Widgets work, if you like a pointless waste of time

Whoops, did we say that? Let's review the data. A new report from Flowing Data found nearly half of 23,160 Facebook apps fall into a "just for fun" category — meaning users play with the apps with scant focus on the marketing message.

We promise. We won't say we told you so. Widget applications actually have uses for branding and for extending a web presence far beyond the walls of your site. Brilliant creative and originality inside a widget can help a message get through. For certain uses, such as searching for mortgage rates, a mini-app makes a lot of sense.

But it's worth remembering amid all the hyperbole, silliness still rules. Thanks, Steve.

Don Imus ratings down. Don Imus ratings up.

Consumer shifts in media usage have every outlet scrambling to redefine how they are measured. Now, the measurement baloney over in print is starting to seep into radio.

Take Don Imus. Crain's NY Biz reports that the WABC-AM Imus In the Morning show has a 1.5 audience share among adults 25-54, down 17% from last year. At first glance, this is bad news for the once-Nappy morning jock, putting Imus into 18th place. Boomer & Carton, a new show on WFAN, has surged ahead to 5th place.

But among adults 35-64, Imus' share is 3.1 and up 24% over last year. And a VP for WABC's parent claims new Portable People Meters — hard-wired survey devices that replace today's current paper diary surveys and pick up inaudible signals from the radio to measure every second of listening — show Imus also beats WFAN in the A25-54 category.

So whom do you believe? Well, no one. Media planning requires forecasting, and such ratings can give you direction on which outlets to build into the plan. But the only way to measure results is to measure results; use 800 tracking numbers or unique URLs or calls to action on the radio that push the consumer to Google trackable keywords.

With all the ruckus on the radio, you need more than forecasts; you need measurement.

If your readers fell in a forest, would you hear it?

WSJ.com proves that affluent readers continue to move online. In March unique visitors at the site were up 175% to 15 million, despite the fact that WSJ.com continues to charge for much of its content.

Meanwhile, traditional paper-based news magazines are tipping over. Newsweek's circulation is down 16%; Time has plummeted 19%; and U.S. News & World Report announced last week it would cut its rate base a whooping 500,000 to 1.5 million -- and print only 36 issues a year instead of the former 46.

These numbers mean that anyone advertising in traditional print may be seeing declining inquiries and rising customer acquisition costs. If you have been reluctant to explore web display advertising, it's time to start that engine. (Photo by Cicada.)

Barney Beagle marketing

Meet Bruce. Bruce is a gigantic dog, and we apologize for the camera shake but when you get close for a photo snap, his fangs look enormous.

Meet Evan. He looks like Bruce. It's eerie, really, how both are tall, white with dark markings, somewhat handsome, and have women who take them outside for walks.

Advertising clients and marketing directors can be like this. They often want ad media that "looks" like them, meaning if they listen to talk radio, they want ads on talk radio.

We call this the Barney Beagle theory. People pick dogs, and marketing programs, that reflect themselves. Back in 1962 the little children's book told the story of how a beagle sat in a store window and watched other dogs get taken home. Each dog was picked up by a kid who looked just like the dog. Until finally a little boy came who looked like Barney Beagle.

The trouble with this is customers are often very different from the (yes) older men in suits who run many companies. If you are a marketing director, your personal preferences can easily lead you down the wrong path. Senior citizens watch a lot of TV. Business travelers use the internet heavily and browse in-flight airline catalogs. Women with children are heavy readers of magazines. Teens spend time inside Facebook. Is your advertising schedule really reflecting your audience, or just your own biases?

When planning media, only use Evan if your customer looks like Bruce.

As TV ratings lie, Kimmel goes live

These new television C3 ratings are BS. Really. Let's think about this -- more people are using DVRs to record TV and skip commercials, and yet the networks have found a way to measure DVR use so the ratings go up.

Here's the story. Today about 1 in 4 U.S. households has a cool black box called a Digital Video Recorder, such as TiVo, so you can record TV programs in advance and zoom past commercials. This is the second big smack in the face for television advertising, the first being the rapid migration of TV viewers to other media, such as the internet and YouTube, for video viewing.

