Google use down 17%. Is tide of search going out?

If you've been having trouble lately with your Google PPC campaign, the table above explains why.

Search remains a vital part of any marketing plan, but shifts in consumer behavior are giving it a smaller slice of the media pie. Nielsen is reporting that the total volume of U.S. searches is down significantly year-over-year, with all searches down 16%, Google down 17%, Yahoo off 30%, and Bing making some gains. We noticed this trend back in February 2008, and it is rather obvious to anyone who has seen the rising tide of social media -- with only so many hours in the day, time spent asking friends online what to do is time spent away from a search engine.

The solution is not to exclude Google, Yahoo or Bing from media plans, but to become sophisticated in how to make them work harder. Search is still the ultimate marketer's dream -- it provides people looking for exactly what you sell, and you pay advertising fees only if you get them to click. But search is also evolving into many other ways that consumers seek information -- via video, friend recommendations, serendipitous Twitter or Facebook updates, product review sites, personalization, mobile proximity, location-based service Shopkick-type temptations. Rather than think of search as a PPC line item, think of it as a series of channels and modalities that people use. Then ask, how do we cover all the new search bases?

Via Dirk Singer, who gosh, wrote very nice things about us.

Reality within

The movie Inception with its dreams-within-dreams is a metaphor for our times. We live in a layered onion of reality with the physical world in one stratum and business, data and (now) social media illusions inside.

We explore this idea over at the Sundayed blog: "How did our world splinter in two — a home life with flesh and blood, and a corporate matrix populated by artificial-numbered social reality? If veal is disdained by some who would never eat a calf kept in a small bin, not allowed to roam free, trapped indoors for life; then who would eat you? In the United States, 9 in 10 people commute to work by car, spending a collective 3.7 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, only to arrive at job sites that require 9 hours or more of input into devices that lead to numbers in banks. If humans are social creatures, driven by sexual urges to procreate and parental desires to protect our young, how did we mortgage our lust-and-love connections to spend so much time in artificial environs?"

More here.

Planning media to differentiate response

Saneel Radia at BBH Labs suggests that media (defined for non-ad people as messaging conduits such as television, radio, print, online banners, etc.) should now be considered as important as advertising strategy or creative in influencing people. In a perfect example, he mentions music -- and how the shift to iPods and digital formats and playlists has had enormous impact on how music itself is structured. The channels influence the idea within, just as paved highways have altered the designs of our vehicles.

This is not a new idea, of course; Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964 that "the medium is the message," with the channel format influencing how messages are perceived. Yet Saneel builds on this, suggesting that individual media channels should not only be evaluated for how they affect message, but be planned to influence differentiated response (what Saneel terms "experience").

One trigger. 20 results.

Differentiated response? This seems confusing at first for marketers used to targeting A person with B message through C medium, akin to splitting a single strand of spaghetti at the ends, so let's use skateboarding sneakers on YouTube as an illustration. A shoe brand such as Vans could reach its audience in many ways: passive viewers could watch a YouTube video featuring the sneaker, or users could forward the cool video to others, or manipulate a video, or even create their own user-generated content filming kids in the backyard in Vans leaping off ramps. Saneel calls this the 1:9:90 rule: "If 1% of the audience drives the experience, 9% participates, and 90% just consumes, wouldn’t a brand want to understand each stratum of people, and how the experience could fit them appropriately?" With the biggest trend in media now being concurrent media use, for instance, teens texting on mobile phones with a laptop on their knees reading Facebook while watching TV, consumers taking different response pathways is now part of life.

And therein is a disconnect. Marketers still often focus campaigns on singular objectives such as lead gen, sales, brand awareness, product launch, and then set up media strands pointed at each target and desired response. Customers, however, interpret brands in any way they want, and engage or react or respond in multiple pathways. Any single message in any individual media channel can push consumers in different directions.

The solution is simple: evaluate all the ways customers could respond from messages in each channel, which types of response provide value, and then restructure your medium-message accordingly. Product differentiation was a 1940s idea. Brand differentiation was a 1970s fad. Customer differentiation rose in the early 1990s. Today, it's time to differentiate media response.

Image: Trey Ratcliff

With free Gmail calls, Google smacks AT&T

In its effort to not be evil while taking over the universe, Google yesterday launched a free phone service you punch up from its Gmail program. The service allows you to dial any number in the U.S. and Canada for free.

