Nielsen fluffs up the TV ratings

The media ratings service Nielsen made two humongo moves recently that acknowledge video viewing is migrating away from live television. On Wednesday, it announced it would no longer track how many TV channels the typical U.S. consumer receives, because as MediaPost reports, "there no longer is a 'consistent' meaning for the term 'channel.' "

But the real story is this: Nielsen has also decided to change the very nature of television ratings by including "duplicate" viewing -- as in, you watch a TV show tonight, and then you watch it again by playing it back on a DVR. This may sound like a nuance, but it is a huge shift in the concept of a media audience delivered. Advertising impressions have always been perceived as mutually exclusive. A newspaper with 100,000 circulation is assumed to reach 100,000 different sets of eyeballs. Broadcast is fuzzier, of course -- a 100 GRP schedule could reach 100% of the viewing population once, or 1% of that population 100 times -- but at the micro level of a single commercial airing, each audience has been assumed to be unique.

No more. A critic might suspect this move is Nielsen's way of bolstering the broadcast industry, by boosting ratings numbers as audiences start to slide elsewhere. Magazine and newspaper publishers have tried similar gamesmanship with their BS "readership" malarkey; back in 2007, for instance, Essence magazine claimed its 1.07 million printed copies reached 7.8 million readers thanks to the magic of "passalong readership." ("Look, honey, Essence magazine came in the mail -- let's hold a party and invite all our friends!") Is Nielsen gaming the system by adding in numbers beyond the "live audience" to now include duplicates as well? Perhaps. Either way, the real challenge for advertisers is Nielsen provides no way to determine if any of that downstream DVR audience skips over commercials entirely.

Image: Tantek

Your Facebook daily newspaper

Zach Allia gives newspaper editors another reason to cry.

You see, last week Facebook expanded its "Like" button -- a little icon you click inside your Facebook news feed to say you dig something, which in turn pushes that item higher in your friends' Facebook stream -- to partner sites around the web. Like wildfire, now The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Vimeo, and thousands of other sites have spread the Facebook "Like" on their articles and videos so you can push their stuff back to friends.

So this week Zach cleverly launched a Likebutton.me app to collect everything your friends are liking. You can even sort all the recommendations by categories: News, entertainment, travel, movies, reviews. If you trust the judgment of your friends, you no longer need a publisher portal. Which gives newspaper editors their new reason to cry.

EdgeRank: Why Facebook filters your stream

If you've used Facebook for a while, you know that sometime about a year ago the social network updated its "stream" to stop showing everything everyone you know posted, and instead magically began listing only items you might find interesting. The magic was a filter -- a process Facebook calls EdgeRank. In essence, EdgeRank creates a score to judge whether something someone else creates is worth pushing to your news stream, multiplying the affinity between you and the creator by the "weight" of the type of change (e.g. a comment is worth more than a "like" click), and also by the recency of when the change was made. If your girlfriend made a long comment a minute ago, bingo, up to the top. That long-lost cousin you rarely chat with, boom, off the page.

When Facebook first started culling its news feed, technologist Robert Scoble was an immediate fan, writing (and we paraphrase) that the filter made his feed instantly warmer -- tapping a more relevant, lifelike view of his contacts. But think more deeply about it, and it is startling that Facebook admits its own network was filled with so much chaff that shoddy material must be eliminated. Metcalfe was wrong when he supposed that the value of a network grows exponentially based on its number of nodes, because he failed to see that each point is not created equal, and the data flowing between them also has differing levels of quality. Marketers who hope messages can go viral inside new human networks may hit a wall if the users of such networks find filters are necessary to wall off the content they find irrelevant. Perhaps, just as the automobile amplified daily pedestrian travel, new communication technologies have reset our ability to maintain relationships at a higher level -- but like your new commute to work, it's only a set distance further, not an exponential growth curve to the horizon.

