Tag: advertising (Page 3 of 4)

Study finds people would not pay for privacy options

September 8, 2007 / elias

A 2007 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley found that most subjects were unwilling to spend even a quarter [25 cents] to keep someone from selling sensitive information about them — such as their weight or number of sex partners. “People prefer money over data, always,” says Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and public policy at CMU. Source: Wired

Is privacy really that big a deal? In short – yes – but paying for paid privacy options is not something I am sure of. Rather, I would expect the forces to swell up like a hurricane that will require political action to enforce privacy as a legal right. As a business, you shouldn’t think of privacy as a revenue stream, but rather, a branding tool to build trust. It’s users ignorance of the truth, not acceptance of the consequences, that has people giving away their data. Don’t abuse that trust if given the opportunity.

Understanding the Facebook poll feature

September 7, 2007 / elias

A little while ago, I was lucky to catch a Facebook poll, as a way of advertising its new poll feature. As a follow up from that experience, I thought I might purchase my own poll to validate its effectiveness. Here are a few of my observations:

1) Answers appear to be clustered

One of the interesting things about the poll feature, is that it is real time. You are getting answers as people vote. You select what type of people you want to target, and Facebook will then quiz users of that criteria by putting the poll on their homescreen. Something I noticed however, was that answers seemed to come in together followed by a gap. I also noticed that these answers that come in groups, usually have similar responses.

I appears that users are highly responsive to a poll. If it appears on their survey, a lot of people appear to answer it. I know this because I specifically targeted my poll to Australians, in the middle of the day when I wouldn’t expect people to be using facebook.
The placing of the options seems to affect the results. I suppose anyone that has studied polling before, would probably know the order of a ballot heavily influences the poll. This appears evident here. Usefully however, Facebook allows you to randomise the poll so that different users see a different order. However as is demonstrated above, with this clustering, its groups of users that see a different order, not individuals

2) Facebook users appear to be more male, and younger
Something I noticed in my previous blog posting on the poll feature, was that there appeared to be more males answering. This seems to have happened occur with this poll as well, and indicates to me that Facebook’s population of users have a higher male base – which is unusual given that women generally outnumber men in society.

It should also be noted that there is no age groups option for people above 50 years old.

3) Takers of the poll appear to be a genuinely random population
The reason I picked 200 people, was that that is the minimum amount a poll needs to be before it can statistically be considered accurate to represent a population. However as I was able to obtain data as the poll was running, it gave me insight into how random (and representative) the population that took the test was.

Below is a screenshot half way through, as well as the final result

The results for the poll are almost identical. Without reading too much into it, that tells me the conditions of the test were genuinely random.

There are a few other things I noticed, but this isn’t me trying to promote a Facebook service, and will leave to make your own analysis in combination with the other Facebook poll I blogged about. I just want to highlight that for absolutely nothing, you can get an insight into a market in literally hours.

IBM recently released a report saying that the Internet has overtaken TV, changing the dynamics of the advertising industry, and that they see the role of advertising agencies in the future to go “beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insight”

Facebook is an amazing company because of the amount of data it holds about the population in various societies. And for a fee – the rest of the world can take advantage of this as well. Welcome Facebook – the world’s most competitive agency for consumer insight.

BarCampSydney2

August 26, 2007 / elias

Things I learned at this BarCamp

It was a very different crowd from the first one.
It’s so easy to network – it was as difficult as breathing in, breathing out! I gave a presentation, and as a consequence, I had people throughout the day approach me and introduce themselves.
In the morning, collaboration was a bit of a hot theme. John Rotenstein from Atlassian asked the question of how do people define collaboration: “when two or more people work together on a business purpose”, was my answer. We agreed. Everyone else, kind of didn’t.
How to raise money – was the afternoon’s theme. Great points were brought up by Marty Wells, Mike Canon-Brookes and Dean McEvoy who led the discussion.
Some things mentioned:

Aussie VC’s lead you on. “Nice idea- let’s keep in touch” is their way of not burning bridges
VC’s work in a cycle that are in five or so year cycles – raise money at the beginning of the cycle
Rule of thumb: give 30% away on the first round, 30% on the second round
Advisor’s that give out Comet grants work on a 2% commission of future venture capital that you raise.
No one understands the advertising market – everyone in the room wanted something they could read to learn more (check back here soon – I promise!). For example, Google’s adwords programme is largely supported by the property market – the mortgage lending market that is affected by the current credit crisis, is going to affect start-ups relying on adsense as the money drops out of these ads.

