Kajeet: We know where you are

Back in 2005 IT blogger Joe Francica suggested that cell phones, web and GPS would soon converge to turn society into one always-on, always-available journalistic entity ... where no one could escape the all-seeing eye of your brother:

In the very near future, everyone with a cell phone will be carrying their very own publishing tool. Each phone will be equipped with some location determining equipment. And most likely each phone will be able to capture imagery. Link the two together and you have a single photojournalist.

So let history note the press release issued today by Kajeet. This cell phone service for tykes and teens announced a "GPS Phone Locator" to help parents keep track of their offspring -- you know, watching a dot on a map move as sonny heads from school to soccer and, hey, wait, that candy store is off limits!

This tech wizardry isn't new -- phone tracking and kid monitoring have been around for years, and the cell in your pocket can be located by triangulating the signal off neighboring cell towers -- but now it's so cheap. Less than 10 bucks a month to have your child tracked by a big eye in the sky.

Soon your wallet and sneakers and dogs and bank receipts will have tiny GPS chips helping you never forget the location of anything. Alas, this means that soon everyone will always know where to find you.

Vivaty: Just when you thought social media had peaked

Yeah, Facebook fatigue and MySpace malaise are setting in, but Vivaty may breathe fresh life into social media hubs yet. NYT reports Vivaty is bringing those artificial three-dimensional landscapes that your 20-year-old friends get lost in to the Facebooks of the world. The development is interesting because, unlike Second Life or other 3D games:

+ This simulated 3D environment works in any web browser
+ Vivaty is compatible with Facebook pages
+ Like photos and videos that people resnag and post on web sites everywhere, you can put up a Vivaty window on your own site or blog
+ Vivaty plans to make money by selling the service to corporate web sites, so companies can set up their own virtual worlds

This clever little business model has just turned the big game makers on their heads, and gives marketers a new tool for engaging users. Now, instead of having to download software and join one portal to artificial reality, you can pop a window to the fake virtual future almost anywhere.

Ad pollution: An argument with our brother

What would it mean if the economy stopped growing?

We stayed up until 1 a.m. Friday night arguing this with our brother, a smart, liberal, arts- and granola-minded man who has settled down with a lovely woman in a tiny town in Maine. He's taken up environmental activism and since we work in marketing -- you know, stimulating demand while a bit worried about melting glaciers in our heart -- and he works for a nonprofit job corps, the conversation rubbed a bit raw. Brother pointed out that our job in advertising leads to consumption, which triggers pollution, atmospheric poison, dead coral reefs, the end of an inhabitable planet, and eventually a burned out shell of carbon circling our sun, covered in the detritus of plastic CD casings and Christmas bubble wrap.

Well, if you put it like that. Steven Stoll raised the same question in the March issue of Harper's: How long can unbridled consumerism last? The desire to ingest new things is the engine that turns the economy, and economic growth is the aspirational principle that eliminates disease, gives millions clean water, creates jobs, and pushes technology. The fact that you are reading this on a brilliant micro-computer more powerful than the machine that calculated orbital mechanics to put men on the moon is tied to the fact that your parents bought way too many things, stimulated business, and spurred investment.

Yet, man, the landfill off I-95 north of Hartford, Conn., is looking tall. Uncontrolled growth in biology has a very ugly term: cancer. So what will our voracious appetites and sprawling cities do to the planet if unchecked?

Stoll, in his essay, suggests that the past few hundred years have been an aberration, and that as the world's resources eventually become scarce, human beings will be forced to adjust to a stationary state -- an economy in balance. Trouble is, people tend to get ticked off when growth stalls. In the Great Depression, families starved, and in the stagflated 1970s U.S. cities had massive crime waves. Every time the GDP flattens out, society rebells.

Our brother suggests the individual path: Consume less. It's a noble idea, we said, but we responded that the desire to consume is ingrained in human genes. Consider the hungry effect chocolate has on most people. Peter Rogers of University of Bristol in the UK noted it isn't the chemicals in chocolate that give us the craving, but the fact that we know we can only eat a little and have to stop. The psychological impact of having to restrain ourselves -- of not having enough -- makes us want chocolate all the more.

And that's the problem with the future of the planet. Resource scarcity creates an inevitable crunch (Google "peak oil" to get really scared), yet as resources grow scarce we all hunger for them even more. We told our brother that perhaps the only way out is to redirect human longing, like parents pointing bratty children at dinner to the vegetables, by leading people to consume things that are good for the Earth. Cars that run on hydrogen. Clothing made of bamboo and hemp. There are rays of hope in greener technology, and the maturation of Western Society into service-oriented businesses (advertising agencies, after all, don't pollute).

