Miller's 1-second Super Bowl ads outmaneuver Bud

When Budweiser struck an exclusive deal with Super Bowl XLIII for beer advertising priced at $3 million per 30-second pop, Miller High Life was shut out.

So in a genius end-run, MillerCoors cut a unique deal with local NBC affiliates who carry the game for them to run a series of 1-second spots. MillerCoors is building buzz for the campaign with an online backstory showing the logic -- the guy in the series above riffs at length over why any idiot would spend $3 million for a single ad, and then brags he could convey the message in a second. The actual snippets that air may be the shortest ad buy in history, all while making the competition look slow. Brilliant.

Hat tip to Sarah Ely.

Why do Super Bowl ads cost 6 times as much?

If we could have your attention, please, you might ask for a moment why the inflation-adjusted cost of a Super Bowl ad has risen from $4.79 CPM in 1967 to $30.77 today. Are advertisers spending 600% more because they're desperate to reach consumers in one of the few remaining mass mediums?

Well, yes. (CPM, for you non-ad types, is the cost to make 1,000 impressions on an audience and the basic benchmark to compare ad costs. The actual price of a 30-second spot this year is $3 million.) Critic Bob Garfield of Ad Age puzzles over why advertisers continue to throw money in "pursuit of an extravagant, terrible commercial," but one hint comes from Vinny Warren, who led development of several Super Bowl commercials. Warren writes in Adweek "the Super Bowl is special because everyone watches it. You, your grandma, your youngest cousin. We all tune in. Last year, 97.5 million people watched the Giants beat the then-undefeated Patriots." Young consumers look up from the internet, and older affluent homeowners put down the DVR button and stop skipping commercials.

Trouble is, the internet may eventually threaten even this mass-appeal model. Clever brands such as E*Trade are leveraging online communications to broaden the impact of their spots; the E*Trade talking baby trader now has a Twitter account and you can watch his video outtakes here. But other companies are feeling the pressure to issue previews of their spots, which may take some of the buzz out of them. We already have images of what Bridgestone, Miller, and Pixar will do. We know Tom Hanks will pitch the upcoming Dan Brown movie sequel and that GoDaddy.com will show two women in a shower. One Twitter page now has an ongoing stream of Super Bowl ad leaks.

Super Bowl ads still work. But if you give them away for free beforehand, will advertisers keep on paying to play?

The real use for Twitter: Predicting consumer trends

Marketers pondering how to cram ads inside social media may be missing the point. The real value of new communication networks such as Facebook and Twitter may be listening to what consumers want.

Listen carefully and you could predict the future.

Professor Yuval Shavitt of Tel Aviv University is building models that do just that, in his case analyzing a half billion queries on Gnutella, a vast file-sharing network, to predict which small-time bands will soon hit it big. He sorts references to artists by the geographic location of the consumer (using IP addresses), watches the patterns of downloads, and can predict with unnerving accuracy when a given musician is about to "tip" into an escalating-then-diminishing bell curve of national popularity. Seed Magazine notes Shavitt's work is based on the "sociological theories of Mark Granovetter, who first described in the 1970s how micro-level interactions between individuals affect macro-level phenomena."

The combination of real-time data on consumer thoughts, geographic locations, and algorithms that predict scaling popularity have huge applications for marketing consumer goods, public relations, politics, and even public health policy. For a simple look yourself, head over to Summize.com and type in your brand name. You'll see what 2 million people on Twitter are saying about you right now.

Marketers, boost the GRPs on sunny days

Dirk Singer points us to a brilliant psychological study on the effect of weather on consumer memory and judgments. Researchers put 73 subjects in a shop in Sydney and tested their ability to recall objects; half were tested on sunny days and half in rainy weather. As you'd expect, rainy-day subjects were in dour moods, but they had much better memories -- recalling 3 times as many objects -- and scrutinized objects carefully.

The British Psychological Society sums up: "The theory is that a bad mood triggers a more sceptical, careful mode of processing, in contrast to the less vigilant, conceptual thinking style that characterises a good mood." If you hope to sell to consumers on a whim with vague, rosy product promises, we suggest you beef up the media schedule on bright, sunny days.

E*Trade baby outtakes

Yet another example of a campaign within a campaign, designed to build buzz on the web. Or should we say an alleged campaign since we can't prove this was produced by E*Trade and certainly don't want to worry about their lawyers. Man, all this legal worry stuff is putting a damper on marketers' ability to go viral on the web. CMOs, please place a call to legal and call those sharks off.

Bloggers, now a word from Virgin America's lawyers

Defamation, trademark infringement, false designation, and false and deceptive advertising are not words you want to hear from a lawyer, but that's what the ad industry blog Adrants got after posting a spoof ad not created by Virgin America.

The airline's demand for a jury trial seems overblown until you realize the growing power of blogs to persuade consumers. Traditional newspapers have whip-cracking editors to remove any whiff of libel or defamation. Adrants' initial headline for the spoof review read "The Hudson Crash: Just One More Reason to Fly Virgin," followed by the copy gaffe "so woot! slather your big reds all over those news shots, V!" suggesting Virgin America really was behind the ad. The grouchy editor we worked with 20 years ago would have whacked us with a red pencil.

