Ms. Adverthinker

As I am reading my latest issue of Wired, I learned the name of condition that I was already familiar with:

Homophily - the human tendency to seek out information that supports preexisting assumptions.

And, according to Wired, the internet “magnifies this echo-chamber effect.”  So, whether your beliefs are right or wrong, you can find a web resource that supports your beliefs and validates whatever argument you are having.

Makes sense.  This “condition” aligns with “niching” trend that is facilitated by the internet.  With a sense of individualism, people are making choices based on their own needs rather than following the masses around them.  To quote the book Microtrends,

“No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.

…the Internet has made it so easy to link people together.  In the past, it was almost impossible to market to small groups who were spread around the county. Now it’s a virtual piece of cake to find 1 million people who want to try your grapefruit diet, or who can’t get their kids to sleep at night.

With the rise in freedom of choice has come a rise in individuality.  And with the rise of individuality has come a rise in the power of choice.  The more choices people have, the more they segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches in society.”

As marketers, this trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  The challenge is reaching broad audiences with our messages.  But the opportunity is that our dollars can be more efficiently spent targeting just those consumers likely to connect with our messages.

A continued theme in my readings and postings (here and here):

“The amount of video consumed on TV has dropped 5% among consumers who actively stream and download content…Meanwhile, movie theater consumption fell 2% while personal computer viewing grew 8%. One-in-five hours watching video is now done online.”

See Brandweek article for more detail.

Supposedly, once you start surfing, you can’t stop.  We are all information junkies and just can’t seem to get enough of it.  Reported in the Wall Street Journal:

“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.

“Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

“The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

“It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

“…technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”

“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.

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.

Using the Internet as a tool, more and more consumers are engaging in culture consumption, broadening their knowledge horizons and then using that experience and knowledge to contribute their own creative expressions and deposit those right back into our culture for further consumer consumption. According to a recent article in Ad Age:

“For years, marketers viewed the cultural consumer as an elite market segment, estimated to represent 2% of the overall population. As we witness a maturing knowledge economy, it’s become evident that we must enlarge our view of who’s consuming cultural experiences and how often. To benefit from the coming era, smart CMOs need to see that American consumers aspire to be viewed as thinking, expressive human beings…Consider these facts:

• The typical adult attends an average of 1.9 cultural events per month.
• 68% of the American public is interested in independent films.
• Gen Y-ers (those ages 18 to 29) attend an average of 2.3 cultural events per month.
• More Americans visit museums, historical sites, zoos and aquariums than attend all professional sports events combined, including auto racing.
• In 2006, 65% of households ranked “avid book reading” as their No. 1 at home leisure activity, according to the Standard Rate and Data Service.”

(Then again, according to a recent article in The New Yorker titled The Twilight of Books, you might not believe consumers are more culturally inclined and reading literature “…if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, To Read or Not to Read, which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, ‘Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.’”)

If your target is an avid Internet user, they are more likely than not consuming cultural experiences frequently. And, as that Ad Age article notes, “Knowledge is power. Ideas are the killer app. Learning is the new status skill. This is an enlightened age, and culture consumers revere brands that teach them new things without pontificating.” What can brands do to feed that consumer hunger for cultural and knowledge?