The debate creates a business opportunity. Imagine the profits to be had by the first major company to produce cheap hydrogen fuel cells, allowing you to plug in your house, boot up off the grid, and emit nothing but water vapor as waste. A market exists to meet consumer demand with efficient supply, or better yet, goods and services that give something back. In the long term, we'll have to get there when petroleum and forests begin to run out. In the short term, profit goes to the first mover that meets the unmet market need.

The choice is twofold: Either we stop wanting so much, or we start wanting things that are good for us. Since want seems to be part of the human condition, dear brother, here's to wanting better things.

Wilkins Ice Shelf hangs by a thread. Rebranding opportunities abound.

Big news on global warming this week. The Wilkins Ice Shelf, an area of floating ice about the size of Connecticut off the coast of Antarctica, has started to collapse. Block after block of ice is just tumbling and crumbling into the ocean, said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The good news is Wilkins is only 1 of 19 ice shelves around the southern continent, so we still have 18 left. Um. Yeah. Whatever your politics, people are going to start noticing this stuff. Maybe it's time to put more green in your corporate logo.

John McCain: Yes He Can't

The interesting thing about today's social media is how it has pushed marketers and PR specialists totally out of the control seat. Now anyone can comment, and if their idea is powerful enough, it could be passed anywhere.

This has to be tough in politics, where no matter what your stand, half the country will disagree with you.

But how will you manage the angry masses for your own brand?

Oh man. Aw geez.

Does your brand inspire reaction like this?

Starbucks vs. Spherion: Blogs about you, blogs about us

Man, did Starbucks get its social media wrong. John Moore over at Brand Autopsy started beating up on Starbucks, so we swung over to check out MyStarbucksIdea.com -- a new blog designed to gather feedback from customers on how to improve the upscale coffee shops.

We were a bit annoyed that Starbucks insisted upon identifying us first before we could check in -- create a username, password. OK, so before any value, we have to give up something. But the real failing is the entire blog is all about Starbucks, not us as customers. The ideas float egocentrically in, about potential points cards, free coffee on your birthday, designing more comfortable chairs, and occasionally Starbucks writes back to say they'll consider the idea. Yeah!

The problem with this is (a) it's all about you, Starbucks, and (b) that is boring.

For a company that gets blogging right, click over to Spherion, a job recruiting and placement network. The Spherion Career Blog is filled with helpful ideas about us, not them: effective job search techniques, how to manage politics at the office, the value of "soft skills" in interviewing, a pop quiz on whether you are a workaholic. The ideas are so fresh, and so relevant to our lives, that we might check back in, or even start commenting back on the stories.

Think about that. Both companies will succeed in gathering feedback. But while Starbucks' approach is cold and mechanical (give us your idea and we'll consider it), Spherion's is subtle (here are dozens of ideas for your career, and we bet you'll write a note in response).

It's not the technology, layout, or even quality of writing that makes the Spherion blog work and the Starbucks site fail. It's simply that Spherion feels helpful, and Starbucks comes off as selfish. If you want to build an online community, you have to give more than you take.

(Self disclosure: A friend of ours works with Spherion, but that doesn't matter, we like the blog anyway.)

Wrestling the demons of spam

We realized today that some important emails from friends and colleagues were being dumped into our junk mail folder -- hidden from view, lost amid erectile dysfunction pitches for weeks. This probably cost us a new account or two from business contacts who wonder why we haven't written them back.

So we dug in and reviewed crap from spammers -- you know, those marketers who flood the internet with millions of messages about your private parts, rotten souls surely condemned to the Seventh Circle of Hell. Not Dante's inner ring, reserved for the blasphemers, and not the middle ring, with its Harpies and thorny bushes. Nope. We mean the outer ring, the special place for those who are violent against people, sunk in a river of boiling blood.

Did we mention we don't like spammers?

But wait. Perhaps we go too far. After all, every form of advertising is intrusive -- the question is simply the degree to which our marketing messages are uninvited. The most welcoming are the signs at the retail store or the text ads on Google, which invite users searching for wares to find exactly what they want. Then come catalogs and targeted web banners, tailored a bit to our preferences, followed by magazine print ads that might delight with good copy or harmonious design. As we continue down the intrusion scale, the braying of commercial radio car salesmen begins to grate on our nerves.

Ah, but junk email. Spam. Those misspelled messages trying to sneak past our filters, promising to build long dongs that ring gongs and all manner of girth, whatever that means. (Historians, unearthing digital bits of our age, will think girth was the most popular product of the early 21st century.) Junk email is more than obnoxious. It overwhelms us with bad taste, and upsets us when real messages from our friends get lost in the mix.

