Mar 7, 2010
Payroll and unemployment data released Friday offered a snapshot of the labor market's health last month. But some researchers say they can get a read on such trends days or weeks ahead of the official numbers by studying Google searches, tweets and even queries at an online phone directory.
Economists painted a mostly positive picture of the latest government data, which showed the economy shed fewer jobs than expected in February and the jobless rate held steady. For people who look at early-warning indicators, the figures were no surprise. The Web-based data have been telling a similar story for at least a month: The job market is getting better—very slowly.
Gary Flake
Mar 4, 2010
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
Ron Ashkenas
Mar 2, 2010
Organizations love data: numbers, reports, trend lines, graphs, spreadsheets — the more the better. And, as a result, many organizations have a substantial internal factory that churns out data on a regular basis, as well as external resources on call that produce data for onetime studies and questions. But what's the evidence (or dare I say "the data") that all of this data is worth the cost and indeed leads to better business decisions? Is some amount of data collection unnecessary, perhaps even damaging by creating complexity and confusion?
Kenneth Cukier
Mar 1, 2010
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
Jeff Jarvis
Feb 28, 2010
I am in Tampa waiting to fly back home to New Jersey and, thanks to the snowicane but rather than sitting in the usual information vacuum to which airlines subject us, I am watching as Continental shows us the status of the flights that were supposed to bring our jet in from LA to Cleveland to Newark to Tampa. I saw the flight to Cleveland canceled, then the one to Newark canceled, and I figured we were doomed when I saw the aircraft number for my flight erased. But then I saw us assigned a new jet, one that flew into Tampa from Houston last night.
That’s simply amazing. Continental is practicing operational transparency. It opened up information is already has to us, the customers, so we can be informed and empowered.
Feb 28, 2010
Utilities are gradually installing smart meters that can tell homeowners the price of the electricity they’re using at the time, including discounts for off-peak hours. But those meters aren’t yet in all that many homes.
There will soon be new options, though, for consumers who want to save money by using energy more efficiently. Companies are coming up with dozens of computer-based devices that monitor electricity costs, outlet by outlet, inside a home.
Jack Neff
Feb 22, 2010
Hundreds of messages on the boards at PampersVillage.com have criticized changes to Pampers Cruisers in recent months, but a closer look shows an outsized portion of them came from a couple of posters.
Social media might be all about big numbers, but in a surprising number of marketing mishaps, a relatively small handful of people were the sparks that turned into online brushfires.
Feb 18, 2010
On the surface it may appear that Google simply created Buzz as a social network add-on for Gmail. But in reality the Mountain View, Calif. search engine launched the beginning of a hub that could eventually connect to forums, third-party PC and mobile applications, as well as other social sites.
Google recognizes the need to allow data and people to seamlessly travel between portals and Web sites. Gmail Buzz users will get a better picture of that soon.
Feb 16, 2010
A year ago, it looked as if the Internet would find itself in Washington's crosshairs. A new Democratic administration was moving into the White House with a huge majority in Congress. A reckless Wall Street was blamed by many Americans for nearly destroying the economy. Regulation was hot. And besides, in the minds of many lawmakers, the Web was full of shady crooks and needed policing.
These days, fears of heavy regulation have abated somewhat, as the online ad market bounces back from a brutal recession, and lawmakers continue to be distracted by bank failures, wars and healthcare legislation.
Feb 11, 2010
Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why? Now some answers are emerging thanks to a rich new source of data: you, Dear Reader.
Feb 7, 2010
Recently, at CUNY, we held a roundtable for ad sales people from hyperlocal blogs to big newspapers to hear what they are hearing from local merchants. We’re wrapping up our research for the New Business Models for News Project — indeed, it was Alberto Ibargüen, head of the Knight Foundation that funded this work, who said he really wanted to hear sales people’s perspective — and beginning research for Carnegie-funded work on new ad models, products, service, and sales methods, working with The New York Times on The Local.
Michael Bush
Feb 5, 2010
What does your search engine say about you? Well, if it's Bing, you're probably an early adopter, but you also visit, shop and ultimately make purchases from Walmart more than other search-engine users. Google searchers, on the other hand, are partial to Target and Amazon, and Yahoo searchers have a strong preference for wireless service from AT&T and Sprint.
