Octavianworld

Testing Across Your Web Presence: A Conversation With SiteSpect's Eric Hansen

A recurring theme in our work with clients is to cast the analytic net across their web presences, not just their web sites.  For example, let's say you're a retailer and you run a "discounted shipping" promotion, with different levels.  The campaign for this should be evaluated not just in terms of conversion on your web site, but in terms of how different levels and creative versions performed in terms of attracting, engaging, and converting customers in all the places you published them -- display ads, SEM units, emails, your site itself, affiliates' sites, etc.

Implementing a test strategy like this has been hard to date, because you may not control all of the different properties involved in the campaign; even if you do, each channel may have its own testing tool; and, even if you've consolidated things somewhat, the tagging job is still a bear.

So, I was really interested to see this recent announcement of SiteSpect's "URL Tunnel" capability, which allows users of this service to implement integrated tests across multiple properties in their digital ecosystem.  I met  SiteSpect CEO Eric Hansen and CMO Kim King a couple of weeks ago at Web Analytics Wednesday, and had a chance to talk with Eric last week by phone about how this works and about how their customers are getting valuable new insights from this capability.

Here's a simple example of how this works.  Let's say I'm a retailer and I have a gift finder on my site that enables parametric search across my catalog (search by gender, age, price range, etc.).  I build a widget version of this gift finder that can be embedded on affiliates' sites, or published as a display ad unit.  I set up "mywidgets.myretailsite.com" and respond to calls from the syndicated widget code from here.  Then I direct this traffic through SiteSpect's solution (either their "SiteSpect ASP" service or their "Enterprise" appliance running in my data center).  Now I can implement and track multivariate tests on widget variants through SiteSpect.

Eric described how a SiteSpect travel customer has used this.  Before, the travel portal acted as a catalog of destination packages, but booking happened on the private-labeled booking engine / travel shopping cart another travel industry partner provided to them.  From a user experience perspective, when a customer pressed "Book it!", he or she was taken off the travel site to the partner's site, e.g., "booking.partner.com", and the travel operator lost visibility to how different variants of those booking pages performed.  Now, the booking engine is still run by the partner, but it's embedded in pages served from a distinct "partner" subdomain off of the travel operator's site, and routed through a SiteSpect server where test variants are defined, applied, and tracked.  

How does the partner feel about this?  In principle, you might expect them to be concerned about the loss of control.  But in practice, since they weren't going to tweak the travel portal's marketing mix elements themselves, they are thrilled give the travel portal the opportunity for insights that will raise conversion rates, and therefore earn more booking fees for the travel partner.  Plus they may learn stuff that they can generalize for the benefit of other relationships.

From The "Stop Whining About Obscurity And Start Rethinking Content For Usability" Dept.: What's your iCalendar Strategy?

At  a number of events I've been to recently, one common refrain has been "Gee, how is it that no one knows about all the cool stuff that's going on in sector X around here?  We've been working hard to get the word out, but we're still flying under the radar."

Around the same time, I was fiddling with my Google Calendars, trying to integrate them and add additional calendars to them (like weather, holidays, etc.).  I was really surprised to see the scarcity of things already registered with Google that I could add.  There's an option for adding a URL for different organizations' iCalendar feeds, but no way readily apparent to me to search / discover such feeds, either on Google Calendar itself or via a logical search.  

I went to the web sites of some organizations with events series that I like to get to, to see if they offered iCalendar feeds that would place those events on my calendar, so I could have them there as reminders if by chance I could get to them.  So far, no joy.  Reassuringly, I'm not alone with this idea or my curiosity at the lack of feeds, or their discoverability, as this post by Jon Udell suggests.

If you are a publisher with a series of events you'd like people to come to, how can you publish an iCalendar feed?  Here are a number of options for tools to publish calendars on your site that also support publishing an associated iCalendar feed.

I also checked out services like Eventbrite  and Eventful, thinking that these intermediaries logically would publish iCalendar feeds for organizations that publicize and manage individual events through them.  Again, no luck -- maybe I'm missing something?

This idea is not new.

The broader point:  Democratization of publishing tools means content exposed as content will find it harder and harder to get its day in the warm sunlight of user attention.  Smart publishers will think about how they can expose their content in formats and applications that are more tightly tied to how users employ that information.  Many things can be turned into event series -- if you are a recipe site, how about a "meal-of-the-week" series?  If you are the US Government -- or Forbes.com -- where's my iCalendar feed for economics statistics announcements?  Other examples: interest rates integrated with interest rate calculators, apartment rental listings integrated with mapping applications that support getting directions...  what can you think of?

Future Forward "What's Next In Tech": "DARC" Days Ahead

Thursday evening I attended Future Forwards' "What's Next In Tech: Exploring The Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" at the BU School Of Management.  The second of the evening's two panels (moderated with usual aplomb by Scott Kirsner) included Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan.  Brian described the criteria Hubspot uses as part of its hiring process using the acronym "DARC":

• Digital natives -- active presences in a number of places on the Web
• Analytic -- not just comfortable with, but passionate about data and the tools to play with them 
• Reach -- their digital presences have a large number of friends and followers that potentially help Hubspot's viral marketing efforts 
• Content creators -- their digital contributions provide signs of intelligent life 

Very useful and memorable.  Also, echoed the "Show, don't tell" philosophy we had at ArsDigita a decade ago.

Brian noted the emergence of Boston as a center of digital marketing thought leadership, citing (among others) local heroes David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and Paul Gillin, and mentioning firms like Communispace and Crimson Hexagon (where my friend Ms. Perry Hewitt was the first CMO before leaving a few weeks ago to lead online communications for Harvard University).

So what did the panelists think would be the opportunities to track going forward (generally, and in Massachusetts in particular)?  My notes (please correct any inaccuracies and ommissions):

• Tim Healy, (CEO Enernoc and our former landlord in Contact Networks' early days -- thanks Tim!) -- Water
• Brian -- (seconding Michael Greeley) -- Connected Healthcare
• Ellen Rubin -- Business Intelligence (naturally, I agree) 
• Helen Greiner -- Cloud Computing 
• Mike Dornbrook  -- Smart Grids (After my recent MITX judging experience I think there's lots of possibilities here too!)
• Neal Sequeira (GC VC who backed video at network Scanscout, another piece of the ArsDigita diaspora) -- The "real-time web" (here's what I think that could mean)
• Michael Greeley -- robotics specifically, "connected healthcare" via the intersection of robotics and healthcare digitization/ informatics more generally 
• Bijan Sabet -- Education (specifically mentioned using online games to teach, citing 8D World as an example)

Pet peeve of the evening: student entrepreneurs who complain that VCs don't do enough to reach out to student entrepreneurs.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if they keep at it, no?  "Capture-it-in-a-bottle" moment of the evening: Scott Kirsner disarming said student as "cranky".

Innovate Mass Technology: June 10 Meeting Summary

Today I went to the Massachusetts IT Collaborative Workshop meeting (http://innovate.masstech.org/about/) at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.  The Governor came to announce a new venture funding prize competition, as part of a ~150(?) person brainstorming session to figure out how to drive IT sector job growth here.  There were plenty of very accomplished people there, and it was helpful to hear what they had to say.  The initiative certainly seems to have a blue-chip organizing committee behind it, and today's event did it justice.  