We sympathize -- cause we all move fast writing online, and Adrants has an immensely talented staff poking needed holes in the inflated egos of the ad industry -- but it's a cautionary tale that words on a screen are held by the same standard as ink on paper. Adrants traffic is up almost 25% this year to 130,000 unique visitors a month, and 1 in 4 of its readers makes more than $100k a year. Bloggers need to tread carefully as their subjects begin holding them accountable for content that could conceivably cause material damages among readers.

It will cast a chill over the blogosphere as reviewers with fast opinions begin thinking of every conceivable downside of a brand's mention. Did we mention that Virgin America did not create this ad?

AdFreak, Cityfile and Make the Logo Bigger have details.

Sports fans swing for the lenses

We read once that human eyes lose their sensitivity to color over time, which is why memories of the green grass and blue sky from your toddler days seem so, well, green and blue. Fading eyesight explains why old people in Florida wear plaid pants, and perhaps why U.S. sports fans have now become dolts that watch 3-D television projections of the game while they sit in the very stadiums in which the game is being played.

Now we certainly don't mean to offend anyone who enjoys watching people in spandex bump into each other; in some countries that is not tolerated but here in America we call it football. Our point: The emergence of cheap, giant-screen, flat-panel screens is starting to encroach on reality. Panasonic chief Toshihiro Sakamoto opened CES this year with a 150-inch plasma called, fittingly, the Life Screen -- not to be confused with the Life Wall, another Panasonic treat that covers entire walls of a consumer's home. (Imagine it: "Honey, I told you to turn off that wallpaper!") Light-bulb-maker Philips has been playing with screens that intercept reality via clear glass, so you can look outside a window or wave your hand to grow a shade tree to block the neighbor's view.

No real news here except the fakery of colored images has been arriving for a while; U.S. office workers spend one-third of each day in front of a screen moving numbers and words around, then drive home to watch the tube. The Super Bowl is almost here and consumers are talking more about the upcoming ads, to be shown on screens, than the game itself. The players meanwhile will dance around a moving yellow line on the field that doesn't really exist, except for video projection and GPS camera technology giving fans at home a clear view of where the ball needs to go. Reality, it was lovely; we'll miss you when you're gone.

If wishes were horses we'd all ride like kings

Some optimist has figured out the terrible 14 percent decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the days between Obama winning the vote and Inauguration Day almost mirrors exactly a similar slump in the stock market right before FDR's presidency in 1933. And after FDR became president, the Dow rebounded with a wild 75 percent bull run upward in just a few months. It's lovely to think stocks may come roaring back (we suggest you pin this chart up on your wall and gaze at it fondly for the next three months), but the real lesson here is how fast markets can turn. Very few business leaders look ahead with contingency plans for what happens if the marketplace for their services tomorrow has shifted from that of today. Via Shelton.

A Thousand Words

Beautiful short by Ted Chung. The world changes when everyone has a camera.

Seriously, GOP.com, what do you want?

We took a close look at GOP.com today to see how they are countering WhiteHouse.gov, and have some free strategic advice for conservatives trying to rebound from Obamamania. Please, Republicans, blow up your web site and start over.

Here's why. If your audience doesn't know what to do, you fail. The point of any communication is to create a desired action. Direct mail: Respond. TV ad: Go buy our stuff. Newspaper report: Read and be enlightened. While Obama has been direct in his messaging (first, donate, now, support the economic recovery plan) the GOP.com site is all over the place. We count at least 18 calls to action:

1. Create a personal GOP profile!
2. Join the GOP Facebook group!
3. Contribute.
4. Join the Young Eagles!
5. Shop the GOP store.
6. Create a profile (redundant link).
7. Donate (redundant link).
8. Call talk radio.
9. Join GOP.
10. Register to vote.
11. Contribute (redundant link).
12. Path for (or to find?) elected officials.
13. Create MyGOP.
14. Get GOP stuff.
15. Make friends.
16. Visit the RNC's Center for Republican Renewal.
17. Download the GOP search bar!
18. Check the event in January!

We imagine a future Rush Limbaugh hitting this site, desperate to get involved in restoring the Republicans to power ... and falling asleep at his desk after 10 minutes of puzzling over what the hell to do.

For web strategy shops, we highly recommend you reach out to GOP.com and pitch them a redesign. The right is struggling and this bizarre communications approach is going to get them nowhere. It's a good test for your own business, too. If someone visits your web site, could they find what they want in 2 seconds? And can they understand what action you want them to take?

How to get things done: Obama publishes hard targets

There's a little link at WhiteHouse.gov that takes you beyond the Obama videos, blogs and policy statements to a whitepaper -- with detailed hard targets for Obama's economic recovery plan. It's a brilliant and risky chess move, and a model for how any business should break through the BOGSAT quagmire. (BOGSAT, as you're surely used to, is a Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around a Table that jaw away at issues but never get anything done.)

Why does this work?

