December 2009 Entries

Published today in MediaPost's Search Insider

It's probably because I'm just finishing a book (The Stuff of Thought) by famed linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, but grammar has been on my mind more than usual lately. And in particular, I was fascinated by how we use Google in our language. Google, of course, has been "genericided" - the fate that falls on brands that lose their status as a protected brand name and become a generic term in our vocabulary. This causes much chagrin with Google's legal and marketing team. What is more interesting however is the way we've taken Google into our lexicon.

Of Nouns and Verbs

Most brands, when they get incorporated into our language, become nouns. Kleenex, aspirin, escalators, thermoses and zippers all went down similar paths on the road to becoming common terms that described things. It might interest you to know, for instance, that in Japan, staplers are known as Hotchkisses (or technically, hochikisu). Google, however, is different. The word Google doesn't replace the noun "search engine," it replaced the act of searching. We made googling a verb. And that is a vital difference. We don't call all search engines Google. But we do refer to our act of searching as googling.

More than this, we made Google a transitive verb - "I googled it". That means I (the subject) used Google (the verb) to do something with it (the object). Pinker says the way we use words betrays the way we think about the world. Verbs are the lynchpins of our vocabulary, because we use them to explain how we interact with our physical world. And transitive verbs, in particular, act as connectors between us and the world. I once said that search was the connector between intent and content. The enshrining of Google as a verb reflects this. The act of googling connects us with information.

Sampling the Outside World through Google

But the use of Google as a transitive verb also gives us a glimpse into how we regard the gathering of the content we Google. Transitive verbs tend to reflect a transfer from the outside to the inside, a consumption of the external, either physically or through our senses: I drank it, I ate it, I saw it, I heard it, I felt it. In that sense, their use is personal and fundamental.  "I googled it" gives us a sense of metaphorical transference - the consumption of information.

So, what does this mean? If you look at the role of our language, there is something of fundamental importance happening here. Language is our collection of commonly accepted labels that allow us to transfer concepts from our heads into the heads of others. These labels are not useful unless they mean the same thing to everyone. When I say thermos, you know instantly what I mean. Your visualization of it might be slightly different than mine (a Batman thermos from grade 5 is the image that I currently have) but we can be confident that we're thinking about the same category of item. We have a shared understanding.

Speaking a Common Language

This need for commonality is the threshold that new words must cross before they become part of common language. This means that critical mass becomes important. Enough of us have to have the same concept in our heads when we use the same label before that label becomes useful. Generally, when technology introduces a concept that we have to find a new label for, we try a few variations on for size before we settle on one that fits. Common usage is the deciding vote.

With things like new products, the dominant brand has a good chance of becoming the commonly used label. Enough of us have experience with the brand to make it a suitable stand in for the product category. We all know what’s meant by the word escalator. And new product categories creep up fairly regularly, forcing us to agree on a common label. In the last decade or two, we've had to jam a lot of new nouns in our vocabulary: ATM's, fax, browser, Smartphones, GPS, etc. Few of these categories have had enough single brand domination to make that brand the common label. Apple has probably come the closest, with iPod often substituting for MP3 player.

The material nature of our world means that we're forever adding new nouns to our vocabulary. There are always new things we have to find words for. That's why one half of all the entries in the Oxford dictionary are nouns. The odds of a brand name becoming a noun are much greater, simply because the frequency is higher. And by their nature, nouns live apart from us. They are objects. We are the subjects.

The Rarity of a Verb

But verbs are different. Only one seventh of dictionary entries are verbs. Verbs live closer to us. And the introduction of a new verb into our vocabulary is a much rarer event. This makes the critical mass threshold for a verb more difficult to pass than for a noun. First of all, enough of us have to do the action to create the need for a common label. Secondly, it's rare for one brand to dominate that action so thoroughly. The birth of googling as a verb is noteworthy simply because so many of us were doing something new at the same place.

Why did I share this linguistic lesson with you? Again, it's because so many of us are doing something at the same place. New verbs emerge because we are doing new things. We do new things because something drives us to do them. That makes it a fundamental human need. And to have that fundamental human need effectively captured by one brand - to the point that we call the act by the brand's name - offers a rare opportunity to catalogue human activity in one place. One of the most underappreciated aspects of search marketing is the power of search logs to provide insight into human behavior. That's what my first column of 2010 will be about.

And, just to leave you with a tidbit for next week, currently another brand name is on the cusp of becoming a verb (although it's exact proper form is still being debated). The jury is still being assembled, but Twitter could be following in Google's footsteps.

What happens when information swamps our common myths? What happens to humans when facts overtake commonly shared fantasies?

In yesterday's post, I started by looking at how our culture might be moving too quickly for myths to keep up. This is important because human's have historically used myths to create a "oneness" of mind. Myths often come bundled with behavioral codes and societal rules. Myths have dictated how we should think and act. Myths rule the mob.

But in the last century, one sweeping technical advance had two very different impacts on two different parts of our world. Today, I want to examine the impact of TV in North America and Communist Russia.

The Death of Mythology in America

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam noticed that American values did an abrupt u-turn somewhere in the middle of the 60's. After a decades long trend of increasing participation in community activities, Americans stopped spending time together. They went to church less often, belonged to fewer service organizations, attended fewer PTA meetings, stopped having dinner parties, stopping playing Bridge with the neighbors and quit their bowling leagues. Not coincidentally, the percentage of voter turnout in elections also started to drop. Americans, once the most intensely community minded people on earth, stopped spending time with each other.

This trend didn't make American's bad people, however. At the same time that American's became less concerned about the well being of their immediate community, they became more concerned about universal issues such as civil rights, equality of women, international piece, religious persecution, sexual intolerance, freedom of speech and nuclear disarmament. At the same time we were becoming less engaged with our communities we were becoming more open minded and tolerant in our ideologies.

The chart shown, from the BuyerSphere Project, provides one hint about why this mental about face may have happened in the middle of the 60's:

As you can see, the 50's and 60's were also the decades where most of us brought TV into our homes. In 1950, only about 12% of American homes had TV. By 1960, that number had exploded to 78%. This meant we spent more time in our homes, which naturally meant we spent less time outside the home, interacting with others. That alone might explain our withdrawal from our communities. But a simple reckoning of where we spend our time wouldn't explain the ideological blossoming of America. I believe it was more than just where we were spending our time. I believe it was what we were spending our time doing. As we viewed the world through a flickering blue screen, our common myths were being slowly but surely destroyed.

Myths rely on an absence of information. Myths depend on a singular point of view, supported by carefully chosen and disseminated information, in the guise of facts. The more singular the culture, the more important it is to carefully restrict the flow of information. Societies where there are strict codes of behavior and adherence to one ideology have the tightest censorship rules and the most virulent propaganda.

The Myth of the American Dream

While America in the first half of the 20th century was philosophically a democratic, pluralistic society, it was, in practice, a culture heavily bound by commonly held myths. In 50 years, America was rocked by two world wars and a decade long economic crisis. Well over half of these 50 years was spent united against a common enemy and sharing in common hardships. We were sustained by our mythologies - the importance of hard work, the ultimate rightness of democracy, the ultimate wrongness of tyranny, the ideal of the American dream. Our channels of information carefully supported these myths and filtered out dissenting facts. Even in the 50's, the imagined spectre of Communism helped us maintain a common mythology, leading to McCarthyism and other irrational behaviors.

But in the 60's, the electronic window of television provided a new channel of information. The history of television typically runs a similar path wherever it plays out. In the beginning, it is a tightly restricted channel that offers governments and other power structures an unprecedented opportunity to build and strengthen common mythologies through controlled programming and propaganda. But, over time, the leash on TV programming inevitably gets loosened. It's difficult to keep too tight a reign on a communication medium that travels freely over the airwaves. The common mythological view gives way to a pluralistic, fragmented pipeline of information. We see other realities, other ideologies, other cultures. As awareness seeps into our collective consciousness, our myths start to die. Our "oneness" gets fragmented across multiple ideological and sociological lines.

This, I believe, is what happened to us, starting in the 60's. Television forever changed how we looked at the world. TV provided the lens through which we lost our innocence, discovering other truths beyond the American mythology. Putnam also cites TV as one of the factors that eroded our social capital. I suspect it played a bigger part than even he imagined.

The Death of Mythology in the USSR

If the effect of TV was earth shaking in a democratic America, at least it appears that most of our institutions will survive the transition. Our governments are essentially built on the same foundations they were a century ago. The same was not true for Communist Russia. There, the very structures of government crumbled along with their myths.

In the analysis of the decline and fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union, the role of television has only been mentioned in passing, but the timeline of the introduction of TV and the decline of the Soviet Communist government are suspiciously aligned. State controlled TV was introduced in the Soviet Union at roughly the same time as in North America (just before World War II) but its spread was delayed by the war. Also, the saturation rate of TV in the Soviet Union lagged far behind America. In 1960, when 78% of Americans had a set in their homes, only 5% of the Soviet population could watch TV. It wasn't until the mid 80's that over 90% of Soviets could watch TV. This coincided almost exactly with the introduction of glasnost (transparency, openness and freedom of information) and perestroika (a restructuring of government) by Mikhail Gorbachev. Demands for more openness and freedom moved in lock step with the adoption of TV and the lessening of restrictions on programming.

If the pervasiveness of myths was an important factor in the history of America, the very mythology of Communism was the foundation of Soviet history. History was literally rewritten to make sure that available information aligned with the mythology currently in vogue. And this mythology, the utopia of Communist ideology and the depravity of capitalism (myths that run directly counter to our western ones) kept the emotions of Soviets aligned for the first 60 years. But just like their American counterparts, TV provided Soviets with a glimpse of reality beyond the mythology. There were other channels of information that began to erode faith in the myths. The speed of TV surpassed the durability of the myths. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Accelerated Demise of Our Myths

The decline of our myths started with the introduction of TV, but the fragmentation of our ideologies and realities has been accelerated dramatically by the Internet. We are bombarded by information, much of which comes to us through unedited, unrestricted channels. The Internet is a massive organic hotbed of differing opinions from millions of different voices. Myths can hardly hope to survive in such an environment.

