The death of serendipity?

A version of this was published in marketing magazine in Feb 2009; this piece looks at how the internet threatens to paint us into an intellectual corner.  Eli Pariser of MoveOn also speaks about this at TED in 2011 (no link published yet).

 

In a 1754 letter, the writer Horace Walpole coined the term ‘serendipity’ – a word he derived from an old Persian tale, ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’.  In the story, the protagonists always benefited from unplanned discoveries, and these seemingly random occurrences ultimately enabled them to fulfil their mission.

Early in the development of the web, the capacity of the internet to surprise and divert us was recognised with the phrase ‘web-surfing’ - following links through the internet that led to places the reader had never anticipated when starting their mouse-journey.

And although web-surfing rarely created the sort of benefits the three princes sought (wealth, kingdoms, marriage to beautiful princesses etc.), the web was seen as a force that opened up our horizons – exposed us to new thinking, concepts and ideologies.  But now, there’s an increasing concern that far from expanding our horizons, digital media in general are making our worlds smaller.

In the analogue age, the shortage of bandwidth meant few TV channels – so ideas competed for exposure, and we had little choice but to see them.  Now, we can watch the God Channel, the Wine Channel, the Gay Network on Sky, and never be exposed to atheists, real ale fans or Jeremy Clarkson.

On the internet, collaborative filtering means we passively influence others when we do things online.  We can shop at Amazon, and be shown other books purchased by people who bought the book we’re interested in, and listen to Last.FM where similar listening profiles will suggest tracks we might like.  In this way, our choice of music and books is swayed by people whose consumption patterns indicate they’re like us.

Social networking has added another dimension to this, enabling us to hang out with people who share our views, rather than merely people who share our geographic location.  Now, we can hang out with others who believe in reincarnation, UFOs, homeopathy or banking, and never trouble ourselves with views that run contrary to our own.

Increasingly it seems, digital media perform a reductive role in our lives – patting us on the back and telling us we’re right, and keeping anything unsettlingly different away from us.

Just as it’s said that the Queen believes the world smells of fresh paint and the national anthem’s playing everywhere, we’re constantly presented with a worldview that induces complacency. 

The world looks comfortable, unchallenging and familiar, and it appeals to what sociologists call homophily – the ‘birds of a feather’ tendency of people to cluster around things that are common to them.

Isn’t this good though?  Isn’t it great that if we like Aretha Franklin we could discover Etta James?

Undoubtedly.  But we’re never going to hear Bach’s double violin concerto, or the Dead Kennedys. 

Which makes a new development on LibraryThing.com interesting – this website for people to catalogue and share their libraries recently launched the ‘unsuggester’ – a tool they describe as ‘the worst recommendation tool ever’.  It uses statistical analysis of users’ libraries to determine the books least likely to exist in the same collection – type in Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, and it suggests ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’; enter ‘Henry Kissenger’ and you get ‘Terry Pratchett’.

Unsuggester is fun, but it tries to address a serious issue.

When we launch new products, we challenge behaviour patterns.  When we try to attract new customers, we’re asking them to do something different.  If the effect of homophily is to fuel people’s insularity and build resistance against change, then in the future it will be harder to talk to people unbidden, more difficult to create new relationships.

As marketers, homophily can reinforce our brand relationships.  But it can also stand in the way of new ones, and addressing this might just benefit from some serendipity.

If we can believe the numbers, change is accelerating

This article was first published in Marketing magazine.

This is the one hundredth column I’ve written for Marketing. 100 is an important number in western culture – we follow the FTSE 100, the Billboard 100, we review after the first 100 days and we can never forget Haircut 100.

So this week I’m going to look at some of the numbers that tell us a little about how digital has taken our world by storm. The Web is 6555 days old today, counting from when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau submitted their WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project – the first use of the WWW term, and even for someone like me who lives and breathes this stuff, some of the figures are staggering.

Then, the internet was a purely text-based environment. But Berners-Lee and Cailliau’s idea of marrying it with hypertext caused a revolution. And despite British Telecom’s failed attempt to enforce a patent in 2002 on hyperlinks, the web has become perhaps the single biggest force for change since the invention of walking.

Every possible permutation of 3 character .com domains has been registered. The BBC has 43 different translations of its website, Facebook has 63.

