What if Facebook threw an ad party and nobody came?

Facebook took it on the chin this week. The online social network launched a new advertising scheme on November 6 to much applause, because advertisers were champing to get at Facebook's wildly growing user base -- 20 million in April and up to 45 million in October. Last night, Facebook removed a key element of the program that could cost it billions of dollars in missed revenue.

The heart of Facebook's new advertising program was something called "Beacon," a variation of its News Feed. News Feed sends a little post to all of your friends inside the Facebook system every time you update your home page, and has become extremely popular. The sense you get when you log in to Facebook is it becomes The New York Times of your personal life -- you get an entire page of news that Sally bought a dog, Henry ran a 5k, and Johnny found a really cool video. Facebook News Feed makes you and your friends the center of the news universe.

Beacon attempted to give advertisers a line into this News Feed, and tapped data about users from 44 sites partnering with Facebook. The targeting possibilities are wonderful, because users log in names, addresses, genders, ages, and even employers and job titles. The idea was Beacon would fire off a little email blurb to all your friends inside Facebook every time you bought something, so they'd get a "referral" of sorts that you like a certain product. Advertisers loved this idea -- virtual word of mouth! Automated! Among 45 million consumers!

But big trouble came when Facebook launched it as an opt-out program for users, rather than an opt-in. Suddenly, if you bought underwear, every friend and business colleague you know on Facebook gets the news notice. Order a racy movie? Perhaps pharmaceuticals? Your boss, on his Facebook page, just got the update.

More than 50,000 Facebook users filed complaints, so Facebook reversed course late last night and changed Beacon to an opt-in model. What's missing from most news reports is this will strangle Facebook's new advertising model -- because Facebook just went from offering advertisers a universe of 45 million consumers to a universe of, oh, the few people who think telling buddies they just shopped for acne cream is a good idea.

To put this in context, imagine what would happen to the direct mail industry if homeowners had to "opt in" to receiving unwanted junk mail. Hmm. Eddie Bauer might go broke. NYT says Coke is holding off on joining Beacon until it sees how the ad model shakes out. Media planners are going to have to understand exactly what audience we are getting before we tell clients Beacon is a bright idea.

The M&M effect: Why frequency in communications builds loyalty

Here's a thought for Saturday coffee. Researchers recently found that as language evolves, the words least likely to change are the ones used most frequently. We all know language transforms over time; this is why Spanish is slightly different from Italian, and why you may be comfortable using the word "got" while your stodgy parents still claim "have" is proper. But repeat words a lot, and we want to hang on to them. Call it the M&M effect.

Language apparently evolved from one common tongue about 10,000 years ago, and the simplest words -- used most often -- still remain similar across the Indo-European spectrum. The word for "three" in English is "tres" in Spanish and "theen" in Hindi. Lots of our more colorful words describing body parts and functions are very close to ancient Chaucer, too, because we use them all the time (especially when mad, or in the mood).

All of which makes us wonder: if frequency keeps words alive in our minds for centuries, then maybe frequency also leads to loyalty in brand communications. Maybe Talbots with its red postcards and BP with its yellow newspaper highlights have the right idea in running the same ad campaign year after year after year. Perhaps the trend of companies firing CMOs every two years, looking for someone smarter with a new solution, hurts their results since they never have a chance for consistency to develop. Today's Santa Claus, all plump and red, started out as a thin saint, then miniature elf, but became firmly rooted in the public's mind as a human-sized red-suited grandpa thanks to a series of Coca-Cola ads by Haddon Sundblom from 1931 to 1966. With all those frequent impressions, Santa's doing fine. Hate to think what would happen to Christmas if some new agency updated Santa's suit to Web 2.0 orange and blue.

If the world is getting smarter ...

... why is it so hard to keep up? New Zealand professor James Flynn believes human IQs are rising every generation, meaning you're smarter than your parents and your kids will out-think you, and he has data proving that the average IQ around 1900 would equal a 70 on the chart today. Paradoxically, this means the average smarts of three generations ago would equal someone with borderline mental retardation by current standards. How did those idiots build civilization if they were so stupid?

The answer must be that these IQ gains are a new phenomena. We can't possibly follow the trend line back, or Shakespeare would have been drawing on cave walls and Rome never would have been built. (Geez, and those guys in togas created Rome while drinking lead in their wine.) So something recent must be spurring people to score higher on standardized IQ tests.