Using product ownership to slash online ad costs

Novices to online marketing are typically shocked that banner ad costs can swing in a 10-to-1 range, but that's the modern Wild West of Internet media buying. About a year ago we were negotiating banner ad rates with The Wall Street Journal. The quotes were all over the place, north of $60 CPM in the initial round, down below $20 as we found other nooks and crannies in their pricing strata. And then, of course, with behavioral targeting, we reached identical prospects for $6 CPM or less.

The secret is simple: If you can find a way to reach the exact same audience directly, without paying the toll extracted by a major publisher, you can often free up 90% of the costs. (This issue has nuances; see Thomas Miskin's excellent riff on why publisher context is sometimes more important than media costs.) Advertising networks are typically the best way to remove the toll; their collections of thousands of web sites can add cookie-based consumer tracking to pinpoint audiences that expensive, elite publications once owned.

OwnerIQ targets the man behind the mower

Now OwnerIQ provides a new spin on behavioral targeting. OwnerIQ is a consortium of advertising networks that uses observations of consumers who visit manufacturer pages indicating they own a product. Say, for instance, you boot up a web site with details on the owner manual for a Blu-ray device. Ping. It's highly likely you own that gadget, so by tagging your computer, OwnerIQ can then serve future ads to you as you travel across the web -- perhaps for a Bose sound system. OwnerIQ collates the data from three sources: relationships with about 30 major manufacturers; publisher partners that offer parts for specific products; and its own site, ManualsOnline.com -- the type of content someone only reads when they have to work on something they own.

OwnerIQ claims in its case studies that response rates can be 50% higher or more than standard web banner CTRs. The cost structure is a fraction of niche marquee sites reaching the same audience. If you believe that past product purchases are a signal for future consumer behavior, OwnerIQ may be worth checking out.

Image: Idiolector

Gray Powell, please return to the beer garden

Rotate photo    View full size

A well-played social media promotion by Lufthansa, who asks that if you know Mr. Powell, former owner of an iPhone 4G prototype, send him over. Via Seth Simonds.

Facebook's 10% problem

Facebook and Nielsen have released a new study on how well consumers recalled the messages of 14 ad campaigns. Let's ignore for a moment that the study was done via an opt-in survey instrument on Facebook, drawing an inherently biased pool of people who are willing to click on an online offer, and see what the data showed:

1. "Organic" impressions, or messaging about a product that your friends actually write to you, led to much higher rates of recall than the paid ads themselves.

2. Yet paid impressions, the actual ads, typically make up 90% or more of all impressions online -- leaving only 10% the social good stuff.

Conclusion: People listen when friends talk, but it's very, very hard to get friends to talk. In our own experience with clients, the vast majority of Facebook ads go unnoticed, much more so than other forms of online display advertising. Click-through rates on banner ads across all U.S. web sites averaged 0.08% in 2009; on Facebook, campaigns are typically in the 0.02% range. CTRs don't track real impressions, of course, but they are a good proxy for how much of your online audience is actually digesting the offer. Part of the challenge lies in social media sites being refreshed frequently as users click to update the news streams, making "impressions" on each page relatively inflated compared to news sites where readers linger over articles. If true organic impressions are only a fraction of the actual paid ads that make it to real eyeball retinas, Facebook's 10% problem may be more like 0.002% -- a tiny, desirable dynamic in which your consumers tell others how good you are, sweetly powerful and so very hard to control.

You can download the Nielsen report here.

Facebook, the operating system

Facebook pulls you further into its loyalty schemes this month with a few clever advances. Docs.com gives Facebook users a way to find, create, or share Microsoft Office documents inside the Facebook ecosystem. Facebook's Platform Showcase touts how major sites such as ABC, CNN, ESPN, NYTimes and Yelp are integrating FB functionality ("Look, honey, we can now share the news!!"). And back at the ranch, Facebook is running ads on its own user home pages promoting the "Like" button you'll see across such partner sites -- hoping you'll click it to push that content around the stream to make all this document creating, web site partnering, and newsmongering work.