I met Jan Devos, who randomly approached me and blew me away with what he has done in his life. Basically (and from the age of 17), he created an implementation of the MPEG4 compression technology (for non-tech readers – MP4 as opposed to the older MP3) and he licenses out the technology to major consumer appliance companies like Samsung, who incorporate the technology into their products.
I met Dave O’Flynn – self-described as a “tall Irish red-head” developer; Matt June – a former Major in the Australian military, and now pursuing a project based around social innovation; I discovered Rai of Tangler is a commitmentphobe; Mick thinks he can skip most of BarCamp because he thinks organising a wedding is so hard; Mike Canon-Brookes over beer revealed he is a Mark Zuckerberg wannabe; and Christy Dena one of the lead (un)organisers of the conference looks completely different from the person I thought she was!

I got a positive reaction to my half hour session on five lessons I have learned on successful intrapreneurship due to a large internal project I started at my employer, with people throughout the day getting into a chat with me about it. Richard Pendergast, who is starting a online parenting site, said he was going to write a blog on one the points with his own personal battle of creating credibility. Glad I helped! I said to him I was going to blog what I talked about it so we could turn it into a discussion, but I have decided, this exam I have to sit in 12 8 days might need to start getting my attention. Anyway, here were the five points I made, however given the discussion during the session by everyone, is a very rough framework as people brought up some great points when talking:

1) It is a lot easier to seek forgiveness, than permission when doing something in an organisation. Or in other words, just do it.

2) Be proactive, never reactive. By pushing the agenda, you are framing the agenda for something that works for your project. Once you start reacting to others, your idea will die.

3) The more you let go – the bigger your idea will get. Use other people to achieve your vision. Give other people a sense of ownership in it. Let them take credit.

4) It’s all about perception. It’s amazing how much credibility you can build by simply associating your idea to other things – and which in the process, builds your own personal brand to push through with more later on.

5) Hype build hype. Get people excited, and they will carry your idea forward. People get excited when you communicate the potential, and have them realise it.

Thank you to all those involved – both the organisers and the contributors – and I look forward to the next one.

A casual chat with a media industry insider

August 5, 2007 / elias

Today I had the chance of picking the mind of Achilles from the International Herald Tribune, who last year was appointed Vice-President, circulation and development. Achilles is a family friend and I took the opportunity to talk to him about the world of media and the challenges being faced.

The IHT is one of the three daily financial newspapers of the world, along with the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It is currently owned by the New York Times, and has a global circulation of 240,000 people. I had a great chat on a lot of different themes which could have me blog about for a week straight, but here are some of the facts I picked up from our discussion, which I will summarise below as future talking points:

On Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal: “very interested to see if he will remove the paid wall”.
The IHT experiemented with a paid wall for it’s opinion content, but they will be removing that later this year
He says the Bancroft family sold it because they are emotionally detached from the product. It was just an asset to them.
A lot of the content is simply reedited content from the NYT and internationalising it. For example, replacing sentences like “Kazakhstan in the size of New York state” doesn’t work well for an international reader who has no idea how big New York state is.
On the threat of citizen journalism with traditional media: “they are a competitive threat because we are competing for the same scarce resource: the attention of readers”
The problem with citizen journalism and bloggers is the validity of their information – behind a newspapers brand, is trust from readers of the large amounts of research and factchecking that occur. They have no credibility.
A blog may develop credibility with an audience greater than the New York Times. But this poses problems for advertising as advertisers might only advertise because of its niche audience. Blogs are spreading the advertising dollars, which is hurting everyone – it’s become decentralised and that has implications which are problematic.
The IHT’s circulation is spread thinly across the world. For example, it has 30,000 readers in France and six in Mauritius.
Their target market is largely the business traveller, which has its own unique benefits and problems. For example, a business traveler will read it for two days but when they get back home, they will revert to their normal daily newspaper. It’s not a very loyal reader.
Readership is a more important concept than circulation as it tells advertisers how big the actual audience of a publication is. For example, the average newspaper has 2.7 readers per copy. However due to the nature of the IHT’s readers, despite having high circulation, they have low readership.
IHT is in a unique position of relying on circulation revenue more than advertising. For example, a normal daily relies on circulation revenue as 20% of its total revenue; the IHT counts on it for 50%.
It’s hard to get advertising because a readership of university professors is less desirable than fund managers that might read the WSJ. Advertisers prefer to target key decision makers.
It doesn’t rely on classifieds as a revenue source – a key thing hurting the newspaper industry currently.
Although they place more reliance on circulation revenue, they still get some good advertising opportunities as a lot of readers are politicians and government decision makers.
They get a lot of advertising for fashion
Psychographic data is more important to advertisers than circulation and it shows what type of readership a publication has.