Feb 2, 2010
The rate that things happen online tends to influence the rest of our world. It began when instant messaging on PCs made a move to SMS text message on mobile phones, giving friends and lovers instant access to each other whenever and wherever, as long as both were in an area with cellular service. Now, Twitter and Facebook status updates on Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo real-time search let us know the moment someone goes to the bathroom. You get the message.
Jan 27, 2010
There's no such thing as real-time search. Without the context behind the status updates on Twitter and Facebook, the characters and words strung together in semi-quasi-sentences reflect a bunch of data points -- or garbage in an endless chain of gibberish.
Now that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have figured out a way to make the Internet come alive as events happen, the next challenge will become filtering the garbage that real-time search creates.
Jan 24, 2010
In the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. The important data from employers and financial institutions have already been sent to the government’s computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the anachronistic chore of preparing a return from scratch. And, in many cases, they pay a software company for the privilege.
Jan 6, 2010
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data - including previously unreleased information - about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create "mashups" of data to boost the city's transparency and accountability.
Steve Rubel
Jan 4, 2010
If you threw me on a desert island (one with internet connectivity) and said that I could use only one website, it would be Gmail.
For the last five years Gmail has become the most indispensable tool in my communications and productivity system. I've even found a full-fledged Twitter client, Twitgether, that integrates into Gmail. My use of Gmail is unorthodox in that I also use it as a massive database -- a backup brain. For years now I have been e-mailing myself articles that I think I might need later. Along the way, Gmail gives me a preview of what the algorithmic, personalized future of advertising and media will undoubtedly resemble.
Steve Lohr
Jan 3, 2010
Most people think of the grand challenges in computing as big science projects, like simulating nuclear explosions or protein folding. But with the holiday shopping season just ended, consider another: retail marketing.
Ken Mallon and Duncan Southgate
Dec 31, 2009
Yesterday we posted the first five digital-marketing predictions from Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic, which looked at mobility, geo-location, viral marketing, gaming and online display. Today, we bring you the final five. And we want to know -- do you agree? What do you think will be the big issues of 2010? Here's the rest of the predictions for 2010.
Jeff Jarvis
Dec 30, 2009
Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news…
And then think how we can annotate that with our own reviews, ratings, photos, videos, social-app check-ins and relationships, news, discussion, calendar entries, orders…. The same can be said of objects, brands — and people.
Tom Davenport
Dec 28, 2009
In my last blog, I argued that people don't care enough about their information environments to prevent overload. This week I am focusing on a related behavioral change that has important implications for companies that produce information products and services: As information grows in quantity, consumers of it are willing to accept lower quality. I call this willingness satisficing — being satisfied with sacrificing quality.
Josh Jones-Dilworth
Dec 24, 2009
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain
Remember that quote. In 2010 the very best marketers, PR professionals, and social media consultants will put data at the center of everything they do. For anyone unfamiliar with these concepts, just as with social media, data marketing may seem opaque or intimidating at the beginning. The only way you ever learn is by jumping in headfirst — become a data nerd, because data nerds are changing the world.
Michael Fassnacht and James Shuttleworth
Dec 17, 2009
Popular culture, including TV shows such as "Mad Men," would have us believe the practice of marketing in an ad agency is a straightforward exercise, calling only for understanding the customer, coming up with a big idea, then creating something interesting and relevant to engage consumers.
Not quite. Marketing organizations today are under the gun as never before -- from a media landscape growing increasingly convoluted and a fleeting consumer universe to the mounting pressure of accountability for any marketing dollar spent. Today's new universe demands a different approach to the design and execution of any marketing effort. And yet, little intellectual brain power or emotional energy is being invested in improving the fundamental marketing process.
Dec 17, 2009
Nielsen will continue to make live viewership data for local TV viewers available in the wake of a furor from media buyers who argued that removing such information would leave them paying for inflated audiences who often skip past ads by using digital video recorders. After saying just a few weeks ago that it intended to stop making available easily digestible data showing the size of live local audiences, Nielsen said in a preliminary draft of a letter to be sent out to clients that it will now keep that data available for an interim period while also measuring viewers who watch shows on a live-plus-same-day basis. The plan, which Nielsen is expected to announce shortly, is set to go into effect on Jan. 7, 2010, and stay in place through March.
Jason Mick
Dec 9, 2009
Google is stockpiling a wealth of user data. With its search engine, its advertising services, its applications, its new free DNS service, and more, the company has an incredible perspective on exactly what users are looking at. Many fear that Google could abuse this information or allow it to be abused, either for profit or to prosecute citizens who aren't necessarily guilty. In short, fears that "Big Brother is watching you" have been replace with fears that "Google is watching you".