1. Specific targets build momentum. Obama's own team is going to have to hustle if it is going to reach them. Metrics include saving 3 million jobs within two years, spending 75% of the plan's funds in the first 18 months, doubling U.S. renewable energy capacity within 3 years, computerizing every American's health records within 5 years ... you get the point. Obama is telling his own team what they have to do, by when.

2. Obama's critics now face a PR problem. Anyone critical of this plan -- and with billions of dollars of stake, the plan deserves scrutiny -- must contest the fact that it won't save jobs or double clean energy, etc. The hard targets make a tougher argument to fight.

3. Any alternative ideas better have better targets. If an opponent has another approach, he or she will need to explain how that new plan will achieve better results. Obama, by setting forth specifics, is inviting his opposition to create even stronger ideas. Go ahead, but you better include a number.

Twitter listens in on Congress. Are you to follow?

Digital guru Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli has mapped the Twitter connections between U.S. congressmen and women. He explains: "The direction of the arrows show who follows whom, and the size of the blobs indicates how 'popular' a given congressperson is among their twittering peers." Red and blue dots denote Republicans vs. Democrats. (Click map to enlarge.)

This is intriguing on two levels. First, you see some users -- primarily Republicans -- rely on Twitter for heavy two-way communication, vs. others who connect infrequently and only one way. That's the difference between pushing messages shallowly and really engaging.

But second, this points out that one value of social media lies behind the scenes, as outside agencies and companies learn to track the connections between individuals and use them for business intelligence purposes. If nothing else, this could help sales in other marketing channels. A classic approach in direct marketing is to target consumers who are "lookalikes" to other consumers. A recent study by AT&T found that social acquaintances within phone networks are 5 times more likely to respond to direct marketing offers, the logic being birds of a feather shop together, or buy the same stuff. Add it up, and social network maps create a new form of customer valuation model in which you can place values on entire networks of target consumers -- based on their interpersonal relationships.

Thus the real value of Facebook and Twitter may not be in their use as outbound marketing devices or even inbound listening for customer service, but in the intelligent mapping of communications between people ... for a God-like view of how humans interact, and how, perhaps unfortunately, those connections might be manipulated.

Remember, good copy can sell anything

We work in the ad industry and even we are speechless. Via Million Monkeys.

Lego violence

We can't confirm if this is a brandjacking or actual creative by DBB, but if this really played out, Lego is showing balls. Imagine isolating a media buy to reach only parents in certain magazines that children wouldn't be exposed to (cause kids would freak out seeing this) to play upon the guilt parents have in using television as a babysitter for their children. It's enough to make them turn off the tube and get down on the floor to play a game with the little guys. Say, Lego.

Via Ads of the World.

USAtogether.org connects individual donors and vets

Tara H, above, was part of an Army squad working out of Baghdad on Valentine's Day 2006 when an IED went off, severing her right leg. Her husband is now deployed abroad and she's having difficulty making ends meet.

USAtogether.org is one of several web sites springing up to help such vets. Unlike other, larger organizations such as the American Legion, USAtogether allows donors to read individual profiles of vets such as Tara in need, and pass money or items directly to the individual whose story resonates the most. It's a nice one-to-one connection enabled by web technology.

NPR reports that the U.S. government provides a range of benefits for vets, but those injured in combat may wait months before aid arrives. Other vets earn as little as $25,000 after leaving the armed services, which doesn't go far as they re-enter society in a down economy without another job.

Study: TV has most influence on consumers

Television is still most likely to convince consumers to purchase your product. A recent study in the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Japan and the U.K. asked 8,824 respondents to rank the top media that sway their purchase decisions. In the U.S., 88% of consumers said TV had the most impact followed by 49% for magazines, 48% for online, 42% for newspaper and only 27% for radio.

Part of TV's pull may be the sheer saturation levels: Television still captures the lion's share of marketing budgets, or about 1 in 4 of all advertising dollars. More than $70 billion was spent on television advertising in 2008 vs. $23.6 billion online.

However, online has already eclipsed newspaper and radio in persuasion. Magazines, look out. Via Steve Hall.

Photo: Spoon

Obama's inauguration speech, illustrated

Graphic illustrator Brandy Agerbeck was listening to Obama's speech yesterday when a friend asked her via Facebook if she would illustrate it. So she did. Beautiful capture of the words, emotion, and call for personal responsibility from the new U.S. president. Via Kelpenhagen.

(Click image to enlarge.)

Google cancels newspaper print ad program

Here's a media planning secret: Newspaper advertising is the most difficult, challenging, and time-consuming form of media to plan and place. Most newspapers have unique ad sizes (forcing advertisers who run even regional campaigns to manage 100 different file formats) and rate structures that make the U.S. tax system look simplistic. And deciphering the actual reader demographics has become a nightmare as newspapers try to mask their declining circulations with fuzzy math of passalong readership and "Audience-FAX."

So it's no wonder Google will shut down its Print Ads program Feb. 28 because sales were not working. Print Ads was a clever idea -- in concept, allowing small-time advertisers to place bids on newspaper ads and build simple creative similar to setting up a Google Adwords program. The Google program did not end up achieving a meaningful "new revenue stream" for newspaper partners. Our bet is newspapers fighting falling ad revenues were not interested in giving cut-rate deals to the tiny requests flowing in from Google; Google, on its side, may have found the mind-numbing complexity of newspaper ad buying too problematic for its own powerful systems.