Half the problem has been solved with time spent

July 28, 2007 / elias

On Thursday, I attended the internal launch of the Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook for 2007-2011. It was an hour packed with interesting analysis, trends, and statistics across a dozen industry segments. You can leave a comment on my blog if you are interested in purchasing the report and I’ll see if I can arrange it for you.

One valuable thing briefly mentioned, was the irony of online advertising.
Continue reading

Citizen journalism is not dead: it’s just a baby still

July 8, 2007 / elias

Writing has always been my thing – which would explain why I started a student newspaper in high school. My interest in politics & current affairs, combined with my writing skills, had me flirt with a career in journalism. Disappointed with student media at university, I started a society for journalists, which was meant to be a democratically run media outlet that created various thought-provoking publications.

Six months after the concept came to me on the back of an envelope whilst visiting family in Athens and London, we created a 24 page colour magazine, with a print run of 4,000 – fully funding the cost with local advertising. Among many lessons from that experience, I learnt two valuable ones: funding is hard, and distribution is key. Better said, funding was a function of distribution – you are not going to get advertisers without an audience. Distribution was the key to having an audience.

That experience led me to experiment with a website, with bling bling effects thanks to Microsoft Frontpage. What was originally meant to be a complement of the print publication, soon in my eyes became the future. In various forms, we tried community-generated journalism, and built a strong following of readers through a weekly web publication on a niche topic (local campus politics).

So whilst that is very much skimming over the top of that 2 1/2 years, I think it illustrates how I’ve experienced through a natural progression of what is now called citizen journalism (or CitJ if you’re cool). I was interested to hear about Bronwen Clune’s Norg network when I met her at webjam and reading Pete Cashmore’s opinion that citizen journalism is dead has me feel like it’s time I wrote about what I think on the issue.

Blogs + adsense is what threatens citizen journalism start-ups

Citizen journalism is not dead – you only have to check out the political blogosphere to realise that. That then leads us to the argument of what is journalism and what is blogging, but I think it’s fair to say, blogging as a form of writing is like editorial pages. Blogging can be a form of journalism – but blogging can also be something else: they are not mutually exclusive. We should also not confuse the fact that a blog as a technology tool is to be treated differently from blogging as a writing style.

What threatens Citizen Journalism as a business model, is that anyone can create a blog and anyone can insert ads into their blog to make money?Ç? – you can be your own publisher with $0. However therein also lies the opportunity for CitJ news organisations – blogs take time to build a brand (like any other publication) and just because you can wack some ads on your blog, doesn’t mean you can make money out of it.

I used to think the Internet eliminated the need for a strong distribution network. Just because it’s cheaper however, doesn’t mean it’s easier: the benefit of economies of scale in the industrial era hold true for the information age. Citizen Journalism as a concept works – however as a business model, it’s still being tweaked. The key is to realise the power of being an aggregator whereby individuals have access to an audience, and don’t have to worry about chasing advertisers.

It’s not that citizen journalism doesn’t work – it’s that the platform to enable it hasn’t been figured out. South Korea’s Ohmynews has proven that it works,?Ç? however citizen journalism platforms are reliant on the local culture of the audience. It’s not so much about the technology (we’ve got that), as it is the culture – afterall, people engineering is a lot harder to do than machine engineering.

Thoughts on attention, advertising, and a metric to measure both: keep it simple

June 17, 2007 / elias

Advertising on the Internet is exploding. Assuming you accept my premise that the Internet will be the backbone of the world’s attention economy – then, I am sure you can see the urgency of developing an effective metric for measuring audiences that consume content online. Advertisers are expecting more accountability online and there is increasing demand for an independent third-party to verify results. But you can’t have accountability and there is no value in audits, if one place measures in apples and the other in bananas.

The Attention Economy is seriously lacking an effective measurement system

Ajax broke the pageview model of impressions, the one billion-dollar practice of click-fraud is the dirty big secret of pay-for-performance advertising, and the other major metric of using unique visitors (through cookies) is proving inaccurate.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The Internet has the best potential for targeted advertising, and advertisers are moving onto it in stampedes – and yet, we still can’t work out how to measure audiences effectively. Measurement is broken on the Net.