We think it's the Tufte effect -- the visual display of quantitative information. Books, film, radio, TV, and now the internet are a very recent development, and today's children grow up in a world awash with far more sights and sounds translating data than their ancestors a few generations removed. As we are barraged with information as babes, we learn to draw connections more quickly. Somehow all this hyperstimuli must be shocking our neurons into new activity.

Flynn says other things may be at work -- better diets, smaller families, or perhaps we're only just as smart as our great-grandparents but have become better at thinking abstractly. Ask a kid today how a dog and rabbit are similar, and she'll blurt out "they're both mammals" for a point on the IQ test. Ask a farm boy of 100 years ago, and he might puzzle, thinking realistically dogs are for hunting and rabbits are for eatin'.

Maybe we're not so smart. Tell someone in the U.S. today to tie a knot, bait a trap, skin a deer, dig a well, or navigate by the stars, and the majority would look lost. If the outdoorsmen and -women of the 1700s gave us intelligence tests tied to their standards, we'd fail. If pandemic flu shuts down the world next winter, we'll wish we knew more. Quick -- any of you know how to build a fire?

Those with IQ envy should check out Seed's crib sheets for the new century. You can carry around pocket facts on global warming, hybrid cars, and nuclear physics. (And thanks to More Intelligent Life for a fascinating profile on Flynn.)

The pitch

We've been thinking about business development lately, having won a few and lost a few. People who haven't worked at agencies may not realize the amount of effort that goes into business proposals. On one hand, "selling" seems trivial, like the empty promises of a guy with greasy palms at a used car dealership ... but in business sales, a team studies the client organization, maps out economic levers, makes calls to resources, sketches ideas, and begins developing the entire solution ahead of time ... to try to convince the client that we're worth paying.

It's fascinating work that keeps the mind nimble, euphoric when it succeeds, and disappointing when it fails. It's probably one of the greatest competitive forces in the new economy, as knowledge workers have to compete with each other to get the next contract or project. If you can't really figure out how to deliver value and move the levers that generate results, you lose and the other guy wins.

Maybe all organizations should move to agency models, even inside their walls. Instead of having secure jobs, employees would have to pitch their bosses every day if they wanted to be paid. Employees would drive in on their commutes racking their brains for new solutions, instead of zoning out to the radio. And employers would be inundated with fresh visions every day.

A model of productivity for the new century: Business development.

Why you don't want Microsoft running your billboards

Here's a nice shot of a Microsoft billboard crashing in Leicester Square, London, last Friday. Luckily passersby on the street are invited to notify Microsoft about its software error. If they can find the keyboard. Sure hope Detroit automakers aren't thinking about using Vista on next year's electronic car dashboards.

Apple to launch faster iPhone. Early adopters cry.

Yeah, it's official. Bloomberg reports at 3 a.m. this morning that Apple will sell an updated iPhone this spring, which will download the internet much faster using the 3G network. News came from AT&T's chief Randall Stephenson.

Why on this good green Earth AT&T would say such a thing a few weeks before Christmas, with the holiday shoppers in full swing, is beyond us. Steve Jobs must be screaming now that word is out. Apple is targeting 10 million iPhone sales worldwide in 2008, which would give it 1% of the world's mobile market. This won't help sales.

It's not a done deal yet, though. Apple has serious kinks to work out of the 3G upgrade, including battery life, since the high-speed data transfer can drain juice fast. Jobs himself noted Apple was having difficulty getting the battery life of a 3G iPhone up above 5 hours. The Samsung BlackJack, by comparison, uses the speedy 3G network and got slammed in reviews for a short battery run -- what good is a sexy cell phone if you have to tether it to a wall outlet?

As for us, we returned our first iPhone in July. The guy at the Apple counter looked shocked, even after we explained we didn't want to wait 2 minutes for every email with HTML to download. The current iPhone is a beautiful, glimmering paperweight. Can't wait for it to work with the real internet come Easter.

Update: A reader notes Stephenson did not explicitly say spring, just "next year." We bet spring anyway because now the news is out, iPhone sales will tank, and as the holiday spending frenzy ebbs Apple will need to juice its spring sales. If only we could get 3G for Christmas.

