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

Splat! Ads in Violent Games Recalled Better

MIT Tech Review: "A team of European and U.S. researchers found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content, even though players spent less time looking at them."

"Those who played a violent version of the game, where the goal was to run down pedestrians, resulting in a blood-splattered screen, demonstrated significantly better recall of advertised brands than those who played the regular version."

 Told you someone should've put up billboards in that airport in Modern Warfare II.

Study: Human Avatars Are Better Salesmen

Furries need not apply

In what seems like ages ago, in June 2006,  Harvard Business Review made a huge splash by running a piece on avatar-based marketing (there was even an in-world panel): "The avatar, though, arguably represents a distinctly different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world. At the least, it may offer insights into its creator’s hidden tastes."

Just as I thought everyone's mostly forgotten about Second Life by now, I found this study by two Boston College researchers who recently published a paper on the effectiveness of avatar spokespeople. Their conclusion: "The participants perceive human-like spokes-avatars as more attractive, and players who interact with a human-like spokes-avatar perceive the iPhone advertisement as more informative than those who interact with a non-human spokes-avatar."

The entire Journal of Interactive Advertising is full of cool topics like this; too bad all their stuff is written in that kind of language that takes hours for us layfolk to decipher.

Study: Weather Influences Stock Movements

Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather, a paper from 2001, claims that there is a "strong and significant correlation" between sunshine at country’s leading stock exchange and market index stock returns (discussion ).

Working on an Anti-Smoking Campaign?

I'm looking at a bunch of anti-smoking creative -- from cutting-edgiest to decades-old -- and am wondering why just about all of the ads use fear to get people to quit (if that was the actual goal, that is).

Is it because fear ads are high on recall? But how many of those who remember that smoking kills (probably just about every smoker) actually take the step?

People subjected to fear ads may show higher intent to quit -- and that's how this creative is probably focus-grouped -- but do they manage to stay away?

Buyology's author Martin Lindstrom writes about fMRI scans of smokers' brains: "The warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the “craving spot,” which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling."

[A piece of history trivia: ads sponsored by Big Tobacco that were designed to prevent teen smoking achieved the opposite effect (here's why).]

If you are working on an anti-smoking assignment, take a look at Allen Carr's The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, a self-help book that has been more successful in getting people to quit than many other methods. Instead of nagging the smokers or scaring the bejesus out of them, he calmly -- and at times cheesily -- explains how smoking doesn't have any of the positive effects that smokers count on, such as controlling anxieties or relieving stress. It also explains how quitting doesn't bring about the withdrawal pangs smokers dread.

A campaign based on this platform would be a breath of fresh air.


On a related note, this Halo-themed anti-smoking machinima spot is lovely:

Future of the Internet: Pew Report

Pew / Internet has published the third installment of its The Future of Internet series where they question a group of experts on a variety of scenarios and their likelihood of coming to life by 2020. Among the highlights:  virtual and augmented reality, the future of user interfaces, and mobile.  There's even a whole book of this stuff out on Amazon.  The report makes for an interesting reading but the research methodology seems restricting (respondents have to react to pre-canned scenarios instead of suggesting their own ideas) and I'm struggling to find practical applications for the rather non-binding expert comments such as "The use of the keyboard may [?] disappear."

Five Things For Monday Morning

Colorful balconies promote Ikea's storage bins in Germany (- ads of the world)

How a supermarket chain in Switzerland got local singles to model for underwear -- and printed their contact info. (-- Neatorama)

A story about Jesus, Tiger Woods, and a game bug that turned into a feature (-- Derek Powazek). To quote the recent but already instant classic, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Vending machine dispenses real men (-- Future of Ads).

How to improve design of queues: CNN highlights work by MIT's Richard Larson. Related: The Future of Crossing the Street (in Boston Globe); Standing in the Invisible Line.

Fat and Happiness are Social

A self-fulfilling prophecy in action as the blogosphere cheers the latest research findings: "Psychologists have long known that feelings can be contagious over short time frames or that people reflexively return smiles. But the new social network analysis showed that that contagious effect extends three "degrees" - as far as a friend of a friend of a friend - and drops off with time and distance.

Yes, but cheer this: the research team's earlier "study, involving more than 12,000 people tracked over 32 years, found that social networks play a surprisingly powerful role in determining an individual's chances of gaining weight" (source).

From which we conclude that popular Twitter users' extra bulk is pure happiness.

Google Papers

Architecture of query-specific search recommendation (source: pdf)

A collection of papers written by Googlers has a lot of stuff that points towards a possible direction of search. Since these are all papers published in academic journals, many of them are locked behind publications' paid subscriptions, but a few are freely available. The one I'm reading now is titled "Retroactive Answering of Search Queries" (pdf); its about identifying queries that have lasting interest and proving answer to these queries at a later date when information becomes available (pictured above).

Study: Why E-Mails Are Often Misunderstood

image credit: csmonitor

Paper "Egocentrism over E-Mail" (2005, pdf): "People tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else."