Razorfish's Shiv Singh suggests Facebook will use data from users clicking "Like" around the Internet to build behavioral-targeted advertising, serving you marketing messages based on the fact you dig polka-dot bikini swimsuits. (Shiv, sorry, we're paraphrasing.) Or the data could be collated and sold to advertisers and publishers to use in their own networks, with Facebook becoming the Experian-type list company of the entire Internet. We could get really crazy and suggest direct marketers will tap such lists, combining users' self-admitted desires and the homophilic connections between them to drop junk mail into your house because your online friends love polka-dot bikini swimsuits. Imagine the irony of technology's hippest online network making mail work better.

If all this sounds confusing, just imagine Facebook as a software platform running inside the Internet, building a level of utility that is hard to leave, adding open architecture that encourages others to plug into it. This strategy worked once for Microsoft. Someday, somewhere, we expect a college kid to launch a new sticky platform ... and that one might run inside Facebook.

Image: Bekkchen

The noosphere of margins

If you don’t work in advertising or communications you’ve likely missed the enthusiasm among middle-aged men who wear jeans and black T-shirts about crowdsourcing -- the idea that masses of people can be sorted to build better solutions at lower costs. It’s a play off the “wisdom of crowds,” where groups of people, each of whom has partial information and can make an informed best guess, often when averaged together can find a near-perfect answer. The world is filled with examples, from children trying to guess the number of marbles in a jar (the aggregate answer is almost always spot on) to markets of investors trying to gauge the future value of a stock (speculative bubbles aside, the way prices of pieces of companies adjust nearly instantly to new information is almost miraculous). Crowdsourcing expands this concept by making it an economic model: You set a prize, encourage thousands to contribute an answer, and after judging the collective input, opt for the top one. That is, instead of selecting the middling average of the response curve, you cherry-pick the best outlying result on the fringe.

Want a new cell phone design? Instead of paying teams of internal engineers, throw a contest, and some brilliant young design student from the crowd will raise her hand to knock your socks off.

All of this has excited the ad industry because it provides a fundamental restructuring of human creativity (the most positive reason) while also greatly reduces costs (useful if you’re managing agency human resources). Futurists also dig it because it pulls deliverables out of the noosphere -- the “global consciousness” concept by Vladimir Vernadsky that we are moving into a third phase of the Earth’s development, after physical formation and biological evolution, to a higher form of collective intelligence. This feels trippy, perhaps, until you look out the window of a plane landing in JFK and see how tiny swarms of humans are acting collectively to terraform our planet, and then, holding that perspective, realize our species may be acting like bees with a hive mind. No less an organization than Princeton has set up 65 devices around the world that randomly generate numbers -- and is monitoring them to see if some form of global consciousness is making those numbers less random. Really. We’re not making this up.

Crowdsourcing employee firings: A thought experiment

The trouble with group consciousness is sometimes it moves in ways that hurt individual participants. Here’s a thought experiment we’ve posed with Edward Boches, the Mullen agency creative chief who is a strong proponent of crowdsourcing: Imagine you run a business with 50 employees, each of whom you pay $52,000 a year or $1,000 per week. One day you decide to fire all your employees and instead hold a weekly global competition for each of their jobs, with a prize for each winner of $100. Thanks to nearly perfect information systems, thousands of people apply for each job post, and you have no trouble filling each slot. (There are lots of smart people starving in the world; now you find them and they find you.) Training would be required of course, but as part of your competition each winner must agree to conduct three weeks of home study, so all the fresh employees hit the ground running. Then, every future week, you fire everyone again, hold another competition, and hire a new crew of winners -- ensuring a constant flow of improved ideas and talent, at a 90% payroll savings!

If information systems were perfect enough, this model could become real. But is it fair?