The humiliation of Nike Plus

We just bought the Nike Plus in-the-shoe-chip gizmo. It's brilliant. One piece plugs into your iPod, and the second fits into your running shoe. The shoe chip tracks your stride, the iPod tells you your pace, and when you get back home and plug it all in to your computer, you can track your running progress on screen and invite friends to challenges. The whole thing is a clever loyalty device that entangles Nike runners in switching costs -- why on Earth will we ever buy New Balance sneakers again if Nike has become our running coach? It also has a nice viral element, since you talk to your friends about it, and then set up web-race results, and then they recruit more friends ...

We're barely figuring this all out when a friend challenged us to a 1k run. There it was, in an email, a blatant provocation. She runs marathons. Our mutual scores will be compared on the web site.

We're going to get killed.

Luckily, we have a solution. Since Force = Mass x Acceleration, and we're heavy, and thus have more mass, and our running friend is light, and thus has less mass, obviously WE are expending much more force to accelerate. We'll adjust the race results accordingly and demand that our speed by increased in line with our additional weight ... or maybe just strap the chip to our Golden Retriever.

With all this talk about cigarettes, we bet she's still interested

The advertising history of Camel cigarettes is a perfect case study in how to reach two demographics at once. Yesterday, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco said it will stop cigarette advertising in newspapers and consumer magazines next year, following protests that its Camel No. 9 ads targeted young teenage girls. Seems the ads, which ran in Glamour and Rolling Stone, had images of roses and lace and were a little too girlish.

This isn't the first time Camel has been accused of dipping down into the young demo targets; back in 1991, the AMA found more children in the U.S. recognized the cartoon character of Joe Camel than they did Mickey Mouse. Joe Camel has been controversial on several fronts, not least of which was the phallic nature of his nose and chin ...


Now, we can't say for certain whom Joe Camel was targeting, and Reynolds claimed it was adults 25-49. Wikipedia reports internal docs from tobacco execs show they had a long history of targeted the 14-24 age group, called "tomorrow's cigarette business" -- since most smokers get hooked by age 25. In one lawsuit against Reynolds, an attorney claimed Joe Camel ads boosted teen sales of Camels from $6 million to $476 million from 1988 to 1992.


The No. 9 ads weren't as aggressively youth-focused, but they did feature images of roses and lace ... and ran in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Glamour popular with teenage girls. Once again, critics said the ads really appealed to the younger demo. Reynolds has backed off by saying it won't advertise in consumer print for at least a year. With TV, radio and outdoor also banned, now advertising will focus on direct mail and point of sale.

We find this entire controversy interesting. Smoking is bad for your health, understood. But the product is legal and manufactured and sold while tobacco companies and health advocates argue about how much communication should be visible to the public. Perhaps it is time to end all tobacco advertising completely ... because all the talk about partial shackles on media sure makes for good PR, and we bet today's rebellious youth will notice all the smoke.

Holiday shopping for whacky artists

Some creative dorks we know just launched a brilliant gift guide for your artistic friends who already have everything. Alas, the USB turntable, perfect for converting your old vinyl into something that works on an iPod, is sold out.

And the feel-good campaign award for the holidays goes to ...

... Oxfam America, for a brilliant, funny, charitable gift-giving web site. Google "silly gift" on a whim and the No. 1 pay-per-click ad is Oxfam, taking you to its web site where you can buy a camel for a country in need. Oxfam's site makes charitable giving a blast, repositioning requests for aid as if you were purchasing a hot leather bag or pair of sneakers for a loved one. We love this idea, and how it integrates Google SEM with strong creative and simple web usability.

When you make a donation at Oxfam, your friend receives a gift card showing the "item" you purchased -- say, a camel or sheep or emergency rescue kit or school uniforms. A donation for that amount goes to Oxfam, and eventually to the people in the world who need support. So much cooler than just giving cash.

Note how visible the customer support number is at the top right of the Oxfam web page. Take that, Amazon!

Our holiday gift to you: 1-800-201-7575

That's the secret number for Amazon.com customer service. Write it down. You won't find it on their web site no matter how hard you look. Because Amazon doesn't want you to find it.

