and as circulations for print fall, pubs will have difficulty defending their ad rates.

Essence magazine is a strong publication and, according to MRI, one of the most popular women's magazines in the country across ethnicities. A media buy in Essence puts your ad in 1.05 million magazine copies. Which is why we're disappointed that Essence needs to exaggerate its readership.

The Essence media kit claims that 8 million people read each issue -- OK, actually 7.845 million -- which is a fantastic concept since Essence only publishes 1.05 million copies. In other words, Essence, to convince advertisers that their money is going further, claims each print issue is read by 7.5 people. To put this in perspective, let's assume Essence is right. There are 36.6 million African-Americans in the United States. With 8 million readers per issue and 3.2 average people per African-American home, this means that Essence magazine is reaching almost every black adult woman in the United States every month. Nice readership!

Essence is not the only publication to make outrageous claims about pass-along readership. USA Today throws around a total readership number of 5 million, with a circulation of just over 2.2 million (USA Today notes in its fine print that some of the 5 million readers are online. The numbers are hard to parse; USA Today claims 10.6 million unique consumers visit its web site each month, which might break down to 1.4 million readers online per day.)

Most disappointing, even the stalwart, truth-laden New York Times plays with the numbers. NYT has a daily paid circulation of 1.08 million, but claims its readers magically multiply to 4.53 million in total, for a breathtaking pass-along rate of 4.2 readers per copy. Here's an NYT exec defending such claims during an analyst call in March 2005:

"I think advertisers are becoming better informed in regard to what the circulation analysis means," Times Chief Executive Janet L. Robinson said. She said it's important to fully explain to advertisers what circulation numbers mean. "But it's also very important for us to convert to a readership model as opposed to pure circulation numbers, which we certainly are in the process of doing."

If all of this smells like fetid equine manure, well, who are we to judge? Sure, newspaper and magazine circulations are off a cliff, but that doesn't mean that their publishers would stoop to defending impressions by making up a fictional "readership" count, would it? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. So we propose a fair, mathematically sound solution. Take any print publication's actual circulation. Multiply it by 5, to factor in all the fictional people who will pass along each copy to their friends. And then divide by 5, to factor out all the people who skip the page where your ad runs.

Netflix, our hero

We recently resubscribed to Netflix and one movie we ordered didn't come in the mail. Arg. We put off calling, dreading what we assumed would be a long, slow slog with customer service. On a whim, we hit the Netflix web site seeing if we could reorder it. We clicked on (1) help, (2) DVDs, (3) DVD didn't come in the mail. Hit the button. Done!

With three simple clicks, Netflix is mailing us a new copy of the DVD, no questions asked. We're sure eventually Netflix would shut down a scammer trying to get free DVDs, but as new customers, we LOVE this service. Great example of intuitive web usability, and of making it easy for customers to climb aboard the Netflix loyalty wagon.

Rockport and Adidas get on the ball

How hip are Rockport shoes on a scale of 1 to 10? Dunno? That's the problem faced by this lesser-known brand. So in June, Rockport launched a brilliant re-branding campaign by Hill Holliday of Boston, which cleverly opens new playing fields both geographically and demographically. It all makes financial sense, since Adidas bought Reebok in 2006, Reebok owned Rockport ... but there is more going on.

Geographically, it's a stroke of genius. Rockport is not well known outside the U.S., and Adidas pretty much owns Europe. Rockport had international sales of only 36% in 2006, but with this Adidas partnership, it now targets 50% by 2008. Adidas will open doors abroad.

Demographically, it's also brilliant -- because there are 79 million Millennial consumers in the U.S. ages 9 to 28 who are growing up fast, and heading for a more-formal workplace. This group has been focused on sneakers and jeans and so may not know Rockports didn't used to be cool. This group can be reached easily, since Millennials are said to consume about 20 hours of media a day in only 7 clock hours.

And Millennials love soccer. The U.S. has been slow to adopt the sport, which started on our soil when Rutgers whipped Princeton in a football game in 1869. Today, we can't even call it by its proper name. But MLS launched in 1996, today the U.S. has 12 major associations, and suburban moms and dads are now consumed by soccer. The brand of choice on those fields: Adidas.

