Guardian: "Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.
The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory."
Idea: Remote Control Jammer Chip Activated By Commercials
Imagine this. You send out a bunch of promo stuff: schwag, catalogs, merchandise. Every item is equipped with a small chip. Next, you create a TV commercial and insert an "inaudible 200MHz molecular vibration sound mat". When you run the spot on TV, the inaudible signal activates the chip, which in turn jams the signal from your remote control blocking people from switching channels. When your commercial stops playing, the remote goes back to normal.
Welcome The XV2083 Remote Control Jammer. The video is below.
Too bad it ain't a real product, but a campaign by a communications agency. Very convincing, though. The next version of the chip should also emit signals that block microwave ovens and suppress bathroom urges.
It's not entirely science fiction, though. Here's a video of a working TV remote jammer and instructions for building one, and a diagram:
Firebrand to Shut Down
Firebrand, the ads-as-content TV show, will shut down, NY Times says. (Gawker says it's already dead, although the site is still up as of this writing.)
About one month ago, there was a heated debate on AdRants about whether Firebrand would survive, and for how long. Steve Hall generously gave it 18 months. A Firebrand exec replied that "Our model proves, once and for all, that marketing can be entertaining AND effective. And that viewers will gladly watch commercials. They just don't like to be interrupted...and won't watch bad commercials." She said the viewership was strong. It wasn't.
About one month ago, there was a heated debate on AdRants about whether Firebrand would survive, and for how long. Steve Hall generously gave it 18 months. A Firebrand exec replied that "Our model proves, once and for all, that marketing can be entertaining AND effective. And that viewers will gladly watch commercials. They just don't like to be interrupted...and won't watch bad commercials." She said the viewership was strong. It wasn't.
Nielsen's BlogPulse Down
Nielsen's blog tracking service BlogPulse.com looks like a cash-parked domain today. Did the domain get expired and then renewed? (the expiration date now is March 6, 2009).
Update [March 5 ' 08]: It's back to normal now.
Text and Data Mining - Anderson Analytics
Anderson Analytics mines large amounts of text -- consumer surveys, call center logs -- and fishes out insights: "We use state of the art natural language processing software which combines linguistics, statistics, and machine learning to code and classify text data. We can then apply data mining and other analytical techniques to uncover the hidden value of this information or link it with other sources.
These techniques can be used for call center customer files, customer suggestions and complaints, survey open ends, focus group or discussion board conversations, blogs, or it can be combined with projective techniques for exponential learning."
Ad Age just wrote about them: "Starwood hired Anderson Analytics for several projects, including the one that culled through the more than 1 million customer-feedback surveys -- 250,000 with comments in 20 different languages -- to find that "good" vs. "outstanding" insight."NXT Packaging Lights Up
NXT blog comment: "hahaha holy crap. never thought my bathroom wud be trippy."
A story in NYTimes about a new line of men's care productss that will come in a package that lights up lava-lamp style: "NXT is sold in an arresting triangular container that lights up from the bottom, illuminating air bubbles suspended in the clear gel. The plastic is tinted blue, and when the AAA batteries in its base are lighted, the whole thing looks like a miniature lava lamp or a tiny fishless aquarium.
To call attention to themselves, the products, which are aimed at 18- to 24-year-old men, will glow on the shelves, inviting customers to pick them up. Every 15 seconds, a light-emitting diode (LED) in the bottom of the container flares on, stays lighted for a few seconds, then fades out."
Lots of other interesting details: the units are shipped upside down, different lights signal different ingredients, it's better to position units on lower shelves. Innovative enough to get Target, Wal-Mart and CVS on board without any supporting ad spend.
Try to see if you can Google the product up, though. Seems like someone needs some SEO. The site is here. The only "Hello, World" entry on the blog already has a few comments.
Bill Gates on LinkedIn
Bill Gates's LinkedIn profile, via a story in NYTimes blog. A related thought: celebrity endorsements through social networking sites sound like an idea.
Knut Grows Up
All too familiar: an overhyped and then abandoned media darling turns into a bloodthirsty monster. At least, Knut was cute.
Knut then.
Knut now.
- Daily Mail
Knut then.
Knut now.
- Daily Mail
Media vs. Agencies
Micropersuasion quotes Booz Allen Hamilton as saying agencies are in trouble because media are encroaching on the traditional agency turf:
The flip side, of course, is that agencies are increasingly tasked with content production for marketers who are bypassing the existing media channels to create their own media that are cheaper to make and distribute than ever.
* By 2010, 53% of media companies surveyed expect to do more business directly with marketers. The majority of marketers (52%) feel the same about publishers* Only 27% of marketers expect to be doing more business with agencies two years from now
* Today nearly every media company (91%) offers some kind of "agency-like" services. This includes former untouchables like idea generation (88%) and creative development (79%).
10 Tips For New Ad-Supported Web Businesses
So, you are launching a new web business and your main business model is selling advertising space, at least until your customers start paying up for your services. It's likely that you will have to deal with an ad agency at some point, and here are some thoughts from the buying side of the table.
1. Demographics. Your site's demographics (or, lovingly, the demo) is what you sell to the agency. Not features, not good design, not your management team. It's the demo. Currently, there are two major ways to present a demo. One is through its descriptive characteristics: "our site is designed to attract people of such and such gender, age, occupation, geography." The other way is through the audience's collective behavior: "our site is for people who are in the market for computer peripherals"; "our site is for the die-hard ice-cream fans."