Search for "customer service" at Amazon.com and you get books on customer service, not helpful phone numbers. Click on "help," and you get web pages that tantalize you with "contact us by email or phone" ... but click there, and you get a screen saying you need to give Amazon your phone number and THEY will call you. So what if your order at Amazon goes wrong, and you want to talk to a live human being?

Slate tracked down the phone number by going to Amazon's home page, then investor relations, then SEC filings, and then the last quarterly filing. The number has been working since 2003, just hidden very, very well. We're sure that call center consultants from McKinsey, Bain, or BCG informed Amazon it could save $312.56 million (consultants always use precise forecasts) each year in service costs by hiding its phone number. You can't fight the math.

But just in case you need it, it's 1-800-201-7575.

See Dick run. See Dick watch video.

InformationWeek tells us sales of multimedia cell phones will reach 300 million units in 2008, exceeding traditional television sets. By 2011 90% of cell phones will play MP3s and video. This means movies soon will be in your pocket or on your wrist more than on big screens, and advertisers will continue to migrate more dollars to mobile video, search, and web formats. Media buyers should start testing mobile formats now to get ahead of the curve. Even if Ben Hur looks like Toy Story on your wrist.

Why you lust for the Barbecue Grill Tool Set in winter

There's a reason people go nuts before Christmas, and it's called evolution. No sane person with the average U.S. household income of $43,000 would consider blowing 0.23% of it on grilling utensils in early winter, but we furrow our brow ridges and want them anyway. Most of us have phones plugged into walls and miraculous miniature cell phones in our pockets, but we lust for the next generation iPhone because, well, its screen has pretty colors.

Holiday shopping is related to hoarding, and psychologists say hoarding is a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, an evolutionary instinct run amok. Hoarding works great in the wild, because the animals that collect energy and shelter tend to live longer and have healthy offspring. For instance, the Arctic gray jay bird stores more than 100,000 mouthfuls of berries and bugs to make it through winter. Humans buy junk because, almost certainly, in the recent Ice Age our cavepeople ancestors had a choice to store food and pelts before winter or not ... and the ones who hoarded mountains of material were the sole survivors. Our great-great-great-great grandpas and grandmas shopped pelts til they dropped. Peaceful, loving, anticommercial types just froze in the cold.

So this holiday season, don't fight the urge. Go get your Heritage Professional Barbecue Grill Tool Set, your Amazon Kindle, your Down Ice Scraper Mitt. It's good for today's economy. And tomorrow, your future great-great-great-grandchildren are counting on it.

Writers' strike may shift ad dollars to cable

Cable is looking better for media buyers as the writer's strike enters its fourth week. Adweek reports that while networks have enough fresh episodes to last through February sweeps, marketers are getting nervous that prime-time ratings will fall as the source of its content dries up this spring. The thinking goes cable has great original content and series (such as The Sopranos) that can be replayed, pulling audiences off of the broadcast nets.

The broadcast season started off in a bad slump, with ratings down about 12 percent -- even with original episodes on the air -- in the first four weeks. If broadcast networks lose more steam, advertisers will want out, and the media planning chaos could cascade into demands for cash back and severe skepticism about the next 2008-09 season. Check out Adweek's analysis here.

The end of newsprint and rise of newsblogs

Blogs and newspapers are getting close, friends, and they're starting to have children. Many papers, like the NY Times, have launched blogs that provide the fluid immediacy of relaxed online chat. And many blogs, like the Huffington Post, have grown as good as real newspapers, with staffs of professional writers breaking news.

Now, professional journalists are launching web-only newspapers, trying carve out ad dollars in the middle ground. VoiceofSanDiego.org is a three-year old, web-only newspaper that gives the big paper in town a run for its money. VoiceofSanDiego is up to 15,000 unique readers a day, while circulation for The San Diego Union-Tribune has plummeted 8.5% in the past six months alone.

All this debate over names and who is professional or not is besides the point; the real story is many mid-market newspapers will disappear within a decade. High-end outlets such as WSJ and NYT will survive on paper, and small community weeklies should remain alive with ads for plumbers and electricians. But those tier-2 vehicles in the middle, filled with padded AP wire reports, have troubled days ahead. Falling circs lead to falling advertising response rates, and as marketers notice print doesn't make the phone ring, they'll continue to push ad dollars online.