The economic challenge that few raise about crowdsourcing, or Chris Anderson's broader theory that all services want to be free, is that there is some value in inefficiency -- a value extracted from imperfect exchanges that is passed onward to support society. Your business exists because it charges a profit margin, and that profit exists only because you build and defend fiercely some form of inefficiency between supply and demand. If customers could get food teleported to their kitchen table from the farm fields in California, all the inefficiencies of transportation and packaging and storage would be gone -- and all the margins of those businesses in the middle also. If your own customers could get what you produce without touching your operations, your source of income disappears. Do we want to live in a world where there is perfectly seamless transfer of goods, services and information? Or the real question is, can we?

Image: Pensiero

Twitter's ad model in 140 characters

Twitter finally launches its ad model. Inserts paid tweets only into search results. CPM price structure. Minimal disruption. More may come.

Dongle prisons, or how iPods pull society apart

On an American Airlines flight inbound to Chicago, light fading as wings shredded fog outside, we noticed about 80 passengers in various stages of reading, typing on laptops, punching numbers into smart phones (should be off? oh never mind), listening to Bose QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones, little screens glowing everywhere ... and it occurred to us: We have entered a world of dongle prisons.

A dongle, as futurist Jaron Lanier explains on page 109 of “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a proprietary mechanical device that acts as a key to make software or content work. Think of the CueCat in the 1990s (a pen-like scanner that allowed early web users to tap magazine ads for more online information), or more recently Kindles or Google Droid phones (complete with hard key for booting Google Search) -- all are gadgets meant to lure you into content prisons. “Prison” may be a harsh word, but the strategy is obvious: The aggregators who profit off the sale of information (Apple with iTunes, Google with search sponsored links, Amazon with print or electronic books) can only thrive if they convince you to become chained to their systems and avoid competitors. To lock you in, they convince you to buy a shiny piece of glass that unlocks their content. Lanier notes that all such material -- music, ebooks, search results -- really is just bits that could conceivably be accessed from any device with a headphone jack and screen, but “dongles” create the illusion of artificial scarcity. Laugh at CDs and vinyl records all you want, technologists: The iPod in your pocket is just as antiquated a delivery device, cleverly designed to limit access.

Societal costs

Attempts to build "sticky portals" are nothing new, but the proliferation of new dongles tied to content ecosystems is starting to cause rifts in how the Internet, and society, function. Trouble is, by limiting access to content, such devices create incentives for consumers to create self-centered feedback systems that in turn polarize society. Do you read the entire daily newspaper anymore, or just RSS feeds and blogs from people who think like you? Do you watch straight-up news, or a cable channel that leans in your political direction? Tech gadgets are bifurcating Western culture. We are building self-service walls, of political opinions or content tailored only to your specific needs that draw you into extremes of mental behavior at odds with your neighbor next door. No one wants the middle anymore; CNN is plummeting in the ratings as liberal MSNBC and conservative Fox News lap viewers up. The desensitization of consumers by free, limitless content means they require ever stronger stimulants; the fluid access of online tools makes it simple to find the content that bolsters preconceived prejudices; this hunger and access in turn drives polarization of content, as the producers of video, news and writing find that extremism builds audiences that might, with the proper dongle device, be tied down to pay.

More is splintering here than the Internet, as Josh Bernoff suggested: content portals are fragmenting society into isolated islands filled with groupthink opinions. The great irony of our age is that in the rush to build mass audiences, the economic winners are instead creating clans who want only to believe what they want, and ignore other opinions. Perhaps this is the next evolution in humans, a division of the gene pool guided not by speciation to survive the elements but by minds trying to weather the storms of too much content. We see macro shifts with the Taliban fighting Western culture; we see national shifts as the Tea Party and Democrats accuse each other of radicalism; we see relational shifts as moms, dads, and children get pulled into different gadget-fed virtual worlds personalized to their demos, insulating family members from each other.

Until we figure it out, plug in your earphones, and enjoy that dongle in your hand.