CNN makes today's inauguration social

CNN hints at the future of broadcast media by joining forces with Facebook today. If you log in to CNN's live feed of the inauguration via the web, CNN will automatically recognize your Facebook account (if you have one) and post a window to the right allowing you to comment on the events with friends. It's a simple, brilliant move recognizing the trend of younger demographics to multitask online while watching the broadcast news.

T-Mobile moves you

Oh this ad is sweet. T-Mobile had a team of dancers gradually take over the Liverpool Street Station in London last Thursday, surprising all spectators.

The spot aired on television a day later and is now hanging at No. 2 on the Viral Video Chart with more than 1.5 million views. Simple ideas are the best. Via Swiss Miss.

Our Sunday night podcast on Twitter, Burger King, and why we love Memphis

Last night four of us marketing types jumped on a Skype conference call to trounce the advertising news of last week. You can listen to our debate here:

- Is Twitter still overvalued as a marketing tool? Or has the microblogging service become the ultimate form of citizen journalism and market research?
- When Burger King killed 20,000 Facebook friends, what did Facebook know and when did it know it?
- Does Circuit City closing down signal darker days for all advertisers, or just that U.S. consumers are choking on homes filled with electronics?

The only thing we agreed on is if you are a major advertising executive, do NOT diss your client's hometown via a Twitter message to the entire world. Thanks to Bill Green of Make the Logo Bigger, John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, and Bob Knorpp of the BeanCast for a fascinating debate. Knorpp is the guy with a velvety voice, or as we suspect, just the most expensive computer mike.

Twitter and Facebook could replace Google and Windows

The photo above shows 14 buttons that allow an iPhone user to leap online. Notice anything? Both Microsoft Windows and Google search fields are missing from each access point.

Advertising strategist Alan Wolk posed an interesting question today on which social media tool is better, Twitter or Facebook. We ask a different question: Will Twitter-Facebook replace Windows-Google as consumers move to mobile web access? A portion of our debate with Alan:

Twitter and Facebook are filling two different roles in the new mobile space. Let's think about the year 2020, when the majority of consumers will use cell phones instead of computers to get online.

- Mobile screens are 90% smaller than laptops or desktops -- creating a huge shift in how operating systems work and how advertisers can squeeze in
- Mobile communication OS must be simpler -- creating a problem for Microsoft, noted for bloated complexity
- The common web browser will no longer be the single platform for getting online -- creating a huge threat to Google.

See it? Twitter and Facebook could replace Google and Windows. To date, Windows has been problematic on mobile. Google is so worried about consumers walking around its browser front door with mobile phones that it jumped into the mobile OS design business. But we don't need either to do what we want on a cell phone -- Twitter lets us email, and Facebook helps us connect more broadly online. Facebook is becoming a nice operating system that lets you manage photos, video, and documents. Add a good spreadsheet program and who needs Office?

Microsoft grew big in the 1980s based on a common PC platform. Google rose in the late 1990s using the common ecosystem of the web browser. But with mobile handsets having no common platform, and no need for a common web browser to get online, both Google and Microsoft face trouble. Twitter is wonderfully suited as a mobile email communication tool, and Facebook is an operating system for people on the go. It's not which will win -- it could be both.

UPDATE: Alan Wolk notes that Google does have mini-applications that allow iPhone users to get quickly online, and that such applications are quite popular. We agree. However, competing mobile applications will continue to erode "access share" from Google on smart phones as users just click on a Facebook button etc. to get where they wish to go.

Photo: Aghong

Burger King to Facebook: Cancel our campaign and you'll be our best friend

Here's a nice roundup from Slate on Burger King's latest bizarre campaign for the creepy King character. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the devilish Penn & Teller of ad agencies, launched a Facebook application inviting users to "sacrifice" 10 friends in exchange for a free burger. The campaign went wild until Facebook shut it down, claiming it violated user terms or some such by notifying online "friends" when they had been unfriended.

The campaign played off of the superficial nature of many online connections, but also proves advertising is now a seed to get large networks -- or best, mainstream media reporters -- writing about you. The story got press in The Wall Street Journal and Ad Age.

Hm. Any chance Facebook was in on this game from stage 1 and played along to "cancel" it for its own buzz? Naw. That would be just too clever, right Crispin?

LiveRail survey: 18-24 group now watches more web video than TV

Take this one with a grain of salt but it spots the trend. Online video ad network LiveRail conducted a survey of 400 people under age 25 via Facebook and MySpace and found 53% spend more time watching online video than TV. The small survey group and biased method of data collection -- let's ask youth online if they spend time online -- create a rather unscientific finding, but one worth watching. Many brands, including the ad agencies that guide them, are moving more communications to online video in 2009.

What's the impact for advertisers? LiveRail says click-through rates on advertising video overlays are 1.2%, nearly 10 times higher than CTRs on normal banner ads. However we note that click-through rates on banner ads were once above 5% when they first launched in the 1990s, and as the novelty wore off banner CTRs fell rapidly to the current 0.14% range. Video advertising may be the new marketing frontier but as online clutter grows, ongoing testing of different vendor formats needs to be part of your plan.