Andrew Donohue, co-chief of the San Diego newsblog, notes online quality may be better, too. Donohue told Mediaweek that 75% to 85% of a traditional newspaper's costs go to infrastructure. As for him, he can spend "every penny on hiring reporters."

Arbitron delays rollout of accurate radio ratings

The Portable People Meter is an interesting device -- it's a little cell-phone sized gadget that allows the ratings group for radio to accurately record the exact station a consumer is tuned into. This meter picks up a signal from the radio station, and replaces diaries as an exact way to track radio ratings.

And guess what -- as the new PPM system is unrolled in markets, radio ratings are tanking. It seems consumers skip around the dial more than previously thought, and while journals didn't always capture the truth (say, someone might write in they listen to Howard Stern for 2 hours in the morning), the PPM device doesn't lie (the consumer may actually change the dial during commercial breaks). Ratings in many markets are down by as much as 30%. Ratings were so startling low, in fact, that Arbitron launched a PR campaign trying to convince media planners that 70 of the new PPM GRPs were as good as 100 of the old ones.

Now, Arbitron is delaying the rollout of the PPM due to controversy over the new ratings results. A lot of networks don't seem to like the truth. Clear Channel, Radio One, Cumulus, and Cox Radio have protested -- because younger demographic groups, in particular minorities, have lower ratings with the new accurate PPM systems. Young audiences are a particularly sweet target for advertisers, and if their ratings fall, ad revenue will dry up.

There are only two ways this can break. Either the truth is young people don't listen to radio as much as they used to, and instead use MP3s and cell phones to communicate (duh), or the electronic monitoring system has flaws in technology or sample sizes (uh-huh). We don't know the truth, but we do predict when it arrives, the truth will set radio ratings free.

Arbitron reports the new PPM should be in eight of the nine delayed markets, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, by September 2008. For now, PPM is only active in Houston and Philadelphia.

Today, bloggers hold their breath. Because tomorrow, it's coming for them.

Word on the blogosphere is we're all supposed to take a break from writing Monday, to honor the Hollywood writers trying to get their fair piece of the American pie. Which brings us to unions. Unions. A politicized word. Depending on whom you talk to, unions are either a collective force for good insuring workers' fair pay, or a fragmentatious force for evil gumming up the machinery of commerce. On one hand, unions have helped end child labor, given us the 40-hour work week and minimum wage, and made middle-class life a noble calling. On the other, unions are hated by business leaders as an unnecessary force of friction, slowing profits, competition, efficiency and growth.

Whatever your point of view, unions are merely collaborations of people seeking rights: We the people, no longer reporting to the other, say, the Union Jack. America was founded by iconoclasts saying yes to us and no to them. If it weren't for unions, we Yanks would be speaking with British accents and driving on the left side of the road. The spirit of unions is the same spirit of country clubs or a military group or a baseball team or the executive suite. Whether you're in or out just depends on (a) your location and (b) your current point of view.

Unions were created in the Middle Ages to protect trade secrets of masons crafting stones for cathedrals. Early in the 20th century, unions grew in power to protect blue-collar workers for fair wages, and then expanded to teachers, nurses, and air traffic controllers. Now, creative types with laptops are using unions to protect themselves from the power of outsourcing. The beloved Internet continues to turn every service into a commodity. Today as the world becomes flat, it is no longer steelworkers who have jobs at risk ... it's scriptwriters and accountants and lawyers and perhaps you at home, with your laptop and proposals and business communications.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was a start. But who will protect today's knowledge workers from artificial intelligence when it emerges in 2028, when Google Autobusiness makes MBAs obsolete? Whatever one's politics, the choice of success as the world becomes completely efficient is twofold: Either band together and fight, or go into the fight alone.

What will Google do with a time machine for world health?

The concept is brilliantly simple: The best way to understand data is to animate it so you can watch trends over time. Go to Gapminder and you can plot variables against each other, and watch bouncing balls shift and wobble as the years roll by.

Gapminder is really Trendalyzer, software developed by Swede Hans Rosling to plot world health trends. Google purchased the software back in March, and we're waiting to hear if Google will do anything with it other than juice its web analytics tools. Rosling was just honored by Discover Magazine as a Notable Scientist of the Year.

The way data jumps off the page is quite startling. The above screen shot, for example, is one part of an animation showing how faster economic growth in China vs. India correlates with increases in carbon emissions. The software also helps assess if there is no connection between two variables; liberals in the United States will be pleased to find that increases in military spending appear to have no impact on U.S. fertility rates.

