Twitter lists: You are no longer the center

Twitter has created lists. Now, rather than connecting directly with others in the microblogging-whatever service, you can simply snatch names and build your own list of people under any title you want (Gurus, Athletes, Dorks, Quacks). To take a peek, the new site Listorious offers collections of lists where you can peruse groups of interesting humans like stacks of dusty comic books at an antique shop.

If you play in social media you know that human desires drive most online connections, and now this new Twitter sorting mechanism for egos has people breathing hard. Is it a new form of self-aggrandizement? A new way for ideas to connect with the world? Is it turning human connections away from one-to-one social networks, back to vicariously watched broadcast channels? Grad student Venessa Miemis posed great questions about lists over at her blog, and here is our response:

Your ego has been stolen

"Venessa, nice to meet you ... What I find most interesting is this new format has changed social media in a fundamental way -- removing the human ego from the center. In the (very recent) past, all social graphs revolved around an individual at the core; now the individual user is removed, and social graphs can float as bubbles in the ether, evolving over time (just as your own list of thinkers will change).

"Networks of people with no ego at the center driving the connections create some intriguing moral questions. Will stalking others be easier, if you now follow people without them realizing it? Can someone defame your name, if they put you on a list of, say, Really Bad People (think of the ugly names of lists posed in the next presidential election!)? Will list-chasing by wannabe thought leaders create a new currency for self promotion? Will companies such as IZEA, which have polluted social media with paid posts and paid tweets, now game the list system by encouraging payments to insert brands or advertisers into popular lists? Will the ability of anyone to promote others to lists create a new sentiment analysis scoring system, providing more intelligence to data miners as they can now see what markets of people think about the individuals or brands in their lists?

"I have no answers. The fundamental issue is people are learning how to manipulate the connections inside human networks for the first time, where in the past they could only control the message. Will be fun to watch."

To explore more, here is Venessa's own "meta-list" of the top lists she likes.

Image: Idlphoto

The girl who knew what God looks like

If you care about education then don't miss this 2006 speech by Ken Robinson. He suggests the Western education system is ill-suited for helping children nurture creativity, and yet in a rapidly shifting world -- where today's schoolchildren will retire in 2065 and we can't predict the future of 2015 -- creativity is the most important skill for humanity's survival. Plus he's damn funny.

Via Jim Mitchem.

Google hunts Big Business (while mobile throws the spear)

An editor we know noticed today that Google is running banner ads at the top of BusinessWeek.com, enticing a corporate audience to click through and learn how Google apps can run their enterprise better. The "Go Google" campaign has been out since mid-summer, so it's time to wonder: What in the world is Google thinking, chasing big organizations?

Los Angeles, for one. The entire city government announced Tuesday it has approved a $7.2 million deal to run Google applications via contractor Computer Sciences Corp. That's right. Police officer and firefighter email and related web apps will now float off local desktops into the cloud.

Google, whassup?

Google makes the vast majority of its moola from advertising associated with consumer web searches. Even if it were successful in making a dent in Corporate America, selling apps to seats for small fees, it might get a minor uptick in revenues. So why chase the enterprise software market? We see five reasons:

1. Search is going down. Consumer search usage is slipping. Google constantly releases data showing paid clicks are up, but much of that comes from overseas growth. Click over to Google Trends and type in any common products or services, and you'll see aggregate search volumes in the United States and globally are sliding in most categories. (Try it here: Punch in "flowers," "diamonds," "auto repair," and watch the demand curve fall.) This is driven by consumer adoption of social media and online networking as a new, real-time, more-trusted way to find things. Search still works ... but like three broadcast TV channels suddenly surrounded by thousands of new cable options, the triad of Google, Yahoo and Bing face stiff competition from your college buddy making recommendations on Facebook.

2. Businesses are market levers. To fight search slippage, Google needs a one-to-many sale. Business organizations are the easiest point of entry to get thousands of users re-enamored with Google free apps ... and search.

3. Redmond will get mad. The "Go Google" campaign also hurts Microsoft. You know, that bad boy that just launched the oh-so-sexy Bing. Google can't be happy to see Redmond finally out with a hot search product, backed by a $100 million ad campaign launch. So Google is slapping Microsoft back where it hurts, in the business software arena.

4. Business users love cell phones. Google is getting buzz. And who is out with a hot new cell phone operating system? Why, Google Android, popping the lid off the smoking-hot Droid phone. Buzz on one side (apps) supports buzz on the other (mobile).

5. And Google needs cell phones to survive. This is the final, most telling point: mobile advertising. Google's biggest threat is from mobile, where smart phones now come with do-anything apps that provide hundreds of points of entry into the internet ... all bypassing the traditional Google search engine. Log on to an app for weather or traffic or sports scores and you've likely just skipped over Google.com. In addition, mobile screens are tiny compared to PC screens, so even if you do use Google as your internet on-ramp, there's less ad space to sell. So Google needs to own the mobile space, and fast.