Why would Google smack AT&T? More likely, it's worried about Facebook, which has 500 million users and could soon launch its own calling or video-calling technology. Imagine the lock-in Facebook could achieve by adding the ability to record snippets, post to your stream, ring all your friends now online. So Google has elevated its Gmail game, leaving AT&T long distance a bit out in future third place. Play the game downstream to a world of mobile tablets with mics and webcams, and free two-way video may arrive sooner than you think.

Mobile eclipse of ad inventory

Brandflakes points us to this graphic showing how users of social-media tools are migrating to mobile. The graphic is slightly confusing -- the overlap between the outer circle and inner one represents the share of mobile users in each category, with Facebook logging in at about 40% -- but you get the drift. Mobile brings enormous challenges to the advertising industry since its small-screen formats limit ad inventory, users tend to be focused on a sharing/sending modality and not passive consumption, and achieving scale across the fragmented universe of handset formats and smartphone apps is a real pain. Think of the graphic above as a looming advertising crunch, with the inner circle eclipsing the old media consumption of yore. Solution? Get testing in the mobile space, marketers -- it is not going away.

Why now it's Obama's mosque

Tis the season of negative advertising. Rick Scott, a Republican running for governor of Florida, is posting ads asking you to stand up to fight Obama's ... mosque. Confused? We mean, just two years ago Obama belonged to a radical Christian church. No matter. It's a classic depositioning move, casting a seed of doubt not meant to lure the logical but to sway only 5% or so of the population both (a) on the fence about whom to vote for and (b) angry about the idea of another religion building a house of worship in New York City.

Negative ads work because they tap our deep-rooted, evolutionary fears. It's the same impulse that makes you retreat from a spider or snake, potentially poisonous in the tropical lands of your ancestors, who were smart enough to flee and pass those fearful genes downward to you. We cringe before the strange, the foreign, the unknown that might hurt us. You can't fight aversion. Fear is hard-wired to survival, because even if unjustified 99% of the time, the 1% that protects you from being bitten is enough for your DNA to survive.

Expect to see more fearmongering this fall as politicians warn us of snakes and spiders all around. If only a few percentage points step back from suspicious half-truths, those who cast doubts win the game.

Via Brian Morrissey.

The pricing genius of the $0.01 iPhone case

Ah, mimicry. DefaultCase.com is making hay off of Apple's iPhone 4 reception troubles by running contextual ads online next to articles about iPhones. The banners are designed to look like official Apple ads (same fonts, layout style), and clicking through to the site offers a killer promise -- get an iPhone case that solves your antenna issue for only 1 penny!

The math is impossible, you say? Why, yes. Check out and the company adds $3.99 for shipping and handling. USPS tells us the cost to ship a 3 oz. package is $1.22, leaving DefaultCase with a nice estimated $2.78 for each small piece of plastic. Great case study in how to manipulate prices to convey value, while also riding a major company's bad press.

P.S. The site also suggests the cases are a $35 value. A touch of reference pricing to sweeten the deal. Yum.

SXSW spam? Blame the network gravity well.

Adman Bob Knorpp has been poking fun at the SXSW "panel picker" -- a crowd-filtering technique in which democratic votes are supposed to help select the best panels for the Austin digital-media conference, but which instead has devolved into "please-vote-for-me" indignities. Sure, only 30% of the decision comes from voters like you, but how can anyone realistically judge 2,401 panel contenders?

SXSW is proof that social networks can't duplicate democracy -- because, unlike voters, not all nodes in a human network are created equal. (Voting networks don't work well, either, which is why the U.S. founders set up a Congress with representative experts to filter decisions away from the sometimes-hysterical masses.) Edward Boches, creative chief of Mullen, has 12,763 followers on Twitter and thus gets noticed when he complains about Marriott. Blogger Chris Brogan has 150,485 followers. Both are likely to get voted in if they float a panel, however brilliant or stale the concept. If the SXSW goal is to build a meritocracy of ideas, and no one has the patience to judge 2,401 individual entries, then what remains is a popularity contest.

The gravity well of networks.

