Demographics for clicks, clues for offline behaviour?

While browsing through the headlines a while ago, my eyes fell on a story from eMarketer about Online Ad Clicker Demographics. While only surveying US netizens, they've found that age, income and visit frequency are closely related tousers’ likelihood to click on ads. The article refers to an August 2008 study by iPerceptions, a web analytics firm. I've evaluated more than a few campaigns and websites where I've been very curious to know who hides behind IP addresses and mouseclicks, so these are very interesting numbers to me.

It points out one of two different directions in current analytics for websites and banner ads, where the other is preached by companies such as ROI Solutions (of Tribal DDB) whose blog has an interesting article with "A Call for Using Only Financial Metrics to Measure and Evaluate the Performance of For-Profit CMOs". This thinking is supported by others as well, such as the planner Nina Åkestam in an article in Resumé a while ago, arguing that for any campaign, the only thing worth measuring is profitability. I don't suggest that the metrics for evaluating the people in marketing and the ads should be the same, but the trend is cleary a call for metrics for what's really in your wallet.

While both of these directions are very interesting, are we missing something important here?

I'm assuming that the holy grail for all my analytics friends would be to track their users across all digital media throughout their day, such as corporate websites, banner ads, widgets, email, mobile and all the rest. The data keeps piling up for each new medium, but I rarely see it turned into real insights of how different people behave.

I want to put out a call to bring social knowlegde into web analytics. Let's make an effort to unify what knowlegde the media buying agencies have about user trends and demographics, combine that with behavioural patterns emerging from search and web analytics and voila - we'll have some pretty powerful insights about how different users behave online and communicate.

For example, if you are IKEA and you learn from your web analyst team that people from the west coast tend to spend a lot of time looking for new kitchens, while the northerners are really more into wardrobes, how about setting up your DM department to tailor for these needs? Or maybe you'll learn that traffic from your ads in an upmarket online magazine are using the search function on your website to look for kitchen appliances, and mobile users mainly look for childrens furniture? Should that change how you make your print adverts?

My idea, and I guess it's pretty obvious, is that what we learn from our consumers online tells us a whole lot about what they except from our offline communication. Let's fill the gap between what the analyst evangelists are eagerly giving us and the traditional social insights that account planners dig their heads into. The first one to be able to combine these with automatic tools is going to have a serious advantage.

And that's really what will bring in the money.

You're only as good as the questions you ask.

The problem
After a very successfull fancy dress party this weekend, I'm faced with the problem that some pictures of me (that readers of this blog may find very amusing) are possibly out of my control and headed for various friends' websites very soon. While I'm concerned about being found when people are searching for me on the net, I'm also trying to make sure they find my professional online persona and not so much the private stuff.

The answer
Given that I'm not really all that interesting, I'm assuming that whoever searches for me will have little patience. My strategy so far is not, as you may think, to track and hunt down my friends who publish their pictures of me online, but rather to make sure that for anyone who tries to find me they will very easily end up here on this site, for instance. SEO is hardly my strongest skill, but some Adwords, a bit of cross referencing and linking to my blog, Twitter and Linkedin pretty much keeps me high enough up on the search result lists that I basically hide all the other stuff someone else might publish that's tagged with my name hidden deep in the haystack.

The question
So all is safe and good if you Google me from my point of view. But how do I really know what you searched for before ending up here? And if I don't know what people search for, how do I optimize for that? And aren't there thousands of people just like me out there, so that if you're in fact not really looking for those funny pictures of me but generally searching for a good interactive marketer, how do you actually find the right one for you?

Abundance of information, just as much as lack thereof, calls for good detectives, and if there is one thing the information society has a lot of it is indeed answers to every possible question you could think of. And as more and more people and companies start using the internet to express themselves, even the most miniscule subject matter has thousands of answers.

A flooded market
In this information overload where each answer is matched by an infinite number of others, even good answers quickly loose value. In our time it is not the answer that has the greatest value, but the good question.

The California based, Bangladeshi born artist Hasan Elahi quickly learned this when his name turned up on an FBI terror watch list. Being all but impossible to get off the list (or escape the FBI surveillance), he decided to turn his entire life into a publicly available timeline on his website www.trackingtransience.net. For years, he's posted hourly pictures of his surroundings, GPS location and credit card transactions, making his life completely transparent to anyone trying to follow him, but at the same time giving Big Brother and endless job of searching through all his traces to find anything important.

Douglas Adams foresaw the problem of computers giving us answers that we don't know the questions to in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", in which I probably don't have to remind you that the supercomputer Deep Thought takes seven and a half million years to compute the answer to the Ultimate Question. The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, but the question remains unknown, and the answer proves not to be very useful.

For every new media technology that pops up, and for each new communication device we are brought closer to a continually growing haystack of information. What do we use all these answers for, and how do we judge what is relevant or even true?