Worldwide, 74 billion searches are made each month, and the size of the index held by search engines continues to grow apace. In 2001, searching for "search engine optimisation” threw up 12,300 results in Google. That number today is 77.8 million – an increase of 632,420%.

The average monthly number of searches per searcher in the UK is 124 - the same as the average number of cups of tea per Briton per month. And although those results are delivered in the blink of an eye, so far this year according to worldometers.com, users have spent 24 trillion hours waiting for web pages to download.

Perhaps it was worth the wait. In the US, 1 of every 8 couples getting married last year met over the internet.

Proof though that the internet is not immune from external fiscal factors came with the creation of President Bush’s economic stimulus plan, which involved sending cheques of up to $1200 to taxpayers. It was widely reported as having created a 30% boost in internet pornography revenues, which currently run at $3075 per second (or 0.18% of global GDP).

30% of internet users have made a purchase (and possibly had their identity stolen) from spam emails. A recent study also showed that less than one in one million spam emails actually lead to sale – which explains why there are so many of them.

After years stuck in your computer, mobile is becoming a serious force in digital. The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the world’s population, and A SIM-free mobile phone sells on eBay every 17 seconds – part of the 1.3 billion handsets that are expected to be sold this year.

Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns describes the exponential growth of change in technological progress. He believes Moore’s Law (the processing power available for a dollar doubles every two years) can be applied to our broader experience of technology. Let’s consider; agriculture appeared 12,000 years ago. The first cities appeared 6,000 years ago, printing 532 years ago, TV 80 years ago, the internet 18 years ago.

If he’s right, half the change we’ve experienced since the internet started occurred in the last two years, and the next 18 years will see 362 years’ worth of change.

So our power to predict the future, to plan our businesses and understand our consumers, is increasingly threatened by this acceleration. And the voices that say they now understand digital are the most dangerous of all, because if they understood it yesterday, things are different today.

The Queen takes Buckingham Palace online

This article was first published in marketing magazine.

The good folk of Google UK are steam cleaning the red carpet and practising their curtseys ahead of a visit by royal neighbours, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, this week.

According to Buckingham Palace “the Queen has always kept up to date with the latest technology” although when conferring an honorary knighthood on Bill Gates two years ago, Her Royal Highness let on that she hadn’t yet used a computer.

This hasn’t stopped the house of Windsor’s technological advances though. Last year she became Google’s first royal client, launching her YouTube channel, whose production team she will be meeting when she visits.

Viewers can see videos of this year’s blackcurrant harvest at Sandringham, and catch up on Swan Upping news (fascinating interview with the Queen’s Swan Marker), whilst revisiting old favorites like the 1957 Christmas Broadcast (a million views so far).

Remarkably – if you’re a bit bah-humbug about this sort of thing – it’s pretty popular stuff. The channel exceeded the US President’s White House channel’s daily viewing figures, with nearly 400,000 people visiting it in its first two days, and it continues to trounce Queen Rania of Jordan’s channel with more than twice as many subscribers.

To date the Royal Channel has notched up over 22,000 subscribers, making it the 18th most popular on YouTube, and joining an array of other new media ventures from what HRH calls ‘the firm’, including a podcast of the Christmas Broadcast, a website and an ecommerce venture selling tickets online for visits to royal residences and galleries.

Odd though it might seem for an operation that surrounds itself with people who dress in 19th century outfits, the Royal Family are no strangers to technology. Back in 1980, Prince Philip was at the centre of one of the earliest hacking controversies, when his email account was accessed by two journalists.

So how much of her time does the Queen really spend online? What would a peek at her digital media diary look like?

It is reported that the Queen mastered emailing in the last couple of years and now has a Blackberry so that she can keep in contact with the family while on the move. The Duke of York, the most tech savvy of her heirs, also suggested that her senior aides be equipped with Blackberrys too. And William bought her an iPod two years ago, on which she reportedly stores the Last Night of the Proms.

Last year’s Christmas message was uploaded onto You Tube almost 50 years to the day that her message was broadcast for the first time on TV. Perhaps presciently, the theme of the 1957 speech was technology: “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct”.

So whilst many would have thought the Queen more silver salver than silver surfer, there’s no doubting The Firm’s determination to reach out using whatever tools come to hand.