Fewer viewers + viewers skipping commercials = TV advertising crisis.

Obviously, no one can sell ads on TV unless you can estimate the impact. So a battle formed. Ad agencies sought to get more accurate measurement, by tracking impressions of individual spots within a commercial pod (and not the overall program rating). Television networks tried to get more vague, by measuring live impressions (when the spot actually airs) plus a 7-day window of repeat viewing for all the DVR users who "watch" the commercials in the following week.

This is where the story starts to smell bad.

A great compromise emerged called C3 ratings -- "live" ratings of the ad at the time it actually airs plus a 3-day window of later viewing. Networks would still love the "plus 7" window to count a full week of follow-up impressions. Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer of GroupM, told Media Planner Buyer last fall, If you look at the program ratings for the five broadcast networks this season, you’re seeing 11 percent to 12 percent erosion. When you factor in live plus 7, it’s closer to 2 percent ...

Did you catch that? Ratings were down, but now magically they are back up.

Thank goodness Jimmy Kimmel has decided to try live commercial skits to keep viewers tuned in. As the baloney sandwich of new advertising metrics starts to stink, trying something new in the creative may be a good defense. Or if you really want to get crazy, just measure your sales results.

We know it's you. ComScore passive biometric observation told us so.

There's a scene in the sci-fi film Minority Report where Tom Cruise, fresh from a future eyeball transplant, walks into The Gap and a digital ad on the wall greets him as Mr. (insert Japanese name here, we can't remember it). It was a bit of humor at marketing personalization gone awry, but points to the future. And comScore is almost there.

ComScore, an internet metrics service that rates web sites, is moving beyond tracking machines to watching the specific individuals who use them. This is a huge leap in monitoring internet use, because while every device plugged into the web has a unique IP address, multiple users handle each device. How do you tell when mom, dad, or 17-year-old Jenny is using the computer? ComScore does this by observing your keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Let us explain. The way comScore measures internet behavior is largely through a vast, international group of consumer "panelists" who opt-in to a voluntary comScore research project. Volunteers get some incentives, such as free software, in exchange for letting comScore watch what they do online.

The trick of getting beyond the computer is pretty simple. ComScore software tracks the "biometric signature" of users -- mom may type fast, dad may peck slow, Jenny may be a heavy user of the mouse scroll wheel -- and then over time matches the discrete patterns with a user when he or she fills out a web form that requires a name. Soon, the comScore system recognizes that fast typing occurs when mom is online. And, by matching the individual user patterns with the detailed demo information they filled out as survey participants, comScore paints a pretty detailed picture.

You can see where this is going. For now, it's surveys. Soon, every online company in the world may start tracking biometric signatures and putting 2 and 2 together between dad being online, his credit card purchases, his demo profile, his web history, and the ads that should be served on his page. In some ways this would be helpful -- Amazon.com might finally stop serving husbands recommendations for Oprah books the month after Christmas. In other ways, you can already hear the privacy advocates howl.

Good? Bad? We could argue this both ways. But one-to-one personalization is coming, and deep, invasive tracking of what you do will soon be powered by the little mouse in your hand.

Google results falling fast. Here's why.

Google isn't exactly bragging about it, but results from Google PPC campaigns are down across the board. Here's what you need to know before kicking your internet marketing manager, and how to fix the problem.

1. First, the downward trend is real. Go to Google Trends, type in a keyword phrase, and Google will serve up a graph showing worldwide search volume. Search use at Google is down about 50% in the past four years for a range of topics including "advertising agency," "heating oil," "furniture," "music lessons," "office supplies" and "new car dealer." It's hard to get a real look inside Google's black box, but play around with the Trends findings and you'll see slippage in most categories.

This look at search trends for "office supplies" proves the point. If anything is constant in business, it's that we all need paper clips and paper. When global search volume is down 50% for the bedrock of business ... something is going on.


