Debating the ethics of SEO

Ad guru Bob Knorpp asked recently "Why do tech people hate SEO?" As you probably know, SEO stands for "search engine optimization," a controversial approach to elevate a web site in Google search results by either stuffing it with content that Google may pick up on or creating inbound links from other web sites to make the content on the site appear more relevant. It's all a bit of gamesmanship to put your brand somewhere it may (or may not) belong.

(UPDATE: SEO expert Michael Gray suggests that the description above is flagrantly inaccurate. For the record, SEO involves changing web site content, HTML coding, and relations to other web sites to allow content to be found more easily by search engines. Poor examples, or so-called Black Hat SEO, can include "keyword stuffing" or filling pages with tons of keywords to try to trick search engines, a naughty no-no, but if you read Michael's comments in full below you'll see there's more than one way to skin an SEO cat.)

Bob wrote,

"Internet purists pride themselves on the idea that the Web is a world-wide leveling of the playing field. It is a place where anyone can rise to the top based purely on the quality of their thinking and expression. In-bound links and being part of the conversation online are benefits that are earned over time...

"SEO, however, 'cheats' that cycle. Thoughts and ideas that have no relevance or that may not offer the best solution can be transported to the top of the search results over-night. And frankly, that drives the tech community crazy."

We responded,

"We have met the SEO enemy and it is us ... because humans have a tendency to pollute every ecosystem, including advertising systems. We did it with phones (telemarketing, now almost dead), email (spam, now wildly annoying and ineffective), radio (Clear Channel once ran 12 minutes of spots per hour and killed ratings, then later retrenched to 9+ minutes with a 'Less is More' campaign to try to woo advertisers and listeners back), and now social media (think of bloggers shilling $500 Kmart gift cards to try to build link Ponzi schemes, throwing the beautiful names their mommies gave them out the ethics window).

"I write this not to say that any form of media is 'bad' -- but rather, just as farmers who rush to herd their sheep into a common grass area to feed their own flocks might destroy the grassy commons, every individual's incentive to be heard can destroy the greater ecosystem. What marketers usually fail to see, in their individual lack of self-control, is we *all* need a healthy environment for advertising to succeed."

What do you think? Is it fair to try to manipulate the link structure of the web to make your own material rise to the top? Or is there a point where exploiting a networked system goes too far?

Photo: Hobo

Godspeed, staff of Rocky Mountain News

Scripps shut down the Rocky Mountain News today. We often write about channel shifts with an analytical eye, but the video above and these photos of the Denver news staff learning their fate show the human cost of changing media habits.

NYT skimmer lets you skip the ads, yet see more ads. Here's how.

Jason Moriber at Wise Elephant points to a new prototype interface from The New York Times which lets you rapidly skim over news content. He writes:

"It might not be pretty, but it matches the online trend of users skimming through feeds, reading over posts, grabbing the nuggets they want/need ... I often say 'react to the behavior of your market, follow what they are doing, not what they are saying.' This new interface from The New York Times appears to be on this path."

The new NYT skimmer format is perhaps most intriguing because it ditches the banner ads that have been encroaching on more and more of the visible real estate on the NYT home page. (See Apple monstrous ad format from last Monday.) But there's a trick -- if you click on any of the article headlines at skimmer, you land at a real NYT inside web page complete with ads. And the ads are more contextually relevant, since NYT can serve them next to the content you want to read. All in all, a nice victory for both marketers and consumers -- faster access to the news you want, smaller and less-obtrusive ad formats, and the potential for ads to offer you something relevant, thus driving up response rates. We say, please NYT, keep it live. Bookmark it here.

TV and print push kids to the web

If you have children you know they are drawn to anything web related. We can hardly get our iPhone away from the wee ones. So it's no surprise that MRI reports children 6-11 leap to the internet to research products they see in offline ads. About 46% of kids report they visited a web site they first heard about in a commercial. Within those numbers, the skew tends to older kids 10-11 who have more access to the net and sophistication.

The implication goes beyond children for marketers who often segment media plans and examine inquiries from each channel -- TV vs. radio vs. print vs. web banners vs. SEM -- as if they were separate Olympians competing for a gold medal in Greece. That's a mistake, since one media channel may feed another. Broadcast and print still work to build awareness, and then the web captures the curious as they explore for more information. Integrating your measurement to capture the impact of all media touchpoints won't be easy, but until you do, don't turn off the TV.

Black swans, Schrödinger's cat, and your own crossroads

We spoke today with a gentleman working on a business plan for a very clever, and potentially lucrative, business. Research is required to tune the concept, and especially to predict which types of customers will be most interested. So we suggested that instead of focus groups or quantitative studies, he instead stage a small web campaign, insert a snippet of Quantcast code into the banners and landing pages, and use it to match inbound visitors to the vast data sets of user behavior online -- which would pinpoint the exact demographics of the audience who likes his offer.

You know. Open the door and observe who walks through it.