Google's recently responded to such doubts, blasting those that would harbor them. Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented to CNBC, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Steve Lohr
Dec 6, 2009
Next Jump may well be the most intriguing Internet business that you’ve never heard of — though that’s likely to change as the company seeks a wider audience. The handful of industry analysts who were invited into the company’s New York offices recently have come away impressed. Next Jump, they say, represents the future of online commerce and could emerge as a counterweight to Amazon, the giant Web merchant. And this patiently gestated start-up, they add, shows one path to the still-elusive promise of Internet advertising: using data to greatly improve the efficiency of marketing.
Dec 2, 2009
Even as his advertising offensive against arch-rival AT&T continues to be the talk of the industry, Verizon CMO John Stratton took to the podium to explain why the "Maps" campaign was necessary. In this seven-minute video, he recaps Verizon's entire nine-year marketing history. In its latest move, the company abruptly threw out its prepared holiday ad campaign to replace it with the results of a data survey it commissioned of its own and AT&T's national G3 footprints.
Grant McCracken
Nov 20, 2009
It's an unpleasant, abominable idea, submitting something as delicate as culture to the rack of metrification.
But here's why it's necessary. There's so much going on "out there" in culture, so many different people creating so many different innovations, subject to change so violent and frequent, that unless we have metrics at our disposal, well, we're done for. We have no real hope of canvassing all that water front.
Nov 20, 2009
Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis.
"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible.
Andrew Winston
Nov 19, 2009
If you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing happens: they use about 10 percent less energy. The simple act of placing data in front of people changes their behavior. Data makes people smarter and inspires them to make small changes to save money and energy. You can use this powerful tool in business not only to cut costs, but to drive innovation and revenues.
Nov 6, 2009
The folks at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG should be happy that Roger Martin likes his job. Otherwise, he could cause them a heap of trouble.
As it is, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is traveling the country, throwing down the gauntlet to companies who hope to analyze and strategize their way out of a recession by bringing in armies of management consultants. You'll get what you pay for, he warns, and it won't be innovation.
"The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies," he says. "You can't send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems."
The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it's unproductive. "No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning," he says.
Nov 4, 2009
The Twitter community is abuzz this week about the site's new "Lists" feature, which allows users to create collections of interesting people to follow on the micro-messaging service.
From lists of sports stars to comedians to political pundits, Twitter has provided its members with the tools required to splice a torrent of updates into a series of relevant, topic-based streams.
In doing so, the social networking startup may have hit upon the long-overdue cure to information overload and birthed a new breed of editor: the real-time Web curator.
Nov 4, 2009
When it comes to deep smarts, curiosity, with practical advice and sprinkled with a healthy dose of good humor, I cannot think of anyone more qualified than Avinash Kaushik. He's not only a real dynamo in all matters analytics, he's also a genuinely passionate, interesting, and kind person. Think that he wrote the answers to our conversation while his hand was healing from an injury because he had made a promise.
Every single one of his posts - and now I can say the same for the books - is packed with step by step actionable insights that will make you think about online accountability as an art. I don't know about you, but he's changed the game of analytics for me - I now have a totally fresh appreciation for what you can do with data.
Nov 4, 2009
Data mining and the proximity of the internet to most of what we do is changing the proximity of proof to decision. Now, you don't need to do a lot of research, the data is just a click away. What are you going to do when your hunches don't match the data that's now pouring in? The data shows, for example, that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk. It doesn't feel that way, of course, but will you respect the data and stop, cold turkey?
Nov 2, 2009
What's the first thing that goes through your mind when someone says the word "data"?
For many of us, the first image is line graphs, pie charts and spreadsheets with columns and rows full of numbers that leave you bleary-eyed and a bit dazed.
But what if someone were to say data can also mean what you post on Facebook and Twitter, the ratings you gave a restaurant, the photos you uploaded to Flickr or even, perhaps, what you feel.
A bit of a reach? Not anymore.
An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of "data" and display it in a way that's relatively easy to understand.
Nov 2, 2009
Nobody's arguing that SEM (both in its paid and organic subspecialties) can deliver ROI. But viewing ROI as a primary and exclusive goal for your organization's search campaigns is dangerously myopic. Here's why:
Oct 27, 2009
Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.
Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.
Michael Learmonth
Oct 19, 2009
Fact: Most people never click on web ads. And that poses a problem for marketers who want to know if their display ads are working. Google, though, is starting to provide an answer. In a bid to build a brand-advertising business, the search giant is using its vast trove of data culled from search queries and web traffic to measure the effectiveness of brand advertising. The system, called Campaign Insights, has been in beta test in the past year with marketers like PayPal and Simplexity and beginning today, the company will start offering it to its bigger advertisers in the U.S. and U.K. Ultimately, like Google Analytics, Google will offer it to all of its display advertisers for free.
Oct 19, 2009
The company last month launched a new advertising campaign to announce that Wachovia Securities had become Wells Fargo Advisors, one of the more recent steps by the fourth-largest U.S. bank to fold Wachovia into its brand since acquiring it last year. Invoking "150 years of financial strength," the campaign sought to reassure Americans that Wells Fargo was on solid footing despite the multitudes of bank closings around the country.
Oct 14, 2009
When Google's renowned visual design lead, Douglas Bowman, left the search giant at the end of March, he wrote a passionate blog post about his reasons for quitting.
He claimed that the company's reliance on data was so extreme, it prevented it from making any daring design decisions, and quoted one instance when a team couldn't decide between two blues, so were testing 41 shades between each of the choices to see which one performed better. Bowman's post sparked a heated debate on the web.
Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google, acknowledges that Bowman is an extraordinary designer who made huge contributions to the company's products. However, she insists there's a clear logic behind Google's approach. "It's very much a culture of experimentation," she explains.
Oct 13, 2009
The search advertising market is coming back, and Microsoft's Bing is slowly gaining share of search-ad dollars.
With Google's third-quarter earnings announcement coming Thursday, two digital agencies released aggregate client search-spending data from the third quarter.
The takeaway: Search spending among U.S. marketers is on the rise, gaining from the second quarter and getting close to matching spending levels of a year ago after several quarters of decline.
Oct 12, 2009
A 20-minute talk by Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., also known from WikiRank, which was originally given at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. During the talk, he focuses on some of the classic examples of information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard's map, the tube map, and so on), the issue of "decorating" data versus making it accessible, and the emerging challenge to empower lay people to participate in visualizing and analyzing their own data.
Oct 9, 2009
I know it's all PC and cool to say that numbers don't matter. Number of fans, followers, readers of your blog -- none of that matters. It's all about just writing and sharing great content because that is the core of social media. [dramatic pause while I hug myself]
Personally, I disagree. I think it's easy to say numbers don't matter when you have 30,000 followers on Twitter and 10,000 fans on Facebook or an email list with over 100,000 readers. And it's easier to fall prey to that thinking and not challenge it, poke at it and see if well maybe... it's flawed somehow.
I think numbers do matter for two reasons.
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle
Oct 9, 2009
Five years ago, we launched a conference based on a simple idea, and that idea grew into a movement. The original Web 2.0 Conference ( now the Web 2.0 Summit ) was designed to restore confidence in an industry that had lost its way after the dotcom bust. The Web was far from done, we argued. In fact, it was on its way to becoming a robust platform for a culture-changing generation of computer applications and services.
In our first program, we asked why some companies survived the dotcom bust, while others had failed so miserably. We also studied a burgeoning group of startups and asked why they were growing so quickly. The answers helped us understand the rules of business on this new platform.
Sep 21, 2009
Ginger, a 27-year-old living in Indianapolis, is baffled as to why she gets the Pottery Barn catalog, let alone the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, considering that she has no children. Similarly, Jeanette, a Toledo, Ohio woman, has long received Limited Too, now Justice, mailings. At 49, she's far outside the brand's tween target. Lands' End, which she also regularly receives catalogs from, would be closer to the mark, except that she hasn't ordered anything from there in years. Even Amazon, which has better data-based marketing than most, has raised the ire of the occasional customer. Vicki ordered bike gear from the retailer for her husband, Nick, two or three Christmases ago. She was surprised to receive an e-mail just last week plugging complementary items.
In today's digital world it's easier than ever for retailers to slice and dice consumer data. Yet many have yet to crack the code and use the data they do have to serve up targeted, timely and relevant offers.
Sep 18, 2009
We spent some time recently looking back at the patterns in the content in PSFK to try to identify emerging themes within specific target categories. ‘Four-Wheeled’ is one of three trends we identified from the data found on our site.