Rockport, in essence, took Michael Porter's five competitive forces of buyers, sellers, competitors, substitutions, and entrants, and focused on the market entrant. But instead of looking for a company entrant entering the field, it found a new demo entrant: The young kids who will soon change cleats for something suitable at their first job.

Pssst: Your PR is showing

Public relations guru Jeremy Pepper worries in a recent post that PR is losing out to advertising over who really influences social media. As advertising gurus, we think the reverse is true. Public relations rules online, because only PR is truly relevant. We love online advertising when it works ... but we see rising cries of desperation from many web campaigns. As evidence, check out the godawful home page to MySpace.com to see how their marketing folks have turned it into a screaming billboard.

You can't "game" relevance. This is why SEO is so hard -- web site owners try to link farm and content stuff to rise in Google's organic rankings, but without true relevance, they'll never make it big.

We've seen four basic public relations approaches required for online marketing:

- create news (Nick Haley's Apple ad)
- break news (Huffington Post, a blog-turned-real media outlet)
- share news (Digg.com's user rankings)
- comment brilliantly on news (Seth Godin's blog)

In simple terms, to pull users to your content, make it relevant. Give away something of value to get the attention you want. Google pay-per-click campaigns really are a perfect form of sharing news that is relevant to users (who are typing in search terms for the product). To pull people to your other web content, you need to create the same near-perfect connection.

Public relations is sometimes seen as a dark, Machiavellian attempt to spin fiction to the masses. In reality, PR works best when it combines relevant truths with a story about a product or service that recipients may find useful. The internet is a perfect sorting mechanism to make relevance and truth rise to the top (which is why Wikipedia works so well). Media planning makes advertising work in the same way -- a good media plan puts the right ad in front of the right consumers, where the consumer will find it relevant.

A question for marketers: Have your media planners, ad creatives, web designers and public relations advisors sat down at the same table recently? If they aren't all talking, you may miss the social media boat.

Someone keep this Apple guy away from media planning

For our next stop in the online advertising revolution, let's visit Nick Haley, an 18-year-old Brit who whipped up an Apple commercial in a day last month. NYT says Haley posted his spot to YouTube, which set off a quick information cascade -- YouTube users Dugg it, Apple marketing employees saw it, they told their ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day to get the English lad on the phone ... and soon the big ad pros, with a bit of polish, had the spot running this past weekend on Desperate Housewives.

This user-generated stuff is getting better and better. Chiat, are you nervous?

Blame it on NASDAQ. U.S. kids are running from IT.

Be careful what business news you share with teenagers -- they have long memories.

Today new college freshmen are abandoning IT and computer science studies, and switching to economics. The number of frosh chasing economics degrees is up 40% in the 2003-04 period from five years earlier, while new computer science majors are down 50%. The trend is so significant that big players like Microsoft are seriously worried, and launching new training programs to jazz up computer classes.

We can't blame the popularity of Freakonomics for this (the book was published in 2005, after the trend began). Academic types believe three things led to the youth shift: the aftermath of the 2000-2001 dot-com bubble burst, in which teenagers saw parents' savings wiped out in the NASDAQ implosion, shown above; the much-talked-about outsourcing of computer jobs from the U.S. to other nations, which further scares youth about future job prospects; and the simple fact that many CS courses are SO BORING in the first year.

The dearth of American computer talent will be filled by experts from abroad. The magazine The American reports that in April, the first day H-1B visas were allowed for U.S. firms to hire skilled foreigners, the government received 150,000 visas for 65,000 openings. The good news for today's college kids: If they do study computer science, they'll be among the few U.S. citizens qualifying for tomorrow's wide-open technology job market.

Tip of the hat to Keira Knightley

True story: Last night a woman we know ripped this ad out of Oprah magazine, saying she found it offensive. Geez. One wonders what the marketers of Chanel parfum were thinking by dressing Keira Knightley of Pirates Caribbean fame in only a top hat and lap drape. Men so inclined will certainly notice Keira more than the perfume. Women so inclined will turn the page, thinking, oh, how obvious. How does sex sell in this situation?

Chanel announced back in April 2006 that Ms. Knightley would succeed Kate Moss as the new face of its Coco Mademoiselle fragrance. Coco Mademoiselle. Pop quiz, guys looking at the above photo. What was that product name again?