Star Wars, retold by someone who hasn't seen it

Joe Nicolosi asked his friend Amanda to explain Star Wars, even though she hasn't watched the movies. So she did. Wonderful example of how word-of-mouth propagates messages, and the errors that creep in no matter how hard you try to control your brand.

Avoiding the Microsoft branding mistake

David Pogue posted a funny question on Twitter today slamming Microsoft for yet more product complexity. We have several colleagues launching new business ideas in 2009, so we thought we'd replay a similar complaint on branding from James Joaquin, venture dude from Bridgescale Partners. Back in June 2007 Joaquin took Microsoft to task for its clunky brand architecture:


Brand architecture is how the names (and corresponding positioning) of your various products and services fit together. Many companies evolve brand names into a morass of complexity because of internal arrogance -- "Hey, we have a new product, this is REALLY important, let's give it a COOL name!" But if you consider how consumers think about you -- rarely if ever at all -- then you might admit simplicity in branding could be more successful.

Here's a test: Name 10 watch brands. Now for each watch brand, try to name 5 sub-brands. Can't do it? Exactly.

Now, let's see how Google manages a similarly complex product line: One brand + clear description = new product name. So simple. Which approach do you think helps customers find, and better yet want to use, the products?

Hudson River plane crash: Almost out of time

Yesterday afternoon we saw this photo of US Airways Airbus A320 floating in the Hudson River and were mesmerized, upset, strangely euphoric. We saw it again this morning and thought, hm, already know that story. Reviewing it this afternoon we thought, ugh, the composition is horrible -- and that cell phone camera has lousy resolution. What a crappy photo.

Why does the value of this image decay over time? Why is "news" more powerful when recent? Bill Green has a nice rant today about the rush for consumers to become reporters via Twitter, even if it leads to inaccuracy, with mainstream media reflowing the reports to get as close as possible to the actual moment of the news event. A picture of a bird being sucked into an engine would be powerful, but 1,000 times more so if posted online only seconds after the plane hit it.

Robin Le Poidevin of Leeds University wrote a few years back that human perception of time may be an actual sixth sense; even if your eyes and ears were shuttered, you'd still note the passage of time by the simple thoughts flowing in your head. He wrote "perception of temporal duration is crucially bound up with memory" -- that is, your memory acts like a radioactive particle decaying slowly into the past. With every passing hour, your experience of the world moves from colorful reality to grainy, black-and-white ghosts.

Humans judge sensory input in context -- so the closer something happens to now, the more powerful it seems because it is associated with all the recent, still-vivid memories flooding your mind. Our brains, of course, quickly forget things, even those that we manage to transition to long-term memory ... so as our mental context to judge events degrades, we may devalue the events that happened next to them on the same mental clock.

A kiss this instant is exciting. A minute ago it's a warm memory. A decade ago and the event dissolves into a story in some dry novel, barely worth a revisit.

Perhaps our modern itch to quicken the pace of news reports is more than media frenzies or technology enablers, but instead tied to evolution, the fact that what happens at this exact second -- or close to it -- may swing our survival. An inbound storm, a report of lions in the savanna, word that the clan next door is preparing for war are all threats our ancestors met and survived to pass their genes down to us.

So we watch what happens close to us in our random location on the spectrum of time. This explains why you throw out old magazines, even if you haven't read them, or why grainy photos from amateur cell phones make Page 1 in national newspapers. We care about what is close, not distant, and that includes the vast fading spectrum of time.

With ratings down 23.9%, MTV sexes up

You can almost hear the executives at Viacom, MTV's parent anticipating an 8% slide in operating income in 2009, pound the board table shouting: GIVE US MORE SKIN!

MTV's audience ratings are down 23.9% in fourth quarter 08 vs. the year prior. The masses of teens are moving from TV viewing to web sites, social media and mobile, so MTV is tarting up new reality shows such as "A Double Shot At Love" where bisexual twin women in tiny bikinis try to decide whom to have sex with. We like the subtle promotion where one hints she has an extra part. The twins' last names -- we can't make this up -- are Ikki.**

Now, dear prudes, let's pause and consider the Darwinian pressure on content producers to evolve sexual content -- because sex still works. In 2008 we saw beavers selling Kotex feminine products in Australia, animals lap-dancing for Orangina in the UK, Calvin Klein baring Eva Mendes' breasts, and our personal over-the-top favorite: A Burger King paper tray liner showing cartoons of vegetables cavorting in a red light district. The Kotex-beaver spot drew howls of protest when it first launched but later was credited with capturing 2% more share of Australia's $250 million tampon market ... in just a few months.

Hypersexed advertising also creates a halo effect of public relations, as media tut-tuts over the supposed scandal and provides millions of dollars in additional free advertising. Some of today's best agencies, such as Crispin Porter, practically build in "public scandal" as a second line on every advertising media plan.

Finally, offline media must compete with the no-skin-barred online world, in which full nudity (as in this promotion for Elave) can be used in videos and sent around with no FCC to stop the message. Sex sells. Sex creates PR. And heck, the online competition uses sex everywhere. It all adds up to more provocation in the year ahead as mainstream media advertisers get desperate for a little more consumer love.