Image: Swami Stream

Starbucks' long-form print impression

Centuries from now, if the Internet and all our iPadish digital culture have been destroyed by roving asteroids or neutrinos that heat the Earth's core, we hope future anthropologists dig up this 28-page mini pocket guide to VIA powdered coffee from Starbucks, because it covers almost all of current Western Civilization. VIA, as you must know, comes in 12-packs of tiny tubes for $9.95 giving Starbucks fans a mobile morning jolt for only 82.9 cents per cup, provided you provide the hot water. This of course is a barrier to entry for coffee aficionados, who are used to dropping about $8 for a fancy java and pastry at the ambient-grooved Starbucks chain. So how can you convince hipsters to get the cheap stuff while not cannibalizing the core?

The pamphlet brilliantly teases with Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced uses for powdered coffee. The Meeting and The Red-Eye for novices ("You think airline food is underwhelming? Try generic airline coffee...") explain the basics of capitalistic culture. The intermediate Soccer Game, Hotel and Aunt Harriet assess our peripatetic ambulatory relationships. And, our favorite, the advanced Guest Chair on a Late-Night Talk Show ("Wow. You're culturally relevant enough to be asked...") shows how we move up Maslow's pyramid from greedy consumption to book tour self-actualization. It's humanity writ large, written small. We're guessing this brochure costs about $1 a pop, but since it's picked up by only the self-selecting discriminant-yet-cheapo coffee fans standing in line at Starbucks, it's a solid impression that tempts us to drop $10 on a packet of powdered coffee. Starbucks, all we can say is, nice marketing -- and thank you for documenting culture for our children.

Forgiving Tiger, forgiving yourself

There's some debate in ad circles over whether the new Nike spot, showing Tiger Woods apparently being chastised by his deceased father, is appropriate. We suggest the execution is brilliant -- not just for the emotion which stops viewers cold, but for the colder media planning fact that about 41% of U.S. marriages encounter infidelity. In any given year about 10% of married people have sex with someone other than their spouse, and cheating is becoming more popular as Viagra, testosterone and estrogen supplements keep us all feeling fitter longer. The 19th most popular web site among U.S. men 35-54, core to Nike's golf demo, is Adultfriendfinder.com. Google launched its web browser with a prominent privacy button to make surfing for porn less troublesome. America, you cheat.

Unfaithfulness is a sad and complex part of life, and anyone who knows anyone who has gone down that path realizes that pain, confusion, and redemption, not models or porn stars, are the real new partners. Spot producer Wieden + Kennedy has captured such angst perfectly. Do you like the creative, the disturbing emotion, the use of a dead man's voice to sell golf equipment, the fact that Nike is softening the market for future, cleaner Woods advertising? It doesn't matter: Earl Woods' voice resonates because it's talking to you.

Footnote: Nike chatter on Twitter shot up to 0.15% of all Tweets when the spot was released Wednesday. That suggests it's working.

Mobile quote of the year

Apple announced its new iAd system today, which will interpose ads into the tiny apps now becoming the main gateway online from touchscreen phones. It's an extraordinarily smart move, given that tiny cell screens are not suited for searching through Google's main search portal -- and that millions of consumers are learning to tap tiny colored icons to get everything they want from the mobile web. Yet here's Steve Jobs explaining the move, as quoted in The New York Times:

“We don’t know much about the advertising stuff. We’re learning. We tried to buy a company called AdMob, the biggest mobile advertising company. But Google came in and snatched them from us. They didn’t want us to have them. So we bought another smaller company, Quattro Wireless. They are teaching us. But we are babes in the woods. We are learning as fast as we can.”

The Yelp transparency mistake

What should you learn from Yelp's retreat today?