Four billion proof points

This is no idle threat. There are now more than 4 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world, compared to about 1 billion computers. Wall Street tech guru Mary Meeker just noted that by 2010 we'll have 10 billion total gadgets with screens in the world ... and most won't have an interface that houses Google search windows on web browsers. Markets with the greatest growth potential, such as China and India, are leaping right over computers to cell phones which are more affordable, just as powerful, and fit into a peripatetic lifestyle. Human interactivity is moving past your old-fashioned computer, and Google's core business -- search with lots of text ads -- works best on those soon-to-be-outdated wide screens.

So Google wants office workers to notice that Google is the place to go for apps, and mobile phones, and yes, search. Put apps and mobile together, and you've got a survival strategy. Go, Google.

Barnes & Noble Nook's $4 billion ad slot

Want to find $4 billion? Look at the design coincidence of Barnes & Noble's new Nook e-book reader, which has a second color screen at the bottom that is somehow the exact same dimension as a web banner ad. Perhaps this is not happenstance at all -- perhaps B&N realized there is still one vast untapped corner of the world that marketers have missed as a channel for their messages, and the humble book is it.

That's right. Banner ads inside books.

If being served banner ads for Masonic meetings as you read Dan Brown feels unreal, well, let's first size the market. The average U.S. adult reads four books a year; with a population of 250 million you get 1 billion books digested annually. At 200 pages per book, that's 200 billion potential ad impressions if we stuck just one ad at the bottom of each page. Now, charge a $20 CPM for such premium placement and -- voilà -- you've just unlocked a $4 billion advertising market. College textbooks with coupons for Starbucks coffee, here we go!

Of course, the challenge would be adoption. Advertising isn't always welcomed in new spaces, so we might need an intermediary to push the idea along. Let's see -- what part of the publishing industry is desperately experimenting with new revenue models?

Newspapers, your defense beckons

Why, newspapers. Their circulation dropped 10% in just the past year, and the graveyard is beckoning. So here's a little more free math: If The New York Times gave you a free Nook, you could be served 60 ads a day (assuming the stickiness of the device made you click around only NYT content) ... at a $20 CPM giving $1.20 in ad revenue to the Times. That's $438 in revenue a year per reader. The Times could buy Nooks wholesale for say $100 and break even after only three months, and grab huge interest among new readers (because who wouldn't want a free gadget and free subscription). Sign up 100,000 new readers, NYT, and in Year 1, after device costs, you'll make $33.8 million. Triple your CPMs, given the impact of the ad unit, and you're at $121 million.

That's a drop in a bucket for a company that made $571 million in the last quarter, but as costs come down from giving up wood pulp and presses, specialized devices tethered to protected content could be a survival strategy. And The Times, like most newspapers, is growing desperate to survive. Would an advertiser pay a $60 CPM for the only ad in front of a reader, who signed up for a device with detailed demographic information allowing rich targeting? Why, since most advertising is surrounded by clutter and thus ignored, we think yes.

Careful, it's a walled garden

The punchline is this: Newspapers or book publishers would win more consumer attention, because you can't easily surf away to other web sites on such devices. Advertisers would win higher response rates, because the ads are much more noticeable and could be contextually targeted to content and the user's personal information disclosed when they signed up. And consumers could win with a device that's more convenient than smudgy newsprint.

E-readers, in the end, are walled gardens of technology that wring more value from users because they control access while providing the illusion of high-tech convenience. Of course technology will soon leap ahead with 3-D mobile screens ... but given the enduring power of printed words on paper, we think users might go along for the read.

Um, Microsoft, we hope that isn't the babysitter

If you dig hearing people argue about the future of advertising you might like this week's BeanCast podcast. We joined in the debate Sunday night with marketing gurus Bob Knorpp, the host; Joseph Jaffe of Crayon; Edward Boches of Mullen; and James P. Othmer, author of Adland. One key question that emerged was if advertising, including direct marketing, is really an "impression currency" that is being devalued as consumers learn to share their own content, how can marketers possibly make advertising work?

We think it comes down to three choices: Marketers can try to improve targeting (with sharper media buying and ad performance measurement); they can try to improve relevance (with product attributes, design, or creative that tell real stories vital to real people's lives); or they can increase shock value.

The shock option explains why users of Microsoft Office will have hot dates with women who put their hands in your lap.

The Warshaw Curve of brand love

This is a story of lovers and haters.

A while back video producer Douglas Warshaw had an idea: Consumers seem to like extremes in video content, including a lot of low-end stuff (fuzzy home videos on YouTube) and also high-end stuff (the new HDTV, crystal-clear images seen on your big-screen TV in your basement). The stuff in the middle, the ho-hum content produced by local TV stations, was the video people were forgetting. Draw this demand and you get an inverted bell curve with a big dip in the middle.

We think this Warshaw Curve also fits how any range of consumers feel about your brand -- and being aware of this pattern is critically important. Imagine you took a survey of your customers and found, on average, the majority moderately like your product. On face value, this sounds good -- you have lukewarm goodwill and, as most brands do, room for improvement. But what if buried in your customer base were extremes of love and hate?