Book of the year: Clichéonomics

Wired's big-idea book generator is brilliant. The concept here is that only a few of the thousands of business books published each year break out, so why not follow the formula of best sellers?

1. Create a title-as-theory. Should sound like a bad B movie. Ours will be "The Marketing Zombie from Payback Lagoon."

2. Give it a subtitle, to explain what you really mean. Ours: "How to Unlock the Transformational Power of the CMO Before She Gets Fired." This doesn't have to make sense, but it will have more terms to sound even more important. Also helps if it makes executives squirm in their airplane seats.

3. Write an even more detailed premise to pitch the book, using words such as "dynamic," "collective," "profound," and "previously hidden." Wired recommends terms such as "tribes" and "the power of unconscious thought." We're thinking "The Secret Signals CEOs Send to Marketing Execs Before Calling in HR." Nice.

You're done. Send the memo to a publisher, get contract, punch up Word, and jump on stage next to Malcolm Gladwell. You've just written the next Big Idea Book. Thanks, Wired.

The great Digg experiment on blog rankings

OK, so we tried it. For a few days last week, we wrote witty and intelligent posts about media planning on our blog, then threw the stories on digg.com. The chart above shows you our blog's web traffic -- which quadrupled on a few days, especially if the story we posted had any reference to Apple. This points out two things: (a) you can increase blog readership by jumping aboard the exponential conduit of Digg, and (b) does traffic count anyway if you have to go fishing for it?

Want your viral marketing to succeed? Try prayer.

Seth Godin has said that the difference between word of mouth and viral marketing is that words passed from friend to friend diminish, while viral communications go exponential. This is why if you tell two friends about a great restaurant, they may only tell one friend, and the message ends up dying ... but if you bought your kid a Razor Scooter in 2000, soon everyone in the world had one.

Of course, marketers all want to become the next big viral thing so they can generate demand without spending big on advertising. Which poses the question ... is there a happy medium? Can we create messages that become self-sustaining, that don't die out, but continue to slowly grow? Is it possible to achieve marketing perpetual motion?

The answer may lie in religion. Of all the messages from human communication, spirituality is the most sustaining. Put aside your personal beliefs (or disbeliefs) for a second and consider the facts. Of the 6.75 billion people in the world, 87.3% of them consider themselves religious. Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are the three largest, encompassing just over 4 billion people. These messages have been around for centuries, without a lot of marketing, and get passed along primarily by word of mouth. Why? Because the content of the message is very powerful (if you believe, it could save your life), and so this strong idea overcomes the innate friction in word of mouth dynamics.

The religions with the heaviest marketing or public relations tend to grow fastest. Islam membership is increasing in the world today, perhaps due to the PR focus brought to it in the Middle East by the controversial Western presence there. In the U.S., the fastest growing religion is Mormonism, which does heavy marketing including a "sales force" of young missionaries knocking door to door.


What makes religion so growable? Break down its components and you see:

- a clear value proposition (we'll save you)
- a community of membership (join others)
- some exclusivity (you're a member but others are not)
- frequent touch points to reinforce the message (church every week)
- reinforcement of the message (small pieces of a broader message are given a bit at a time)
- connection to the consumer's own life (for example, in Christianity, the Sundays often go through an annual calendar cycle tied closely to the seasons, with Christmas, Easter, etc.)
- co-opting of the local culture (Christianity did this with many holidays, including the December date of Christmas, vs. the consensus of many scholars that Christ would have been born in the spring while the "shepherds were out tending their flocks")
- switching costs (if you leave, the community will disapprove of you)
- some skin in the game (you often have to give up something, such as tithing or time, to participate)
- a migration of the message from an initial early-adopter radicalism to a more mainstream conservatism (for evidence of a religion's transition, just look at the altar in front of your church, and ask yourself -- what kind of sacrifice was that flat platform originally for?)
- and, perhaps most important, a focus on the consumer's lifecycle (by engaging them early in their lives and moving them up into loyalty status, through a series of escalating responsibilities).