The business-review site Yelp has been getting smacked around by rumors that it rigged its review system, nasty allegations to be sure, perhaps a big misunderstanding from the small businesses it profiles who can be hurt badly by a negative appraisal or two. (Yelp has become a word-of-mouth powerhouse, now the 101st most popular web site in the United States with nearly 10 million unique monthly visitors. Imagine the angst if your little shop got a one-star rating on Yelp you didn't know how to counter.)

So today Yelp announced it would back away from a key component of its advertising system: It will no longer allow advertisers to pick the first review that appears on their page -- as in, previously if you paid Yelp cash, you got to select the best review for your own business and elevate it in the rankings, while your competitors who didn't pay had to just suck up whatever consumers wrote. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive, was quoted in the NY Times as saying: "I hope that these changes will debunk some of the myths and conspiracy theories out there about Yelp and its advertising and whether those are linked."

We're not here to judge whether Yelp was wrong to previously allow advertisers to buy placement of favorable ratings; but we do note sowing confusion among customers is not a strong business model. Allegations are just that, and Yelp's helpful business outreach manager Luther Lowe pointed us to 184 instances of Yelp advertising sponsors who had reviews stating "this place sucks." The site boasts a complex business model that includes social networking, rewards for frequent reviews, "elite" status for the most loyal contributors, and a filtering system that must monitor more than 2 million business reviews for fair play.

To be fair, you try hosting that many rabble-induced ratings and see if you don't tick off a few coffee shops.

But the lesson is clear: The perception of extortion, of unfair play, of biased material, of paid postings, is enough to break community trust. We heard it long before this latest news broke, months ago on a business trip in which a client raised doubts about whether to engage with the Yelp review system. "I've heard rumors that people pay to play," she said, "and that model just doesn't seem fair." In an age of lightning-fast online tempests, the utmost transparency is required to keep your community happy. If you raise doubts about the rules of your game -- say, by allowing some to pay to get better treatment in what is supposed to be an objective forum -- you risk having to recut your business model.

Footnote: The New York Times asked its readers what they thought of Yelp. The responses show what happens when doubt catches fire.

Pulling demand forward

Why don't ad people ever talk about sales?

They could learn a lot from Nabisco product packaging. While social media gurus may tell you today it's all about engagement and conversation, we say buzz don't mean a thing if people don't buy your product, consume it, and then buy more frequently. (See: your paycheck.) If you follow this logic -- that sales is the consummation of desire and so its lustful tipping point, the bite into the cookie, is pivotal to success, the eros induction of all your communication machinations -- then we ask why is it so many people in advertising never talk about sales? Branding and positioning and narrative and, oh, in today's buzz circles, curation all hype nurturing audiences as if the invisible tantric lovefest of people sometimes thinking warmly about you is enough to jack up next quarter's revenues. But here's the truth: advertising, while an accelerant, is only one piece of the operating funnel that turns raw materials into profits, and if the process doesn't get pushed down through the sales closure you'll be out of business and your consumers will be hungry tomorrow.

So why, oh why, if you invest in advertising don't you deploy strategies to get customers to consume more? The tactics are many and yet typically underutilized: Bundle products together (think, a web site that offers a pack of three products with free shipping instead of defaulting to one order). Create design incentives for customers to pick up more than one good (see: cookie packaging above). Offer a subscription to several purchases instead of a single sale (dear NPR, if you're going to nag us to donate, why not ask when we call for an automatic renewal of our gift next year as well?). Ad branding experts may recoil, as if we offered to put ink stains on their fingers or asked them to pick up a shovel, but it's time to admit: Marketing leads to sales and sales are what matter.

If you're not thinking about the connection between marketing and sales, you're missing out on how to get more people to see and share your value. After all, 491 billion sold Oreo cookies can't be wrong.

Evolution of theses: When technology pulls us apart

If technology is accelerating, and if technology is designed to fill niches, and if technology is adding appendages to your memory, motion and perception -- is technology morphing you into a new species? A group incompatible with the rest of humanity?