It's really not the email medium that is rotten. Instead, it's the sneakiness -- the fact that the authors hide behind the message, avoiding any adverse impact from consumers who would think poorly of the brand. These marketers prey upon the stupid or naive, and disguise their own names so that anyone with half a brain can't fight back or complain.

We'll rethink the punishment ... let's put the spammers into the Ninth Circle of Hell, which Dante wrote was guarded by giants to lock up souls who were betrayers. People who committed fraudulent acts were frozen in a lake of ice called Cocytus, sunk into the painful cold at various degrees depending on the level of the crime. For the marketing authors of unwanted email, ice up to the neck feels about right.

Keep it simple

We worked on several projects this week where things got really complicated. And then it got simple. After all the discussion and logic, either projects go live or they don't; web site conversion rates go up or down; the advertising creative pulls response or fails.

Love me. Love me not.

It's important to cover every angle in the planning phase. It's also important, as you prepare to execute, to make a decisive, single stroke. This can create conflict in an organization where some people are brilliant at planning all the angles, and others chafe to pull the trigger. Neither are right or wrong; both are needed; the trick is making contingencies and clarity come together.

A good exercise for your next project is to whiteboard the top 10 key decisions -- then look at each and ask, "what is the simplest way to make this part work?" Too few considerations, and you fail. Too many requests, and you end up with a bad logo.

BMW's kinky Hofmeister tease

Just as we'd given up sports cars for $4-a-gallon gas, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG brings its 1 Series over the pond from Europe this month to taunt us Yanks with a tighter design and 230 horsepower. And to seal the deal, BMW includes magazine ad copy that makes absolutely no sense.

Here's the offending copy block:

... the BMW 1 Series truly is a car that has been condensed but is missing nothing. The greenhouse with its Hoffmeister kink has been moved rearward.

Now that's copy! Who could resist? We lunged for the computer and Googled "Hoffmeister kink" five times before finding out BMW's agency had misspelled it. Bimmerfest.com tells us the Hofmeister kink is not a German sex game, but rather the tiny bottom bend in the C-pillar, the piece of metal separating the rear window from the back glass, which launched in 1961 by designer Wilhelm Hofmeister.


The greenhouse, by comparison, is the grouping of windshield, side windows, back window, roof and support pillars that collectively give most cars the majority of their design vibe. That's right. The literal translation of Hofmeister kink is curvy top. BMW, you naughty, naughty tease.

Either BMW is targeting auto enthusiasts who speak this rare jargon, or some brilliant ad agency is tempting affluent readers to Google obscure argot in hopes they'll read more about lovely nuances such as BMW's 50-50 weight distribution and rear wheel drive. Call the bad ad copy an Easter Egg for the obsessively curious.

Hmm. It does look so sweet. The heck with miles per gallon. We'll see you at the kinky greenhouse dealer.

Bill, rebrand it like this

A friend of ours is helping an ad agency rebrand itself, so he basically has to pitch ideas to black-clad creatives. Imagine that fun conversation: No, Pantone 19-1557 was the color of the year LAST year ... and omigod you chose Arial over Helvetica!

Just kidding. Anyway, our advice when rebranding is to move out of category.

Let us explain. Back in the 1960s ad gurus Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote the landmark book on brand positioning, theorizing that every customer has an invisible ladder in his or her head for every product type. To "brand" your firm, you have to stake a claim on an empty rung. Think Avis: We try harder, which positioned Avis as better than No. 1 car renter Hertz, or Wendy's Where's the beef?, which knocked McDonald's bready burgers.

Rebranding is even more complex, because it means changing to a new position in your customers' already crowded heads. The exercise is tough, because it involves myriad factors such as competitor claims, emerging market trends, your own future product development -- and usually a committee. The simplest route we've seen is to map competitors on three axes, product innovation, customer-focused total solution, or operational efficiency, and then look for the white space.

White space often exists, because companies and people tend to be ego-centric and so similar businesses cluster together. Home service companies, for example, work hard to provide service so may position their brand as the best customer solution company -- leaving the efficient price rung open. Ad agencies, filled with award-winning creative, like to focus on their product innovation -- leaving room in the customer solution department. You know. Like achieving concrete marketing results.

So here's a quick exercise. Draw three arrows radiating from a common center point. Label the arrows "innovation," "efficiency/results," and "customer solutions." Plot your competition. Then go where they aren't.

White space exists even if you have to stretch to find it. Just ask the judges on American Idol.