If you boil it all down, religion offers a powerful message, a powerful benefit, a close-knit club, switching costs, and ties to your broader lifestyle. It has one basic objective: To create a community of loyalists, who work to attract other loyalists. The closest analogy we see in marketing today are the new social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces, Flickr and Orkut, where small close-knit communities mirror the consumer's own personal world.

We're not saying any religion is right or wrong. We just suggest that, as a communications vehicle, religion is the most brilliant case study for marketers trying to make their message stick. It has to be, because evolutionarily only the strongest messages can survive for centuries in a world of consumer choice.

Correlation does not equal causation. Smokers rejoice.

If you dig data, you could still choke on the 25-pound Historical Statistics of the United States, available for only $940.50 at Amazon.com. P. J. O'Rourke dissects it in The Atlantic pointing out the problem with data. Americans are eating less red meat and more vegetables, but still getting fatter. Divorces are down, but suicides are up. And -- get this -- from 1973 to 1994, smoking rates fell from 4,148 cigarettes per capita to 2,493, yet lung and bronchial cancer diagnoses are up 34%.

The message: Stopping smoking is dangerous, because without cigarettes you may get cancer.

The trouble with data like this is it is too easy to jump to conclusions, and to assume a change in A must drive a resulting change in B. Marketers run into this all the time measuring campaign results. Three common mistakes in advertising measurement are (a) setting metrics up too broadly so you cannot accurately track individual responses to individual ads, (b) neglecting to consider the impact of competitors on your results, or (c) failing to evaluate how shifts in ad channels affect each other. We've seen many clients with declines in print response AND increases in internet response who cannot connect these dots. In other cases, we've seen advertising results fall for no apparent reason -- until we begin tracking the major competitor moves whose gravity is causing our client's prospects to swing out of orbit.

Measurement is hazardous, because the wrong assumptions can lead to the wrong decision. Cause and effect, or effects with no cause? Until we figure it out, it's probably best to stop smoking.

Browsers get hungry, start snacking on software

The UK magazine Web Designer, a brilliant pub about web trends that perversely gives almost no content away on its web site, explains in Issue 136 how to move a web site outside a browser window -- to take over the entire user's computer screen. You've seen this at work at YouTube, if you hit "full screen mode" on the video.

This is much more than a design gimmick. If web sites can now go full-screen, and run programs, and store your data, then what is the point of desktop software? As this trend continues, companies that rely on PC-bound software (Microsoft) or PCs with complex innards (Dell, HP) are going to get hammered. All users will need is a screen, and everything else they want will be found online.

The impact on online advertising could be huge, since as content, utility, and storage move out of our homes or offices into the great wide web, it will become easier and cheaper for consumers to have multiple entry points into the internet. The screen in your car, the screen on your iPhone, the screen tablet in your briefcase, and the screen at the hotel lobby check in will all tie in to your online data systems. More points of entry, at a lower user cost, will create more time than ever before online. Facebook, for example, is really a new operating system that is housed online. You can run programs, communicate, store contacts, keep photos and files, all online -- all you need is a screen to get in. Back in 1995, Facebook itself would have made a high-end computer.

All this, in turn, will continue the cannibalization of other media as consumers shift their routines to internet usage, vs. broadcast receptivity. To see full-screen web in action, check out papervision3d, which can turn your entire screen into a fish tank, or Sequence Post, a UK site showcasing high-end video work. More is coming.

The viral messaging of a movie star

Friday night, Amtrak back from D.C., we're in the café car, and this bald guy in a blue jacket in front of us orders a drink. There's something about the way he orders that gets attention. He makes a joke about a glass with ice, his smile twists into a dimple, and a blonde woman next to him starts blushing furiously. We think -- hey, that's Stanley Tucci.

For those who know, Tucci is an actor with serious chops, going the distance with Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Peter Jackson. But for marketers, the interesting thing about the exchange was what happened later. Tucci on the train created a viral marketing case study.

We go back to our seat, and for about 60 minutes no one says anything. And then, strangers start chatting.

Did you hear there's a movie star on the train?
I can't remember that guy's name, but I love him.
Wasn't he in that film Devil Wears Prada?
I think he's filming in Philadelphia with Peter Jackson.

