Why Facebook Will Do Search And Why Google Needs Social

Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product.

This is why.

Things That Should Have Happened By 2011

When I started to look at predictions for a living back in 2006, I remember how 2011 was this big banner year against which most forecasts were made. I guess partly it was because 2011 was at the end of a five-year horizon, and partly because it was conveniently removed into the next decade. Whatever the reason, I've been patiently waiting for this year to arrive to check back on some of the more feisty predictions made in the outset of the 2.0 boom. And now this time has come.

Some of the stuff below has worked out remarkably -- surprisingly -- well, such as the prediction from Hitachi about commercial availability of mind-machine interfaces (check!). Other stuff -- not so much:  podcast audience was expected to skyrocket  from 11.3% in 2006 to 51.1% in 2010 (eMarketer #084888), but it didn't, lingering instead at 12% by December 2010 (eMarketer #123668).

Above is Gartner's Hype Cycle chart for 2006; you will love how tablet PCs sit at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. Below are a few predictions made in 2006 or in early 2007.  

"Hitachi: Commercial Mind-Machine Interface by 2011" (Wired, November 2006)

"In 2011 you'll never have to clean your house again. Nanotechnology could soon allow you to sanitize your bathroom with a flip of a light switch." (PopSci, June 2006)

"446m Mobile Phone TV Users By 2011" (IMS Research in Digital LifeStyles, August 2006)

"Segments such as video game advertising, set to become a market worth close to $3 billion by 2011, will result in the further maturing of this industry." (ABI Research in Gamasutra, February 2006)

"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life." (Gartner in AdLab, April 2007)

"Online advertising will grow to represent 9 percent of overall advertising spending by 2011, and search will continue to be the driver of growth." (Jupiter in ClickZ, July 2006). Fact check: online advertising's share of total advertising spending was 15.3% in 2010 and is expected to grow to 20.5% this year (eMarketer, January 2011)

"Broadcast and cable TV will pick up $5 billion in revenue from new ad platforms by 2011. That’s the good news. The bad news is TV will lose $12 billion in traditional revenue over the same period, thanks to ad-skipping and other disruptive technologies." (Jupiter in Lost Remote, September 2006)

"By 2011, TV programming delivered over consumer broadband connections will be a "viable alternative to cable." (Forrester in eCommerce Times, January 2007)

"Already worth $1.4 billion this year, mobile porn will be worth nearly three times that much by 2011, or $3.3 billion." (Juniper in Pocket Lint, November 2006). Also, "most people who watch mobile porn are "lads down the pub" wanting to impress their friends, rather than hard core porn watchers."

"Shipments of the tiny [tablet] PCs could rise to 7.8 million units by 2011." (In-Stat in CNet, May 2006)

"When Chairman Bill Gates first outlined the notion of an ultramobile PC at a hardware conference last year, he talked about a device that would weigh less than 500 grams, have all-day battery life and could cost less than US$800, possibly as little as US$500." (CNet on Microsoft's Origami project, March 2006). See the Origami Project page on Microsoft's website (with devices scheduled to ship in 2008).

"By 2011, 28 million cars in the U.S. will be iPod-ready, up from just under one million in 2005." (Telematics in Motortrend, May 2006)

"Podcasting to Generate $400 Mil. in Ads by 2011." (eMarketer in MediaWeek, February 2007)

"Over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011." (eMarketer in Gamasutra, April 2007). eMarketer's recent forecast for the year: $1.1B

Re: On Infographics and Chartoonery

Just saw Noah's post about infographics where he is writing about "the entire phenomenon of turning a whole bunch of information into a pretty, but mostly incomprehensible, picture and presenting it to the world."

I've done my share of data collection and presentation;  some of the stuff is fairly complex with hundreds of data points packed in one image, other stuff is more like this classic parody from Flowing Data. What I have found out is that both forms have their place. The latter, or as Tufte put it, "chartoonery", has been useful when:

-- When I want my data to make a point quickly, and when I want the data to be self-sustaining and not require someone's voice-over.
-- When I have a presentation and the pages of supporting data are customarily stuck in the "appendix" that nobody ever reads, a "chartoon" works as a lot more attractive and usable summary of the findings.
--  When I have data I want people to share with others, they are a lot more likely to pass around a single image than raw tables or decks with pages of Excel charts.  "Chartoons" are also easier to embed into a blog post.
-- When people want to keep a set of data handy for continuous reference, they are more likely to print out (and even hang on their wall; true story) a "chartoon" poster than a bunch of PowerPoint slides.
-- When I am sick of looking at raws of numbers, fumbling with fonts and laying things out on a page is a  calming exercise not unlike doing dishes.

