20 years of internet fads

Whenever you hear people caught up in the latest craze, thinking it will never end, point out this chart -- and remember how fleeting fads may be.

Our blurry world of optimism (thanks to TheBeanCast)

So a friend of ours has started an optimism campaign but before we get to such silliness and how it drives most of the consumer responses to marketing around the world, let's remember that randomness rules our lives.

It's simple. While every day you get up and go to work, carefully trying to control your income and pay your bills, if you think back to the major events that shaped your life -- your first job, the day you first met your future spouse, the moment of intimacy that spurred the 1 out of a million genetic match conceiving your first child -- it was all random. A second sooner or later on the sidewalk, you would have missed your lover. If you had been late to the job interview, you'd now be working in construction. A sperm out of line and your boy would have blacker hair.

Physicists tell us that the world really is a series of constantly dividing, multiple universes, and that you are here now because this version of you took one path home while in another version of the world another you went to the supermarket. The world keeps splitting because subatomic particles have been calculated to be in two places at once, leading to Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger's thought experiment that if you put a cat in a box and let poison either break open or not, tied to the subatomic particle being one place or another, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time -- until you open the box and lock the universe into one of its two options. As the atoms shimmy, so do we.

So if the universe has many options, perhaps philosopher Gottfried Leibniz was right and we live in the best of all possible worlds. After all, in only one will we survive. What is the response to any marketing but an attempt to secure happiness, beat the odds, and gain more protection/shelter/sustenance to put the alternate ending of death aside? Unfounded optimism not only deludes us that we're in control of randomness, but drives the global economy. We say lock this happy universe in -- so go sign TheBeanCast's optimism pledge now. If you push the right button, the cat in the box won't get hurt.

Photo: Pulpolux III.

87.3% of the time, you trust numbers

Why do people believe every number they see? Tonight social media guru David Armano rebroadcast a tweet claiming Razorfish generated $18.8 million in incremental revenue for H&R Block. It's possible; H&R Block takes in about $4 billion annually, so a 0.47% lift from online chatter could happen.

So we tweeted David back, asking how agencies such as Razorfish measure social media results, and he responded he didn't know. Meanwhile thousands of David's friends were forwarding the stat around to others online. This is not to poke at David, who is a truly brilliant and generous agency mind and has illustrated the nuances of social networks in ways that might make Edward Tufte blush. Rather, it points out the human fallacy of numbers.

We like numbers. 50% off. Buy 1, get 1 free. Perfect 800 on SAT. You're a 10. Numbers make us feel good, and if tipped just so -- say, $3.99 instead of $4.00 on a mocha latte -- we rush to respond. Numbers can even be fake and we take action. Look at the cover of Oprah or Men's Health or other quasi-entertainment magazines and you'll see lots of numbers -- 99 ways to lose weight, 7 steps to better sex, 3 new brownie recipes. Are 7 steps to sex too much or too little? Doesn't matter. We'll buy the magazine, read about it, and then lose weight while eating brownies.

Numbers lie. Yet numbers illuminate the truth about our inner needs. We yearn to predict the future exactly and if you tell us you can, we'll believe you -- at least 87.3% of the time.

Update: David Deal, VP of marketing at Razorfish, wrote us to note the $18.8 million figure was wrong -- an error by a panelist who pulled unrelated data and attributed it by mistake to H&R Block. Thanks, David, for the update.

TVs and microwaves: Consumers no longer need you

A new Pew study has gotten some buzz over the fact that consumers now view microwaves as more a necessity than television sets. The scary finding for marketers, though, is that most categories of household goods saw a 20-point decline in perception in the past three years as consumers began tightening their belts. You can almost hear the sales of big flat panels screeching to a halt. Marketers of all stripes need to rethink their messaging -- because what people needed yesterday is now just a luxurious add-on.

Via Brandflakes.

Barclays' Visa Black Card has a $495 annual fee. Should you, too, raise prices?

Our first thought after opening the mail to see an invitation to the Visa Black Card of Barclays Bank Delaware was, Wow, a credit card with a $495 annual fee, do these guys know we're throwing a recession here? After chuckling, we then did the math, and realized a direct-mail piece that cost $0.50 and had even a low 0.25% response rate would attract accounts at a $200 cost per sale -- meaning the $495 fee would pay off quickly even if almost no one responds. The Black Card, if you missed it, is Barclays' slightly downscale version of the black AmEx Centurion Card, a hyper-elite credit tool that allows you to basically buy your own private island. Barclays' edition comes with a concierge service that can help you find things like rare books, perhaps useful when alone on that island.

