The Experience is the Brand

Data Data Everywhere, and Not a Bit of Meaning

Not long after the first commercial sites appeared on the Internet, long before DoubleClick and Mediaplex and 1,000 other 3rd party ad serving solutions came along, advertisers clamoured for a form of measurement that quantified the value of what they were buying.

And web site publishers were all to happy to oblige, armed with log files and reams of data about pageviews, impressions, visitors and clicks…. more data than any offline publisher had ever offered, in more excruciating detail than anyone could have imagined, or wanted.

It all seemed terribly impressive at the time, to know down to the individual viewer how many times a page was seen, or how many times a link was clicked on. And a lot of advertisers felt a sense of comfort with the exactness of the measurement… it all seemed so reliable.

Except that there were always exceptions, and difficult ones to explain in layman’s terms. (This is not to say that advertisers weren’t, or aren’t, smart enough to understand the details… it’s just that, as with most issues relating to technology, they have better things to do than try to tease out the differences between a visit and a visitor, the vagaries of using web bugs vs. javascript to gather usage data, 30 gigabyte logfiles and so on. Marketers never worried too much about cathode ray tubes or circuit boards either, and that didn’t stop anyone from creating effective advertising.)

So it’s useful, I think, in light of the fact that more and more marketers are questioning the utility of the click, to talk about why the click came to be used in the first place. It’s really quite simple:

It was easy to measure.

Since the invention of hyperlinks, the click has been the Internet’s basic unit of interaction. Literally every single piece of measurable data available online today originates from a click. Because it is and always was so essential to the basic functioning of the Internet, keeping a log and then reporting on click activity later evolved quite naturally.

(I’m skipping over an important development here: initially, most banner ads were sold on a CPM basis… this was the model publishers were used to offline, and pageviews seemed equivalent enough to “readers” or “viewers” in print and TV. But this model was dying before it started…. the Internet had no scarcity of bandwidth similar to offline media, and publishers could just create more inventory at will. Impression-based buying has enjoyed a resurgence of late, as more big-brand marketers have shift budgets online… but this is actually impression-based buying of a sort that is fundamentally different than that which first developed, and which was killed off by Google’s popularization of click-based purchasing.)

Now, barely a decade and a half into the commerical web, we have oceans of data derived from that simple action. Clicks-to-conversion, clickthrough rate, and clickpaths. But as the data grows richer, meaning has been harder to extract.

In the end, for most marketers, what matters is what sells. And the link between online exposure and offline activity is hard to measure. Couponing and loyalty programs can help, but they only hit a segment of the audience. Reconciling online ad exposure with shopping behavior can be done – on a sampled basis with tools like Consumer Direct – but typically only with large budgets, and in specific industries.

And if you have enough online and offline data and a decent enough geographic footprint to have measureable differences in your marketing mix by region, you can analyze differences in your spend by channel and see large-scale differences in effectiveness.

But for businesses that transact primarily offline (that is to say, most businesses), a more satisfying (and intelligible) measurement of advertising effectiveness is elusive. The best units of measure are the ones you control yourself – measures of engagement that happen on your own web properties, or ad units that enable and encourage interaction. Use the click as a basic building block of your measurement platform – as a starting point.

The Web Will Disappear (in About 18 Months)

Back in 2005, Mike asked me (probably for a pitch) where I thought the web was going in the next 2-5 years. I made two predictions: first, that the “web” would disappear; that is, it would become ubiquitous, like electricity. Second, that it wouldn’t improve much in terms of usability, because publishing and development tools were getting easier and easier to use, which meant that more and more people would be producing more and more garbage.

This was at a time when social networking was dominated by Friendster; Facebook and Twitter were barely concepts; and the iPhone 3G was still about 2 years away.

On the first point, I think I’ll turn out to be mostly right. The U.S. is really the last industrialized country to get high-speed, ubiquitous mobile data access, and most major cities are covered (and I venture to guess that WiMax will hit the rest of the country within the next year and a half.) With newspapers in decline and some form of electronic paper reader on the rise (I honestly don’t think it’ll be the Kindle DX; I’m waiting for something flexible), plus devices like the Hub and G1, we really aren’t that far from having the web embedded in everything, everywere, all the time. (In 2005, it seemed a lot further away.)

On the usability front, I think the jury is still out. Many tools (like Tumblr, and TypePad) make publishing content easier to do well, which means greater UI consistency across sites. Unfortunately, the Top 10 Usability Issues still haven’t changed, and so far there are no good tools for helping people produce better, more worthwhile content.

This is part of what makes Twitter so difficult to get a handle on; it’s astonishing ease of use makes it easy to fill with content, but terribly difficult to extract anything useful out of. Once again, search will be the killer app here.

I Have Been (Politely) Asked to Get a Clue

Because part of my job entails strategizing with and for clients about social media, and because it would be useful to my professional development if I appeared to have at least a passing familiarity with Twitter and Facebook and the like, it’s been suggested that I start engaging on a social network or two.

Mind you, my only complaint about Twitter is that it doesn’t accomodate me: I can’t say anything useful in less than 700 words, much less 170 characters. But the fact that I wonder out loud about who would be able to use a medium so constrained virtually assures that hundreds of millions of people will flock to it immediately. (You could say I have a history of mistiming these things; Back in ‘94, I thought AOL was the Dumbest Investment Ever. I was feeling pretty bad about that call for the next 6 years or so and then, not so much.)

Of one thing I’m certain: the more people there are who begin twittering, or blogging, or Geocity-ing, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio will be. I seem to harp on this issue about once every three years, so this time I’ll be brief: if the value of a network increases following Metcalf’s law, then it would seem an equally valid heuristic that the worth of any one node will decrease proportionally.

Right now, there is bird tweeting in my backyard (for real; he doesn’t have a cell phone.) Tomorrow, if there were a billion birds in my backyard doing the exact same thing, I doubt it would be as pleasant.

To any one listener, a single voice can be beautiful, profound, profane or intruiging. But a billion voices are rarely anything other than noise.

Midwest dominated by nice people

Apparently, there is a large swath of self-satisfied, generous, humble, modest, industrious and pleasant people who eat moderately stretching down from North Dakota through the midwest to Ohio. No word yet on whether this slow-moving mild front will proceed eastward through mid-Atlantic states, or remain stationary over our nation’s very agreeable midsection.