Click between the chatter on MSNBC and Fox News and you may wonder. Speciation is the process by which new living types arise. In nature, this usually takes a while; humans and chimpanzees shared common genetic ancestors 4.1 million years ago, and we haven't talked much since. But outside forces can accelerate speciation. If you own a golden retriever or a poodle, you have evidence that human intervention helped what were once plain gray wolves 12,000 years ago split into thousands of unique sub-species.

So here's a question: What happens to humans if we accelerate our own path down specialized roles? Technology is making this possible, with laptops and cable networks and the Internet and iPad frames allowing us to push and pull only the data that reinforces our world views. This process is given momentum by marketers who seek to personalize content and offers to lift their response rates. Not everyone lives in the Internet bubble, of course, but media proliferation followed by fragmentation has been pulling aspects of society apart in other ways, both in the U.S. and across the globe. If you live in the United States, host a party with someone from Connecticut and Texas, then toss out "what do you think about healthcare?" and watch the sparks fly. ("It's about time we helped the sick and poor!" "It's a socialist ploy to destroy our Constitution!") At the broader human species level, Western capitalism and Eastern communism fed the Cold War in the 1900s, and in this century Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism are causing the same terrifying rifts, a whiff that we might escalate violence to the point of destroying ourselves, all because people have differing mental perspectives.

Wars of perception are nothing new; the history of religion is filled with them. But what happens when mental perspectives can morph more rapidly, accelerated by the vast expansion in content, connections and memory coming from technology? People are becoming more than people, now with appendages called automobiles and keypads and mobile communications and Google replacing our feet, hands, voice and memories. As technology embeds itself further in our bodies, we can self-select the relational pathways that most interest us, and avoid all others who fall into differing perspectives. Your thesis doesn't agree with mine, so I'll shut you out and seek only those who think like me. Soon, as screens become more prominent than sunlight, I may decide to only see those who think like me. Sounds a bit like humans and chimpanzees headed for different sides of the hill, no longer interested in mating with each other.

Image: Express Monorail

Why you blather about curation

Digital strategist Len Kendall asked why people insist on using jargon that means little. We responded:

There are two driving factors that lead to big word BS syndrome: what I'll call badges and signaling.

Badges are psychological reward systems in which you gain more points as you advance in an organization. Think military hierarchies, college degrees, and Twitter follower counts. These are learned systems in which participants have to struggle to rise, receive illusory badges or scores for achieving higher status, and are reluctant to give up that complexity since it provides the reward of accomplishment. Complex language in many cultures -- health care, academia, business consulting -- is a badge that is learned over time and shows you have entered the Inner Sanctum. This is why the worst writers in the world are usually college seniors, who have been trained to use fancier, laborious language in term papers to impress professors.

Signaling is the second motive, which is why so many speakers on panels at SXSW used the bullshit phrase "curating" this year. Curating is a fancy word for managing, yet using it signals you are on the cutting edge of the latest tweak in mental masturbatory business strategic thinking. Business consultants (some, at least) fall into jargonspeak as a way of showing that at the end of the day, net-net, out-of-the-box thinking leaps the chasm to a paradigm shift. The coloration signals smarts even if the words mean nothing.

My point is the human desire to achieve status and then signal it are not going away soon. We'll be curating complex language for a while.

Image: Nebulaskin

The Outdoor rope around her wrists dug deeper

Erotic prose aside, what Internet hyperbolists fail to mention is that out-of-home advertising (billboards and the like) has been the second-fastest growing ad medium of the past decade. Outdoor slumped slightly in 2009, like everything else, but in the 11 years prior its share of U.S. ad budgets rose 242%, and prognosticators suggest outdoor will accelerate again with the expansion of new digital boards, LCD point-of-sale displays, and improved ad metrics that supposedly give marketers a read on the audience demographics likely to have made eye contact with a display. The Traffic Audit Bureau is rolling out an "Eyes On" system that uses video monitoring of passers-by eyeballs, 50,000 surveys of consumer travel habits, and a pinch of statistical magic to make outdoor ratings real.