Some thoughts on the day:

It helps to have goals, if only to prioritize different ideas according to the contribution they could make toward meeting them.  The UMass Donahue Institute presented some interesting research (anybody got the link?) on IT sector capital investment on a per IT job basis, and some job growth stats for the sector here in the Commonwealth.  This got me thinking.  Let's say a reasonable objective would be to create and retain 25k IT sector jobs each paying $100k -- I picked this number to reflect skill, cost of living, and inflation -- over the next five years.  What top line would justify that?  What characteristics would the jobs have to have to make sense in Massachusetts, rather than some other place?

For each person you pay $100k, there's overhead: benefits, taxes, rent, tools of the trade.  Call it another $100k per job.   Plus you need other people to make and sell what the IT folks engineer.  Then in some cases the stuff is real physical stuff and has material costs.  Whatever, all in let's say that the required top line, for each $100k IT job, is $800k.  25k new IT jobs thus means we need $20 billion in new annual revenues to justify them.  Or, to coin a new unit of currency, $20B = a Google (though not as profitable -- GOOG generated $20B in revenue in 2008 with only 10k total employees worldwide, of whom maybe half (??) are engineers).

Hmm.  A little daunting, but maybe not.  Question: what sectors a) are huge b) need huge change and c) are led by Massachusetts practice and innovation?  Answer: health care and education.  Together, these push $3 trillion in spending in the US.  A 2% efficiency gain (the same with less, or more with the same) would represent a 3X ROI on the $20B folks would pay to achieve that.

There's precedent for the state mobilizing at this pace and scale.  In 2004 I was honored to be asked by BENS to work with MEMA on an initiative to increase emergency (read anti-terror) preparedness in conjunction with the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  In six weeks that summer, with a low-six-figure budget, we developed the equivalent of "Craigslist-for-emergencies" and registered $300M in emergency-related assets from 30 major local corporations which could have been made available if needed.  (See clearinghouse ideas below.)

OK, now let's think about the pipeline.  We need to attract, engage, and convert that revenue, and the jobs that go with it, to Massachusetts.  Some we grow from scratch, some we have to import.  Maybe the work from here is to do the math to figure out how much activity we need in the attract and engage buckets to convert the target revenue and jobs, and then prioritize and manage the initiatives according to how (cost-effectively) they contribute toward the goals in each bucket.

Other thoughts (some previously tweeted:) 

• You get what you measure.  We have debt clocks and population clocks. Maybe the Boston skyline needs a job creation clock?
• Tough times drive folks toward isolation, when what they need is more circulation for more company formation and job creation, so maybe encourage circulation-friendly initiatives? Like online clearinghouses for cheap office space to get them out of their basements? (For example, Craigslist doesn't present options in a very consumable way.  A better service would allow filtering by total budget, or location, or number of people to be accomodated, to help clear the market more readily.) Or, help finding shared financial and HR services for VC-backed startups struggling to use capital efficiently with the B-round door slammed shut?
• Our competition is described by vastly larger scales -- China, India, even Silicon Valley (SJ to SF can be 2-3 hours in tough traffic).  Can we afford to define ourselves so narrowly? Heretical thought: NE+NY as a marketing partnership?  It's only 4 hours and 15 bucks by Bolt Bus (with free wifi!) between the two.  Now that's capital-efficient!

OMMA NYC June 9 Summary

Following yesterday's post with the raw notes, here's a summary of what I observed / learned at OMMA Metrics & Measurement -- short, since Joe Mandese already did such a great job writing up the day.

This was the first OMMA conference of its kind.  It attracted a great and appropriately diverse (advertisers, publishers, agencies, vendors, advisors) field of expert panelists, and it was well attended (couple hundred folks + in the audience I think).  So it was a target-rich environment for taking the pulse of the marketing analytics field.  At the same time, as the first of the series, it blended a number of audiences and objectives that in the future may end up in different conferences (or at least tracks of the same one), which made some things a little hard to follow at times, for different reasons.  Nonetheless, worth the time and money.  If you missed it OMMA is doing the same thing again soon in SF.

Of course it's always easier to hear validation of what you believe:

• the importance of having clear questions / hypotheses in mind before you embark on analysis -- this was always important, but it's ever more so now when the data sets and the tools to manipulate have the budget-busting power of Tsar Bombas (which, coincidentally and thankfully, never entered service) compared with what we had even ten years ago
• the large degree to which the technology options outstrip the qualified people to use them
• at the same time -- a point made on different panels by ClearSaleing's Adam Goldberg and Razorfish's Vivian Zhu -- the fact that [my words] "the scary stats and SQL aren't going away, and marketers who think so are swimming against the current"
• analysis within individual channel silos is getting acceptably sophisticated, if still hard to benchmark due to a lack of standards. However, integration across them for attribution and consequent (and ultimately much more valuable) global optimization is hard, especially as you move from mix- to campaign- and eventually to customer-level actionability. (IMHO the key here is to do the actionability math first -- what are the benefits and costs of moving from mix-level to customer level tweaking? -- then fit the cost and complexity of the analysis to the opportunity.)

Couple of other observations about the conference:

• While it's always entertaining to see vendors go at it on stage, it's also a bit of a waste, because the real issue is rarely that one is purely superior to another, but rather the specific questions / conditions for which each is suited.  So I had mixed feelings as I watched Josh Chasin (comScore) and Adam Gerber (Quantcast) duke it out over whether measurement or addressability was better (an overly simplistic summary of the panel on Audience Measurement, but hey, it's what I remember).
• More stories and more pictures would have been nice.  What we did get was good; in particular, Compete CMO Stephen DiMarco's presentation (ppt glitches notwithstanding) was a model in this regard.  His illustration of the "slow-roll" launch of the Blackberry Storm / Bold launch, and its use of multiple web sites / presences (including, controversially, conversion on partner sites), was instructive.

So, the pulse: 

• This -- in the end, better decision-support and accountability -- is clearly where the action is in a global marketing sector that still runs into hundreds of billions of dollars despite tough times.  
• It's brothy, late-Paleozoic days still (hoping that doesn't mean the recession is the digital equivalent of the Permian Extinction!), with analytics infrastructures facing uncertain evolutionary futures as the things they measure change. "Confusing!" as one panelist put it.

The two themes add up to opportunity.  We see the solution as scaffolding to help make sense of it all.

Postscript:  Josh Chasin's March 12 post on comScore Voices, and the Gian Fulgoni white paper linked from it, were helpful to understanding the Audience Measurement debate further.

Postcript #2: Josh Chasin explains his OMMA Metrics and Measurement panel comments further.

OMMA Metrics and Measurement NYC June 9 Notes

At OMMA Metrics & Measurement today. My notes below, observations to follow in a separate post later.

Jeffrey Eisenberg's keynote: a report card on online metrics and measurement.  His opening themes on what a report card should and shouldn't reflect: 

• "Work Matters".  (Echoes of "experience curve" and TR's "Man in the arena" quote)  
• Common Obsessions not worth overemphasizing 
• • correct data 
  • matching GA 
  • data precision 
  • "How can we trust...?" (you can't trust any single source -- interpolate)
  • cookie deletion 
  • denial ("We don't believe that") 
  • definition ("What's a hit?") -- "How Idiots Track" success
  • attribution ("You'll never know for sure")
  • engagement
• "A click is an expression of expectation, not just action" (Did we fulfill the click?) 
• Preaching Continuous Improvement, not a single (or string of) Big Bang insights
• 79% of businesses capture Internet data, yet only 30% of them have changed their sites as a result 
• The report card 
  • Technology A- 
  • Training B-  
  • Client Benefit     D
•  Marketers jobs in the future will be measured much more like salespeople's

Joe Lazlo, moderating the Audience Measurement panel.  Theme: "Best of times, worst of times?"

