Digital Hive

If you want insights, you'll have to unclench

The always brilliant (and incredibly adorable) Alina Koyfman shared a fantastic New Yorker piece about where insights come from (download it below). In it writer Jonah Lehrer consults the leading scientists in the field and learns some startling, helpful things.

Most interesting to me: "the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation - the brain must be focused on the task at hand - transformed by accidental, serendipitous connection. We must concentrate, but we must concentrate on letting the mind wander."

I particularly enjoyed the reference to my favorite contemporary physicist, Richard Feynman, "who preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a topless bar where he would sip 7UP, watch the entertainment, and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins." (NOTE: it's not clear whether Feynman himself was topless or just the entertainers)

Lehrer at one point observes that the "clenched state of mind may inihibit the sort of creative connections that lead to insight breakthroughs." Particularly in today's economically challenging times where clients are cutting budgets and expecting us to do more with less, I think it's critical to learn how to unclench your mind, and unclench the minds of your team-mates. It's only when we're all unclenched that we can wander optimally to the biggest idea.

Download lehrer_insight_new_yorker1.pdf

Spreading random happiness - what a refreshing idea

Thanks to Cool Hunting for the tip about a groovy new site experience called You Look Great Today.

It's an incredibly simple concept: use one of the "thumbs up" visuals available on the site (see photo) to turn a run of the mill photo opp of someone into an endorsement of their hair, eyes, or overall attitude and appearance. Post the photo to the site to get others' opinions, and vote on their submissions. Digg/Facebook what you like, etc. (there's a full range of the usual content distribution options).

The creator of this concept is The Happy Corp; I can't exactly tell what The Happy Corp is (where is easier, Broome Street in NYC), but here's what they say they do: "Improving gross national happiness through the invention, management, and maintenance of progressive brands and ideas." (note to self: what a great positioning for an agency)

Happy Corp says YLGT is "dedicated to finding and capturing greatness in the wild." But what I found most interesting about this concept is the random positiveness of it:

Observe greatness. We often forget to tell our friends how bright they shine, let alone total strangers. Bedroom eyes, perfect smiles, clean hair, and sweet outfits. Together we decide what looks good. Who looks great today?

The un-self conscious positive energy of this idea really makes me smile. It strikes the right balance between sweetness and simplicity. It's not too too cloying (is the pepto pink too much?), neither is it too involving for either subject or submitter. A simple way to bring some positive energy into your life and others'.

Customer experiences that give people a stimulus (an excuse?) to spread positive energy around are (in my humble opinion) all too rare and particularly relevant in today's times of Wall Street meltdown, subprime mortgage hangover, Iraq debacle, falling dollar, etc. HELLO PEOPLE, time for a little positive energy. Would be a great idea for a brand to co-opt. (Kodak?)

Will be interesting to see how much traffic the concept generates.

Go out there and spread some happy, people!

The Land of Luxury?

Okay fashionistas and luxury brand fanatics – pop quiz: What brand comes to mind when I say Hamptons Signature Satchel? Bleeker Duffel? Heritage Stripe Tote?

Did you guess Coach? You smarty pants – you are correct.

Where do you think that Hamptons bag was made? Think again.

I have recently begun an arduous program of using every gift card, gift certificate and store credit I’ve ever been issued.  Reason number one being many of them will be eaten by their issuers at a charge of $2.50 to $5.00 per month if not used. I fear some companies may go out of business altogether, so hey – I’m shopping.

This weekend I was only up for one mall store visit so I chose Coach as I had a $100 gift card to burn. (That one has been hanging around for a while because there is not much at Coach in the $100 price range.) Now I need another handbag like I need another arm, but one cannot let gift cards evaporate.

To spare myself the agony known as retail clerks, I hit the website and made my selection on line, carefully memorizing the name of the product.  “I would like the Hamptons Signature Tote Capacity Wristlet in black please” I practiced in the mirror.

Luck was on my side because as I entered the store I spied the exact item hanging on the front wall. I snatched it up and walked directly to the register. To wait in line. Ugh. The economy may be struggling, but not, apparently, in the luxury leather goods market.

A young woman with a palm pilot-like device approached asked if I’d found what I was looking for as she tapped some information into the device. I showed her my selection and proudly declared “I would like the Hamptons Signature Tote Capacity Wristlet in black please.” “Yes,” she sniffed, “I got that.”  I don’t think I received an ounce of credit for memorizing the name. I was informed that someone would be out with my bag shortly and directed to pay the young woman behind the register.

I paid up and then wandered the store for 5 minutes until someone in the back room wrapped the bag in tissue, applied a sticker and delivered it to me out front. I perused the featured bags ranging in price from $798 to $7000. Yikes, step away from the display table. Before I could do any damage fortune smiled and a young lady stepped from the back room and called my name. I grabbed my bag and ran.