So it's about the end justifying the means, really.

Fundamentally, I don't disagree with Noah. It's amusing and mildly irritating that some of the shallowest, ugliest and often inaccurate junk that is passed for infographics these days eclipses in popularity the truly outstanding work (here's one example) that may take weeks to build. But that really shouldn't influence how we choose our own tools, right?

Speaking of tools, have you seen tagxedo.com? It's like Wordle on steroids.

Study: 3D Ads Remembered Better

Make that ad really pop:

"ESPN used Disney’s Media and Ad Lab in Austin to measure viewer response to its inaugural 3D coverage. It was, for the most part, favorable. ESPN found that cued recall of ads increased from 68 percent in 2D to 83 percent in 3D. Purchase intent went from 49 to 83 percent. Ad "liking" went from 67 to 83 percent.

"We don’t know how much of this is due to the novelty of the 3D experience,” said lead researcher Dr. Duane Varan. "We tried to get around that with 2D... but we won’t know the answer to that for a while."

-- TelevisionBroadcast.com

Nielsen Corrects The Number of iPad App Users

Headline in Register

Headline in Business Insider

Nielsen has come out with a report about iPad users that contained one widely quoted (by Register, Business Insider, RWW, among many others) number - 32% of iPad users haven't downloaded a single app. This number has just been adjusted down to a much more reasonable 9%.

Mistakes happen, and this one shows how little filtering is done to the press-released info by publications that tens of thousands of us read every day and use in our work -- has a single one of those that turned the "32%" number into a headline called Nielsen to ask for a clarification? This is why we end up reading such ridiculous claims as "iPhone apps are bigger than television" that are based on stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense when you stare at it for more than a second.

Also, it's interesting how the adjustment in the number of people who have downloaded an app had no influence on the breakdown of the downloaded apps by type.

Before: 32% of iPad users haven't downloaded apps

Before: 9% of iPad users haven't downloaded apps

One Ad Agency In Numbers

An very nice agency self-promo poking fun at the infographics and kinetic typography genre for Dare in London.

Study: Some People Watch Less TV

Say Media (formely VideoEgg and Six Apart) is releasing today a potentially interesting "Off The Grid" study (see it in my Google Docs) about people who are consuming less live and more streaming and on-demand TV. The study breaks these people down into two groups:

34 million are Opt-Outs.

22 million are On-Demanders.

I wish companies that send out announcements and nicely formatted summaries would also attach raw data, because the way these segments are defined here seems kind of arbitrary. For the Opt-Outs, how many people don't own a TV at all compared to last year? Is not having watched TV in the past week indicative of their long-term behavior? For On-Demanders, how many of those who watch less live TV are streaming?  How many of those who stream watch more live TV as a result?

There must be some people who watch more TV for the overall viewership time to have gone up, right?

ZOMG! iPhone Games Eat Away at TV Audience!

...says a company that puts ads in iOS games. Here's you daily dose of self-serving numbers.

"Social games on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices are competing for television viewers. In fact, these apps, tracked on the Flurry network alone, comprise of a daily audience of more than 19 million who spend over 22 minutes per day using these apps. Treated as a consumer audience, its size and reach rank somewhere between NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and only 4 million viewers shy from beating the number one prime-time show on television, FOX’s American Idol."

Which, of course, means that "compared to a top television series, which airs 22 episodes a season, advertisers can reach a larger consumer audience through applications 15 times more frequently."

Which, of course, is coming from "a leading smartphone application analytics and monetization platform."

There's lies, damn lies, and statistics, and then there's stuff that doesn't make any sense at all, like comparing a number of people who have spent 20 minutes, on average, over a course of one day playing any of a number of games with the audience sizes of individual shows that are broadcast within a time window.

Good thing this is coming from an "analytics" company.

...and Statistics

If you haven't been following, Bob "The Ad Contrarian" Hoffman posted Top 10 Double-Secret Unknown Facts About Advertising, a digital strategist shot back with his own interpretation of the "secret facts", to which Hoffman replied, "Normally, I don't bother answering annoying gnats, but this guy accused me of cheating. I spent a lot of time on this and was painstaking in getting my sources."

You must be new here, Mr. Klein.