My original question was: what happens when information strips away our myths, along with the social codes embedded in them? What happens when our common views are shattered into billions of different fragments? If the introduction of TV caused the social fabric of America to unravel and the Soviet empire to crumble, what will the digital onslaught of information do?

What indeed?

We've been in transition for a long time. And it's starting to wear us down.

Cognitive anthropologist Bob Deutsch had a column this morning that talked about the crisis of time we're all experiencing in our lives. It seems we're always rushing to do something. In the column, Bob had a paragraph that jumped out at me:

Myth-Beggoten

His line - 'between mythologies" - was particularly interesting. Humans are animals that need to share a lot of things. We are herding animals and this need to herd drives much of our behavior. We look for commonalities and feel more comfortable when we find them. It gives us a sense of belonging that is very important. And myths are an essential part of that formula.

For our entire history, our shared acceptance of myths has united us. Myths govern our view of the world. They are the tools we have invented to explain the unexplainable. But, one by one, science and technology have stripped down our myths and thrown them into question. Myths come from the deeper, darker recesses of our brain, down in the subcortical regions of our neural basement. They don't stand up very to the cold hard light of rational reasoning. And increasingly, we are forced to be reasonable about the things in our life. Information drives us towards reason, and we have more information thrown at us than ever before.

Moral Reinforcement

Myths also served another purpose. They gave us rules to govern our behavior. Most of our myths were religious in nature and came with a corresponding code of social behavior. The basic rules of herd survival,  including fairness and reciprocal altruism, were baked into the package. That's why a variation of the Golden Rule is found in every single religion in the world.

But, when the myths start to break down, what happens to the rules of behavior that came bundled with them? We start to get confused. Things start to become disconnected.

The Atheist Next Door

There's a mix up of cause and effect that we struggle with when we talk about things like religion. Even if we renounce our religion, we don't suddenly become evil people. Just because atheists don't believe in God doesn't mean they've freed themselves from the obligation to do right  by their fellow man.  In fact, if you had to pick someone to be your neighbor, an atheist wouldn't be a bad choice. Statistically speaking, the percentage of atheists in prison is far less than the percentage of atheists in the general population. Atheists are also less likely to get divorced. When you look at the types of behavior that govern the continuance of social harmony, atheists have a far better track record than most segments of the population.  Religion doesn't cause morality. Morality superseded religion. You could say morality begat religion. Unfortunately, a lot of the less noble instincts of our species also got tied up in the whole religious bundle - including the tendency of humans belonging to different herds to try to kill each other.

But when our myths, including religion, start to slip away under the scrutiny of rationalization, we start to feel cut out from the herd. We start to become disconnected from our sense of "oneness". We still try to do the right thing, but the reason why isn't as clear as it once was. If we stop to think about it, we can come up with a Dawkinesque rationalization using things like game theory and "tit for tat" reciprocal strategies, but it was a whole lot easier just to believe that God would smite us if we weren't nice. The fact is, we don't take much time in our lives to "stop and think." We cruise through live 95% of the time on emotional autopilot and myths are great guidance systems for emotions.

Myth-drift

So, back to Deutsch's point. What happens as we drift between mythologies? The Pew Forum on Public Life and Religion has shown that the percentage of "non religious" people in America has grown from just over 7% in 1990 to over 16% in 2007. What is perhaps even more telling is to see how that group breaks down. Only 1.6% were atheists and 2.4% agnostics. These are the ones who were, to some degree, proactive about severing their ties with an accepted mythology. 12.1% were simply drifting away from their mythologies. They were wandering out there, beyond the idealogical boundaries of the herd.

Deutsch talks abut the increasing pace of our lives being the culprit in our sense of disconnection. And, in that drive to do more in less time, we tend to sample life in little commoditized chunks. Ironically, in the same email that continued the link to Deutsch's article was a sidebar with the top 10 franchises of 2009, courtesy of Entrepreneur magazine:

Top 10 Franchises Of 2009
    1.    Subway
    2.    McDonald's
    3.    7-Eleven
    4.    Hampton Inn/ Hampton Inn & Suites
    5.    Supercuts
    6.    H & R Block
    7.    Dunkin' Donuts
    8.    Jani-King
    9.    Servpro
    10.    am/pm Mini Market

It was a fitting echo to Deutsch's words. The most successful businesses are the ones that slice off some aspect of our lives and serves it up to us fast and shrink wrapped, preferably at a cheap price.

I'm not so sure we are simply "between mythologies" as Bob Deutsch suggests.  I suspect we're moving too fast for myths to keep up. Myths, by their very nature, have to grow to critical mass to be effective. Historically, myths were the foundation for global religions. Today, myths are email strings that quickly get exposed on snopes.com. We deconstruct myths before they get a chance to gain enough traction to serve their purpose: uniting us in a common view. We have access to too much information for myths to stand much of a chance of survival. That's where I'll pick up in tomorrow's post.

We live in a heavily over retailed environment. We have a massive amount of real estate dedicated to consumerism. The question posed in a story today in the Wall Street Journal is an interesting one. As we shift more of our shopping online, what happens to our world, which resembles one massive shopping mall?

The Shift in Shopping

The fact is, we're forever changing the way we shop. We've had a discontinuous innovation in shopping. Online shopping gave us the ability to gather information, check opinions, compare features and find the best prices faster and more efficiently. Even if we go into a store to actually purchase, we go in armed with information that leads us directly to one item. We know more about what we're buying than the staff working in the store and we often have information in hand, printed from the web.

The entire strategy behind retail locations is quickly becoming irrelevant. The concept of the huge store that would surround us with compelling suggestions to buy is becoming less effective as we spend less time physically browsing and more time doing it virtually. The massive investment in the "consumer experience" is paying back fewer and fewer returns. This fact became painfully obvious when you look at the long list of retailed who were rocked by the recession. The news stories blamed the economy, but again, like so many things, the blame has to rest with our changing habits and behaviors. We just don't shop like we used to.

Taking It to the Streets

And if the desktop rocked our very notion of shopping, there's another, even bigger shift coming. Mobile computing, with it's ability to know where we are and even (through digital cameras) what we're looking at, will blow our previous concept of shopping into non existence. Our handheld devices will link virtual stores and the physical ones we're in. There's an iPhone app called Red Laser. It let's you scan UPC bar codes and then searches online destinations (at this point, just a few) to find the best price. As we speak, developers are working to tie that in with a shopping engine like Milo.com, which taps directly into the real time inventories of stores near you to bring back the best prices. We're literally weeks away from the ability to scan, send, retrieve and shop. While you sip a tall Chai Tea Latte, you could browse hundreds of locations in a 5 mile radius AND check out the best prices online. Can you feel the shopping malls crumbling around you?

RedLaser 2.0: Realtime iPhone UPC barcode scanning
Every time I bring up a discontinuous innovation fueled by technology, there are inevitably protests from those who desperately hold on to the tangible and experiential aspects of our lives. "We love shopping too much!" they protest. "The shopping mall will never die!" True..some of us love shopping too much to relegate it to an online search. But some of us don't. A lot of us don't. And when you think about the massive investment in shopping that's been made by retailers, you require a huge critical mass of shoppers to keep it going. The tide has shifted and it will wash away retailing as we know it.

The Shift in B2B

In my book, The BuyerSphere Project, I talked about something very similar happening in the B2B world. In our research, we found that approximately 60% of business buyers who buy regularly purchased items (toner cartridges, copy paper, office supplies, etc) would prefer to do so online. Yet, the physical infrastructure of the companies who sell these items still supports shopping methods that are rapidly dwindling in popularity - especially physical brick and mortar locations. When the C Suite talks about budget allocations, a huge percentage goes towards supporting these legacy outlets and a relatively tiny budget goes to the online channels. Our corporate priorities are totally screwed up, as the gap between how we do business and how our customers shop gets wider and wider.

It's not going to be pretty for retailers as they adjust to this new reality. They are just emerging from an economic gut punch and now they have to think about reinventing how they do business. I have no idea what the store of the future will look like. Perhaps more like the Sears catalog store of my childhood. All it was was a counter with a warehouse behind. You simply walked in and picked up your order. In those days, in rural Alberta, you did your shopping in the catalog. Funny, how everything old suddenly becomes new again.

Published today in Mediapost's Search Insider.

You're going the get the inevitable recap and prediction columns as the days of 2009 dwindle. I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the shift in marketing. It seems to me that there are three fundamental drivers of this shift. I'm going to spend today talking a little bit more about them, as I believe these are the bearing points we have to pay attention to.

Influence

It's somewhat odd, but for something as old as advertising, we still have remarkably little information about how it actually influences us. What are the exact buttons that are pushed by advertising? We've tried to come up with metrics that measure influence, like brand recall and affinity, but they have generally proven to have little to do with what we actually do in the real world. The ARF have been continuously pressing to introduce engagement as a new cross-channel metric, but the work of at least some academics have shown that even engagement might not be an indicative measure.  The whole question of subliminal influence has generally been pushed under the carpet because of the tainted perception going back to the '50s and Vance Packard.

But the fact is, as we learn more about the mind and how we really make decisions, we find that the role of advertising in influencing our purchases is perhaps not so clear as we first imagined. The ability to quantify influence still evades us, but the call for measurable and accountable advertising is louder than ever. As you move closer to the purchase, measurement becomes easier. But when you move backwards to the earlier influencers, the picture becomes much murkier. I think the trails we leave online will help shed light on influence, along with the explosion of research being done through new neuro-research methods.

Participation

Perhaps the biggest shift in the marketplace has been the balancing of George Akerlof's information asymmetry. We spend a lot of time talking about consumers being in control. I think this is taking it too far. What is true is that marketing is now about meeting the consumer halfway. Consumers have access to more information, not all of which is supplied by the manufacturer. Think of the difference between a church and a community hall to understand what the new marketplace looks like.  We have taken brands from behind the pulpit and forced them to sit down at a table and talk to us. This is new territory for the brands, as they learn that listening is at least as important as talking. Preaching has given way to participating. And when you think of it that way, this whole question of control becomes somewhat irrelevant. Do you control most of your conversations?