We call this network lock-in -- a form of groupthink that emerges when networks reinforce their current structures, similar to the stardust coalescing in gravity wells to form a new sun and planets in orbit. Humans are drawn to ideas, and they chase other nodes who espouse their own ideals most fervently. This like-drawn-to-like dynamic explains the rise of extreme news (Fox, MSNBC), horror-movie porn, punk rock, shouting politicians, and uber-bloggers. Fragmenting media blows self-reinforcing communication bubbles, where you, if extremely conservative, can find videos and commentators explaining why Obama is a socialist; or, if liberal, find an equal number of talking heads explaining how Obama is saving the economy. We are lured by gravity; tidal forces pull us to nodes that take power from our joining masses; the extremes of commonality rule the day.

Unfortunately, for edgy forums such as SXSW, this means a concept on the fringe of public consciousness -- stardust far afield -- may be ignored in favor of the topics already talked the most about. In the interactive series categories this year, we see 136 proposed panels on "social networking," 77 on "advertising," yet only five on tablet computers and none at all about artificial intelligence (they are there, but you have to dig). Tablets are the edge of media; AI may change the world soon. Unfortunately, few at SXSW may talk about that future.

TiVo fast-forwards the TV ratings industry

U.S. marketers spend about $70 billion annually on television advertising. What happens if the data guiding those investments was wrong?

TiVo, the little gadget that helps you record television programming, is poised to give Nielsen serious competition in how video audiences are measured -- and perhaps to fill some gaps. Nielsen, as you know, compiles ratings for television programming that explain what percent -- or share -- of the 114 million TV sets in the United States are tuned to any program. Trouble is, Nielsen bases such ratings on a sample of 25,000 U.S. households. While Nielsen does process more than 2 million paper diaries in its four "sweeps" heavy observation periods, in general only 0.02% of the entire U.S. television audience is actually measured -- and 99.9% is not.

TiVo will shake that up by releasing directly observed data on 375,000 households: second-by-second viewing from TiVo's set-top boxes including whether you skip commercials, play shows back later, or pump content from Hulu or YouTube through your set. Critics have long pointed out that Nielsen's panel-based measurement leads to errors. Panelists tend to overestimate their viewing of new programs they think they'd like; college students, in that sweet youth demo, have been underrepresented; viewing outside of the home, such as in bars, is not recorded; and thanks to the blunt scoring system, some shows with real audiences have been given 0.0 share. New data is coming, and the shifts may unnerve $70 billion in TV investments.

Image: Môsieur J.

Giving ideas away for free

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

If a competitor asked you for advice, would you give it? Probably not. Yet take this Altimeter research report on how to get more from Facebook landing pages -- sharp stuff. Posted for free. Where their consulting competitors can see it and repurpose it. What gives?

Sharing seems risky, especially among business warriors used to hiding secrets and skewering competitors. This morning, we had coffee with an executive from a competing ad agency to discuss forming a debate panel series, perhaps inviting other agencies from the region, and upon our return to the office met with some skepticism. What? Share ideas?

Now reframe the thought from you vs. them to you in the center of a vast network. You want to reach other nodes of value, potentially future clients, but you can't find them now. There are threads leading to them, connections through other people, and to reach them you need your message to flow along the paths inbetween. Sharing information means you'll connect with new nodes (people, organizations) who discover you, and if your transmission has value, they will pass it along. You are increasing via randomness the odds that you will connect with value in the network. It's akin to a single person, moving into a strange town, deciding to walk downtown to meet new people rather than sit home on the couch. The more random connections, the greater likelihood of a real relationship emerging.

Sharing information didn't matter much in business when networks were locked away behind hard corporate walls, when sales meant cold calling and door knocking. But today, you can connect with almost anyone. Things can flow anywhere. Your current client base is likely people who almost randomly found you, because they had a need and were searching in their own networks. We suggest you increase such randomness; take your next big idea and give it away.

Apple's 7-inch iPad decoy. Just in time for Christmas.

This is how Apple will defend the price of its $500 iPad.

We start with a Taiwanese newspaper report that Apple is building a new, smaller 7-inch iPad due in stores this Christmas. If you wonder why Apple would place yet another product between its iPods, iPod Touches, iPhones, iPads and actual computers, consider it the basic business strategy of a decoy.

