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.

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.

Mad Men Against The Machine

Last month, I was on a panel at a FutureM "Flying Cars Are Here" event. I talked about robots, which in retrospect turned out to be surprisingly timely: that same week, AdWeek ran "Machine-Built Brands" and AdAge wrote about "Glitch in the Coming Advertising Singularity". The accompanying slides are on Slideshare and are also embedded at the end.  Below is what I talked about.

Hi. I run the R&D practice here at Hill Holliday. It’s a really great gig because I get to read science fiction and think about robots.

I can easily name two reasons to turn to science fiction for insights.

One is that some of the kids who read science fiction grow up and go on to making things they’ve been dreaming about.

The other reason is that science fiction, just like advertising, reflects the collective dreams and fears of a particular era.

We fantasize about giant machines laying destruction on entire cities, or brains of metal that farm humans for energy, or a disembodied artificial intelligence that provokes a nuclear holocaust.

On the other hand, you have Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons, a show that launched right in the middle of the Mad Men era, the golden age of American advertising.  And if there is one thing that Rosie can tell us about our collective dreams it’s that we really would love a chance to slack on our chores.

A New York Times spread from the early 1980s sums up the duties the humans have been eager to relinquish: "In the distant future robots may scrub toilets, wash the dishes, and mow the lawn. Made to order robots can already be adapted to serve drinks at cocktail parties or vacuum on their own."

Ever since the Mechanical Willie, a robot that Westinghouse unveiled in 1934 and that crooned in a “mellow baritone and manipulated a vacuum cleaner with almost human skill” – ever since then, the civilization has been trying really hard to stick the broom into some else’s mechanical hands.

The broom, of course, is both very literal and very symbolic, a metaphor for all the things humans have long sought to outsource.

A 1978 book called Exploring the World of Robots introduced the world to the "Maid Without Tears", but also mused about the bigger picture of the future where humans are being cared for by a nurturing robotic brain:

"The robot brain will suggest meals for the day. It will order our shopping, finding out from other robots in the local shows where the best buys are."

We wanted a machine that would not only wash our socks and do our dishes but that would also know us so intimately that it would relieve us from deciding which socks to purchase and what food to eat in the first place and let us, humans, concentrate on nobler pursuits.

If we look at our technology dreams that do come true, we’ll see that while they retain the core functionality, their physical appearance is often different from the way we’ve imagined it, dictated by what is commercially practical at the moment. We wanted a life potion and got pills and vaccines. We wanted a magic carpet and got the 31 inches of seat pitch on the economy class. We wanted a “Maid Without Tears” and got a Roomba.

We wanted a machine that would take care of our daily odds and ends, a brain that would help us navigate the abundances of capitalism. We got what we wanted.

Only instead of a white shiny plastic humanoid rolling around a house we got server farms.

We got hundreds of thousands of computers sitting in fortresses of reinforced concrete. They hum quietly and analyze every single choice we make so that they suggest something we are likely to enjoy even more.

What started with “if you like this book, you will love that one” a decade ago now spans a wide range of human choices, from running a family budget (oh, it looks like you are spending too much on food) to finding a life partner (“how about Jelly Penguins who lives 4.35 miles from you?”).

The machines gently guide you towards new restaurants, recipes, exercise routines, business associates, friends, dates, movies, music, potato chips, mutual funds and underwear.

There are many different companies carving out their own niches in the business of making recommendations.

One company, Hunch, has an ambition to help us make all of those decisions at one place.

And then there’s Google that, in Time’s words, is “a massive recommendation engine advising us on what we should read and watch and ultimately know”.

We, the ad people, used to be the ultimate recommendation engine, the ones who told others what to crave, what to buy, who to look up to, what to aspire to.

We told others how to think: Think Small. Think Different. Think Outside the Bun.

We were the ones who defined tastes and influenced choices.

And now all these recommendation services create an extra layer around customers, a cocoon that is becoming increasingly harder to get through.

This year, we as an industry will spend more than two billion dollars on “search engine optimization”, which is to say that we are paying a lot of money to convince the machines that what we have to say is what people actually need to hear.