Until Google releases an update, healthcare policymakers can be tempted with limited data sets here.

Chevy's curious new bait-and-switch campaign

The new Chevy Volt is not available for sale, it doesn't exist yet except in theory, and it may or may not be headed for production by 2010. But Chevy is advertising it in magazines such as The New Yorker reaching the educated, affluent and environmentally enlightened. What gives?

The campaign is very curious. If the target is potential GM investors, the ads fail, since the GM name is missing from the copy and appears only in the legal fine print. If the target is consumers, the ads are tripped up with subtlety, since the curious will want to go to the web for more information. The fine print directs you to chevy.com, where the Volt can't be found, even under upcoming vehicles. You have to type "Volt" into the site's search engine to find it.

The main promo at chevy.com is a button talking about "gas friendly to gas free," which two clicks later takes you to ... a lovely selection of big-ass trucks that can run on an 85% blend of ethanol, with nothing electric in sight. GM actually has a decent web site for the Volt here, but you need Google to find it.

The car is certainly sexy, with an electric-petroleum engine combo that is nothing new, but sheet metal and glass that make grown men drool. Perhaps the goal is to build buzz by teasing us. Chevy, we've seen the future and we want it. Too bad it's not available for sale.

Holiday shopping: Simple shoes, camcorder complex

Beating traffic, we shop the Web. Brilliance over at Abercrombie & Fitch with one of the simplest ecommerce designs we've seen in years. Click on the category, all the options appear as a horizontal series, and you swipe the scroll bar right to see everything. Probably works great for college kids in a hurry before Friday night parties.

Simple provides the coolest Earth-friendly shoes we've seen, made from bamboo and organic cotton. We feel good plopping down $90 for a piece of rubbery canvas.

And a big bad boo goes to the camcorder industry, for the various mind-fuddling formats that make moving from still pictures into video so difficult. Apparently, mini-DV is going out, DVD has some troubles, AVCHD is hi-def DVD that is sweet but doesn't allow editing from many cams to Macs, HDV uses some form of mini-DV tapes, and hard drives are the best devices but should not be confused with HD ... which means hi-def ... but hi-def is available on hard drives. Got it? Camcorder Info at least helps us figure it out.

Maybe the very spirit of innovation that allows technology to progress so rapidly also creates this enormous fragmentation in the marketplace, where every private producer has an incentive to be incompatible with the other products. Simplicity is hard to find in commerce because complexity leads to the next level.

Speaking of which, we're getting eggnog.

Giving thanks at Mediassociates

This year we're thankful to have met some of the most inspirational people ever. Scott, who changed our life forever with one conversation over a beer. Charlie, who is a walking wikipedia of media planning and who we can never, ever beat into the office. Christy, who can actually make print work. Darryl, the interactive genius and punk rock star. Giuli, who inspires us to lose 20 pounds in 2008, run a half marathon, and drop cash on silly Nike web technology. Chris, who can dial into the vast realms of broadcast and pull out incredible national campaigns. Rocky, who chews our shoes while we type. Tom, who taught us what we really do and don't want to do in life. Pierre, who's probably forgotten us, but made us realize the need to be in the right place tomorrow, not today.

Which brings up the nature of teams. We work with family, colleagues, partners, clients, vendors, and outlets. Sometimes there is friction, sometimes misunderstandings. But when it works, there is a mutual value exchange where everyone walks away with something better. We're not sure where the line of demarcation is between us and them, our team and yours. In 2008, we plan to move that line out ever farther.

Web location, location, location

Our phones have been ringing lately with calls from brokers of mortgages, windows, cabinets and siding services -- all asking how to advertise now that the real estate bubble has burst.

We say go online. A new report predicts that real estate web spending will outpace offline media by 2012. Today, about 65% of real estate advertising is spent in newsprint vs. 35% online; that will soon be a 50-50 split. Google, behavioral targeting, videos in banner, and real estate content verticals should all be in your ad mix.