2. To make fewer searches worse, more competitors have jumped aboard to chase the reduced number of searchers. The glory days of being first out of the gate with a PPC campaign on Adwords are over. As competitors bid on your category, placement on the page remains difficult. A few industry bargains remain, including healthcare, where most hospital administrators have not yet discovered they can capture patients online in search engine marketing. (See: Pew.)

3. The likely scapegoats are new social media such as Facebook ... but they are not to blame. A new report by Pew notes that social media has been around for as long as the internet (starting back with Usenet and electronic bulletin boards). Pew researched email use and found it has been almost constant from 2000 to 2007 (about 55% of internet users type email on any given day), showing consumers haven't really migrated more to interacting with each other.

4. The real answer: Consumers are more savvy. Today about 68% of online shoppers now search at least four online resources before making a purchase decision -- and all that clicking around drives up PPC costs. Mediapost reports that users are also gravitating toward reviews written by other consumers, not company paid ads, which helps explain the decline in Google search volumes.

It's simple, really. More competition + smarter shoppers + consumers gaining control over product information = tougher PPC results. The only solution is to build more sophisticated PPC campaigns with bid management software and to extend your brand online with other entry points, such as microsites, blogs, and video. Search still works. But like everything else in advertising, now it's going to take hard planning to make it work right.

It's not just Google. It's a complex mousetrap.

Mario Sgambelluri throws cold water on the whole Google-has-the-best-results thing by pointing out the way most people measure internet campaigns disregards everything we know about marketing.

The logic trap marketers fall into is thinking the last ad people saw triggered the response. So if a text ad on Google creates a click at 25 cents, that's good, right? Sgambelluri points out that people take actions based on a culmination of impressions. The concept of integrated marketing has been around for decades, yet we seem to forget this when evaluating online ad components. A Google ad helps close the deal, but prior impressions in offline and online media helped get consumers to the point of decision.

This is important, because as marketers allocate funding in online campaigns they must consider the upstream online communications -- banner ads, blogs, social media, videos, microsites -- that lead consumers to the search engine trigger point. Atlas Institute source presentation here.

Big, bad news for web ads: 6% of users drive 50% of clicks

A new study by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore may shake internet advertisers to their core. Seems only 6% of online users create 50% of all clicks on web banner ads. Worse, this "heavy-clicker" group is not a sweet demographic target:

- Heavy-clickers have low household incomes below $40,000 a year
- Heavy-clickers spend more time online, but this is not equal to higher online spending
- And, in a death knell for "but wait we're just branding" campaigns, the study found there is no correlation between high clicks on banners and increased brand affinity.

Put it together, and you get a bleak picture. Your click-through rate may be above average, but you may be getting clicks from just a low-income, brand-oblivious fraction of your total online target audience. This doesn't mean that banner campaigns don't work, but it does mean that click-through rates alone won't tell you results. You'll have to track conversion rates, costs per lead, costs per acquisition, and even new customer profitability and lifetime value ... the deep metrics that explain the real web campaign results.

Perhaps high-income, highly educated web users have better things to do on the web -- like use the web.

When web ad measurement fails, build a ruler

We've been critical about broadcast, outdoor and print media measurement systems lately ... but at least there is one ruling body in each of those media that tries to establish standards. A new report says the lack of consistency in online measurement may be scaring some advertisers away from internet advertising, especially as web media continues to evolve into video, widgets, and social media apps. This is ironic, because the web is awash in data ... but often not all of the numbers add up.

For example, one standard of web audience is "unique visitors." But if a user deletes the cookies on his computer, he comes back as a new unique visitor each time ... so John Doe, battling viruses on his Windows PC, may get counted over and over again inflating a web site's traffic report. "Uniques" also do not account for the same viewer logging in from different computers.

This is more than a nit: unique visitors are the baseline of a web site's audience, the equivalent of reach in traditional media planning. If reach is off, what else could be?

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, put it: "Marketers want to know, If I take $10 out of TV and put it into online, am I getting $10-plus back?"