Two billion dollars is the kind of money that can buy some 800 Super Bowl spots; that’s every single spot in every Super Bowl for the next decade.

And we’d better get used to it. The machines aren’t going away.

Over the course of several recent interviews [1,2,3],  Google’s Eric Schmidt outlined the company’s vision for what he called a Serendipity Engine.

Search occurring in the background.

The machine learning from not only your active interaction with it, but also, passively, from your behavior, from the comfort of your pocket as you go about your day.

A brain that suggests what you should do next, what you care about.

Imagine a future, Schmidt says, in which you don’t forget, because the computer remembers.

Imagine this future, and then brace for it.

If Your Agency Kicks Ass Without Market Research, It's Not Wrong

German Dziebel,  a planner with a PhD in anthropology with whom I share a department and an office at Hill (as well as an occasional cracker) and who in the past worked at Arnold and Crispin, has joined the current round of debate about market research with a comment so interesting that I asked him to guest-blog it here.  He came back with the thoughts that follow.

“All market research is wrong.”

"Is your market research helping you in achieving your end? If yes it's not wrong."

Behind this disjointed Platonic dialogue, there’s a tell-me-what-you-think-and-I’ll-tell-you-who-you-are situation. Faris Yakob is Chief Innovation Officer at MDC. He recently authored the first line. His detractor is an anonymous Ph.D. student in marketing. MDC owns a majority stake at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which is the most profitable agency in the network. As an erstwhile planner at Crispin, I witnessed (and enjoyed) the downright neglect for large-scale, serious, quantitative and focus-group-based market research. As Alex Bogusky, borrowing from Steve Jobs, used to say: “Who cares about what consumers think. We should surprise them with innovative ideas instead of tracking their misguided accounts of their own needs and wants.” Well, I paraphrased and beautified it a bit but this is the essence of what he used to say. Colin Drummond, an average-size link in a chain of ever-changing heads of planning at Crispin, used to direct his department to a paper that once appeared in Brand Republic. The paper was called “Why Great Planners Have to Be Dumb.” Great is good, smart is bad. Most recently, Colin, now head of planning at Ogilvy West, tweeted about the new book “Proofiness,” by Charles Seife, that purports to expose, in a populist genre, the faults of statistics.

At that time Crispin’s planning department was 30-(wo)man-strong. So, here’s another apparent paradox: if great planners are dumb and all market research is wrong, why do you need to maintain as many as 30 dumb planners undoing market research? The answer is simple: to staff the brand-new name for planners at Crispin, namely “Cognitive Anthropologists” or “Cogs.” Cogs encompass traditional planners – those who renounced market research to fit Crispin’s culture -, social scientists – those who didn’t find work in overly populated academia – and investigative journalists – “investigative” not in the sense of bold, dedicated truth-seekers but in the sense of investigating consumer habits and writing about them without technical jargon. Again, “anthropology” (from Greek anthropos ‘human being, man’) was picked for its sound, not for its meaning and not by professional anthropologists but by advertisers seeking new ways to market directly to “people,” not “consumers” (Apparently, consultant Robert Deutsch, a self-proclaimed cognitive anthropologist with a background in social psychology, introduced the word to Crispin’s senior management.) Driven by a concoction of imagination, greed, boredom, lies, thrill and insecurities a new bold philosophy of planning was violently born.

One of the observations that I made trying to resolve the apparent conundrum of informed anti-intellectualism is that the denial of market research in theory and practice next to the adoption of an academic moniker “anthropology” accompanied the ascent of Crispin as the hottest ad shop in the nation. Crispin attempted to revolutionize planning by bringing on board practitioners who would gear research to the goal of changing consumer culture (note another shift from “market” to “culture”) around a brand by means of creating entertaining and memorable content, launching new technologies and experimenting with disruptive use of media. Re-positioning the planning discipline was a way to re-invent market research for advertising’s emerging new ecosystem. In the famous words of Red Queen from Carroll’s Looking Glass, “it takes all the running [read: market research] you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” (This principle is so great, it even made it into the book of evolutionary laws, thanks to Leigh Van Valen.) It involved a Dionysian influx of humanities and social sciences – bastardized but marketable – into what once was dominated by the Apollonian disciplines of psychology, communications and economics. In a surprising reversal of the Ph.D. student in marketing’s defense of market research, if the abnegation of market research helps you in achieving your and your client’s end, the all-market-research-is-wrong dictum is not wrong. It’s just a different way of using old words: not descriptively, but performatively (pace John Austin).