If all of this seems pre-economic-apocalypse-bubble-ish, there is an important lesson here: Perhaps your organization, too, should raise your prices. Barclays is simply positioning credit as an elite club, with a compilation of value-added services that might seem expensive to us, but to others is just akin to dropping $500 for a good night out. There's no harm here; only those willing to pay will reply, and then pay well they will.

This strategy is called price differentiation, charging some customers more for the same basic service -- as seen in every airline seat configuration. The guy and lady in first class get a glass of wine and a few extra inches of room, and in exchange for that $5 freebie they pay hundreds of dollars more for the same miraculous transport from NYC to LA.

Price differentiation is extremely efficient. It feels unfair at first, so play this game: Imagine you are trying to sell an old Beatles record. To your wife, it's worthless; to a collector who realizes it's a rare edition, it's worth $5,000. The collector will get much more perceived happiness from it, so if you find him and charge a small fortune, you both get an equitable transaction. In any supply of goods, some value the supply more than others -- shouldn't they pay more for the privilege?

Walk into a grocery store and see this in action. The woman in front of you pulls out a coupon and gets 50 cents off a can of soup. You don't. You're busy, you don't have time to clip coupons, so you value the discount less. You and that lady have just paid two different prices for exactly the same can of soup. The grocery store has optimized its profits by wringing more cash from you than her. And you both feel OK about it.

Charging similar customers differently for nearly the same product or service is a fine way to raise margins. In a perfect world, you might charge each customer a unique price. The trick is to attract the best customers willing to boost your profits without upsetting the masses. We say, try a Visa Black Card.

How much longer will we write about Twitter?

Adweek tests your attention span by launching a TweetFreak site filled with news about Twitter and we thought so Oprah joins Twitter and a week later all the mainstream press write about it and now an ad-industry pub launches a Twitter-specific news microsite for a service that doesn't yet make money from advertising penned by the usually unfaddish Brian Morrissey who tweets to promote it reminding us that in any bell curve of rapid adoption all things must crest because after all how long can any one concept like Twitter hold your attention even if Twitter now includes a Terminator game and then come to a cascading decline sort of like this chart of iPhone application usage fall-off clearly showing that consumer interest fades with time like the Fonz jumping the shark until a newer technology or communication stream pushes the now-old Twitter fad into the sad equivalent of a fax machine once thought an innovative marketing tool now sitting in the corner because after all how long can any one concept like Twitter hold your attention until the Möbius strip of technology bends again and then Oprah joins the new thing that replaces Twitter and a week later all the mainstream press write about it and Adweek even launches a new-technology-specific microsite penned by ...

Mad World æsthetics

Gary Jules was first to slow down the Tears for Fears song Mad World, years before American Idol. Here Jules shuffles awkwardly up to the mic. A guy with unkempt hair just starts playing the keyboard. Horrible production values. Lighting looks like our basement. But isn't it nice to see what art emerges when you get beyond high-gloss?

Toilet talk

We beat up on Joseph Jaffe a few posts ago about his advocacy of paid opinions. To show we're fair-minded, we say watch his clever review above of Charmin's bathroom marketing. We dig the iPhone app telling you where to find the nearest rest stop. Also, we've decided to start speaking in a Britash acksahnt.

Too busy to read a Nielsen web report? Click here.

London's Dirk Singer digests the latest Nielsen internet report so you don't have to. A few of his highlights: More people use online video today than email, but watch for only 6 to 10 minutes a day, so TV is still video king. Time spent using social media bypassed email in February of this year, so it's time your boss stopped snickering about Twitter. And mobile internet remains Peanuts' Great Pumpkin, the exciting dream that Linus stayed up late to greet but has not yet quite arrived.

Paid posts and the psychology of deception

Yesterday we dropped into a debate with Chris Brogan about the ethics of paid blog posts. Chris is on the advisory board of IZEA, a company that enlists bloggers to write about brands in exchange for payment. Some feel this is OK. Others, like us, think buying online opinions is an ethically challenged gray area of marketing communications.