Gary Vaynerchuk: With no privacy, you gotta be good

Fantastic view on how new media creates new transparency, where your customers will know more and more about you. This could be an opportunity for your brand, or a curse -- all in how you play it.

At your next Marketing Steering Committee, toss a thought grenade on the table: What would happen to our sales and customer loyalty if our customers knew everything about our products and pricing? Could we still compete? And if not, what are we going to do about it?

Tx to Brandflakes and Chris Brogan for the find. Bonus points to Mr. Vaynerchuk for excellent use of hand motions.

Farewell, dear Shuttle: Why consumers of technology are daft

Technology is running in reverse.

First we gave up CDs, which back in the 1980s offered crystal-clear, concert-quality sound, for compressed MP3s that mute music with a strangled buzz. Then we stopped using film, which had resolution so fine we could turn snapshots into giant wall posters, for cell phone cameras that produce pixelated images enshrouded in bloody fog. Then we began swapping big-screen computers with comfortable keypads for little plastic, breakable mobile devices where one has to type with two thumbs.

And now we have YouTube -- a brilliant video leap forward in which we can watch 4 1/2 by 3 1/2-inch grainy films produced by drunken college students.

So. Technology is getting worse, and now the horror sets in. NASA is ditching the Space Shuttle in 2010 for -- we're so upset we can hardly type it -- a rocket with a capsule on top. This has been coming for years; talk of retirement surfaced soon after the Challenger accident in 2003. But damn if the new rocket doesn't look like a 1960s moon launch.


The Shuttle was what technology is supposed to be about. Slick. Sexy. Reusable ships that soared to heaven and back, igniting imagination with double-delta wings and heat shields like something out of Star Wars, a design that a 5th-grader might dream up. The thrust structure was made from titanium, the engine cranked up to 104%, and when spent, the Shuttle could piggyback home on a Boeing 747, sort of a, look, I'm too sated from space travel to bother finale. The Shuttle made outer space seem within reach, a there-and-back again adventure, with parts that were recycled for a little green gift to Mother Earth.

But we blew it. Viewers stopped tuning in for live Shuttle launches, ratings went down, so NASA has stuck us with the Orion, above. Ick.

Maybe technology is running backward because we've all grown a bit selfish. Rather than share movie experiences on gigantic screens, we want secret video in little boxes from YouTube. Instead of socializing in concert halls, we demand earbuds that pipe in private iTunes.

If this trend continues, humans will probably stop talking to each other with rich facial expressions and vocal nuances altogether and instead take up lower-resolution alternatives, perhaps typing little messages on tiny keyboards and posting them in small windows for others to come find.

Oh, never mind.

Forbes: When chasing long tail of blogs, be careful what you bite

Forbes is the latest big-brand content player to try to compete with ad networks by getting in the game itself. The risk in this move is it may erode the Forbes' brand.

We've noted that the problem with big brands online is their advertising results -- you know, the number of people who actually click through the banner ads, the thing that marketers pay for -- tend to pale compared to ad networks. Online ad networks are groups of hundreds of web sites that provide incredible targeting, by tracking your behavior across each site and then tailoring ads based on what you've been reading. If you make $150k per year and just perused a series of car reviews, an ad network will begin serving up Jaguar banners. Because you're in the market for a car, you may bite.

Big sites can't watch this online behavior at other web sites, so when you walk into their world, they have difficulty personalizing ads. This in turn hampers ad results, and advertisers suddenly don't find a big brand site very attractive. Now, Forbes has launched Business and Finance Blog Network, a group of 400+ blogs that extends its tracking reach online.

The irony of all this is it may erode the Forbes brand. If users get comfortable obtaining expert financial advice and news from hundreds of blogs, traffic at Forbes.com may start to spiral downward.

As Forbes follows the dynamic that makes online advertising work -- users surfing around sites -- it may point readers away. Good luck chasing that tail.

Lawyers in lederhosen

If you wonder what a legal team is doing in leather shorts with H-shaped suspenders, so do we. There's a certain type of advertising that tries to break through by simply being arresting; think Wendy's red wig, Burger King's subservient chicken, and now, law firm Hanson Bridgett.

Steve Hall at Ad Gabber investigated, and learned from firm managing partner Andrew Giacomini that they tried something "completely different" to tap into viral networks. You know, so bloggers would post it and pass it along to their readers ...

Damn. We've been had.

Nice bill: Sprint's Simply Everything

Bless you, Sprint. This battered cell provider is stepping up to the plate with a new, mind-slappingly easy $99.99 Simply Everything plan that makes it worth your while to switch. Is your current bill more than $150 a month? Switch to Sprint and you'll save $600 a year -- more than enough to cover that nasty termination fee.