Intention

The last is a big one, and it has really driven digital marketing, particularly search. A consumer's intention has always been an overlooked part of most marketing programs. Intent was assumed but wasn't really integral to marketing strategies. The only place intent played a part was in directory advertising (such as the Yellow Pages) -- and when you're the only game in town, you don't have to spend much time refining the rules.

Search changed all that. We have become a "just in time" information economy, where intent drives huge volumes of very focused consumer activity as they gather required information. Harvesting intent at the end of the process has been relatively simple -- a good search placement and an effective landing page are all that's sometimes needed. It becomes much more difficult when intent is further removed from the end transaction. Intents can change as you move through a long consideration process, shifting from gathering information to checking prices to short-listing your alternatives to actually placing an order. Understanding intent and meeting it effectively are the challenges that separate the great search marketers from the bottom-feeders

These three drivers are the forces that are changing marketing. When I look at them for commonalities, one comes to mind: in each, we have to get better at knowing the people on the other side of the transaction. We have to spend more time understanding what influences our prospects' buying decisions, how we can participate effectively in the process and how we can help satisfy their intent. All of this depends on us getting to know our prospects better. It's not a "market"; it's dozens -- or hundreds, thousands or millions -- of individuals. And we have to learn to have conversations with each of them.

This will be a short post today because I rambled on longer than intended with yesterday's post about Dr. Robert Heath and how we process advertising.

Today I wanted to share an amazing example of how subliminal suggestion can work. Popular UK mentalist Derren Brown games two UK ad agency types (who doesn't love screwing with these agency wanks) by turning the tables on them through the power of subconscious priming. It's from a popular TV show, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but even allowing for some manipulative editing, the clip is startling.

My plan was to analyze the reasons why this worked after you had a chance to watch the clip, but to be quite honest, Steve Genco over at Lucid Systems does such a good job of this, I'd only be repeating him. So, you might as well go right to the source. I highly recommend reading Steve's analysis after you have a chance to watch the clip.

Now, the clip. The owners of the content don't allow for embedding of the player, so you'll have to go over to YouTube to watch it (I know, I don't understand the rationale either). Then check out Steve's post-mortem.

I'm currently reading a paper by Dr. Robert Heath and Dr. Paul Feldwick from the University of Bath called "50 Years using the wrong model of TV advertising". As the title implies, the paper looks back at 50 years of TV and brand advertising marketing effectiveness, so it will take a little time to digest (especially in trying to take the implications and assertions covered and apply them to an online market) but my immediate thoughts are "Omigod! We have a lot to figure out here."

Return of the Hidden Persuaders

Heath and Feldwick assert that you don't have to pay a lot of attention to an ad for it to be effective. In fact, they resurrect many of assertions that Vance Packard made back in the 50's with his blockbuster book The Hidden Persuaders. Packard's claims about the subliminal power of advertising have been largely discredited or ignored because of  the infamous Fort Lee, New Jersey case of subliminal ads (two frames, one of Coke and one of a bag of popcorn, were shown for 1/3000th of a second every 5 seconds in the movie) in a movie theater, supposedly increasing sales of Coke by 18.1% and popcorn by 57.8%. The experiment was held by James Vicary, but he was unable to reproduce the findings later in a follow up supervised by outside parties

Traditional thinking, supported by market effectiveness research, makes some assumptions about what makes an ad work:

    •    For any ad to be effective, it must first attract attention and the active involvement of the viewer
    •    The advertising process is essentially a one way, communication from the advertiser to the consumer
    •    The role played by creativity and emotional elements is to support this communication, either by fostering liking of the advertising which transfers to the brand, or by increasing attention

This model, which depends on the processing of the information in the ad, is supported by most attempts to measure ad effectiveness, which track things like awareness and recall. All of these measures depend on engagement of the cortical regions of the brain. They rely on the focusing of attention and cognitive engagement with the ads. In fact, this notion of engagement, of being "tuned in" to an ad, is the basis of the Advertising Research Foundations call for a new ad effectiveness metric. The drive has been to find a way to measure engagement.

Gut Instinct

But there are some assumptions in this model that may not be fully supported by current thinking in neuroscience and psychology. Heath and Feldwick cite Damasio's Somatic Marker hypothesis as one fly in the ointment of the "Information Processing" model of advertising effectiveness. Damasio's theory provides academic support for something very human that has proven resistant to most attempts to measure it in a lab setting. He calls it somatic markers. You know it better as "gut instinct". Damasio's research (and others, including Joseph LeDoux) has provided compelling evidence that there is more than one way for us to process information. We have the rational route, where we carefully consider and weigh information to come up with the most logical answer. And then there is the "quick and dirty" route, where signals take short cuts through the subcortical parts of the brain (where emotion and our older evolutionary instincts live) and provide a rough and ready human guidance system. These short cuts provide an almost instantaneous emotional foundation that may prompt us to take immediate action (jumping back from a snake or slamming on the brake when a child runs in front of our car). The rational route is simply too slow to keep us alive in these situations.

It appears that these initial responses, the quick and dirty release of emotions, don't get overridden by the slower rational loop when it finally catches up. In fact, we tend to hammer our rationalization into shape to support our first "gut instincts". If they don't fit, we suffer from cognitive dissonance. Something just doesn't feel right. Malcolm Gladwell called it "Blink".

The important thing to keep in mind here about how this impacts advertising is that much of the input filtered in gut instinct flies in under the radar of rational thought. Our cortical systems that drive rational thought, although powerful when focused, simply move at far too slow a pace to keep up with the torrential flow of stimuli of our world. If we had to think about everything we saw our heads would explode. So, the stimuli gets processed at the sub-cortical level and only a few things get passed up the cortical chain for further processing. That, according to the Information Processing model, is the big challenge faced by advertising.

Advertising Flying Under the Radar

This was where Heath and Feldwick jumped in. "What if," they speculated, "the whole Information Processing model was wrong? What if we processed ads the same way Damasio theorized we process the rest of the information thrown at us in our lives. What if the most effective aspects of advertising flew in under the radar?"

Heath and Feldwick start the paper with an example of a UK ad for a snack food featuring a pop song and surreal visual scenes that failed miserably in controlled testing. The metrics used were all based on the Information Processing model. These are the standard metrics typically used to measure ad effectiveness: ease of understanding, believability, relevance, branding and persuasion. The ad failed on all scores. The research report came to pessimistic conclusion:


The advertiser, because of a lack of time, decided to ignore the test results and ran the ad anyway. The ad was a huge success in the marketplace, generating buzz, making the song a pop hit and, most importantly, allowing the brand to capture a substantial market share.

What happened? How could an ad that failed so miserably in a lab perform so well in the real world? And this is not a unique case. The problem with most market research is that in trying to quantify human behavior, it often gets it completely wrong. Labs aren't the real world. Human behavior isn't something that can be measured by a gauge or monitor.

Advertising is a Personal Experience

We absorb advertising in the context of our surroundings. Sometimes we absorb it consciously, sometimes it seeps in under the threshold of awareness. And when advertising does filter into our skulls, through whatever route, it gets mixed in with a mysterious concoction of emotions, beliefs and feelings that precedes it and is unique to each one of us. Even the social setting we're in at the time of exposure colors how we feel about advertising. We feel differently about ads we see with friends than those we watch in a lab. How could you possibly get an accurate measurement of this in a lab setting?

Heath and Feldwick also share the results of research they conducted that show that emotional ads actually require less attention to process. This runs directly counter to the Information Processing model. Ads like the snack food commercial that have what it takes to slip in under the conscious threshold might actually be more effective because they take the "quick and dirty" route to our emotions, rather than demand the heavy lifting of the cortex. And, because they do slip in without a lot of conscious intervention, they will score miserably on any standard ad effectiveness measure.

In Enquiro's research, we've actually seen similar results that hint at the same thing. There seems to be an inverse relationship between how hard an ad has to work and how effective it is. There is still much work that needs to be done to understand how online advertising influences us, but I think Heath and Feldwick's findings raise some serious doubts about how thorough our understanding of true advertising effectiveness is.

Advertising: Going Beyond "Salesmanship in Print"

The question is, if Heath and Feldwick are right, or even partially right, how do you take a systematic approach to improving the effectiveness of your advertising program? This gets to the really difficult part of advertising, where intent is triggered or brand affinities are first formed. Advertising has long sought to measure this effect in humans. Direct response effectiveness can be measured because reduces the variables to a manageable level. Direct response takes the John E. Kennedy/Albert Lasker approach to advertising: it's "salesmanship in print". for the first part of the 20th century, this was the role of advertising - to effect conscious (and hopefully, immediate) persuasion. And this was measurable. You present a sales message to someone and you measure whether they have been effectively persuaded based on some action they take - i.e. purchasing your product. It's this same logic that's applied to measuring search marketing effectiveness (valid in some cases, not in others).

But when you move up the awareness chain, accurate measurement becomes an impossible task. A successful outcome is an incremental gain in positive "mindshare". If the mind was a jar you could measure the volume of or a path that you could determine the length of, you might be able to measure your progress. But the human mind is the most complex output ever produced by evolution. As Heath and Feldwick's findings show, the mind doesn't go down predictable paths and the further you move away from a measurable event, quantifying the impact of any particular influence becomes exponentially more difficult. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is what makes attribution models so difficult to determine. They tend to arbitrarily measure the things that are easiest to measure, and guess at the rest.

Advertising has been desperately seeking a way to predict the likelihood of ad effectiveness. We have thrown a handful of logical, rational metrics at the problem and when we stop to think about it, we convince ourselves that it should work. The problem is that we're throwing rational metrics at an irrational process. We have tried to turn the art of advertising into a science, and it has so far resisted our efforts to do so.

I don't think there is a way to predict fabulously successful advertising. I don't believe there is some hidden formula or algorithm that will reveal itself with enough prying in a sterile lab environment. I think the best advertising, the stuff that goes beyond the John Caples "salesmanship in print" approach to the place where it stirs our emotions and sinks into the darkest depths of our brains, gets read by our guts, not our brains. There is no measurable meter. There is only a visceral connection. And these ads can't be measured and manufactured. They hit us at a gut level and they get created as the same level. They are sparks of ideas that come from our humanness. The great ads connect "gut to gut."

