Archive for the ‘Industry Research’ Category

Ping Reviewers Need to Get a Life- One That Looks at More Than Just Facebook

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Industry Research, Marketing, Music, Social Media, Technology
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September 02, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978491523

The new Nano and Apple TV aside, one of the more interesting announcements from Apple during their September 1st music-themed event surrounded Ping, Apple’s new social networking functionality within iTunes.

Unfortunately for Apple, the buzz around Ping isn’t all good, in fact much of it is negative. Reviews are currently expressing their disappointment over the lack of artist buy-in, comment censorship, the lack of Facebook integration, its partnership with LiveNation, and a few of its other features, or lack thereof.

However, many of the negative reviews that Apple is experiencing on Ping’s launch seem to stem from comparison to Facebook. Yet comparing Ping to Facebook is really like comparing those oft-referenced apples and oranges. In reality, Ping should be compared with Pandora, Deezer and other social music sites and recommendation engines that have gone social.

To compare Ping to Facebook is to misunderstand what Ping is attempting to do. Namely, it is attempting to sell you music by helping you to understand what is related to what you have already declared you enjoy. As the New York Times article reviewing Ping described, “With it, users will be able to follow friends and see what music they have bought or enjoyed, what concerts they plan to attend and what music they have reviewed. They will also be able to follow bands and get updates on their new releases, concert tours and other events.”

Ping is clearly attempting to be more music-focused than Facebook, and beyond incorporating the “follow” and “like” capabilities that Twitter and Facebook have made a part of the modern lexicon, the bulk of its resemblance to the world’s largest social networks is in the fact that it wants you to have friends, and to like things, and it wants to know who your friends are and what you like. In essence, it is being a social network.

The act of comparing Ping unnecessarily reiterates Facebook’s position as social networking platform to the world. Yes, Facebook is dominant in the social networking world. But is it the only social network? No.

Of course, there is one feature that Steve Jobs and his team seem to have explicitly designed to be distinct from Facebook, as described by the New York Times article, “Mr. Jobs said Ping would have simple privacy controls. Anyone will be able to follow bands and receive their updates, and users will be able to say whether they want to be followed by anyone or only by people they approve.”

Take that, Mark Zuckerberg.

Old Spice, Chickens, and Bears- Oh My! A Look at the Art of Interactive Advertising

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Advertising, Art, Branding, Industry Research, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Tools/Gadgets, TV
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September 02, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978491387

Smart advertisers and marketers know that part of building awareness of a brand and attachment to a brand these days involves allowing the consumer to feel as if they are a part of the brand, and the brand is a part of them.

The most innovative way to elicit this feeling among increasingly jaded consumers is to allow them to participate in the way a product is sold to them, or presented to an overall greater audience. In other words, to integrate elements of “interactive or collaborative advertising” into their overall marketing strategy.

Some of this is revolutionary stuff, and is still regarded as too dangerous by most traditional advertising, marketing and brand agencies the world over. Ostensibly, what it means is giving consumers permission to experiment with, and command some control of, a brand. If I may go down a yellow brick road of an analogy, this is no less than cutting down the Wizard’s curtain and revealing the small man behind it, subsequently allowing the consumer to revel in his or her discovery of the small man, and as a result of said revelation, being amply empowered to get Dorothy back from Oz to Kansas his or her self.

But when it works, it works so, so well.

Let us take, for example, the Old Spice Guy. If you’ve never seen or heard of Isaiah Mustafa, or any of the YouTube response videos that the company launched in response to Tweets it was receiving, then you must be dead or on a remote desert island with no smartphone. This ad campaign which has incorporate TV ads, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube so well has dominated most of this year’s buzz conversations.

How about something more recent? Tipp-Ex is a correction fluid brand (think White-Out), who recently launched a YouTube video ad campaign which allows the viewer to determine the end of the story. The viewer first watches the setup video where a guy camping with his friend is alerted that a bear is right behind him, and is urged by his friend who is videotaping the event to shoot the bear. The video viewer is at this juncture permitted to decide if the man should shoot the bear, or not. After making the decision, the viewer is redirected to a video in which the camper urges the viewer to rewrite the story.

The whole thing is highly reminiscent of “advertising and design factory,” CP+B’s groundbreaking 2001 “Subservient Chicken” campaign for Burger King, where visitors to the website can type in any command and a man dressed in a chicken suit on a webcam performs the requested function. So while Tipp-Ex’s overall concept isn’t new, their delivery is.