** CORRECTION: Our agency has an eyewitness account from Sarah Ely, who notes the MTV twins' names are Rikki and Vikki, hence the double-K Ikki. "In the first episode the challenge was for guy and girl teams to lick frosting off of mannequins. They were at it for like two hours." Now we must tune in!

Social networks: Not just for kids anymore

Pew released its latest report on social media yesterday, with the headline that more U.S. adults than teens now use chatty services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. As a percentage of each demo, teens are still more likely to socialize online; but in terms of sheer numbers adult use has skyrocketed from only 8% of those with online access using social media in February 2005 to 35% today.

The Pew survey unlocks a few surprises. Social media use is concentrated in urban areas (34% of online users) vs. rural (23%); no surprise there. But whites (31%) are less likely to use online social media than African-Americans (43%) and Hispanics (48%). And perhaps most surprising, while 17% of teens said they use social media to flirt online, 20% of adults do the same. Since adults tend to be married and teens do not, it means you grownups out there are being very, very naughty.

Ford: Drive fast and you kill plants

Notice anything green at the right of this dash display?

Ford and Smart Design have released a prototype for the dashboard of the future -- an electronic display that uses iconic visual representations to convey information clearly, without distracting, so you don't crash the car. One of the nice touches is a fuel-efficiency symbol at right. Ford research showed consumers often want to get a "high score" for mileage, so the display uses an organic symbol of growing leaves to convey your impact on the planet. Go easy on the gas and the leaves bloom; accelerate hard and the leaves wither and die. Clever.

Via David Armano.

Secret to online targeting: Hello, neighbor

One of the great myths of online advertising is that publishers can accurately dissect the demographics of a given web site's users. Quantcast uses cookies and comScore uses research panels, but all major online metrics companies monitor only a fraction of the millions of web sites that consumers actually consume. And even of sites they do measure -- how do they know who you are, at the PC screen? Or if it is you or your spouse or kid or the dog somehow perched by the home office desk pawing at the keyboard?

David Honig suggests that the simplest way to improve online ad targeting may be to recognize the relationships between similar consumers. He wrote in OMMA Magazine that AT&T Labs Research and NYU ran a study in 2004 looking at response rates from telephone "network neighbors," or people who communicate with each other frequently:

"If they found one network neighbor to have responded to a particular direct mail offer, then sending the same offer to his network neighbors resulted in a three- to fivefold lift above any targeting technique not informed by this network-neighbor data."

OK, the study used phone networks and direct mail, but put the media formats aside for a moment. This is an amazing finding, if you think about it. These consumers had nothing else in common except that they communicated with each other regularly via the telephone; when direct mail hit them, they tended to act like a clone of their friendly counterpart. The researchers called this "homophily," in which people attract friends with similar interests who like the same products or causes -- and have the same Pavlovian responses.

Honig suggests this approach of mapping "neighbors" online for ad targeting may eventually replace demographic targeting; rather than pitching an ad for diapers to women ages 35-44 with children and HHI above $100k, you'll serve the ad for diapers to friends of women who have recently bought diapers. Birds of a feather shop together.

Photo: Estherase

The 128 failures of George W. Bush?

As the pregnant U.S. election nears its delivery date this month there are plenty of cries rising from both sides of the political chamber. The left scores one with this microsite listing 128 executive branch "failures" since 2000. The site was built by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan news organization criticized in the past for favoring rightist political groups. This go-around, however, George W. Bush gets berated with hyperlinks to complaints spurred by emails from 4,800 government employees.

Left or right, right or wrong, the microsite is notable for how compelling it is as a form of political commentary. It's branded under "broken government," certain to grab attention. The 128 articles form a powerful argument, and in-depth analysis -- based on government reports and wide sources of journalism -- create a McKinsey-ish fact-based pyramid. Whatever your story, when you build it on detailed sources the argument is hard to topple.

(In the spirit of fair play we'll note the conservatives' complaints regarding the left soon.)

Via Guy Kawasaki.

TiVo makes search simpler on TV

Why is it so hard to find stuff on TV? Parents still struggle to find that show on dinosaur bones while clicking over R-rated material on HBO with the kids watching in the family room.

TiVo announced at CES last week that it is improving television search functionality to mimic that on Google -- now consumers can type in the first word of a show they wish to see, and all the corresponding options pop up. This simple move may accelerate consumer drift away from primetime programming, which peaked way back in 1983 when 105 million people watched the last episode of M.A.S.H.

TiVo and similar DVR devices are making advertisers nervous, because they allow consumers to record shows and fast-forward over commercials. This risk is compounded by the so-called convergence of internet with television, in which consumers could surf any video online and avoid all advertising from traditional broadcasters. "Convergence" has stalled for years, due to the conflicting standards and hassle of hooking up various boxes to your television, but it's coming closer. Wired notes this month that "Sony, LG, Toshiba, Panasonic and Samsung all unveiled Net-connected TVs and enhancements enabling ... the ability to access online videos seamlessly from Youtube, Netflix and Amazon, without requiring a peripheral device." TV will never go away -- humans like large-scale theater -- but the ads on it soon may be avoided altogether.

