Ms. Adverthinker

“Text Analytics–a general term for the mining and interpretation of written words–has been used for more than two decades, most notably by the defense industry as far back as the Cold War to read into the word choices and text of, say, a speech written by Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” — according to a recent article in Ad Age.

The article goes on to say that marketers are increasingly using text analytics to mine information from customer service surveys, e-mails, online forums, and blogs.  “…while the blogosphere and social networks have so far not proved great advertising media, text analytics offers the potential to make them stronger marketing vehicles.”

Dove used the tool to not only understand reactions to their campaign, but to gain an understanding of what motivates people, which issues are most important to women in their target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them.  All by using text analytics from content on its own message boards.

What a fantastic way to leverage social media tools with a quantitative analysis!

Check out the hilarious article in The New Yorker this week about technology and the absurdity of it.  I think my favorite part was the first paragraph:

“Shortly before Valentine’s Day, a study was released claiming that forty-seven per cent of men in Britain would give up sex in return for a big-screen plasma television…As with all matters relating to technology, numbers are key: precisely how long were those men prepared to go without sex?  And how large a screen?  (Answers: six months; fifty inches.)”

Other highlights:

“When teen-age girls window-shop these days, they don’t linger longingly outside show boutiques or record stores.  They cluster, sighing, noses pressed against the glass, in front of cell-phone stores.  But few of these devices will ever be used for talking.  The real purpose of a phone, as everyone knows, is texting.  Only techno-tards make actual phone calls…”

“Congratulations.  You, but especially I, now require the kindness of an eight-year-old…to turn on the television, let alone the living-room lights.  This may be the first generation of children who are better qualified to survive in the world than their parents, especially if survival depends on maneuvering loyal droids to fire ranged weapons using a nunchuck.”

Great read.  Enjoy.

The CEO of Ask.com announced a shift in the search engine’s strategy yesterday, as reported in the WSJ. He now wants to “focus Ask on its core audience, predominantly women who use the site to ask questions about topics like entertainment and health. To do that, he says, the company will launch new products and enhance its technology through efforts like pulling in more community-generated answers.”

“The new strategy…is a retreat from efforts by former Ask management to broaden the search engine’s audience beyond middle-American, predominantly female consumers, who have long made up its core, to more technologically sophisticated audiences. Just last summer Ask had begun offering search results that combine text, video, maps and other results on one screen.”

The search engine also plans to “refocus the company’s products and marketing on the area where Ask believes it is strongest — searches framed as questions, as opposed to single words or phrases.”

This shift makes so much sense. Rather than competing in an already saturated search market where Google is king, Ask is smart to focus on a niche audience with whom they have already had success. And, by focusing on a niche audience, the search results will be so much more relevant for those users. I love this idea.

The talk in business these days is all about how to involve the consumer–the end user–in the brand. Through brand interactions, comes loyalty. Bonus for businesses: consumers want that involvement too. They want to contribute to product creation, give their opinions on product reviews, throw out advertising ideas. All of this is an effort to be heard. Consumers are desperate to find outlets where they can feel individual and important. And brands are giving them an outlet to do this (good thing, since consumers would do it anyway).
The convergence of these two desires results in blogs, product reviews, and consumer contribution to content. The epitome of consumer contribution to content is the amazing Wikipedia. The NY Review of Books has a great piece summing up the success and addictive qualities of Wikipedia when contributing content for the world to read:

“More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.”

“It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.”

And on the thrills of the edit:

“I clicked the ‘edit this page’ tab, and immediately had an odd, almost lightheaded feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, Why don’t the words resist me more? Soon, though, you get used to it. You recall the central Wikipedian directive: ‘Be Bold.’ You start to like life on the inside.”

Providing consumers an outlet to interact with a brand and be heard can give a brand that addictive quality needed to bring consumers back again and again.

Others might view Wikipedia differently, and not quite so democratic, as noted on Slate.com:

“While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it’s a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.

“Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.”

Over the holiday shopping season, Wal-Mart launched a new blog, CheckOutBlog.com.  This blog is a new and interesting approach for Wal-Mart.  The NY Times reported on this new blog over the weekend:

“Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries.