• Jon Gibs, VP Media Analytics @ Nielsen -- "great times, but confusing!"
• (Note -- you know you're among fellow analytics nerds when a stray quip about direct measurement vs. panel-based measurement gets a laugh...)
• Adam Gerber, CMO, Quantcast -- future of media sales is different from the past -- we're not selling content any more (since we're mostly dumping it into ad networks now anyway) but rather *data* (echoing Tim Armstrong).
• Adam paints the Quantcast vs. ComScore/Nielsen panel/hybrid approach as Quantcast's real-time modelling, understanding, and targetability *now* ("addressability") vs. Comscore's and Nielsen's validation of the *past* 
• (Panel has now devolved somewhat into intense, mostly polite "war of approaches"... here's a good post from Italy's Antezeta summarizing the issues, and here's a more recent explanation of the battle over the truth of Hulu, from Reelseo)

Jodi McDermott (aka Widgetgirl), moderating the Analytics Food Chain panel.  Theme: what's going on in different arenas.

• Vivian Zhu (Razorfish) -- Theme: Tough love.  I paraphrase: "Don't fear the data overload, embrace it! Learn SQL and SAS.  The data house will remain messy, don't think you can clean it up perfectly as loads more data comes in.  Deal with it!"
• Judah Phillips (Monster) -- What are the goals?  Tool choices vary accordingly.  And different people get to use them.
• Dennis Mortensen (Yahoo!) -- Don't think tools, think data -- what you have, what you can do with it.  Definitions and standards matter -- at Yahoo! we have a 28-page definition of a page view (!) 
• Judah -- we built DW, built dashboard with 9 KPIs, deployed globally to 26 companies; but we still support Excel Export. No single analytics tool vendor does a good job of supporting integration of internal information with what they collect.
• Jodi -- the "Data Divide": folks who have their act together -- data feeds, data cleanliness, a dashboard to present them, web analysts to support it all -- vs. folks who don't. 

Tania Yuki, Measuring Video and Virality panel:

• What does virality mean?  definitions vary (not helpfully) 
• Scott Ferber -- viral more likely among non-professionally produced content (my old essay on this)
• Brian Shin -- we see three characteristic curves  
  • reaching a million views in first two weeks 
  • approaching four million in first few weeks -- we call these "embraced" 
  • more than that -- the hundred million views club -- "breakout campaigns -- e.g., Susan Boyle
• Scott Ferber -- online video advertisers tend to fall into three buckets
  • CPA oriented 
  • demo reach oriented 
  • metric focused -- e.g., unaided recall
• Beware "negative virality" -- the video that's so bad that it's passed on so more people can laugh at how bad it is. 
• On translating video metrics to GRP -- some comparability is better than no comparability

Stephen DiMarco, CMO Compete, at lunch: 

"Powerball Marketers" vs. "Moneyball Marketers" -- picking on Al Ries :-)  

Rishad Tobaccowala: 

"I'm a numbers guy, but I've never seen a client decide based on numbers.  We're living in "data diarrhea".  Yet no huge cos built on selling data.  Why doesn't a car have a dashboard like a jet plane, if it's all so interesting?  It's about boiling it down.  Summarizing "Freakonomics": "If you want to understand someone's behavior, you have to understand their incentives."  Questions I hear:

• which country should I be spending my money in?
• should I cut price or increase promotion? 
• the container and the pipe have blended together -- what is Nike+ (creative?  channel?) ?
• the future of television? (it was so simple and reliable, what will replace it? How do I deal with "escaping video") 
• what about advocacy?  what happens in a world where we're all given megaphones? 

"The future comes from the slime"

• do video 
• work with creatives 
• advocacy 
• retail impact of mobile 
• data exchange of some sort 
• worry more about being behind consumers than competitors 

 Joe Mandese, leading the Attribution panel

• It's hard
• (My question: Maybe it's not about whether to attribute, but when incremental ROI makes it worthy to move from mix-level, to campaign-level, to customer-level)

Joshua Koran, "When the Numbers Speak for Themselves"

• recurring theme in panelists' comments -- it's all in asking the right questions 
• analytics can only achieve 30-40% explanation in social sciences

Doug McFarland, Integrating Online and Offline Data

• "Does anyone really want all that data?"
• "I don't think we know what to do with all that data" 
• ESPN -- we have a Texas focus group lab...   
• Roman Bukary -- Online Offline is wrong question -- right way to think about it is real-time vs. batch approach to targeting 
• "Interesting companies to look at, besides your own?" Joe Apprendi says "Check out Next Action" 
• Doug: "Agencies still buy --  online too -- based on reach and frequency" 

(Related Posts on this topic: January AMA panel (podcast), March MITX Measurement 2.0 panel)

Nick O'Neill, The Ins and Outs of Social Media

• Base measures: "sentiment and volume, over time"
• We've begun to be able to distinguish earned media impressions from paid media impressions to make the case 
• Advice -- be sure you have a listening program in place! 

  

Support A Worthy Cause: Nashoba Learning Group

Dear Friends,

On June 13, I'm riding in Nashoba Learning Group's annual 50 mile Bike-a-thon fundraiser, and I'd really appreciate your support.  As some of you know, the school does extraordinary work with autistic and similarly developmentally-disabled children (here's a good Boston Globe article that ran last year), and it's become a model for other schools around the country in the process.

Here's a link to the donation page, and below is my account of the 2007 ride (reprinted at friends' requests):

http://www.nashobalearninggroup.org/donations.htm

Many Thanks!

Cesar

"Friends,

Thank you all for being so generous on such short notice!   

Fresh off a flight from London that arrived in Boston at midnight on Friday, I wheeled myself onto the starting line Saturday morning a few minutes after eight .  Herewith, a few journal entries from the ride:

Mile 2:  The peloton drops me like a stone.  Dopeurs! Never mind; this breakaway is but  le petit setback.  Where are my domestiques to bring me back to the pack?

Mile 3:  Reality intrudes.  No domestiques.  Facing 47 miles' worth of solo quality time, I plot my comeback... 

Mile 10: 1st major climb, L'Alpe de Bolton (MA), a steep, nasty little "beyond classification" grade.  I curse at the crowds pressing in.  'Allez! Allez!' they call, like wolves.  A farmer in a Superman cape runs alongside.

Mile 10.25: Mirages disappear in the 95-degree heat.  (First time I've seen the Superman dude, though.  Moral of this story: lay off the British Airways dessert wines the night before a big ride.) 

Mile 10.5: Descending L'Alpe de Bolton, feeling airborne at 35 MPH

Mile 10.50125: Realizing after hitting bump that I am, in fact, airborne.   AAAAARRH!!!

Mile 14: I smell sweet victory in the morning air!

Mile 15:  Realize the smell is actually the Bolton dump

Mile 27: Col d'Harvard (MA).  Mis-shift on steep climb, drop chain off granny ring.  Barely click out of pedal to avoid keeling over, disappointing two buzzards circling overhead. 