The cold hard truth is the advertising industry has been riddled with inflated metrics for years, and as the data systems get better (driven by the attempt to keep up with the flow of data from the web), a lot of old-school Emperors are going to realize they are wearing no clothes. Media can work, but only if you base your media plans on reality. If the reality is teenagers are leaving radio to listen to MP3s, let's count it, and deal with it, not hide facts. If the reality is newspaper circulations are down, let's not make up bogus "readership" claims based on passalongs, because that does an advertiser little good.

The only real solution we see is for marketers to bypass the competing claims by setting up measurement of inbound responses. If a marketer spends $10,000 on one outlet, and can track with accuracy that 200 responses came in, she will know the cost per response was $50 in that particular media. If another media option drives a response at $25, then that's a better deal. As media options continue to proliferate, each channel will inflate and defend its own metrics, and silly claims will continue to rise. If you want the truth about advertising, measure it yourself.

Correlation does not equal causation. Smokers rejoice.

If you dig data, you could still choke on the 25-pound Historical Statistics of the United States, available for only $940.50 at Amazon.com. P. J. O'Rourke dissects it in The Atlantic pointing out the problem with data. Americans are eating less red meat and more vegetables, but still getting fatter. Divorces are down, but suicides are up. And -- get this -- from 1973 to 1994, smoking rates fell from 4,148 cigarettes per capita to 2,493, yet lung and bronchial cancer diagnoses are up 34%.

The message: Stopping smoking is dangerous, because without cigarettes you may get cancer.

The trouble with data like this is it is too easy to jump to conclusions, and to assume a change in A must drive a resulting change in B. Marketers run into this all the time measuring campaign results. Three common mistakes in advertising measurement are (a) setting metrics up too broadly so you cannot accurately track individual responses to individual ads, (b) neglecting to consider the impact of competitors on your results, or (c) failing to evaluate how shifts in ad channels affect each other. We've seen many clients with declines in print response AND increases in internet response who cannot connect these dots. In other cases, we've seen advertising results fall for no apparent reason -- until we begin tracking the major competitor moves whose gravity is causing our client's prospects to swing out of orbit.

Measurement is hazardous, because the wrong assumptions can lead to the wrong decision. Cause and effect, or effects with no cause? Until we figure it out, it's probably best to stop smoking.

Outdoor industry's fling with GPS is officially over

Billboards may be the second-hottest advertising format in the U.S., but measuring them isn't getting easier. Marketers had hoped that Nielsen's GPS tracking system, in which consumers in LA and Chicago had their exact movements tracked via a small device and compared to billboard coordinates, would be expanded by the Traffic Audit Bureau.

No dice. TAB, which audits traffic counts for the outdoor industry, is walking away from GPS measurement citing the high cost. Instead, next year TAB will launch a new estimate of viewers for outdoor based on the eye movements of test subjects who, um, watch video simulation of billboards rolling by the highway. Media buyers may get slightly better data than the old DEC (daily effective circulation); DEC measured all the cars passing by, where the new Eyes On system will estimate the portion of people who actually see the boards. The fact that DEC will now be discounted in acknowledgment that many drivers ignore boards is a good thing--now, media planners can at least estimate impressions without padding.

Nielsen's GPS tests had some intriguing findings. About 75% of consumers who drive under a highway overpass will notice a 200-square-foot board. Only 30% of consumers passing a bus stand will notice the image. As for the rest of outdoor, now, we may never really know.

The opportunity cost of your ad spend

Freakonomics points out that cycling to work may get you killed, but the risk of crashing (12 times more for cyclists vs. auto drivers) is offset by the heart-healthy benefits (people who don't cycle to work have a 39% higher mortality rate). All of which reminds us of your advertising budget.

Many clients allocate advertising at the beginning of the fiscal year, then call it a day. Budgets are carved up among television, radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, Yellow Pages, and sales collateral. The problem with this is that your media plan may be based on brilliant impression forecasts -- GRPs, CPM, reaching the target at the lowest cost in the highest performing media -- but without ongoing shifts in your advertising pattern based on measurement, you'll never optimize results and eliminate risk.

