The Experience is the Brand

@TrueMobileData says 59% of mobile web use is social. I say, “prove it.”

One of the things you learn early on in any intro-level statistics course is that the mathematics behind data analysis is, by itself, fairly sanguine about how it is used. Formulae are not terribly picky about the ends to which they’re put to work, and so any professional statistician takes care to apply those formulae, and present results, with discretion and care.

Data are easy to manipulate, precisely because there’s usually more than one way to perform an analysis. And because, “no significant effect could be determined” rarely makes for interesting reading, there’s a great temptation to dig deeper, and see if another analytic approach can’t “tease out” the truth.

When I read a headline like, “Half of all time spent on mobile internet is spent on social networking sites,” one big question comes to mind: what was the sample?

GroundTruth’s release claims that the sample size is about 3 million mobile phone subscribers. Which sounds appreciably huge, until you realize that there are about 285 million mobile phones in the US (see CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Survey, PDF.) So their sample covers about 1% of US Mobile handsets.

That’s certainly still a reasonable sample size, if the sample is representative. And to determine whether or not it is, we need to know at least something about the networks on which these handsets operate.

Why? According to Ground Truth, “…Ground Truth™ captures usage directly from network data provided by mobile operators and other data partners.” That’s a rich and reliable source of data, to be sure: but it says nothing about the representativeness of the handset users on those networks, as compared to the US population at large.

Ground Truth isn’t being very forthcoming about these data sources. In response to a question of mine, they tweeted: “We have a large sample of mobile phone users from a diverse group of mobile operators. Confidentiality limits disclosure.”

Well. Confidentiality is fine and understandable, but if you can’t cite your sources, don’t publish your conclusions.

The press release regarding this “study” is fairly vague in terms of data, but perhaps offers one or two clues. They go out of their way to mention that “mobile-centric social networking sites such as MocoSpace and AirG are better at engaging consumer than are with PC heavyweights like Facebook and MySpace.”

MocoSpace is an “off deck” social networking website, which means that access is not restricted to or sponsored by any particular network operator. They have a mobile-ready site, which renders well on an iPhone (although they do not have an iPhone app.)

AirG is a somewhat different story. It’s a mobile-based chat service, more or less an instant messenger client for your phone. It is marketed under about two dozen different brand names, including Virgin Vibe, Boost Hookt, Amp’d Chat, TELUS Chat Central, Amp’d Lounge….

Hey, wait a minute! These all have something in common. Most of these seem to be affiliated with pre-paid or pay-as-you-go mobile phone providers. That might tell us something about the audiences using these social networking sites, as well as whether or not these users’ behavior is representative of the mobile internet audience as a whole.

It might also be important to know whether or not either of these two site operators are clients of Ground Truth.

Social networking usage on mobile is important, there is no doubt about that. But publishers and advertisers need the whole story if they are going to make an informed decision about where to commit resources. To say that pre-paid mobile subscribers spend 60% of their time on social networking sites is important, relevant, and useful. But it is not the same thing as saying that “Half of all time spent on the mobile internet is spent on social networking sites.”

For a company with “Truth” in their name, Ground Truth ought to be going out of their way to tell the whole story, if for no other reason that to ensure that their data are taken seriously.

Running Interference: Google Brings Enterprise Analytics to Joe’s Tire Shack

In Joel on Software, one of my favorite writers on the business of software describes Microsoft’s strategy for keeping competitors at bay: just change the API.

Microsoft would be developing an email platform, for example, that made extensive use of some low-level programming within Windows, as would a competitor. But because those APIs were poorly documented (not a mistake), the competitor would have a hard time figuring out why their email program kept crashing. Microsoft’s Outlook team, on the other hand, could just walk over and talk to the programmers down the hall, and figure out how to deal with the issue.

And by the time the competitor had figured out their own problems, Microsoft would have released a service pack that broke all of their carefully-constructed workaround.

This is not a new strategy. Sun Tzu wrote:

Defend what cannot be attacked; attack what cannot be defended.

So, too, does Google employ a strategy of running interference. Writing about their constantly improving free Analytics product, Bill Glassman observers:

They might be showing obsession because of where they want to be, but then again, they could be throwing up a smoke screen to keep the competition too busy to attack Google on advertising.