The party
I often get approached by businesses asking for advice on how to present information about them and their products online, and most have clearly defined ideas about what is important for them to broadcast to their online audience. Unfortunately, this approach rarely does much to impress their users.

Imagine you are at a party with a bunch of university professors and generally very smart people who know a lot of stuff. How would you behave in this context? Would boasting about everything you know, which may or may not add anything to the collected knowledge in the room, be the key to a successful evening? Or would you rather try to find out something clever from these other smart people at the party?

The internet is much like this; it is both a vast repository of information and a constant buzz of users asking questions and digging into it. If you do indeed provide some information that you'd like someone to find, what questions do your customers ask about your product to find this? And are you the one supplying the answers they actually read, or is someone else providing them? Finding the questions and knowing what to use the answer for is to me paramount to any activity online.

So for this party I went to this weekend, I need to figure out what questions I've left unanswered. Or just hope that what answers I provided there left so little to the imagination that they won't be looking for more of that...

Mobile paradigm shift

When considering new trends for 2009, it's hard not to once again suggest that mobile marketing will soon have it's heyday. It's been on the list for many years already, but I think there's something in the air that will gain momentum and get a lot more serious attention in the year to come.

The launch and massive success of Apple's iPhone has attracted a lot of attention to new ways of using mobiles, and since it excells in many areas it may be difficult to spot exactly which feature that really holds the key to the gate of a paradigm shift in mobile marketing.

The iPhone's App Store, where you can buy and download applications that extend the use of your device almost inifinitely, has gained such popularity that it already beats Apples own online music store, iTunes, in terms of download volume. By October 2008, Apple had sold 200 million applications. Of course, other brands are keen to take part in that game too, and Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Palm have all got their own take on the App Store.

Get moving!
So why do I predict this will be the hub of the new mobile marketing wheel?
- Because it moves the users focus from what the device is capable of doing out of the box to what it can be doing in the future. The mobile phone is hence changing from being an object in itself to a platform. The object itself is saturated with technology, we want to fill it with new content and new ways to use it.

What this means is that the mobile phone is not essentially about telephony anymore, it's about providing you with what you need to be connected when you are on the move.

Open platform, open mind
Putting a camera and a music player into the phone were fairly obvious choices since these were already small devices you carried in your pocket, but what these new iPhones, HTCs, Blackberrys and Androids will do for you is only in it's infancy of innovation. The genius of the App Store and it's siblings is the open platform for development. Anyone can make and sell their programs there, and hence the collective fantasy of application creators around the world will make sure you'll get anything you wish for.

Fragmentation again
Did I mention the words "break through"? So will there be a big bang? As a marketer, will you miss the train if you're not ready yet?
No. It won't be the one big thing that suddenly everyone is doing. It will be a million small things. You will need to know who you are talking to and how they communicate and use their mobile devices. But when you do find the right tool, chances are that you will make a much stronger connection with your users than with any other channel. Why? Because if you are on their mobile, you are always with them. And that may be a little big bang just for you!

Media companies taking the role of agencies? I don't think so.

I've just come across an article in Ad Age Digital, stating that in bypassing the traditional business model of the media and advertising agencies by developing creative concepts directly with the media companies, they are in fact putting the agencies out of business.

An interesting idea it is, and as marketers in businesses across the globe get smarter I'm sure they will get better ideas for how to target their audiences and spend their marketing dollars more wisely. The trouble is, however, that the time you need to set aside just to keep track of all the different media companies and how you can integrate your service with them will take no less time for a marketing department than what it does for an agency.

The media trend over the last few years is not that targeting your audience has become any easier, on the contrary the fragmentation we've seen of late is only the beginning of something bigger.

I fear not the creative CMOs who will talk directly to the media companies. I rather think that media agencies and digital creative agencies will team up with the media to offer a fully integrated creative product to their clients. I do fear, however, that those agencies who are not able to offer a creative product that is integrated into the media, acting as an added informational or entertaining value, will have an uphill battle in the times ahead.

This is not to say that it will not happen to some degree, but on a broader scale it really is no threat to those offering truly creative integrated services.

More comments on the AdAge article over at LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/newsArticle?viewDiscussion=&articleID=17915863&gid=44140&split_page=1

Litteraturopplevelser på vei inn i den digitale tidsalderen?

Min eminente kollega Fred tok opp et interessant tema forleden dag:

En gruppe i den norske bokhandlerforeningen fremla i juni en rapport der man antok at punktet der et digitalisert marked vil få avgjørende betydning og for alvor påvirke hverdagen i forlag og bokhandel, vil melde seg om fra to til fem år. Bokhandlernes bekymring er naturligvis at e-bokkjøpere ikke vil føle behov for å oppsøke bokhandelen.

Her er artikkelen, den er verdt å lese.

Mitt syn er at svaret på spørsmålet om hva som skal til for å løfte boklesing inn i den digitale tidsalderen ligger ikke hos ingeniørene, men markedsførerne. De tekniske løsningene for smarte "digitale bøker" finnes helt sikkert der ute allerede, men er ikke tilgjengelige eller attraktive nok til at vi blir interessert og inspirert.