“This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

“…Wal-Mart’s site…turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.

“The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.”

I wonder if won’t still be met with some skepticism just because it is hosted by “Wal-Mart.”  It is a very interesting approach, and if nothing else, shows some progressiveness for the brand that is right in line with positioning it has taken on sustainability. If they keep this up, they just might gradually change perceptions of Wal-Mart — a task that at once seemed impossible, but could now be a plausible outcome.

I love research: usually there is a nugget of information that is revealed and gives us an “a-ha” moment.  But I also love research because it always confirms things we instinctively know, but provides the data to support those instincts.  That is what an article in today’s WSJ does for me.  The article is all about recall of commercials watched through fast forward on a DVR.  Some key findings reported that the most successful ads:

• Concentrated the action and the brand’s logo in the middle of the screen.
• Didn’t rely on multiple scene changes, audio or text to tell the story.
• Often used familiar characters.
• Were more likely to have been seen once before live.

Duh.  But the implications are interesting:

• Advertisers may want to unveil new campaigns during live events like sports games and then re-run spots during programs likely to be recorded.
• Advertisers may want to test multiple edits of a spot to see how it performs when it is fast forwarded.

“No matter which services you choose, the most important point is simply to use video.  Too many companies don’t have clips showing their products, their philosophies, or simple news announcements by their CEOs.  Business is a conversation, and video is increasingly how that conversation takes place.” — summary of an article in this month’s Fast Company that talks all about the various ways video can be used by businesses.

As reported in BusinessWeek, social network users are spending less time on sites like MySpace and Facebook in an effort to avoid advertising.  “The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore.  MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says.  The total number of people on such sites is still increasing at an 11.5% rate, but that’s down sharply from past growth rates.”

“MySpace and Facebook recognize the issue but say increased targeting and other innovations will spur users to pay more attention.”

We will see what happens, but maybe online games are the new social networking sites when it comes to hot places to advertise.

How addictive is gaming? “Total time spent gaming online hit 11.4 billion minutes in December, up 27% over the previous year…Only e-mail and shopping keep people online longer nowadays.”  So, naturally, media companies and advertisers are looking for ways to leverage the popularity of online games.  BusinessWeek reports that MTV has been taking advantage of this growing trend and now “is pushing hard into online games in pursuit of their rich advertising potential and can’t have failed to notice that traffic growth is slowing at social networks.”

MTV has been signing up advertisers for its games, and one of the more recent additions: Staples.  Staples “recently sponsored a game on ShockWave.com, an MTVN site that attacks millions of women users.  The game features the Easy Button from its TV spots that, when pressed, magically makes chores disappear.  Women visitors were asked to submit photos showing why they needed an Easy Button.  They voted on the top five–including a messy garage–and the winning photos were converted into digital jigsaw puzzle, which happen to be a favorite among women gamers.”

I am continually surprised at the number of female gamers, but everywhere I turn lately I am reading about the popularity of gaming and the how women love gaming too.  See my previous entry on how women spend their time online.

But, I digress.  The point is, online gaming boom is showing no signs of slowing and advertising within games is the new product placement.  In fact, advertisers are expected to spend $2 billion on online games in 2012, four times 2007’s total.

Courtesy of Advertising Age this week, we learn that 2007 was the year that women tipped the scale to compose more than 50% of online users. What are they doing online?

• Shopping: travel, clothing, health & beauty products, financial products, and food. Women 45 to 54 were much more likely than men to make impulse purchases online when given limited-time offers or extra free items.
• Gaming: women are more likely to pay for play.
• Viewing video: news, movies previews, and music videos.
• Parenting: more than 43 million moms go online daily and spend an average of 85 minutes there.
• Socializing: women 25-34, with a college degree are more often to search for local dining and entertainment information, use instant messaging, visit social-networking sites, read blogs, and download music.
• Dating: when dating online, they lie about weight more often than any other attribute.
• Staying healthy: almost 84% of all women sought healthcare information online.