The brilliance of all this isn't the math, but Sprint's movement away from fancy creative to a plainspoken CEO, Dan Hesse, explaining the facts: Here's our idea: You get to use the phone for all the great things it can do without worrying about the meter running. Sure, it's not as beautiful as Sprint's spots last year in which puppeteers with flashlights turned night scenes into streaking displays of color. But apparently U.S. consumers didn't "get" the message that they needed a faster, brighter cell network. What they really want is a bill that makes sense.

Sprint's promotion is gutsy because it recognizes that consumers aren't in love with cell providers due to technology -- we simply hunger for a commodity payment plan to underwrite our wireless gadgets. Sprint also has the guts to tout a price plan in mass media knowing full well that millions of current Sprint customers, paying much more, will dial back in and renegotiate. They'll be loyal but surely less profitable.

There is a lesson here for any subscription service or home service provider. Inside your organization you may have thousands of people working to build cell phone towers or deliver dry cleaning or pump heating oil, and you probably work overtime to train call service reps on quality service. But most of your customers don't see what goes on inside operations. They simply get a bill, and they want one that they can understand.

It ain't sexy. But Sprint got this one right.

Hat tip to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for a clear message.

Why ESPN knocked down Specific Media

There's an interesting battle brewing online between big brands and ad networks, and it holds lessons in how to make online marketing work better.

ESPN.com this week said online ad network Specific Media could no longer sell ESPN banner ad inventory. The people who run major brand sites, such as Wenda Harris Millard over at Martha Stewart, explain in Mediaweek that this is about price ... claiming online ad networks despoil the brands of premium sites by selling ad slots at cut-rate discounts.

What the big boys aren't saying is that ad networks such as Specific Media, which are collections of hundreds or thousands of sites, threaten the big players because the advertising results from ad networks are often better. It's pretty simple, really. Ad networks can track one user across multiple sites and chase them with personalized ads, based on extremely sophisticated demographic and behavioral targeting, while single web sites can't.

This is the deep irony in internet marketing -- that the biggest brands may make the lousiest advertising channels. Think of what the dynamic is within a WebMD, iVillage or ESPN.com:

Lots of different users, all with varied interests (ESPN has 197 different sports links from its home page navigation menus alone), all hitting one site. Your ad appears, and many of the users won't be in the market. An ad network, by comparison, works like this:

Ad networks allow marketers to track a single individual across multiple web sites, track their past behavior or click stream, and then serve up personalized ads in response. We've seen clients with click-through rates on ads five times higher from ad networks than the same ads that appear on brand sites.

In the advertising world, it's not the price of the ads that really matters -- it's the cold, hard results of what it costs to acquire consumers. We typically recommend that clients do A-B testing to run major sites and ad networks against each other. By all means, set up a horse race and include ESPN. But remember: you're not buying a brand -- you're buying a customer.

Scrubbing with Verve: How the green movement motivates good design

Spring and green are in the air. Norway just made news by announcing it would be carbon neutral by 2050. The New York Auto Show this week, filled with depressed automakers who realize Americans are not buying high-margin gas-guzzling SUVs and may retrench from buying cars at all in our home equity hangover, had one bright spot -- sexy designs of small, nimble, efficient cars like the Ford Verve. One glance and you think, finally, designers are getting green right.

Our favorite environmental push, though, comes from Deirdre Imus, who founded dienviro.com with Hackensack to educate the public about how to control environmental factors such as mercury, lead and tobacco that may trigger cancer. Imus launched a line of home cleaning products, called Greening the Cleaning, which scrub scum with plant-based enzymes and none of those toxic fumes that require a gas mask.


This is a brilliant move, because the shelf-space for green environmental cleaners is still pretty empty, and Imus could rapidly build momentum even as the big CPGs catch on. Proceeds support a 4,000-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico for kids with cancer.

All of which seems a bit logical. Producing products that are beautiful, efficient, non-toxic, and give something back to the world. Can you hear the marketing opportunity for your own brand?

Clean sheet it, and start with crayons

Here's a nice piece of whimsy from Slate. Crayon Physics Deluxe is a simple video game by Petri Purho of Helsinki, Finland, that pushes back on the hyper-realism of Gears of War II or Quantic's artificial intelligence-laden Heavy Rain. You simply draw objects that become rooted in gravity, allowing a ball to roll or be pushed toward a star. The game created a sensation at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in February.

Why all the fuss? Purho did something new, totally out of the box. A fresh idea beats sophisticated graphics any time. Chris Baker at Slate commented the game looks as if it were designed by a third grader. Purho wrote back, I take that as a compliment.