Good luck measuring that.

How hard does an ad have to work to do it's job?

That seems to be a question that keeps coming up. As I've said before, when the content of the ad is aligned with our current intent, we've found that ads don't have to work very hard at all. All they need is a few lines of relevant text. Which is all well and good, if the right intent has been planted.

So, how hard does an ad have to work to shift intent and get the whole process going? Again, in my past post on attribution models, I suggested that the heaviest lifting may be done by the ads that somehow manage to shift intent and send it off in a new direction. This is a herculean mental task and once intent is successfully planted, you have the advantage of your prospect's attention being focused on you.

It's that switching of cognitive gears that all the brand advertising in the world tries to accomplish. Obviously, this is a huge question with many parts. One of those parts, the role of emotion, was explored in a recent study. UK Professor Robert Heath (more about Heath in future posts). What Heath found is that advertising that employs emotion doesn't tax the brain as much as a rational appeal. This makes sense. Emotion hits us at the sub cortical level, the most efficient part of the brain. Evolution has engineered this part of the brain to respond in a "quick and dirty" fashion to the base needs presented by our environment: the need to love and bond, the need to eat and the need to run away to save ourselves. The second loop, the harder working loop, is the rational processing that happens at the cortical level. This is the type of thinking that gears up the frontal lobes, requiring us to weigh options, make choices and support those choices with rational reasons. The nasty little secret in all of this is that most of our rationalization is simply false. Our emotions guide our guts in one direction and we falsely rationalize it so we can stay aligned with our gut instincts.

The longer the decision process, the more emotions play a part. And, as Dr. Heath and his colleagues found, a lot of this emotional subtext can filter in without us even noticing it. It plants the seeds at a subliminal level (I'll be sharing a fascinating example of this from the UK in a post later this week). So, if we're buying a car, planning a trip or moving to a new house, there is a rich and impossible-to-ignore foundation of emotional influence being laid, that we later try to rationalize to make it align with the rational side of our brain.

 This happens in all types of purchasing. It was what we found over and over again in the B2B buying behaviours of companies in the BuyerSphere Project. Even in this supposedly ultra-rational marketplace, emotion ruled as corporate buyers went to extremes to avoid risk, the primary emotional motivator in the B2B marketplace.

Over the weekend I had a ton of new things to consider about how advertising works dumped into my lap, sparked by a quick email from Gian Fulgoni at comScore. I'll try to sort through them over the Christmas break (when my plan is to spend a little more time organizing my blog feeds) and fashioning them into somewhat cohesive thoughts here in the blog.

Thanks Gian..I feel that Santa came early this year!

We love to look up to people. We need heroes and role models. We need aspirational targets. But what happens when one of our heroes crumbles before our eyes? Case Study: Tiger Woods.

It's not really surprising that humans need these psychological bearing points. Yesterday, I talked about the importance of social norms to us. These are the unwritten rules that govern our behavior in a group. They tell us what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and taboo. And these behavioral guidelines are hardwired deeply in our brains. In his book the Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker shows how our feelings towards obscene words seems to reside in a different part of our brain than those that are normally responsible for language. People with brain injuries that remove most of the normal language abilities have somehow managed to keep their ability to swear intact. Our reaction to George Carlin's The 7 Words You Can't Say on TV lies deep in our subconscious, centered in the fear center of our brain (the amygdala) and the home of habitual behaviors (the basal ganglia). It's why when I say piss you have a totally different reaction than when I say urine, although both labels have exactly the same meaning. It is also why one of the symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome is an overwhelming urge to swear (Coprolalia). Tourette's is caused by faulty wiring in the limbic structures of the brain, including the basal ganglia.

The same mechanisms govern our adherence to social norms. In any group of people, we will pick a few to admire and aspire to, and a few to revile and feel disgust for. And the line between the two, as Tiger Woods found out, is not that far. When a hero crosses the line of our social norms and breaks an unwritten rule, we are quick to condemn. It why spin doctors will always have jobs. It's also why we have a cult of celebrity. Mass communication and entertainment have created a global social group and has created heroes and villains, giving us bearing points to judge ourselves against. The archetypes of the hero and the villain are, as any Disney story editor will be quick to tell you, embedded into the human psyche. Think about the visceral reaction you had when you saw the picture of Tiger with his baby and ex-wife above. And now, think about what your reaction would have been just 2 months ago. Something fundamental has flipped in your brain that governs your feelings towards Mr. Woods.

The celebrity marketing firm Davie Brown Entertainment has attempted to quantify this all-to-human quirk of ours. Their Celebrity Index ranks some 2400 celebrities on their ability to influence brand affinity and consumer purchase intent. Scores are compiled based on seven different attributes: appeal, breakthrough (can they catch your attention when they appear on screen or in print), trendsetter, influence, trust, endorsement and aspiration. Not surprisingly, Tiger has not faired well in the index.

Wood's overall score dropped from the 6th most influential celebrity to no 78, but the big losses are in the aspiration and appeal scores. Just a few months ago, Tiger was a role model on par with Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg and Warren Buffet. He was the 9th most aspirational celebrity on the list. Today, he's plummeted to the basement, where he's roommates with Jerry Springer and Al Sharpton. And when it comes to appeal, he's dropped from 96th to 2252nd. He used to keep company with Matt Damon and Meg Ryan. Now, when it comes to appeal, he's rubbing elbows with Dolph Lundgren and Kid Rock.

Trust is another area where Woods took a major hit. Prior to the scandal, he was as trusted as Sean Connery. Today, you would rather trust Pauly Shore. And finally, let's look at the score that made Tiger a billionaire, his "endorsability". He dropped from no. 11 to 1681, only slightly ahead of Chris Brown.

The power of social norms giveth and, if you decide to be an absolute cad, they taketh away. Celebrities are well advised to remember, it's we who put you there and we're also the ones who will take you down.

This is today's Search Insider Column from MediaPost, which was sparked by a story in yesterday's local newspaper:

I've stated before in this column that "It's a Wonderful Life" is perhaps my favorite holiday movie.  Yesterday, as I was having lunch, I had my own George Bailey moment. I had a chance to see what my life might have been like had I not made the decision to go into search 14 years ago.  I was thumbing through the local newspaper (yes, I still do that on occasion) and the lead story in the business section caught my eye. The title was: "Ad Agencies adjusting to the new economy."

Kelowna, B.C.  is a small town (although larger than Bedford Falls). It supports three full-service ad agencies. I know the founders of each of them fairly well. A long time ago, in another life, I was one of these agencies, working with a handful of clients, many of which were in real estate.  In 1996, frustrated with the challenges of dealing with small-town budgets and attitudes, I decided to move into the online space, which subsequently took me into the world of search. That allowed me to work with clients outside my market.

I guess, given what's happened to these three agencies, my decision to move online proved to be the right one. In the last year, one agency has gone from 12 full-time people to just the founder, who has become an independent consultant. Two of the agencies saw a split between two long-term partners and a drastic reduction both in clients and staff.

These are the facts. One can read between the line to get a glimpse of the heartache and soul-searching that came with these very difficult business decisions. At least two of the agency founders said they were going through a personal discovery journey and were looking at pursuing other "more rewarding" professional endeavors in the future. Not to be overly cynical, but I find the frequency of these voyages of "self discovery" are usually inversely related to the success of your business. With a few notable exceptions, not many people reevaluate their professional lives when their businesses are rocking.

Suddenly, Search Seems Rosy

2009 wasn't a banner year for my company, but compared to these stories, it was a skip down the Yellow Brick Road. We grew top-line revenues by 14%, added nine new jobs, opened a new sales office, maintained or increased client satisfaction levels, gave our employees healthy pay raises and managed to stay on the right side of the ledger sheet.

I paint these contrasts not so much to say how great we are in search, but because they present a microcosmic view of the shift in marketing. While traditional budgets were being ruthlessly slashed throughout 2009, digital and search budgets bounced along and managed to keep from being swamped by the economic storm. I certainly have talked to several search marketers who had a tough year (some of whom are also looking at their own personal "voyages of discovery") but I would guess that the incidence rate is far less than you would find on the other side of the digital divide.

All Aboard!

The other interesting thing I gleaned from the story in my local newspaper is that all of the agency founders are paying more attention to what's happening in the digital domain. As the demand for real estate brochures and print ads dries up, they're only now realizing that something surprisingly robust and healthy appears to be happening online.  Suddenly, strategies including Facebook and Twitter are starting to show up in their pitches to local clients.

Having made my decision to move online almost a decade and a half ago, I would caution these people that becoming a digital "guru" may not be quite as easy as it appears to be. As became abundantly clear at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, we've still got a long way to go before we understand the various online gears and levers of a truly integrated campaign. You're more than welcome to jump on the digital bandwagon, but be prepared -- it's moving a lot faster than you might think!

At the Search Insider Summit in Park City, we tried something new that turned out to be a fascinating experiment in Millennial behavior. We invited 5 college students to get on stage and just tell us how they used technology in their day to day lives. It was moderated by Michelle Prieb from Ball State University.



Some of the key things I heard in the anecdotal comments:

80% plus of all video watched is consumed online

These students live with a computer, generally a laptop. Some don’t even own a TV. Therefore, it makes sense that the primary distribution channel for video would be online. Watching TV was said to be “going out of their way”, which is an interesting metaphor. It used to be that “going online” felt like a journey somewhere, where as “watching TV” was just absorbing our environment. If Steven Pinker is right and you can understand how the mind works by the metaphors we use, the students choice of words indicates they’ve flipped this attitude. Online is the environment and the TV lives somewhere outside that environment. Again, this ties in well with everything we discovered about Digital Natives in The BuyerSphere Project.

The other interesting thing about consumption of online video is the ability to time shift to meet their schedule. Even I, well advanced into Digital Immigrant status, find myself appreciating the flexibility offered by digital video. I’m probably consuming between 30 and 50% of my video through an online connection. That’s a fundamental shift in viewing behaviors, and like so many other things, it means the traditional revenue models are shaking and crumbling.