So, there’s nothing to debate – time to imitate and steal.

If Your Market Research Works, It's Not Wrong

Faris detonated a bomb the other day with his "All Market Research Is Wrong" manifesto. My first thought was "Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules."  I understand the choice of the provocative headline and its role in attracting readers and encouraging debate but it did feel a bit like a case of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The "All Market Research is Wrong" line was copiously retweeted at least partly to (and, I suspect, by) people who wouldn't bother reading past the fourth sentence with the "epistemologically specious" bit in it.

It's hard to disagree when Faris writes that survey results must be supplemented "with real behavioral data, from direct observation, or from the web - triangulating insights from as many sources as possible." But boiling down an entire "$11bn" industry to a few misguided practices and then dismissing it as useless --  "all the data it generates should be understood as wrong" -- doesn't quite seem right.

Faris discusses market research as "the systematic collection and evaluation of data regarding customers' preferences for actual and potential products and services" and goes on to argue that using online surveys and focus groups is not going to yield predictive results about customer preferences.  (It's appropriately ironic that "market research" in the dictionary he uses is also listed as "uncountable".) This is a rather narrow definition -- compare it with Wikipedia's entry for "market research" ("any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers") or even "marketing research":

"The systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal of marketing research is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior."

But even a cartoonish definition of market research as "web based surveys done over the weekend" (as Faris adds in a comment under his post) is too broad to exclude such methodology as, say, discrete choice modeling where options can be presented to a panel via a "web based survey done over a weekend" and which has proven useful for estimating probabilities of demand for one alternative over others.

There are plenty of things that can go wrong with all market research, survey-based or observational: misinterpretation and selective presentation of results, over-reliance on some indicators at the expense of others, wrong instruments for the task, badly formulated questions, sampling errors, biases and so on. All these issues seem to be what IT help desk people call PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair -- a user error, not a system malfunction.

But ultimately, as one particularly pragmatic PhD student commented, "Is your market research helping you in achieving your end? If yes it's not wrong."


Also, coincidentally, picked this gem up on Twitter today - "data is not plural for anecdote."

Gender-Specific Shampoo Usage Instructions

If you are one of those people who read instructions on shampoo bottles, and you share a bathroom with a person of the opposite gender, you might have noticed this striking stylistic difference in how directions for shampoo usage are worded for men and for women. Here, it's eight words on one bottle and forty on the other. Reminds me of how men and women shop differently.

Should instruction manuals for products that are even more complex than a bottle of shampoo be written for a particular audience and accounting for gender and perhaps age differences?  How about different levels of domain knowledge?  You know how they include multi-lingual booklets with gadgets these days. It would be kind of like that.

On a related train of thought - in his post on investing, Mark Cuban wrote this: "Wall Street has done an AMAZING job of creating conventional wisdom . 'Buy and Hold' is the 2nd most misleading marketing slogan ever, after the brilliant 'rinse and repeat' message on every shampoo bottle."

I kept thinking about the awesomeness of the "rinse and repeat", started to poke around and dug up this Fortune article back from 1999: "In Benjamin Cheever's novel The Plagiarist, a marketing executive becomes an industry legend by adding one word to shampoo bottles: REPEAT. He doubles shampoo sales overnight."

One More Thing to Worry About: Foursquare Tips

A guy interviews with a company. The guy doesn't get the job.

Three years later, the guy sits down in a coffee shop. He pulls out his phone, opens the Foursquare app. Scans for nearby businesses.  Sees that the company is right nearby. The guy leaves a tip on Foursquare about how much the company sucks anyway. The comment looks like it might have been left by a customer. Or an expert reviewer.  Since the company is not a dining or entertainment establishment frequented by heavy Foursquare users, the tip lingers near the top of its venue page.