Largely what’s interesting about interactive or collaborative advertising is that it nicely paints the line between earned media and paid media. A company pays to create the initial ad, but then by virtue of the fun of interacting with it and collaborating it, consumers share and continue to virally promote that ad, which is where your earned media begins to kick in.

These concepts aren’t exactly brand new, but their integration into basic marketing strategies is, and increasingly larger companies are beginning to take notice of how much buzz can be generated through earned media without having to necessarily pay for every step of it. In addition, not every company has experienced skyrocketing revenues as a result of investing in interactive advertising, so the science here and how to master it is still relatively new.

One thing’s for sure, however. It sure makes advertising a lot more fun from the consumer perspective.

Get the Feeling You’re Being Followed? You Are.

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Industry Research, Marketing, Media, Mobile Technology, Politics, Search, Social Media, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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August 30, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978482524

At the beginning of this year Mark Zuckerberg famously announced that privacy was dead, stirring the pot and increasing concerns among the majority of internet users that their identities and personal information were being appropriated for capital gain.

Arguably, 2010 has been the year of “location aware technology,” whether the location is two dimensional or three dimensional. These days your computer knows where you’ve been online, where you’re going, and why you buy things there, and your phone can tell any satellite where you physically are on the globe and what advertising you’re passing at that very moment. Clearly, marketers are doing their best to collect as much of that information as possible and to use it.

One of the main issues in the ongoing debate about whether location aware technology and geotagging are net-positive or net-negative developments (or somewhere in between) centers on the concession that advertising and marketing are not going away any time soon. Advertising is an institutionalized facet of American life, especially in major urban centers. That being said, marketers like to argue that with more information they can better speak to a consumer’s interests and needs, as opposed to leading a consumer to buy something he or she doesn’t need.

Leaving that argument for a minute, the real concern here is over privacy, and educating the masses on how to protect their own privacy. A recent article in the New York Times cautioned readers against geotagging photos at their homes, and cited the example of Adam Savage, one half of the “MythBusters” team who had geotagged a Twitter photo of his car in front of his personal residence in the Bay Area. The Times pointed out that by doing Adam Savage had just informed all of his Twitter followers of his personal address, the make and model of his car, and that he was leaving for work at that very moment, “geotags… are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online.”

Now with Facebook Places, a new feature which allows its users to tag their locations in their status updates, and the increasing use of Twitter and FourSquare, organizations such as the ACLU are concerned that the spread of technology is one again outpacing usage education and awareness of the risks of information abuse, “The organization highlighted the element of the new service that allows users to “tag” an accompanying friend and post his or her location to Facebook – even if the friend does not have an iPhone, which is currently the only platform on which the application is available.”

The other side of this coin involves how browsers and advertisers track our movements online. After all, this is a huge market that Facebook plans to tap, 50 percent of Facebook’s over 400 million users log in to the site at least once a day, and more than a quarter of that overall number access the service from mobile devices. However, despite all of the hype, new research shows that most users still decline to announce their location publicly.

According to a recent Forrester Research report, “Just 4 percent of Americans have tried location-based services, and 1 percent use them weekly…Eighty percent of those who have tried them are men, and 70 percent are between 19 and 35.”

Returning to the modern marketer’s argument that the more information they can gather on a person’s interests, habits and locations, the more applicable an ad will be for a consumer, there is strong evidence to support this. Personalized ad retargeting, where ads for specific products that consumers have perused online follow them around while they continue to browse the web, are becoming more pervasive. And marketers are big believers, “‘The overwhelming response has been positive,’ said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com.”

Still, consumer sentiment about being monitored, whether online or off, reflects overall concern and creepy feelings. Ongoing education about how browsers and advertisers collect behavioral information both online and off might serve to eliminate the two-way mirror feeling that many consumers experience. However, it has not yet proven to completely allay consumer fears and concerns about a potentially serious breach of privacy.

In other words, while consumers feel uncertain as to where all of this leaves their privacy, advertisers are increasingly certain of where consumers stand. Literally.

When Early Adopters Ruled the World

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Industry Research, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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July 23, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978389762

Are you an early adopter or a laggard? Are you neither? Do you even know what these labels mean? Every technology company does, and how you respond to this question determines their relative level of interest in you as a tech consumer.

Incase you have never before encountered these terms, here’s a quick synopsis: Everett Rogers’ “diffusion of innovations” model organizes people based on how long it takes for them to adopt and adapt to new technologies.