We’re big fans here of Google Analytics – it’s price-to-feature ratio can’t be beat, and for many organizations that are tentative about taking the dive into web analytics, the barrier to entry is embarrassingly small. Three minutes and some copy-pasting, and you’re gathering data.

For Google, the value in providing an enterprise-level solution for free is not to reach deeper into the Fortune 500. The value is where Google has always been aiming: the vast and deep middle.

While the top 100 advertisers on Google’s ad network (by dollar volume) are certainly using an array of commercial campaign and traffic analysis tools, they certainly don’t account for more than 25% of total ad volume. That leaves a couple of million advertisers who could make better use of their ad dollar if they had better metrics. And remember, these advertisers aren’t necessarily trying to decide which search engine to buy ad space on – they’re weighing AdWords against the yellow pages, billboards, radio spots and placements in diners.

There is a huge, pent-up demand for information about the effectiveness of advertising, and as fast as the ad world is changing at the high end, the long tail of small business is mired in advertising techniques that have been dutifully driving their businesses for the past 40 years… and are about to get upended. By arming these companies with “enterprise-class” tools for evaluating the success of their campaigns, Google is creating a huge, loyal contingent of long-term customers who will shift their advertising budgets online in direct proportion to the growing certainty of that medium’s success.

In Praise of Long Copy

It is fashionable, of late, to conclude that brief, punchy copy is best suited towards capturing the attention of people online, because as everyone knows, nobody reads anything online, ever.

This strikes me a conflation of a well observed and well documented browsing habit among most people, who tend to scan rather than read. And particularly in terms of lists of items (products, news headlines, categories, etc.), scanning is even more punctuated, limited to the first two words or so of each item.

Is it a contradiction, then, that some eyetracking studies have shown that the Ogilvy Layout still works? Or would it simply be a mistake to conclude that offline and offline behavior are so different that conclusions drawn from one medium simply couldn’t apply to another?

Now, in magazines, which are mostly read as a diversion, the first thing to get scanned are pictures.  We are visual creatures and pictures typically convey a lot of information (and emotion) fast, so a strong visual is almost always going to be the first thing the eye fixes on when the reader is engaging in general browsing for interest.  Please note, though, that this scanning order changes for task oriented individuals interacting with a website.  People scanning a web page redefine “worthwhile” by relevance to their task, and therefore focus on the headlines first.

- Jeff Sexton, Tests Indicate Ogilvy’s Old School Layout Still a Winner

Behavior changes with context, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the context of an online experience is different enough that the “old school” rules don’t apply – users don’t read, they scan, for instance. How is it that scanning – apparently superficially – conveys enough information that users can choose intelligently among the maelstrom of options available to them? Are they so focused on their task that all distractions are ruthlessly cast aside in single minded pursuit of their goal?

This post started as the result of an item in my Twitter feed, led through three other related, linked articles (all quoted here) and will probably terminate in a half-finished thought. All the while, I should have been assembling an analytics dashboard for a client. Using oneself as a proxy for examining the behaviors of others is never a good idea, but I doubt that my experience in the last 30 minutes is drastically outside the mainstream.

We humans have remarkable brains, capable of processing scads of data coming from multiple inputs. But we are hard-wired to attend to novelty, and generally not quite so good at efficiently filtering out distractions. Why do 30-50% of DVR owners not skip the ads? Is it because so much of the advertising out there is so good, we just can’t bear to miss it? Or is it because the change of scenery is, itself, interesting?

I’m inclined to think – though I can’t yet prove it – that the tendency towards brevity, pithiness and punchy copy has not been successful in the aggregate. There may be specific advertisers who’ve benefited, but if the whole of the marketing universe has simply been sub-divided into smaller pieces and split between more voices, the overall quantity of message hasn’t improved (and I’m of the belief that more voices in a conversation tend to degrade its overall quality.)

Can a truly persuasive, high-quality argument (in the sense of a position one wishes to communicate and convince others of) be encapsulated in a 10-word snippet? In 155 characters? Can a customer be won for a lifetime of loyalty with a one-liner? A statement so inexplicably powerful that resistance is futile? (Wouldn’t that be quite an effective weapon?)