A decoy is a product, service or simple price point that is offered not because a marketer wants you to take it, but because it creates a reference point to make another product look better. A BMW salesperson might show you the 7-Series that costs $90,000, knowing it's too rich for your blood, but by comparison a fully loaded 5-Series sedan for $59,000 suddenly looks like a bargain. Or conversely, a Realtor might guide you through a colonial that needs a lot of work for $390,000 -- knowing by comparison the pristine colonial she shows you next for $410,000 seems like a better value for less headache. Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational suggests that for any product "A," if you introduce a slightly worse or more expensive version "-A," you are more likely to get consumers to leap ahead:

"In essence, introducing (-A), the decoy, creates a simple relative comparison with (A), and hence makes (A) look better, not just relative to (-A), but overall as well. As a consequence, the inclusion of (-A) in the set, even if no one ever selects it, makes people more likely to make (A) their final choice."

Do you really want the small one?

Which brings us back to Apple. By introducing a slightly smaller, worse version of the iPad tablet, Apple kills two birds with one stone. It can sell the tiny gee-whiz gizmo to consumers who don't have cash for a $500 toy; and thanks to a lower-end decoy, it makes the upscale tablet look better -- and defends the high price. It is no secret that other manufacturers are rushing to produce tablets at lower costs, or that Apple in the past has been forced to rapidly reduce its prices to extend its toys into the mass markets. But if the decoy can help Apple defend the iPad's high price point (we bet $400 by Christmas, with the small 7-inch logging in at $300, take that tablet market share!) for even six additional months, Apple will make millions more.

So go ahead. Enjoy the new, tiny 7-inch tablet when it emerges. But if you walk into an Apple store to look at it, and then find yourself lured by the bigger, more expensive iPad, congratulations: Apple's decoy has worked.

Paper.li prettifies your Twitter stream

One of the great interface innovations of blogs was the top-down, most-recent-first format of a news stream. You post something, and it goes at the top of your web page, pushing older news lower. Twitter and Facebook adopted this flowing format -- trouble is, as your online connections expand it gets harder to digest the torrent within the stream.

Paper.li is a new web-based service that does to your Twitter stream what Flipboard can for other social media on the iPad -- filter the inbound links and turn them into an elegant layout. No longer is news lost in the stream; now it pops front and center. Here's what Scott Monty's Twitter stream looks like as a daily newspaper. Follow the logic, and you'll see opportunity for ad targeting tailored to the context of the material your best friends think is best for you.

Isn't it nice that we've evolved communications to the point that the latest news looks just like newsprint?

Thin slicing, or why you can see her femur

Why do advertisers use extremes?

Drastic images have been around in advertising for nearly a century, so this anorexic, meth-abused-looking model for American Eagle jeans shouldn't surprise you. Skinny and super-skinny are back in, you see, a flashback to the pencil-stick appeal of Twiggy in 1966, who thank goodness has put on some healthy curves since.

The psychology concept of "thin slicing" may hold a clue: in simplest terms, humans make rapid judgments based on tiny bits of information. Malcolm Gladwell covered this in Blink, suggesting that "what happens in the first instant when two people meet" can outweigh much of the visual and relationship data that streams between them later. Psychologist Paul Eastwick ran a fun little study of speed daters in 2007 and found that single men and women could rapidly discern whether the potential partner across the table, in only 4 minutes, was really interested in them or just desperate for a date. Physical attractiveness had no effect; what mattered when men and women scored others was how much their partner uniquely and authentically wanted them vs. all others. (This is a good message for all you sales guys: take off the smarmy grin and try to truly help your prospective client, and the person you're courting will pick up on that.)

If we make snap judgments based on tiny slices of information, then advertising must move fast to convey data. Extreme images bang the drum hard. Young women may not really want to weigh 80 pounds and eat only lettuce, but seeing a model who fits that bill tosses a data point to the frontal lobe: wear these jeans, you'll be thin. In a way, you can blame your caveman ancestors, who had to move fast on tiny pieces of information to avoid charging tigers or incoming tempests. Although we're certain if they could see this model, they'd say, ooga, girla, you need to eat something.

Toyota spills social media to build target list

Clever. Toyota has released an iPhone app and microsite encouraging you to "drive with a glass of water," in this case a virtual glass inside your phone that will spill water based on how aggressively you gas your car. At face value it encourages consumers to learn to drive more cautiously to save up to 10% of their fuel consumption. The app also self-identifies any consumers who are worried about efficient transportation, dare we say for future non-social-media targeting with ads for Priuses? Run the app, and Toyota now has your phone number; the company can do a reverse append to get your mailing address, and is potentially collecting data on how far and fast you drive. Next week, check your mail.