True story.

It's like drive-by yelping. There isn't much I can think of that can be done about it. Or about a bunch of dissatisfied strangers flashmobbing outside your windows -- they don't have to be inside to check in and leave tips -- and populating your venue page -- that Foursquare creates automatically for you and that probably ranks pretty high in search results -- with their grievances. There isn't a lot of context to these tips. There isn't an easy way to reply to them. Deleting them isn't easy either, and is probably not a good idea anyway.

So there, something else to add to your social media policies checklist.

Good thing there's still time before Foursquare becomes mainstream.

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.

Mobile Check-Ins And Future Loyalty Programs

I first witnessed the excitement around the potential of location-based mobile marketing back in 2000 at one of the numerous m-commerce conferences. Back when the coolest phone was Nokia 9110, and mine was more of a cute Alcatel, the common marketing dream went like this:

Stores will be able to market their products and services by transmitting promotional coupons and messages to passers-by: "Come in and enjoy a complimentary cup of our new coffee blend," or "Get half off, if you make your purchase within the next 30 minutes". (The quote and the image above are from this pdf published a decade ago.)

It seems like a lot of thinking today rolls along the same tracks: a user pulls out his smartphone, opens an app, and sees banners with offers from nearby establishments. I've been somewhat skeptical about the whole banner-on-the phone thing as much as I once was about SMS promos, but this kind of location-based advertising probably makes sense, not least because it has been around forever in its lower-tech form of the "Sale" signs you see in store windows every day.

One thing I'm hopeful for, though, is this whole emerging checking-in behavior. If enough people get used to the act of announcing where they are,  retailers will get a new way to guide and measure shopping behaviors with the granularity that can't be afforded by the traditional loyalty card. Loyalty cards reward purchase. A program based on check-ins would be able to reward a much wider range of actions, from spending a certain amount of time checking out the merchandise in a particular aisle to bringing along friends. The reward might not be large enough to get people to drive all the way across town to check in, but it might just be the force that gets mall shoppers to poke their nose into the store they wouldn't otherwise visit.

I don't think badges and other forms of social recognition will remain a very strong incentive for a whole lot of people for too long, and I just posted an argument to that effect on Forbes,  but a program that follows the frequent-flyer mechanisms of point accumulation and tiered rewards could be very interesting.

How Spreadable Is Your Viral?

There's a growing movement among people who think about and deal with pass-along content to abandon the term "viral" and start calling things "spreadable" instead. The argument in favor of the latter was first articulated by Henry Jenkins in his eight-part blog post a year ago and has since evolved through conference chats and discussions on blogs by Mike Arauz, Sam Ford, Faris Yakob and many others. This 70-slide deck is a nice, even if a bit overwhelming, summary; Sam has also laid out the main principles of spreadability and how they apply to marketing in a Fast Company article.

In this debate, I have found myself in a position of the guy whose job is to make sure the baby doesn't tumble on the floor as the bathwater is being thrown out. To this end, I've just posted a piece on Forbes Marketshare blog where I'm trying to do a couple of things. One is to recognize that the debate is much more than a case of academic nitpicking of little consequence to practitioners. The other is to show that there's mileage left in "viral" even if the term has long lost its original meaning.

I'm also happy I managed to sneak in not one but two references to 24.  All this and more in The Spreadable War on Viral Media.

Keep Track of Media Culture To Make Better Ads

In the creative brief, right under the media plan summary, there should be a description of each media property and the particularities of its audience. Which means there's a job for someone to do nothing but watch TV, read magazines, browse the web, and take lots of notes, sort of a mix between an account and media planners.  After all, we have well-paid professionals hunting down and explaining obscure cultural phenomena - why not somebody who keeps track of the stuff that's popular today. Somebody who'd work in the Chief Culture Officer's department.

Or maybe it could be an industry publication, CliffsNotes for popular media culture. Wonder if there isn't one already.