Shocker of the Week: Mobile Usability is Hard

Aside from the more interesting data collection techniques used in the study, Jakob Nielsen has dropped a stunning bomb on the world of mobile web development:

Creating a useful and usable mobile experience is hard.

Of course, that’s only true if you are designing for the mobile experience, as opposed to redesigning a web experience for mobile. They’re different things.

Despite the prevalence of smartphones and iPhones and other mobile web devices, the reality is that, at least in the U.S., 85% of people still use a basic handset with a numeric keypad, and a 90 pixel-wide screen.

90 pixels wide: that is roughly the size of a large postage stamp. Those of you who have worked in the offline world, consider this comparison: you’ve been asked to take a full-page ad in USA Today and redesign it as a 6-line classified ad in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Or condense a 2 and a half hour film into 30 seconds.

These are not impossible tasks, but they are difficult. You’ve got to make some hard choices.

At The Archer Group, we’ve been hard at work on a couple of iPhone apps recently. Even on a richly interative, touch-screen platform with a screen as large as that, application development is largely a process of deciding what to leave out. Simplicity – both in terms of the UI but also at a deeper level of how information and functionality are structured, is essential.

On a postage-stamped sized screen, where input is limited to a 12-button keypad and semi-usable, at best, predictive-typing, there’s only one rule: if in doubt, leave it out.

If you find yourself overseeing the development of a mobile app, or the mobile view into your company’s existing online offering, consider this:

• The most popular feature among mobile phone users is voice. 100% of handsets can make phone calls.
• Assume that your audience is on a slow data network; graphics still take significant time to transmit, text is faster
• The mobile web is the Mathalon, not the Miss America Paegent; it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty, you have to be right.
• Of everything you offer your customers online, pick ONE THING to do on mobile. Do it extremely well.
  • After that, you can think about expanding your feature set.
  • Once you think about expanding your feature set, STOP, and DON’T DO IT.
• Go back and look at the one feature you built: make it work better and faster before you try to make it do more.

See, mobile usability isn’t that hard after all.

Website Hours: M-F; 9am-5pm

Silly me, I thought the web was an always-on medium. Here I’ve been, pretending all these years that the self-service nature of a website meant that it would be available when I was ready, on my terms.

Wasn’t that the promise way back in, oh, 1998: that I’d be able to buy dog food in my underwear at 3am on a Tuesday?

There are certainly many more pressing problems within our nation’s health care system than the unavailability of UnitedHealthcare’s website. But anyone who worries about “government rationing” of health care under a single-payer system should at least take a moment to consider this: here we have a private enterprise ostensibly in business to serve their customers, a business theoretically driven by some profit motive, a business which relies on cost-cutting efficiencies like a self-service website where members can check claims, balances, EOBs, etc.,and their website is down for scheduled maintenance every evening from 8pm to midnight, and most of every weekend.

Just to clarify: the website isn’t occasionally down because of a technical glitch, they purposefully and with some apparent forethought take every essential system offline in the evenings and on weekends for routine maintenance.

Imagine if ATMs didn’t work on evenings and weekends: what would be the bloody point of having ATMs in the first place? They’re automated, for heaven’s sake.

I know just enough about systems architecture and complex development to know this much: there is no legitimate reason for this to be so. I’ve worked on systems that pulled stock trading settlement data from fixed-length data files retrieved from a tape memory system over a 28k modem, and even those were down for maintenance less than 2 minutes a month.

I can surmise that UnitedHealthcare treats their customers this way because they know that most of their customers have no choice but to put up with it. I’m in an employer-sponsored health plan (and lucky to be so, at that), so I can’t really take my business elsewhere. And I’m not about to get on the phone at 10pm at night to talk to a customer service rep (not that their call center is open that late, regardless.)

Still, strategically it makes no sense to neuter a self-service system this way, and force your customers into a more costly service channel.

A Million Little TV Spots

When I hear that the ad agencies and ad networks are starting to play nice together, I’m struck by the fact that the conversation keeps focusing on how large media clients are going to better utilize the new technologies afforded to them by microtargeting, mass personalization, and segmentation.