The web is also a treasure trove for home targeting data. WSJ has published free maps of areas of the U.S. where home mortgage defaults will be highest, when $600 billion in U.S. adjustable rate mortgages reset at much higher rates next year. (Note, even the affluent are going to get squeezed in 2008, and this will set off hot spots of home sales churn.) Companies such as Mediassociates can provide customized analysis of ZIP Codes where home values or market churn are highest (and of course tie it to brilliant media plans). You can also find interesting heat maps at Zillow showing areas of hot home values, such as these pretty pictures of Florida.


The average home price in Florida is $212k, but by zooming in, you'll find orange and red highlights indicating homes of higher value ranges. Plot it against your own geo target, and even a small business owner can pinpoint home-service marketing at the ZIP Code level. Isn't it nice to find such sweet tools for free online?

Newspaper circulations, ad spending continue to fall

More bad news for print. Paid circulation for U.S. newspapers is down 2.6% in the past six months, and Q3 advertising spending in newspapers and their web sites plummeted 7.4%. The trend of consumers abandoning newsprint for web is highest in urban markets, where affluent consumers have greater access to high-speed internet connections. This is somewhat horrific news for advertisers, since the sweetest consumers of all -- those with high incomes -- are the first off the Print Ship Titanic.

Papers are responding by muddying the metrics, pushing "readership" instead of circulation numbers to try to claim that the average print title reaches 2 to 9 readers. In simple terms, this is a brilliant marketing move ... where publishers claim, um, our actual paid circulation is down 10%, but theoretically, those papers are now passed to more people. Uh-huh.

Print is still a viable marketing medium, but the real issue is this: If readers are down, then your ad results will be down, too. The only way to sort through the claims of publishers is to hard-wire measurements from the actual ads. Set up unique 800 numbers for each print ad, track net phone calls, and calculate your cost per inquiry per individual ad. Then, and only then, will you know what is working in your print advertising.

Maybe it has something to do with valve caps

Maybe sex in advertising is what the market really wants. First, consider Jerry Judge, former top dog at Lowe, who grouses to WSJ today that ad creatives are way behind the times, because they use too many images that objectify women:

There was the sexual revolution, and I think advertising looked away from the growing importance of women in commerce. It was a strange denial. How can you have about 85% of your creative department be men and about 85% of the purchasing power in the hands of women?

He has a point. We've seen reports that women account for 80% or more of home purchase decisions, yet in meeting after meeting with clients, women rarely enter the discussion.

But second, let's consider Oprah. Walk by the magazine rack at your local Borders and count the faces. The women's titles line up like a Victoria's Secret fashion show: Vogue, Cosmo, Bride, In Touch, Essence, all with females on the cover. There are a lot of women looking at women in the media. We call this the Oprah effect.

So we see four possibilities:

1. Communications leaders tend to be men, and because men tend to be sexist, they use images of women.
2. Women are simply more attractive than men, so viewers of both sexes buy more titles or products from images with women.
3. Women -- 51% of the target consumer population -- prefer to compare themselves to images of other women.
4. Men -- 49% of the target population -- have an adverse inclination to look at other attractive men. (Either because they are homophobic, or have an evolutionary impulse to fight competitive males, or maybe just find facial hair damn ugly.)

Hmm. Pick your poison. We do know that (smart) communicators measure results, either in terms of ad response or magazine cover sales, so over time one would think the selection of top-performing creative would lead to the supply of creative the market demands. Women rise to the top of images because, perhaps, to the fair go the spoils.

We don't want to seem sexist. But then, we don't buy Oprah.

What was Amazon smoking?

Look, we're usually strategic and analytical and all that, but just LOOK at Amazon's piece of junk. Really. What was Jeff Bezos thinking? Amazon's new Kindle book-reader mutation is a great case study in how mobile devices require the integration of software and hardware design, and how if you don't put the two together, you blow it. Consumers are getting sophisticated: We're used to Razrs and Coopers and iPhones and, yes, even Vista. We want our technology in shimmering glass, not gray button-bricks. Can't wait to curl up Sunday morning in bed with this lump of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Please.

Cultural learnings for make glorious database profit

Someone at Forrester posted a bright idea: The new way to map your customers isn't just by lifetime value (future stream of profit), but by combining lifetime value with "social value." Mary Beth Kemp defines social value as the influence your top networked customers have on others ... think of great shoppers who are also great ambassadors, the people who make your brand message go viral.

Rich, compelling, influential souls who shape society. Sort of like ... Borat.

