Hasta La Creative!

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.

It wouldn’t be a revelation to say that no large-scale ad delivery system is perfect.

Reason one is that, at any given moment, only a fraction of the exposed audience is actively on the market for the benefit that the advertised product delivers.  Yes, I actually might be interested in switching to your cell phone plan, but talk to me in 15 months when my contract is about to expire. This is the efficiency problem of advertising: in order to reach the few people who are interested right now, the delivery systems by necessity overshoot and spam the crap bejesus out of thousands who promptly tune out.

Reason two is that few would admit they believe advertising. People consider the source and recognize the nature of the claims as self-serving and discount them accordingly.  This is the effectiveness problem. The advertisers’ typical recourse is to bypass rational thought altogether and to beat the claim into the audience’s subconscious through incessant repetition.

(Now is a good time to note that we are are talking only about ad delivery here. Effectiveness of creative is a different topic.)

That’s what the main media planning principles of “reach” and “frequency” are about — solving for efficiency and effectiveness. In the picture above, this situation is illustrated by the undesirable lower-left quadrant that says “You Are Here.” You are there because most of the existing large ad delivery systems are both inefficient and ineffective.

Except for two.

Google with all its imperfections is the most efficient way to deliver ads — only people who need something now would actively look for something and see an ad for it.

And even though it took them awhile, Facebook is figuring out that they have this whole effectiveness thing down. According to many studies (the one below, and others, including my own), friends are the most trusted source of product information. Facebook has hundreds of millions of friends, and Facebook also sells advertising, and now Facebook is putting two and two together to make advertising that comes from friends.

But Google and Facebook each solve only half of the efficiency/effectiveness problem.  The impeccably timed search ads Google delivers are still self-serving. And the perfectly trustworthy social ads on Facebook still show up at the wrong time. In other words,  Facebook and Google each have what the other doesn’t, and they are going to fight for it.

On Google’s end, this is what the whole Search Plus Your World business is about — fixing the source problem.  That’s why the push to get people to +1 stuff, and then connect people into social graphs via Gmail and Google+, and then use +1ers as implicit endorsers. Not, you might notice, unlike Facebook.

And Facebook needs to fix its targeting. “Interests” have an expiry date and “likes” of pop-culture icons are only tangential indicators of predisposition towards, say, vacuum cleaners. Facebook does have several more precise mechanisms for intent targeting useful for certain categories (a recent change of status to “engaged” is a reliable signal for the wedding industry), but by and large nothing as precise of an intent indicator as search.

Hence the picture of Zuck in front of an extra-large search box.

You might have already seen Clay Shirky’s now famous speech about cognitive surplus given at Web2Expo and the dramatic comparison of the time spent watching TV (200B hours a year in the US) and building Wikipedia (100M hours total).

He mentioned another number I thought was interesting: “In the US, we spend 100 million hours a weekend watching just the ads” (fast-forward to 5:52, or read the transcript). The order of magnitude seems right but I can’t figure out how he arrived at his estimate. Here are the inputs I’m working with.

– Number of hours spent by men watching TV on weekends: 6.98hrs (less for women, but I’m keeping the math simple). I don’t know if the number is an average across the entire population or only accounts for those who watch TV.
– Number of ad minutes per hour of TV programming: 16 (wiki), which means 3.72 hours of ads total for a two-day weekend (16*6.98/60*2).

Now, to arrive at the 100M hours number, we need to assume an active audience of 26,881,720 (100M/3.72hrs) viewers on each of the two days. How accurate is this number? I’ll try to check with our media folks next week, but drop a comment if you have ideas.

Of course, this little calculation assumes that Shirky’s remark was not a mere rhetorical device (hey, if we just stopped watching ads we could build a wikipedia in a weekend) and that people do watch all of the ads throughout the entire 7-hour TV binge instead of doing laundry or zoning out.

Related:
Dissecting Advertising Clutter
The Ad Zapper in Your Brains

I’ve been keeping an eye on Hey! Nielsen (lovely name, but the way), a place for TV fans to voice opinions about TV programming that opened last September. Nielsen’s intent is to figure out how to incorporate the feedback into its ratings: “Using data from real users, Hey! Nielsen generates a Hey! Nielsen score — a real-time indicator of a topic’s impact, influence, and value. As users submit feedback, the score is created from a number of factors such as user response, blog buzz, and news coverage, as well as raw data from our sister sites Billboard.com, HollywoodReporter.com, and BlogPulse.com.”

Funny, Tetris has a way higher buzz rating than GTA IV (111 to 28), even though BlogPulse shows otherwise.

A heat map of Google clicks and attention distribution on a Google search results page from a 2006 eyetracking study. Useful for making PowerPoints more dramatic, but beware of the methodological limitations.

Jacob Nielsen, Alertbox, September 1997:

“Banner ads are useful to the extent that they drive qualified users to such corporate sites, but there are many other ways of attracting traffic: a survey of people who had actually bought things on the Web discovered that only 12% of buying customers had arrived at the vendor’s site from an advertisement – 88% of the shoppers had navigated there in other ways. Search engines and hypertext links are the most important mechanisms: offer content-rich pages, and other sites will link to you.”

“Maybe we can forgive advertising agencies who don’t know any better, but an old-media perspective is also characteristic of many so-called “new-media analysts” who take an incredibly non-strategic view of the Web and analyze it purely in terms of “eyeballs” and a television metaphor.”

Earlier:
Flashback: Internet Is a Fad

The inconvenient truth brought to you by the Interbrand’s Brandjunkie survey: “When asked about which brands were really serious about sustainable development, brandjunkies offered a resounding, and—perhaps you may want to sit down for this—surprising consensus. Who is really going green? Answer: NOBODY.”

On the other hand, 74% of the 2000 respondents come from marketing, so it’s not horribly representative.

You’ve probably heard the story about how a smart department store put diapers and beer on the same shelf because it had found out that a large group of diaper-buying population consisted of young fathers stuck at home on a Friday night. Here’s what really happened:

“The analysis “did discover that between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. that consumers bought beer and diapers”. Osco managers did NOT exploit the beer and diapers relationship by moving the products closer together on the shelves. This decision support study was
conducted using query tools to find an association. The true story is
very bland compared to the legend.”

Micropersuasion quotes Booz Allen Hamilton as saying agencies are in trouble because media are encroaching on the traditional agency turf:

* By 2010, 53% of media companies surveyed expect to do more business directly with marketers. The majority of marketers (52%) feel the same about publishers

* Only 27% of marketers expect to be doing more business with agencies two years from now

* Today nearly every media company (91%) offers some kind of “agency-like” services. This includes former untouchables like idea generation (88%) and creative development (79%).

The flip side, of course, is that agencies are increasingly tasked with content production for marketers who are bypassing the existing media channels to create their own media that are cheaper to make and distribute than ever.

Press release: “”The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.””

Beta coming on March 1.

NY Times published an excellent graph showing adoption rates for different technologies by three income tiers of the US population. Links: the article, the graph.