What we like about this campaign is it combines the fleeting interest of social media and mobile apps -- where most apps become unused after 48 hours -- with a hook that tags potential customers for future remarketing elsewhere. If that sounds Orwellian, please don't buy anything at retail stores, because they've been reusing your data for nearly a century.

Via Branislav Peric.

Reebok ungets the viral thing

This Reebok video is making the rounds in ad circles as an example of what not to do in the viral space. You know, create an amateur video with crazy happenings, launch it on YouTube and watch the viewers scale to millions -- except in this case it is blatantly professionally produced. For complete details on the mistakes made trying to show a guy stumbling across Ralph Macchio to showcase sneakers, see the post by Angela Natividad, who filed it under heavy wincing.

The deeper question is, if this is a mistake, what is a brand to do? You can't sit back and hope amateurs create something superbly authentic that will rise up the viral charts ... yet if you leadenly produce something that almost looks real, but is fake, you get trashed by all of us who are wise to your manipulative moves. This may sound strange when the entire world of advertising is based on manipulating opinion, but it actually makes sense -- because the problem here is the source of the information has been disguised. Humans make judgments based on where they think data is coming from; if your best friend tells you Toyotas still lead in quality, you may believe her, but if a salesperson says the same, you take it with a grain of salt. Advertising for decades has been put in boxes that are cleared marked as "source: someone trying to sell you," so you can sit back during commercial breaks knowing there is an agenda. But hiding the source creates confusion -- a level of cognitive dissonance, a failed ability to score the data with a key metric, the point of origination that tells you the motive of what is coming in.

Polluted ecosystems

Follow this logic, and quasi-marketing-almost-authentic material ticks people off because they don't know how to judge it. Are the shoes really being worn by a former Karate Kid movie star? Is this knowledge something true that we can use for future reference? Um, no. This is why we vote paid posts and sponsored conversations are failures of communication, because they manipulate people without being clear, and end up polluting the entire information ecosystem. Advertising works because it's potentially useful information with the source clearly identified. Social media works because it's helpful references from people you trust. Blend the two, and you seed confusion and potentially irritation. This is why the usually helpful blogger Chris Brogan got spanked by his followers over a paid Kmart Christmas post.

So how does any marketer solve the viral puzzle? David Armano has suggested that to become remarkable, you must do something that people will remark upon. Rather than fake a creative encounter, do something truly creative with your business that others can't help but talk about. It's not easy building real authentic news that others will report on, but hey, that's why they call the news new.

Shiny object syndrome

David Armano, the great visualizer of social-media dynamics, offers a nice introductory talk on why social differs from media, and why it does more than support marketing.

Wordless

"I feel safe between pages, wordless in the backseat of a car, filled with the cacophonous invented voices of others. Maybe because of that, I'm comfortable with silence, letting the weight of it settle and bake as others wait for me to hold up my corner of the frothy conversational parachute."

-- Quote from Angela Natividad. Sometimes you read something that reminds you words have power, too.

What to make of NYT's millionth mobile user

Finance guys are fun to watch because they bet real money on their predictions, so it's notable that Seeking Alpha believes The New York Times Company stock is headed up due to mobile usage. Alpha suggests there are now more than 1 million people who read NYT via handsets every month, and that the scaling trend line could take NYT's total web traffic from 28 million monthly users today to 70 million by 2015.

There are implications in the logic, of course. Alpha's calculation is based on 106 million mobile page views in June and a guess that the average mobile user reads 100 pages a month. If the real answer is 200 pages per user -- say, 6 per day -- 1 million mobile users is now 500,000. Second, the NYT mobile app has been downloaded 4.5 million times -- so even if the real mobile readership is 1 million per month, that's only 22% of app-grabbers who find the Times intriguing enough to engage via mobile. Third, the iPhone, and now the iPad, are driving bursts in experimentation by consumers who download apps ... but there is always a falling usage pattern over time. Given the comical missed forecasts of mobile advertising revenues, the jury's still out on whether mobile adoption among marquee web sites will really scale.