When I got home I unwrapped my new bag and when I finished removing the Coach branded tissue from inside the bag I found an interesting surprise – a country of origin label. MADE IN CHINA. Are you kidding me?

For all of the counterfeit goods seizures in the news, Coach sent its patterns to China? I bought a $98 thingy and it wasn’t even made here? I dragged out a few bags from my luxury closet (okay, a basket in the regular closet) to see where they were made. Prada: made in Italy. Groom: made in Paris. Il Bisonte: made in Italy. Coach, what are you thinking?

Is a luxury brand still a luxury brand if the country of origin is better known for counterfeit luxury goods?

Operators are standing by and I’m dying to learn your opinions on this one.

You've been warned: the internet is evil!

I came across an interesting WSJ.com interview with author Lee Siegel I wanted to share.

The WSJ summarizes the premise of Siegel's new book (pictured here):

"In his new book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Mr. Siegel [a cultural critic and senior editor at the New Republic] rails against the worst aspects of the Web, which he views as a vehicle for commerce that devalues serious thought in favor of 'page views.' The Web, he suggests, nourishes a youth-focused culture that prefers gossip and buzz to reporting."

Well that got my attention.

The Q&A which follwed in the article (Qs from the Journal's Jeffrey Trachtenberg) reveals more of the author's thinking, much of which seems pretty far out of touch with how we are seeing people use the web:

"WSJ: Is it possible that you've overstated the significance of the Internet mob in dumbing down daily life?

"Mr. Siegel: I don't think so. You can see the leveling of culture in every aspect of culture. You have a situation now where the audience is so exalted and catered to that at the end of a Broadway play you will have the actors applauding for the audience, and the audience will take a bow. That's the power of the Internet, where consumers are seen to have such powers that they must be heeded. What this masks is a crude commercial pitch. Getting people to participate is just a way of getting people to consume (emphasis added)."

This is the same line of reasoning which would tell voters to stay home on Super Tuesday because it's rude to demand they be heard.

I must ask, why is this phenomenon bad? Haven't marketers been in complete control of their interactions with consumers for quite long enough? We think it's about time that consumers had a say in the relationship, indeed started to drive it. We love the internet because it levels the playing field.

Also, I think more than ever before participation is culture - people have many more ways to touch and feel what's happening in the world, and share it. Yes that could result in a purchase of some kind, but quite often it results in a non-commercial action like sharing an opinion or discovering someone you can relate to and learn from. There is a way for participation to be a good thing, and the internet makes it possible.

Siegel continues: "Popular culture has given way to popularity culture. Popular culture draws people to what they like. Popularity culture and Web culture draws people to what everybody else likes. It used to be that Big Brother is watching. Now it's Big Brother is watching, oh, really, when, and how can he watch more? Big Brother, what's his cellphone number?"

I see the author's point here - but is the web a driver of this phenomenon (culpable for creating in) or merely instrumental in its spread (an enabler of what people want)? I would argue that the web is to be commended for enabling people to take their passions and interests (regardless of what they are) to a new level.

Many find the web's bounty overwhelming, and thus "shortcut" to the choices their friends make (in buying a new product or selecting a hotel for a trip, for example). The web creates a problem in offering too much choice. But this is a good problem, and preferable to having less choice.

We love the internet because instead of forcing people to think one way or another, it gives them many more choices and options, with the added advantage of perspective from their friends, peers, even experts. If it's done nothing else, the web has given the consumer much more control (and choice) than ever before (not less!), and therefore the ability to reach better decisions. What they choose to do with their newfound choice is up to them. If they choose to like the same thing, that's their right.

"My book is really about what it means to be online. The Internet is the first social environment created for the asocial individual. There is no signal of a real presence: not a voice not a face. Just words on a screen."

To this I can only say - bollocks. Ask any teenage what MySpace means in their lives (or Facebook) and you won't be able to shut them up - it's their entire universe, it's how they express themselves to their peers, it's how they experiment with aspects of their evolving identities. Or, check out the stories patients share with each other on illness discussion boards. The web is not just a real presence that morphs and evolves to reflect the user's life, it's a whole new dimension for expressing yourself and connecting to others.

If you have a WSJ.com subscription, check out the video accompanying the article. If you don't, download the article: Download author_qa_wsj.com.pdf

"Reality marketers": paparazzi for hire

A recent Time magazine article details a disturbing new extension of paparazzi mania - hiring your own personal faux paparazzi. I suppose this evolution is logical in a world where pop culture's favorite lens magnet Britney Spears has selected a paparazzo as her new paramour.