The curve above shows how a sentiment analysis of a brand might average with lukewarm affection, but have hidden extremes of customers who despise or adore you. Managing these extremes is what's important, because the haters can lead to sudden PR nightmares and the lovers can become your word-of-mouth fan base. Blogger Len Kendall noted recently that most social media sentiment rankings show neutral in the majority of consumer comments. Jay Leno is a perfect example: most viewers, according to social-media tracking service Trendrr, feel neutral about his TV show's performance. But the small fraction who think Jay has jumped the shark are creating a groundswell of negative buzz, and his ratings are down.

Be careful. Even if most of your customers are in neutral, your brand could be grinding gears.

Digital Emily and the future of your flesh

Paul Debevec, the digital effects star behind The Matrix and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, here shows off the latest evolution of animation. The fake Emily looks so real (fast-forward the video to minute 5:00 to see the technically constructed, moving face) that you can no longer tell the difference between computer graphics and reality.

Perfection of human artifice was bound to happen sooner or later. For decades, animators have struggled to overcome The Uncanny Valley effect -- the disturbing vibe you get watching animated faces that don't look quite real. German psychologist Ernst Jentsch coined the term in 1906, as as we've written before, most "human" animation attempts such as the Tom Hanks' characters in 2004's Polar Express are as eerie as walking through a wax museum at night. The eyes are dead; the faces look ghastly; we don't believe it is real. But now, fake reality is here.

Untrue faces may mask the truth

What happens to the world of communication when computers can post illusions of humans, who don't exist, saying anything the controllers behind the scenes want? The first application is obviously video games, such as Quantic Dream's "Heavy Rain," but imagine fake faces intersecting with social media and a computer script that could pass the Turing Test. The possibilities are endless. A company could create a fake public relations spokesperson, as verbally gifted as Scott Monty with the sex appeal of Angelina Jolie. We could elect politicians who don't exist. The illusion of artificial intelligence would be complete, as long as the lips move just so and the script makes us believe.

How about yourself? Would you improve your own image to the world by creating an avatar that looks like Brad Pitt or Megan Fox? If you go out at night, will it mean typing at a computer while you send a 3-D perfection of species out to mingle in a better, photorealistic Second Life?

The standards for morality will slide in such a future, where our presentation to the world and actions are projected digital ghosts, not our own flesh and blood. Work, advertising, social gatherings, love and war could shift from Earth to the Matrix. It's all a natural progression from our current use of film and video, which now requires careful costumes, lighting and staging, to a real-time artificial projection. Instead of acting out roles in a movie, each human will simply boot up their animated avatar and leap into the fray. Fake reality, here's looking at you.

10x more devices. Paradoxically, there's less room for ads.

Mary Meeker was one of the first Wall Street analysts to realize the potential of the internet. In the 1990s she rode the first tech bubble to the top, successfully predicting the rise of Amazon, AOL and Netscape, and then got beaten up by the press when that bubble burst and other stock picks failed.

Now Meeker is back with a glowing forecast of economic recovery and mobile adoption. The most interesting slide for marketers may be No. 32, which points to a continued rapidly fragmenting media world of 10 times more devices in consumers' hands. In 2000 there were about 1 billion computers or cell phones on our planet; by 2010 the device plethora is expected to be 10 billion units. The only possible behavior that can support such expansion is concurrent media usage, a trend observed by Nielsen in which consumers use television, smartphones, Kindles, tablets, games and GPS systems all at the same time. Do you have teenage kids? Check what's in their hands when they're watching the tube.

A casual viewer of Meeker's rosy outlook might think mobile phones point to huge opportunities for advertisers (yes, a new platform to push out our message!); a more critical observer will realize that in a world filled with devices for sharing information across multiple channels simultaneously, the ability of consumers to focus on any single ad message is going to be diminished. (Back to those teens: where do their eyes go when commercials come on TV? Why, down to the laptop in their laps.) Play the device expansion forward to 2020, when chips and tiny glass screens and video walls are everywhere, and something has to give. The size of small screens on smartphones leaves about 90% less visual space for ads vs. a computer screen. A simple ruler shows you the severe contraction in advertising inventory approaching ... in the very hyped-up devices, cell phones, that are the future of consumer communication.

The paradox: More ad channels, less real ad inventory

What's that? Ad inventory is shrinking? This seems nonsensical, since we're approaching 10 billion devices all filled with colorful screens. But it's true. While media buyers can find low CPMs and millions of slots for banners or mobile apps, the real impressions on the audience are growing diminished. In terms of consumers actually seeing the ads -- you know, eye contact required to make the message sink into the brain -- tiny screens, concurrent media usage, and shifts in consumer modality from watching to creating all squeeze the "real" ad inventory making impressions on your target customers.