Or so we hear. Outdoor still has significant challenges. Digital board units, which are rotated on electronic billboards every 8 to 10 seconds, are often priced at par with normal billboards -- a rather interesting math stretch since drivers zipping past at 60 miles per hour are likely to miss 3 of the 6 units being rotated onto the new digital screens. Point-of-sale displays have a wonderful potential to provide customized offers to consumers as they near the checkout, most vulnerable to impulse buying, yet marketers have failed to find a way to provide any true personalization (imagine, if you will, a scanner that recognizes your grocery cart contains ingredients for beef stroganoff and so offers you the perfect matching red wine on sale as you roll up to the register). The inability to measure any direct response to outdoor messages makes marketers awash in Google Analytics gun-shy about throwing big dollars into a silent hole. And outdoor execution, which can be brilliant (see the OAAA Creative Resource Center for inspiration), is often abysmally produced by local auto dealers or hospitals whose cluttersome eyesores give the entire segment a bad name.

Marketers evaluating outdoor need more than fancy impression estimates: It's a function of whether the media use fits your target demo, whether the modality of consumer interest makes low-cost frequent impressions an asset, and whether you can articulate your message in a few clear beats. For product categories where consumers rarely think about you until they suddenly need to -- home insurance, automobiles, health care specialities -- a low hum on the horizon helps intercept the untargetable. Soon, you can measure the real eyeballs perking up, too.

Via Scott Brunjes.

The Victor & Spoils $750 gift/insult

One challenge of crowdsourcing is no one knows how to set a fair market price for it. In the ad industry, low recessionary demand for creative and a high unemployment rate mean crowdsourcing platforms can extract a sizable margin matching talent input with project output.

The risk, in non-economics-speak, is you might piss people off. Check The Denver Egotist comment stream about Victors & Spoils' latest crowdsourcing promo. V&S apparently sent out emails to creative types offering them $750 to ideate a national campaign.

V&S is a sharp outfit led by John Winsor, formerly of CP+B, you know, the Alex Bogusky dissonance shop that puts a whiff of psychological nightmare behind simple things like hamburgers. V&S is experimenting with new models of crowdsourcing, such as combining group competitions with strategic oversight, and one could argue this bit with a guaranteed payout is a fair deal, heck, a gift. Their email allegedly said:

"We’re looking for those big, media-spanning, cross-platforming, brand-transforming kinds of ideas. Ideas that from under which TV, digital, in-store, and new revenue-stream types of pieces naturally fall.

"10 big ideas gets you $750 bucks. If you move on there’s potential for $1000 more for you."

Others, including the Egotist, saw insult. Egotist commentator Rob responded:

"A whole $750 for 10 ideas. Well shit I have Photoshop too!

1. Re-design website
2. Put up some social networking links
3. Refresh your logo
4. Tweak brand colors to purple and red
5. Tell your friends
6. Create an online giveaway
7. COUPONS!
8. Video
9. IA, SEO, SEM, CIO, CEO, CRM, CMS, CS4
10. Devalue all creative by crowdsourcing."

Image: "Batman - 66/365 Anger" by Jer Kunz

Film at page 11

Videos in magazines? Angela Natividad notes that French publication Enjeux les Echos recently included video ads for Citroën DS3’s "Anti Retro" campaign, even with a little plug on the inside page so you can download the files to a laptop. The technology to insert disposable video into magazines, brochures or direct mail has been around for a while and is costly -- typically $10.00 or more per unit, which works out to a $10,000 CPM, about 300 times that of a normal color ad in a marquee pub.

We're entering an age of gimmickry as print publishers try to defend their old pulp-based models, which while dying still drive far more ad dollars per eyeball than web equivalents. Toss in the iPad, which conceivably could make anyone a publisher of book-quality material, and the old guards of text may soon die. Until then, enjoy the show.