Image: i_follow

Why autoposting is a silly, bad and dumb idea

Read the tweet above by Mullen's creative chief Edward Boches. Beyond the words, do you get the vibe? The head of an ad agency is taking time out after a busy day of work to send an update on news he thinks is relevant. You feel connected. You may want to to contact him, especially if you're an aspiring ad worker-bee or a client with a major budget.

And that's the goal. Boches is one of the people we've met in social media who is real -- who works at it, spends hours a day responding to every comment on his blog, tweeting to the elite and drones alike, a human being meant to help who at the same time has attracted major new accounts for Mullen such as JetBlue, Zappos and Martha Stewart.

Which brings us to the point: If you're planning a social media presence, you have a choice. You can act like a person and engage in real time, which takes effort, or you could turn into the 2010 version of the AP newswire feed and stage news nuggets and pithy remarks using software tools such as HootSuite. (Mashable gives an entire rundown here.) Look at a screen-shot of the HootSuite interface below: can you feel the real human vibe?



We don't mean to disparage software; automating communications is a complex decision, and as email and faxes and radio playlists have proved, if it can be automated, someone will do so. But if you automate social media, you are making a critical mistake. It's midnight, a new year, and someone is asking you a question! Not. Perhaps your organization has millions of customers or fans, say, similar to Rick Sanchez of CNN; it may be extremely difficult to be real and not automate tweets or postings with help from an editorial staff and software spraybots. Yes, it's tempting -- you can fake real communications with a simple programmable click! But we've seen famous people who've reached the top, based on their own talent, hire ghostwriters, trying to extend their influence and paychecks, only to have the substandard experience crash down.

It's hard for bean counters who carry mechanical pencils to understand, but if you falsify authenticity -- even if it is to reach millions of people and make boatloads of money -- you're missing the point. You can't build human relationships on a fake platform. Social media, like any network, tends to rebel against malicious intrusions (see telemarketing and the DNC list).

The reality is social media is scalable, but only to a certain level. To reach it, you have to work hard, and then maintain those relationships every day. Fake your connection, and the people on the other end will eventually tune out.

Inspired by Stuart Foster of The Lost Jacket.

Pilot's big, bold 'enhanced need set' move

There aren't many campaigns worth adoring, but we love, love the Pilot pen handwriting microsite which, as you can guess, allows you to scan in your own handwriting and then use it via computer to type documents or emails with informal penmanship. At first glance the system is a little gimmick designed to attract attention to old-fashioned (and perhaps classier) handwritten notes. But think of the risk. What happens to Pilot if we all opt-in, create our own computer fonts, and send messages to each other without buying pens and ink cartridges? Did Pilot just kill its future business?

This campaign is an example of meeting your customers' "enhanced need set" -- a concept from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers that means thinking of concentric circles around your core product, and then brainstorming the additional needs your customers might like filled. Mobil gas stations did this with their clean bathroom and Speedpass campaigns (moms want sanitation, drivers want to get in-and-out fast). Westin hotels did the same with its "heavenly beds," a luxury mattress that made sleeping nicer and was copied by much of the hotel industry. If you sell A, what happens if you also meet customer need B as well?

For Pilot, we think the computer font move is brilliant, because the focus on handwriting likely outweighs the risk we'll only type at each other. Just look at the Gloria signature above. Then think back to the days of fluffy white stationery with the little paper fibers embedded, bending beneath the scratch of your pen, with no delete key and only emotion to guide you. Don't you feel guilty for writing home via email now?

Via @alphanum3ric.

Social media kills your web portal

Yeah, we know you're working on a big new corporate site -- and here is why it likely doesn't matter. New research from Nielsen shows Americans now spend 33% of their time online using social media or online games, up from about 25% a year ago. Google search has remained about constant, with the big losers being portals such as Yahoo and AOL -- with their slice down by 19 percent. Peter Kafka over at AllThingsD also notes that email is migrating over to smart phones, where Americans spend 42% of the time they hold handsets pecking at tiny keys.

The harsh lesson for marketers: Consumers want to see less of your single site, and if they do read a message, it may be on tiny handsets with less visual inventory for ad messaging. Perhaps instead of focusing on your single landing page, it's time to build a broader web presence with more options for consumers to find, or share, your story.