Does This KFC Logo Make My Butt Look Fat?

USA Today: "Women on college campuses are being paid $500 each to hand out coupons while wearing fitted sweatpants with "Double Down" in large letters across their rear ends."  Should've used the programmable LED G-strings instead.

See older KFC stunts; more butt-vertising.

...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.

What If Nobody Followed Twitter Celebs

Some weird glitch on Twitter has reset all follower/following counts to zero. That's what a very lonely @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) looks like.

Using the iPad as AppleTV

I was reading a rant about the new AppleTV on SmugMug's blog and found myself nodding in agreement with "Imagine that the AppleTV ran iOS and had its own App Store."  I then reached into the drawer for the iPad's VGA connector I'd bought a few months back for $30 (haven't seen any cheaper knock-offs yet), plugged my iPad into the flatscreen, and there it was, an AppleTV with an app store. I downloaded a few Stanford's free video lectures  from iTunesU -- the native Videos app supports video-out -- and played them on the large screen. (Other shows rented or bought through iTunes might not play via VGA.)

I watched two movies from the Netflix app; they weren't of Blu-ray quality, but were still very watchable and streamed smoothly over wireless.  You can't charge the iPad while the VGA connector is in, but the battery lasted long enough to provide video entertainment for the entire evening.

Among other video sources that looked fine on the big screen were websites (some through Safari, others through the Perfect Web Browser app that almost lives up to its name), the ABC app, YouTube, and AirVideo for watching video files stored on other PCs at home and streamed to the TV via iPad over the wireless. The Hulu app, too, should work with video-out, but I don't have the Plus subscription to try for myself.  Many more video apps are in the works.

I've been looking for a small HTPC to replace a dead desktop as a bridge between TV and the internet, perhaps an Acer or a Lenovo, but for now, it turns out the iPad will work just fine.

A Company That Fell Of The Cluetrain [rerun]

Here's something I've been thinking about for some time now.

You see, there is this company.

It publishes over a hundred RSS feeds and several email newsletters, but not a single blog.

The only conversations this company entertains are the ones it starts itself or is subpoenaed into.

Conversations it doesn't like, it tries to silence.

It has sued some of its biggest fans.

Continue reading the original article and the follow-up. Both were originally published last fall.

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.

The Rise of Automatic Tastemakers [rerun]

Just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers – sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

Read on.

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.

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.

The ROI of Second Life [rerun]

What I wrote about Second Life four years ago can be applied to Foursquare check-ins and other emerging media behaviors that haven't yet reached enough of a critical mass to be useful to advertisers in a traditional way.

"If it’s not about fame and if it’s not about money, why bother at all? The answer is knowledge.

Some experts predict that in the fairly near future at least part of the Internet will turn 3-D with online destinations either adopting some form of 3-D interface or expanding into the existing virtual environments (3pointD.com is one of the blogs tracking the signs of change). The argument goes that the companies that are playing inside Second Life and similar worlds today will be better prepared for tomorrow."

Read the rest of this 2006 post on Hill Holliday's blog.

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.

BP Blames Photographer For Photoshop Blunder

When BP got caught altering one of the photos on their Gulf response press page, whom did they blame? "A photographer."  

Washington Post: "Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank."

AP: "He [Dean] says the photographer was showing off his Photoshop skills and there was no ill intent."

The photographer's name shows up on the image's meta data. He's been doing work for the company since at least 2004. "Showing off his Photoshop skills?"  Couldn't they find someone else to throw under the bus?