More at Purho's site here.

Perhaps if your ad contained a wild animal ... oh, never mind

Dear Advertiser,

Your potential customer is not paying attention. Watch the above video and see if you catch the drift.

A recent study by MRI found that consumer attentiveness varies by medium and by the time of day. In morning drive, 21.6% of radio listeners were "highly attuned"; mid-day that number falls to 13.3%. Across the board, from internet to magazines to TV to newspapers, users had highs and lows of when they were attuned to the content. The bad news is that in most cases, about half of consumers said they were tuned out. The really bad news is that your precious media plans, which include detailed forecasts on CPM and GRPs, are largely fiction.

You see, impressions don't count if they don't really exist.

Marketers have known this for years; in the 1800s Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker said half his advertising was wasted, trouble was, he didn't know which half. But technology is speeding up the tune-out curve. Consumer adoption of DVR -- those fancy digital video recorder boxes that allow you to skip cable TV commercials -- grew from 8% in 2005 to 23% this year. Facebook has launched new privacy controls, which allow you to cluster contacts and keep those risqué party photos away from Mom and Dad. Humans are circling the wagons on communication, and noisy advertisers may be left out on the dusty plain.

The solution? Evaluate the potential attention levels of your audience for each component in your media plan. GRPs, CPM, or eye-grabbing creative alone won't cut it ... even if it includes a dancing bear.

(Tx Monkeys.)

The Economist to Facebook: Blah blah blah

Some people just don't understand Americans. Look, if we believe it, it must be so. Harper's just noted that despite all the gloomy press about recession, 55% of us Yanks believe our homes are still rising in value. That's right! It's too bad those guys at Bear Stearns lost their shirts by hyper-leveraging derivative instruments created in brimstone by dark computers based on a home loan some guy in a shiny suit sold to people with FICO scores in the 300s who didn't need to authorize their income and whom you wouldn't let baby-sit your kid. Whatever. Our house is rising in value. Former Federal Reserve governor Laurence Meyer just told NPR that no one could see that crash coming. Of course not! Our house is rising in value.

Now, The Economist has a piece claiming that Facebook and MySpace are vastly overvalued because they can't really monetize their user base, and goes so far as to compare AOL's recent snap up of the Bebo social net to Microsoft buying Hotmail a decade ago. Sure, The Economist says, back in the day web-based email was lauded as an incredible communication innovation, but no one really made a buck by advertising on it.

And, to really throw cold water on us, The Economist suggests that all these social media will eventually morph into one big, ubiquitous feature of life. Just like that Charlene Li over at Forrester.

Come on, Economist. Does it matter if Beacon bombed, or if you can't monetize widgets that toss sheep, or if social media users have changed modalities and block out advertising? Does it matter if people soon control their own online social network without 25 passwords? Those are details. We need a hot new thing. We need to believe. We need our home to rise in value. And besides, that Bebo has a really cool URL.

Lost your job at Bear Stearns?

Check Google. Those pay-per-click competitors don't waste any time.

We know it's you. ComScore passive biometric observation told us so.

There's a scene in the sci-fi film Minority Report where Tom Cruise, fresh from a future eyeball transplant, walks into The Gap and a digital ad on the wall greets him as Mr. (insert Japanese name here, we can't remember it). It was a bit of humor at marketing personalization gone awry, but points to the future. And comScore is almost there.

ComScore, an internet metrics service that rates web sites, is moving beyond tracking machines to watching the specific individuals who use them. This is a huge leap in monitoring internet use, because while every device plugged into the web has a unique IP address, multiple users handle each device. How do you tell when mom, dad, or 17-year-old Jenny is using the computer? ComScore does this by observing your keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Let us explain. The way comScore measures internet behavior is largely through a vast, international group of consumer "panelists" who opt-in to a voluntary comScore research project. Volunteers get some incentives, such as free software, in exchange for letting comScore watch what they do online.

The trick of getting beyond the computer is pretty simple. ComScore software tracks the "biometric signature" of users -- mom may type fast, dad may peck slow, Jenny may be a heavy user of the mouse scroll wheel -- and then over time matches the discrete patterns with a user when he or she fills out a web form that requires a name. Soon, the comScore system recognizes that fast typing occurs when mom is online. And, by matching the individual user patterns with the detailed demo information they filled out as survey participants, comScore paints a pretty detailed picture.

You can see where this is going. For now, it's surveys. Soon, every online company in the world may start tracking biometric signatures and putting 2 and 2 together between dad being online, his credit card purchases, his demo profile, his web history, and the ads that should be served on his page. In some ways this would be helpful -- Amazon.com might finally stop serving husbands recommendations for Oprah books the month after Christmas. In other ways, you can already hear the privacy advocates howl.