Speaking about crumbling revenue models, here’s another area where marketer’s savvy is severely lagging market adoption. Few marketers have had the appetite to experiment with placing ads in online video offerings, which means the ad inventory is paltry, to say the least. We quickly get sick of seeing the same boring ads over and over again on Hulu (a strong favorite amongst our panel) or other video sites. Our Millennial panel was quick to use words like “boring”, “annoying”, “irritating” and “hate”. As one Summit attendee said to me, it’s the “dirty little secret” that the effectiveness of these ads is hindered by the company they keep. There’s little that’s creatively interesting or, lowering the bar further, not out and out annoying about these ads. We ignore them because we need to maintain our sanity and the same UPS ad being seen for the 27th time does not capture the loyalty of a fickle market.

Another interesting fact was how they found videos. Like most viewers, they had a few shows they were dedicated to and would go directly to Hulu.com or another similar site to watch them. But when it came to viral video, they depended almost completely on word of mouth, filtered through Facebook. Twitter was not a factor in WOM recommendations (only one of the five even used it regularly).

Facebook is the one site they can’t live without

The panel was asked if they could pick one and only one online destination for a month, what would it be. All chose Facebook.

Facebook plays a huge part in the lives of these Millennials. They spend anywhere from 2 to 8 hours a day on it. As I said, it has become their native environment and their main point of contact, but with some important qualifiers (see additional points later in this post). It was fascinating to see how these students had incorporated Facebook into the structure of their social network. This goes beyond being a home page or portal. It  is almost more an umbilical cord, the primary point of connection with the outside world. Through this pipeline comes a steady stream of recommendations (viral content, video, face-to-face social events), updates, gossip, rumors, news, personal messages and other social lubricants. In fact, much of the everyday stuff of our lives that we take for granted as social animals came delivered to this group via Facebook. It’s no wonder that everyone is looking at how to make a buck on it. More about that later in this post.

Whenever I talk about the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants I usually use Facebook as an example. There are always a group of Immigrants in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s who protest – saying they are also frequent users of Facebook. But it’s an order of magnitude difference. Again, this is not so much about usage as it is about attitudes towards technology. Fervent Facebook Fans in the Digital Immigrant camp may visit the site a few times a week, even once or twice a day – but these Digital Natives had Facebook open all the time, for several hours a day. Again, this is not a destination you visit, this is an environment you live in. And that seems to be the crucial difference.

Facebook is primarily used to maintain the “weak ties” in their social networks

A few comments from the panel provided clues as to how they weave Facebook into their social network. “I know everyone on Facebook” and “I use it to keep in touch with people I don’t care about so much.” 

Mark Granovetter in his ground breaking work on social networks back in the 70’s discovered that our social networks are made up of dense clumps of close friends and family, bound by “strong ties”, and these various social clumps are connected much more loosely by “weak ties.” Weak ties are what you use to maintain contact with acquaintances. But, as Granovetter showed in some fascinating experiments, those weak ties are vitally important in the spread of news and gossip, as well as fuelling word of mouth recommendations, getting job referrals, calling in favors and even product recommendations. And it’s exactly these kinds of ties that our Millennials are maintaining through Facebook. They don’t need it to stay in touch with their close clusters, because they see them every day. They use it to stay in touch with more distant family, people they went to high school with and even old boyfriends and girlfriends – the people one panelist said “I don’t care so much about.” This creates some interesting social dynamics.

The social network of teenagers is vitally important. This is when they start to sharpen their skills as social animals, so their friends become disproportionately important to them. They can’t believe their best friend in high school won’t be their BFF (which my daughter tells me stands for Best Friend Forever) and even if they attend different colleges, it is important to “stay in touch”. Not coincidentally, the concept of Facebook was spawned by people going through this very phase in their lives. The question is, as people move on with their lives, starting families and making the inevitable adjustments to their social network, will the importance of Facebook start to wane?

They get their news online, if at all..

I’m not so sure whether this is a result of the adoption of technology or just a symptom of where our panelists were in their lives, but they seemed to have little interest in the outside world, or at least, news of the outside world as delivered through traditional media channels. Again, they relied on news spread through their online social network, delivered through Facebook. And this was the one place where they were more apt to turn to Twitter and real time search tools like OneRiot and others. They didn’t make it a priority to set time aside to “be informed”, whether it be watching TV news or reading a newspaper. One panelist did do this, but the rest seemed content to let news filter in through their online channels.

In general, this seems to reinforce my previous thoughts about the erosion of the “destination” model of news publishing and our shift to a “just in time” news economy, powered by Google and real time search.  If this shift marks a cross-generational trend, the demise of standard news outlets and publishers that rely on outmoded revenue channels might be a lot sooner than even I expected.

There’s a delicate balance to what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to commercial content on Facebook

So, if Facebook becomes the environment for Millennials, the revenue opportunities must be vast, right? Not so fast. You see, we have this tricky little thing called social norms to consider.  These are the unwritten rules of behavior necessary to keep groups functioning smoothly and they use our concepts of reciprocity and fairness as their underpinnings. Game theory has shown that groups generally stabilize around rules that ensure all members benefit from a “tit for tat” approach.  Although one member might think that they can reap greater benefits by consistently taking advantage of all the other members, this isn’t a sustainable strategy. The group eventually wises up and shuts down this weakness in the group’s structure.

In any group, social norms dictate what’s acceptable and what’s not. This is true whether we’re talking a church prayer group or a street gang. So, it’s no surprise that these rules of conduct are also emerging in our online groups. The challenge comes when there are pressures by the caretakers of the group to generate revenue. Logically, if you have a group of people gathering to talk about things, it makes sense to try to steer those conversations down commercially viable paths. But, as Facebook learned in trying to introduce advertising vehicles, including the astoundingly ill-thought out Beacon, there are several social norm landmines you have to step around.

The Millennial panel made it clear that they’re okay with non intrusive  ads that don’t cross the line of what is socially acceptable, but marketers seem to have a tough time staying on the right side of that line. The panel universally condemned ads that use rich media to interrupt, ads that take over the screen and interstitials that lodge themselves between the user and what that user really wants to do. They also showed remarkable savvy about what is an ad on the page, how to avoid them and even about more advanced targeting strategies. It comes down to a cat and mouse game, with these users getting better at ignoring ads and advertisers becoming more desperate to catch the user’s attention. It became clear that user intent seems to make the big difference, with sophisticated behavioral targeting seeming to be the best way to identify potential intent (short of search, where intent is explicitly stated).

Millennials Don't Spend a Lot of Time thinking about Privacy

Privacy was a non-issue with the panel. In fact, they had spent very little time thinking about it. If privacy got in the way of online functionality, there was no contest - functionality would always win.

It seems that a surrender of a certain degree of privacy just seems to be the price of entry into a more functional online world. The Orwellian implications seem to be more concerning to the prior generations.

I'm a Disney Fan in the truest sense of the word. I'm a Disney Fanatic. And I'll miss having Roy E. Disney in my world. I never knew him..never met the man. To be honest, I haven't given him a lot of thought until today, when I heard of his passing. But when I heard of it, I discovered there was a surprising large hole somewhere inside me.

I believe a company can be more than just a collection of individuals driven by an income statement. I believe the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. I believe some companies can shove the world into a new and better direction. I believe that occasionally, companies can tap into some corner of our souls and connect us in ways that border on the mystical. It doesn't happen often. It may only happen once in a lifetime. But for me, Disney has been such a company.

The Disney Co has had a few very able caretakers. To me, one of the most interesting partnerships in the history of American business was that of Walt and Roy Disney, Roy E. Disney's uncle and father.

There was never any question that Walt was the star. And Roy, his brother, was okay with that. Walt was the dreamer, the genius, the visionary and the child. Roy was the grown up who somehow made things happen. Vision without realization does nothing to change the world. Roy managed to take Walt's unbound fantasy and somehow squeeze enough of it into the real world to make us feel that magic had indeed happened. Walt might have been the architect of the Disney dream, but Roy Sr. was the guy that built it.

For over 30 years, until Walt's untimely death on December 15, 1966 (ironically, 43 years and 1 day before Roy's death today) the two skated on the edge of bankruptcy. It was never about profit. It was about delivering on a promise to the world.

After Walt's death, the company lost direction. It has stumbled since..several times in fact. But Roy Sr. and Roy Jr. have never once abandoned the legacy they inherited. It's always been about more than a balance sheet. Roy E. Disney has launched more than one boardroom war because he believed, deeply, that Disney has to live up to the promise that was made. The world is too gray a place to abandon to the black and white of a income statement. The world needs the color of Disney.

Why does it keep happening? I go to client meetings after being assured that the various VP’s and executives from the other side of the marketing chasm would, this time, finally, grace us with their presence.  I’ll be presenting research showing how a fundamental shift in buying behavior is completely changing the rules of the industry they compete in. This isn’t just a few percentage points here or there. This is a massive 60% shift plus of buying behavior..a shift that will turn this company on it’s head in less than a half a decade. This is a meteor streaking to the earth, obliterating entire species. This is a 500 foot high sheet of ice advancing on a continent. This is survival folks!

Did any VP’s show? No. They never do.  If your celebrity spokesperson is shooting a new TV commercial, they’ll be camped out at the shoot location, hanging over the goodies table, fawning and grabbing every opportunity to press the flesh. But heaven forbid they try to jam one digital marketing meeting (or worse yet, a search meeting) into their packed schedule of  meetings and phone calls. After all, it’s no easy job guiding the Titanic into an iceberg. It takes a lot of time and planning to hit it straight on, ensuring your ship will sink efficiently and effectively. "Don’t bother me with your stupid research about changes in behavioral patterns or your lame advice, suggesting I perhaps change my bearings. What the hell do you know about marketing? Do you know how long I’ve been doing this?"