It's a classic supply and demand problem. If demand for third-party interruptions is falling as consumers learn to make their own content (witness Hulu.com's struggle to make money with limited consumer patience for online video ads), and the supply of interruptions grows higher (as advertisers try to squeeze into every emerging channel), the value of those interruptions will fall. Substitute the word "advertising" for "interruption," and you'll see marketers' challenge.

The (un)controllable, (de)coherent path to multiverse results

If fate like any marketing campaign is a series of unexpected twists within a long story as unstoppable as a run-on sentence that could be stopped if only it had an editor, then you know that tossing two dice leads to 36 possible combinations of which only one will land on the table unless you buy in to the multiverse concept, the longer chain of our universe in which the world constantly divides into alternative, splitting realities (say, in this one you have a job but in the other one you're a rock star) which of course bends the mind until you realize multiple universes are based on real physics experiments by scientists who discovered that small (yes, very small) subatomic particles behave strangely when observed, as if moving so fast they can't be pinpointed in any single spot in space but instead randomly exist in two places at once until you view them and they settle down, like necking teenagers freezing under a cop's spotlight, an idea best illustrated by putting a cat inside a steel box, as Erwin Schrödinger suggested in a horribly famous thought experiment, and also adding a vial of poison tied to a hammer to be whacked by a Geiger counter which in turn is connected to a single atom that might or might not decay radioactively in a given hour and then have the fate of the poor cat (do NOT try this at home) hinge on whether and if the atom does decay, tied to the whims of the elementary particles which as we said earlier in this sentence exist in two places at once, then the cat is both alive and dead in the box at the same time because its fate depends on the unrealities of the subatomic particles, until you open the door and observe it, in which event fluffy little Whiskers either meows happily or is looking a little gruesome soaked in hydrocyanic acid, as distasteful as tech geeks hitting up Cougars at a bar, because your act of observation has cast you into one fixed future, now the present (although in another reality you see exactly the opposite), which of course brings the reality chain back to ad campaigns in which marketing managers must align a series of events that are problematic because every tiny action in the chain can lead to an alternative reality, and a lot can go wrong in this multiverse coined by psychologist Williams James way back in 1895 in which Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat co-exists (or not) with your dead-or-alive marketing results, meaning you probably should focus less on the tagline in your creative and worry more about whether the entire response chain is working from ad impression to awareness to inquiry to call center to lead capture to hairy sales guys stepping in to credit check to ecstatic purchase to fulfillment to damn-we've-got-buyer's-remorse, because this is our real point: in a world where every second splits the future into different pathways so much can go wrong that you have to control all the variables to get the process right, like an obsessive Six Sigma cheerleader in an ill-fitting suit squeezing potential errors out of the timeline such as whether wasted, spent consumers who carry mobile phones around in their pockets can dial a number easily from your ad and speak with a knowledgeable sales rep and not just type in the URL (although your hip agency says the web is hip and no one prints unhip phone numbers anymore), which of course is as silly as expecting online readers with social-media-attention-deficit-disorder to read a long blog post without clicking away to Google "necking teenagers", because it's damn near impossible to type on a laptop while driving in a car and who wants to get up from watching TV to boot up a computer anyway, so campaign designers must carefully plot the path to a future chain of events in which everything works perfectly like an improbable run-on sentence if your reputation, hell, job depends on avoiding a radioactive meltdown because who doesn't want marketing results that act like lucky dice or sweating teenagers who never were discovered by the cop in the only perfect future that you want: the one that will make your CEO go meow?

Image: Spacepleb

London Underground: To save your rep, you have 4 hours

When Jonathan MacDonald saw a London Underground worker yelling at an elderly man, he whipped out a video camera, posted the clip via Twitter, and within 24 hours the story had made page 1 of London's Evening Standard. No fists flew, only words, but if you read MacDonald's blog post you realize the senior citizen was being abused for having his arm caught a few seconds earlier in a train door -- a nice, bile-filled moment for London Underground customer service. The transit worker named Ian, at the end of the clip, shouts "sling him under a train."

The faster the rise, the steeper the fall

What's intriguing about such viral phenomena is the front end of the public interest curve matches the back -- meaning the faster the spike, the less time you have to react. And things will spike; millions of consumers are now walking around your organization's touchpoints armed with tiny video cameras. Dirk Singer of London PR shop Cow notes that today, when bad PR strikes, "you have 48 hours to restore your credibility as after that people generally won't visit your website to get your point of view." The balloon boy story of this week is another perfect example. On Thursday this week we drove to Boston for a client meeting and, within the space of 6 hours offline, had missed the entire story of a young boy apparently floating through the air at 7,000 feet in a rickety, homemade balloon contraption. Here's what public interest looked like on Twitter:


See the challenge? Huge spike at first -- by 6 p.m. the day the story broke, balloon boy had peaked at 2.51% of all tweets. Yet by 10 a.m. the next morning, interest had collapsed. If that tale had been your brand, and not a young boy potentially falling out of a weather balloon, would you be able to react in time? If the story broke within social media and not on CNN, would you even notice?

