Thought Gadgets

The world will end in 2012. Or not.

2009-11-21T22:34:00.005-05:00

We were debating healthcare reform with our brother-in-law over an early turkey dinner tonight when we realized ... two intelligent people with the same set of data can come to two vastly different conclusions, just as the well-educated policy wonks on Fox News and MSNBC could all be Mensa members and still yell at each other. Humans aren't really clear judges of the world after all, since some other combined forces of genetics, training, environment, education, culture or homophily warp our conclusions. We all have access to the same mental inputs, yet Republicans and Democrats, or Americans and the Taliban, tend to fall into polarizing we're-right-and-you're-not camps. Every culture that has ever gone to war with another has firmly believed they were backed by God.

We can't all be right. It's confusing. So we leave you with two looks at the end of the world in 2012.

31,594,000 ways to avoid your content portal

2009-11-21T09:28:00.020-05:00

Facebook became the third most popular venue for watching online video in October, signaling the end of content portals. In our age of a million channels where making choices is difficult, the recommendations of our peers are becoming the new TV Guide.

What do we mean? There are three ways that content is distributed: First, producers can push -- say, NBC's old Seinfeld appointment television viewing on Thursday nights in the 1990s. Second, users can search -- Google's rise in the early part of this decade, and more recently the popular YouTube engine that allows you to find funny cat videos. But the third wave is when people you trust do the finding for you.

Here's a test: Think of all the content your business puts out that you want people to see -- your web site, your press releases, videos, ads and marketing communications. Now, add up all the ways you enable others to share your content with their networks of people. Is the sum more than zero?

Homophily at prime time

Human networks amplify the dynamic of "homophily," the tendency of people you like to enjoy the same things you do. This is why people in cliques tend to wear the same clothes, watch the same movies, discuss the same politics, and now ... share the same content. We trust our friends and loved ones. When they share something, we want to watch.

The strategic lesson for marketers is if you want your message to go viral, you have to find ways to entice networks of users to share it with others. For example, Facebook is no Hulu or YouTube yet, but the numbers for video access there are rising. In October 31.5 million unique users watched videos posted inside the social network, vs. 13.4 million on Hulu (the leading site for professional video content) and 105 million in YouTube (top site for user-generated video).

The "sticky" portal strategy of the 1990s is dying a deserved egocentric death. The center will not hold because you are no longer the center. You have to find ways to pass it along.

Speaking of heaven

2009-11-20T23:23:00.006-05:00

We beat up on augmented reality a few posts back, so let's be fair and think where a visual internet could go when unhinged from flat screens. No, not holding magazines up to computer cams, but instead, a world in the future where you wear glasses and see a newer reality with appendages you want. Tiny computers would project images onto your lens, overlaying perfectly with the real world behind like the magic yellow line on NFL football fields. The first step would be adding information about contacts or products; nimbuses of stats about colleagues, halos of data surrounding each soup can in the aisle to aid your navigation through life.

Of course we would take it further, tweaking our perception of reality for greater self-pleasure just as we now tint the world blue or orange with designer sunglasses. If you're into goth, you could make the world look like a vampire flick. If you're into self-image, you gaze down and see a fitter you, trimmed and tucked. No one would have to buy fashionable clothes any more, because we would see everyone else in the fashions that we, the visual receivers, want.

This isn't fantasy; we already alter our audio reality with iPod earbuds, piping in fictitious sounds that set dream moods that don't exist. So why not adjust the eye vision, too? Say with virtual rings around the Earth -- like the view from Paris at 1:01 in this clip.

Via MTLB and Nerdcore. Inspired by @tsand, who reminded us that augmented reality is just a baby with a long ways to go.

Death and social media

2009-11-20T00:18:00.011-05:00

We were on a plane between Nashville and LaGuardia last night when, on a whim, we punched up Wi-Fi for $10 and found a surreal update from our brother on Facebook. "RIP Uncle G.... you were a good, good man and will be missed."

People die every day. People are then missed. Uncle Gordy is now one of them, and while we weren't close social media had played a strange role in making us miss him more. Gordon Halley was born in 1926 in New England and moved to the western United States years before we were born. We hardly saw him at all, until about six months ago his photo popped up in Facebook as a friend recommendation. Activities: Wild bunch (Seniors at church). Interests: Aviation, photography. Favorite TV Shows: Jeopardy, Dancing with the Stars.

