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.

The Annoying Things of 2008

(Fished out this rant from unpublished drafts and it still felt fresh.)

Cloud. This thing must have been born out of someone's cliparted PowerPoint slide -- you know, the one with two computers and a cloud in the middle that is supposed to mean the 'net. It's become so bad I had to update my browser filter.

Speaking of PowerPoint and annoying: in 2008, boring pretty pictures have finally displaced boring ugly bullet points.

The death of blogging. Suddenly, it became fashionable not to blog. Or at least to hold one's nose while blogging, conspicuously.

Uncalled-for portmanteau words. Another year going strong.

More single-thought books that should have remained articles in the magazines. Or, better, twitter tweets.

Panel discussions. I'm glad I didn't go.

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.

Game Developer Submits Game of Resignation

A game developer submitted his resignation from a game dev shop by creating, what else, a game. (Play with arrow buttons).
- via Facebook geek friends

Most Photographed Landmarks

"Mapping the World’s Photos" (pdf, researcher) is a paper based on an analysis of some 35 million photos of landmarks uploaded to Flickr. Researchers have identified popular tourist photo traps (the Apple store is NYC's 5th most popular), but also some other interesting behaviors: "Although [Amsterdam] is the tenth-most photographed city, relatively few photos are taken in its top ten landmarks." New Scientist has the story.

Also:
Brands as Landmarks (on HHCC.com)
Brandscapes: Longaberger Basket Building

Who Needs TV?

"Just 52% of the public in the latest poll say a television set is a necessity -- down 12 percentage points from 2006 and the smallest share to call a TV a necessity since this question was first asked more than 35 years ago."
-- Pew Social & Demographic Trends

Dissecting Snailmail

image source; Deliver Magazine

According to the ongoing USPS Household Diary Study, only 3.9% of snailmail stream consists of personal (household-to-household) mail (including the 20 postcards, apparently).   Other trivia: United States Post Office operates almost 37,000 locations throughout the country; households with $65-100K income and less than high-school education receive the most mail (3.7 pieces/week),  the next group is $100K+ with college degree (3.0 pieces/week); and, surprise, the larger the household the more mail it receives.

Also, the number of personal letters people send is on decline, but still amounted to some 1,116,000,000 letters in 2007.

Understanding Behavior Around e-Cards

An interesting, even if slightly dated (2007) data bit from an eMarketer / Marketing Sherpa study: of those people who tried e-cards as a viral strategy, there are many for whom it didn't do anything -- twice as many as those for whom it worked.

The problem, I think, is that most marketers view e-cards simply as a library of static images equipped with a send-to-friend form, kind of like this, without understanding the social protocols around card-sending.

On a related note, did you know that "the average person receives more than 20 cards per year", according to the industry org (yes, there's one for card publishers, too, and an official publication).

Quote of the Day

"Anyone who knows anything about advertising knows that experiencing a product has far more impact than experiencing an ad."
- Bob Hoffman in The Ad Contrarian eBook (pdf)

I don't agree it's always the case. Ads for Schwepps, for example, are much more fun than the carbonated water they peddle. But there are plenty of other soundbites in that ebook that you can believe in, like the one on the difference between puzzles and mysteries (read it yourself).

Or this one: "As we all know, In American business there is nothing stupider than the people who had the job before we did."

Create Your Own "Billion" Countdown

You can easily make your very own flipbook version of the Apple's billion apps countdown by taking the background image and gluing the digits onto book pages.