Data is dangerous because it lulls us into false security -- we often want to predict what will happen based on erroneous theories, and then fail to see the reality transpiring before our eyes. Wired notes this week the meltdown on Wall Street was tied to a single math formula that allowed investors a shortcut to assess hugely complex risks (um, big mistake). Our Twitter colleague Max Zeledon points out Nassim Taleb's thesis that major events are really unpredictable; humans in hindsight try to make sense of the disorder in the universe by linking data points into logic flows, when the reality is Black Swans -- things that shouldn't exist -- often just pop up. You can bend your mind thinking about the paths of fate; see Schrödinger's cat and then ask which of yourselves is going in to work tomorrow morning.

Sometimes data can predict events, if screened carefully; Google does this beautifully with its little known Flu Trends site, collecting user Google searches for flu remedies to predict outbreaks in the United States two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control. Tel Aviv University professors are sorting Gnutella music searches by the location of consumers to predict when small bands will spike into bell curves of popularity. And in our favorite example, a simple chart comparing home prices vs. rent over the past 28 years indicates clearly that the U.S. housing market was due for a massive headache in 2009.

So are we humans vain to try to see the future, based on the data at hand? Or does randomness really make forecasting impossible? We ordered Taleb's Black Swan tonight to learn more. Until then, we'll keep trying.

Photo: Dietrich

'Nice not to see Cheney': As Obama speaks, Congress Twitters

As President Obama took the podium last night, members of Congress did more than listen. They started tweeting on their Blackberries, sharing text messages 140 characters at a time.

"One doesn't want to sound snarky, but it is nice not to see Cheney up there," typed Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Republican Rep. John Culberson of Texas went further, broadcasting video live from his camera phone. It's all reported in a brilliant column by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who writes:

"Some members called it a new age of transparency, a bold new frontier in democracy. But to view the hodgepodge of text messages sent from the House floor during the speech, it seemed as if Obama were presiding over a support group for adults with attention-deficit disorder."

Call it the new duality of consumer media consumption. Even as we participate in live events, we feel compelled to contribute, and new social media broadcast tools make it simple to carry on side conversations. The impact for marketers is both positive and negative. Pro, disseminators can listen in to instant feedback on what people think digesting the message. Con, your audience may tune out. Heck, the President can't even capture their undivided attention.

What you can learn from the North Face iPhone app. Hint: Think free.

See the red logo above? Notice how small it is?

Dirk Singer, chief of the London-based Cow PR shop, has a nice review of the North Face iPhone app, which gives skiers free information on snow conditions. "Though it contains a link to the nearest store, North Face knows better than to interrupt users’ ski holidays with constant brand info," Dirk writes.

This reminds us of the recent Bud.tv failure, which by comparison pushed the brand hard and made it difficult for users of the entertainment site to derive any content (Bud.tv had an extensive registration/log-in process that required your driver's license). Unlike North Face, Bud.tv failed because it didn't offer enough free value first before trying to identify (or sell) you, the user.

Wired editor Chris Anderson has been making rounds talking up his new book Free, filled with the concept that the rapidly diminished costs of data transfer and storage mean prices for many services are also approaching zero. In this competitive arena, marketers need to provide some level of service for "free" ... while in reality they hope to make money by selling goods to a fraction of the users. As Chris has noted, even if you sell to only 1% of your audience, if your audience is big enough, 1% of a large number can still be a large number. North Face has gotten the free-vs.-selling balance right. Next time we head north to ski, we'll check out their iPhone app ... and then maybe buy some gear along the way.

NY Times: All the news you can't see below this ad

The New York Times revised its web site today to make room for a new ad format that takes up one-third of the visual real estate. First up, Apple, with big sound, crayonish animation and flipping pages. We asked our colleague Jim Knipper, an internet display guru, for the technical term. "That's called a big-ass ad," Jim said.

The trend continues NYT's stretch to sell more of its sacred news space -- back on Jan. 5 NYT sold ads on the cover of its print paper for the first time. We're conflicted. From a media buy, the new, large, beautiful formats are sure to get noticed. But as a news consumer, the only next step we see in making these ads more intrusive is if they give us electric shocks as we sit in front of our keyboard or flip through the paper. As news organizations lose traffic and ad revenue to the web, and then within the web lose even more to the long tail of niche web sites and consumer-generated content, they must try new tricks to keep advertisers engaged.

So bully for you, Apple. Now where did we put that news?

Oscar winners, U2 album leaked? On web you can find what you're looking for.

Last August a Dutch fan of U2 walked by Bono's holiday villa on the French Riviera and heard the singer's voice booming out of a sound system. So the fan recorded the tunes -- tracks from U2's first album in four years -- on his cell phone and posted them online. Problem was, the album wasn't to be released until this spring; Bono was simply enjoying a private blasting of his new record. U2 managed to get the four songs taken down from YouTube, but then last week perfect digital copies of No Line On the Horizon appeared again on the internet two weeks before hitting online music stores.