It’s as though, having shown up for a rugby match dressed for badminton, Publicis and WPP have decided to put on a brave face and hope for the best.

There has been, is now and will always be a place for broad campaigns aimed at driving brand awareness, and herding a large group of people towards satisfying the desires of a single, huge, business.

But there is a larger need for a mechanism that allows a hundred million small enterprises to market their goods, services and themselves to a similarly small and scattered audience – and audience measured in dozens or hundreds, not millions.

The big agencies continue to try and figure out how to play the “new” media by the old rules. They ask, “how can I build a viral campaign that spreads my message far and wide?” “How can I use social media to get people to talk about how much they love my brand?”

For decades, global business – brands and the companies that support them – have lurched towards ever greater conglomeration, going for scale and scope.

But the digital advertising landscape is built for a different kind of scope: it is engineered for point-to-point communication which, although usable in a large broadcast model, isn’t optimized for one-way message delivery. Why do brand managers and their agency partners fret over how to handle negative feedback online? Why do they try to fine-tune their placements so that video overlay ads show up only on content they deem “brand-appropriate?” Why do they struggle with content- and keyword-targeted campaigns, throwing armloads full of cash at a medium where the best results are achieved not with a broad-based “messaging” campaign, but with a hundred thousand individual conversations.

Why are WPP, Publicis and now Google and Microsoft working together to develop new ad formats for digital media?

What happens when Unilever’s ads for Dove soap get elbowed out of their “prime” advertising space by 1,000 artisans selling hand-made goat-milk soap, who join together in a loose social group and collectively purchase $20 million worth of in-video ads on YouTube?

Who’s going to knit that group together? Who’s going to provide them with the technology and creative backing to develop that campaign? Who’s going to place it, bid for the space, monitor and fine-tune performance?

Does the world inexorably move towards larger and larger enterprises selling more and more of the same stuff to everyone, or is there a point at which smaller becomes better?

This is going to be big: Virtual DVR gets the green light; Digital marketers to become the new “traditional”

To date, the convergence of digital media and television (a distinction which, post-6/19 is largely semantic) has been stymied by one fundamental difference between these media: time sequencing.

Despite TiVo and OnDemand and Slingbox and others, television is still largely – for most people – a time-bound medium. Even though many cable, sattelite and over-the-air viewers are able to time-shift their TV schedules, most television viewing is still conducting in “real time.”

Now, some programming simply won’t be time-shifted; sporting events and news, for example, lose their value over time. Can you imagine tuning in for the Superbowl three days after everyone else? Do you really want tomorrow’s weather report two days from now? (The exception might be for sports fanatics, who want to watch 15 football games from over the weekend but can’t actually do it all at once; so they time-shift some of the games into subsequent days of the week.)

“Water-cooler” shows are another exception: no point in watching Survivor after everyone has already talked about it the next day. (Actually, I don’t know that there’s ever a point in watching Survivor, but maybe I’m the exception.)

But with 500-channel cable and sattelite lineups routinely accessible, time-shifting becomes less of a luxury and more of a “necessity”, at least in terms of people maximizing their leisure time. With so many choices, it’s unlikely that everything you’d care to watch is on in precisely the right order on precisely those days of the week when you’d want to watch them. So you set your Digital Video Recorder to tape the shows you want, and they’re ready for you, when you’re ready.

There are a couple of problems here, that keep this from being practical for everyone:

1. You likely don’t have space on your DVR to record everything you’d want
2. You can’t record something in the past (say, the first three episodes of Big Love that you missed before all your friends were talking about it.)
3. You can’t record something you don’t already know about (this is a variation of number 2.)

There are other issues, too, in terms of the usability and practicality of some DVR’s interfaces and ability to put the show you want to watch where you want to watch it. (For instance, to play an episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 minus their marraige on your iPhone while waiting to clear customs at Gatwick.) I’ll cover those later.

If I haven’t already bored you to tears, let me get to the point.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Cablevision to start offering Virtual DVRs. This is important for marketers because Cabelvision and other cable and wireless network operators can combine virtual DVRs with a couple of other technologies, and fundamentally change the landscape of entertainment.