Defending luxury prices in a down economy

Brand strategist Martin Bishop kicked off an interesting debate on methods to defend the price of luxury goods in a lousy economy. Some commentators suggested marketers who discount luxury brands are showing a sign of weakness.

Here is our response:

It is not true that if consumers require a price cut, marketers have not done their job.

Economist Richard Thaler noted decades ago that consumers require price framing -- a reference point by which they can determine if they are getting a good deal. Every product really has two prices, a usually higher mental "price A" by which you judge the value, and the "price B" you pay. If consumers judge the difference to be positive, they feel they get a good deal; if the difference is negative, it appears to be a "rip-off" situation.

Talbots is a luxury clothier that uses price framing brilliantly -- a $120 sweater is expensive, but if it is marked down 40% from $200, the woman shopper thinks she's found a bargain.

Marketers have always played this game, in many ways -- not always using discounts. Luxury goods seek to disguise the price differential by obscuring the first reference price. Gee, a diamond costs $3,000? Well, that could be a good deal, because as a consumer I do not have transparency into what the reference price is. Obscuring the reference is a common pricing strategy -- you can do it with luxury branding (a Lexus costs more than a Toyota even with most of the same components) or with simple variations of bundling (think of Omaha mail-order steaks which include free knives and add-on packets of food).

The story here is that consumers are bad at judging value, and so typically look for a reference to see if their deal is better or worse. Luxury brands disguise negative value for consumers -- the fact that consumers are paying a very high surcharge for a product or service really not worth that -- by clouding the reference price.

In a down economy, the mask begins to fall off. Diamonds that have been positioned as $3,000 icons of love that last forever begin to look more like shiny pieces of carbon. It's not that marketers are doing a worse job; but rather outside inputs of information -- news about the economy, fear that one may lose her job -- create a new level of awareness that helps consumers figure out the "real" reference price. The bottle of perfume that costs $80 suddenly looks like scented water worth 80 cents. In times of caution, consumers in essence open up their judgment inputs to more sources of information, like deer hunted in the wild. This heightened sensitivity gives them a better fix on the real value of the product.

All of which is saying, yes -- luxury brands will take a hit, as the illusions they present on the reference price wear off. Discounts on luxury goods are not a bad strategy -- the dismal market is going to force brands there anyway -- so instead of fighting downward price pressure, try new ways to control the perceived spread between the reference price and reality. Coming soon: $4,000 diamonds now 33% off.

Photo: Laura-Beth.

Dentyne tells website visitors to get lost

Brilliant. Via Slate.

A year of edits in OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative, user-generated project similar to Wikipedia in which volunteers can upload GPS data on road locations -- creating perhaps the world's most accurate map. The video above shows one year of edits from users around the globe (with white flashes showing map edit uploads). It's a brilliant snapshot of collective intelligence at work, with a bit of dark irony: all this labor was done amidst a global recession for free.

Video animation by itoworld.com.

$100k homes use more DVRs. Don't touch that remote!

Speaking of video shifts, Mediaweek reports that more than half of U.S. homes taking in $100,000+ in income subscribe to time-shifting DVR devices: those black boxes that allow you to record a TV show, play it back later, and potentially skip over the commercials. The Mediaweek headline is a little misleading -- it is not true that "more than half of $100k homes time shift" since we suspect many consumers have a hard time with the damn remote controls. But the trend among the most affluent consumers is definitely worth watching.

The irony of ads pushing video online

More than 1 in 4 U.S. households now have a DVR device allowing consumers to skip over ads, and marketers are scared silly. Ad Age just reported that NBC and CBS may not exist in their current form in a few years. The darkest worry for advertisers and content publishers is that broadcast dollars may turn into online pennies, if consumers ignore interruptions online and drive down the value of ad inventory.

So it's ironic that we find this online FilmFellas discussion by Steve Weiss of Zacuto, a filmmaking product shop, explaining that advertising is one of three powerful forces pushing video online.

Force 1: Good tools. Online video took off in 2005 with YouTube but the initial quality was fuzzy. Recent improvements in high-definition cameras, falling costs, and sites such as Vimeo that stream video in HD are changing the game.

Force 2: Your ego. Any design shop or marketer or artist who ever filmed anything is familiar with the soul-crushing pain of having a committee screw with your vision. With online video, creators can control their own output, and that's a powerful draw.

Force 3: Advertising dollars. Weiss points out that advertisers will gradually shift funding away from traditional broadcast -- where consumers can skip over ads and call up television only at the times they want -- to online video, where ads can be inserted with more control and (theoretically) 1to1 personalization.

Ah, but don't listen to us. Watch these guys chat about it over wine.

Daddy, where did the Internet come from?

Wikipedia tells us "the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP)."

If you ever wondered what the heck that means, here's a crisp tutorial. The vignette is a sterling example of how video can explain complex ideas more clearly than text alone.