Somehow, the ideavirus of Stanley Tucci slowly spread across the train, until it reached a subtle tipping point and everyone knew. Stanley got off in Stamford, and people kept chatting. One woman who shook his hand kept recounting the story. And then the news slowly died off ... like the exponential and then diminishing curve of a viral infection.

Sure hope that guy wasn't carrying anything serious.

The lights were on, but no one was home

Jogged around the White House today in D.C., got a great view of the fence. Occurs to us there is a missed opportunity here for the President and the incumbent Republicans to market to the mass of citizens, giddily ogling the famed white building. The view isn't so hot, especially on a rainy day. Imagine if they had some fun kiosks, talking about everything the President has done for the country, issues dear to the Republicans' hearts. Thousands of missed impressions. Instead, we see a big, black, iron gate.

Why serious pubs such as Harper's and NYT are getting undressed

Sure, sexual imagery in media has been around for a very long time. Way back in August 1997, the dry-as-dust magazine Harper's published a cover showing an affluent blonde woman losing her top at a cocktail party, breasts almost exposed. Lewis Lapham may be boring, but we're sure the editor knew this cover art would boost circulation. All kidding aside, it's no coincidence Harper's started writing about sex and drugs at the dawn of the internet.

But now, more recently, we note an almost desperate increase in sexual volume in staid, traditional publications. Slate.com recently published a cover story dedicated to the, ahem, female derrière. If our mother had caught us reading such a thing when we were 13, we'd still be grounded. The New York Times leads today with a cover story about how the latest women's fashion exposes underthings. The online NY Times slide show goes on to cover Madonna back in her translucent bra phase. Wired magazine leads this month with cartoon Manga of a pink-headed schoolgirl looking like this:


We're not prudes, but we can do the math. The New York Times now features 44 bloggers on its blog index, compared to only 43 news content categories on its home page. Some of these are brilliant blogs, such as Freakonomics, but others are merely repackaged op-ed pieces. We don't see this as a fad or trend. We think the democratization of media has moved off the printing press and is now empowered by individual bloggers with laptops trying to build their own mini-media empires. Some of the new contributors, such as the Huffington Post, will take off and become media vehicles in their own right. Others, such as Seth's blog or the designer Darryl Ohrt, will find niche audiences that are smaller in numbers, but highly attuned.

Media is moving from a many-to-one to a one-to-many model. This trend will continue, as the input devices get smaller and more mobile, linked into the mass of Internet audiences via Apple iGlass-thingadohickies. The mainstream press is struggling as its audience abandons it for the smaller, more creative, more cutting-edge authors on the blogosphere. Sure, some big news players will survive. But as they try to do so, they'll leave us with erogenous NY Times features such as NYT's profile of Madonna looking like this ...

Help. I'm rising and I can't get out.

What the failing interface is up with JW Marriott's new elevators? Holy confusion, ad man. Show up in Washington D.C. after a long evening of travel, make it past security and the front desk, who will question your government contractor status, and yes, you are confronted with The Miconic 10 Elevator Management System. In simple terms, this elevator has buttons on the outside -- in the lobby -- for your floor, and no buttons inside where you'd expect them.

We're sure mathematically this wondrous machine whisks people up to the 10th floor more quickly, but the user experience is totally counterintuitive. You have to punch in your floor number while standing outside the elevator doors in the lobby, look up, see which elevator gets "assigned" to you, and then walk inside the steel vault where no buttons will allow you to escape until you get to the designated floor. We recall an article in The New Yorker or WSJ somewhere explaining the math behind this, and how it reduces the average wait-and-travel time for optimal human transportation efficiency.

But damn. We felt like cattle in the chute, looking around bovinely, trying to figure out what all the bright lights meant. Is that my elevator over there? No there! Hey I'm in -- can I get out? And why are you putting a prod in the back of my skull?

Our point, marketers, is that in the constant push and pull, yin and yang, love-hate of efficiency vs. design, sometimes numbers don't win. Sometimes -- gasp -- design rules the day. And the Miconic 10 is a horrible design. In the consumer touchpoint of getting in a steel box at the end of the day at a hotel in a strange city, we just want to be in control.

We're especially curious about the ROI of such a system. If Marriott is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovating perfectly good elevators, what is the return? Perhaps business travelers will say, man, I got to my floor 3 seconds faster. I'm never staying at Westin again.