The death of deference, particularly in the mainstream media, means the royals share a common objective with politicians, companies and celebrities, to get a message across to the public without editorial interference.

It’s hardly the stream of consciousness ramblings that we’re used to from the blogosphere, but professionally-produced content albeit with a slightly homemade feel. Video captions look like they were produced at home, but there’s a clear strategy here. Show the royals in action – visiting troops, supporting community development, helping charities.

No video footage of junior ranks falling out of Mahiki here – it’s all hard-working nobles, designed to build confidence in the monarchy as a solid, practical and valuable part of UK plc.

Google are used to visits from CEOs who don’t get digital but are keen for the association. But as Googlers stand by their beanbags to show the Queen around, they’ll be welcoming a business that’s seized the web with both hands.

Affiliates at Christmas

This article was first published in marketing magazine.

Last week, I wrote about how marketers can prepare their search activity for Christmas. Whilst search campaigns for the holiday season have been in planning for some time now, there’s still a lot that can be achieved in the short time that’s left before the slimming season takes over.

So assuming that search is all sorted now, this week we’re going to look at affiliate marketing. Unlike search, there aren’t many different strategies needed at Christmas – rather it’s the intensity of competition that demands merchants up their game.

Weakness on the high street is leading more retailers to focus effort and investment on their internet plays, and this fourth quarter is likely to see some of the most intense rivalry yet, as merchants compete for customers’ hard-earned cash.

I’m going to look at three actions that are specific to the season, and at elements of good practice that simply become more important as competition peaks.

First, content affiliates – who run websites with content designed to draw in traffic mostly sourced from natural search. Most will be optimising their sites for Christmas right now so those merchants that can provide them with copy, product ideas and creative in good time will stand more chance of being featured prominently.

Secondly, some affiliates specialise in Christmas – creating sites and search campaigns aimed directly at consumers looking for seasonal goods. Your existing year-round affiliate relationships may not include these outlets, and it’s useful to review coverage at this time of year to ensure you’re represented here.

These specialists look to get their sites up and running three months in advance of the season’s peak in order to maximise coverage within the search engines’ natural listings. But many will still be finalising sites over the next couple of weeks – so there’s still time to get materials out to them.

As ever with affiliate marketing this is about effective communication. The offer to affiliates itself is one thing, but building a direct relationship with affiliate partners stimulates lower churn and better prominence, as well as useful intelligence about what affiliates are looking for to drive their businesses.

You wouldn’t manage a sales force through email alone, and affiliates are no different. They have their own goals, marketplace dynamics and challenges to their businesses – a dialogue with them not only enables them to work more effectively on your behalf, it enables you to shape your offer around what they need – keeping you ahead of the competition.

Third, as with search, if you can capture data and good practice around seasonal activity, this becomes a vital resource for future campaigns. Key actions can be recorded and used to build a process which can be applied repeatedly, benefiting from the ongoing accumulation of experience.

And you won’t have to wait until Christmas to apply it. Half term, Valentine’s Day, financial year end, Easter – all present seasonal opportunities which affiliates cluster around, and all therefore present an opportunity to dust off your model on a regular basis.

Affiliate marketing is a burgeoning sector which is becoming increasingly complex as it grows in value as a route to market. The competitive peak around Christmas will test merchants’ capabilities in managing this channel, and a good performance here will provide solid experience for the year.

Affiliate marketing was a £3 billion market in 2007, and it’s still growing fast as consumers increasingly turn to the web for purchases in the tightening economy. Christmas 2008 will be the biggest yet – and there’s little time left to grab a piece of the action.

Planning search for Christmas

This article was first published in marketing magazine

If you’ve got children, you’ll know the degree of forward planning that goes into Christmas. Mine started early lobbying (landscape analysis, benchmarking) in August, and by mid-September, their campaign had moved into a fully active phase.

Goals had been established, and broad strategies to achieve them put in place. Without being consciously aware of it, I’ve already got high spontaneous recall scores for ‘Lego Secret Agent Truck’, and ‘ponies’ (my daughter has audacious goals, and I’m not sure it’d go in the garage).

On the other side of the fence, retailers have been working away for months preparing their offerings. Christmas store designs were signed off months ago, and bets made about winning lines for the season.