With a virtual DVR, the recording resides not on a box on your entertainment system, but at the cable company. Your recording is shared with everyone else – so rather than store 100,000 copies of Most Dangerous Catch, Cablevision stores just one copy and anyone can start watching it whenever they want.

• This eliminates most of the storage capacity problems, not only by centralizing storage of programming, but also by eliminating 99% of the redundancy.
• If the recording resides at the cable company, it can be instantly delivered anywhere there is sufficient bandwidth – to your TV, your phone, or a flat screen in a hotel room.

So, you can watch anything you want, anywhere you are, anytime you like. Aside from being kind of neat, why does that matter?

It matters because all of the world’s entertainment content is now digitized and delivered on-demand. And for it to be delivered to you on demand, the cable company needs to know where to send it when you ask.

Which means that they are sending you a video stream, digitized, to an addressable device registered in your name. Sound familiar?

It’s called YouTube.

Now, if only there were a platform out there which could embed, in real-time, advertising that was targeting specifically to each viewer, either as part of that video stream or as a companion piece of data displayed along side of it.

That’s called AdWords.

Even though the first itteration of addressable tv commercials has been scrapped, a new launch date is set for the end of 2009. Still, the technology already exists to deploy this all pretty much right now. (And as much of a fan of Google’s tools as I am, they’re not the only player – there are other ad delivery platforms and video streaming services, and they just need to be linked up; Google just happens to be there already.)

This isn’t about watching YouTube on your 56 inch LCD screen in your living room, or having to endure text ads running alongside NBC Nightly News. When technologies converge, it’s rarely in the form of one technology simply expanding into another technology’s space. Rather, the best elements from two technologies are combined to create something new.

So let’s review:

• Virtual DVR brings the public an unlimited quantity of high quality programming that they currently want to watch (and don’t have to find), delivered digitally in a personal, and personalizable stream.
• Online advertising gives marketers a platform to develop, target, and deploy advertising in a highly personal way; content producers have a platform on which to sell ad space (either directly negotiated or in an auction model.)

For marketers who have spent a lot of time building large branding campaigns predicated on a broadcast model, I have some bad news: the world is going to get unmanageably complex, and that model is going to break. It may not happen right away, but it will happen.

For marketers who have been deciphering the complexities of micro-targeted online advertising, the landscape is about to open up.

50% * $0 = $0

For more than a few years now, I’ve been fuming at the fact that US mobile carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) charge exorbitant fees to deliver mobile goods. Carriers take up to 50% of the purchase prices for ringtones, wallpapers, and other virtual goods that can be downloaded directly to your cellphone. (In fact, up until a couple of years ago, carriers insisted on taking 50% of the value of any donations made through a cellphone to a charity.)

This is madness.

A bevy of new mobile commerce startups are percolating up right now, but they all face the same problem: they must either build their own payment processing and transfer capabilities (essentially, become a bank), or utilize the carriers’ ability to charge purchases to customers’ cell phone bills.

Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg was on Charlie Rose last night, explaining how – now that they had built the bestest, fastest, whiz-bangiest network in the world – they wanted to reap the benefits by deploying more applications on their network that weren’t so “capital intensive.”

Translation: we own the pipe, and we’d like to take a piece of transaction that flows down it.

There are two impediments to this strategy:

1. There are lots of other pipes which are just as fast and just as good
2. You might like charging on a pay-per-use model, but no one likes paying that way.

Verizon (and most other carriers) would like mobile payment providers to keep forking over 1/2 of the value of all goods and services delivered on their network. And why not? It’s effectively free for Verizon to deliver 1MB of content, so why not take $1 for it? Why settle for $.25?

There are two reasons why a quarter makes a better business plan: first, the volume of goods and services that vendors and processors can afford to sell on a mobile platform explodes when the transaction costs approach zero. Second, given two delivery mechanisms that provide the same benefit (buy anything from anyone who has a mobile phone, anywhere), users will choose the easiest option.