So we weren't surprised when someone began passing around this memo showing the Academy Award winners before tonight's broadcast. Who knows if this is a hoax -- and that's part of the point. The new publishing and file-sharing tools are blending reality, opinion, paid sponsorships, untruths and even lies, seeding a thorny mess for content publishers such as awards auditors or rock bands. Chris Anderson has argued for three new "free" business models (best illustrated by David Armano) where producers learn to give more away for free on the front end, to maintain some semblance of control and revenue in the back. In other words, you can't stop the flow of digitized content to the free.

Hey. If Mickey Rourke wins, all bets are off.

Is Google search usage falling?

Something funny is happening at Google.

Organizations using pay-per-click Google ads are seeing costs rise, and to date the excuse has been increased competition. (Google ads are an auction-based system, and as more companies shift ad dollars online, even in a recession, the jostling pushes prices up.) Google reported healthy results in fourth quarter 2008 with $5.7 billion in revenue, up 18% from Q4 2007. "Search query growth was strong," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

But Google's rising revenue may mask that people are using its search engine less.

When we visit the search giant's own Google Trends for assessing search volume, all signals are down. These graphs from Google show five years of search volume based on the average for the entire time period. We punched in a series of common phrases (see blue text at top of each chart) that people would seek online.


As the economy slowly entered a tailspin, search queries for "financial services" trended down -- when you'd think people would be researching brokers. "Debt consolidation," perhaps the hottest topic as people fear losing their mortgages, also declined after a peak of interest in 2006.


Love is perennial, but apparently guys searching for flowers are about 20% off since 2004.


Well, let's see how tech enthusiasts are using it. Surely people researching shiny new digital toys would start at a search engine ...


Or we could try disease. The aging U.S. population continues to age, and unfortunately cancer occurrences rise as people get older.


Last try. Sex. A human need. Let's pick a phrase that might be queried by both men and women:


Aggregate use of Google for common search terms is fading. Why? Consumers continue to grow more comfortable with the internet and may not need a search front-door to navigate. If you want lingerie, you now know that Victoria's Secret has a web site. And the shift of consumers to user reviews, blogs, Facebook, and user-generated video are hours not using Google.

Google remains the single most effective form of advertising media -- because you only pay when a customer actively searching for your service clicks on your ads, and the costs to generate leads are still far below all other media. Even with escalating competition and slight decreases in demand, PPC Adwords must be part of most marketing budgets. But the trend is one to watch. Consumers are already moving to social media, and soon cell phones with tiny screens will be the main path online. Google is still the leader, but its pace is slowing down.

Bud.tv dies. Is your web lead form next?

Ad pundits seem pleased that Bud.tv has kicked the can. The site drew heavy criticism when it launched, and Adweek editor Brian Morrissey has perhaps the best analysis of how Bud.tv failed by trying to be a content portal in a world of disseminated internet entertainment.

We wrote a year ago that one major problem was the lead form, or more accurately the sign-up process. Bud.tv asked visitors to create accounts with a complex age-verification system that included your driver's license number. The site launched with a $30 million Super Bowl blitz and content by Kevin Spacey's Triggerstreet and Matt Damon's LivePlanet, but instead of reaching the goal of 2 million users per month, traffic hovered around 150,000 uniques, then slid. Anheuser-Busch tried to fix the site with help from guerrilla New Media Strategies. Bud.tv eventually was redesigned to give away some content previews. Alas, fail. At last check Alexa gave Bud.tv a traffic ranking of 1,296,883 among all web sites; by comparison, this niche blog's ranking is 958,442.

There is an important lesson -- web sites who hope to build audiences or sales need to give away something of value before asking too much of users in return. Anheuser-Busch was in a tough box, trying to promote beer and so being forced to verify the ages of its participants really before they got to the juicy content. (We hear there were wild girls-on-film parties inside, but never made it past the bouncer.) Registration processes or online lead forms that request too many data fields are a sure way to kill the buzz.

Rebranding God

When GodTube.com launched in August 2007 it grabbed 1.7 million unique visitors in three weeks, becoming the fastest-growing site in the U.S. But even though 82.2% of Americans believe there is a heaven, the God-specific branding may have been too niche. The site rebranded Feb. 2 as Tangle.com, a "family-friendly Christian" site with a shift in focus from simply sharing videos to broader social-media connections. To date Alexa and Quantcast show the renaming has not moved traffic volume.

Will the Tangle name broaden the customer base? Or will leaving God behind alienate users? Ah, the perils of picking a brand in a world where diversity rules.

Via Patrick Evans.

Take the Amazon Kindle sales logic test!

In its fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, Amazon.com, Inc. reported $3.63 billion in North American segment sales, $3.07 billion in international segment sales, $2.89 billion in worldwide electronics and other general merchandise sales ...

Oh yes, and Amazon reported no sales data on the Kindle.

This is a noteworthy PR move because analysts and pundits are lauding the Kindle as being a hot-seller despite the fact Amazon has released no sales figures for the e-book device. Amazon pushes the Kindle (now updated in design) on its home page constantly, and crows it will transform how people read books. Stephen Dubner over at Freakonomics, usually an intelligent writer, illustrates the buy-in when he notes: "although Amazon is famously quiet about releasing sales figures, the consensus is that the Kindle has been a big success."