There are other ways to describe your audience. Psychographic description ("our site is for very honest people") is an interesting approach, but it is yet to be widely adopted.
If you don't have a large audience already -- large enough to register on Comscore's radar -- I think you are better off with pitching the behavioral traits of your audience. This will narrow the number of potential advertisers, but the advantages of advertising on your site and not someone else's are more obvious, and you can command higher CPMs.
2. Build your site with advertisers in mind. Very often, site designers focus on user experience but forget that advertisers, too, are users who have their own goals and needs. (Oh, look, we have some space left here -- let's slap a placeholder for banners.) Audience planning should be among the first steps in designing an ad-supported site, not an afterthought. Generic media kits behind email forms frustrate media buyers who are juggling multiple plans under pressing deadlines. And if the ad unit placement is such that it doesn't generate interactions similar to the rest of the campaign, your site will be "optimized" off the plan
3. On the other hand, don't let the ad greed cripple your design. CPM ads tempt designers to add extra steps to even the simplest processes for the sake of page views. You'll have to weigh the benefit of every extra page view against the risk of having the user leave the site in frustration to never come back.
4. Allow standard IAB ad formats on your site. You'll never guess how much overhead goes into banner production, and budgets have their limits. Plus, resizing banners is no fun.
5. But custom high-engagement formats can sell for more. Think of Facebook that sells branded pages for $300K/3 months.
6. Allow enough technological wiggle room to accommodate for ad formats the demand for which may come up in the future. Yahoo bought eGroups email list service in 2000, it is ad-supported, but I think you still can't target the banners by group categories, not to mention insertions at the individual group level. Also, create the most precise targeting mechanism possible -- you'll make more money. If you collect users' age, gender and zip code during the sign-up process, there's no reason why you can't allow targeting by any combination of the three, at a premium.
7. Allow low-cost test drives. Agencies would love to be able to incorporate new interesting media into their plans, but they can't sell them to their clients without solid numbers upfront. The only way to get solid numbers from a new medium is to test it at a cost that is not prohibitive.
8. You can't overmeasure your audience. Offer metrics that go beyond the basics of impressions and clicks. CNet's sites put a link to a feedback form under each banner (I wonder if they share results with the advertisers).
9. Make data PowerPoint-friendly. An intelligent good-looking graph goes a long way.
10. Media buying cycles are always longer than what you'd prefer them to be. At least online, media buying is rarely reactive -- every new opportunity will be evaluated and filed in an appropriate folder to be pulled out at the beginning of the next cycle.
1. Demographics. Your site's demographics (or, lovingly, the demo) is what you sell to the agency. Not features, not good design, not your management team. It's the demo. Currently, there are two major ways to present a demo. One is through its descriptive characteristics: "our site is designed to attract people of such and such gender, age, occupation, geography." The other way is through the audience's collective behavior: "our site is for people who are in the market for computer peripherals"; "our site is for the die-hard ice-cream fans."
There are other ways to describe your audience. Psychographic description ("our site is for very honest people") is an interesting approach, but it is yet to be widely adopted.
If you don't have a large audience already -- large enough to register on Comscore's radar -- I think you are better off with pitching the behavioral traits of your audience. This will narrow the number of potential advertisers, but the advantages of advertising on your site and not someone else's are more obvious, and you can command higher CPMs.
2. Build your site with advertisers in mind. Very often, site designers focus on user experience but forget that advertisers, too, are users who have their own goals and needs. (Oh, look, we have some space left here -- let's slap a placeholder for banners.) Audience planning should be among the first steps in designing an ad-supported site, not an afterthought. Generic media kits behind email forms frustrate media buyers who are juggling multiple plans under pressing deadlines. And if the ad unit placement is such that it doesn't generate interactions similar to the rest of the campaign, your site will be "optimized" off the plan
3. On the other hand, don't let the ad greed cripple your design. CPM ads tempt designers to add extra steps to even the simplest processes for the sake of page views. You'll have to weigh the benefit of every extra page view against the risk of having the user leave the site in frustration to never come back.
4. Allow standard IAB ad formats on your site. You'll never guess how much overhead goes into banner production, and budgets have their limits. Plus, resizing banners is no fun.
5. But custom high-engagement formats can sell for more. Think of Facebook that sells branded pages for $300K/3 months.
6. Allow enough technological wiggle room to accommodate for ad formats the demand for which may come up in the future. Yahoo bought eGroups email list service in 2000, it is ad-supported, but I think you still can't target the banners by group categories, not to mention insertions at the individual group level. Also, create the most precise targeting mechanism possible -- you'll make more money. If you collect users' age, gender and zip code during the sign-up process, there's no reason why you can't allow targeting by any combination of the three, at a premium.
7. Allow low-cost test drives. Agencies would love to be able to incorporate new interesting media into their plans, but they can't sell them to their clients without solid numbers upfront. The only way to get solid numbers from a new medium is to test it at a cost that is not prohibitive.
8. You can't overmeasure your audience. Offer metrics that go beyond the basics of impressions and clicks. CNet's sites put a link to a feedback form under each banner (I wonder if they share results with the advertisers).
9. Make data PowerPoint-friendly. An intelligent good-looking graph goes a long way.
10. Media buying cycles are always longer than what you'd prefer them to be. At least online, media buying is rarely reactive -- every new opportunity will be evaluated and filed in an appropriate folder to be pulled out at the beginning of the next cycle.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)