The problem, I’ve realized, is that the meeting invites always come from the e-marketing folks in the company, and as such, they’re treated with the same respect as a flaming bag of dog do-do you might find on your doorstep.  Somewhere out in the balkanized regions of head office hell these teams huddle, immersed in their silly little schemes, nattering away about landing page tests, organic optimization, AdSense buys and attribution models – nothing of any consequence. Certainly nothing really important like GRP’s or Up Fronts or agency commission. These are the things that Marketing VP’s and CMO’s can roll up their sleeves over a two hour working lunch and really go to town on. Meanwhile, that stupid little e-marketing team  is producing results that blow the socks off any traditional advertising initiative. They get the patronizing pat on the head in the quarterly marketing report, but really, does anybody know what the hell they’re talking about?

So when the meeting invite comes, the VP’s and CMO’s assume it will be some inane conversation about an obscure java script tag that’s wreaking havoc on the online use experience or how long we should set the cookies before they expire.  “Give me a frigging break!” they fume. “I’ve got a flight of TV commercials to schedule and some new print creative to approve. I don’t have time to talk about some inconsequential thing that has a direct influence on 67% of the people buying our product. I’m all tied up looking at glossies of a print ad that maybe, if we’re extremely lucky, 4% of our market might see. Priorities, folks, it’s all about priorities!”

So, okay, don’t come to our silly little online meetings. Stay holed up in your corner offices in the executive wing, gazing fondly over at the high end schwag you scored from your media buying reps or the picture of you and Michael Douglas that your significant other snapped when you ran into him at the Cannes Advertising Festival. Rest comfortable in the knowledge that nothing of consequence could possibly be discussed in an e-marketing meeting – nothing like research showing that search is critical in over 70% of the research being done by your potential customers or that your two main competitors are generating leads from Google at 2 and half times the rate you are. It’s okay, you can just run another SuperBowl ad and everything will be all right. Just relax and repeat the mantra: “I’m a big, strong dinosaur. Nothing could ever beat me. I’m a big, strong dinosaur. I’m far bigger than those puny mammals.”

Come to think of it, I bet no dinosaurs ever showed up at those mammal meetings where they talked about kicking some evolutionary ass.

In looking at the problem I presented in part one of this test, I’m pretty sure most of you decided to set up your stand first at the marathon, where there was a guaranteed market for your product. What you sacrificed in numbers you more than made up for in quality of prospect. In fact, you probably thought the whole test was a little ridiculous.

Yet I can tell you that over 90% of marketers, many with MBA’s and almost all of them having passed 5th grade, fail this test miserable every single day. Here’s what they do.

Where the CMO puts their Gatorade Stand...

They take about 90 to 95% of their available time (108 to 114 out of the 120 minutes) and put up their stand on the busy street. Many ignore the marathon location all together and the few that do plan to set up their stands go to the organizers and tell them they’re willing to spend 6 to 12 minutes manning it. Because of the short time they’re willing to commit, the organizers give them a spot over 500 feet from the finish line, hidden behind a large elm tree. Only about 10% of the runners even see the stand and only 4 to 8 of the 400 runners even take the time to walk over to it, and then only after they’ve checked out all the other refreshment stands available.

These marketers fail this 5th grade common sense test by ignoring or underfunding search. Look at the above scenario and tell me how it differs from how over 90% of marketers allocate their budgets. Search is lucky to get any scraps left over. If you think it doesn’t make sense, I’d have to agree.  When the scenario is reframed in a different context, it seems ridiculous. But it’s business as usual for most marketers.

Because search reaches buyers “already in market”, you’re guaranteed to have prospects that are qualified and interested. Just like Gatorade at the finish line of a marathon, you’re reaching an audience thirsty for what you’re selling. But there’s another similarity between the two scenarios. As I talked about in a previous post, the alignment of intent is a critical element in engagement with advertising messages. Again, sticking with our marathon analogy, let’s look at how the difference of intent will vary our prospect’s interest in our Gatorade stand:

The Intent: To Quench their Thirst

At the marathon finish line, runners have no other objective but the rest and rehydrate. Your Gatorade stand is perfectly aligned with their intent. They’re actively looking for you. The easier you are to find, the shorter path they have to take to reach their objective – getting something cold to drink. They have nothing else to do, no other pressing objectives to pursue. You have 100% of their attention.

But when you put your stand up beside the busy commuter thoroughfare, that’s a completely different thing. Although the number of prospects is greater by a factor of 100 (40,000 vs 400), you have no idea that any of them are thirsty. Now, given the greater audience, you could use the rationale that odds are good that at least 1 in a hundred motorists would be thirsty. But you have another obstacle to overcome.

Even if a motorist is thirsty, their mind is elsewhere. They have a destination in mind and that’s why they’re in their car, rushing along the boulevard at 40 miles an hour. To get them to stop at your Gatorade stand you have to do three things: catch their attention, give them a reason to put their current task at hand aside for a few moments, and, make it easy for them to stop long enough to get a bottle of Gatorade. The odds of doing any of these successfully are monumentally stacked against you. So this is not a pure numbers game (40,000 vs 400), it’s making sure you reach the market that’s right for you.

It's Not Either/Or

Now, I’m the first to admit that this is not an either/or scenario. If you want to sell as much Gatorade as possible, you’ll need to look at both potential strategies. But you do need to prioritize, and I think any fifth grader would tell you your priorities should be where people are thirstiest. Catch the marathoners and then worry about the motorists. Unfortunately, most CMO’s do exactly the opposite. They spend all day beside the road, standing under their massive signs, hoping that some motorist might be a little parched and low on electrolytes. A few, as an after thought, spend a few minutes slinging Gatorade at the marathon finish line just as the last contests are straggling in and are pleasantly surprised by the success rates they see. Unfortunately, they’ve already missed 98% of the finishers and have no idea how much Gatorade they could have sold had they spent more time there.

The smart 5th grader, upon reading over the problem again, will also discover that they can get the greatest gain from marathon sales with only a 45 minute commitment of their 2 available hours. That’s all the race organizers are asking for. And this commitment will net them 85 to 90% of the total available sales. There are a finite number of racers and you don’t need to over allocate resources to reach them. You just have to be smart about the allocations. That still leaves you 75 minutes to try your luck with the motorists.

The top of the class 5th grader will try to leverage both strategies, capturing the motivated market at the finish line by allocating enough time to capture a prime position but also taking the time to put the sign up by the road side, directing traffic to the location that’s just a two minute drive away. This way, you’re expanding the market available beyond the marathoners to motorists that are thirsty enough to add a few thirst quenching moments to their daily commute. The one challenge that comes with putting your stand by the finish line is that the number of marathoners is finite, whereas there are always cars whizzing along the thoroughfare.

When put in these terms, it’s really not that difficult to allocate your time in the way designed to realize the maximum return, yet almost every CMO fails this test. Perhaps it’s time to return to fifth grade.

Are you smarter than a CMO?  Are you even smarter than a 5th grader? Let’s find out.

Go back to grade 5 and imagine that on a hot summer day, you come up with the brilliant business plan of selling Gatorade. The day for the launch is Saturday and the temperature is expected to soar into the low 90’s (about 37 degrees C for us Canadians). The unfortunate thing is that you only have 2 hours available to do the actual selling. Being a prepared entrepreneur, you’ve scouted out your neighborhood and settled on two possible locations:

It just so happens that this Saturday, a marathon is being run and the finish line is at the end of your street ( which is a cul de sac) in a large park. You’ve approached the organizers of the run and, impressed with your business sense, they’ve made you an offer. You can make your Gatorade stand part of the official refreshment center at the finish line.  But there’s a catch – the location depends on the amount of time you’re willing to commit to manning your stand. The more time you commit to, the closer you’ll be to the finish line.

The other location is at the other end of your street, where it feeds onto a busy boulevard. Here, traffic zooms by at 50 mph, as it’s one of the main feeder routes to the downtown core. Again, your intrepidness pays off. After approaching the city, they’ve agreed that you could place your stand on the side of the busy road.

So, let’s size up each opportunity. If you devote enough time (at least 45 minutes out of your two hours) to the marathon, the organizers are willing to give you the prime location right at the finish line. Approximately 400 runners will cross the finish line and will immediately look for something to drink. Yours would be the first booth they see and organizers tell you can reasonably expect about 30% of the runners to stop by.

On the busy roadside, about 40,000 drivers will go by in the 2 hours. Because they’re whizzing by, you know you have to build a large and impossible-to-miss sign which will take some time to put up and take down. Because of this, it doesn’t really make sense to go to the trouble unless you’re willing to stay at least an hour in this location. You really don’t know if anyone will stop for a Gatorade because you have no idea if any of them will be thirsty or running low on electrolytes.

So, on Saturday, where will you put your stand and how will you divide up the available 2 hours? If you wish, you can let me know by submitting a comment below. If not, just click on the following link and we’ll see if you passed the 5 minute 5th grader Gatorade CMO Test.

Originally published December 10 in MediaPost's Search Insider.

I've had a few days now to reflect on what came out of the Search Insider Summit in Park City. It was an interesting perspective: Avinash Kaushik telling us that the majority of search marketing "sucks"; Mark Mahaney prophesizing that search is poised for a big climb in 2010; Rob Griffin warning us the entire industry is going through the throes of change; Chris Copeland showing us that social media is inextricably linked with search activity; and Mike Moran cautioning us that CEOs and CFOs worship at one altar and one altar only: profit. If we want to sell search, we have to speak that language.

Adding to this, I climbed on my usual soapbox, arguing that we spend too much time with data and too little time with our customers. In the panel exploring how to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches, the panelists were asked how they differentiated the two. For me, the answer is this: Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.

SEM's Call to Arms

So, when you mash this up over 3 days and distill the essence, what do you end up with? I think SEMs heard a distinct call to "up their game" last week in Park City. Sure, there are tough problems to tackle. Marketers are demanding more from their budgets than ever before. As Avinash said, attribution causes many marketers to "cry like little girls." Determining user intent and matching it in our ads is tough. Matching it on the landing page and beyond is even tougher. Trying to wrap our heads around the shifting tide of social media gives us all a migraine. And if our jobs weren't tough enough, Google just gave SEO a slap upside the head last week with personalization of all search results. Thank God the bar was open after the sessions wrapped up.