6 steps to save 31% of your advertising budget

If you spend $1 million on advertising each year, please don't throw $310,000 out the window. Here's a case study to show you how to stop wasting media dollars. Follow this path, your boss will think you're a genius, and you will get more customers. It works for local, regional, and national advertising campaigns.

The map above shows a 25-minute drive-time zone around a retail location in Burbank, California. This is a basic estimate of how far people will drive, in a major urban setting, to get to a store. Now, let's say this retailer was considering a promotion on cable TV. Here's how the cable zones would overlay that driving footprint:


You can visually see the waste. Anything outside the yellow line is advertising spent on customers who won't drive near your store. But how do you actually remove the waste? Take 6 simple steps.

1. List the ZIP Codes within each cable area, and the corresponding number of households
2. List the ZIP Codes only within the drive zone, and the households
3. Match the ZIPs
4. Create a business rule for how much waste you will tolerate -- for example, any cable zone with fewer than 50% of households in the drive zone gets removed
5. Kill the cable zones in your media plan that fall below this threshold
6. Count up the before and after households, and you'll see the savings.

Without this analysis, here is what a cable buy in the Burbank, Calif. area would look like. Mediassociates found that an untargeted buy from an inept media planner would spray 6.3 million households with cable ads, yet only 3.8 million of these homes would be in the driving range of the store -- for 38.92% waste:

With a drive-time analysis, the cable buy would look like this: A targeted flight reaching 3.2 million households, of which 3.0 million are in driving range, for only 7.66% media waste. Cable zones highlighted in gray were removed from the media plan.

The lesson learned: If you have regional territories or retail locations, plot your media carefully. Doing so can save you 31% or more of your advertising budget. Without this media planning analysis, you might as well take one-third of your ad dollars and throw them in the trash.

Make the logo newer

Here's a brilliant discussion of good and bad logo redesigns. Designers will get it, and non-designers will appreciate the logical explanations of how to recast a brand image.

Hint: If you are rebranding by committee, fire the committee. Branding takes leadership. Leadership takes a leader.

Why 7% of Facebook is worth more than 53% of MySpace

No, we're not talking about Microsoft's $240 million deal. Instead, we're comparing the portion of visible real estate on Facebook vs. MySpace pages dedicated to advertising. Just look at the MySpace image above. 53% of the page shocks and awes you with advertising, numbing the senses with Will Smith doing something futuristic before a broken bridge. By comparison, ads on Facebook take up only 7% of the screen.

You don't need to be a designer to see the difference. The Facebook format is superior, standing out with a single, solid impression, a visual equivalent of a polite hello. The MySpace ad shows up at the doorway screaming bloody murder. Worse, no one at MySpace seems to be considering the adverse impact of this quasi-porn layout -- which surely scares off a sizable professional networking audience.

Microsoft, we're happy you married Facebook. Really. Good luck consummating the new ad strategy. Just, please, since Facebook is a dear friend to us ... be gentle.

Put down your blog, and become banker to the world

Rather than blow $100 on fine dining this weekend, you might aspire instead to visit MicroPlace.com, the new micro-financing site that launched today to lend your pocket cash to the working poor. MicroPlace is attempting to raise $1 billion in tiny business loans for millions of farmers, weavers, craftsmen and other business people around the world struggling to make ends meet. You can get in the game with $100, make subsequent loans for $50, and hope for a 1% to 4% return. MicroPlace will match your loan to a qualified applicant in need, and the transaction is secured via PayPal (and all backed by the giant eBay).

It continues the fascinating trend of human social behavior fragmenting into one-to-many connections. Google lets individuals advertise nationally. Blogger lets individuals broadcast news internationally. Facebook lets individuals build their own global community. Now, individuals can give loans to Nicaragua and Ghana.

There's no guarantee you'll get anything back from MicroPlace, even your principal, since your return depends on someone in the world deciding to pay you back. But you'll feel good about it.

How do you predict Apple computer designs? Look at OS X.

If you want to know what Apple products will look like two years from now, just check out the 3-D glass interface of the new OS X. Apple has a history of telegraphing changes in hardware design by first updating the look and feel of its operating system.