So let's do a logic test: Say you are Amazon and you launch a new technology product to great fanfare, and the numbers roll in, so you:

A. release the sales data to boost your stock, since you've exceeded expectations;
B. don't release the data, since true figures wouldn't meet expectations and thus would hammer your stock.

Hmm. No, really, Amazon, we believe you. Feel free to comment below with the actual Kindle sales results.

Zuckerberg deletes his Facebook account

Good clean fun from Joy of Tech and All Things D.

The credit crisis visualized

Improvements in online video quality are seeding new educational tools. Not only can you watch free lectures from MIT or Stanford, you also occasionally find brilliance from upstart designers. Here's a wonderful animation of how cheap credit and low interest rates convinced investors to upend capitalism as we know it.

By Jonathan Jarvis as part of his thesis at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His other work is worth viewing, too.

What everyone missed about the Facebook fiasco

There's been lots of chatter since The Consumerist pointed out Facebook changed its terms of service so that its license doesn't expire after users leave. Bloggers cried foul, thinking Facebook wanted to "own" their content forever even if they delete their Facebook accounts.

We told BusinessWeek yesterday that everyone is missing the point: It's not about Facebook wanting your content. Facebook wants to keep you in a prospect database forever.

It's simple, folks. Facebook, like Google and YouTube and MySpace and Twitter, is building an enormous data set of millions of consumers, their demographics, interests, and interpersonal connections. Facebook now has a list, if you will, of 175 million people, what they like, and who is just like them. This information is incredibly valuable to marketers.

Of course Facebook does not want to reduce that list. If 5% or 10% of Facebook users delete their accounts per year (as the social media site, like others before it, begins to crest and fade), Facebook would have to continuously update its prospect database. Since much of the value of that data lies in the connections between people -- which allow marketers to perform lookalike modeling, proven in studies by AT&T to quintuple response rates to advertising -- scrubbing the list of dead accounts would be a royal pain.

The real story here is Facebook is anticipating customer churn so has expanded its legal language as a preemptive strike to keep the data on your relationships, even after you leave. Perhaps Facebook's execs realize that all social media sites have a limited window of popularity, so it's best to lock in the customer database value while you're at the top.

So stop worrying, people. As we told BusinessWeek, Facebook doesn't want your baby photos. It wants you and the relationships you hold.

Photo: Marco Bellucci

Obama launches Recovery.gov, the great threat to advertisers

Liberals will love it. Conservatives will hate it. Advertisers will have heart attacks.

Tomorrow The New York Times technology section and WSJ.com will be reviewing the new Recovery.gov web site, which launched today to showcase how the stimulus funds are being used to perform CPR on our economy. It has some nice touches: Omnipresent web video, registration for email updates, chance to share your personal stories, a timeline of activities. MSNBC will run a puff piece and Rush Limbaugh will have histrionics.

But the real story is advertisers are scared, because Recovery.gov is one more illustration of how large and complex organizations (such as the federal government) are bypassing traditional media sources (CNN and Fox News) to speak directly to the public. And when big players talk to small consumers directly, the old model of third-party interception with advertising gets pushed aside. The issues driving this are manifold:

+ Low-cost mass media -- the White House can set up a web site anyone can access for a few thousand dollars.
+ Almost-perfect access to scheduling -- news of new information sources travels extremely fluidly, so consumers know almost instantly that a major new source (Recovery.gov) has launched without reading TV Guide.
+ A plethora of free media platforms -- YouTube, Twitter, Blogger -- give enterprises of any size free video and text publishing tools to set up their own transmissions.
+ Growing consumer comfort in finding, sharing, and adding to source material -- perhaps the biggest trend of the past 5 years is people yearning to participate directly in how information is shared.

It's a lovely move, watching people become more creative with more access to more programming. Except it is squeezing the financial sources that make it all possible. With nary an advertiser in sight.

The president gets 100 days. You get 90.

If you know someone about to take a new job (and in this recession that's a lot of people), tell them to read The First 90 Days. It's the best book we've seen on the psychology of succeeding in a new organization, and has implications for ongoing management roles as well.

Here's the gist: New managers have 90 days to prove themselves; your first three months set the momentum for your ongoing victories or failures; you won't succeed without a specific plan and milestones; and what helped you succeed in the past is not necessarily the same skill set required to thrive. For example, one major mistake new managers make is not recognizing the organizational context. Author Michael Watkins suggests there are four types of organizations, each with different needs:

1. Start-up
2. Turnaround
3. Realignment
4. Sustaining success

Based on your organization's psychology, you need to play a different game. In a start-up, people are excited but lack direction, so successful managers need to channel energy into rapid but focused execution. Turnarounds require overcoming demoralization. Realignment companies often require battling bureaucracy and denial ("this can't be done!") before the organization can reinvent itself. And sustaining-success organizations may sound ideal, but managers will battle complacency.