It's like bicycling to work every day, even if a hurricane is blowing rain in your face. You can't pick one approach and then not change it based on real-world events.

Why is changing a plan important? Most marketers understand that different products have different margins, and that different customers have different lifetime value. The same goes with media outlets. One print pub could give you a cost per call of $50, vs. another pub -- running exactly the same ad -- with a $500 cost per call. 20% of your print probably drives 80% of your total print results. You cannot predict this in advance, no matter how good your CPM forecasting, because the real world of media consumption will always surprise you.

How do you change? Measure. If you track the impact of each specific ad -- such as with unique 800 phone numbers -- you can gradually cull out underperforming outlets and redeploy funds into the media vehicles with the highest yield. Once the media "flat tires" are identified, we pull them off, and put new "wheels" on the advertising machine.

Stay tuned for some ad-optimization forecasting tools coming to our new mediassociates.com web site when it relaunches in a few weeks.

Smooth, with notes of cherry, pepper, and a mild finish

Ever wonder what advertising connoisseurs might think of your ad creative? Upload your ad to the Andy Awards Instacritique and an impartial judge will tell you if you're destined for ad greatness or just a dunderhead. We wonder how our brilliant media plan flowcharts will fare.

The Andy Awards have been around since 1964, launched by the Advertising Club of New York, and now cover print, radio, television, out-of-home, direct mail, video/cinema, interactive and other media. Go ahead. Be brave.

Answer one question to solve advertising math

We're constantly amazed by the number of marketers who get hung up on media math. Of course, it's complicated, with every media channel talking about different metrics -- Gross Rating Points (% reach x frequency), CPM (cost per mil, or thousand impressions), DEC, and those lovely new web figures, cost per click, conversion rates, etc. Here's a little secret: media channels use different metrics because they like to use the ones that make their channel look better than the other options.

So: How about cost per acquisition? It's simple. How much are you willing to spend to bring in one incremental customer?

You should be able to answer this, and then pass it to your ad agency or media planners, and hold them accountable. If one customer generates $1,000 in revenue and $300 in profit in the first year, you may be willing to spend, say, $400 to bring in a new customer (since more profit will flow in future years, and you need to replenish your base). That's your target cost per acquisition.

So, you have $400 in funds to bring in a customer.

If half goes to sales, then you have $200 to spend on marketing for each new customer.

And if only 1 in 4 customers is sold, you have $50 to spend for each lead (or inquiry).

$50. That's it. All of your media needs to drive a phone call or web lead form for $50 per inquiry. How's your direct mail doing? If it costs 50 cents per piece, you'll need a 1% response rate to get to a $50 call. How's newsprint? If one ad costs $5,000, you need 100 calls from a single ad to get to a $50 call.

Now, you have a single, common benchmark for every aspect of the media. Those old GRPs and CPMs are fine for planning. But if you really want to measure performance, you need to track action, not impressions. Everything else is just Monopoly money.

With mobile up, something's got to give

Forecaster Jack Myers predicts newspaper ad spending will continue to decline by 2 to 4.5 percent per year, for the next three years, as mobile advertising more than doubles in 2008 to $1.1 billion. Ad spending in print is down as circs fall and readers move online. We recommend print in many campaigns, but coach clients to measure ad performance to keep a close read on what works and what doesn't. In many ad campaigns, there is a 10 to 1 ratio in cost per inquiry from various print ads in different pubs. CPM analysis is no longer enough -- marketers need to find ways to measure responses from each individual ad, given the importance of making print work in a declining readership market.

If your customers rarely call you, go outdoors

We were on the phone a few years back with the head of marketing for a major washing machine manufacturer. The guy had a problem -- washing machines tend to work very well for more than a decade, but when they break, consumers rush out and buy a new one within 48 hours. His question: How in the world could he market in such a low-interest consumer category when customers never think about his brand, until suddenly and urgently they do?