The website for one of the new enterprises capitalizing on this trend (Celeb 4 a day) offers "your very own paparazzi experience" in Austin, TX, LA and San Francisco - including a mocked up publication with your photo on the cover (see example). Britain's Personal Paparazzi offers similar services but a tad tamer - they appear to specialize in taking photos of guests at parties which are then uploaded (the photos, not the guests) to a photo hosting site for later access.

According to Time, "The trend is driven by the twin obsessions with chronicling one's life and experiencing fame. 'We live in a culture where if it's not documented, it doesn't exist,' says Josh Gamson, a University of San Francisco professor of sociology who studies culture and mass media. 'And if you don't have people asking who you are, you're nobody.' University of Pennsylvania sociologist David Grazian, who wrote On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, calls personal paparazzi reality marketers, who make the act of being photographed more meaningful than the actual photos. 'The goal isn't to produce a product,' he says. 'It's to heighten the experience of the event. In that sense, there doesn't even need to be any film in the camera.' "

Interestingly, comments on the ONTD page where I noticed a posting about this (having seen it originally in Time's latest print edition) nicely illustrate society's collective ambivalence about this phenomenon - half are asking where this service can be bought (and if there's a budget version), and half note how sick it is.

I can't help but be struck by this phenomenon's resemblance to the broader trend we've seen in marketing - the most successful brands are no longer stalking their consumers paparazzi-like with a long lens, they're being invited in by people who want to experience the brand, share it with their friends, etc (without paying the brand, but offering an exchange of their time and attention).

On a more tactical level, I wonder how we can harness this manufactured desire for pop culture validation with big creative marketing ideas. Certainly recent campaigns which let you get your photo or text message onto a huge digital display in Times Square are an obvious step in this direction, as are the perennial promotions offering prizes to live like a star for a day (perhaps with an actual star in tow), but I haven't yet seen a brand thoroughly embrace this trend. Is there a way to translate this phenomenon into a more powerful marketing platform?

At minimum we could paparazzi people as a prize?

Politics unusual - Bloomberg for President

I saw an interesting poll in the online WSJ today (click at left to enlarge) - about Bloomberg potentially running for president. Now we all know WSJ readers are NOT a nationally representative sample of likely voters, so take this with a grain of salt, but I was intrigued to notice that the largest % of respondents (38%) want Bloomberg to enter the race and are likely to vote for him (or so they say).

I find it fascinating that this independently wealthy mayor of New York is so well regarded for a bigger role, without much of a national stage track record. He's Giuliani with a fortune and without the 9/11 halo, right?

Perhaps this is just an extension of the Fred Thompson mania earlier this year - when an undeclared candidate was near the top of the polls. I'm not sure if this indicates general malaise with the "products" officially on offer at this point (Giuliani, Romney, Hilary, etc.) or people really really love Bloomberg or what.

Thoughts?

Digitas planning is famous!

Check out this great Huffington Post blog posting by our very own George Scribner!

His thesis is very compelling: the Internet is now the most trusted medium for news.

"In a world where you have to consult and cross-reference multiple sources to decide what's true about anything (whether it be a news event, a mutual fund, or a movie), the Internet is the best -- and only -- medium that allows one to do this."

A highly worthwhile read.

What planners can learn from criminal profilers

On a recent transcontinental flight I was catching up on recent issues of the New Yorker and discovered a very interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the November 12th issue.

We've all heard about criminal profiling - the process of using factoids about an unknown criminal to get into the offender's mind and motivation in order to capture him or her. I'm interested in profiling because it's so often been likened to account planning (interestingly, an APG conference about 10 years ago had a leading criminal profiler as a guest presenter).

Gladwell's article is a fascinating read for anyone who likes puzzles and problem solving. It was particularly interesting to me because it debunks the credibility of the long-worshiped craft of profiling - and therefore raises some issues about how we planners pursue our craft.

He reveals: "In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That's just 2.7 per cent." Clearly profiling has gotten more credit than it's due.

He cites a number of specific failings of profilers' typical techniques. First off - vagueness which masks a lack of logic and rigor. He writes about a number of investigations where the profile - compiled by an "expert" - was ill-defined, and outright wrong, in part because the profiler relied too heavily upon intuition rather than facts.

A key driver for error: incorrectly ascribing motivation to action. He quotes Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the FBI's approach: "The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons. You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn't want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behavior in isolation."

Unlike criminal profilers, we planners aren't solving crimes, and our role is seldom a matter of life and death. And it doesn't inspire Big Ideas to quote facts - using our imaginations and being playful help us to inspire the team. But we need to strike the right balance of inspiration and information. So we have something to learn here.