Sep 7, 2009
The web knows something, but it's not telling us, at least not yet.
The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.
It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.
It also knows how many followers your followers have...
So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout. Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread?
Sep 5, 2009
When an engineering colleague of mine (95% of my immediate surroundings) emailed me a link this past week, I thought for sure it was for a YouTube video. This link was different though, in that it introduced me to Anscombe's quartet, a set of four datasets that share the exact same statistical properties. Each one of these datasets has the same mean, variance and mean of each y variable, variance and mean of each x variable and the exact same correlation between the x and y variables. A little geeky, eh?
What's my point, you might ask? When each one of these datasets is plotted out visually, they have completely different appearances (just click on the link above and you'll see what I mean). There are outliers where one would not expect to see them -- identifying both opportunities and risks in your data depending on what you are analyzing. However, one would never see the variance in data patterns if it was not plotted in a chart or graph (or analyzed data point by data point).
Sep 3, 2009
The other day one of my clients asked me a deceptively simple question: What is the best market research technique? It turned out to be a leading question, as he had in his hand an article from a recent article in Inc. that said, "Given limited resources ... it generally makes sense to go quantitative."
While of course quantitative surveys can generate important learning, it's dangerous to assume there is any single "best" market research technique.
Sep 2, 2009
A coalition of privacy groups wants Congress to force online marketing companies to get amnesia about what citizens do online, unless they get permission to remember.
At issue is the online ad industry’s increasing infatuation with behavioral ad targeting — which involves tracking a user to divine what her interests are in order to show ads targeted to those interests. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have such technology, as does Facebook and dozens of ad networks you have never heard of.
Aug 29, 2009
March Madness lasts only three weeks, but Metric Madness goes on all year long. What is Metric Madness? It's the notion you can run anything by the numbers, and it's become the hottest concept in business today.
Aug 29, 2009
We're awash in data. Here's how to make yours matter.
Aaron Goldman
Aug 27, 2009
Last month I shared what search taught me about running a business. Today, I'd like to list 10 lessons Google taught me -- and the rest of the world, for that matter -- about marketing.
John Sviokla
Aug 27, 2009
There is a vital lesson buried in the August 19, 2009 Jet Blue announcement that they were suspending sales of the $599.00 "All You Can Jet" promotion they'd debuted only seven days before. Any student of Behavioral Economics could have predicted that an "all you can eat" approach would inspire vastly different behavior than if Jet Blue had charged a lower fixed fee plus $1 per mile. Similarly, over a decade ago when AOL switched to a usage-independent flat price, connection time increased four times more than they anticipated. "All you can eat" is an entirely different price than "very, very cheap."
Aug 24, 2009
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings? The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.
Aug 20, 2009
Marketers want private, direct conversations with consumers and thanks to technology this is easier to do. We are all GPSed, Googled and Facebooked, put in matrices, files, rankings, etc. The digital environment not only collects more and more private data, but it also offers marketing many tools for evaluation and promotion online and offline. But it raises concerns whether privacy needs more protection.
Aug 19, 2009
Last year, Google updated Google Trends and launched Google Insights for Search, allowing advertisers and marketers to track search behavior based on frequency of searches, time frame, or geographic location. Now Google is throwing the element of predictability into the mix. Looking at a particular trend's historical search popularity, Google forecasts the trend's future performance.
Maria Popova
Aug 13, 2009
At the intersection of art and algorithm, data visualization schematically abstracts information to bring about a deeper understanding of the data, wrapping it in an element of awe. While the practice of visually representing information is arguably the foundation of all design, a newfound fascination with data visualization has been emerging.
Matthew E. May
Aug 11, 2009
We all know what our customers want. We’re confident that we understand the problem. We look at reams of marketing reports. We conduct the focus groups. We survey them. We have plenty of data. Guess what? It’s not enough. Data can only indicate facts.
Aug 7, 2009
Sunday Business analyzed new data from the American Time Use Survey to compare the 2008 weekday activities of the employed and unemployed. The comparison may seem obvious, but differences in time spent by these two groups can be striking.
Suzanne Kapner
Aug 4, 2009
After years of calling the shots, the traditional Mad Men of advertising -- the creative types who cooked up memorable sell-lines like "the ultimate driving machine" -- are increasingly sharing the spotlight with, you guessed it, the nerds. Or as Jon Bond, a co-founder of Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, which has done work for Target and Panasonic, says, "If we were in India, it would be as if the untouchables had suddenly become the ruling class."