Watkins recounts the story of a brilliant former CEO for Coca-Cola who rose quickly through the ranks, a real numbers guy. Douglas Ivester knew the organization, was named CFO by age 37, was soon COO, and when the top executive suddenly died he seemed the perfect replacement. But Ivester didn't let go of the numbers, refused to hire a new COO, and reportedly fumbled strategic decisions such as acquisitions and a Coke contamination scandal in Europe. What made him succeed in the past had not prepared him for the future. Ivester erred as CEO, Watkins writes, because he didn't adapt his past brilliance to the new role's context.

As the world struggles in recession, organizations themselves can change. Managers who have thrived for decades should look around carefully and see if the needs of their team are changing. Is your sustaining-success group sliding into a reorganization, or worse, a turnaround situation? If so, how must you adjust your skills to fit the new dynamic?

Organizations are complex things. If you're stepping into a new one, you better understand your environment. Book summary is here.

Stop worrying. The recession is helping true love.

At first it looks like bad news. The National Retail Federation projects that annual Valentine's Day spending fell from $122 per sweetheart in 2008 to $102 this year, surely dismal economic signs. But dig deeper and stats show consumers are simply shifting spending to less-costly indulgences. Starbuck's has launched instant coffee while flat-panel TV sales are bombing. Consumers cut V-day spending by nearly 20% but bought more chocolates instead of roses.

We still have needs but are looking for new sources of gratification.

Curious about where this trend might take us, ahem, we looked up the factors behind impulse buying and found that even in a down economy, impulses still rule. Psychologists break down shopping motives to external and internal factors. External motives include advertising (of course), distractions, and influence from others, all potentially declining as we now avoid the malls. But internal motives may be more prevalent -- loneliness, sadness and anxiety.

The economy has fueled anxiety, which propels consumption in new ways. Researchers Rajagopal Raghunathan and Michel Tuan Pham once noted that sad people tend to chase high-risk/high-reward activities for "reward replacement" -- the classic flush 40ish guy in a sad marriage springing for a new sports car -- while in anxious times humans prefer low-risk/low-reward choices, something that satisfies without risk of harm. This is why condom sales are up. Admit it. You're freaking out and want a hug.

Marketers in this economic maelstrom are well-advised to rethink how their products can communicate lower risk and simpler pleasures to potential buyers. The new mantra for advertising is less flash, more comfort.

The pricing brilliance of Starbucks' $1 instant coffee

Imagine you're a marketing executive at Starbucks, caught between bloated retail overexpansion and a bad recession. Customers around the world are rethinking $5 cups of coffee. Dunkin Donuts and McDonald's are chasing you; hell, they just put up paneled walls. You gotta bring prices down but don't want to kill profits or erode your brand. What do you do?

Instant coffee. This week Starbucks launched an entirely new powdered-coffee product line, which will sell for $2.95 for a pack of three -- putting the price of a single cup of Joe under a buck. The official line reported by WSJ is "the market for instant coffee is so big, particularly overseas, they can no longer ignore it." Um, yeah. What's really going on is Starbucks is having its cake and eating it too, by differentiating its new low-cost coffee product a mile away from the expensive custom brew.

The genius of this is it creates variable pricing for essentially the same product. Just as some customers show up at grocery stores with coupons and buy canned soup for 50 cents less than you do (if you are like us and too lazy to scout coupons), Starbucks now can reduce prices only for the types of customers who really want a bargain. The other lazy types (um, us) will still walk in and somehow believe the ground stuff behind the counter is worth $4 more than the ground stuff in the instant bag. If 90% of people think coffee tastes better when someone else makes it, Starbucks has in effect only lowered its prices for 10% of its customers.

Margins protected. Just add water and stir.

Photo: Jeff Kubina

"25 Things" goes viral, but only after mutations

If you want your message to go wild, you have to let other people mess up your message.

That's the lesson from Slate's analysis of the evolutionary roots of Facebook's "25 Things" craze -- a silly meme in which people online asked other people to write two dozen-plus bits about their personal lives. "25 Things" was a viral message, or bit of culture that spreads like a biological infection among the human population, cresting and falling like an epidemic.

What's interesting is when Slate searched for the root cause of "25 Things" it found the idea didn't start with 25 items -- the idea of asking friends to tell X number of things about themselves, and then invite others, has been bouncing around for years. In 2008 there was a chain letter requesting 16 things; in December Twitter friends began asking each other to write seven. The concept mutated, like any disease, until it found just the right recipe of virus -- apparently 25 -- that allowed it to spike across the population.

Slate spoke to Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at University of Texas, who models infectious diseases. She mapped out the epidemic curve of the "25 Things" meme and found that at its height of growth, every user successfully got 1.27 other users to write their own stories. However after only two weeks, the fad crested around Jan. 30, then collapsed.

Marketers interested in making messages go viral should note that this meme didn't scale until it had evolved from numerous strains -- 7, 16 -- that failed. The implication for advertisers trying to launch the next big craze is it is not enough to have one really cool idea -- instead, launch a whole bunch, let people play with the messages, until Darwinian evolution tweaks one just right into a virus the population simply cannot resist. We always knew you can't control viral propagation; we knew you had to seed the messages everywhere including in blogs; now, apparently to succeed virally, you also have to give up control over the content.