But online, (with some notable exceptions) few retailers pay as much attention to Christmas planning as they do offline. This is particularly true in search – a key channel as the shopping season swings into action. So this week I’m going to look at three of the most important things you can do to get set for Q4 – there are plenty more, but space as ever is at a premium.

First, what happened last time? Smart search advertisers create separate campaigns for Christmas. This allows full control over seasonal inventory, facilitates independent measurement and creates a module that can easily be amended and re-used each year.

If your search team did this last year, you’ve got segregated performance data to go back to and see what worked and what didn’t, and this is the starting point for planning 2008. If they didn’t (and you still plan to be around next year), now’s the time to get this set up – you’ll thank yourself in 2009.

Analysis of historic data will help forecasting and ensure that the seasonal opportunity is maximised. Additional seasonal traffic, plus increased competition can push up CPC levels, so don’t miss out on sales by running out of budget.

This is easier said than done – after all competitor activity can drive up your volumes too, and to avoid being caught out you need to keep an ear to the ground.

So making sufficient funds available is vital to avoid disappearing from the search results just when there’s a spike in interest in your product or sector. But as ever, just being there isn’t enough.

Copy is always hugely influential on effectiveness, and at Christmas your advertising and product offering may be quite different to the rest of the year. This needs to be reflected in the integration of seasonal offers into ad creative messaging and the testing of different offers to maximise clickthrough and conversion. So test special offers, price reductions, free delivery and gift wrapping – but make sure your landing pages reiterate the offer.

This is one of the commonest mistakes. When you put a sign in the shop window saying ‘free giftwrap’, think how many consumers nevertheless ask whether you do free giftwrap before making a purchase. They don’t wait until after they’ve bought, instead they seek reassurance before they buy.

So by using the homepage to repeat the offer that’s brought them in, you’re offering the reassurance that the assistant gives in-store.

Finally, technology. Using an XML product feed as part of a search marketing platform allows stock availability to be used as a dynamic control in your search campaign. So when an item goes out of stock, keywords can be paused - minimising wasted clicks and ensuring budget is diverted to best sellers or available products.

Christmas is a time when spikes in demand can play havoc with inventory control, and the application of technologies like this can improve customers’ experience of a retailer, whilst also enhancing the effectiveness of its advertising budget.

I hope my kids get what they want this Christmas, and if they do, it’ll be in no small part down to their clear objectives, consistent strategy, and the groundwork they put in early on. They’re already halfway through their campaign - what chance do I stand?

Integrated agency: rather missing the point...

This article was first published in marketing magazine


What does integration mean?

It’s a word we’re hearing a lot at the moment, and as you might expect, there are a lot of agendas in play here.

Back in the early eighties when direct marketing agencies started springing up all over the place, the integration argument was a hot topic – “how”, asked marketers then, “can I integrate my brand and direct activity?”

These marketers were concerned principally with media leverage and creative consistency, and the agency networks responded by acquiring DM agencies. But as marketers have discovered, there’s a difference between acquisition and integration – and plenty of DM agencies still exist separately, even within networks.

But does this mean the work isn’t integrated? Of course not. Many marketers have found that so-called ‘integrated’ agencies might be convenient, but they sacrifice focus and expertise to achieve this.

Think of the Swiss Army knife. It’s not a very good screwdriver - the corkscrew is painful to use and even the knife isn’t the best knife you can use. But you can put it in your pocket, and it’s useful for lightweight general occasions – though you won’t use it if you’ve got serious work to do.

Right now, this argument’s being rehashed in digital media, where the agency networks tell us they’re upping their game, “putting digital at the heart of the organisation”.

They point to dozens of studies that show that TV and press influence response rates to digital advertising, and stress the convenience of one call for busy marketers.

But to be effective in this space, an agency needs to combine triple-A standard display, search, SEO, affiliate marketing, technology and data practises.

Search and affiliate marketing may deliver some of the same outcomes as media, but they’re planned, traded and managed in completely different ways, using different tools and different skills.

SEO is principally a technical discipline, although objective-setting and measurement align it to marketing.

Even media is a different kettle of fish online. Trading uses different models, with agency deals a disadvantage particularly in the current market. Smart agencies are using workflow and knowledge management tools, whilst most agencies still use excel spreadsheets for planning. Media exchanges and auctions are on the horizon, and technology plays a central role in effectiveness.