Mile 33:  Whip out Blackberry, Googling 'Michael Rasmussen soigneur' to see if can score some surplus EPO

Mile 40:  I see dead people

Mile 50:  I am, ahem... outsprinted at the finish.  Ride organizers generously grant me 'same time' when they realize no one noticed exactly when I got back."


View Tour de NLG in a larger map

The Future Of Paid Content

Some are trying to put the "free content" genie back into the bottle and return to a pay model of some sort.  

This will be tough.  One problem is that (most, though not all) publishers have taught us to expect a lot for "free".  Another is that the world is awash in content, so if you're a publisher, hiding yours behind a pay wall just makes room for someone else to try to have his (ad-supported) day in the sun.  Snobs contend, "Water everywhere, but only a few drops (ours) worth drinking."   Maybe, but with production and communication costs low, and lots of people out there, there are enough exceptions to disprove the rule.  Regardless, focusing on these issues misses the point about where the value for the average reader is today.  The future of paid content lies not in the content itself, but in serving two adjacent needs:  filtering what's relevant, and helping audiences to use it productively.

Let's look at filtering first, and let's take Twitter as an example.  At north of 20 million users, and even with a churn rate fluctuating around 50%, you can't ignore it (and recent research suggests bsuiness people are paying attention).  The challenge is finding useful tweeters (Digerati friends please help -- is that what one who tweets is called?Or, is it "tweeps", or "tweeple", or some such?).  There are some early stage services probing at this: besides Twitter Search (formerly Summize / monetized via... TBD) and its upcoming "Discovery Engine", there's Hashtags (search by / subscribe to... wait for it... hashtags; monetized via tip jar),  Microplaza (tweets from people you follow; monetized via subsidy from parent co, which is an enterprise-focused collaboration platform ASP), Tweetmeme (Digg for Twitter; monetized via sponsorships), Wefollow (like the Yellow Pages of Twitter), plus a half a dozen more I've heard of and tried and doubtless dozens I haven't (see here for more).  (Michael Yoon and I are working on one, stay tuned.)   Is some refined, scalable version of one or more of these systems worth $2-3 bucks a month to some reasonable sub-segment of the Web-using public?  Related memo to Google: it would be worth $2-3 month to me to have Google suggest good posts from my blogroll (I use Google Reader) based on parsing my emails, which it currently does to serve me ads in Gmail.

Second, and perhaps potentially far more lucrative, are services to help audiences do stuff with content.  Be an affiliate for schools that sell courses related to the content, for example.  Last time I checked, the market for education, particularly online / just-in-time education, was growing at a healthy clip.  More simply, offer lectures by content authors / editors and sell tickets to these events, or be an affiliate for others who do that with your content.  My favorite creative approach to segmenting audience needs and monetizing accordingly comes from the musician Jill Sobule, whose http://jillsnextrecord.com/ (scroll down to "A Message From Jill") does a nice job of unpacking all the reasons why folks engage with her music, and then pricing related offers accordingly.  Folks wonder about Myspace's future, what with the Google deal expiring soon and all.  I wonder:  does Jill's approach suggest one path might be to leapfrog Eventful and function as an uber-agent for the bands making their homes on Myspace?  

The Age of Analytics, Part II: It's not the Technology, it's what you do with it

When we started our "marketing analytics agency" business nearly a year and a half ago, we were reacting to a set of emerging needs and opportunities wrapped up in a zeitgeist we called "The Age Of Analytics". In the midst of a tough economy, it's nice to see (in addition to the clients we have the good fortune to work for) validation of the concept, both in yesterday's NYT (discussing the emergence of data practices at ad agency holding companies) and in today's Mediapost.  The latter article, summarizing research by Forrester Research's John Lovett, offers some especially interesting forecasts:

• spending on web analytics (software and support services) will double to nearly a billion dollars in the next five years;
• the growth is being driven principally by marketers trying to figure out what's happening across media channels, not just within a web site;
• most of the growth will come from organizations with between half a million and two million uniques;
• 58% of sites surveyed through the WASP service have analytics installed;
• the average cost of hosted analytics services is $15,000 / year, though 73% use free (read: GA) services;
• Of the folks using services they pay for, over a third also use a free (read: GA) service as well; 

The article presents a wonderful picture from John's report that perfectly describes the market as we see it today (see this earlier post on "Pragmalytics" which describes our approach).  Most organizations have some analytics system installed, but they're still struggling to get over data issues.  The challenge ultimately is to get over the "action chasm", or as one senior executive told us last year, "Our challenge is to get our marketing team thinking less like accountants and more like decision makers!"  

 

Postscript from John's "Analytics Evolution" blog:

Web analytics is no longer a point solution – its part of something bigger. For vendors, this means that you should plan on diversifying or instilling your data collection solutions into as many marketing applications as possible. Agencies and consultants should maintain an agnostic approach to Web analytics tools and focus less on which solution and more on applying the right metrics, reporting quality (actionable) information and uniting data from disparate marketing functions (like advertising and site-side information). Organizations should be asking themselves how their Web analytics solution is supporting their entire marketing efforts. Not just in the data that the tools are producing, but in their ability to generate insight and automate marketing processes. Practitioners, it’s your time to shine. As I mentioned, the job market is ripe and your skills and talents are more in need now than ever.

Going Green and UI Design: The Parable of the Prius

This year I was a judge in the MITX Technology Awards Competition, in the Business Intelligence and Devices categories, along with Charles Berman (SVP at Fidelity) and James LiVigni (VP Sales at Kronos).  The devices category had a number of green tech entrants.  As we opened our discussion, Charles shared  an observation that struck me as pretty profound.

"I've been driving a Prius for a while," he told us.  "It dawned on me that it represented a pretty interesting experiment in psychology. I mean, the interior's just ok and the performance is only one step up from a Yugo.  So why are people so rabid about it?  Sure, there's the green angle generally.  But my personal experience has been that it's about the mpg meter.  The Prius has this gauge that goes from zero to a hundred mpgs. It becomes a game to see if you can keep the average above your target -- mine's 50.  You get this constant feedback.  It becomes the focal point for how you drive.  You get hooked, not just rationally, but biochemically."

His broader point of course was to suggest that we should consider the degree to which the entrants in the category had addressed the need for behavior modification in the design of their solutions.  It isn't enough to provide reports on energy savings.  You have to put this information in very visible places, integrate targets, and make a game of it if you want people to change their ways.  If we want kids to remember to turn off the lights, why are the electric meters only outdoors?

Take it one step further, whether in business or consumer applications:  BTUs are really BTU$.  Why not displays that integrate actual versus target usage with energy prices updated wirelessly?  Then, in any given period where actual usage is below target usage, pay the relevant users a 10% (for example) "commission" on the savings?  Or, take it two steps further.  Network the measurement devices, and provide competitive feedback as part of a new MMPG: instead of green monsters "World Of WarCraft", create green heros in "Globe of GreenCraft".  Three steps beyond: track relative usage across the network, and target users with usage tips and ads for relevant products and services (reminds me of the Binge-o-Matic). Four steps beyond: create town-level teams, and enroll your neighbors in friendly competitions?  (No cheating by turning the local park's trees into firewood.)

So how does your application re-wire the user's brain in addictive ways?

Postscript May 11, 2009: AKQA wins One Show Interactive for Fiat ecoDrive.  Nice, but somewhat derivative?

