Disclaimer:
The opinions blogged herein represently only those of Rick E. Bruner and do not reflect those of his employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
Questions and Answers
In my years of working in research, and journalism before that, I've long understood this, but I just worked it up into a pity quote while lying in bed last night: Finding the answers is the easy part. Insight comes from asking the right questions.
Don't end up like these poor schmucks.
"Marketing metrics give the illusion of certainty and control.
Cannabis has much the same effect."
— Tim Ambler, London Business School
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
— Albert Einstein
<shameless plug>
On Friday, DoubleClick released a new white paper that I think many in
the industry will find valuable titled "Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness."
</shameless plug>
I wrote a draft of this as an email to someone, so I figured I should blog it.
I call it Bruner's Corollary (to Maslow's Hierarchy) on Time Management. Abraham Maslow was a smart guy best known for something called Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, which can be summarized as "first things first," or in the human condition, breathing, food and water are more important for survival than love, art, morality, etc. As a metaphor, it's popular in business management, to the extent that posthumously a bunch of his ramblings have been cobbled together as Maslow on Management
Along those lines, I've come up with a corollary for time management. Time management is one of those things we'd all like to get a better handle on. On the advice of a friend, I bought David Allen's Getting Things Done
The Bruner Corollary on Time Management is much simpler and can be summarized thusly:
Step 1) Whatever it is, ignore it.
Step 2) If it is important, it should call you back.
It's also a great filing system:
Step 1) Set whatever it is on the giant pile of paper on your desk.
Step 2) Months later, find time to plow through the pile and realize, to your great relief, that most of it is no longer relevant and can be thrown away.
Probably like many of you, I get a redonkulous number of emails daily, way too much to deal with, particularly if I hope to accomplish anything else. So I kind of graze. If you're my wife or my boss, or my boss's boss or the CEO (yes, I'm a peon), I'll probably read your email right away. If you're anyone else, I'll try to get to it when I can. That may be never.
The way I figure, if it's important, you'll probably email me again. Better yet, you'll call. If you don't know my phone number, and you don't show enough initiative to figure it out, whatever you want can probably wait. It's not as important as breathing or eating or sleeping, is it? And if it's not that important, how important could it really be?
The thing I love most about working at DoubleClick is all the incredibly bright people here. One of the standouts among them is Ben Saitz, senior muckymuck of IT-something-or-other. Virtually whatever the question, he's my go-to man.
So today I was asking him about the feasiblity of implementing some hairbrained technical thing I dreamt up to give us killer competitive advantage (I could go into detail, but then I'd have to kill you). It was kind of kludgy and hacky, and I didn't know if you could really do it.
Ben's reply: "I'll have to think about it, but yeah, it can be done. Anything can be done."
Is that what you want to hear from a senior engineer, or what?
I'm an Internet advertising evangelist, so you might think I would be only too happy to root for the decline of TV advertising, given that popular thinking is that much of that ad spending would gravitate online. Sure. Bring it on.
But, as a researcher, and specifically a media researcher, I feel my first loyalty is to sound analysis. With that in mind, I have to take exception to much a recent post, "TV after Advertising (and Advertising after TV)," by Douglas Rushkoff. For such a respected a media pundit, I found his post surprisingly facile.
I agree that the world of advertising is clearly going through a profound period of change, and the confluence of new digital technologies and changing consumer behaviors represent long-term challenges that will reshape the whole media/advertising landscape in the long term. But I felt his article grossly over-simplified what is going on.
There are three points he makes, in particular, that I would challenge. Two of them are embedded in these paragraphs:
The implicit contract was that in return for this free gift [of traditional broadcast TV], we would sit through the sponsors' ads. But the emergence of cableTV, payTV, VCR's and, now, DVR's, has introduced viewers to television without advertising. Whether we fast forward, delete, or simply pay for the ad-free Sopranos, we're watching TV on our own terms. And we don't want to go back. Television has finally become a medium in its own right. We'd rather pay for good programming - be it HBO for us or Noggin for our tots - than get commercially sponsored junk for free.
Broadcast networks can't be expected admit that the dollars spent advertising over their airwaves are increasingly less effective - not before next month's "upfronts," anyway, where advertisers will be asked to pony up huge sums in advance for the privilege of being TiVo'd past during next season's prime time schedule.