Remorseful that we hadn't connected with our mom's brother in at least two decades, we friended him back, then picked up the phone and called. Gordy had a warm, gravelly voice. He also had cancer, a rare blood thing, something to do, he thought, with cleaning engine spark plugs with no gloves for hours a day as a youth back in the Army. We got off, said what the hell, booked a plane ticket and took mom, aging herself with cancer, in a wheelchair through connecting airports across country to reunite with her brother. It was a spontaneous trip, inspired in part by the silly Jim Carrey movie "Yes Man" in which one opens oneself up to the world to experience new things. Yes, we said, let's go.

At the end of that California visit we somehow got Mom back up the steps of the small plane for the return flight home. Los Osos, Calif., has an airport about as big as a Chili's restaurant. Gordy had shown up a few minutes too late to hug his sister good-bye, so he and his son, a tall grown man himself, stood by a chain link fence in the predawn light, up an embankment above the Tarmac at the little California airport, waving at us. They looked like two cowboys, a scene out of romance film, two silhouettes with arms in the air. We'd just spent four days with a good man we'd almost forgotten; seen his leathery tan, his quiet humor, the way his grandchildren out West drove hours just to spend time with the man they loved. We're cool with all this, we thought. This isn't too sad. And then our mom started to cry.

Social media is hyperbole and lunacy and silly pokes in comical graphics, perhaps soon to fade as the ham radio fad or the telegraph years before. But it does connect people beyond their circles in ways we do not expect. It also leaves a digital legacy, how permanent, we don't know, but we wonder about our own trail of online breadcrumbs as we read now that Gordy liked Mexican and Chinese food, and women too, and has a granddaughter going to school and had gray hair, blue eyes, a good smile and a core belief that the west coast is fabulous!

No one wants to hear someone has died on Facebook. But if you listen closely, you may find voices worth visiting even if they are not next door.

This Esquire download should take only 5 minutes

2009-11-18T19:14:00.009-05:00

Picking on the new Esquire augmented reality cover is a bit too easy. Sure, we could laugh at the idea that consumers will carry the physical magazine over to their home office, boot up the computer, spend five minutes downloading software, and then hold the magazine cover up to the web cam to get an enhanced experience. Of course it's crap, a 2009 rendition of the 1990s' :CueCat barcode reader that Forbes and Wired tried to get you to use at the tail end of the last internet bubble. Remember that? You plugged a device into your computer, which took about five minutes, and then held the magazine up to the device to get an enhanced experience ...

The :CueCat bombed, of course. Wikipedia rattles off the disaster: PC World called it one of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time"; Jeff Salkowski of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "you have to wonder about a business plan based on the notion that people want to interact with a soda can." By 2005, a liquidator web site tried to unload 2 million of the ugly plastic devices for 30 cents each.

So here we go again; a national magazine asking people to jump through hoops to connect a print vehicle with a web communication. Why are we repeating history, the mistake of interactivity for interactivity's sake? Magazines, like books, have their place in life, and no one wants to hold one channel (Esquire) up to another (a computer) to get an enhanced experience. The augmented-reality chore is like walking into a restaurant and having the waiter give you a burger sans bun, and then inviting you back to the kitchen to help the cook finish the ensemble.

It's not a facelift, it's a positioning strategy

Esquire is not led by dummies. They know they are asking too much, that augmented reality is a fad that will too pass, and that most users will never see the super-web-cam result. (Someone said risque women posing as elves are involved, but that's just hearsay.) Esquire's editors also realize print is under pressure -- the once uberhot Maxim magazine recently shuttered its print edition in the UK, and Esquire's total ad pages booked are down 24% year over year -- and anything they can do to differentiate themselves in the marketplace helps. So Esquire is rolling out a series of physical gimmicks (such as the recent E-Ink cover), all good for PR, which generates buzz among readers, which gets advertisers to consider pushing media budgets Esquire's way.

Sure, we don't want to hold magazine covers up to web cams any more than we want to build hamburgers at a restaurant. But Megan Fox can only go so far. Esquire, all we can say is well played -- you're resonating with a stupid technological gimmick that makes us view you differently in your competitive set. No, we won't head for the web cam ... but we may just sign up for a subscription.