Hoffman and I had a similarly lovely exchange in the past: his numbers, my numbers, his graceful retort.  It was so much fun last time around that I couldn't resist poking a stick into a few of his "double-secret unknown facts".  Because, to quote Hoffman, "What I try to expose in this blog are the outrageous claims and misleading data." It's not that the numbers are not accurately cited, it's that some important nuances are painstakingly omitted.

"Fact #1) 99.9% of people who are served an online display ad do not click on it."

Yes, well:



Source: EyeBlaster via eMarketer.  Here's the DoubleClick's Benchmark report Hoffman probably refers to.


"Fact #2) TV viewership is now at its highest point ever."  This announcement from Nielsen is Hoffman's source.  Let's look at it closely, especially at the pdf linked at the bottom of the announcement.  From the pdf, we learn:

Average viewership per day, persons 2+:
-----------------------
TOTAL DAY
1991-1992: 4:06
2008-2009: 4:49
-----------------------
PRIME TIME:
1991-1992: 1:12
2008-2009: 1:12

Not exactly an explosive growth.

And a related tidbit from Nielsen's "TV Audience 2008" report (pdf and a MediaPost article):

Number of available channels per average household:
1990:  33.2
2008:  130.1

Charting the two together, we get something along these lines:

(Chart source: Future of Media Report 2007 (pdf) and 2008 (pdf).)



"Fact #3) 96% of all retail activity is done in a store. 4% is done on line." Hoffman's source: US Census Bureau.

Let's look at the US Census then.  Here's the growth chart for e-commerce dollar volume for the past decade (click on it to zoom in). So far, pretty accurate, although one can say that last year the e-commerce volume was "highest ever", kind of like the way Nielsen talks about TV viewership above.

Now let's look at the footnote:  Electronic auction sales, mail-order sales and automotive sales are included in retail, not e-commerce. E-commerce also excludes "non-retail operations such as travel agencies, financial services, manufacturers, and wholesalers".

Oh, and then there's this: "Manufacturers led all industry sectors, with e-commerce accounting for 39 percent of total shipments ($2,154B) - up substantially for the seventh straight year."  (US Census E-Stats 2008, pdf).

"Fact #10) TV viewers are no more likely to leave the room during a commercial break than they are before or after the break." Hoffman's source: Council for Research Excellence.

I've already looked at this study back in May. If you do the math, it turns out that probably only about 20% of the people are sitting in front of commercials not doing anything else, maybe paying attention.

The Myth of 5,000 Ad Messages [rerun]

"You’ve seen this number before: an average American consumer today is exposed to — or “bombarded by”, or 'inundated with' — 5,000 advertising messages a day. This number finds its way into slide decks, it peppers newspaper articles, and it is quoted in academic papers.

You probably used it at least once. I know I did. Only today, I realized I had no idea where this number was coming from."

See what we found out back in 2007, as well as a response from Yankelovich's J. Walker Smith.

Enjoy August reruns of some of our most popular articles while the editorial team (of one) takes a long-overdue break away from all things digital.

What I Learned From An Experiment in Spreadability

Just published some data and analysis behind the Jerzify Yourself site that Hill Holliday built back in January as an experiment in "spreadable design" and that got picked up by celeb publications and got passed around rather nicely. Lots of interesting stuff:  the effect of celebrity tweets, the speed of link propagation in Twitter and Facebook, different levels of "spreadfulness" we saw on different sites -- all right here.

Retro Photos For New-Media Report

The new Razorfish Outlook report is out. My favorite part:  photographs taken by the company's employees and used to illustrate the paper and the mention that "photographs were shot on Kodak 120VC or Tri-X film with a Holga 120 camera."

That, and in its "Publishers to Watch in 2010" list, Razorfish included MySpace.

Study: People Share Room With TV Ads

They make it sound like it's a good news.

Center for Research Excellence released new findings from their massive and very expensive ($3.5M) ethnographic study of media consumption behavior. The researchers observed and recorded behaviors of 376 adults in four markets for the average period of 33 hours each or roughly two full waking days (or "three-quarters of a million minutes" altogether, as they prefer to put it.)  It looks like they used methodology and tools developed by Ball State Uni's Center for Media Design for its Middletown Media Study, which I've been following here closely since 2006.

The press release is pretty celebratory throughout, starting with the headline "Most TV Viewers Do Not Leave the Room or Even Change Channels During Commercial Breaks."

The study was funded by Nielsen.

A supposedly sympathetic media executive is quoted as wondering rhetorically: "Do viewers actually pay attention during commercial breaks?"

Great question. Let's see what we can milk from the data highlights since the press release never answers it directly.