The real problem, of course, is deception -- we can argue as to what degree, but there is no question that paid posts deceive by elevating a topic artificially and by inserting opinions more favorable because they have been bought. (This is one reason why Google seeks to ban paid posts from search results.) Even with disclosure saying a blog post is "a sponsored conversation," the conflicts of interest and levels of confusion are high.

Does Joseph Jaffe really like his Panasonic TV enough to write about it?

Or is Joseph tweeting because Panasonic is his client, for whom he organizes blogger junkets to build online reviews of Panasonic gadgets? And does Keith Burtis realize, in the exchange above, that he just stumbled into a paid conversation?

Degrees of deception are nothing new. Back in 1996 Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, asked 147 people to keep a journal of all the lies they told in one week -- with surprising results. Lies are extremely common in human communications; in any seven days, we tend to deceive about one-third of the people we talk to one on one. Men and women lie differently (men tend to be more egotistical, lying to inflate their personas, while women are more likely to deceive to appease hurt feelings). The wildest finding was that the intent of most lies was to be helpful. We use falsehoods to make others feel better. We even may need lies to boost our own self-esteem.

So what's wrong with a good lie?

All communication contains a spectrum of truth vs. fiction, but the closer we get to untruths the more cognitive dissonance we encounter. Since humans need to sort their way through life by making judgments based on outside information, we often rely on others to tell us what is going on in the world. Dishonesty can make us feel better; it can also be dangerous by skewing the facts in ways that lead to wrong assumptions. We may have an evolutionary bias toward the truth; cave men who lied about sabre-toothed tigers may have gotten their friends eaten, and only the skeptical survived to pass down genes.

Advertising, of course, is often filled with stretched truths; this may be why media have demanded for a century that advertising be clearly labeled, so that consumers can judge the communication with a grain of salt.

Lies and half-truths surround us. This probably explains why people fight so much over politics, since there may be no right answer. It also hints at why paid posts are so controversial. In a world of imperfect information, it strains our mental data intake to learn that supposedly authentic opinions online may, or may not, be skewed by cash changing hands.

Photo: Riot Jane

Design LG's next phone. Win $20,000.

Two years ago high school student Andrew Kim posted this "butterfly" concept for a cell phone and blogs immediately began buzzing. Now CrowdSpring gives you a shot at fame with a $20,000 first prize offered by LG to the artist who can predict the next big mobile handset design. Entries are scored by market potential, feasibility, creativity and polish -- and participants also get a free trial run of Autodesk rendering software.

Now we don't usually go in for this type of self-promotional-giveaway, except this one seems genuinely valuable to both participant and big brand. The real story of course is how for a few grand a major handset manufacturer can tap the brilliance of an army of aspiring designers and get good buzz ... but then, some designer is going to get noticed and be launched to fame with free software he or she downloads off the net. We love it. Now if only we knew the first thing about sketching in CAD programs.

Via Ross Kimbarovsky.

Rapleaf maps human relationships for offline sales

One of the coolest behavioral targeting trends we see is from emerging companies such as Rapleaf that map the connections or relationships between consumers. This is revolutionary ground, because companies can now predict what you might do based on what your closest human friends are doing.

Consider that a recent study by AT&T found that "network neighbors," or people who communicate often with each other, are 5 times more likely to respond to the same marketing offer, and you see why marketers are intrigued.

Here's one example of how Rapleaf enables this. Imagine you run an airline company and map data to realize that customer John Smith flies twice a year from New York City to Las Vegas. Now imagine you append information from Rapleaf, compiled from millions of online social interactions, and find out that John Smith has two college friends who live in Las Vegas. Putting two and two together, you could then send direct mail offers to John's friends in Vegas offering them discount airfares to visit New York City -- so they can fly to see their friend in reverse.

What's interesting about this?

1. It shows the power of social media in mapping real human connections that can make offers more compelling to consumers.

2. It shows that social media is a data collection source -- but the marketing implementation could be somewhere entirely else. If you can learn something about consumers by watching their behavior on Facebook or Twitter, the best sales approach may be with traditional offline marketing media.

3. It shows that people are watching you. Privacy guidelines aside, now with so much exposed online, for the first time the personal relationships and individual quirks are going into master prospect databases.

Photo: Josef Stuefer

We Are Hunted: Top tunes from social media

If you read The Wisdom of Crowds, at least the first 10 pages, you get that groups of people tend to be really smart in picking correct answers. So why not use the millions on social media to find the best music for your iPod playlists?