Rogers’ theory comprises five groups. First, the “innovators,” which should be relatively straightforward. These are the people who are inventing and pushing the envelope. Next, the “early adopters” are big believers and big influencers who adopt technology right as it enters the market. The “early majority” follows. Those who belong to this group listen to early adopters and, based on their review and expert reviews of technology, will generally adopt and adapt to innovations. The “late majority” are those who are largely skeptical of emerging technologies, but realize when new technology becomes omnipresent that it’s time to get on the bandwagon. Last, but by no means least are the “laggards,” the strong skeptics who often blatantly disregard new technologies and publicly reject the latest innovations.

Laggards may often end up adopting technology further down the road, but can actually miss whole stages of innovation in between. For instance, a laggard might go straight from a Walkman to an iPhone without ever owning a single CD or minidisc.
But how does this all really break down into numbers? Early adopters generally only represent 13.5 per cent of the population, while early majority and late majority members represent 34 per cent each, making for a combined 68 per cent of us. The laggards represent just slightly more than the early adopters, at 16 per cent of the population. But why, then, does it feel as if everyone already owns (and complains about) an iPhone 4?

One theory is that early adopters and innovators are the most talkative about new technology. They love to show off their new gadgets and discuss them constantly.  The early majority and late majority assume everyone else has already heard enough about their gadgets by the time they acquire them. For laggards, chances are they are only interested in the fact that their technology works the way they want it to. Beyond that, their interest in the subject pales.
For these reasons early adopters and even the early majority have often been the darlings of the technology sector, who mostly focus their marketing and advertising on this 47.5 per cent segment of the population. However, now that the interwebs have been around for a while and we can reflect on some of the early fervor that the Web incited, some who were early web app and website adopters are now beginning to regret the information they put out there so early.

After all, the web has proven to be incredibly sticky with information, and increasingly website privacy controls evolve over time just as much as any consumer hardware design. That means the information entered ten years ago might be in the same condition as when you inputted it, but it might be visible to about 10 million more eyes than it was in the very beginning. In addition, consumer reviews of new gadgets, especially groundbreaking new efforts by technology companies, increasingly seem to suggest that the first generation of anything isn’t actually ready to own.

Do these frequent, and increasingly public failures in high-tech gadgetry suggest that a new era may emerge where late majority and laggard segments of technology consumers may be growing? If so, will technology companies begin to market more to laggards, and if so, how exactly would that look?

To quote an expression oft-used by a laggard friend of mine, “only time will tell.”

If You’re Happy and You Know It…So Does Twitter?

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Industry Research, Media, Mobile Technology, Social Media
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July 23, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978387963

Ladies and gentlemen, you may officially toss out your collection of mood rings. Now there’s a better way to check if we’re happy or not: Twitter.

Computer scientists at Northeastern University have just released a study which presents conclusions regarding the relative happiness of America based on “sentiment analysis” performed on tweet content. One key finding that’s making headlines and ruffling feathers is that Americans living on the West Coast are happier than those living on the East Coast.

For the study, the scientists at Northeastern performed the content analysis on nearly 300 million tweets from Americans and then indexed them according to time of day, sentiment, and location. The analysis was performed using the Affective Norms for English Words, or ANEW, system developed at the NIMH Center for Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida. As described in its manual, ANEW was developed “in order to provide standardized materials that are available to researchers in the study of emotion and attention.” Basically the ANEW system allows researchers to assign different values to a set of pre-selected words in order to determine a relative scale of emotions.

However, as is often the case with an attempt to project standardized values on subjective human behavior, ANEW is not completely reliable. As one article discussing the paper’s findings noted, “if someone types tweets ‘I am not happy’, the system counts the tweet as positive because of the word ‘happy’.” That being said, even as an imperfect tool, the practice of “sentiment analysis” using the ANEW guidelines is actually gaining popularity among large corporations as a tool to measure brand awareness and reactions.

Unfortunately for the study conducted by Northeastern University, most of the results aren’t exactly earth shattering revelations. For example, apparently most of us hate our jobs and prefer the weekends. But the video they put together does offer a nice visual of how the happiness or relative gloominess progresses over the course of an average workday.

What do you think? Do you think text-based “sentiment analysis” is a legitimate form of making these types of conclusions? Do you think the West Coast is, in fact, happier than the East?

How FourSquare Will Control Your Local Billboards

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Branding, Industry Research, Marketing, Media, Mobile Technology, Search, Tools/Gadgets
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July 22, 2010: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978387268

The news recently broke that Foursquare is forming agreements to start charging search engines such as Google and Bing for their geographic location data. Instantly various news sources launched stories seeking to satisfy user curiosities by positing what these information transactions might lead to in the future. Among the many educated guesses were enhanced real-time search, social mapping, and more strongly developed mobile search. I would add one more: more strongly targeted traditional advertising and marketing media.