Good? Bad? We could argue this both ways. But one-to-one personalization is coming, and deep, invasive tracking of what you do will soon be powered by the little mouse in your hand.

Lost in Google: The linkers and the link nots

We were doing dishes tonight after one of those desperate meals where you throw odds and ends from the refrigerator in a saucepan with curry powder and it occurred to us -- anyone can now find us. You see, today we searched for ourselves in Google and discovered, finally, we had achieved the No. 1 organic position. Our name comes out on top.

And then the following thought occurred -- why is this important? Think of the poor intellects of our society who labor without blogging and hyperlinks, whose thoughts go un-viraled and un-RSS'd and thus never enter the top Google search results. Think of the billion people on this planet without fresh water and plumbing, and the brilliance that some of those minds contain but cannot communicate online. If Ben Franklin or Albert Einstein or Bill Shakespeare were alive, recording the electric love story of the universe in notebooks, Google would never notice.

Perhaps this is the problem with Google search results. There are two types of creators in the world today -- those who create and may by happenstance publish into the web, and those who work avidly to game the system. The race within marketing and advertising circles to pen one of the top 150 blogs has become a bit of a, well, game. All the hyperlinking and networking among peer sites, with the agenda of elevating one's own rankings (or one's business), must crowd out those who don't care.

Google has been getting flack for adjusting its black-box formula, to include things such as "Quality Score" that helps real content rise to the top. Tonight, we realized, this is a good idea. Pity poor Google, trying to maintain algorithms that sort the wheat from the chafe, trying to recognize the next Gandhi when he posts a single piece of prose into the vast web and doesn't Digg it. Pity today's unsung Darwins and Curies, the souls out there who already have figured out cold fusion and dark matter and a cure for cancer, but pencil it into a binder. Somehow we've done it, outfoxed Google, and made them think this author is someone people are searching for, while others remain lost.

Doesn't matter really. Anyone who really cares could just dial 411. Somehow we think the real brilliance in the world is still being scribed on clay, somewhere down by a river where minds unfettered by Twitter gather for debate. You won't find them on Google, unfortunately, no matter how hard you search.

Twixxer: As seen on TV

If you're new to social media (and who isn't?), here's a brief rundown. Social media is a revolutionary new way we can all stay in touch by typing and even watching video. Like on TV. The 10 things you must know:

1. Blu-Ray -- gives you really, really high-res video in your home, on your TV.

2. DVD -- gives you plain high-res video in your home, on your TV.

3. PC -- gives you sort-of-fuzzy video in your home, almost like a small TV, but adds lots of text in things called files or web pages, glowing like a TV.

4. Web site -- used to be text and pictures, now filled with video, like your TV.

5. Cell phone -- used to be sound, then added text, then pictures, and now even video, like your TV!

6. Blogs -- used to be web logs, or web pages, but now has cooler name, and includes everything found on a web page except it's all written by you, even with video by you, like your own broadcast. On TV!

7. Twitter -- used to be called text messaging, except now you can do it to many people at once, and they can do it back at you, sort of like a text-messaging conference call. Not like TV :(

8. Tiny URL -- Ok, this one is complicated. You see, Twitter text messages only allow 140 characters (we think), so this is a web site that converts long URLs into, yes, tiny URLs, so you can send long web site addresses to your friends within Twitter, so they can immediately and joyfully see your brief text message and click out to a big web page, that might even include video, like a TV!

9. Twixxer -- a new variation on Twitter that makes your Twitter feed look much like a blog, which resembles a web site, except even now with video, like a PC screen or DVD, just like your TV!

10. Fax machine -- hey, sometimes Twitter and Blogger go down, so now you can write down either Tiny URLs or real URLs and fax them to friends when all the other social media shuts off due to server errors, but the fax should still go through so your friends can access the web when everything finally turns on, and punch in the addresses, to boot up the text and video and relax and enjoy -- just like watching TV!

Questions? Find me on Twitter. I'll be typing a video. You know, like on TV.

Yahoo yanks the wheels off your web site

Yahoo may soon make your web site irrelevant.

The search giant is percolating a new system that would lift entire blocks of copy and content from your web site to post in Yahoo results. This makes a lot of sense from a user's perspective -- think, if you were searching for movie reviews, wouldn't it be nice to see all the top reviews about one film on one page? And this has been coming for a while. Search engines already lift titles and snippets of text and photos. Entire sections of your site popping into Google or Yahoo was bound to happen.