What has allowed the lowly quants to sit at the same table as the advertising Brahmin is a new way of thinking about the creation of desire.
Doug Sherrets
Aug 3, 2009
Twitter cofounders have talked about the importance of discovery in interviews and at conferences over the last several months. This week a new design for Twitter.com went live featuring top tweets and a search box to find more of what you want, but Twitter and many other web companies could improve discovery much more by incorporating other players’ data.
James Urquhart
Aug 2, 2009
Nick Carr's classic vision of cloud computing, The Big Switch, spent a lot of time exploring the evolution of the electric utilities in the early part of the 20th century. That history is a powerful one, and one that shows the true value that can be derived from centralized generation and distribution of a critical commodity.
However, some have taken electricity as an analogy to cloud adoption to an extreme, and declared that there will be a massive and sudden shift from corporate data centers to entirely external cloud computing environments--public cloud utilities, if you will. They are wrong, and the reason why they are wrong can be captured in a single simple statement.
Data is not electricity.
Jul 27, 2009
Dawn Pabst hates the wait for a pizza delivery. So after she orders a pepperoni pizza from the Domino's website, she never waits.
She tracks.
The Air Force technician from Las Vegas tracks the second-by-second status of her pizza via colorful, thermometer-like gauges at Dominos.com. She's one of millions of customers who monitor everything from order accuracy to the moment their pizza is prepped, baked, boxed or sent for delivery. Pabst says she even tracks the name of the person who bakes her pizza.
Simon Dumenco
Jul 27, 2009
Why should we fear Google? There's an easy, obvious answer to that, particularly if you're a media or marketing person: because Google is killing us. It is, duh, blatantly steamrollering the business models of countless business sectors, from Madison Avenue to print media. (Despite all the Bing hype, it appears that Microsoft's refreshed search engine -- er, decision engine -- isn't making a dent in Google's dominance.) Annoyingly, it's a cute monopoly -- with a cute logo, a cute motto ("Don't be evil"), cute executives and a cute corporate culture -- that bewitches a lot of people into somehow doubting that it's a monopoly, and prompts even otherwise cynical media people to be unnecessarily polite about it.
Jul 27, 2009
Stick around for seven or more decades and you're apt to become the focal point of some stereotypes before you're done. In the case of today's 65-and-older consumers, though, the problem is that the stereotypes of frail-and-lonely ancients are more creaky than the people to whom they're applied. And it doesn't help matters that baby boomers talk loudly about being poised to transform the nature of old age, as if it has heretofore been unchanged dating back to the Stone Age. Looking at some survey data on 65-plusers, and hearing from people professionally engaged in understanding and marketing to this cohort, we get a clearer picture of how older Americans see themselves and the advertising that's aimed (or, often, misaimed) at them.
Joshua Porter
Jul 21, 2009
I love this quote I read recently: The plural of anecdote is not data.
Suw Charman-Anderson wrote this in reference to a story published last week about a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report on teen’s use of technology. The report got tons of press from the likes of Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the Guardian.
Jul 20, 2009
Your users, employees, consumers and donors are obsessed with data now. Are you helping them solve their knowledge problem? Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn't do a thing about it is beyond me.
Scott Morgan
Jul 16, 2009
Budgets continue to be slashed. Brands are disappearing. Media is getting more fragmented. The only thing getting bigger is our federal deficit. So as a marketer, how do you capitalize on a world that is getting smaller in so many respects?
Jul 14, 2009
The final panel at Friday's CrunchUp focused on the phenomenon of real-time, featuring a high-profile panel complete with representatives from Google, Microsoft, TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Seesmic, FriendFeed, Stanford University and a pair of venture capitalists. The discussion ranged from the opinion that real time was simply yet another feature, or a revolution in terms of application and Web service development, while the panelists discussed revenue opportunity or how large companies would try and control the data from being shared with competition.
Jul 1, 2009
If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.
Jun 30, 2009
Steve Rubel, long a maven of PR and the new media, is now committing his life to digital memory.
To the right, Steve's diagram of how various media will work to capture and communicate the fine details of his professional life.
In a couple of centuries, this may make him our Samuel Pepys, a man who speaks for us all when someone comes to see what it was like in and around 2009.