Getting your arms around such chatter isn't expensive. Here's a list of 34 free (and 60 some-odd paid) social media monitoring tools to get started. Beyond such tools, you'll also need to restructure old PR processes to allow your organization to react. There's no time to craft press releases and run them through legal. You can't wait to schedule a meeting with the head of HR. So what is your plan? Start listening and planning your response, because like a Mylar balloon over Colorado, what goes up soon comes down.

Equal rights don't exist on the internet, do they?

You'd think our government would take a stand on internet access, but guess what? They punt. Yesterday the FCC launched a fuzzy new blog that talks out of both sides of its mouth. It's all about the issue of network neutrality, which seems simple at first: the internet should be free and open -- no variable pricing, no limits on access, no one blocking your content. Sounds good, right?

Before we explain the FCC's double standard, let's dig deeper to see the flip side of unshackled internet use -- the painfully slow email downloads in your home office thanks to the teen next door downloading fat movie files, the fact that the United States trails Sweden and Korea in bandwidth speeds. If you've ever waited for downloads, you realize the web has costs. The words you're reading now, on this blog, aren't free at all, but rather the lucky result of over-building during the 1990s internet bubble. You can watch videos at Hulu today because silly companies got silly stock options back in 1997, and investors jacked up the network infrastructure. And guess what? Your prepaid pipes are getting full.

So the internet issue has two sides -- keep all access equal, or allow providers more control to raise money for the strapped global network. As with any scarce resource, the network neutrality concept has fierce advocates (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) and opponents (your cable company), and no wonder -- the companies who profit by sending stuff free over pipes want it kept that way, and the firms that pay for those pipes want to be able to charge more to keep them working. In perhaps the strongest argument against network neutrality, telecoms argue that if they could charge heavy web users more for access, they'd be able to fund future advances in internet technology. That is no more unfair that Apple charging $599 for its first iPhone to fund the production build-out that now allows you, two years later, to pick one up for 99 bucks. Early adopters, like heavy internet users, had the most need, and they were willing to pay more -- a wealth transfer that ended up supporting the rest of the population. So why not?

Who's right? The FCC says everybody.

So back to the Federal Communications Commission. The new FCC OpenInternet.gov blog sounds, in name and tone, like it's promoting network neutrality. Chairman Julius Genachowski speaks with phrases such as "the fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular internet content or applications." But wait -- Genachowski quickly adds caveats. "This principle will not prevent broadband providers from reasonably managing their networks. During periods of network congestion, for example, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else." Um, what?

Genachowski concludes the FCC will make decisions "on a case-by-case basis." So ... cable companies and telecoms should not discriminate against any internet users ... unless they need to. They shouldn't charge more for usage ... unless required to reasonably manage their network. The FCC will enforce this ... with ad hoc decisions.

If you're confused, so are we.

Perhaps it's too much to ask that a government bureaucracy take a clear stand on internet access in an age where suggesting we expand health coverage gets seniors, now on government-funded Medicare, screaming about government socialism. The only clarity we found on the FCC's site was a link to a Digg-style ranking of user suggestions. Here, the public's wishes rise to the top. Bring U.S. broadband pricing in line with the rest of the world. Promote telecommuting. End unreal claims of internet speeds. Heck, catch up with Korea's pipe speeds, where people stream TV shows on cell phones.

The public wants bandwidth, and they want it fast. The FCC says it's listening and it wants "freedom". But as with any public good, we suspect eventually someone will have to pay for it.

10-finger screens, yet no help for your remote

Clayton Miller has built a graphic user interface for computers that, yes, taps all 10 of your fingers. It is called 10/GUI. It is brilliant. And it is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

If you pan out like an angelic Walt Mossberg to look down from the clouds at humanity's progress for the past 20 years, you'll see cumbersome connections with technology. Each device -- laptop, cell phone, television set -- has a few common interface standards (say, most laptop screens tilt backward and use a QWERTY keyboard) but the real story is chaotic complexity. Gadget designs are all over the place. Sure, we have a common computer mouse, but good luck turning on the TV in your neighbor's home or setting an alarm clock in a strange hotel room. Here's a test: visualize where the "play" button is on your own home stereo. We bet you don't know.

The disincentive of differentiation

Why are common interface standards so absent? Call it differentiation. First, technology moves quickly and devices keep changing; smart phones barely existing 5 years ago, and designers are still tweaking where buttons go on touch screens. Second, manufacturers continue adding "feature creep," little tweaks to each device to try to defend margins. We didn't ask for a video camera in our iPod Nano, but we got one. And third, the competitive marketplace is good for invention but not so fine for industrial standards. If your company's product works similar to others then competitors can easily mimic you and steal your customers; it is better, for profits, to build a unique widget, sell the hell out of it, and block other companies from plugging in.