AOL's Future: Our PhDs Can Beat Up Your PhDs

Tim Armstrong, the new CEO of Time Warner's AOL (soon-to-be-ex-) division, recently gave an interview  at the 4As conference to Ad Age's Jonah Bloom.  Before taking the AOL gig, Armstrong was the top sales guy at the world's most influential media company.  So I figured maybe I could learn something from him.  In the interview, and especially in part III, he said some things I found interesting, especially on both a sales-tactics level and on an analytics-strategic level.  Also interesting was the way, at least as I heard it, that they talked past each other.

In part III, Bloom asked (I paraphrase throughout, emphasis mine) for Armstrong's vision of what AOL would be: "A content company? Community? Technology services? An ad infrastructure player?"  Armstrong:  "an Internet digital products company... competing on making products simple and innovative."

Bloom probed first, perhaps tellingly, on content: "Do you believe that the Internet can support quality content?"  An interesting first thread to pursue,  given how Armstrong had answered.  By my lights, a very east-coast, old-school publishing way of looking at the world, magnified (meant as a compliment) wonderfully by Bloom's perfect-for-the-ad-world, vaguely Eton-meets-Ali G English accent -- we author (high production value) content, and you (unwashed masses) passively enjoy our oeuvre.

Armstrong answered, "Yes, in a way that's respectful of the quality of the content.  Brands are important, and I haven't met too many marketers that want to associate their brands with content that's beneath them."  

Bloom pressed, "Are you saying there's a way to get good content paid for, by the consumer, and not just with an ad-supported model?"

In answering, Armstrong played a clever sales card, cognitive dissonance.  He said, "People are not paying enough to put their ads on AOL content."  Brilliant!  Here we were all thinking, "AOL, fourth-place portal my grandma uses, sux," etc. and he plays the "I've got nothing to lose, so I play unpredictable" card.  Now he's got us thinking.  We ask ourselves, "In this hypercompetitive world with increasingly perfect  pricing, did I miss something?  And, he's Tim Armstrong, so I should hear him out.  Where's he going with this?"

"Publishers don't give ad agencies enough insights," he said.  "Agencies pound but don't get what they are looking for, to move brands to a different degree.  AOL has a research lab with 40 PhD engineers in Mountain View -- I didn't even know we had it before I started -- and the insights they have on how advertising works... we have problems getting that information around inside, but if agencies had that information available to them, in a more transparent way, there would be a lot more ability to innovate and test and integrate the systems..."

He continued, "If I were an agency, I would say, 'What's the access I have to insights?'  [As a publisher] I would have a Chief Insight Officer who basically the only thing they did would be sharing with those [agencies]."

I was dying to hear an example or two of these magic insights that promised to be AOL's path to pricing glory.  Interestingly, Jonah didn't pursue this, and the first question from the audience was about selling out the AOL logo for co-branding.  Oh well.

My take: really interesting to hear Armstrong implicitly attribute the value of content not to its production inputs but to its performance, and to focus on the insight-generation capability as the core engine of AOL's way back.  As for his prescription for agencies (extensible to any publisher really), I don't think appointing a Chief Insight Officer is likely to be enough.  In our practice, as I wrote a while back, there's "scaffolding" you also need to generate and leverage insights:

...while the "data deluge" of the digital world demands that you improve your infrastructure for taking advantage of it, I've come to believe that we need to think about building a "data warehouse" as a continuous process and not a single or episodic deliverable.   To this end, what's important is having

• a map that shows where all the data lives,
• a dictionary that explains what piece of data means,
• a directory that explains how to get to the data,
• a guide that describes how routine analytics get done and associated decisions get made, and
• a library (searchable at minimum, if not indexed) that stores all of the individual bits of research (again: queries, regressions, tests, benchmarks) and conclusions you've reached in the past. 

These artifacts need to be living documents, like Wikipedia, rather than static editions.  But like Wikipedia, they need to be "curated". Or if you prefer a different metaphor, think of them as parts of an "insight engine" for driving your business, which collectively need to be lubricated and maintained to run your business at peak performance.  Based on recent assignments, I'm convinced there's a 20-30% time-to-market advantage associated with having these things up to snuff.

Related: Larry Kramer argues that AOL-Time Warner was a good idea that failed in execution.

Smart Destinations: Creative Intermediation for Growth-Challenged Times

I had breakfast last week with Rob Schmults, an ecommerce veteran who after gigs at Fort Point Partners and GSI Commerce is now CMO at Boston-based Smart Destinations.  Rob's firm sells you and me a fixed-price, all-you-can-eat, multi-day "Go-Card" that provides discounted admissions to a variety of attractions in 15 cities across the US.  In an otherwise tough economy, Smart Destinations is growing at a healthy rate.  As such, it provides an interesting model for others trying to find ways to do the same.

For us customers, Smart Destinations offers convenience, savings, and less hesitation to do "one more thing" if we're taking the family to, say, Miami.  For the attractions in different cities that enroll in the program, discounting off the retail rate, and being listed in Smart Destinations' guide book, drive additional visits that they are betting they otherwise wouldn't have seen from you and me.  One cool feature of the service -- when an attraction signs up, it gets a Smart Destinations card reader, similar to a credit card terminal, that it sets up at its member/ information desk by the entry.  That way, visitors don't wait in the conventional admissions lines, the attraction gets another POS terminal, and Smart Destinations gets paper-free instant accounting for admissions fees (bought at wholesale) it owes the attraction.

Together, increased savings and convenience link customer groups and attractions that might not otherwise have hooked up, creating an economic pool that Smart Destinations can then try to maximize and harvest through creative packaging, pricing, and marketing.  And there's still plenty of room for innovation!  For example:

• Today, Smart Destinations sells principally to folks in city X visiting City Y.  But imagine if it were to reconceive itself as a "platform" for "third-party affiliates", and allow local teachers and grad students to put together "profjonestourofcoolthingsforkidstodoinharvardsquare dot smartdestinations.com", tapping new market segments of suburban families desperate for high-quality activities in their own cities on grim winter Saturdays.
• Today, attractions are enrolled ahead of time and are relatively "slow-in", "slow-out" of the program.  A logical extension might be to offer a "Site59.com"-style "dynamic-packaging" approach in addition to the base service.  Site59.com was an ingenious service created in 1999 that purchased blocks of unsold airline seats, unbooked hotel rooms, and unreserved restaurant tables and concert tickets on the cheap, and combined them into conveniently pre-planned packages for busy professionals desperate for a weekend away with significant others, but unable to plan more than a day or two ahead.  The resulting attractive arbitrage -- buy what someone's desperate to sell, and sell what someone's desperate to buy, was a big winner in the dark days of 2001-2002.  (My erstwhile colleagues at ArsDigita were proud to have worked with the Site59 team to build the service.)
• Today, Smart Destinations markets through a variety of conventional channels -- search, affiliate programs.  But travel journalism suggests a number of potentially synergistic relationships.  Think for example, of a Smart Destinations partnership / sponsorship of iconic regular editorial features like the NYT's "36 hours" .  A few purists might sniff at the erosion of "Church-State" boundaries, but pragmatists no doubt would cheer! 

So, the question is, what other sectors have the potential to spawn businesses models like this?  