We Are Hunted is a perfect search engine for music, compiling the top 99 most-wanted tunes from internet peer-to-peer networks, Twitter, MySpace, and other online networks where people with better haircuts than us hang out. Wired has a complete writeup.

Stouffer’s correlation is not causation

Hey, we love Stouffer’s, but Jodi Beggs is on to something when she notes the pre-packaged dinner company stretched logic in a recent TV spot. Jodi writes:

This is the statement that first caught my attention: “Studies show that kids who have regular family dinners tend to get better grades.” While I am confident that this is a true statement, it’s not as meaningful as it appears. The advertisement is trying to imply that having regular family dinners CAUSES the good grades, so obviously the viewer should buy whatever Stouffer’s product is enabling the good grades…you don’t want your kids to grow up stupid, do you? In reality, it is just as likely that the families that have regular family dinners are more supportive in other ways as well that enable the students to get good grades. Or perhaps the students that have regular family dinners are the ones that aren’t overscheduled with other activities and thus have more time to study and get good grades.

We're all for good grades and easy food. Perhaps the Stouffer's claim is just advertising writ large; we all consume goods trying to increase happiness, or coolness, or perhaps even intellect, when the traits we seek were lying inside waiting all the time.

Hat tip to Jodi's blog Economists Do It With Models, worth watching.

2001: The comedy

A 16-year-old film student from The Netherlands edited scenes from 2001 down to a goof-fest voiceover from a film comedy. Makes you realize how much of what we think we see, read or hear in the media is forged by editors behind the scenes, slyly shifting our focus for more impact.

Lost in the clouds

Someone took this photo of the Space Shuttle launch. Incredible. Someone else took a video of the same launch, recording people disappointed with the spectacle as the ship got lost in the clouds. Finding the right perspective takes, well, perspective.

Via Rm 116.

Memo to publishers: It's all about controlling the outcome

The death of print has become such a cliché Paul Dailing recently penned an instruction manual on How to Become a "Death of Newspapers" Blogger. Magazine ad pages are off 26%, ad revenue at many larger newspapers is down 30%, NYT is chopping sections and the Chicago Tribune is cutting one-fifth of its editorial staff.

Why are newspapers dying and magazines gasping with asthma? It's not just about lost readers -- publishers have failed to help advertisers predict results, sort of like this card trick.

Advertisers provide magazines and newspapers more than 90% of their revenue, yet it is astounding how little publishers have done to help advertisers get more return from their dollars. Imagine if publications offered advertisers measurement systems to monitor the cost-per-response from every ad format. Imagine if publishers gave advertisers a host of case studies, results forecasts, planning tools, ad formats, tracking phone numbers, and testing schedules to make advertising work better over time. Imagine a print sales rep going over an advertising results report, showing a 20% improvement in marketing ROI and a series of specific steps for boosting ROI another 20% from the print ads in the next quarter.

You haven't heard of these solutions from your newspaper or magazine sales reps? Funny. Neither have we. Until publications help advertisers control the outcome, expect the death watch to continue.

Of taxing tea parties and simple prose

Americans pay far too much in taxes, to hear today's protesters tell it, and the "Tea Party" rallies against the tax code being held across the U.S. show how simple messaging can resonate. Simple, but perhaps not accurate. The table above shows the history of highest marginal tax rates in the U.S., which peaked at 94% in 1945, fell to 70% under Nixon, 50% under Reagan, 39.6% under Clinton, and 35% under Bush. President Obama has hinted he would return tax rates to the Clinton-era level, a movement that many on the right now call socialism but by historical standards is still a bully good deal.

This isn't to say who is right or wrong; we'd love to pay zero in taxes ourselves, if only schools and fire departments and highways could be built out of rain from the sky. The Tea Party concept is brilliant because it simplifies the message, evokes America's history, and makes protesting sound like a bit of fun. If you want to build a movement, don't talk details or history -- instead, create a catchy name. Don't miss Rick Santelli's original CNBC tea-party rant that started it all.

'Amazonfail' wins 1.2% of all tweets

Damn. If you're wondering why your organization should begin monitoring social media, consider that Amazon.com won 1.2% of all messages on Twitter this Sunday with the hashtag #amazonfail. Hashtags are little terms users put on a tweet so that others can find all messages related to a topic, and the fact that 1% of all Twitter users felt compelled to label their opinion of Amazon as a failure means the company had to take action.