Consumers gain innovation but lose sanity in this process. The competitive market fails in improving consistent interface design. Incumbents with market share and installed customer bases (think Microsoft Windows systems on Dell laptops) have little incentive to change how you really interact with their devices; improving user interface would require huge hardware shifts, might make old products obsolete, and free you up to really shop around. And consumers also drive the fragmentation by buying new gizmos with new looks and feels, because shiny feels good, even if it means new shiny that doesn't match the 20 other tools you have at home.

Darryl Ohrt suggests Clayton Miller may get bought out by Apple or Microsoft for his 10-fingered genius. We hope so, but alas, we fear the invisible hand of the free market has no need for 10 fingers.

Healthcare napkins

View more documents from Dan Roam.

This is hard to believe but someone explained the current healthcare debate cleanly without taking sides. With Sharpies and a napkin. Wondrous presentation by Dan Roam and Anthony Jones (also named by BusinessWeek as one of the World's Best Presentations of 2009). Via Shiv Singh.

Google Earth to make history playable from every angle

The first thing you think watching Georgia Institute of Technology combine security video feeds with Google Earth maps is cool. Then, like Gizmodo, your brain clicks to freaky, worrying a real-time view of the entire planet may give Big Brother the perfect tool for spying on people.

But play it all the way forward and you see a future where Google, if it builds on this experiment, can record all of history from every angle -- soccer games, airplane crashes, presidential movements -- for any of our descendants. This requires a little patience, people, but if we can fit video cameras into iPod Nanos, surely it won't be long before we can combine all visual feeds into one kick-ass model. And then, as the centuries roll by, history will no longer be words on paper written by the victors, but instead real views. Imagine seeing Gandhi or Jesus Christ or Moses in action. We can't today, of course, but a thousand years from now our descendants may look back and see us, and the inspirational leaders or demonic tyrants among us who write tomorrow's future.

Gaming history

In the near term, say, the next 100 years, the impact will be greatest on media conglomerates. Today only a handful of huge communication firms rule the entertainment world -- Bertelsmann, Disney, NewsCorp, TimeWarner, Viacom, and Vivendi Universal. But these giants and the advertisers who ride next to them may lose audiences, if entertainment becomes seeing anything from anywhere in the past with Google Earth zoomability. Movie night circa 2030: "What do you want to watch, honey?" "I don't know -- say, let's boot up Mount Rainier exploding in 2019 and watch the people flee Seattle!"

When the world's history is one gripping video game, entertainment will get real. Perhaps this is science fiction. But then, so is flying through the air in steel tubes and having a global communicator device in your pocket.

The ROI of now vs. later

Today we defended Seth Godin in BusinessWeek over the debate, if you missed it, of whether he should post public conversations about brands without their permission. Some said Seth was brandjacking. We say, get over it, let him play with public data. The issue is really much broader -- of how controlling any idea is an outdated mindset, and how letting go of control of your brand, methodology, or secrets is required if you want to scale within the new networked world.

Call it the ROI of now vs. later. In the 20th century companies profited in the moment by controlling their concepts -- because, after all, if you owned Coke's secret formula, you made a killing adding sugar to water. Control made you money, and because communications to the public were also easily controlled, there was little incentive to worry about the ripples outside your boardroom walls.

But in the 21st century the new networked world creates huge opportunities outside your office or factory. A common marketing dream is to "go viral," but as we know from watching Skittles or Subservient Chickens, viral requires letting customers play with your concepts. What happens if you release your ideas into the wild and let strangers abuse them? Why, you might spark conversations among millions of people, all of whom could become customers. You give up making money today for a broader impact tomorrow. The economics of open systems require a huge leap of faith, and many companies may never get there (we can't imagine Coca-Cola giving up its secret formula anytime soon). But if you think about the millions most companies spend on advertising, it is silly not to add a free component to the mix that could have 100 times the impact -- or, at least not to evaluate the financial upside carefully.

Idea manipulators as the fifth force

The reason ideas must be free is the competitive landscape has tilted toward a new entrant -- the public, holding video Nanos and editing software, hungry to play. In his Five Forces model, management guru Michael Porter suggested that companies face five gravitational pulls as they try to make a profit: competitors in their space, suppliers and buyers who are upstream or downstream, substitutes that customers might flee to, and potential entrants. Companies in the past locked up information because they feared competitors might steal it, match them, and thus kill their business. They wanted tight control over costs from suppliers and margins from customers. In Porter's theology, "potential entrants" would be the OxiClean guys popping up out of nowhere to give P&G a run for its money. But what if in the new networked world, consumers repurposing ideas are the potential entrants? What if their tide is unstoppable, a fifth force with exponentially more impact that the old supplier-competitor-customer loop? Is ignoring it an option?

Or, to use another metaphor, like children trying not to eat a marshmallow today, perhaps trying not to control you message tightly will give you more rewards tomorrow.

IDEO crowdsources the future of climate change

If you've read of prediction markets you know the minds of masses can be remarkably accurate in forecasting the future, say, U.S. elections or Wall Street's reaction to congressional failure. Now the innovative consultancy IDEO is inviting minds to game out the future of climate change on the new blog LivingClimateChange.com. Anyone can submit ideas here and the most provoking posts make it to the site -- like this one, The Commute, by Martin Zabaleta and Jonah Houston. The site also could be a recruitment screener by IDEO itself for the bright dreamers of the future. Innovators, game on.