If you're a kid looking for work this summer, maybe start a Zipcar-ish lawn equipment exchange in your town?  Sign up folks with stuff as suppliers when they're not otherwise using their things.  Sell a "lawngear" card to others without stuff.   Use some of the proceeds to return sharpened, well-oiled gear to its owners, and pay for damages.  Pocket the difference. 

Or, if Smart Destinations doesn't provide enough inspiration, check out The Coupon Diva. (Listen especially to the point she makes at 4:15 into the video.)

Optimizing SEM vs. Affiliate Channel Investment: Amazon Giveth, Amazon Taketh Away

Last week Amazon announced that it would stop paying affiliates that drive traffic via paid search.

This is worth paying attention to and understanding better.  Amazon is the biggest online retailer.  Affiliates (through its Associates Program, not to be confused with its third-party sellers) are a big part of its marketing program.  And, driving scale / lower costs by encouraging and supporting (paradoxically) the growth of seeming competitors is a fundamental part of Amazon's "Wheel of Growth" strategy (see Scott Wingo's excellent analysis on Seeking Alpha, including the Jeff Bezos napkin diagram that beautifully captures the idea.)

I didn't understand Amazon's decision, so I asked Rob Schmults, CMO at Smart Destinations, for his take.  His answer was an enlightening window into the big leagues of multi-channel optimization in ecommerce, and with his permission I've shared our exchange (emphasis mine).

Cesar:

Why would Amazon do this if they pay affiliates on a CPA basis?  If an affiliate uses a paid search unit to drive traffic to Amazon vs. putting the marginal dollar into a better site, it shouldn't matter to Amazon, because the affiliate bears all the risk on that traffic-driving investment.  Could it be that there's an overall systemic side effect, which is that if everyone spends on SEM, the overall affiliate ecosystem's investment in value-added content helping to sell Amazon stuff is depressed?

Rob:

I think Amazon is doing it because they want to clear out the pile-on around terms they are buying directly themselves. Most companies forbid affiliates from bidding on their "branded terms" as you know (i.e., the name of the company and its branded terms -- to be clear: NOT the names of other brands it may happen to sell). Those terms tend to have an effective acquisition cost well below affiliate fees, so any traffic from those terms going through an affiliate costs more that if they had come through the company's own paid link.

But the affiliates also drive up the cost of that paid link by bidding on the term. Assuming Amazon has purely economic motives for its decision, then it must have decided it has enough keywords that it can buy profitably where the acquisition cost is already below the affiliate cost OR will be once the affiliates are no longer bidding on the terms.

One other economic consideration is double paying. Most companies pay affiliate on ANY sales to someone who came through that affiliate for a period of time (30, 60, even 90 days). And most companies don't carve out sales to that customer where they may have come through another program in the meantime (PPC, e-mail, online ad). In those cases where the affiliate visit came first, but another program was the last click before purchase, it might be argued that you are double paying for that customer.

Here's an example:

I visit your site and come through an affiliate on March 15. I don't buy but I get cookied and you have a 60 program. Sometime before mid-May I click one of your PPC terms and then buy from you. Not only did you have to pay the PPC fee as always, but now you owe the affiliate 8% or whatever.

Because of the economics of PPC, nobody complains when PPC gets clicked first for no sale, and then the affiliate is the second trip that converts. But then the premise of PPC is PPC, not pay for performance!

Anyway, cutting out the PPC riding affiliates would probably eliminate the biggest source of double payments. The bigger affiliates tend to loan you their customers rather than pick off ones opportunistically.

Cesar:

Hey this is really great -- thanks for taking the time to explain it!  I guess at this scale of keyword purchases, etc. the volumes really move the market so optimization matters lots.   One interesting question is whether the time window issue might presage the emergence of a two-tier/staged payment model where affiliates get paid for the click if there's no buy , and later for the buy if it happens in the time window?

Rob:

Interesting thought. I think there could be value in it. One challenge is that it’s a pain to track double payments in an actionable way. You can do the analysis to identify, but not sure how many companies can do it in a systematic way that would be necessary to either stop double paying or go to a variable rate. Maybe not as hard as it seems – just needs someone to put a concerted effort to it. There are real dollars there.

Rob's emphasis on actionability here is of course the crucial part, especially in these resource constrained ways.  One alternative to the two-tier payment structure I suggested would be to shorten the duration of the time window during which you would credit an affiliate for a sale.  Pushing this once step further, you might vary that by product category, to match purchase decision cycles for different products.  On more complex sales with longer cycles (cars), it might be appropriate to retain a longer window.  For less complex decisions (books), it might make sense to go much shorter.

Regardless, thank you Rob for your clear and thorough explanation!

MITX Measurement 2.0 Panel Recap

Yesterday morning I went to a MITX panel discussion titled "Measurement 2.0: How to Tell the Full Digital Story".  With 110 folks, it was SRO at Google's pad in Kendall Square.  Charlie Ballard from One to One Interactive (sponsor of other cool MITX panels) moderated, and the other panelists included Paul Botto , head of GA Enterprise Sales at Google, Morris Martin from Microsoft's Atlas Institute (that's him in the banner picture), Visible Measures' VP of Marketing and Analytics Matt Cutler, Mike Schneider from Allen & Gerritson, and my friend and colleague Ms. Perry Hewitt, CMO at the Cambridge-based social media measurement firm Crimson Hexagon.

Notwithstanding that it's so very 2004 to call anything "2.0" these days, Mike was correct to point out that before we can expect dollars to move toward "Web 3.0", we've got to get Measurement 2.0 right first.  Charlie usefully characterized that if "1.0" is about optimizing within channel silos, "2.0" is, in this context, about optimizing across them.  Whether you like the moniker or not, I agree (not uniquely) with his premise.  

Paul pushed the point further, arguing that to really understand a customer's experience, we need to move beyond a page-based measurement model to an event-based one.  This is especially necessary in a rich media world (think YouTube) where an experience spanning interaction across multiple rich media objects can happen within the context of a single page. (Whether or not you agree, it's provoking to think that while some pressures push us to think more macro (multi-channel), other technological developments push us to go more micro (intra-page).  Wonder if the same design concepts (pathways, handoffs) apply "fractally"?)  

However, Mike took the view that we should be careful about introducing new more exotic frameworks into a world where standards are such that we still can't agree on what defines a visit.  Matt pointed out that event tracking generates 10-100x the data, further complicating matters.  I'm in between: if you got a whole lotta Flash, you have no choice but to implement event-based measurement. Nonetheless, if we can't agree on standards, you give up benchmarking, because your own site (and perhaps others your agency has implemented) will be your only apples-to-apples point of reference.  (Paul indicated that event-based measurement is an invitation-only feature of GA.  I asked for one, and will report what I learn when I get to try it.)

Charlie kicked off the questions for the panel by referring to the multi-channel-measurement tool ur-text, Suresh Vittal's (Forrester Research report "Defining The Online Marketing Suite".  Specifically he asked if the centralized, "command and control" notion of tracking folks through a purchase pipeline across multiple channels still makes sense.  

Matt's take was that the explosive rise of social media has pushed the centralized model toward obsolescence (so soon!). He argued that with the "conversation" happening in places that don't (yet) let you slip measurement tags into their "vessels", marketing needs to be more about tracking what's happening out there using tools (like Perry's firm's) that Suresh didn't then cover but since has.  "Today, the center of gravity has moved, and marketing is much more like portfolio management", said Matt.   He then pointed to a silver lining opportunity: getting value from what he called "big data".  He described how in some presentations, he's successfully used tagcrowd.com to crunch a big bolus of comments on a video to infer / visually convey their collective meaning.