I reject as falacy, inherent in both points, that the sea-change has already happened and that we know how the future of consumer behavior will manifest itself. Speficially, he says that consumers would rather pay for good programming that get "junk" for free. Secondly he suggests that ad money from this upfront season will be wasted because consumers (implicitly, the majority of them) will TiVo past the ads.
Taking the second of those first, it is still a small portion of American households that have DVRs. One research firm, Leichtman Research Group, claims it is presently around 13%, although fast growing. Nonetheless, 13% or even 20% (by the end of this year, for argument's sake) of consumers passing up your ads this year is not a total waste of money. It is a discount factor. Also, research (I can't be bothered to cite specifics) suggests that most DVR users do stop and watch a portion of the ads. I know from my own behavior I do this regularly, when the ad looks funny, or the girl is especially cute or, yes, when the product looks interesting.
Okay, so some mitigation in the fast-forwarding behavior and the fact that DVRs are in "only" 13-20% of homes today should not be a total relief for advertisers. As I stated, I agree the landscape is changing. But I think it's irresponsible to suggest that the game is already over and we know what the outcome looks like. We're still a few years away from the total impact of these forces. It's certainly not too late for advertisers to start changing behaviors and learning how they will play in this new world.
To the other point, that consumers would rather pay for content than consume it for free, again, I think he's irresponsibly generalizing here. Yes, consumers will pay for HBO. But not most households. Founded 34 years ago, HBO, together with its sister station Cinemax, now reach 39 million homes in the U.S., or roughly a third.
My response to people who say "There's nothing on TV but junk" is "You obviously don't watch enough TV." Yes, the "Sopranos" is great. And "Curb Your Enthusiasm" still has its moment. And I know that "Deadwood" and "Entorage" have their followings. (But "Six Feet Under" is gone (sob!) and "Big Love" is a disappointment.) Are we supposed to believe, however, that HBO has the only good programming on TV?
I got a DVR specifically because I'm a "Lost" junkie. I went through a brief "Desperate Housewives" phase as well. At the risk of getting into a subjective flamewar about what programs are actually good or suck, let's just say there is a lot of popular programming still on broadcast and basic cable. "Thief," "Black. White.," "Alias," "My Name Is Earl," "Everybody Hates Chris," "American Idol," "American Inventor," "Deal or No Deal," "Law & Order" (and spin-offs), "CSI" (and spin offs), "Gray's Anatomy," "House," "South Park," "The Daily Show," reruns of "The Chappel Show," and on and on (not to mention all the documentary and how-to stuff on Discovery, History, Food, etc.). Whether you personally like any of the above shows, they're all popular and innovative to varying extents.
But would we seriously expect fans to pay $12 a month for access to each of those commercial networks to see that programming ad-free? I don't need research to confidently say no way. The future will clearly remain a hybrid of ad-supported and ad-free TV. Did Mr. Rushkoff fail to notice that half a year after ABC started selling downloadable versions of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" for $1.99 ad-free, they have now started offering them for free with advertising stuck back in? I'm very interested to see which of those models wins that race. I'd guess the answer in the long run for the industry as a whole will be a mixed model, but my money's on the free ad-supported model for driving the majority of downloads.
Finally, however, Mr. Rushkoff's basic premise seems to be that advertising simply does not work. To make the point, he falls back on that cardinal rule of media pundrity: when in doubt, quote Marshall McLuhan:
[A]s Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium really is the message. TV sells TV, Paris Hilton sells Paris Hilton, and sneakers sell sneakers. TV's liberation from advertisers shouldn't have sent brands running to find a new unrelated medium on which to promote themselves; their panicked migration to the Internet, cell phones, or movie product placements only bespeaks a lack of faith in the selling power of the products, themselves.
These days, consumer goods are their own best media. Just as the Starbucks coffee cup and cafe experience sells more coffee than any TV or billboard advertising campaign, the shape of a automobile chassis or placement of its cupholders sells more cars than all that indistinguishable footage of cars taking turns on desert lakebeds. Great products are their own billboards, and satisfied customers (not to mention passionate employees) are their best spokespeople.
Sure, that sounds great in theory. And Starbuck is one of the great go-to examples (along with Google and The Body Shop) of a large company built with virtually no use of traditional advertising. And certainly word-of-mouth has always been a vital and little-understood component in business success. But those companies that build large consumer market share without advertising are the exception to the rule.