Blame flannel shirts on Wall Street and Narcissus

2009-11-14T12:43:00.013-05:00

To understand the current flannel fashion, let's walk over to Wall Street and Greek mythology. First up, market psychology. There's a saying that investors don't pick stocks based on what they think will happen (if you believe Google shares will rise in value, you buy them) or even what they think others predict will happen (if you think others think Google's stock will go up, that will drive up prices, so you buy it). Instead, market investors are three steps removed -- if you think everyone else believes that others think the stock will go up, then you buy the stock. We guess about others' desires to stay ahead.

Self-reflection starts with vanity

And everyone's desires are tied to Narcissus. As Geoffrey Miller recounts in the brilliant "Spent," Narcissus was the handsome Greek lad who spurned the wood nymph Echo because he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. (He drowned and turned into a flower or something, which is why you hear echos in lake valleys. Really.) Miller suggests that most humans consume goods we don't need because we have bits of narcissim in our psychology: the craving of others' admiration. This is why people buy fancy leather jackets or watches or purses. You probably already have ways to stay warm in the rain, tell time, or carry cosmetics, but we crave new things because they signal our value to others.

Which is all tied to sex, of course, because if others don't find you attractive, you don't breed and your genes die. You, dear friend, are alive today because your caveman and cavewoman ancestors wore sexy pelts that turned each other on. Signaling status, intelligence, and creativity also pulls communities around you, useful if you need a collection of spears to fight off a stampede of mammoths.

Prediction + need = trends

These two drives -- needing to signal to others and predicting how others will see our signals tomorrow -- explain most of fashion. We constantly adjust our self-projections to stay ahead of what others will crave. The only way for your sperm or eggs to beat your competitors' is to outthink their game. Which brings us around to flannel shirts. Have you seen the damned things are back in style?

Image: American Eagle Outfitters web site.

New film of the Hudson plane landing: Virtual history

2009-11-13T08:12:00.006-05:00

We hate to replay Wired but this is worth seeing. (Forward the video above to 1:21 to get the real kick.) Kas Osterbuhr, an engineer at K3 Resources, has built an incredible virtual recording of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 taking off, being hit by geese and then splashing into the Hudson, complete with actual voiceover from air-traffic control. Osterbuhr is a specialist in data visualization and points us to a future when real events could be replayed from any angle, thanks to the GPS and other devices tracking the location of everything. No matter if cameras weren't present to record it; a little data augmentation, and you can watch history anyway.

Wired has details here, and Osterbuhr has additional views here.

The silly bias of the Razorfish Feed report

2009-11-11T16:32:00.005-05:00

Did you know that people who stand in line for ice cream also like to eat ice cream? The latest Razorfish report on social media trends makes just as much sense. Their "Feed" report now being retweeted everywhere online has rosy stats such as 65% of consumers have had online experiences influencing their perception of a brand. Yes! Marketers, unleash those social media budgets!

Alas, dig into page 14 of the report and you find the survey sample was 1,000 consumers who:

a. have broadband access
b. spent at least $150 online in the past 6 months
c. visited a community site such as Facebook or Yelp
d. consume or create digital media.

That's right. Razorfish asked heavy users of the web and social media who are comfortable spending money online if they are influenced by the web and social media. We hate to rain on Razorfish, usually a sharp group, but this report feels like self-justifying fuzziness designed to provide bar charts for business development. The technical term for this is "coverage bias," in which the sample being studied does not represent the population as a whole.

So enjoy those Razorfish quotes being tossed around -- 97% of consumers search for brands online! An "overwhelming majority" welcome advertising on social networks! We also hear that 100% of heavy internet users are people who use the internet.

Freed up, locked down

2009-11-09T21:22:00.007-05:00

Rupert Murdoch is mad. It seems Google has been lifting his content for free (Google helps you find things by copying paragraphs of material it doesn't own every time you punch a query into its search engine) ... and so he is threatening to shut Google down. You know. Refusing to release content from The Wall Street Journal in a format that search engines (or others beyond his walls) can read and republish. All you have to do is subscribe to his protected (unphysical) material.

Sony is happy. It seems Sony wants you to buy its new TVs. Alas, you just upgraded your television two years ago to the big flat-panel in your basement, and Sony's new gadget is only marginally better with, um, slightly more contrast. Sony knows you're saturated with electronics and don't really need a new device ... so it is offering to open content up. You know. Giving away free movies from Hollywood in a format your family will enjoy and rewatch. All you have to do is buy the Sony (physical) material.