Photo: Gaetan Lee

A look behind the silly Pepsi brand manual

Ad people are chuckling over the supposed Pepsi brand manual now floating on the internet -- which compares the logo development with Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Grecian mathematics and the earth's magnetic field. But we say bravo, TBWA/Chiat Day or clever jokester behind the brand architecture, because someone had to motivate the company to do something.

The lesson here is you have to sell hard to get anything good done.

Group execution requires consensus, and consensus is the enemy of genius because it usually requires negotiation, modification, and dumbification. The problem grows bigger with every extra body in your team. For example, two people come to agreement relatively easily, but first they must juggle four possible outcomes in their negotiations to get to "yes-yes."
But the network dynamic expands exponentially as you add more decision-makers. A team with only five people has 10 internal debate lines and 40 potential decision points. This is why committees often stall.
Given such multiple players, there is never a simple path to consensus -- and there is a 39/40 chance in a group of five that the idea will be modified into porridge. The only pathway to brilliance is either a strong leader with vision, or a supporting team that sells an idea way too hard (see: Pepsi brand manual). Gary DiCamillo, onetime CEO of Polaroid, was famous for "80% solutions," the belief that there is never enough data to prove any initiative will work, so if one is 80% of the way to assurance, why, go ahead and launch. The Pepsi brand document may be a spoof, but it illustrates beautifully how difficult it is to convince a team a single idea has merit. Hey. If a circle worked for Da Vinci, it will surely sell soda.

Via This Is Herd and Brandflakes.

Simon Hoegsberg's sliding camera

A stirring look at humanity by Simon Hoegsberg, who photographed 178 people on a bridge in Berlin and morphed it into one photo 100 meters long. Via Make the Logo Bigger.

Advertising untargeting: Letting in only good customers

Years ago we gave a talk in Nashville about stealth marketing, or figuring out how to deselect the types of prospects you don't want responding to you. This sounds harsh but every business has customers who cost far more to serve than they generate in profit, and marketers carefully try to avoid them. Direct mail campaigns do this all the time by selecting a list of "best prospects" (and by default ignoring others).

Now individuals can let in only the right customers, too, with Oodle classifieds. Oodle, which yesterday scored a $5.6 million round of additional funding, sells everything from $600,000 homes to $150 rat terriers. The company is experimenting with a "social classifieds" app on Facebook that allows users to screen out the weirdo factor -- you know, unsavory types that may respond to your offer to sell a bedroom comforter. The concept is your classified ad will only appear in front of people whom you preview first.

The idea has pros and cons. On the plus side, if you are selling a beloved vinyl collection to make room for your new baby nursery, you may want to only let it go to a friend or someone whom you believe is an appropriate audiophile, and not the anti-Beatles nut who plans on burning the records for a local PR stunt. On the con, redlining customers has a touch of prejudice in it. Back in the 1930s the federal government tied itself in knots by withholding mortgages in inner cities, contributing to urban decay, and racial profiling has gotten insurance and credit card companies in hot water.

Right or wrong, now you can sell your personal stuff to only the people you know something about.

Photo: Only Alice

Paid vs. earned media by David Armano

What's the difference between paid digital media (online advertising) and social media? David Armano explains in this beautiful graphic that new social media communications have to be "earned" -- they require listening first, human involvement as you engage, and lots of time as you build trust. Only then can you seed the network with the message you hope self-propagates. If your boss keeps asking why you can't just launch a Facebook or LinkedIn page to promote your new product, print this out, blow it up, hang it on the wall, and draw a circle around the upper right dashed line labeled "time intensive." Social networks require authenticity, and authenticity takes time.

(Click image to enlarge.)

Michael Phelps' bong: The marketing effectiveness of hypocrisy

Bill Clinton did it. Barack Obama did it. And this week the world saw Michael Phelps doing it -- via a photo of the uber-Olympic athlete with his lips wrapped around a bong, smoking marijuana, cast on the internet. By Friday one of Phelps' sponsors, Kellogg's, had dropped him while others took a more forgiving view; Omega and Speedo accepted his apology (and probably had calculated Phelps' controversy would draw even more attention to their advertising: Phelps is wearing an Omega watch in the bong photo).

Marketers should love scandal. Scandal grabs attention, even when it's not that big a deal. Psychologists Jamie Barden of Howard University, Derek Rucker of Northwestern and Richard Petty of Ohio State have noted that the order of events is what usually provokes a response -- you could eat 10 pizzas and announce you're going to lose weight, and no one would care, but say you plan to lose weight and then eat 10 pizzas and people will love the mini-scandal. What's fascinating is both scenarios are really the same thing -- some guy trying to lose weight and eating too much -- but one order makes people mad.

Now we don't mean to make light of drug abuse; the NIH reports that by grade 12 more than 40% of teens have tried marijuana, a puff with 50% more carcinogens than tobacco smoke and which can permanently lower your IQ. It's serious stuff, harms kids, and Mr. Phelps as a well-compensated role model should have known better. But we also feel a bit bad for him doing what so many 23-year-olds do -- screw up -- feeding the public's desire to hunt hypocrisy.