Paris Hilton sells Paris Hilton? Gimme a break. Subtract the insane amount of media exposure she receives for free every day for just waking up in the morning, and Paris Hilton is nothing but a rich, anorexic skank incapable of selling a hamburger at McDonald's, as, I suspect, was documented on her stupid TV show. And sneakers sell sneakers? So Nike is the dominant player in the sneaker category thanks only to its admitedly great products (labor practices not withstanding), but owing nothing to the millions it spends on sponsorship and advertising (reportedly $25 million a year to Tiger Woods alone)? That's absurd.
We're to believe that Marlboro is the number-one selling cigarette in the world just because it tastes so much better than Camel, and not due largely to the (pre-Brokeback) sex appeal of the Marlboro Man? Tide outsells its nearest rival because moms across America rave to one another in coffee klatches about how much better it removes stains than other soap concoctions? Coke has a third more market share than Pepsi not because of its century-plus record of great advertising and out-spending of its archirval but because its secret formula for sugar water is actually so much better than Pepsi's?
The biggest problem with the world of advertising is that most of it sucks, both for entertainment value and in terms of effectiveness. But to say that advertsing simply does work, as Mr. Rushkoff seems to insinuate, is just wrong. Good advertising does work, and many business fortunes are testimony to that fact. And what television would look like without it is something I seriously doubt our grandchildren will ever see.
I was delighted to see the launch of Google Calendar today. I had in my head a long post about various new features Google should launch, and a calendar, to complement their Gmail program, was top on that list.
But after quickly checking it out, I came to the conclusion that you can't sync it with Outlook. You can import your Outlook calendar, but it appears you can't keep it synched up to date. I have to agree with this discussion thread on the matter that without that feature, Google Calendar is a non-starter. Who wants to manage two separate calendars?
Here's how you release a press release: you write it, you submit it to a PR distribution service like PR Newswire or Business Wire, and you simultaneously post it in HTML format to your web site. Honestly, how hard is that, people?
Here's what you don't do. You don't email bloggers with the press release itself, because bloggers by and large don't "rewrite" digested press releases and pretend that's their own news, the way trade magazines do (unless, of course, they are the in the pocket of Wal-mart). Bloggers want to link to news, not rewrite it. That means, if you're going to call their attention to a press release, have it posted to your web site already, not two days after it goes out on the wire service.
And don't post it in PDF format. HTML will do just fine. PFD requires a special reader to launch when I click the link, and that freezes my browser for a minute or two, and that annoys me. But, for God sake, don't post it in Microsoft Word format. Not only does it likewise lock up my system while my word processor launches, but, hello, have you ever heard of macro viruses (you know, the things Microsoft Outlook warns you about every time you open a Microsoft Word attachment)? Better yet, how do you like the idea of your competition editing your Microsoft Word press release, inserting some disinformation, and then passing it around on your behalf.
But, seriously, if you're going to post your press release in Microsoft Word format, please, please make sure you've saved it as a version that has accepted and left no trace of all the Track Changes comments, because otherwise you just look like completely ridiculous.
A couple of colleagues and I were attracted to the sound of a Mister Softee icecream truck 10 floors below our office (and a block away) this afternoon. I sit closest to the window (yes, I'm that important that I have a window cube), but I didn't even notice it till they pointed it out. One colleague was apparently on her last nerve over it ("Killing me, Softee, with your song," she joked), though really you could barely hear it.
Anyway, we got to joking what a cool ringtone it would make for your cell phone. So, naturally, I found the company's site and poked around. Clearly, it hasn't been redesigned since 1995, which is kind of charming in a way, as Mister Softee is nothing if not retro in any event.
They even have a page featuring the music, that reads: "Because of the large volume of requests we receive for the Mister Softee theme song we have decided to include it here on our website for our customers to enjoy."
What is absolutely brilliant, however, is that it's not in a downloadable ringtone format, or even an MP3 or streaming audio. No, it's a GIF of the sheet music. Like, what, we're all going to gather round the piano in the parlor and sing the theme song together? (Yes, it actually has words.) Or, perhaps, download it to our portable player piano device that's all the rage with the cool kids?
One suspects this was done with zero sense of irony, which is magnificent. So brand appropriate.
Another bizfart for all you hungry entrepreneurs: a chain of stores in aiports where you can buy MP3s for your iPod and digitized versions of movies and other video content (with all the appropriate DRM controls built in) for your various portable devices. Wouldn't have to be much more than a kiosk with USB and Firewire cables hanging out. Wouldn't even need a human staff person, come to think of it, just a credit card slot and a good browsable interface.