The firestorm erupted after Amazon removed 57,000 gay- or health-themed titles from its main search function, including such risky content pieces as "Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography." Amazon apologized, first calling it a glitch, and then a "ham-fisted cataloging error." Point is, people are talking about your brand, too. B.L. Ochman has a good spin at Ad Age.

Convo Monitor: Who knew so many chatted about chocolate?

We think social media (Facebook, Twitter, your fax machine) is a better listening vehicle than an advertising channel. To test it, click over to Convo Monitor, a free service that helps you listen in on communication streams inside Twitter related to any keywords. Twitter, of course, is just one social media tool -- software such as Radian6 will let your organization listen in on millions of blogs, news feeds, and social media sites to identify the influential consumers who either love or hate you.

In fact, Radian6 is probably listening to this post right now and getting ready to comment. Damn them. Have we no privacy?

Via Darryl Ohrt at Brandflakes.

Pixazza: A price tag inside web photos

James Everingham was watching his wife search online for the shoes "Sex in the City" star Jessica Parker wore in a photograph and realized, wouldn't it be easier if photos carried embedded ads? His brainchild is now Pixazza, a photo-ad integration company that just scored $5.8 million from a Google-fed VC fund. When users scroll over online photos tagged by Pixazza, little price tags appear; move to a price tag and a window pops up explaining the product and where to buy it. Clever. Unobtrusive. Response rates won't be high, but then, with banner ads they never are -- so why not let those who really care find more info on the products pictured?

Learn to speak European

Raw ideas. Found near scratchpads, blogs, whiteboards, water cooler, tweets, talking after two beers with your boss -- all ways to float raw ideas in unrefined form. Many people in business are afraid of half-baked concepts. Messages need to be controlled. Approvals orchestrated. Politics managed. Unbound creativity might be embarrassing.

Sure, you'll make mistakes. But filters block the path to genius.

"Ways to Be Cool" via New Shelton.

Coolest little fake shilling we've seen in a while

We checked in on the pay-per-tweet service Magpie, in which people online agree to turn over their personal Twitter accounts to let ads run. The ads aren't disclosed. They look like genuine opinions from these people. These people get paid (a little) as messages are transmitted to thousands of online followers. Brands like Apple, Skype and Flip are participating.

Is this cool? Do such paid insertions in conversations break trust, even if "sponsorship" is disclosed, if the recipient can't tell the source of the opinion?

If we told you the Flip camera is the coolest little device, would you now believe us?

Do you see the problem?

LA Times sells sugar on Page 1, faces hypoglycemia

Like a kid grabbing a cookie not realizing the sugar is bad for her, the once-mighty Los Angeles Times has run a front-page advertorial article that reads like real police blotter copy. To wit:

"It's not every assignment that puts you in the back of a squad car, especially one that gives you a true glimpse into the hearts of the heroes behind the badge. This is the story of one such day when this reporter got a chance to ..."

... what? Investigate cops in a squad car? Cool, sounds like LAT is winding up for a Pulitzer.

Alas, it's an ad, and even with the clarifying logo at top, if we had an IQ below 100 we'd be tempted to think this is real news. We checked in with the American Society of Magazine Editors to see how the higher-brow glossy set manages advertorial copy, and they have strict guidelines: "For magazines to be trusted by consumers and to endure as brands, readers must be assured of their editorial integrity... advertisements should look different enough from editorial pages that readers can tell the difference."

And that's the rub. Whether newspaper or magazine, confusing the boundaries between ads and editorial helps no one in the long term. Misled readers tend to move away to resources they can trust. Nicely played, NBC. We pity all the advertisers riding in the response rate cars that follow you. Via Make the Logo Bigger.

Twitter's gray hairs

Surprise, surprise. ComScore reports the heaviest users of Twitter are adults 45-54, and the majority of the microblogging service's 10 million users are now adults 35+. If you thought social media was just for kids, watch Obama punch his Blackberry, or better yet read Frank Reed's riff on why wired networking attracts grownups.

Advertisers: Does this trend bode well or ill for your traditional media response rates?

Reader's Digest porn

We could debate all day whether this photograph of a topless woman cupping her breast is simply photorealism of cancer self-examination or the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of boosting newsstand sales. Reader's Digest is still the best-selling magazine in the U.S., with circulation above 10 million; when such a conservative pub takes its top off, you know magazine publishers are feeling pressure.