First off, rigor is critical. We can't just pontificate and make stuff up, we must study consumers to truly understand why they do what they do. Second, we need to be careful when assuming what rationale is driving a behavior; that's why we blended behavior and attitude in our recent WebDotDigitas work. Finally, we need to constantly track how successfully our impressions of consumer motivation translate into in-market results - and continually improve our approaches. This means paying attention to measurement results and thinking about how we can use them to improve the work.

You can download a PDF of the article here: Download malcolm_gladwell_dangerous_minds.pdf

ad:tech NY - some interesting tidbits

I attended part of ad:tech NY last week and learned some great stuff.

Marc Landsberg, President of Arc Worldwide, shared an interesting case about how to engage consumers online with a high consideration purchase. 500 days before the launch of the new Fiat 500, the marketing for the vehicle began, with the creation of a social community, members of which could vote on colors of the vehicles, develop their own customized designs, etc. This consumer engagement translated into major business impact, specifically an increase in pre-orders and desire to visit a dealer. I found an interesting NYT article with more details about this interesting case.

Social networks mean different things in different cultures (kind of a no brainer, but a helpful reminder). In Spain, for example, people don't disclose as much about themselves, which makes "friending" a different experience. If you violate the local norms, you can't build a successful social network. Another interesting cultural nuance - in Africa, the most popular digital download is love poems.

Mobile was another hot topic. Panelists agreed the future of mobile content is digital and local. And it will continue to evolve as an expression of identity and way to transact.

Across mobile technologies, the biggest human challenge we are helping consumers with is overcoming loneliness. Kind of a profound human insight, if you stop and think about it. It's always good to keep in mind the human need we are addressing.

I discovered a new phrase - "brand browsing" - a catchier way of talking about the consideration phase of the purchase funnel.

NY's Jonathan Adams spoke on a great panel (moderated by TNS/Cymfony's Jim Nail) about social media and consumer generated content (a few days ago I posted the MySpace research "NeverEnding Friending" that several of the panelists discussed). Really exciting to learn about how the use of WOM is super-charging the performance of campaigns, and how measurement has finally developed a way to isolate the performance of the WOM element.

Finally, as always it was a pleasure to see Arianna Huffington speak. And interesting to note how she consistently focuses any question onto Huffington Post's key points - this is the second time I saw her this month, and she's a remarkable spokesperson for her brand. The 3-way joke also killed - again.

Introducing WebDotDigitas - a proprietary take on how people use the internet

Earlier this year we undertook our first ever proprietary research about internet consumers: WebDotDigitas.

There's a lot of great research out there about how folks behave online. But the approaches we reviewed all either took a behavioral approach, or an attitudinal one. The two approaches were never combined.

We had a strong hypothesis that online users with similar behaviors may well have very different motivations. And that people with the same attitudes might behave very differently. At minimum, we thought we could generate deeper, actionable insights about online consumers if we considered the 2 together. So we took a unique approach with WebDotDigitas - we evaluated internet users with a combination of attitude and behavior, for the first time ever (we believe).

We partnered with Compete to get detailed online behavioral data on 3,000 online consumers - the top 700 sites they visit, along with page views and session length. We then surveyed those consumers to better understand their expectations, attitudes and desires. We assessed the data in aggregate, and also developed 6 segments of internet users.

You can download the white paper Tina Bronkhorst wrote about the study here: Download WebDotDigitas.pdf

Some of the key findings:

• Online behavior significantly impacts overall brand experience and attitude; it's not a separate experience for the consumer
• Nearly 40% of online users would prefer to sample a product before buying it
• 8 out of 10 people forward emails on, to an average of 10 people; the most forwarded emails aren't about sales/coupons, they're about humor and inspiration
• About half of internet users say they've never read a blog - but their behavioral data reveals they've been regularly visiting sites like TypePad
• About half of internet users still have a very functional relationship with the internet - they don't surf, they don't do social networking, they use the internet for tasks like banking and travel planning, and some of them don't even like the 'net very much

By examining behavior and attitude together, we truly deepened our understanding of how and why people use the internet. We now know that users' online time and tenure (time online) tell only part of the story - users' attitudes and expectations also provide important insight into their motivations, and help us segment users into actionable segments.

As consumers increasingly use digital channels to learn about and interact with brands, it is critical that brands understand more about their audiences than just where they go online, and how much time they spend there. To be successful, they need to understand and deliver upon online users' expectations, and enable their behaviors and preferences - for example, the expectations to be able to sample a product before buying, and their desire to share humorous and inspirational content with their friends.

We are now preparing wave II of WebDotDigitas - let us know if you have hypotheses you'd like to test.