You can thank me with a lifetime gift certificate (or a 10% stake, would be nice, too).
I actually posted this almost four years ago — a Monster.com ad (that I doubt was ever actually aired) about the joys of life in the advertising world — but it's so insanely great I have to post it again, as someone sent it to me again recently. You can now find it in two places, in case one goes defunct at some point in the future: here and here.
DevilDucky.com posits "What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging? Introducing the new I-pod Pro XP 2005 Human Ear Professional Edition."
The results is one of the funniest Quicktime parodies you've ever seen. Delightfully set to Danny Elfmann's music from "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure."
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm truly a thankless bastard.
As well they should be, everyone is gushing about Web 2.0 these days (despite the unflattering things that article says about my wonderful employer, I think O'Reilly's piece is the most profound piece of Internet industry trend analysis I've read in years). So many cool new online apps coming along recently. But I'm so greedy, all I can think about is how eager I am for Web 3.0, when all these cool apps work as well as they should.
Flickr is awesome, by far the best photo sharing utility out there, but could they possibly make it any harder to navigate? Please? Del.icio.us lives up to its name in more ways than one: it's terrific, but also uncessarily hard to navigate. (Its navigation problems are the exact opposite of Flickr's: Del.icio.us has too few navigational options (e.g., why can't you just search from the homepage for terms people have tagged?), so it's hard to root out the valuable socially-charged content that's in there, while Flickr has so many ways to get at its content, I often spend 10 minutes of clicking to find the exact feature I need to manage my photo files (e.g., just try to create a Set based on a Tag in less than 100 clicks).
But let me direct today's fuller criticism to Writeboard, a new stripped-down shared document tool from the innovative folks at 37Signals. By and large, it's neat. But here are a few pointed criticism I have of it (the first one which I emailed them about and never heard back on; another black mark):
1. Saving is a pain and a time waster. Every time I save, it closes out the editing window of the document and shows me a saved page version of it. To get back to where I was in the document, I have to go back into editing mode and scroll back down to where I was. Compare that to Gmail, which saves a backup of the document (granted, not time-stamped versions of the document like WriteBoard) but keeps me in the editing window and maintains the state of my position in that editing window. If I'm writing a long document and saving frequently in WriteBoard, it means several seconds delay every save (even for "minor saves" which do not create a new version of the doc). It serves to discourage frequent saves which defeats a key benefit of the service: document mangement.
2. Every time I create a new document, I have to create a new log-in and password specific to that document. I'd much prefer having a general login (so it's the same as all my other non-essential web apps, so I don't have to remember unique passwords for each document) and then see all the documents for my account. This idea of a new login for each document seems nonsensical.
3. URLs are not active hyperlinks. I just created a list of bloggers and their blogs for a project, but the URLs are all dead, requiring my colleagues to cut and paste each one into the browser window to look at them. Duh.
But, aside from that, it's definitely useful. Let's all just agree to hurry up, put our socially-networked, intelligent-crowd heads together and release at least Web 2.1 sometime in the next year or so.
Thanks to colleague and pal Ari Paparo, I just discovered PresentationZen.com, a blog devoted to the art of designing great business presentations. It's a lot to take in, but it appears to be a gold mine.
Here's a bizfart that just occurred to me: a TV channel with no sound, just engaging images. Think of a multimedia show at a trip-hop concert. This occurred to me while I was blogging and listening to music but felt I didn't have quite enough stimulation and wished for just some eye-candy on TV to accompany the music.
I think this would be especially popular in bars, where some video image is already so ubiquitous in most American bars today, but usually it's more of a distraction than an enhancement. But this style of TV would be designed explicitly to be just background ambiance, so it needn't be distracting.
Moreover, ads could fit neatly into this kind of silent, montage video environment very well. Ideally, they should feature a new kind of TV commercial approach, where sound and explanation are not required. Rather, I would envision ads in a similar type of fast-cut montage style, just featuring flashes of the product and logo that could be recognized for the simple promotion they are from across the room, but fleeting enough to avoid feeling interruptive. Product placement would also be a natural, where the video artists composing these video montages could be given free reign to design longer pieces that kept working in themes of the ads cleverly and artistically.