Study: Scientific Jargon Sounds Convincing

Researchers at Yale established that "explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information."

Here's an automatic computer science paper generator and a postmodern essay generator, both very convincing, the former so much that it got its creators accepted at an academic conference.

-- via Neuroscience Marketing

Scientists Measure Laughter

Pink Tentacle: "Researchers at Kansai University have developed a machine that can scientifically measure the quantity of a person’s laughter, as well as distinguish between the real and the fake.

The sensors, which attach to a person’s cheeks, chest and abdomen, take 3,000 measurements per second. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, where it is analyzed by special software that determines the nature of the laugh and assigns a numerical score based on the quantity."

Would be fun to measure the quality of the canned laughter on TV shows.

Study: Sad People Spend More

AP: A new study shows people's spending judgment goes out the window when they're down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed. Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip. (via Neuromarketing)

From the "Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More" paper: The present findings do, however, allow more than one explanation for the link among sadness, self-focus, and spending. Our working model proposes that sad and self-focused individuals spend more on commodities because they seek self-enhancement. Another possible model is that sad and self-focused individuals experience reduced self-value or sense of entitlement, and therefore value other things more by contrast." (site, pdf)

Microsoft Shows Off Next-Gen Ad Tech

Video demo: "Contextual Ads for Video. Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video." (Another demo)

Microsoft showcased a series of new technologies from their adCenter Labs during the lab's Demo Fest.

Press release: "The technologies highlighted at this event included the latest advances and algorithms in content analysis and computer vision for video and images, speech recognition for contextual video ads, and advanced marketing intelligence that enable enhanced audience insight and better targeting capabilities for advertisers."

Some of the geekier stuff:

"Contextual Ads for Video. Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video.

Intelligent Bug Ads. By using a computer vision algorithm to calculate the least intrusive spot in the video, it approximates human judgment and places the ad in the video where it is least likely to interfere with the consumer’s viewing experience.

Visual Product Browsing. This tool uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might, without the need for manual data tagging.

Content Analysis Engine. This technology uses advanced algorithms to automatically extract and categorize information from search queries and Web page contents to better understand user intent and minimize search engine marketing complexity.

Content Detection in Sub-documents. This technology identifies sensitive or unsuitable content such as pornography, weapons or negative sentiments that advertisers would not likely want to be associated with, and automatically blocks contextual ads related to that content."

Scientist Debunks "The Influentials" Theory

Fast Company runs an article in which Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, puts to test the idea that trends are sparked by a handful of highly connected individuals, or the influentials, as they have become known after the bestsellers The Tipping Point and The Influentials.

"Watts believes [...] a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an 'accidental Influential.'"

Watts has published several books on the subject, including Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

Update [Jan 27 '08]: Mike Arauz from Deep Focus responds.

My own beef with the theory of influentials is its implicit assertion, in my understanding of The Tipping Point, that if you have influence over a certain social network, this influence will have the same weight over the entire range of topics. I don't know if this Absolute Influence exists, and my own daily experiences offer nothing to support the idea: it is not a given that someone who is an apparel fashion trendsetter in one particular network will be have the same influence over the choice of others' plasma TVs, for example. Likewise, one's influence will also vary across different networks, which makes identifying and targeting The Influentials a much more complex task than it is suggested by the theory advocates.

Study: Store Ads Influence Shoppers' Goals

"Researchers from MIT have shown that people are most susceptible to be influenced by advertisers and promotions at the entrance of the store. According to the scientists, people usually don't have their shopping goals very clearly pre-determined; they decide not only what specific product to buy but also what kind of product they want to buy during their wondering through the supermarket's aisles."
- Softpedia

IBM's Version of Advertising Future

IBM researchers talked to a bunch of consumers and executives to come up with their "The End of Advertising as We Know It" report (full report, PR summary). Key findings:

"The report indicates by 2012, the landscape of the industry will change so profoundly that to survive, advertising industry players need to take aggressive steps to innovate in three key areas:

- Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing;
- Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats;
- Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting."

Dunno. Anything that starts with "the end of..." reeks of too much sensationalism. "As we know it?" Who "we"? IBM? Ad agency CEOs? Consumers? Bloggers? Then you get all the usual buzzwords: accountability, fragmentation, declining TV viewership (but here's a graph that shows TV viewing time has been steadily increasing over the past 50+ years, and steeply so after the year 2000), and disruption. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it would've made a great report had it been written in 1995, but now it's like that consulting joke about them taking your watch and telling you what time it is.

Want to know what advertising will be like in the future? Ask someone who pays a lot of money for advertising now, like a P&G CMO. The future of advertising will be what they say it should be.

Study: Initials Influence Decisions

"People like their names so much that they unconsciously opt for things that begin with their initials. Tom is more likely to buy a Toyota, move to Totowa and marry Tessa than is Joe, who is more likely to buy a Jeep, move to Jonestown and marry Jill."

-- Original study: "Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions," and Newsweek via Neuromarketing