But from a marketer's perspective, this is a disaster. Entire business models hinge on pulling people to sites. If people no longer need to click through to your site to read your content, then all your precious lead forms, phone numbers, designer-nuanced layout, usability-consulted pathways, even the ads on your site -- it all goes away.

Yikes.

Stephen Baker over at BusinessWeek broke the story on March 13, after interviewing Prabhakar Raghavan, chief of research at Yahoo. Apparently Yahoo is cooking up new search results pages that will show blocks of information lifted from your web site, so that users can find what they want without having to click through to you.

Chris Brogan comments that while this may be beneficial to users -- say, who could read all the car reviews they want on one single web page -- it undercuts the entire web industry based on getting traffic. And even worse, it demolishes the third-party advertisers who buy space on all those web sites. Who in the world will want to buy into a Tremor Media or Advertising.com ad network of thousands of web sites, if users begin to ignore them to read everything on Yahoo?

Some may think this would undermine search engines' overall utility to advertisers as well -- but play it out all the way. If Yahoo makes organic clicks from its search results pages less likely, the only way to get traffic to your site from Yahoo will be to pay for PPC ads. And if the big advertisers who today are hot on vast ad networks find the long tail of hundreds of sites no longer performs, they'll look to a portal -- say, Yahoo -- as the place to put ads. Now, only a cynic would suggest that Yahoo might consider diminishing organic clicks to other sites to build demand for its own ad inventory. Luckily, we are not that cynical.

It's really just one more step in the evolution of users, not marketers, controlling content. RSS feeds already allow you to pull from blogs or news feeds you find interesting. Soon, you'll get an instant RSS feed on any topic from a search engine.

Brogan notes that the only way for advertisers and companies to respond is to make their content portable, so that it can be passed easily along the web, perhaps with a few bread crumb trails leading back. Maybe the trick will be [click here for more information] to find [click here for lead form] ways to insert your real strategy [click here last chance!] into the message. We'll see.

A free note to Steve Rubel and Chris Anderson

Steve Rubel and Chris Anderson have been writing a lot recently about the future of business moving to free services, especially online. The idea is that cross-subsidies -- the hidden dynamic in which someone else pays, such as marketers who underwrite your "free" TV shows -- will make giving away products or communications the only way to compete. Yes, the future is free web services, but there is a crack forming within those business models.

"Free" has a challenge, because most free models are underwritten by advertisers -- who only pay if they get results. The problem is consumers are paying less and less attention to peripheral marketing messages as they begin to control the social conversation, and this undercuts the entire model. Deep in the heart of "free" a cancer is forming called diminishing advertiser response.

One way to think of the problem is a shift in consumer "modality," or how people use media. In the 1950s-1990s, consumers were passive recipients, watching TV and listening to radio and putting up with the ads that sponsored the message. This model worked for advertisers, because the fraction of consumers who responded made the expense worth their while.

Then, in the late 1990s and 2000s search engines arose. Consumers learned to enter "hunt" mode, searching the vast choices of the web, and the ads underwriting Google and Yahoo worked because they matched the "hunt" mode of users. The model still works, but it is in decline ...

Because social media has now put consumers in a third "do" mode -- and while "doing," they are no longer paying attention to ads. Users engaged heavily in Twitter or Facebook communications are focused on their peers, not peripheral advertising. Embed all the apps you want, have users toss sheep on Facebook, they are focused on their friends, not commerce.

Twitter is the best example of a wonderful communications tool that shuts advertisers out (although we've suggested in the past that perhaps advertisers could sponsor fonts, Marriott could take the "M", Coke the "C", etc.). The people who make free apps should be embarrassed by their failure to communicate this risk. Sure, Slide.com may have millions of users who have installed fun little Pokey apps on Facebook. But where are the results? And if results are not forthcoming, eventually advertisers will wake up and walk away.

(For evidence, Google "widget advertising results" in quotes and see what you get. In all the vastness of the Internet, not one hard case study emerges.)

This is not meant to slander any specific type of online application. The real answer is not for any single industry to feel threatened -- EVERYONE in business should feel threatened. The Chris Anderson "free economy" is a nice idea, but someone has to pay. As mobile screens get smaller, as there is less inventory for advertising in the visual shelf space, as consumers gain more control over the message creation, and as consumers pay less attention to peripheral noise -- the old implicit bargain that advertisers underwrite content may go away.

The question in this new free web services universe is: who will foot the free bill?

Christvertising: Ad bloggers debate branding with God

Heaven help us. The agency site Christvertising has been making waves online as advertising experts debate -- is this a spoof? Can one really enlist a network of 1 million+ believers to pray for a product? The web site's videos are so straight, and