Internet analysts and emerging media connoisseurs may write disproportionately more about innovative new technologies, but if you ask the advertising and marketing executives of the world if they have abandoned traditional media as part of their integrated campaigns, the answer would be a resounding “no.” The data that Foursquare will provide is a solid reinforcement of retaining those traditional marketing strategies. What we physically see and interact with outside of the realm of our computer and television screens still matters.

Still, it might surprise most people to learn that the data they generate by using Foursquare’s geo-location technology will be used to determine what shows up on their local billboards. Yes, you heard right– billboard. Even if, admittedly, these days that billboard might be digital and therefore closer to a television than the enormous printed posters the term still conjures.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Geo-location data brings the internet back to the earth by collecting information on where you were when you saw what. With apps like Foursquare, suddenly it’s not who you are, but where you are and when that matters most again. That means that physical advertising efforts such as billboards can be even better data-driven and targeted to the interests of local populations.

How do you feel about these types of emerging social media and GPS-oriented advertising ventures that will know where you go, where you shop, and where you eat? Do you think of this type of geographically-targeted advertising as convenience, or as an invasion of privacy?

Cream and Sugar with Your Wifi? A Look at the New Starbucks Digital Network

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Branding, Industry Research, Marketing, Media, Mobile Technology, Music, Tools/Gadgets
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(This post can also be found on Gather.com here: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978618733. It was originally posted October 20, 2010)

Although the coffee giant has been offering free Wi-Fi in the majority of its U.S. retail locations since July 1st, a new exclusive content network called the Starbucks Digital Network (“SDN”) launches October 20th in more than 6,800 of its U.S. operated stores.  The new content network will be specifically curated by the company and is being launched to enhance the customer’s in-store experience on what some might call a fourth dimension- the Web.

“The vision,” Starbucks’s Vice President of Digital Ventures Adam Brotman told Mashable, “is for Starbucks Digital Network to be a digital version of the community cork board that’s in all of our stores.” The move is a strategic one, despite the financial free-wheeling philosophy it seems to represent.

Starbucks has struggled publicly in the last few years with its big-brand, corporate generic image and how to compete with much-loved “mom and pop” coffee stores in big cities. The initial backlash was palpable, but with CEO Howard Schultz back at the helm, Starbucks is now trying to improve its public dedication to the local communities it moves into, and to incorporate many of the elements that make the neighborhood coffee joint a favorite for locals.

Because Starbucks relies so heavily on the in-store experience, the company is attempting to enhance the “third space” look and feel of the retail locations while also providing a stellar “fourth dimension” experience online.

As part of its extensive content network, SDN will offer access to news sites such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today, but will also offer additional content channels such as “entertainment, wellness, business and careers, my neighborhood and the customer-personalized Starbucks.” The incorporation of the “my neighborhood” content channel is a pillar in the giant’s strategy to compete with the local feel of smaller community-based coffee shops.

As Brotman told Mashable, SDN “delivers on this objective by serving up content to users based on the exact whereabouts of the store where the user is accessing the free Wi-Fi. Community fare includes local news from Patch and a look at nearby DonorsChoose.org classroom projects that could benefit from small contributions. Foursquare users can check in via the web from Starbucks stores, and Zagat makes available full ratings for restaurants in the surrounding area for free.”

But when is too much, just, too much content? Reportedly, Starbucks will be tracking user activity via web analytics to get a sense of what users respond to. From there they plan to taper the content network and its offerings based on usage research what is most popular.

From the research the company has already gathered based on its free Wi-Fi offerings since July 1st they now know, according to Brotman, that “more than 50% of users logging on to the free Wi-Fi are doing so from mobile devices, so the company was motivated by usage behaviors to build a mobile web experience just as good, if not better than, the standard web experience.”

As a boon for what many regard lately as a foundering hi-tech company, Yahoo is the coffee retailer’s technology partner for the SDN, having developed the site, hosting the SDN, powering search and also providing content. Yet Starbucks is not exactly following a hi-tech profitability model. The coffee behemoth is not charging its content partners for placement on the network, and no financial transactions are taking place unless SDN users make purchases.

Yet as traditional tells us, location is everything. As emerging technologies and social media allow consumers to make more educated, location-based purchasing decisions, perhaps this is Starbucks’ and Yahoo’s way of embedding themselves in communities via an increasingly location-based technology market. As Brotman said, “We’re really excited about the fact that we can leverage the location-based nature of the site to connect our customers with the communities around the stores,” he says.

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