Finally, data is critical. Sophisticated data models are the key tool here, analysing the interdependency between the different digital channels, the influence of offline, and driving investment based on real customer responses in real time.

If none of these skills look like those of the average traditional media planner or buyer, it’s because they’re not. The networks failed to anticipate their clients’ demands for digital expertise, and are now engaged in an unseemly rush to build capability - but they’re missing two key ingredients.

First, the real challenge of integration is between the different digital channels. Combining digital with offline is relatively straightforward – integrating digital channels requires skills most traditional agencies simply don’t have. So their claimed advantage lies in the easy bit.

And there’s a bigger challenge.

For many brands, the internet is fast becoming the dominant channel for consumers – it’s where they hear about products, buy or make decisions to purchase, and crucially, where we as marketers can hear what they have to say about us.

As this shift happens, it will become the core of marketing activity – sales, advertising, market research and customer service, putting digital at the heart of strategy and making offline media a downstream activity.

So all this focus on integrating the media aspects of digital and offline activity is missing both the real challenge and the real opportunity. This isn’t about administrative convenience. It’s about the challenge of integrating digital’s many complex aspects, and the opportunity of moving marketing itself from a broadcast past to a future that reflects consumers’ new relationship with brands.

Cross media deals, and the absence of the free lunch

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


As economic belts tighten, advertisers are looking with renewed vigour at getting the best from their media deals. Since the last recession, online has become a major medium – expected to overtake TV this year – and budgets are now substantial.

Encouraged by some agencies, advertisers are looking more closely at how cross-media dealing might create greater pricing efficiencies (procurement speak for cheaper) as increasingly, media groups own properties which span both the traditional and the digital worlds.

But amidst all this hype about synergies and leverage there are some real bear-traps for the unwary here, and some agendas that aren’t altogether straightforward…

Let’s look first at some of the bear-traps.

First, this isn’t a big market opportunity. There’s actually little crossover between the Top 10 traditional media operators and the top 10 in digital – the top ranking traditional media owner in traffic terms is the Daily Mail in July, and that scrapes in at number 10.

The online display market is dominated by the big portals – MSN, Yahoo and AOL, the smallest of which delivers twice the audience of the Mail’s site. Sky might be a 500lb gorilla in the TV market, but it’s at number 14 online. And this raises a further consideration.

When a media owner is selected to meet planning criteria arrived at for the offline property, there’s often a mismatch online. The Telegraph’s audience online is much younger, Channel 4’s is more upmarket and most of the Guardian’s audience is in the US. So plans created for one medium can struggle to translate effectively to the other.

Then there’s measurement. Whilst TV is traded in share and ratings, online is traded in impressions, clicks and outcomes.  Smart operators have been using rating points in online for years – it’s a useful way of creating a point of comparison across media, as well as a sense of the scale of a campaign against the audience size. But the danger here is that the tail comes to wag the dog, as lowest common denominator traditional media metrics can replace more business-centric outcome measures in setting objectives.

Of course, there are positives. Editorial teams can be more effectively motivated, and publishers are often more willing to integrate commercial messages into their content. But of course if it’s just running creative on radio and online that you want, arguably that’s possible without a cross-media deal – your online and offline agencies should work together to make this happen for you; it’s their job. And of course if they do, you’re not constrained to using just the properties of that particular media group – you can do anything you like (almost like media planning really).

Where it really gets sticky though is when you try to account for the value. Both agencies and media owners can get into a media version of find the lady – a great price on one medium concealing poor value in others.

This is particularly the case if the agency creating the deal isn’t particularly expert in one of the media channels – they’re keen to show their openness to using that channel (usually digital) but wouldn’t know a good deal if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.

Worse though, since auditors are often employed on a single medium, these deals are often removed from the audit altogether. So a press audit might omit a deal because it has a substantial online component – and it might be tempting for an agency to load the pricing up on that deal in order to demonstrate deeper discounts on that media owner on the parts of their business that are subject to scrutiny.

Heaven forefend, and I’m sure that never happens.

We all want value for money. But as the economic weather gets wetter, it’s wise to remember that nowhere is the free lunch more elusive than in media.