But we search marketers are a resilient bunch. The people roaming the hallways of the Chateaux at Silver Lake didn't look morose. In fact, they were almost giddily optimistic. There was a sense that as rough as the ride was in this boat we all chose to set sail in, at least it was heading in the right direction. Rob Griffin put it this way: "If you're any good, you might not have the same job title or be doing the same thing in a few years, but you'll be employed. That's more than a lot of other people will be able to say."

I'm Not Sure Where We're Going, but Follow Me!

I look at it this way. The market has already shifted. And where the market goes, we marketers have to follow. Somebody has to figure this stuff out. And, as I remarked to someone over drinks after the sessions wound down, I'm constantly amazed by the number of people in marketing who have impressive titles on their business cards but simply don't get the magnitude of the behavioral shift we're in the middle of. Avinash is right. A lot of what I see in the digital marketing landscape "sucks." We have to get better. We have to get smarter. We have to do a better job of listening to the people we're trying to market to.

I know we will get better. Really, do we have a choice? And the advantage search marketers have is that we have chosen to work in the one area of online that has been an unqualified success. Everyone is looking to us as an example of digital marketing done right. And we're looking at each other saying, "Okay, that worked. Now, what's next?"

At the Search Insider Summit yesterday, Avinash Kaushik said much of thinking around attribution is "complete and utter garbage."

"Most marketers suck at attribution. They get all worked up and run around crying like little girls"

Attribution is one of the thorniest problems we've dealt with on the client side in the last year. Avinash had some clarifying views, which I'll share, and then I'll tie in attribution with some of the things we're seeing on the qualitative side of ad engagement:

First of All, Do You Have an Attribution Problem?

Avinash recommends segmenting your traffic by number of site visits required before conversion to see if you even have an attribution problem. If 90% of your conversions comes from one or two visits, you probably don't have a urgent problem. However, if a significant percentage of sales results from multiple visits, further investigation is required. Next, segment by referrer source and again see how many visits are required to convert. This allows you to isolate if you have a problem and where it might be.

Okay, I Have a Problem. What Do I Do About It?

Now you have figure out which of the many models is the appropriate one to use. Kaushik quickly dispatched the first and last click models - "Crap..and crap" - as well as the "Berkeley Kumbaya" model, where everything is fairly distributed in the interests of "universal harmony" and finally, the MUC model  - percentages based on "Made Up Crap". The one that gained some level of approval was a modified decay model, where last clicks are weighted more heavily and earlier touches received less attribution value.

The Cognitive Engagement Attribution Model

As Avinash was talking, I jotted a note down on my notepad - "Attribution Model based on engagement with ads". In a post last week, I talked about the importance of aligned intent. The fact is, there is a switch in our level of cognitive engagement somewhere along the line that can have many contributing factors. Further, even after this cognitive switch leads to higher engagement, not all those ad exposures are equally influential. If we understand more about the nature of influence of these ads, perhaps we can start to pick apart the attribution model.

Let me explain in a couple of scenarios:

Scenario One: Aligned Intent

If you already have an objective in mind, attribution is an easier nut to crack. Let's say that you work in a clinic and you suddenly find you're running short on face masks. Your intent is defined, you search by the product name, check a few sites out and order from the site with the cheapest prices and fastest delivery time. As Avinash said, you probably don't have much of an attribution problem. If the buyer was price conscious, you might have a couple of site visits and the referrer would likely be a search engine in each case.

Scenario Two: Aligned Intent, Longer Sale Process

Okay, let's get a little more complex. In this case, you know you need to replace your aging photocopier but some research is required. In the BuyerSphere Project I referred to this as a modified repeat purchase, things you buy occasionally but because of changing specs, they come with an education curve each time. Your intent is already defined, but the path is longer. You'll be eliminating risk, so you will likely have more online touch points. In our research, we've seen that there is generally early search activity, then a transference to vertical engines, review sites or directories to help refine options (Business.com's buying guides provide a classic example) and probably several vendor site visits. Search will often be used navigationally to stitch all this activity together.  In a more complex scenario like this (typical in B2B and longer sales cycle purchases - i.e. cars, travel, real estate) how do you slice up the attribution pie?

Perhaps we can gain some further insight by looking at how each of these visits mentally influences the prospect.

Early in the process, the prospect has intent (to find a new photocopier) but the decision criteria framework hasn't been established yet, a key requirement for risk mitigation. This is what leads to the early search activity, as the prospect plots out the "decision landscape". They are identifying the factors required in the eventual purchase decision. This sets up the entire subsequent chain of online activity to follow. Not only that, but this is typically where the first consideration set is compiled. A vendor website touch is common at this point.

As the criteria is set, consideration and evaluation begins to take place. The objective here is to reduce the number of options to a manageable number, typically less than 5. This is where vertical directories, reviews and repeat visits to the vendor site are essential in deciding which alternatives make the list and which ones don't. At this point, the prospect's interests become more focused and specific - i.e. exact pricing information and detailed feature comparisons. They're rationalizing the purchase decision by weighting difference criteria.

Finally, a decision may be made in your product's favour. The conversion event finally happens. Often the path that will lead to this will be a navigational search resulting in a site visit. 

In this typical scenario, we have a series of site visits originating from different referrers. Here is where the attribution problem becomes challenging. Using the decay model, the assumption would be that the last event, the decision to favor the brand, is the most important and would be given the most value. Moving up the chain, each event would become less important, until, at the top - mapping the decision landscape - this online activity would receive almost no attribution value.

This attribution model is based on a causal chain, with the values based on percentage of likelihood on going through each point and reaching the end of the chain. Say each touchpoint represented a letter in the chain below

A - B - C - D - E - F

The goal is to take 20 candidates for consideration at A point and reduce it to one candidate at F point. Now, using a simple formula and some assumptions, one could construct the following attribution model:

At A - you're one of 20 candidates, so you have a 1 in 20 or 5% chance of a successful conversion
At B - the list has been narrowed to 12 candidates, so you have a 1 in 12 or 8.3% chance of successful conversion
At C - you're 1 in 6  candidates, so you have a 16.6% chance of successful conversions
At D - the list has been narrowed to 4 candidates, so you have a 25% chance of successful conversion
At E - there are only 2 candidates, so you have a 50% chance of conversion
At F - you're the successful candidate.

This is the thinking behind the decay model, and, incidentally, pipeline weighting in most CRM and sales automation tools. The further you get down the funnel, the greater your odds, so the higher the attribution. In a rational world, this makes sense.

But, as I explained in The BuyerSphere Project, the funnel analogy doesn't hold up very well in the real world. Not all prospective candidates have equal chances and not all stages are linear. Let me use an analogy that Avinash used in his keynote:

Avinash said that first click attribution is like giving his first girlfriend credit for his current marriage. I want to stick to the same analogy, but I have a differing view. If you asked any married person what one of the most important moments in their life was, I'd bet the moment they first met their wife would be high on the list. Us married people consider that moment to be one of those pivotal life changing events. If you followed the causal chain that lead to your wedding day, you'd put a high degree of value on that moment, because if it hadn't happened, none of the following would have happened either. Similarly, the moment you first introduced your intended to your parents, or when you had the discussion about whether you both wanted kids would also be pivotal moments. Humans following convoluted decision paths where not all stages or factors are weighed equally. This is true in finding your life partner or in making complex purchase decisions. If we were to apply a decay model to the causal chain that led to Avinash's marriage, his decision to drive to the church the morning of his wedding would get 20 times the value of the moment he first met his wife, 12 times the value of that first introduction to his family and possibly 3 times the value of the day he proposed to her. Somehow, that just doesn't seem right when we think of it, factoring in emotions. And emotions are an essential part of any decision.

Complex decisions are journeys down paths, and along that path we'll meet points of resistance and other potential paths branching off. I'm not sure you can say the decisions we make near the end of the path are more important than the decisions we make at the beginning. I think it's a complex and nuanced scenario.

Final Scenario: Complex Purchase, No Intent

Let me stick to the Avinash wedding analogy. In the previous example, I assumed that intent was already planted. Even before he met his wife, Avinash intended to get married someday. But what if that was never Avinash's intention? What if somewhere along the line, something had to flick some switch in Avinash's brain and take him from a life plan of avowed bachelorhood to that of a man looking for a wife. This is a powerful and fundamental change, because whatever caused the switch to flip had a dramatic impact on every event that followed. The planting of intent changed the mental framework of Avinash Kaushik from a man who filtered out all talk of marriage to one who was openly receptive and actively seeking it. As I said in a previous post, that planting of intent significantly alters the nature of our engagement with advertising.

This brings me to my friend Gian Fulgoni's point, made in a comment last week:

There’s also another even more important point that we need to consider: brand building. That needs to occur even when the consumer isn’t foraging for information in support of an impending buying decision. Otherwise the value of an individual brand name isn’t going to be as meaningful to the consumer when he / she is in the shopping / buying mode. CPG manufacturers know this well...They understand that (coupons and flyers) need to be supplemented with “branding” advertising that they run themselves because they need to make sure that their brand value has been firmly established in the mind of consumers before they compare prices across brands at the shopping / buying stage.

Awareness advertising is still required to "flip" our mental switches and make intent advertising possible. So, what does this mean for attribution models? Again, I would argue that this flipping of the mental switch, the aligning of intent, is a critical step in the purchase path. Indeed, it creates the purchase path, and so deserves a much greater value than it would typically get in most attribution models. This switch flipping doesn't happen on search, it precedes it, often through the exposure of a display ad or some other awareness format. Using the Avinash Wedding Attribution Model, doesn't Avinash's decision that at some point in his life, he wants to get married deserve at least as much credit as his decision to drive to the church on the day of his wedding?

So, What Does This Mean?

If you accept that the weighting of influential moments in the mental decision path may be a viable approach to attribution modeling, it throws an immensely complex problem at you. How do you possibly understand these weightings? Again, like so many things that hinge on human behavior, I believe the answer lies first in qualitative exploration, then quantitative verification. For any given product, or even category of products, you start to see commonalities in purchase behaviors. Most of your prospects will have to make the same decisions and encounter the same forks in the purchase path. By gaining more insight into what actually influences those purchase decisions, you can then begin to formulate an attribution model that's based on more than guesswork or "Made Up Crap".