- 20% change rooms during a commercial break
- 86% of viewers remain with live TV during commercials (that is, don't change channels)
- Multi-tasking was found to accompany about 45% of all media use. That's 45% of the 80% who stay in the room. "Multitasking" here does not include concurrent usage of other media, as seen on the graph below (source: pdf).  And of them, 86% stay on the same channel.

In other words, about 38 people out of 100 (that is, 100 x 0.80 x 0.86 x 0.55 - does the math check out?) are in the same room and on the same channel as TV commercials and aren't working, eating, or attending to personal or religious needs.

Now, to fill in the gap on concurrent media exposure.  In Ball State's original media study in 2006, which was smaller in scope but similar in methodology, researchers found out that TV is an uncontested (single-exposure) medium during 71.5% percent of total minutes it is on (pdf).  (According to a different, newer Three Screen report, 59% of people use TV and Internet at the same time at least once a month.)

So, in the end, we probably have a whopping 20% of the people sitting in front of commercials not doing anything else, maybe paying attention. Maybe.

- via Ad Contrarian, who, too, thinks the news is good.

Your Family Pictures, Now With Limited Commercial Interruptions

Here's one genius idea whose time is yet to come: let people stream online pictures from their accounts on sites such as Facebook and Flickr to the digital frames on their desks, walls and nightstands along with news, stocks and weather updates, and an occasional ad.

There's a company called Thinking Screen Media that does exactly that via its FrameChannel service. Get a wifi-enabled frame, plug into the info stream via FrameChannel and select among dozens of sources, and there you have your own Captivate screen you stare at during elevator rides in the office.  Only now it's in your bedroom. Incidentally, Captivate's founder is on the board of this new company.

The company has done tests with IPG and plans to start selling its ad inventory some time this year. It also has just launched an iPad app that turns the device into digital frame.

The idea is genius because as hardware prices drop and people's comfort with the tech grows, everyone will soon have as many screens on surfaces around them as they now have old-fashioned paper photos. All of these screens will be online.

The idea is early because today wireless frame penetration is at 5%.

Some 5.9 million digital frames shipped in 2008 in the US and the market will remain flat until 2013, and IDC expects that by then two thirds of all frames shipped will have a wireless capability.

Funny, there are people who have already figured out how to block ads on this barely emerging medium (lie about your location during sign-up).

Eventually, digital frames will become wallet-sized. They will be monetized as well: every tenth time that you open your wallet you'll see an ad. Then, our windows will be internet-ready as well.

Starling Preps App For Social TV Viewing

For those of you who were interested in the last week's post about social TV, here's another recent announcement (also written up in Contagious and Creativity):

"Starling builds on the emergent trend of 'co-viewing,' which generates active social media chatter when fans of a show gather online. It connects fans with other fans of the show, and friends to what their friends are watching. Users engage each other around the shows they already enjoy, and discover new shows through the social graph.

Starling builds the experience by sorting popular comments, and comments from the viewer's friends. Comments that appeal to the viewer can be voted upon. Voting is simple. Viewers tap the screen to 'star' a comment and viewers with well-received comments are awarded points in a global scoring system."

Some relevant Nielsen stats from q4 2009: "59% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a month; the amount of time Americans spent using the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month."

Renault Puts Electric Cars in Sims 3

Electronic Arts and Renault announced an agreement that will enable players of The Sims 3 to download Renault's electric vehicles into the game.  "This Spring, Renault's Twizy Z.E Concept car will be made available to download free of charge [...] within an Electric Vehicle Pack."

Two years ago, Ikea released a Stuff Pack for Sims 2, a year after H&M. I've also seen BP-branded windmills in the most recent SimCity Societies.

Some numbers: "Since its June 2009 launch, The Sims 3 has sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide to date." Fans have downloaded 130 million copies of player created content that includes Sims, houses, and stories. Nearly 2 million uploads have been made to date to the Sims 3 community site, "including 20 movies each hour. The Sims 3 YouTube Channel is in the top ten most viewed sponsored channels of all time with more than 28 million video views."
-- press release, Joystiq

Debunking The Ad Contrarian

Update (April 12' 2010): Welcome, readers of TAC's fatherly rebuttal and MadMen fans! Did you know that Sterling Cooper didn't have a "television department" until Crane's "appointment" in 1960? 


Like many of you, I enjoy reading The Ad Contrarian blog, ran by an agency CEO Bob Hoffman.  In a sense, TAC is the ad industry's Perez Hilton: he draws in crowds by doodling on faces of today's idols; more often than not that's online advertising in general and social media in particular. Some of his posts are right on target, others are wildly off, but all are usually entertaining.

