The Experience is the Brand

“2/3 of american web users object to online tracking.” Really? That few?

Reading a study recently written up in the NYTimes (ht, @TheGrok), I find the results amusingly obvious.

Question: when you shop online, or visit a website, or view an ad – who owns the data describing that activity?

At first glance, the question seems to be easy to answer, until you actually start asking people. Anyone in marketing or eCommerce would be hard pressed to say that they had no right to keep and use that data. Many would say that, if they’re a participant in the transaction (regardless of whether a purchase was consummated), that they had at least as much right as the individual to that data.

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians will maintain that the individual’s data is their own, and that maintaining control over how it is used and maintained is a matter of personal liberty (in the constitutional sense.)

Consider some alternative scenarios:

If you walk into The Gap and buy a pair of jeans, does The Gap have the right to keep a record of you doing that? Does the answer change if you pay with cash, as opposed to a credit card? What if the cashier just happened to ask you your name, and commits it to memory? (Try this variation: you live in a small town with a general store, run by Harold, who makes a habit of remembering what you buy, so he can keep the store stocked. How uncomfortable does that make you feel?)

Let’s say you walk into The Gap and don’t buy anything. But the surveillance cameras record everything you do, including every item of clothing you examine. Do you have the right to demand that those tapes be erased? What if the manager makes a habit of watching those tapes, and committing to memory the items you spend the longest time looking at, so she can be ready to recommend something the next time you come in?

What if The Gap uses facial-recognition technology to match up surveillance video of what you browse to compare that against what you actually buy, several visits later? Does this feel more or less uncomfortable? What if Harold just happens to have a photographic memory, and is particularly observant?

Your answer might be expected to shift somewhat based on the introduction of technology into the scenario; we tend to be more comfortable with a level of intimate knowledge about us being maintained by another human being, as opposed to an impersonal system. But why? How can we hold Harold more accountable to use his knowledge responsibly? Suppose Harold is a bit of a gossip, and suddenly everyone in town knows that you have a fondness for Fruit Loops and Vaseline. You might stop shopping there, and pretty soon Harold starts losing business.

Introducing technology into the picture may increase the extent and scope of the tracking that’s possible, and it might make you uncomfortable, but it also adds an unexpected dimension: the possibility of more control over your data.

You can’t make Harold forget what he sees; you could make DoubleClick lose track of what sites you’ve visited, and where you’ve purchased. (And trust me, DoubleClick isn’t going to go out of their way to reconstruct your browsing history; as a single individual, you’re just not worth the effort.)

You can’t erase your shopping history at the general store, but you can clear your Amazon cookie. You can stop using a credit card, and pay for everything with cash. You can turn off cookies and Javascript and install an ad-blocker. You will never be completely anonymous, but you need only raise the bar ever so slightly for most marketers and merchants to give up on tracking your behavior.

Though changes may be afoot for the legal framework which governs what ad networks and merchants may collect, how they may use that data and what kind of disclosure will be necessary, I’d be willing to bet that that framework will trail the advent of privacy-enhancing technology by a couple of years. If the outcry is loud enough to warrant legislation, it can’t be very long before PayPal or some other enterprising entrepreneur introduces a Privacy-Enhanced browser/credit card/pop-up blocker that gains wide adoption.

The technology is perfectly feasible; all that’s missing is the demand.

Mass Individualized Marketing

Convergence has almost become a dirty word in the advertising and media world, kind of like “synergy”: you hear someone use the term, and you want to punch them in the face, but usually you can’t because they tend to be people with body guards.

Still, I find it interesting to think about where the confluence (not exactly a synonym) of technology and marketing and media platforms might eventually lead. I wonder about how combining the targetability of digital advertising might mesh with a mass-medium like TV; addressable advertising is coming, soon, though most of the practical examples I’ve seen involve little more than dynamically inserting the address of your nearest Pep Boys into a commercial during a baseball game – applications that basically make the advertiser’s job easier, but do very little for the viewer.

Technologically, something like the following ought to be possible: While watching the Phillies game, a commercial for Pep Boys comes on. It plays, and I don’t change the channel – Comcast takes note of that. The game comes back on, and Comcast triggers their ad server to display an ad via Google AdWords, overlaid on the bottom 1/4 of the screen.

Now, maybe I’ve surfed online in the last 14 days and searched on Google for “car repair.” Google, having a record of this, and knowing that a Pep Boys commercial just played on my set, serves an in-video ad for Pep Boys, customized with a note that a new location has opened up around the corner, and offering a 15% off coupon on an oil change if I click “Yes.”

Either they send the coupon to my mobile phone (perhaps the on-screen prompt asks me to enter it in), or they mail to to my house; Comcast of course knows my billing address.

Redemption can be a tricky issue, but there are options: a code can be typed into a point of sale system and validated; a barcode could be displayed on my phone and scanned. If the security of the validation isn’t a concern (and for a %-off coupon, it often isn’t – the important part was getting the customer in the door), then simply showing the cashier a code displayed in a text message will work fine.

Stringing together all these technologies isn’t terribly far-fetched. Some cable companies are already placing “pop-up” ads in television programming, with viewer-initiated coupon “clipping”. It is clearly Google’s intention to move, eventually, into serving targeted video and text advertising on television, and “addressable” cable boxes makes the specter of personalized advertising all the more real.