Perceiving hypocrisy is really an attribution error, in which we leap to think a mistake by someone else is indicative of "who" they are while if we make the same mistake ourselves, we blame our environment. If you smoked pot yourself in college you probably look back and think of the peer pressure, the stress of exams, your own immaturity, the breakup with the boyfriend or girlfriend ... hey, the world made us do it.

But we don't know what other people are like, so startling observations are mesmerizing because we assume the news reveals hidden secrets. In the recent past elegant actress Zhang Ziyi was caught disrobed at a beach, schoolteacher Betsy Ramsdale was caught on Facebook pointing a gun at the camera, and U.S. Senator Larry Craig was caught taking a wide stance in a men's bathroom. Just as the shock of profanity stirs the amygdala organ in the front of our brain, evoking a fight-or-flight response, the shock of others breaking our trust makes us stand up and take notice. Scholars at University College London have found that emotional instigation makes events more likely to stick in our long-term memory. Observing others and quickly determining who was breaking social norms probably helped humans survive through many wars, famines, and Ice Ages. Our quickness to judge helps us live for tomorrow, and we remember the judgments that stand out.

It's enough to make marketers welcome the controversy. Nicely played, Omega and Speedo. Kellogg, do you wish to reconsider your position?

Video is becoming like Legos: Building blocks everywhere

Our favorite news snippet of the year so far is an estimate, reported by OMMA, that 70% of consumer time online is spent creating or sharing content -- a rather earth-shaking trend that will further damage the ad industry. Advertising results are down in social media even as use of such networking sites skyrockets.

We thought of this as our 8-year-old boy filmed his first stop-action Lego brickfilm, above, and we helped him get it on YouTube and Vimeo with a few simple clicks. Sure, the focus was off, but a child in a single afternoon created a mini-animated short film. Cameras and digital creation devices are now everywhere, so easy kids can use them. No third-party advertising interception in sight, but maybe that's half the fun.

Blocking online ads is now artistic

Marketers have feared for years that online ad blocking will take off. Add-Art is the latest addition to these clever little programs that swap out all the banner ads on your computer screen. In this version, users' screens get artsy.

The new program also gives visibility to aspiring artists. Add-Art founders explain: "The project will be supported by an small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming Add-Art shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators."

Such services are growing. As of last February, only 2.5 million people had downloaded the Adblock version of banner blocking. Today that number is 11.04 million. Marketers, the art of avoiding you is growing popular.

Facebook valuation? Try $0.007 per hour.

Facebook celebrates its 5th birthday today so we checked in to see how its ad model is performing. Not well. Turns out advertisers think your Facebook time is worth less than a penny an hour.

Here's the math:
- Facebook has 150 million total users; 39.9 million are in the United States
- U.S. ad revenue is expected to be $208 million in 2009
- That works out to $5.21 per user
- Since the average user spends 2 hours a day on Facebook or 730 total hours per year ...
- The advertiser value of one hour of your time on Facebook is 0.7 cents.

The point here is not to diminish social media as a communication tool -- some analysts now believe consumers spend 70% of their time online creating and sharing content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But it shows ad dollars are not following as marketers continue to see weak returns from investing in social media channels. Not every channel is suited for advertising -- worth noting, before you throw too much of your ad budget in the game.

Photo: Vlauria

Google to advertisers: The consumer is here!

Google moves closer to just-in-time, just-in-your-space advertising with the new opt-in Latitude program. On the surface, Latitude is a GPS-based social networking service allowing you to easily find the location of family and friends. The service replaces Dodgeball, which Google purchased a few years back, and competes with other mobile-phone-based location services such as Brightkite or Vodafone's new Pocket Life. Our personal favorite is the almost-guerrilla YellowArrow.net project, which plasters real yellow arrows on locations with texting codes that allow you to dial in and get information about what you're seeing -- sort of a here-you-are-so-you-are-now-here loop.

Marketers of course are agog at the possibility of reaching you with messages as you approach the closest Starbucks or shopping mall. Now, with services such as Google, not only might marketers see where you are, but they could begin drawing connections between your geographic wanderings and those of your friends. We tried to figure out the privacy parameters reading Google's terms of service; um, it's a bit thick. The key points seem to be that Google can use any information gleaned from your observed behavior to serve ads, and change the terms at any time:

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information.

17.2 The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the Services are subject to change without specific notice to you.

17.3 In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.

Well, hey, that's fair -- Google is giving you huge value for free, consumers, so expect to be tracked. And take it all with a grain of salt. Back in 1999, in another life, we came across a marketing plan for a major handset manufacturer that would have sent text messages to consumers with coupon offers as they drove past exits to large shopping centers. Didn't quite take off. We'll see if consumers want to receive push messages on phones as they pull their friends across the map.

25 years later, advertisers miss their shot at Big Brother

Occasionally you read an insight so bright it hurts because you hadn't seen it first yourself. That's how we felt today reading Bill Green's riff that the Super Bowl ads all failed because not one was as good as "1984" -- the Apple TV spot that introduced the world to the Macintosh computer.