 Originally published Dec 3 in MediaPost's Search Insider

I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life – I want to shift paradigms.

Now that I’m older and arguably wiser, people sometimes ask me for that “one piece of advice”. Usually, it involves stepping into someone else’s perspective and seeing things from their viewpoint. With each year that passes, I find myself doing that more and more, leading me to dole out that piece of advice more frequently.

Our Reality is What We Perceive It to Be

You see, there is no truth or ultimate reality. There is only our perception of it. We have a lens we see the world through.  And everyone else has his or her own lens.  Paradigm shifts happen when we suddenly see reality through another lens, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to try to understand what another person’s view of reality looks like.

Stephen Covey tells a story of a ride home in a New York subway one day. In the same car was a father with his two children. The children were running wild through the car, jumping on seats, jostling other passengers and fighting with each other. The father sat oblivious to the actions of his children, staring straight into space. Someone had to rein these children in and the father didn’t seem to be doing anything. The reality through Covey’s lens was that the father’s obvious lack of parental discipline had resulted in two rude, ill mannered children. Finally, he could take it no longer. He moved over to the father and said, “Your children seem a little rambunctious.” The father looked at the children, then, turned to Covey, “I guess they are. I’m sorry. We just came from the hospital. Their mother passed away this morning.”  Needless to say, Covey’s paradigm shifted in an instant.

The Paradigm of the Marketer

Most of the problems I see in marketing result from the fact that marketers see the world one way and their prospects see the world another way.  We have two different paradigms. And marketers have a difficult time putting their lens away long enough to try the view through their prospect’s lens. About a year ago, at the Search Insider Summit (I’m actually at it again as I write this) I saw this clearly in one session. It was on mobile advertising strategies. From the audience, which was entirely made up of marketers, there was frustration that the carriers wouldn’t allow targeting of mobile users through their account information. “You have all the information, why don’t you allow us to use it to target our messages?” was the cry from more than one frustrated marketer. I asked for a show of hands of all who thought, as marketers, that this would be a good move on the part of the mobile providers. Every hand shot up.

“Okay, as mobile users, who still wants to have ads targeted to you by your personal information.” Several hands suddenly wavered, hit by the force of shifting paradigms. Many went down. Others dipped noticeably as their owners realized their own hypocrisy. Suddenly, they were seeing the world as a customer, not as a marketer.

Analyzing campaign data and crunching numbers is not the way to shift a paradigm. Our personal lenses are stubborn things. It’s very difficult to swap them for another.  The best way carries the fancy title “ethnography” but it simply means “writing about people”. Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, seeks to understand people by observing them “where they live”, in the full context of their lives. In this setting, one gets further removed from your reality and more embedded in theirs, making paradigm shifts easier. I don’t think we, as marketers, spend enough time in the lives of our customers. And unfortunately, the Internet and the flood of data available is only making the problem worse.

The Survey Says…

Here’s my last analogy. I’m a huge West Wing fan and I recently watched an episode from Season Two where President Bartlet’s staff was polling 5 “Red” states on their attitudes towards gun control.  Not surprisingly, the percentage approving came up short of expectations. Josh Lyman, a White House staffer, was disappointed and frustrated. 

“That’s it!” he said, “We have to dial down our gun control rhetoric.”

The pollster, played by Marlee Matlin, responded “I think you have to dial it up”.

“That’s not what the data says,” Josh replied.

“How do you know what the data says? The data says whatever you want it to. It depends on how you ask the question, what they had for breakfast and whether a gun control lobbyist pissed them off yesterday.”

Data tends to reinforce paradigms, not shift them. It’s the understanding that comes from personal contact that shifts paradigm. It’s sitting beside an apparently delinquent father and learning that he just lost his spouse.

Metaphors are more than just a play on words. Many, including Steven Pinker, believe the way we link linguistic concepts together gives us a direct window into the workings of the mind. To see how widespread our use of metaphors is, just look at how many I've used in these opening lines. "A play on words", "link linguistic concepts", "direct window into the mind" - none of these can be taken literally. We don't physically link ideas or install a window in our skull, but you knew what I was talking about. My use of metaphors shared common mental ground with you, helping you visual the concepts I was trying to communicate.

Some linguists and psychologists believe metaphors are essential in helping humans understand complex concepts. We use terms that are usually used to describe physical force or location in more abstract ways: "He pushed his agenda on the group", "we have a tough month ahead of us" - we use metaphors like building blocks, constructing complex communication by borrowing from commonly understood terms. Pinker goes into this topic in some depth in his book "The Stuff of Thought."

Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman spends a lot of time (there I go again - as if you could literally spend time..the metaphor mentally positions time for you as a limited resource) pondering metaphors. There, locked in our subconscious language (we don't deliberate about the metaphors we use, they come naturally with our use of language) can be found our true feelings towards things. Zaltman uses metaphors as a Rosetta stone to unlock our real feelings towards brands. As we talk about Coke, or Nike, or Apple, or Toyota, the language we use will inevitably include metaphors and the ones we choose will help researchers like Zaltman understand our true feelings towards those brands. Coke can be a tradition, a reward or a guilty pleasure. Nike can evoke status or perhaps pretention. Apple can inspire devotion or smack of creative elitism. Toyota can embody reliability or seem boring and pedestrian. The words we choose can reveal how we feel - as Pinker says, our language is the Stuff of Thought (even his title uses a vivid metaphor).

So, if this holds true, one has to be troubled by the paradigm of the marketer. We use words like "campaign" and "target" when we talk about reaching our market - words that come from a confrontational lexicon. Marketing has often been compared to a war. Even words like "segment" bring to mind a faceless, brainless mass that somehow had to be sliced up to make it manageable. And if you want to think of something truly disturbing, consider the literal meaning of "brand" - a physical searing of ownership. Brand comes from the Old Norse brandr - meaning to burn. It originated when manufacturers literally burned their mark onto their products. But i suspect today marketers have a different mental image of branding: searing their products into the brains of their prospects.

All this language speaks of the traditional view of marketing, the objective of which was to conquer the masses. But today, marketing has a different paradigm. We aim for partnerships and participatory relationships. Yet, for all the talk about the new age of marketing, we still seem stuck in the old way of thinking. Perhaps it's because we have to change our language first. If we still use words like "consumer"; a personality free devourer of products; or, as Jerry Michalski referred to consumers - gullets with wallets and eyeballs - how can we develop any respect for our supposed "partners" in the new marketing?

I hate snow! I hate cold! I don't ski...

So, why am I actually excited to be heading to Park City, Utah tomorrow?

It's because of MediaPost's Search Insider Summit. I just wanted to take a moment to thank Ken and Ross Fadner for allowing me to be an integral part of the past several summits. Much as I enjoy the job Incisive and Third Door do with their much bigger shows, SIS will always have a special place in my heart. It's my favorite show on the circuit..small, intimate and smart. And this show promises to be one of the best, with Avinash Kaushik, Mike Moran, Mark Mahaney, Scott Brinker, Lance Loveday, Frank Lee, Aaron Goldman, Roger Barnette, Rand Fishkin, Rob Griffin, Ben Hanna, to name just of the few Search Insiders you would be spending time with over the rest of the week in the beautiful Chateau at Silver Lake if you're also headed to Park City.

My intention is to keep blogging from the Summit and possibly Tweeting (although there are many better and more prolific Tweeters there) through the week.

This morning marks the official release of my first book - The BuyerSphere Project. You can find links to a digital preview, the full digital copy and the order page on Amazon.com at
http://www.enquiro.com/thebuyersphere/

The book is the result of a fairly extensive research project we did at Enquiro this year, looking at B2B buying behaviors from inside hundreds of organizations. I'll be doing a number of posts giving you some sneak peeks inside the book over the coming weeks, but today, I wanted to give you a little of the background that lead up to it.

 I've been threatening for sometime to write a book, but let me tell you, this was never the book I intended to write. I've actually been struck in talking to other authors about just how many "unintentional" books actually get written. This is one of them. It just "sort of happened" this year and I thought it might provide a great chance to test the waters of authorship and self publishing, allowing me to get my feet wet before I actually write the book (which has since become books..plural) that I first set out to write. As I said, the book evolved from research we conducted at Enquiro and white papers I wrote to promote the research. After I wrote the first paper, one of our sponsors said, "This reads more like a book than a white paper." Which, of course, was the point where my best laid intentions went off the rail. The next thing I knew, I was writing a book.

As an evolutionary off-shoot, The BuyerSphere Project differs from my mythical "intended" book in several ways -

• It's written for a very specific audience - I know this is not a book for the masses
• It's research heavy, so it's not for readers who blanch at the site of charts and graphs
• I made the decision that with the number of graphics in it required by the research, it had to be printed in full color, making it quite expensive to print (hence the relatively hefty $39 price tag)
• It's a bit of a strange hybrid between a research analyst's presentation, a business marketing how to book and a psychological/neurological who-dun-it, resulting in a certain narrative unevenness. It is what it is.
• It does not take the leisurely road in exploring concepts. It packs a lot of information into a relatively small number of pages. It's euphemistically been described as  "an epiphany smorgasbord", slightly less diplomatically as "intellectually dense" and finally as a "fire hose". Again, it is what it is.

I admit, I'm going into this as naive as can be. This is all totally new territory for me. I had talked to a number of successful authors hoping that they would all offer some consensus on the right path to take, and my hopes were dashed pretty much from the first conversation. It seemed that every piece of advice conflicted with every other piece of advice.

Publishing is a scary thing for an author. It's taking your reputation - your very thoughts - and putting a price tag on it. The one thing I heard over and over is this piece of advice: "Don't expect to sell many books. That's not why you write a book. You write them because you have to."  Okay..as ambiguous as that advice is, I think I get it. I have tried to keep from developing any expectations at all for this book. I'm looking at it as a fortuitous opportunity that I had to take advantage of - a learning experience.

No matter what happens, I've already been rewarded. It's been fun so far!