That means a platform where I can text someone else a dollar amount from my mobile phone is going to get taken up more quickly than an app I need to download, install, and ensure that the recipient already has. (Nearly everyone can text. Amazingly, not everyone has an iPhone.)

If memory serves, there were something like $2 Billion in ringtones sold in the U.S. last year. GDP for the U.S. was about $14 Trillion. Which looks like the better target to you?

Five Point Plan for a Perfect Mobile Marketing Solution

I don’t particularly like mobile couponing.

I don’t think offers broadcast via Bluetooth or WiFi or any other interruptive mechanism have much of a future.

And it seems particularly obvious to me that having to download an app in order to participate in a retailer’s “special offers” is a plan doomed to smallness (unless the retailer wants to give the phone away with the app installed.)

Instead, I think key to a ubiquitous, useful and successful mobile marketing solution (the kind that actually links mobile and mortar), needs to demonstrate these attributes:

1. It must build on the mobile technologies that are most widely used today (that’s voice, and texting)
2. It must be pulled by the user, not pushed by the marketer.
3. It must be timely – which means presented at the right time, but also time-sensitive (i.e., it must expire quickly.)
4. It must fit within the existing flow of a purchase cycle (and, by doing so, cannot interrupt any portion of that cycle)
5. It must allow for the redemption of the offer without additional connective technology (this is really an expansion of #1, but different for some subtle reasons.)

To a lot of people, these are going to seem like obvious constraints. For others, they’re going to seem backward-looking and dismissive of more cutting edge mobile technologies. For the record, I’m envisioning a system where the “integration” of mobile marketing is as seamless and ubiquitous as the integration of paper or TV into marketing, but still allowing for the unique capabilities of the mobile platform (personalization, trackability, etc.)

Some justification is required, so here goes:

1. Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a mobile phone, many people have more than one. All of them are capable of sending and receiving voice (“well, duh,” you might say, but this fact is often overlooked.) Most (90%)+ are capable of sending/receiving text messages. No other technology is as ubiquitous.
2. Interruptive marketing is doomed to fail in the long run because the noise will always quickly drown out the signal. Even a subscription-based service where users opt in to receiving offers has to be judicious about how often messages get sent.
3. Delivering offers when people are succeptible is important – and so long as you are delivering them on-demand, fairly easy. But if your goal is to activate your customer, the offer has to expire. Quickly. (If for no other reason than, with the opportunity missed, a customer will re-opt-in for another chance.)
4. Interrupting the purchase cycle is always going to reduce the number of people who complete it. If you’re asking people to request information or opt-in for an offer, the response has to come back to them immediately… and you can’t be garaunteed that immediacy with any carrier network all the time.
5. Screen-scanning registers and Bluetooth-enabled checkouts are great… but it will be a long time before they’re everywhere. A long time.

This is something of a work in progress, to be sure. I’m trying to center in on some core principles for mobile marketing, though.

The WITOIF syndrome

More than once I’ve had that feeling – an idea so dastardly simple and brilliant, I can’t help but feel ashamed that I hadn’t been able to connect the dots myself. And it’s even more amazing when, in this age when ideas spread instantly around the globe, you find that no one else has thought of it either.

I recently met with a potential client who wanted us to develop a new site for them. Over the phone we’d chatted about their existing business, and a new audience they wanted to reach out to with this offering. They already had many of the pieces they’d need to make it all work, but he wouldn’t share any details until we met in person.

It was vague and fascinating, and I can’t help in those situations but try to put the pieces together myself. I met with him the next day.

Within about 5 minutes of walking in the door, he had shared only the name of the website he wanted us to build – but everything had fallen into place. My head was bobbing up and down – “yes, yes, yes… this makes perfect sense. This is brilliant.”

And it still amazes me: no one is doing this already. And it’s not that no one else has the wherewithal or the pieces to make it happen, it’s just that no one is doing this. No one else has put the puzzle together yet.

Sadly, confidentiality prevents me from sharing any details, but trust me: it’s freakin’ brilliant. Mind you, it’s not going to change the world in any fundamental sense, but it is going to bug the hell out of a lot of people who could’ve thought of it first, but didn’t.

And I wish that I’d thought of it first.