Consider history. Back in March 2001, Apple launched OS X v10.0 Cheetah with the new Aqua vibe and white borders around all the screen windows. Macs in following years were encased in white plastic -- so on-screen image and off-screen hardware matched perfectly. Then, in August 2003, Apple launched the OS X Jaguar with a brushed metal look. We still remember how the new OS X looked a bit bizarre, with an aluminum on-screen presence above the white plastic of our Mac laptop. The Apple web site at the time still pushed white plastic hardware ...


... but soon enough, first Apple laptops and then desktops moved to brushed aluminum.

So where is Apple going with its new hardware design? Looking at the new OS X Leopard we see lots of 3D reflections, and the new Dock looks like glass. And for the first time we see window interfaces in OS X with pure black. Since Steve Jobs plans his technology conquests years in advance, we predict glass is the new wave of Apple machines -- and glass works best for touchscreen devices. Perhaps in two years the iMac will shrink to a nice paper-sized glass pad, with a black border, thin metal back, no keypad and flash memory instead of a hard drive, that acts as keyboard, video screen, computer, projector and mobile device in one. Lower-end Mac computers will still be plastic, but will shift to cooler black with little highlights of glass. We see it coming, because OS X never lies.

For some, radio still holds its attractions

Media planners frustrated with radio's failing ratings, take heart. The estimable Erwin Ephron ran tests to find that radio, when combined with TV, can achieve 30% higher impression levels for the same budget dollar. Ephron crunched the math to back the old argument that two broadcast media work better in unison than one. Still, he misses a key point--MRI research shows that consumers exposed to commercial radio often are not fully attentive. 30% up in reach, 30% down in attention, and the media plan still has static.

Apple's iChat hidden gem

As of this post there are only 3 days 0 hours 16 minutes and 51 seconds left til Apple launches a tweaked version of its operating system, OS X Leopard, to the public. Most of this is just rearrangement of icons on the Dock, but we like one little nugget that may change how people work.

The new iChat includes a feature where you can post a video image of yourself on a computer screen next to any other document, say, a PowerPoint presentation. Now, you can truly teleconference with complete sensory realism: Your face, your voice, and your Excel chart showing rapid market growth. It's very cool that this is built in, and for telecommuters or business consultants on the road, Apple just made life easier.

Outdoor industry's fling with GPS is officially over

Billboards may be the second-hottest advertising format in the U.S., but measuring them isn't getting easier. Marketers had hoped that Nielsen's GPS tracking system, in which consumers in LA and Chicago had their exact movements tracked via a small device and compared to billboard coordinates, would be expanded by the Traffic Audit Bureau.

No dice. TAB, which audits traffic counts for the outdoor industry, is walking away from GPS measurement citing the high cost. Instead, next year TAB will launch a new estimate of viewers for outdoor based on the eye movements of test subjects who, um, watch video simulation of billboards rolling by the highway. Media buyers may get slightly better data than the old DEC (daily effective circulation); DEC measured all the cars passing by, where the new Eyes On system will estimate the portion of people who actually see the boards. The fact that DEC will now be discounted in acknowledgment that many drivers ignore boards is a good thing--now, media planners can at least estimate impressions without padding.

Nielsen's GPS tests had some intriguing findings. About 75% of consumers who drive under a highway overpass will notice a 200-square-foot board. Only 30% of consumers passing a bus stand will notice the image. As for the rest of outdoor, now, we may never really know.

At last, the truth about sex in advertising

Here's a social site that brings a little honesty to human relationships. SeekingMillionaire.com invites really wealthy men or really attractive women to post their hyper-hot profiles and connect in a gold-diggers' paradise. It all comes with caveats: You can be considered "rich" if you make more than $100k per year, and we wonder if all the women really look like these photos, um, of 5' 9" models with gray eyes from Romania. To be fair, rich women can also meet young male guys, but we didn't see many photos of that dynamic in action.

If you want even more honesty, visit their sister site, SeekingArrangement.com, in which "sugar babies" list their expected monthly compensation. Whatever one's morals, you have to admire this online market's efficiency.

Will Facebook, with its new SocialAds, jump off its own URL?

Advertising Age reports today that Facebook has been mailing carved Lucite bricks to ad bigwigs in NYC, something about a Nov. 6 press conference on "a new way to do advertising online." Sweet. Facebook is finally stepping up to monetize its base.