The real story of course is how sexual stimulation is the ultimate fallback in grabbing human attention, no matter how much we think we've evolved. Humans are still mammals awash in hormones. The Family Safe Media watchdog group estimates there are 68 million daily searches for pornography online, accounting for 25% of all search engine requests. Provocative nudity has been used to sell products since at least 1871. There's nothing new here; just ask the 1930s' Rockford Varnish Company. Good luck, Reader's Digest, getting that circulation up.

Seeing the negative space

Sometimes we get so caught up in internet ADD cool hunting that we fail to observe the real world around us, that thing with wind and trees and children and old lines from Shakespeare and coffee that doesn't come in $5 cups but still tastes oh so damn good. The warmth of a shaggy dog on a cool spring morning. The smell of garden soil, or flowers, or the grass, or anything that doesn't come in a bottle or filtered by indoor air conditioning. So we're taking a brief vacation next week and have decided to free our mind from this media-technology obsession. No more buzzwords. No more ROI. For one week, no more advertising idiot savant.

We'll write, but it will be about the space beyond our silhouettes. Or, to paraphrase Alan Wolk, the news beyond upscale urban 30something white male hipsters. Surely something is there.

Photo: Darwin Bell.

True/Slant gets funky with ad integration

If Facebook, Digg and The New York Times had a drunken ménage à trois, their lovechild might look like True/Slant, a new ad-inside-journalism web model. The concept is simple: Journalists write; readers comment to push up articles and their own personal fame; and advertisers get to write their own pages, too. The site is heavy-up with skilled authors formerly of NYT, Financial Times and Rolling Stone, but it's the ad integration that has Walt Mossberg buzzing.

Walt notes: "In a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists' pages, but will be labeled as ad content." It's actually brilliant integration -- the ad content has the heft of the real articles, but the clear distinction -- both in labeling and in authorship -- keeps the gray shadiness of sponsored posts at bay. The site even gives reporters a cut of ad revenue, inspiring them to write strong authentic pieces that attract a loyal following and thus more ads.

We like it. Now if only someone would clean up the layout.

So that's where newspaper revenue went

Dirk Singer notes that online classifieds grew by 84% over the past year and that for the past three years there has been growth every single month bar one. We bet when Craig Newmark began sending emails in 1995 with classified ads the big newspapers had no idea Craigslist would grow up to kill them. What's lurking around your business corner?

How online publishers can stop ad revenue from crumbling

A day after the Associated Press practically accused Google of stealing its content, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped before the Newspaper Association of America to explain his vision for the future of journalism. Yes, advertising will still work, Eric predicted, but the internet will continue to break down some ad models that rely on scarcity, because on the internet everything is ubiquitous.

What, oh what, can online publishers do in this cruel new universe where marketers can target customers online without paying high prices to web publishers? Why, get clever. Here are four ways publishers can defend their ad pricing.

1. Decommoditize your readers. Yes, marketers will use technological tricks such as retargeting to serve ads to publishers' readers without paying the publishers themselves. But publishers who add additional data about their readers could continue to charge high CPMs. Surveys, sign-up questionnaires, click-streams within a publishing network can all pinpoint audiences that are prime targets for marketers. Surely there is information inside the publishers' walls that can add value to justify higher ad rates.

2. Contextualize your content. Bloomberg.com, for example, offers a stellar closed advertising system in which marketers can target banner ads to certain keywords in ad copy, or within site searches. Brands are willing to pay for context that makes sense.

3. Band together. We received an idea from the vice president of a national news magazine that certain online publishers could form a group to resist behavioral targeting, or at least compare data sets among their readers to add unique value to marketers. The groups could align like-minded news organizations, industry verticals, or even customer verticals. Imagine, for example, a series of publications that encouraged retargeting only within their content networks -- perhaps even allowing noncompetitive advertisers to target each others' similar audiences. An insurance company wanting to serve banners to affluent men could chase respondents to an expensive men's watch brand, and vice versa.

4. Forecast results. Come on guys. We research media on behalf of marketing clients, and every time we ask an online publisher for forecasts on basic performance measures -- click-through rates, conversions, traffic, sales -- we get a dazed, hurt look. "Results? Um, we don't discuss results..." Until your salespeople can tell us what advertisers will get by advertising on your web sites, we'll be tempted to put the money elsewhere.