Payment force = mass times acceleration

Who wins in these scenarios? Both involve cross-subsidies -- in which you pay for one thing (subscription, gadget) to get another future series of stuff (stories, movies) for apparently free. Murdoch wants you to spend a few hundred a year for a stream of business content. Sony wants you to spend a few thousand for a giant slab of glass that streams "free" content. Our bet is the Sony scenario wins. Consumers perceive value at the point of purchase, and a sexy device (think, the iPhone in your pocket) feels worth a sudden outlay of cash, even if that outlay is bigger.

We admire Murdoch's stubbornness in defending the value of content streams. We just don't think people want to pay for it. The pain of spending has to be tied to something substantial, like a big block of glass. Perhaps it's all the result of the caveman bartering logic that we relied on for thousands of generations before the advent of electronics just one breed-cycle ago: If the deal doesn't involve mass, we can't accelerate payment.

Image: Hey Mr Glen

The gorgeous, improbable future of newspapers

2009-11-06T14:48:00.003-05:00

Here's an idea: Take the dying, shrinking newspaper and move it in the opposite direction. Bigger. Bolder. Better.

The creative minds behind McSweeney's are publishing a vision of what newspapers could be -- a stunning 380 pages of original content, including an enormous 112-page broadsheet 15 inches by 22 inches, a magazine, books section, and -- take that, AP newswire -- a 32-page news section filled with local reporting. Titled the San Francisco Panorama, it launches in early December with contributions from 150 writers, artists and photographers. (Preview the sweetness here.)

How could the market possibly support such a huge endeavor? Why, once a year, if that. The editors suggest this is a one-shot deal. "We think that the best chance for newspapers' survival is to do what the internet can't: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet ... and then unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do." Given the book-like effort, the pub will go on sale at bookstores around the country beyond the local San Francisco market.

All we can say is, wow. They even brought back the comic strip in its full-page, complexly plotted, type-font-you-can-read glory. And yes, it will include ads. It's a newspaper we might actually pay for. It makes us miss what newsprint used to be.

Via Mark Wanczak.

The awakening hive mind of Wikipedia

2009-11-05T20:18:00.009-05:00

Crowdsourcing has gotten so much press this year that it's easy to dismiss as a fad: you know, like Six Sigma leanness, 1to1 personalization, CRM customer management, it's a clever term that simply recasts common dynamics of efficiency or connectedness. The skeptic thinks: It's just a ploy by agencies for new buzz. The cynic agrees: Humans hunger for frameworks to understand the world because there is too much data coming in for anyone to digest without filters, and so when something slightly new seems to be happening -- social media! augmented reality! -- we produce new names and imagine, by our own novel sounds, that the rules of gravity have changed.

And then, like tulip bubbles, the fad passes.

But what if crowdsourcing is real?

What if humans, like ants or bees, are finally communicating in networks that produce a new form of hive mind? At 1:30 p.m. today, Nov. 5, a shooter struck the ranks of Fort Hood, Texas. By this evening, six hours later, Wikipedia had published a detailed analysis of the mass murder from a historical perspective tied to 22 published references. An army of volunteers had rushed to the online encyclopedia to post, for free, an evolving, informed, objective record of the events.

If you don't think crowds have the power to shape content, message, meme, or society, read the article and wonder.

Human news from Fort Hood

2009-11-05T20:08:00.003-05:00

Two hundred years ago if something horrible happened, neighbors would rush out to the streets in throngs and discuss their opinions. We lost that in the mass media and auto-travel-based-suburban extensions of the 20th century. One of the nice things about social media is it is bringing this back.

Image from Twitter search for "Fort Hood," evening of Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009.

Can you open wine with your shoe?

2009-11-03T17:11:00.003-05:00

Sometimes we find something so creative, so inspiring, so fresh, so ingenious, it makes us believe that anything is possible. Like this.

Your mobile app will fail. So line up some more.

2009-11-03T08:38:00.013-05:00

Look at your smart phone. See those colorful apps on the screen? Now ask yourself, what happens when the cost of making one of those becomes almost zero?