Jun 23, 2009
Apple's "Wall of Applications" developed for its recent developer conference did more to demonstrate the breadth and scale of its applications than any single static ad ever could. It's a great example of the power of data as a compelling form of communication. In Apple's case, it's all about the scale of the information to signify the size of the ecosystem.
Jun 23, 2009
The Obama administration's most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. Are you searching for a Food and Drug Administration report that used to be obtainable only through the Freedom of Information Act? Just a mouseclick away. Need National Institutes of Health studies and school testing scores? Click. Census data, nonclassified Defense Department specs, obscure Securities and Exchange Commission files, prison statistics? Click click. Click. Click.
Mark McClusky
Jun 23, 2009
On June 6, 2008, Veronica Noone attached a small sensor to her running shoes and headed out the door. She pressed start on her iPod and began keeping track of every step she took. It wasn't a long run—just 1.67 miles in 18 minutes and 36 seconds, but it was the start of something very big for her.
Jun 22, 2009
Customer databases, which cull years of spending and behavioral information to try to boost conversion and revenue, have long been a staple for marketers in industries such as travel, hospitality, retail and financial. But what happens when a massive disruption -- say, a meltdown of the economy -- alters consumer behavior so dramatically that it renders historical data useless?
Scott Morrison
Jun 16, 2009
Micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter Inc. hasn't figured out how to make money, but that hasn't stopped Web giants Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. from racing to establish real-time search capabilities. The growth of Twitter has fueled expectations that real-time search could drive Internet advertising to new heights by allowing marketers to target relevant ads at consumers interested in breaking events, hot topics or their favorite celebrities. Some proponents argue real-time data and search could develop into a billion-dollar market.
Jun 2, 2009
On a recent Thursday, Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management, was sequestered in his SoHo office. He wasn’t scrutinizing a television ad or images from a photo shoot. He was combing through graphs and Excel spreadsheets.
From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.
Tomi T Ahonen
Jun 1, 2009
Our friend Peggy Ann Salz over at M Search Groove mentioned the diminshing utility of using demographics in marketing segmentation and targeting. I wanted to return to this topic, and argue loud and clear, that the evidence is overwhelming, that we (marketing professional) have experienced in the past few years a total shift where customer demographics have gone from utility to futility. Yes, futility. They are now counter-productive. You, reading this blog, need to start to remove all references to demographics in all of your company marketing.
Stephen Baker
May 24, 2009
Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they're beginning to have about our online friendships.
May 18, 2009
It seems absolutely dumb to argue that while the quality of data used to make decisions is important, it is actually not that important to have the highest data quality.
Richard MacManus
May 15, 2009
I've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together three big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation I've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post I'll highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of my own.
May 15, 2009
Digital visualizer Aaron Koblin started his lecture at the 2009 OFFF in Lisbon with a quote from Bruce Schneier of the BBC: Data is the pollution of the information age. While it was a theme that seemed to be running through the OFF conference this wasn’t what he was going to talk about. He said while it’s important to be aware of the extreme abundance of data it’s ironic that his job is to use it. With the vast volume of data he argued that we can make insights that we never could have seen before. He said: “Data tells stories about our lives.”
Miguel Helft
May 11, 2009
Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google.
Al Ries
May 5, 2009
March Madness lasts only three weeks, but Metric Madness goes on all year long.
What is Metric Madness? It's the notion you can run anything by the numbers, and it's become the hottest concept in business today.
One scientist recently predicted that the great discoveries of the future will come from finding patterns in vast archives of data. "The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician, not a doctor."
The marketing community eats this stuff up. Nobody generates more data than they do. Hallelujah! "The Singularity is Near," as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book of the same name, and marketing people can't wait to join the revolution.
I'm not too sure.
May 4, 2009
A few weeks back I had asked this question on Twitter: Inspire me: If there is one web analytics question you want answered what would it be? What’s your juiciest / mundane, daily, challenge?
The result was this post: Top Web Analytics Questions, Twitter Edition.
Those 16 questions (!) were just one part of the story.
My twitter account is linked to my facebook account , so my tweets get posted as my status updates.
That means I got a bunch of questions on the facebook account as well. . . .