The largest barriers are likely to be legal ones: the kind of data sharing necessary to enable the scenario I’ve outlined above would require some pretty explicit opt-ins from viewers, and rightly so.

Other scenarios wouldn’t, though: for Pep Boys, enabling this kind of direct response has some obvious benefits, but it’s far from the only way to build a customer base. Building brand awareness and favorability are equally important, and for campaigns which focused on these goals, getting a hold of personally identifiable information for each viewer (cell phone numbers, mailing address, etc.) isn’t necessarily all that helpful. Instead, the technology might be used to serve more traditionally-styled television spots that were triggered by viewing behavior: you’ve watched The Closer on TNT 12 times in the last year, you might be interested in the new CSI:Poughkeepsie. Or maybe you’re a frequent viewer of The Travel Channel. American Express would like to pitch you on a Platinum card with extended travel protections. But only if you’ve never missed a payment on your cable bill, and subscribe to HBO and Showtime.

If you think this all sounds vaguely – or explicitly – creepy, you’re not alone. I’m always torn between my desire to help my clients explore what’s possible with technology, while doing everything possible to make sure I’m no where near the receiving end of it.

Why I Don’t Interview Anyone

Our agency’s growth has been rather on the slow and steady side – which means we’ve roughly doubled in size in 18 months. Still, that growth can be difficult to manage, especially when the crush of client work comes in increasingly large batches, and good help can be so very hard to find.

Within the UX and Strategy group which I head (we called it “Performance Strategy”, basically because “User Experience Architecture, Media Planning, Analytics and Research” doesn’t fit nicely on a card, or in a sentence), it can be particularly challenging to manage this growth. I tend to look for people who have experience in IA and Interaction Design, preferably with both a technical background and an ability to communicate effortlessly with designers, programmers, clients and publishers. Experience with analytics and media planning is a plus; oh, it’d also be nice if you’ve run a usability study or 2, and if you’ve got experience interpreting eye-tracking data, so much the better.

While we’re at it, if you fit some or all of this description, I’m hiring.

Aside from all of these “paper” qualifications, there’s that ever-elusive quality we screen for first: fit.

I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong in my brief business life, but it’s brought to me to at least one firm conviction. Any company who’s work product is essential the result of a creative process has but a single competitive advantage on which to trade, Its culture.

It’s nearly impossible to define, and yet essential. And if it’s missing, deficient or dissolving, there’s not an off-site pow-wow or team-building obstacle course or fine-tuned mission statement in the world that’s going to grow one.

So when I look for new people to add to my small team, and to the agency in general, I find that the most important skill is the one that can’t fit on a resume. I’ve found that a resume, some work examples and 15 minute phone screen can tell me 90% of what I need to know about a candidate (or can at least let me know if the answer is “no”.) The missing piece, though, can only be evaluated in the context of what we do every day, which is solve problems with the help of the rest of the team.

So I don’t interview. At least, not anymore. I used to, and I used to do it a lot, asking candidates to sit down with me for an hour, sit with a few other folks for a while and see what everyone could ferret out about this complete stranger in the course of 20-30 minutes.

It’s a fool’s errand.

I’ve decided to do something else instead, and I’m excited about it. Tomorrow is the first real test-run, so we’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s surprise, but here’s a few things that drove me down this path:

• If I’m thinking about interviewing, it’s because I need to add to the team; I don’t generally troll just for possible future candidates.
• If I need to add them, it’s because there is work waiting to begin.
• Once they’re on board, there’s no time to get to know them, understand their working style, and adjust our process to match.
• I’m a firm believer in the concept of, “if the answer isn’t ‘YES!’, it’s ‘no.’” If someone isn’t absolutely the right person, we’ll know in a few hours.
• I’d rather not have hired someone only to have to let them go a few hours later.

With that in mind, a little experiment is underway. My theory is that interviews suck, and conversations are much more fun, and more relevant.

TV Advertising Finally Comes Full Circle

It began with radio really, with branded “soap” operas sponsored by Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers, in the 1930s. Migrating to television in the 50’s and 60’s, serialized programming supported by a single sponsor allowed an advertiser to “surround your target audience with your brand messages and that you are delivering via an avenue or vehicle they are very receptive to.”

Of course, that quote is from 2009, in a recent AdAge article touting a “a larger trend of marketers wanting to link to specific programming…”

Wendy’s is sponsoring ESPN Football Fridays, and embedding their logo into that of the content producer, in what would seem – for all the breathlessness of the article – to be a revolution in product placement.

“Embedding” a product into television programming has enjoyed a resurgence of late, the idea supposedly being that if you expose an audience often enough to your brand they’ll be more inclined to form positive associations, links which will impact their buying choices later on.

I don’t really object to the claim that product placement works; it’s the supposed “newness” of the idea that seems absurd, and idea which is old enough to be most marketer’s grandfather. At it’s birth, single-sponsor broadcasts arose largely because there were few sponsors with the financial means and audacity to pour significant dollars into the medium; now it seems to work because there are too many sponsors chasing too little attention, and the most obvious way to rise above the crowd is to crowd them all out.