One question is, if we take his comments literally, are we back to local optimization of social stovepipes?  And, "big data" is valuable if you've got big comments.  What if no one comes to your party? In Long Tail space, no one can hear you scream. (Aside: this puts a premium on understanding viral propagation of your social media efforts as part of your portfolio management.)

Morris argued that the central model's value is just beginning to be realized, as it enables us to better understand the value of "upstream" investments and slowly ease away from over-emphasizing the value of being (if you're a publisher) / spending on (if you're an advertiser) the "last click".  Setting aside that Atlas is a display ad network with a natural interest in making this point, others have confirmed that display campaigns lift searches 15-20%.  Knowing this value, I think the opportunity here is to do the math to determine the "effective CPA" of an extra dollar to search vs. an extra dollar to display.

Charlie next asked, "How do we move from measurement to optimization?"  

Morris asserted that you've got to be able to track everything first, and that you shouldn't try to retrain media planners to work with a different process -- it's just too hard.  He pointed us to Atlas' Engagement Mapping tool, (launched a year ago, here's a review) as one option for optimizing within existing constructs.

Perry noted that one client has told her that her thinking about optimization has shifted, from "measure twice, cut once" to "measure twice, cut fast" -- the point being that media usage patterns are shifting quickly enough that a rough optimum appropriate to today is better than a perfect optimum appropriate to patterns we saw six months ago. Perry continued, "agility is the core competence in optimization efforts today."

Picking up Perry's thread, Matt urged the audience to think carefully about what data to collect.  He distinguished between "just-in-time" versus "just-in-case" data collection efforts.  "A bigger regression won't help," he noted, observing that "Even if it's more accurate, if people can't understand it they're unlikely to be able to act on it."  He suggested focusing on a narrow set of metrics and trying to move the needle 10% first, then adding more complexity to your models.  And, as a way to avoid analysis paralysis, Mike advised starting with a likely story in mind to prove or disprove, rather than boiling the ocean (testing/ regressing everything against everything) to find "emergent stories".  Truly men after my own  heart.  

A logical extension of the points above, particularly Perry's, is to shift the relative importance of A/B testing and passive measurement, versus back-testing, for media mix modeling efforts.  Charlie moved to this question next, asking, "How far can it go?"

Paul pointed out great results they've had (using Google Website Optimizer, natch) optimizing the Picassa download page.  Testing 200 different versions, they settled on one that "none of us would have ever thought of" that drove downloads 30% higher.  Surprisingly, the words "free download" don't help.  And, for those who fear that testing curbs creative freedom, reducing us to no better than Shakespeare's Monkeys, Paul pointed out that ironically, the opposite has been true -- creative teams feel they don't have to "play it safe" and can explore more possibilities, knowing that testing will ultimately discipline the process.  (Of course, this is true when experiments are as small as having or not having "free" on your page, but gets harder as the creative execution gets more expensive.)

Charlie's next question: "What about brand-focused advertising measurement?"  Matt talked about how the emergence of online video and social media have brought the left and right brains together: in these media, it's now simultaneously possible to craft a story that traditional brand marketers love and to measure its impact at least better than before, if not yet well enough.  In particular, he told the story of a credit card company that syndicated a video widget and saw a big jump in applications from folks who viewed it.  Perry told the story of how semantic analysis of an online crafting community's conversations (about vinyl home decor -- go figure) is being recycled to shape creative execution of television spots for one of her firm's clients (Ahem Perry, interesting crowd you're hanging with).  Matt further pointed to opportunities for "viral packaging", like paying Blendtec $10k to ask "Will It Blend?" of your product after their clever YouTube experiment with the iPhone drove millions of views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers to Blendtec's channel.  Paul suggested folks try Google Insights for Search as a way of getting a better view of what's happening upstream.

Panelists suggested the following additional resources:

• Paul -- From its Conversion University, the Google Analytics IQ test / certification.  (Brilliant monetization strategy -- give the content away, charge for the certification.  Get your "degree" now, as Matt pointed out, the web analyst shortage will soon be turned into a glut by Wall Street's refugee quants stampeding to Madison Avenue!)
• Paul -- Avinash Kaushik's Occam's Razor blog 
• Matt -- Tufte-compliant Excel charts courtesy of Juice Analytics (see also ChartChooser)  
• Matt -- Information Aesthetics blog
• Matt -- Flowing Data blog (more on visualization)
• Matt -- Visible Measures blog -- especially if you're into viral video and are looking for good examples 
• Matt / Morris (can't remember) -- Ian Thomas' Lies Damn Lies blog (web analytics and stats)
• Paul / Matt -- Google bought Gapminder, featured in Hans Rosling's famous TED presentation, and turned it into Google's Motion Charts tool.   

Q&A:

• I asked about whether the assembled players had explored allowing members of social media services like FB and LinkedIn extend their member profiles to include "analytics tracking tags" fields, so members could track visits and interaction by others in content the members publish or syndicate there.  It seemed to me a win-win all around for advertisers, members, and social media platforms.  Answer, good idea in principle, but social media platforms still guard that data jealously and there are privacy concerns that folks like Google and Microsoft in particular are sensitive to.  Paul did note though that YouTube provides some of this data to branded channel customers today.  My view is that if I can track you, dear reader, in GA using the tag embedded on this page through the Typepad template that wraps this content, it won't be long before Facebook makes the same thing happen, since advertisers want/ will pay for that (indirectly via CPMs), and who knows, they might be able to get a buck or a few each month from publishers to whom that information is really valuable.
• Another person asked about the validity of the "view-through" as a metric -- that is,  what credit do you give to display ads that aren't clicked on?  Here's an article that describes the issue further (I love the author's concluding sentence: "Something between 0 and 100 percent credit is appropriate, depending on the advertiser's unique environmental, programmatic, and analytic profile. Each advertiser has to find its own answer.")  Morris referred folks to the Engagement Mapping research cited above, noting that "You can't grow search from the bottom of the funnel."
• A third question was about the degree to which marketers should try to identify "emergent" funnels from the data versus operate/ test "pre-defined" purchase funnels.  The panelists were pretty much aligned in their responses about the practicality of focusing on the latter.  Matt said, "we're reinforcing for advertisers the importance of stories -- as humans we're tuned to listen to stories deep in our DNA, and it's much harder to infer them from oceans of data and analyses."  (From my end, I see an opportunity here -- services that collect stories as hypotheses, so that you can test the fit between stories and stats, mad-libs style.)  Charlie told a story about how they had tracked anonymous user 110135 through this cookie ID, and used this journey in a presentation to a cable company CEO, to huge effect.  Mike put it beautifully: "No story, no value."

Facebook's New TOS: What About Syndicated Content?

Al Essa wonders how you can retain some control over your Facebook content given its new TOS.  

I license my posts here under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.  I syndicate these posts automatically to my Facebook profile through Facebook Notes.  

Which governs Facebook's rights to my syndicated content, CC3 or Facebook's TOS?

Listen: AMA Boston Multi-Channel Analytics Panel Jan 20 2009

http://analyizethis.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to Jim Gallant for this recording.