Surviving the death of the click

Yikes. At first glance it looks like most consumers don't give a damn about banner ads. ComScore is reporting that the number of U.S. internet users who click on display ads is down 50 percent. Back in July 2007, only 32% of all users clicked on internet banners in a given month; by March 2009, that number had plunged to only 16%, and 8% of U.S. users drove most (85%) of all clicks.

So other than knotting a noose, how should you, a marketer in charge of internet advertising, react?

1. Don't be scared by concentrated results. Recognize that all response behavior follows power laws, the Pareto idea that a fraction of any resource drives the greatest return. You know, like the 10% of folks at your weekend party who get wildly drunk and make out on the deck while the rest stand in the kitchen sharing tips on accounting. Sure, in a given month only 1 out of 6 people may click on an ad, but that doesn't mean the rest of the population never does. The concentration of clickers is a normal power cluster, just like those found in your stock portfolio.

2. Measure ahead of the click. As comScore suggests, clicks by themselves are a lousy metric for monitoring total online ad performance. Ad impressions build with reach and frequency and over time lead to action, usually in other channels. We've seen the inverse for clients who have launched campaigns on television and driven brand-specific searches through Google. A recent study of 8,824 respondents in the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Japan and the U.K. found TV had the most influence on audience purchasing decisions, even though it is typically one of the hardest media to track. Impressions here push action over there. Banner ad serving tools can track consumers who see your impression and then come in later via search engines. Social media monitoring tools can tell you the chatter among influencers. Find ways to measure the waves, not just the splash.

3. Watch impression costs. If you do begin evaluating internet ads on impressions and not just click performance (or downstream conversions, etc.), you must be careful with costs. Online ad inventory has exploded in recent years, led by social media pages whose users refresh frequently, artificially bloating inventory (think of a Facebook user rechecking her page every 60 seconds, each page with multiple ad slots). Careful online media planning can reduce costs against a given demo target by 90%, often by weighting the buy toward ad networks (collections of hundreds of sites) vs. individual marquee sites. A CPM of $1.50 instead of $30 against the exact same target should be a no-brainer.

4. Optimize, even if hard data is limited. Clicks still matter, in terms of monitoring variances in performance between online media outlets and then optimizing the ad mix. Sure, only a fraction of your prospects might click on your ad, but if costs per click have a 20-to-1 skew across your online media plan, that's an indication that some of the media venues are working well and others are bombing. Clicks and the associated downstream conversions, sales, and return on advertising can be monitored through each discrete online component to gradually improve the campaign performance -- often freeing up 30% or 40% of your ad budget for redeployment.

Sure, not everyone walks through your online banner doorway; but evaluating the ones who do to rebalance the mix will provide lots of impressions where they count -- on the CEO who watches your sales figures.

Image: Theogeo

Why we called Starbucks stupid, and why you lie too much

This morning we hit Starbucks in Fairfield, Conn., on a perfect coffee-shop day. Gray skies, overcast, rainy. We dodged the taste-test guys at the door, grabbed a mocha-venti-something, and headed for the second floor, filled with plush couches and wide windows. Beautiful. Except there is no free Wi-Fi.

If you travel, you know Wi-Fi is as necessary as a pressed shirt. We've noticed the trend of coffee shops cutting internet access before, but since we're now on planes three times a month shooting all over the country, we decided to sign up for the Starbucks paid Wi-Fi via AT&T. For $20 a month. $240 a year. And it hit us, getting on the internet at Starbucks is costing us more than a new iPhone.

So we tweeted "Starbucks I Hate You."

Now, this isn't a rant on Starbucks' cheapness. We can guess how the game is played. The titanium-craniumed boys from McKinsey come in, provide a black-and-white PowerPoint deck, and tell CEO Howard Schultz he can shave $XX million dollars by knocking out free Wi-Fi. Heck, Schultz can even make money with a rev-share with AT&T, and since he skipped a salary increase in 2009 due to tough times, this likely sounds good.

No, really. You're a dumbass.

This is a rant about honesty. We tweeted our frustration, and Mullen ad guru Edward Boches wrote back whimsically "Guess they won't be a client anytime soon." We're sure Edward was joking ... but is it surprising that an ad agency might say something honest about a company's mistake?

If you work in advertising you've seen lots of presentations to clients, and the worst usually begin with a sycophant complimenting the CEO about his golf game. Schmoozing, oozing flattery leads clients down dangerous garden paths. In fact, almost every campaign presentation is carefully orchestrated to push clients off-guard -- watching the new creative on a shining flat-panel screen in a warm conference room filled with coffee, likely Starbucks. The glow of groupthink pervades as compliments abound. This is great. No, you're great. This campaign will be great. And very rarely do we hear hard-hitting critiques of what could be done better. Agencies often have no incentive, because it costs them more to recut creative or media plans. Clients often don't push back hard, because they're already paying big bucks and admitting what they paid for is flawed hurts their own egos. Everyone has an incentive to be slightly dishonest, to say things are better than they are, and substandard ideas go out the door.