For a long time I've been thinking of introducing a new feature to this site, and today I will: Bizfarts.
The premise is brainfarts I have for business ideas. Not unlike Lindsayism's "highdeas," except that drugs are optional. Enjoy.
I just sent the following note to an email list of former PR colleagues:
This morning I went through a three-and-a-half-hour media training session this morning with Jim Cameron, and I would highly recommend him.
As some of you know, before and after my one year at NRW, I was a
journalist for several years for publications including Ad Age, Boston Globe and a newspaper I edited myself, Budapest Week. In addition to my PR experience, I've also worked as an industry analyst and have done lots of public speaking and many press interviews on the receiving end. So you might think I would be fairly seasoned. I would like to think I am, but I still found this training highly valuable.
He started with a one-and-a-half-hour PPT presentation with loads of
practical advice, tactics and strategies for dealing with press interviews. He's a former print and broadcast journalist of more than 10 years and been doing media training for 25 years. The second half
of the meeting consisted of mock interviews with the four of us being
trained. The mock interviews were brutal, nightmare scenario practice
sessions, where he did his best to interrupt us, steer us off topic,
ask hot-botton, dangerous questions and so forth. It really kept you
on your feet and made the subjects think strategically and tactically.
Highly recommended. Details here: Camcomm.com (Jim, a tip: you're overdue for a site redesign.)
I'm reading a great book called How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrell Huff (with illustrations by Irving Geis), a business classic since 1954. One one of the second page are a collection of quotes about statistics, one in I particularly love:
I have a great subject [statistics] to write upon, but feel keenly my literary incapacity to make it easily intelligible without sacrificing accuracy and throughness.
Sir Francis Galton
When I lived in San Francisco in the late 1990s, like so many Bay Area residents I became a great fan of the legendary columnist Herb Caen in the last year of his life. One regular feature of his columns I loved was "name phreaks": people whose names seemed to oddly describe them in some way, usually by what they did for a living.
In that proud tradition, here are two name phreaks I love in the media and market research space: David Poltrack, EVP of Research and Planning at CBS Television and Staats Abrams, SVP of Roper.
I heard of Poltrack a few years ago and thought that was pretty amazing for a guy in charge of research, but Staats??
Meanwhile, Roper, formerly Roper Starch, was bought a while ago by NOP, which was itself just purchased by a German company, Gfk, so, as I understand it (no kidding) the company is now going to be known as Gfk/NOP. If they could only merge with an LM, they'd lock up nearly a quarter of the alaphabet (Gfk/LM/NOP). Get a Q in there and go back to the full Roper Starch brand and they could have the whole run of GFKLMNOPQRS. Name phreaks, indeed.
UPDATE:
Oops. I forgot "J".
A friend sends a screen grab of a MediaWEEK page that includes curiously targeted Google ads. Friend explains:
I noticed that the Google ads at the bottom of MediaWeek feature 1- An ad for people with drunk driving charges and 2- An ad for people needed a legal defense team for sex crimes.
I've been in the agency biz for a while, but that's pretty bad. It recalls the time I first told my mother I was going to work for an agency. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone, and after what must have been 15 seconds, she said, "You're not going to become an alcoholic, are you?"
Maybe Bill McClosky's daughter was right.
Online marketing guru Joe Jaffe has a new book out, Life After the 30 Second Spot. I haven't read it yet (Joe, are you sure you got my address right for my review copy? ...*ahem*), but I'm sure it's great (and not just because Joe and I are industry buddies; we've worked on projects together, and I know he's one sharp cookie and an industry pioneer, not to mention a great writer, based on his regular iMedia column).
To promote the book, he's demonstrated his savvy in action with a funny Flash animation about the inanity of the TV Upfront, a so-called VidLit (so named by the virally popular animation for Yiddish With Dick and Jane, which I guess would be a YidVidLit.) Worth watching for a laugh and a taste of the book's insight and wit.
Also, if you haven't seen it yet, watch Joe's homemade Nike commercial based on Tiger Woods's amazing chip shot in the recent Masters Tournament.
I'm very pleased to announce the availability of a report I've been working on for some time, The Decade in Online Advertising (PDF | landing page).
I'm wondering if anyone gets the visual pun in my logo. Moreover, I'm wondering if anyone still reads this blog, or if it's all accidental Google traffic by now.
(On a positive note, trackback spammers still seem to value this blog highly.)