I get unduly excited, though, when in one sentence he insists that his ideological opponents should support their claims with solid data and in the next he makes sweeping generalizations that have little to do with reality.

Take his most recent post, for example, which he opens with: "We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure."

This statement, by any measure,  is inaccurate.

Internet advertising is as effective as TV at driving sales, if you believe the study published last year by ComScore, who had monitored purchasing behavior of 200,000 of its panelists. "Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent." The advertised brands were all consumer packaged goods. (via)

Here's a different study published by Yahoo! Research together with, again, ComScore in 2007: "Consumers exposed to display advertising spent an average of $6 in the store for every $1 they spent online".

(Since TAC insists on quoting the "99% of all video is viewed on traditional TV" stat from Nielsen's "Three Screen Report", I didn't bother googling past the first available ComScore study.)

TAC then writes: "Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of powerful consumer-facing brands."

This, too, is hard to believe.

Let's start from the day the very first commercial aired, which was on July 1, 1941 during the launch of NBC, since TAC's 15-year timeline for the mainstream web apparently begins when the first ad banner went live in 1994, with only 2 percent of the US households online.

For thirteen years after 1941, the share of TV remained way below 5 percent of the total ad spend until it surged to about 15 percent in 1954 (via), as a recession ended and the install base of TV sets had finally tipped over the 50-percent mark (via).






TV advertising during this period was dominated by the "single-sponsor" format, where an advertiser would produce and control an entire chunk of schedule with programs such as Kraft Television Theater, Colgate Comedy Hour, and Coke Time. The modern "magazine concept" format, where advertisers would buy one- or two-minute chunks of air time, was not established until the 1960.  "While participation advertising met with some initial resistance on Madison Avenue, many agencies saw that it was the ideal promotional vehicle for packaged-goods companies manufacturing a cornucopia of brand names, such as Procter and Gamble with such disparate products as Tide (laundry detergent), Crest (toothpaste), and Jif (peanut butter)." (source)

Given that there were only four TV networks at the time and a rather limited ad inventory, it is hardly possible that TV was creating "scores of powerful consumer-facing brands" during the single-sponsor era.

Finally, TAC asks, "After 15 years, can anyone name even ten serious non-native [that is, not Google, Amazon, etc] consumer-facing brands that have been created by web advertising?"

To be honest, I can't. But I also can't think of 1) any non-native (not purely web-based) "serious" brand  that tried going the online-only route, and 2) many "serious" brands launched in the past 15 years created by any means.  Based on what TAC wrote later in the comment section, let's consider a brand "serious" if it does better than Zappos, which had $1B in sales and 10 million customers in 2008.

It's an interesting question, though, and if you know the answer, please leave a comment.
Can you name a serious non-native consumer brand created entirely by web advertising?

On the other hand, "great brands have never been created by 'branding'".

A/B Testing Creative for Panhandling

A few years ago, I posted about a business student whose internship project was to increase daily revenue of a panhandler through adjusting the emotional pitch of the cardboard sign. In the same spirit of responsible citizenship, Daily Conversions blog decided to do a split test on another pandhandler's banner. Results? "This experiment improved this man's earnings by over 100% over several days."

An important finding: holding your cup up doesn't do anything for your conversions.
-- via

The Last Inaccurate Video on Earth

Look, ma, another graph that has nothing to do with reality! (There's a whole book of those.)

FITC would've been better served by commissioning a remix of the Downfall clip, or a Trololo spoof, or pretty much anything else instead of this scaremongering The Last Ad Agency on Earth ridiculousness.

And what's up with this bathroom shot?  It either should look, um, used to show that the guy was vaporized on the can, or the magazine needs to be pushed aside to show that he finished, flushed and left, and then was vaporized.

Avatarize Yourself Until You Are Blue In the Face

Na'vi editor of Pandora's AdLab

I was about to say that this new tie-in from McDonald's will cheer up all those people who got depressed "because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora," but after uploading my own mug shot I'm not so sure.

Anyway,  here are some stats about Euro McD's "Avatarize Yourself" campaign in Europe from the latest Oddcast email update: "Our [18-]country, 7 language deployment has already racked up more than 4mm user sessions in a few weeks, with an average session time of 9 minutes, 45 seconds! One out of four sessions results in sharing via email or social networks, generating almost 1.2mm earned sessions."