But what if we were all honest? What if you had Starbucks as a client, they suggested charging for Wi-Fi, and you looked Howard Schultz in the eye and said, friend, that is one big, dumb-ass move? Howard might be insulted. He might fire you, and have security kick you into the street. But then again, he might avoid a mistake, Starbucks customer loyalty would improve, and the chain might stop closing stores.

So Starbucks, when we say we hate you, we do it out of love. Now we're going to figure out how to write this down as a business expense, and then get a second cup.

Gowalla: The bar tab for your social network

Those hipster kids in Austin recently launched Gowalla, a new social network that adds restaurants and bars to your friends or followers. The deal is you walk into a retail location, punch up your Gowalla iPhone app, and the GPS in your phone will recognize where you are -- offering "reward" booty to thank you. You see threads from others who visited before you, and toss your own updates into Facebook and Twitter.

Why not add hard cash?

Gowalla for now is a simple geocaching game, basically a cleaner version of techies running around with GPS devices tagging certain spots on planet Earth. But conceivably it could add real coupons, with cash savings at bars, restaurants, and clothing outlets, giving retailers a reason to join in. The "passport stamp" could segue into a loyalty points program; and because Gowalla, unlike Foursquare, only works if you really are standing in a location, retailers will know whether you're on site.

The question is whether a social tool that gives incentives at bars with gossip and photos will really take off ... um, who are we kidding? We see Facebook buyout within 12 months. Dammit, Gowalla, why didn't we think of this?

For a complete comparison of Gowalla (which is global) vs. Foursquare (which is not), The Next Web has a strong analysis. Via Jeremiah Owyang.

Nice pitch. I don't believe you.

One of the arrogant beliefs within ad agencies, including sometimes our own, is the thought that with the right branding, creative and media plan we can influence anyone in our target audience to buy a product. What that belief misses is the power of consumer prejudice.

Gallup, for instance, just reported wild doubts among the American population over how credible news media is. This should give marketers pause, because "news journalism" (with the exception of a few cable networks) is supposedly an even-handed, objective presentation of facts to the world. Only 45% of Americans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in news media, and the numbers slide further among the well-educated and conservatives (for advertisers, read that as "higher income, desirable customers").

Brands face the same trust challenge

Decades ago Toyota realized it couldn't possibly overcome its customers' inherent bias. Toyota was a mid-market brand, and it would never attract luxury car buyers. Rather than fight the perception trap, Toyota created the Lexus ... to wild success. And more recently Toyota launched the downmarket Scion brand targeting hip youths who wouldn't be caught dead in a stale Camry.

Prejudice is an ugly word, but everyone has it, because we carry our worldviews around with us and make judgments about actions based on our past experiences. If you were burned by a stove as a child, you didn't touch it again. When you buy a product and it fits a mold, you put it into that box, and don't believe it fits somewhere else. Psychologists call this "heuristics," mental shortcuts humans make to comprehend a world awash in too much information. Your cave-people ancestors didn't think carefully whether to run when a lion attacked; a flash judgment told them to bolt, saving genes for you. Prejudice and snap logic are the reasons why healthcare reform in the U.S. may fail; health care is enormously complex, people have had bad experiences with paperwork and government bureaucracy in the past, so it is more simple mentally to just shout "NO!" than to try to process a nuanced, and potentially beneficial, reform logic.

It's worth a discussion with your marketing team. How far can you push the brand message to be credible, given your target audience's preconceptions? And when do you decide you need to become radically new to reach prospects who will never believe your old brand story?

P&G to pay media based on 'engagement'

Engagement is a fuzzy word tossed about by ad gurus in black T-shirts to describe consumers who have interacted with or, better yet, begun spreading news about your brand.

Procter & Gamble put some teeth behind the engagement concept this week with a media brief issued to online publishers in the UK. P&G announced it will pay publishers more money for "engaged" users as tracked by specific metrics -- for example, consumers who sign up for newsletters or watch videos after the initial ad impression. The move is really a pay-for-performance play, focused on the conversions of people to action and not the oft-fictitious CPMs or fraud-laden CTRs.

P&G has serious clout; it is the world's No. 1 advertiser, dropping more than $9 billion annually to push brands such as Crest, Tide and Pampers. But not everyone believes the model will stick. Nick Suckley, co-founder of media shop Agenda21, told New Media Age he thought cost-per-engagement online ad models may be slow to take off in the absence of hard, consistent metrics across the industry. "The point is how can you measure the real effect of someone engaging?" he said. "It’s impossible." We expect publishers to push back as well; charging only for the ads that truly work will expose marquee web sites as having a boatload of ad inventory that often doesn't work well at all.

Via Branislav Peric. Image: Auzigog