Some didn't like our recent BusinessWeek column suggesting ad rates will plummet for marquee web sites. We say, don't ignore the future. Dig deeper. Data cuts both ways, and if you play it right, you can charge for it. Hat tip to Miconian for inspiration.

Photo: Amanky

For a dose of consumer loyalty, try mGluR5

When faced with traumatic events that threaten survival — car wrecks, landing a plane in the Hudson, 9/11 — our brains often form stubborn memories that linger long after the threat is gone. So begins a report in Seed Magazine that researchers at Salk Institute for Biological Studies have isolated a neurotransmitter useful in "unlearning" bad experiences, a consumer skill almost required by marketers.

First, on unlearning: It seems that healthy brains regularly overwrite negative experiences -- it would be tormenting to think constantly of that place in the road where you had a bad accident -- and the sexily named metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5)  has a lot to do with it. Mice, when the mGluR5 genes were removed, simply couldn't forget bad things such as shocks associated with a certain sound. Mice with the normal genes could get over the trauma. In essence, this little receptor helps the mind heal.

Second, on marketers: Consumers fall into a vast spectrum of love and hate, and the ones that hate you may cause immense damage, a cascade of negative word of mouth that -- with new networked technology -- could go viral. The ability for consumers who have bad experiences with a brand to flip into peace, or better yet loyalists, is vitally important to any marketer with a churn problem.

So let's hear it for mGluR5. Without it, most imperfect companies would be toast.

Photo: Jasmic

Ad prices fall to new equilibrium, not end of the world

Eerie skies loom over the ad industry. On Monday in BusinessWeek we comment on the latest trend: How improvements in online ad targeting will draw marketing dollars irretrievably away from the old, big online publishers -- putting major web sites in the same profit pinch now facing newspapers. It's a bit of a paradox, really: the better advertising gets at reaching the right prospects with relevant offers, the more the people who live on advertising get squeezed.

But hold on. Is it really as dark as that? Bob Garfield, Ad Age columnist and author of the forthcoming The Chaos Scenario, thinks so. He counts down to doomsday for the ad industry in a recent column: Newspaper circulations have slumped 20% in two decades; The Rocky Mountain News is gone and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went web-only; ad pages in magazines are off 22% in one year; heck, Playgirl magazine shut down. Garfield concludes that in the modern world of micro-media, consumer control and abundant, free content, the old workhorse Advertising -- once required to drag media to your house -- must be put out to pasture.

That's wrong, because booms don't go to infinity and busts don't fall to zero. Humans constantly draw forecasts based on recent trends, and we almost always shoot too high or low. Just as your brother-in-law was certain you should take out a home equity loan in 2007 to invest in speculative real estate because property values always go up (uh-huh), now today everyone is crying that the old advertising models are dying forever. Yes, we're in a horrible recession and in a huge change in consumer modality. Yes, people are spending 70% of their time online creating or sharing content, not reading web sites or watching professional videos. Yes, tools such as DVRs are allowing some to skip TV ads, and new broadband feeds from the internet may pull eyeballs away from 30-second spots on CBS.

But what if we land at a media duality?

We think the shifts will continue but eventually reset, with an emergent human behavior that is a media duality -- watching the big screen passively while also typing on an iPhone. Reading a magazine with ads while scanning news quickly on a web browser. Humans have always wanted to create (see: arrowheads) and at the same time watch theater (see: campfire). Consumers have always longed to get something for free, and the 5 hours and 9 minutes they spend daily with live television is still a free temptation, supported by third-party advertising.

For a look at the future, observe teenagers watching TV. They use companion devices -- cell phones, laptops, game systems -- to comment or type or play while the larger images wash over them. Sometimes, this means the audience is tuning out. But often, they are engaged and sharing the experience more deeply with friends.

Advertising has always had problems. John Wanamaker commented in the 1800s that half of the money he spends -- oh, you know the quote. A recent 2007 MRI study found that more than 50% of the time consumers aren't paying attention to any ads at all. Yet advertising is still a good deal -- a minor interruption for consumers in exchange for lots of free content, a careful investment for marketers in exchange for responses that build a business. The price of ads is falling. But not the sky, at least not yet.

Photo: Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke of the Lightmark Project.

Life.com's glossy take on freemium

What would you do if you owned an old, tired brand and also about a million photographs? Why, give the photos away for free.