This is going to be interesting, because current ad formats on Facebook pretty much blow. Banner ads require you going through Microsoft, and good luck getting a call back. Widget-based advertising is a little silly. And Facebook's two intriguing options, news feeds to users' home pages and sponsorship pages that act as microsites, have questionable results. A fully loaded microsite will set you back about $50,000 per month, all for the opportunity to hope your brand advocates seek you out inside Facebook to chat about new Victoria's Secret lingerie.

The hard truth is consumers have different modalities, and if they're being social, they may not want to be interrupted. Internet advertising works best when consumers are searching, not socializing. This is why Facebook click-through rates are low, at about 0.04% for Facebook banners vs. the 0.14% average for U.S. banners vs. upwards of 0.70% for behavioral targeting banners on skilled ad networks such as Tremor Media. Advertising to a Facebook user is a bit like interrupting old college friends immersed in gossip at the end of a bar. When on Google, consumers are chucking spears. When on Facebook, they're drinking beers.

Facebook must be aware of what doesn't work. So on Nov. 6, stay tuned. We think there are two possibilities: Either (a) an enhanced version of News Feed on users' home pages, in which trusted advertisers are invited to give you news, or (b) Facebook gets really ballsy and moves the ad platform off its domain into other sites. Imagine -- what if Facebook became a widget itself that could roll around on other web sites, and you could check in to your Facebook window from Digg.com, Slate or WSJ online? And what if that rolling Facebook window was sponsored by an advertiser? Maybe Facebook will succeed best by untethering it from itself.

Whatever. Facebook has filed a trademark for the term SocialAds, so we know the name. Now, we just hope the new format includes Victoria.

Why it feels so right for Walt to be so wrong

Years ago we read a Request For Quote from a mobile phone company desperately seeking advice on how to stop its customer churn. It faced a horrific, potentially bankrupting problem -- the business was losing nearly 25 percent of its customers every year.

Which is why we find Walt Mossberg's polemic against cell phone carriers so interesting. Today WSJ devoted an entire special section to its technology columnist's rant against the many sins of big wireless cos. Geez, Walt. You even called them a Soviet Ministry.

Sure, there's a lot to dislike: Onerous contracts, inflated phone prices, artificial rebates, locked technology, incompatible networks, overage charges, rollover minutes that vaporize, spotty coverage, missing SIM cards, missing software, crappy web interfaces, incomprehensible bills, and inconsistent subscription pricing. In fact, you probably pay a very different rate for your monthly service than other users on your network. Don't believe us? Get your bill, call your carrier, explain you want to sign up as a new customer -- and hold your breath at the price differential.

Alas, there is a reason for all this mess, and it's you, dear customer. You see, customers are fickle, and a sizable portion of the population skips around from utility to utility every year. Admit it. A sexy new cell phone comes strutting by, and you're out the door. If this were a human relationship, you'd be a floozy.

Companies that provide commodity services such as cell phones -- remember, it's just a phone call, after all -- have to compete with other companies that offer exactly the same service. And they know you're cheap. Now, put yourself in their shoes. About 20 percent of their customers defect every year. They have to replace them. So big wireless cos do two simple things: Install switching costs to keep old customers from leaving, and offer discounts and incentives to get new customers to sign up.

Rollover minutes? They are a positive switching cost -- if you leave, you give up something of apparent value, the 2,000 "free minutes" you've accumulated. Termination fee? Now that's a negative switching cost. If you leave, that will be $299 please. Get it?

We're sorry to inform you, Walt, and you, U.S. consumer -- but everything you hate about cell phone companies comes from your own behavior. In a commodity marketplace where consumers constantly shop around, the big companies will create barriers to try to wall them in. They have to, to recover the billions in investment they make in cell phone towers and untested technologies. If you took out loans to build cell phone towers, you'd be worried, too. Years ago, priests invented marriage contracts to keep us all in the pen. Now, we have cell phone contracts. If we humans all weren't so disloyal, maybe our communications would work just a little bit better.

Your cell phone don't wanna be lonely no more

Rob Thomas plays front man in the Wall Street Journal today, as the new American Telephone