Then we'd have more ads that enhance the primary media experience instead of interrupting it, like these Target's 15" spots that ran during Lost finale.

Intent, Context, Beer, Diapers, and Fishing

Hunch's Chris Dixon wrote a great blog post over the weekend about Facebook, Google and the difference between ads that create intent and ads that harvest intent. Hunch, being a recommendation engine, is, of course, all about harvesting intent. (I failed pretty miserably at their Twitter Predictor game with about 30% correct answers. Or maybe it was the game that failed, I don't know).

His post reminded me of two things. One is the urban legend about grocery stores putting beer next to diapers to boost sales of both.

The other one is an old Internet joke that not only has a lot to do with intent and contextual advertising but also points at the ideal state of things, at least from the advertiser perspective. It goes like this.

A young guy from a village moves to a big city and goes to a huge department store looking for a job. The manager asks him whether he has any sales experience, and the guy says that yeah, he was a salesman back in his village.

The guy gets the gig, the first day passes, and the manager stops by to check in on things.

“How many customers bought something from you today?”

The guy says, “one”.

“Just one? Our sales people average 20 to 30 customers a day. How much was the sale for?”

The guy says, “$101,237.65″.

The boss says, “$101,237.65? What the heck did you sell?”

The guy says, “First, I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fishhook. Then I sold him a larger fishhook.

Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4×4 Expedition.”

The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and truck?”

The guy said, “No, the dude came in here to buy tampons for his wife, and I said, dude, your weekend’s shot. You might as well go fishing.”

Dear Agency of The Year, You Suck

AdAge on Monday "wallowed in consumer generated advertising's trough of disillusionment", in the twittered words of @AdHack. The piece opened with " Dear consumer, Your 15 minutes are over. You suck."

It's the same consumer whom AdAge pronounced The Agency of the Year in 2007.

Rich, the author, called last week for a quote. I told him it's silly to dismiss the entire genre. Every time you have doubts about consumers' creative potential, head over to The Best of Craigslist, or Flickr's Explore, or The Sims Marketplace.

Yes, asking people who don't have any film-making experience to shoot a TV spot for you isn't very likely to result in anything.  But it isn't the only way to involve consumers into the ad-making process either. Ask people to do something they already know how to do and enjoying doing, and you'll get brilliant things like Nikon's Stunning Gallery or Chrysler's machinima.

Or else it's crap in, crap out.

Closely related:
Media Pendulum Swings On Second Life
Busted: Another "Consumer-Generated Ad" Myth

Unlock Wall Street Journal Articles With Google

Among many other things I don't understand about the newspapers', and News Corp's in particular, handwringing over Google is this. Wall Street Journal's managing editor says that Google turns people into content sluts because they expect online stuff for free (no, I don't understand the slut-free connection either). Now, the simple antidote against your pages being indexed by search engines is a robots.txt file, but whatever. What I don't understand is why WSJ's articles that are otherwise behind a paywall are unlocked when you arrive to them through a link on Google.

Take a random article from today, say, this piece about BSkyB's financial results. You click on the link to the article on the Business section's homepage, and predictably hit the subscription jar.




You then copy the headline and paste it into Google's search field:





Click on the link that is likely to come up on the top, and -- magic! -- the entire article is yours to read.




The only difference between the two is that the free one has "?mod=googlenews_wsj" appended to its URL. Now, tacking it onto the URLs of other articles produces mixed results (wouldn't an unlocking bookmarklet be neat?), but searching with Google has worked for all other dozen random articles I tried. Someone else has reported that WSJ tries on occasions to obscure the text with an overlay, but I haven't seen that.

So yes, while I'm not complaining, I can't understand what WSJ is doing either.

Brand Names as CAPTCHA Words

CAPTCHA advertsing (almost) in action: this Wordpress plug-in installed on some blog just served me a brand name. Do you see a business potential here? Have a CAPTCHA service that sells word placement to businesses, tracks actual usage, and splits revenue with publishers.

Disposable Advertising, or Don't Kill the Microsite

The Subservient Chicken site attracts 10-20K unique visits each month.