That spot was perfect. It was directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off of Blade Runner, and so shook the world when it aired in the third quarter 25 years ago that it was replayed on the evening news. "Can you believe what Apple did? It called IBM Big Brother!"

So here we are, now in that big-screen future, and we get spots about racing cars and aliens pushing TV and guys crunching chips so loudly that girls' clothes fly off. Bill lists nine total reasons why all these ads pale next to "1984," and his last is most plaintive: Context. "You relate to an ad based on how your life is going," Bill says, and if ever there were an opportunity to play savior against a dystopian disastrous environment, this is it. The global economy is melting, ice caps are soon to follow, the aging population is stressing social services, intellectual property rights are being tossed, bailouts may bankrupt our grandchildren, and that's just the news on page A1.

Maybe that's why the latest Super Bowl ads fell flat. On the 25th anniversary of "1984," advertisers missed a golden opportunity to offer a hopeful solution. Maybe Obama took the wind from their sails (the brand position for hope is filled). Maybe, at heart, creatives knew no current product is as inspiring as the original Mac (although we do dig that Audi). Still. Ad industry, it would have been nice if you had tried.

Read Bill's entire rant here for enlightenment.

Sometimes with Google it's flirtation, not a wedding ring

You didn't marry your spouse on the first date -- but didn't that first kiss count? Of course it did. Online marketers need to realize the same and not just measure "the last click" when quantifying online advertising performance.

Web consultant Avinash Kaushik points out that marketers running paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo or MSN need to evaluate search terms based on how they fit into the consumer purchase cycle. Some terms may appear initially to have poor performance ... but be a required step to lure the customer to your door. He suggests:

1. Category keywords are used by consumers in the early consideration phase. These terms are typically numerous, have low costs per click, and low results in terms of conversion to leads or sales.
2. Category and brand keywords are used as consumers enter active consideration. Results begin to improve, but bids on these terms become more expensive.
3. High-cost brand keywords are dominant as consumers get close to purchase.
4. And so-called "conversion keywords" are the terms that consumers type in when they are most likely to submit a lead or make a sale.

His point is all the terms are needed to provide a sequence that guides customers from learning about you to considering you to actually buying. Marketers who hope to manage the entire process most effectively should examine metrics other than hard results; flirting may take more than a single click.

ABC News' local iPhone portal play

Way back in the 1990s companies such as Prodigy, Earthlink, AOL and Yahoo were in a race to become your online "portal" -- the single-stop-shop for you to get on the internet. The buzzword of the day was "stickiness," meaning if you made your web site sticky, customers would return again and again.

About 2000 Google killed these arrogant hopes with its brilliant search engine, since then the main way consumers move online. Yet guess what? The portal play is returning on mobile handsets.

ABC News makes the latest bid with yet another "app" button for your iPhone. (Apps, on smartphones, are downloadable programs that allow users to leap online with a simple tap, and like the portals of yore create new opportunities for single content producers to try to make consumers stick.) ABC News has a nice offering, using the built-in GPS service in the iPhone to provide a feed of local news and weather ... and hopefully get consumers to stick around for 20/20, Charles Gibson and all the corresponding ad impressions.

Funny thing is, this time portals may work. Standard web browsers look horrible on most cell phones, and one-button mobile apps give you just the content you want -- weather, NY Times, Facebook -- with one simple click. Pew notes that by the year 2020 (no connection to ABC!) mobile phones will be the most common tool for consumers getting online. You can almost hear Google gasp in frustration as the big PC browser that made its ad model so powerful starts to fade from tiny handset screens.

How this shakes out is anyone's guess, as every content producer tries to create the ultimate single-button-widget for your handset. It also creates a devilish question for marketers -- if you miss the right portal, you may get shut out from consumers, so which of the millions of potential online apps do you pick?

It's all enough to make you hope Google creates a simple mobile operating system.

Ads failing, Facebook turns to research

Facebook advertising has some of the worst performance of any online ad formats. Click-through rates (the percent of ads that are actually clicked on) are among the lowest of any online ad buy, and while the ads can be purchased on an efficient cost-per-click basis, target populations tend to be tiny. The service now has 150 million active users, but if you drill in to reach a given demographic the numbers shrink -- for example, advertisers hoping to reach men over age 25 with college degrees in New York City end up with only 70,280 targets. Multiply those people by the 0.07%, say, who click through ad impressions, and you see the problem.

One ray of hope for social media sites such as Facebook is to give up on advertising models -- you know, pushing third-party messages to people who don't want them -- and instead move to learning models. Facebook announced at Davos this week that it is launching a market-research service to turn its vast subpopulations around the world into online focus groups. 150 million members suddenly become the world's largest market-research database. The service moves beyond marketing; for example, political leaders could ask populations in Israel and Palestine their take on whether current events will lead to peace, and adjust diplomacy (or, egads, wars) accordingly.

Flaws remain. The real-time reporting capability is offset by the skew toward young demos and an affluent, tech-savvy audience. But if millions of people are chatting and ignoring you, perhaps the best utility of the network is simply to listen in.