Jeg tror ett (av flere) viktig clue til å forstå hva som kommer til å flytte dette markedet ligger i journalistens misforståelse:
"Og vi venter fremdeles på det store, tekniske gjennombruddet, slik Apples iPod fikk for musikk."
iPod var ikke egentlig noen teknisk nyvinning, den representerte noe nytt kun gjennom markedsføring og brukergrensesnitt, og begge deler ligger etter mitt syn innenfor det som løses gjennom kommunikasjon. (Jeg mener ikke å skrive dette for å provosere noen iPod-fans, men det fantes rimelig mange andre MP3-spillere på samme tid som også var gode).

En annen innsikt ang. digital distribusjon av musikk er at det er ikke sikkert at iPod stod for en veldig stor del av salg/distribusjon ifht. å endre musikkøkonomien. MP3 kan spilles av på et utall andre spillere, men iPod er et symbol på den lette tilgjengeligheten og mobiliteten.

Slik sett er kanskje ikke Kindle/Readius/etc. det mediet som kommer til å bli mest brukt, men man savner kanskje symbolproduktet for å løfte dette ut av en generell grøt av konkurrerende produkter.

Forøvrig må vi vente oss en tilsvarende fragmentering av "lese-medier" som vi har sett med alt annet: iPod har ikke utkonkurrert stereoen i stua, Youtube er ikke et alternativ til kino, men en viss andel av det vi leser av bøker kan tenkes å bli fortært på en ny måte, dvs forskjellige digitale medier. Det i sin tur vil helt sikkert gi fruktbar såjord for litteratur laget for nye medier (lydbøker for mobil, sms-noveller osv er jo en del av dette).

I want new metrics!

Some time ago I read an article about a study performed by comScore with Tagoda and Starcom which documented that within the U.S market, 6% of the online population account for 50% of the clicks on display ads. Not a surprise that clicks are not balanced across all online users, really, since we all behave and respond differently to advertising in general.

However, problems for those of us who are not dedicated number crunchers do not stop there. I was looking at the weekly traffic statistics for the major Norwegian websites the other day, and noticed that the most visited site (www.vg.no) boasts a whopping three million "unique visitors" in one week. Given that we are a modest 4.8 million inhabitants in this country, and 84% uf us are online (SSB Statistics, Q2 2008), this means that VG.no should have an impressive 75% of us visiting their website if "unique visitor" was corresponding to an actual person. It may be because I'm not a keen reader of VG.no, but that does sound a bit inflated.

With a recession looming ahead of us it's fairly obvoius that marketers are going to be giving us a clear message about kindly giving them the utterly best return on their investments. For those of us who work with interactive media, we need to get some new tools to be able to compare not only how different online media perform (how much is a 'click' on a banner worth compared to a 'unique visitor' on a website? What is 12 pageviews compared to 12 minutes in an engaging Flash game?), but also how they compare to offline media.

Microsofts analytics department, The Atlas Institute, takes a plunge into the deep end and makes an attempt with "Engagement Mapping", which may indeed be taking us a few steps further.

Now that Joost is back in the game with their new in-browser player to compete with Hulu, I'm very interested to see if traditional TV metrics will be moving towards a new standard as well as internet metrics finding new ways to prove efficiency and effect. Not to mention Google TV Ads and the new overlay ads that are popping up on nearly every web TV player I've seen the last few months - what will they add to this conundrum?

Exciting times are ahead in this sea of numbers, but give me something more than clicks and unique visitors - I want effectiveness!

Red Cross makes me think

The British Red Cross has launched an alternate reality game (ARG) called Traces of Hope to inform about one of the services they perform; tracing and connecting people who have been separated by war or disasters.

The game is played by entering your email address on the registration page. Some time after after registration, for me long enough to have forgotten that I registered, the player will receive an email from Joseph, a man who has been separated from his family by the war in northern Uganda.

While I write this, the game has just about begun. I've received three emails from Joseph, the last including a link to a Reuters satellite comms system whith several clues for where to look for more info. I am reminded of the Nokia Game ARG in the early 2000's, and although Nine Inch Nails bagged a prestigious grand prix in this years Cannes Cyber Lions, I feel that this marketing format still has a lot of unexplored potential.

Traces of Hope has so far not wandered far from other ARGs that I've seen, but it seems that Red Cross and the game developer Enable Interactice have teamed up with commercial sponsors in an interesting way (I mentioned Reuters, yes? Penguin also, apparently). For corporations who want to venture into charitable sponsorships, I find this to be a very interesting path. A partnership that is both useful to the Red Cross and puts the sponsor forward without being just charitable or even tacky.

I'm curious to see how the game will continue, but it's certainly a way forward for interactive learing tools.

More on the issue over at ARGnet.