The debate about their increasing irrelevance aside, if we are going through all that trouble to build campaign microsites, why are we always in such a rush to pull the plug on them when the campaign is over?

I've heard two kinds of arguments: (ir)relevance and cost. I can rarely agree with either.

Unless the information on a microsite is so super time-sensitive that it becomes misleading as soon as the clock strikes twelve, I don't see how an old microsite -- retired and cut off from ad budgets, perhaps, but still breathing -- can hurt anyone. Coke's brand equity hardly suffers when I buy a poster on eBay that sports "A Pause That Refreshes" tagline instead of the current "Coke Side of Life". Have Burger King's Whopperetes become so off-brand that the microsite, launched for the 2006 Superbowl, is no longer live?

And I'm not picking on Burger King; the company is better than many others in preserving its own digital ad history. Many of BK's campaign sites are no longer around -- Whopperettes, Power Sitting (blog post) that made fun of Atkins in 2005, the fictional rock band CoqRoq (blogpost, also 2005) -- but the ones still alive show that they can pull in traffic long after their best-by date. Subservient Chicken, launched in 2004, still gets a healthy 10-20K monthly uniques (the graph above) who can't be all advertising types. SimpsonizeMe, developed two years ago, attracted 30K visits last month.

Which brings us to the argument about cost. For the sites that don't need daily babysitting and are not based on a third-party technology that requires ongoing license fees, the recurring costs are domain registration, hosting and bandwidth. Here, the reasoning should be fairly straightforward: does the site generate enough traffic at a certain benchmark CPM to pay for itself in impressions? In other words, if your benchmark is $10CPM and your hosting/traffic tier costs $100 a month, the site needs 10,000 pageviews to break even. (The actual formula I use also includes time spent on site). This kind of planning for the microsite's afterlife could be done before the project even launches; it can then guide designers to include features intented specifically to generate postmortem impressions.

For decades, we've been working with media that because of their nature made advertising transient and, like paper plates, sometimes useful but ultimately disposable. With the web, we can create ads that accumulate viewership over time in a way that pre-YouTube TV spots never could, and yet we are squandering the opportunity. Thinking of microsites as an investment that pays off over time instead of an expense line in a three-months campaign budget could be the first step.

P.S.:
- GSI is the hosting service for Subservient Chicken and Simpsonize Me.
- When visiting SubservientChicken.com, enter "Crispin"

When Medium Becomes Part of the Message

Billboard for a drill whose image is made of tiny holes drilled using the product.


 
Billboard on a busy street treated with a Tide product to show its lasting whiteness.

Kind of like the used bicycle advertising a used-bicycle store.

Why Measure Engagement?

The formula for engagement: source


It's been years, and I still don't quite understand the obsession with measuring site engagement at any cost.

I'm puzzled by the stuff like "engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals." My question is why.  So, you do all the calculations and come up with a number, and what do you do next? Try to increase it?  Why?

To me, the two metrics that ultimately matter are:

1. How many people performed a desired action (aka "conversion rate", which often implies but doesn't have to be sales or email sign-ups -- it can be any targeted action.)

2. How many people remember what I want them to remember for a certain period of time (aka "branding"). Under the current and mercilessly simplified ad theory, recall is influenced by frequency and length of exposure as well as the message's emotional impact.  Designing for and measuring the emotional effect might still be more qual than quant, but frequency and length is pretty straightforward, especially online.
 One definition of engagement  this model fits is Innerscope's "engagement = attention * emotion", and I'm fine with that since here engagement is an indicator of recall and not an end in itself.

Taco Bell Sign Falls, Kills Woman

source

More on the question of how coverage of news -- in this case, tragic news -- only tangentially related to a brand influences public perception of that brand.

North Platte Bulletin (4/4/09): "A Chambers Nebraska woman was killed Friday afternoon in North Platte after a 75-foot Taco Bell sign fell on top of the pickup she and her husband were in."

Speaking of tangentially related, here's another angle on brands, news and fans (source):

Free Strips of Paper

There's something depressingly philosophical about this image, perhaps a commentary about the ultimate product of all our work.
- source