It's happening. Apps are morphing from software into advertising channels because the cost of producing them is plummeting. Swebapps.com, as BusinessWeek reported, is just one of several companies that allow non-techies to create their own apps for a few hundred dollars. If you sell steaks by mail, you can draft a tiny software icon that offers grilling tips and barbecue recipes. If you are recruiting college students, you could launch a how-to-meet-people-on-campus app that also promotes your higher ed program. The app stores are now an unlimited new marketplace for promoting products, with handy software that provides a service ... and subtly promotes your brand.

Bad for long-term loyalty, good for short-term buzz

The bad news is apps stink as a loyalty device. App usage follows traditional power laws in that most consumers stop using most apps after a month; this spring a study by Pinch Media of 30 million app downloads found only 20% of people continue to use a given app after a single day, and after 3 months only 1% of users continue tapping on a given app. Hire an interactive shop and dream as big as you want, odds are that within a few weeks your mobile app will fail.

But what about as an ad vehicle with a given campaign life? Think of it like this. Instead of consumers using Google search to find your web landing page, they'll now use app stores to find your push-button mobile software. It doesn't matter if usage falls off from your mobile app because -- just as you refresh ad creative -- you can launch a series of new apps for pennies next month as well. If apps are almost free, and have a short life, then instead of viewing them as one-off software utilities, consider them as sequenced media placement.

An app a day keeps the mobile in play

Mobile apps were born at 6 p.m. on June 29, 2007, when Apple rolled out its iPhone acknowledging that even with a beautiful touchscreen design, getting on the internet through a mobile browser is a pain. What good is the web in your pocket if you can't easily tap into it? So tap Apple did, including "apps" with single-touch icons that launch specific internet-based programs. (Google, the current PC portal to the internet, must still be freaking out about this, but that's another story. And probably why Google is aggressively entering the mobile software business, giving away free GPS directions to keep you paying attention.) Apple now has about 85,000 such mobile programs for the iPhone, and Google's Android mirrors it -- click on this icon and weather, sports scores, or Bloomberg headlines pop up.

As costs decline for building such simple mobile software, we see a competitive marketplace heating up. Brands will vie for shelf space by building scores of apps related to their brand. Imagine Crest with tooth whitening apps, dating apps, dentist location apps, calorie counting diet apps, public speaking tips, personal portraits for your Facebook page ... an unlimited array of onramps leading to whiter smiles based on toothpaste sales. The simple mobile app will move away from software to media placement, just another advertising channel.

It is arrogant, isn't it, to try to build a single mobile app that becomes a "portal" for every consumer to use? As the web has taught us, consumer communication patterns don't fit into such traps. So if you're playing with mobile apps, we suggest you move beyond one big idea. Don't do a single app. Do a hundred. Create a campaign calendar and fill up the timeline with scores of mobile buttons launching like soldiers going to war.

Image: William Hook

Twitter lists: You are no longer the center

2009-10-31T09:33:00.009-04:00

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

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

Your ego has been stolen

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

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

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

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

Image: Idlphoto

The girl who knew what God looks like

2009-10-30T13:16:00.005-04:00

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

Via Jim Mitchem.

Google hunts Big Business (while mobile throws the spear)

2009-10-29T21:55:00.012-04:00

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

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

Google, whassup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four billion proof points

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

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

Barnes & Noble Nook's $4 billion ad slot

2009-10-27T14:39:00.017-04:00

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

That's right. Banner ads inside books.

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

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

Newspapers, your defense beckons

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

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

Careful, it's a walled garden

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

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

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

2009-10-26T17:12:00.009-04:00

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

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

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

The Warshaw Curve of brand love

2009-10-24T09:58:00.010-04:00

This is a story of lovers and haters.

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

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

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

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

Digital Emily and the future of your flesh

2009-10-23T12:37:00.008-04:00

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

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

Untrue faces may mask the truth

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

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

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

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

2009-10-22T16:14:00.009-04:00

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

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

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

The paradox: More ad channels, less real ad inventory

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

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

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

2009-10-21T20:11:00.017-04:00

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

Image: Spacepleb

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

2009-10-17T09:26:00.008-04:00

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

The faster the rise, the steeper the fall

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

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

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

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

2009-10-15T19:54:00.016-04:00

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

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

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

Who's right? The FCC says everybody.

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

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

If you're confused, so are we.

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

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