That's what Life.com is doing in its latest incarnation. The magazine, which had several lives starting in 1883 as a Puck-type entertainment vehicle, died as a photo mag in 1972, died again as a monthly in 2000, and finally really, really died as a newspaper insert in 2007. Life has now partnered with Getty Images in a beautiful web site that makes it easy for people to email or share photos from the vast collection of shots of celebrities, animals and news.

It's a perfect case study of Chris Anderson's "freemium" concept -- you get a lot for free, but Life will also sell glossy custom magazines or books from $6 to $89.99. And the photos are only free if you don't mind the ghostly Life watermark at the bottom of each image.

Well-played, Life. Browsing the images of history may tempt us to buy a book. Via WSJ.

They're shouting. Should you listen?

Dirk Singer at London PR-shop Cow poses the question: Does listening in on social media lead marketers to mistaken conclusions? For example, a recent Motrin ad suggested moms get grouchy and need pain meds after carrying babies around. Thousands of so-called "mommy bloggers" angrily protested in blog posts and on Twitter. Dirk writes:

J&J pulled the ad and apologised. I mean after all, judging from what was written about it, you'd imagine that millions of US mothers were insulted by the campaign.

But guess what? In a subsequent survey involving consumers at large (ie not just the ones on Twitter), 90% of women had never seen the ad and once they saw it the ratio of those who liked it was 45% positive and 15% negative. Meanwhile 32% liked the brand more and 8% only liked it less. In marketing terms, those kind of figures are a clear success.

To listen or not listen? It's enough to give you a headache.

Photo: CarbonNYC

Want news now? Twitter's search may rival Google.

BusinessWeek and Silicon Alley Insider debate whether Twitter's improved search functionality may one day rival Google. John Borthwick has the deepest dive, outlining a strong thesis:

1. Google provides search among static documents, but fails to sift the "now web" -- what is happening in real time in online conversations. When a plane goes down on the Hudson, social media sites such as Twitter are filled with news, while Google trails days or weeks behind. Just as consumers want new news, they also have an unmet demand for new search.

2. The web search market is growing mature and has only gradual increases in usage; but new verticals such as video search have grown extremely rapidly. YouTube (a smart purchase by Google) has turned into a major video search engine with 114% YOY growth November 2007 to 2008.

3. So what could scale big, fast, next? Real-time search from services within Twitter or outside monitoring programs such as Radian6. With 70% of all consumer time online now being spent in social media-type functionality -- creating and sharing stuff -- and not reading the web, real-time search is poised to become the next huge leap.

We wouldn't bet against Google, but tracking trends in real-time is surely appealing for many consumers and the advertisers who chase them. Looks like Twitter has found a business model after all.

Yahoo! releases ideological search

Breaking April 1 news from Yahoo...

Scientists at Yahoo! today released Ideological Search, allowing users to control the ideology of their search results for the first time in search technology history. Until now, many Web search users were offended by the facts, pages, articles, and blogs in their search results that contradicted their own personal beliefs and values. Furthermore, search engines were often accused of being biased in one direction or another. Rather than try to comply with a hard-to-define “search fairness doctrine”, Yahoo! Ideological Search will allow its users to personally control the ideological perspective of their search. Users can now search with confidence, knowing that their search results will perfectly match their ideology, and no results will offend them...

We laughed. And then thought, hey, there's a real market for this.

Now playing on your TV: Twitter and addressable ads

TVs are getting smarter, and while we're cautious about dropping $2,000 on a big box that may have outdated technology in 2 years, we like the looks of Samsung's new sets -- which include widget apps that run things like Twitter. Samsung says that by summer it will include Netflix and Amazon apps as well, allowing users to download HD movies.

Cable companies aren't taking this disintermediation lying down, though. Canoe, a venture of six of the largest U.S. cable operators, announced that within 6 weeks it will launch so-called "addressable advertising," or the ability for one national advertiser to run different spots on TV sets at the same time in different parts of the country. The initial cut is a little rough -- the first "Community Addressable Messaging" initiative would allow two creative 30-second spots to run, one reaching 42 million homes and the other 18 million. Eventually Canoe plans to enable customizable TV spots into every home that uses cable. There's also a nice data collection play here, too -- since Canoe could track exactly how many people see the different versions of each spot.

Which would be great, except some consumers may now skip cable to download films from Netflix or Amazon directly.