Jonathan Salem Baskin
May 4, 2009
If you're like most CMOs I know, you've probably got this love/hate thing going with digital media and reporting tools. On one hand, digital is a clarity engine, in that it demands by its very binary function the expression of "yes" or "no." Numbers are incontrovertibly numeric, so questions of who, what, where, when and why are limited to answers with the precision of how much. The "hate" side of our relationship with all things digital isn't that numbers are incomplete, it's that numbers have no inherent meaning -- which means that they're usually misunderstood or misused.
May 4, 2009
If you have spent any time on the Internet in the last few months, chances are you have clicked on a shortened link Web address.
URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years. The most popular service, TinyURL.com, was started in 2002 by a unicyclist named Kevin Gilbertson.
But the tools have soared in popularity recently, in part because of microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, where messages are limited in length and every character counts.
Apr 10, 2009
Apologies to residents of the Lower East Side; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and other hipster-centric neighborhoods. You are not as cool as you think, at least according to a new study that seeks to measure what it calls “the geography of buzz.”
Apr 9, 2009
Newspapers across the country may be scaling back to survive, but online video appears to be one area where they are expanding aggressively. An analysis of 187 U.S. newspaper Web sites by Web video provider Brightcove shows a surge in their video-related activity last year.
Apr 6, 2009
Consider, for a moment, what would happen if the identities, geographies and surfing histories of a large number of internet users suddenly became invisible. Yahoo and Google would not be able to target them with advertising based on demographics or behavior. Hulu would have a hard time blocking people from outside the U.S. from watching "30 Rock." The International Olympic Committee would not be able to sell different web rights in different countries. China wouldn't be able to censor YouTube. In short, much of the infrastructure of online advertising and international TV syndication -- let alone the ability of authoritarian regimes to control the web -- would break down.
Apr 6, 2009
Sprint Nextel is benching its CEO as pitchman in favor of hipper advertising. The Overland Park, Kan., telecom company is kicking off a new campaign Monday that highlights all the mobile Internet and data services that cellphone users can access on its network.
Grant McCracken
Mar 31, 2009
I suddenly realized my problem with aggregators. When I configure my feeds, I want just about everything.
Joe Marchese
Mar 31, 2009
For marketers and publishers of the social Web, design matters. Creative matters. Ideas matter. It is true that properly utilized data can drive better decision making, but it is also true that all the data in the world doesn't create innovation without interpretation, and data doesn't always lead to great design (especially when the data is about the wrong thing -- clicks, anyone?).
Mar 29, 2009
When it comes to analytics, few know the space like Avinash Kaushik, which is why we took your questions to him. He's the author of "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day," a prolific blogger at Occam's Razor and Google's analytics evangelist, where he proudly claims the tagline "Data-driven decision making uncomplexified."
Seth Godin
Mar 27, 2009
Why spend $10,000 to do a photo shoot for a magazine? After all, all your profit is in the ads.
Sometimes it seems like people who build websites and magazines that take the high road aren't paying any attention at all to conversion and revenue and manipulation.
Mar 26, 2009
Imagine that a company set up a mall store where, instead of selling trinkets, it sold information about customer behavior. For a few cents, it could tell a saleswoman at Nordstrom that the person who was about to walk in had already stopped at Steve Madden and was looking for red shoes. That is the idea behind two new Internet companies, BlueKai and eXelate Media, which run so-called behavioral exchanges. They do not sell products or ad space, but information about Web site visitors.
Greg Boustead
Mar 20, 2009
What do scientists read when they don’t think anyone is looking? Is it possible to anticipate emerging areas of research before they exist? If we could take a real-time snapshot of innovation, what would it look like? For the first time, we may now have some answers.
Garrick Schmitt
Mar 19, 2009
Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age.
Feb 20, 2009
Most companies will increase their investment in online marketing in 2009, but the ROI may be sketchy. Fewer than half (47%) of marketing professionals in North America and
the U.K. recently surveyed by Alterian reported that they currently use
analytics to measure online campaign results.
Feb 20, 2009
Last week I was speaking on a panel called
"Ask The SEOs" at SMX West. It's a fun panel that I'm lucky enough to
participate on at a lot of shows. The concept is very straightforward.
Put a handful of SEO experts on stage and give them two fewer
microphones than there are panelists and let the audience pepper them
with questions.
L. Gordon Crovitz
Feb 9, 2009
The essence of capitalism, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter
warned, is "creative destruction" that undermines economic structures,
then replaces them with better ones. Today we know all about
destruction. We could use a happy dose of the creative element. Welcome to TED.
Davis Thinking