We describe such customers as having high modality. It doesn't mean your product is bad or that your customers don't like you. It means your product may be so good, or such a simple subscription model, that consumers don't think about it often until some distant switching point in the future.

If you have customers who don't call often, outdoor should be in your media plan. It works.

Billboard gets a bad rap by some marketers who don't understand it, and say things like "outdoor is just for branding." We challenge that opinion with some raw numbers: Billboard is the second-fastest growing medium in terms of total advertising dollars in the U.S., with share of ad spending up exactly 300% from 1996 to 2007. After the internet, no other ad channel is growing so quickly. By comparison, newsprint ad spending is down 25.6% in the same period.

Major advertisers wouldn't triple their spending in a category unless it was working. Look at OAAA's list of top billboard advertisers and you'll find two patterns: companies that try to steer you off the next highway exit (amusement parks, McDonald's), and organizations such as hospitals, cell phone carriers, and insurance companies where consumers need them only very infrequently.

Why? Billboards build cheap buzz. Companies who have consumers with high modality need to intercept them at a low-cost hum level. American consumers are spending more time in cars, and less time with traditional media as the internet captures attention inside the home. Outdoor has gotten its act together with cleaner formats and new digital boards. Outdoor is the cheapest way to provide a low-level hum.

Outdoor does have problems -- it's difficult to measure response, DEC metrics don't exactly match up with the media math in other channels, bad designs or locations can spoil the impact, and billboards work best when integrated with other channels, making results, yes, even harder to measure. But if customers love you only infrequently, try meeting them in the great outdoors.

What is execution genius?

We've worked with scores of clients and have seen what works -- always, measurement. Brilliant execution always comes from figuring out how your advertising resources are really performing, by using measurement systems such as unique 800 numbers, test cells, customer surveys, or list backmatching. Once you know exactly what each ad is doing, you can realign media resources to make them work harder.

Just like these guys using a forklift to lift another forklift.

Thanks to American Copywriter for this one.

Lower your SEM handicap

Don’t believe the hype. The number one position is not always beneficial to a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign…it is often harmful.

The number one position statistically generates the highest average click-through-rate (CTR) among all other positions. Therefore, on an unlimited budget, your campaign will most likely gain the maximum amount of clicks when your ads stay atop the sponsored listings (left-side listings, of course). This seems to be a great piece of information; however, let’s face it: simply driving traffic to your site means absolutely nothing if your end goal is to convert these website visitors to sales or leads (conversions).

Position numero uno often lacks when it comes to conversion rate. The reason: prospective customers/clients often “feel out” their options before they commit to a purchase or a lead form; the very nature of shopping. Before purchasing, searchers are very likely to visit several sites by clicking multiple paid ads during the pre-buy information gathering stage. For instance, if you were in the market for the new Titlest driver, would you go ahead and buy it on the first site that you clicked on? Not a chance. It is not until you find the most competitive price with free shipping that you commit to duck-hooking and/or power fading yet another over-priced driver.

Much like finding the right driver, finding the right ad position (sweet spot) involves testing, testing, testing. Ad copy testing, although burdensome and lengthy, can dramatically lower cost-per-lead values and thus increase ROI. It is not worth doing…it is absolutely necessary.

Book of the Decade award

OK, we don't give awards, but if we did, this is it. A year ago Briggs and Stuart published the first marketing book to really explain why so much advertising is wasted, and they measured a billion in ad dollars from 20 blue chip companies to prove their case. Turns out that about 37% of ad budgets fail completely, and that success in advertising hinges on measuring ad campaigns while they are in flight.

What works, they say? Rebalancing the media mix would give most CMOs a 10 to 20 percent lift in results. Hitting prospects from different channels at once outweighs single-channel frequency. GRPs are fallacious, and not all reach is created equal. Perhaps most important, organizations have to be willing to measure, and then to change.

A year later, I still carry it around, as useful as my laptop. Man, what a read.