Reported in Brandweek, and based on findings from a new eMarketer report, here are some stats on the future of brandable widgets (”mini-Web applications that are downloaded and installed for use on personal computers, Web pages, blogs or social-network profiles”):

• 100,000 developers worldwide are currently working on widget programs.
• Facebook began allowing widgets on its site last May.  Since then, 13,000 widgets have been created for the site alone.
• Social networking sites are a big destination for widget placement.  In 2007, 13.6 million Web surfers between the ages of 12-17 were social network users.  That number will be 15.3 million this year and 17.7 million by 2011.
• Asked whether they thought mobile marketing or widgets would play a larger role in advertising strategies for 2008, 58% of marketers sided with widgets.

“Marketers spent $15 million creating, promoting and distributing widgets in 2007.  That number is expected to grow to $40 million in 2008.”

Is your brand represented in the widget world?

Coming off the Super Bowl surge of popularity for advertising (when commercials get higher audience than the game thanks to DVR devices), a NY Times had an article today noting the importance of the web for additional viewing of popular commercials. In fact, marketers should be thinking about ways to post all spots on the Internet on various sites:

“The ‘torture test’ for brands beyond their Super Bowl ads is how to make it easy for consumers to find the ads and engage with them, whether you put them on Web sites, on YouTube or make them easy to search for on Google,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at the Nielsen Online Strategic Services division of the Nielsen Company.

With broadcast production costs rising and media placement costs continuing to rise, it just makes sense to take the spots that have been produced for the paid media placement and use them in free media outlets that consumers actually seek out. As an advertising agency and strategic partner to our clients, we should be recommending that all produced spots are placed on the web.

Earlier this week I wrote about my love of the Kindle after reading that Steve Jobs thinks it is stupid (I am exaggerating, of course) because no one reads anymore. Well, it seems his comments stirred up some others as well. Advertising Age disputes Jobs’ statistics on reading as well:

“‘Who are these “people” to whom Steve Jobs is referring?’ Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief Sara Nelson asked me last week. ‘Not the million-ish who are devouring Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” or the ones who line up for Harry Potter and/or James Patterson novels.’ She added: ‘All I can say is that when I sat in restaurants and airports or on buses or trains and pulled out my Kindle, I got more attention than if I’d shown up naked–with an adorable puppy.’”

Right on.

This is from an article in Advertising Age:

“Research from internet ad network Mindset Media confirms the ad’s personification of Mac users as superior and self-satisfied.  Its recent Mac user ‘mind-set profile’–a psychographic ranking system that scores respondents on 20 different elements of personality–found them to be more assured of their superiority, less modest and more open of the general population.”

“Far fewer cohesive personality traits emerged among PC owners, likely because of the breadth of PC ownership.  Given that 95% or so of all computer users own a PC, those users essentially are the general population.  The one area where PC users did stand out as statistically different was in creativity–low creativity, that is.  Mindset Media found they tend to be realists who are emotionally steady and work well with what they’re given.”

This makes total sense.  I don’t think research really had to be conducted to learn these things, but it is interesting that now there are statistics to confirm it.

Tom Green, the comedian who has had a few television talk shows already, has launched an Internet-based talk show.  Here is what the site says about it:

“Tom Green Live is a LIVE Internet-based talk show featuring celebrity guests, hosted by comedian Tom Green, from his living room…yes, his actual living room. The show is LIVE at TomGreen.com, The Channel, from 8pm-9pm Monday through Friday. Although technically it’s a talk show, it’s really much more than that. Tom Green Live is non-political, and because The Channel is completely independent, pretty much anything goes! With a combination of A-List celebrity guests, a global audience, and Tom’s signature brand of comedy, Tom Green Live is unlike anything you’ve seen before! Tom takes calls over the phone, along with Skype video calls from viewers from locations as varied as the U.S.A, Canada, Australia, Estonia, and Argentina, not to mention several others! The mission is simple, to make you laugh, and to make you, the viewers, an integral part of the show by harnessing the power of the National Internet, something no other show can offer, sounds cool right? Check it out right here by clicking on the “Tom Green Live” tab on the player, oh, and make sure you tell a friend!”

Think about the growth potential of a channel like this if he were to get paid advertising.