On the brighter side, Rushdie found this

If you're in love with someone beautiful, you're probably delusional. Your sweetie is ugly, and you may be, too.

We know this is a harsh finding, but data bear it out. Researchers dug in to the web site Hot or Not, the silly "judge a photo" site that has grown into a dating service, and found a treasure trove of human mating behavior. Key findings: Almost all users of the service rated people the same on a "hotness" scale of 1 to 10 (proving we all recognize beauty or the beast when asked to judge a picture); yet users who were themselves rated lower on the scale were more likely to want to date others lower in the beauty rankings. In fact, for every 1 point on the 1-10 scale a user dropped in attractiveness, he or she was 25% more likely to accept a date.

Hmm. Ponder the horrible truth. We all really recognize beautiful people. But if we are more, um, normal in appearance, we're more likely to want to date others at that level.

The coolest thing about the data -- and we know you're digging this -- is there is a diminishing curve in terms of how much higher on the beauty scale a dater is willing to stretch. If the photo of the prospective date was somewhat better looking than the user, his or her interest in the date increased ... up to a point. Once the "hotness" level increased too much, user interest fell off, like this:


Wow. Finally a graph showing the high school concept, "she is waaay out of my league."

The scientists conclude that matchmaking is hardwired into our genes. Moderately attractive people go after other moderately attractive people, since the odds of rejection are lower -- and thus finding a mate more likely. As like attracts like, the genes get passed on, ensuring human survival even though we don't all look like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. For marketers and creatives, this may mean it's time to re-evaluate the use of extremely beautiful models in advertising, since too much of a hot thing could turn the mediocre masses off.

(Thanks Odd Numbers.)

Saving the Earth, one candy bar at a time

NPR gives us hope today that there is something we can do to save the planet from carbon-gloomed warming ... eat more chocolate. Joao Tavares, the cocoa farmer above, has figured out how to grow chocolate under the canopy of old rain forests, making money while preserving giant trees that absorb carbon emissions.

With the U.N. issuing its most dire report on the Earth's future Saturday, this week will be a case study in how different media and political outlets respond. The NY Times trumpeted the U.N. report in a headline Saturday. WSJ buries the news on A4 today under the obscure headline, "Setting New Carbon Standards," but with an interesting take on a hard question, who will pay to clean up the planet? WSJ's editorial board is silent on the issue, which we bet means they're cranking away to unleash a real humdinger tomorrow. Greenpeace misses the boat, failing to update its web site or press releases and instead gives us old critiques on the whaling industry and Exxon. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth blog shows the looming disaster of not keeping a blog current, pitching the DVD with an old post from September 15, 2006. Geez, Al, whatever our politics, aren't you missing an opportunity here?

Whatever. Maybe sea levels really won't rise 40 feet, because we're going to eat more chocolate.

Holiday gift idea: Howtoons for kids

Saul Griffith is one of these renaissance MIT types who starts business incubators, makes it big and gets profiled by Fortune. Today he is figuring out new ways to generate power from high-altitude wind.

But we like his Howtoons the best. Howtoons is a comic book / blog that teaches kids ages 8 to 15 how to make cool stuff, like a marshmallow shooter, out of household items. Griffith started this as a little side project, since he was disappointed in the current education for children on how to do anything real with science other than log on to computers. If you want to slip a little engineering to your kids this Christmas, check the book out at Amazon.

Why teens text: Because PCs don't fit in their pockets

Brandflakes gives us a great post that teens are using instant messaging more than email. Follows Slate's analysis of why. We think there's one missing conclusion: Teens use instant messaging more than adults simply because cell phones make it possible.

In other words, don't big-brain the nuances of email communication vs. texting to death. It's not about the channel preference; it's about the user environment. Email requires access to a keyboard and computer, and those are usually found in home offices or work places that teens don't frequent. Texting requires a cell phone, which most teens have. If you didn't have a job with an office and spent most of your day in classrooms, soccer stadiums and malls, you'd be texting more than emailing, too.

We bet email will come back as teens age, and as input devices like the iPhone make emailing from mobile phones easier. This trend of teens using instant messaging is sort of like the trend of teens drinking beer by railroad tracks. It's not the railroad they like; it's just a really convenient way of doing something interactive without getting permission from mom and dad.