MITX "Digital In The Downturn" Panel: 2009 is the Year of the Counting Dog

Yesterday morning I went to an excellent MITX panel discussion, "Utilizing Digital In A Down Economy". Here are some notes:

• The panelists were grim about the outlook.  Jere Doyle predicted January will bring 1M (!) new job losses economy-wide. Guesses at changes in digital spending ranged from slightly negative to up 10% -- way down from the 20-30% digital growth rates we've become accustomed to. 
• (One dynamic to keep an eye on: digital has shorter lead times (say, vs. catalog production or TV ads) and therefore the first to get cut; the flip side is it's easier to ramp up again)
• While the 2001-2002 bubble burst was worse, the landing for the industry was softer because the Fed pumped  up the economy; this time our industry is healthier and the capabilities we offer customers are more mature, but there will be no soft landing. 
• Old Media's really in trouble now.
• Measurable Media (e.g., paid search, email) closely related to conversion are faring the best.
• Digital advertising for branding -- e.g., display campaigns with 0.1% CTR's -- are really sucking wind.
• Despite all the evangelism of the past 24 months, social media per se won't attract spending (except perhaps as a content-generation vehicle), though specific, close-to-conversion solutions that leverage it (social graph-based extensions of things like Bazaarvoice) are still getting serious looks (I can verify this independently).
• Emily Green asked, "Are people more willing to trade information for value?" General answers: yes.  More specifically, Ralph Folz talked about the "Value Exchange" concept, using Adidas' MiCoach as an example of how it doesn't necessarily have to be about price (see also this related post).
• Emily also asked, "Are we likely to see a new generation depression thinking -- a generation of recessionistas and frugalistas?" (Great terms, first I've heard of them.) Ralph: "Huge push in our agency to measure consumer engagement with brands, be more consumer-centric in our analytics, to figure out exactly how people are reacting" (So can we also coin analistas?) (See also this related post.)
• Panelists' advice for coping: "Cut deep and fast now -- don't be incremental"; "Sometimes the fish just aren't biting, so keep your powder dry"; and, the audience favorite: "Pursue the Cockroach Strategy -- there's always food along the sides!"   
• I asked, "Top 5 adjustments you'd recommend clients make to their digital strategies in the downturn?"  Answers: Ralph offered,  "My 1-3 are measurement, measurement, and measurement."  Others: "Think explicitly about how to create or highlight value for consumer in all digital interactions," and "Don't ignore global opportunities"
• Kiki Mills asked, "What will 2009 bring?" Jere Doyle: "2009 will be the year of Survival"; Ralph: "Year of Data"; Emily: "Year of Cash"; Jim Savage: "Year of Accountability"; and poor Tom Anderson, who went last and rightly tried to offer something different: "Year of Mobile" (to which the snarky refrain was "Isn't next year always the year of Mobile?")
• From the Great Closing Remarks department: Emily suggested reading  Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism, noting optimists' belief in 3P's: "It's not permanent, it's not pervasive, and it's not personal."

Rothenberg's Rant: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

Yesterday's Ad Age carried a 3-minute clip from IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg's speech on audience measurement.  

Rothenberg argued for looking past the glum economy to what he called a "crisis of complexity", with research at the root.  Citing an October McKinsey survey of 350 marketers which found 80% allocating media by guesswork and off last year's numbers, he suggested that research professionals are making audience measurement too complicated for marketers.  Then he went on to suggest that the solution lies in "business process standards and measurement".

I wasn't there to hear the rest of Rothenberg's comments, so this observation may miss further context.  But I see where he's coming from.  He runs a trade association whose job it is to promote interactive / digital media as an advertising option.  One way this happens is by standardizing measurement so the medium is easier to buy.  Today, advertisers can measure traffic more or less well enough, and care more about measuring engagement (as a means of getting foks to click on the holy "buy" button of course).  Notwithstanding efforts to solve this (like Eric Peterson's -- see this white paper and this more recent post), this is hard because engagement can mean many things and user interactions (or lack thereof) can correlate imperfectly with each of these meanings. Hence complexity, frustration, and his call for standards.

While I agree with Rothenburg's diagnosis, I disagree with the priority for his prescription.  Yes, standards are important, but they take a long time to agree on and the processes that generate them can bog down if the issues at hand get too far ahead of their economic relevance.  For my part, I think if we're to realize the full potential of interactive media and advertising for more effective and efficient marketing, there are two more immediate imperatives.  

First, no reference to measurements and data about engagement should be made without first starting with the specific user behavior to be promoted and the possible options for doing so.  The data and analyses are only useful in that context, and it's only in that context that we can judge if we're being too simple, too complex, or "just right" in how we're trying to answer questions.  So let's break engagement down -- do we mean more reading by users, users giving us information in exchange for suggestions, registration for more personalization, content contributions, user recommendations (forward to a friend, for example, or otherwise)?  If we do this, marketers can "shop" more easily for the kind of media they believe drives the kind of engagement that they need to convert at a higher rate.

Second, marketers and researchers need to meet in the middle in terms of education.  Researchers need to better understand the specific engagement objectives and solutions their work addresses -- magnitudes, implications, investment requirements, feasibility, necessary analytic precision; marketers need to get smarter about the guts of how interactive media and advertising actually work, and the implications of those mechanics for the data they use and the actions they might take.  To this end, I'm in the middle of reading Avinash Kaushik's excellent book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.  I'll follow with a more detailed summary / review, but I strongly recommend the book for marketers despite its somewhat narrow title -- in addition to a great exposition of the nitty gritty of how things work, the book offers lots of practical advice about how to keep analytics manageable, in perspective, and focused on actions.

IAB has a role in driving both of these imperatives forward, and it already does.  But we've reached the point in digital marketing where we need to move beyond whether (as argued here and here), to how.  For IAB and others, rather than orienting publications and sessions around specific media or measurement per se, these might be organized around business issues -- "driving awareness, engagement, conversion" and only presenting data and analysis in the context of how it supported business decisions related to these issues.  Limitations and complexities in data and analysis should be balanced with references to whether they matter  and to practical workarounds or cross-checks when they do.  The ideal session or publication would present integrated stories of problems, options, analysis, and results, and through this help us keep complexity in appropriate perspective.  And, standards-setting efforts will proceed faster and generate better outcomes with a better-informed "electorate" of marketers.

AMA Panel January 20 2009: Marketing Analytics for the Multi-Channel Opportunity

I'll be moderating this American Marketing Association panel discussion on January 20 in Boston.  We're focusing less on the nuts and bolts of analytics within individual channels, and more on how some major organizations are moving operationally and organizationally to implement analytics programs to support multi-channel marketing strategies.

It's an interesting time for this of course.  I've had half a dozen conversations with various senior marketers and agency executives in recent weeks on the topic, and it seems that the economy has been an accelerant and a retardant on this trend in roughly equal proportions.  For some, "exotic thinking" has been shelved and managers are hunkered down in their individual functions and channels, going back to the "tried and true".  In others, the pressure to drive the business despite prevailing conditions has folks thinking more aggressively and creatively.

More to follow...

CMO Club Talk Recap

From Pete Krainik, this recap of the presentation Perry Hewitt and I delivered at The CMO Club Boston dinner last Tuesday evening, complete with video.

Here's Perry's version, including our presentation via Slide:

The CMO Club 11 11 08

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cgm ugc)