Better Homes vs. a better brand name

One glaring mistake some marketers make is insisting on one brand in online communications -- when consumer behavior is to pass through numerous sites related to your product or service. Here Dan Hickey of Meredith Interactive discusses why they moved away from the well-known "Better Homes & Gardens" brand to create a new microsite "pure to food and recipes." The new site, Mixing Bowl, is still in development with Ripple 6.

Extending your brand online to carefully selected, focused consumer needs can create a hub-and-spoke system to pull awareness toward you. To put it another way, the old 1970s branding argument that your iconic name must be focused to grab a "position" in people's minds no longer works, when consumers search through millions of sites looking for specific answers. People want what they want. Let them find it first, and then they may come find you.

New York Times sells the cover

Call it a sign of the Times.

Today The New York Times began running full-page horizontal display ads on page A1. USA Today started the trend years ago when it stuck small display boxes at the top of inside sections for advertisers such as Northwest Airlines. Most editors have resisted this, especially on the front page, the most hallowed ground for top editorial stories. But with NYT revenue down 13.9 percent in November from the year prior, readers bailing and advertisers retrenching in the recession, it's natural that NYT would consider selling more space.

This doesn't always work so well. Front-page ad placement comes at a premium, and when our agency has tracked the actual responses from front-page banner ads for clients, we found that consumer responses often don't keep up. Large papers typically require 13-, 26- or 52-week commitments for Page 1 display ads, making such visibility a bit of a risky proposition.

Any advertiser considering such placement would be well advised to install a measurement system to track responses from each individual ad. It's the only way to evaluate whether what feels good -- being next to the major news -- ends up as a good customer report.

'Heavy Rain': 2009 may be year when AI looks real

"Heavy Rain" is getting closer. This computer video game, scheduled for release in 2009, is developed for PlayStation 3 by French studio Quantic Dream and moves the technology of 3-D human rendering forward to include flowing hair, tears, wrinkles, and the type of twitching, blinking, pupil-dilating eyes only seen in people in reality.

If it works as planned, the game may be the first to overcome The Uncanny Effect -- that slightly creepy feeling you get watching modern animation that still isn't quite right, you know, Tom Hanks as the dead-eyed conductor in 2004's The Polar Express. This unnerving effect was conceived by German psychologist Ernst Jentsch in 1906: artificial bodies, he said, that approach realism look even worse, like eerie dolls at Grandma's house that are almost-but-not alive and therefore seem possessed.

Heavy Rain also poses some questions:

- Artificial intelligence: When artificial human faces become totally believable, will we perceive artificial intelligence even if it does not yet exist? It's one thing to set up computer simulations that act like intelligent responses; but if the face presenting it seems human, the mind behind it may suddenly seem real, too.

- Dual standards for morality: What happens to the morals of society when our avatars, or self-drawn images that we present online, look real but still take actions that real society would condemn? It's one thing to play an online video game where you shoot cartoon characters; when the game becomes total immersion in reality, are we then committing real murder?

- A second economy in which all rules, including advertising, change: Virtual worlds have come and gone, but in each advertisers have failed to make an entrance (See: Second Life). When the virtual becomes so beautiful that it transcends our own world, the temptation to move our minds there will be huge. The early forays into virtual communication (online war games, social media communications) show that advertising from the "real world" is often unwelcome.

Put them together, and the appearance of reality in new worlds may make fiction seem real, causing seismic shifts in the morality of what we believe, the values in how we act, and the tools we use to build or exchange wealth. It all goes on sale in a few months on your Sony PS3.

Vimeo killed the MTV star

In one more sign that advertisers are beginning to be cut out of the media loop, online video service Vimeo offers a music video channel with no commercial interruptions -- from professional pieces with full CGI animation to work by upstart bands. Man, when we were kids, we had to put up with commercials to find stuff like this.

Know your meme: FAIL

When exactly does a standard FAIL become an EPIC FAIL? Where do these silly, pass-along internet memes come from? What is a meme?

Watch and learn.

Speech of 2008: Mark Pesce on hyperpolitics and hyperconnectivity

On June 24, 2008, Sydney-based consultant Mark Pesce gave a speech at the Personal Democracy Forum at Lincoln Center, NYC, that changed our world view on today's technology. His point is humans always develop tools first and then, only much later, figure out what to do with them. As society tries to understand what computers and internet connectivity mean, we may not know for hundreds of years.

Pesce notes:

"For at least three thousand generations, we’ve had big brains to think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence.

"Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent and conservative. This posed a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, long known as ‘the sapient paradox’: if we had the 'kit' for it, why did civilization take so long to arise?"

Pesce goes on to suggest we are entering an age of hyperconnectivity, where fluid access to all the world's information and to each other -- through the cell phones that now connect more than half the planet -- will change human empowerment. Small groups might rise up in new political structures. Old governments may struggle to defend themselves against these power redistributions.

We don't know what the future will bring. It will surprise us, and it may take centuries to resolve the new social-media connectivity we have created in the recent decade.

Transcript of Pesce's speech is here. Follow him on Twitter here.

Why didn't you guys try Motel 6?

Our friend Bill Green illustrates the recent pay-per-post blogging ethics solution: Pay Per Thought. Everyone can pitch everything. We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

(Click image to enlarge...)