(Although I am focusing on advertising, this can be applied in other contexts. An advertising metric is simply putting a monetary value on what is really an attention metric.)

Yet when we look at the traditional media, are we being a little harsh on this new media? Is the problem with the web’s measurement systems just that it is more accountable for its errors? After all – radio, television, and print determine their audience through inference which are based on sampling methods and not actually directly measuring an audience. Sampling is about making educated guesses – but a guess is still a guess.

Maybe another way of looking at it is that the old way of doing advertising is no longer effective. Although we can say pageviews are broken due to AJAX, the truth is it was always an ineffective measurement system, as it was based on the traditional media’s premise of how many viewers/subscribers theoretically and potentially could see that ad. As an example of why this is not how it should be: when people visit my blog via Google Images, they hang around for 30 seconds. People that search for business issues on the web that I write about, like stuff you are reading right now – spend 5+ minutes. If both are equal in terms of page views, but the later actually reads the pages and the former only scans the content for an image – why are we treating them equally? My blog is half about travel, and half about the business of the internet, which is why I have two very different audiences. Just because I get high page views from my travel content, doesn’t mean I can justify higher CPM’s for people that want to advertise on internet issues. Not all pageviews are the same – especially when I know the people giving me high pageviews, arn’t really consuming my content

Another issue is that advertisers are so caught up on who can create the most entertaining 30 second ad, that the creativity to get people entertained has ovetaken the reason why advertising happens in the first place: to make sales. The way you do that, is by communicating your product to the people that would want to buy it. If I placed advertising on this blog, from people who want to do web-business related stuff, they should only pay for the peope that read my blog postings for 5+ minutes on the Attention economy, not for the Google images searchers who are looking for porn (my top keywords, and how people find my blog, makes me laugh out loud sometimes!).

When we create a metric that measures attention, lets be sure of one thing: the old way is broken, and the new ways will continue to be broken if we simply copy and paste the old ways. New ways like click-through ads that appear on search results, and account for 40% of internet advertising is not how advertising should be measured. The reason is because it is putting the burden of an effective advertising campaign, on a publisher. Why should a publisher not get paid, with the opportunity cost of not using another ad that would have paid, because of the ineffectiveness of the advertisers campaign strategy at targeting?

When measuring audience attention, lets not overcomplicate it. It should be purely measuring if someone saw it. As an advertiser, I should be able to determine which people from which demograph can see it my ad – and yes, I will pay the premium for that targeting. If it turns into a sale, or if they enjoyed the content – is where your complex web analytic packages come in. But for a simple global measurement system, lets keep it simple.

Concluding thought

If I stood at the toll booths of the Sydney Harbour bridge naked, some people will honk at me and others won’t. If I can guarantee that they can see me naked, that’s all as a publisher I need to do. It’s the advertisers problem if people honk at me or not. (Not enough honks means as a model I should still get my wage. They just need to hire a better looking model next time!)

Privacy – just like inflation

June 11, 2007 / elias

Privacy is a massive business issue. I’ve commented on the lack of interest in privacy from entrepreneurs in the web space; I’ve tried to define privacy; and I joined the APML workgroup for this reason

Need to know why I think it matters? Well here are three facts:

1) Targeted advertising is the future of advertising. Why? Because it’s most effective type of advertising.

2) Web services, and arguably the entire attention economy, rely on advertising as a revenue model.

3) There is a natural friction between targeted advertising and privacy. You can’t target without knowing who you are targeting – which implies some type of implicit collection of data.

Google, on the strength of its brand, has been able to manage the privacy issue. But no longer. Privacy International has ranked Google at the worst privacy offended on the internet. As 99% of Google’s revenue relies on advertising, with open acknowledgment that they are trying to find ways of better targeting advertising, we can expect to hear more and more how Google’s evil is in the data they collect and the way they control it.

Economic growth is one of the key concepts to how our world works – it’s what companies and countries for example, constantly aim for. But as we have seen repeatedly, if an economy grows too quickly, problems can appear – inflation, infrastructure issues, and fatigue. Greed has a price. In the context of an economy, inflation is the speed-hump – the faster you drive over it, the bigger the hit.

So would it be too far to extend the metaphor, to say that privacy is the advertising equivalent to inflation? If you are relying on advertising as a revenue model, remember that privacy will matter more and more with an interconnected world.

The attention economy needs a consistent base

June 10, 2007 / elias

Okay, enough naval gazing. The journalist in me (by experience), the accountant in me (by education), and the businessman in me (by occupation) is going to synthesise my understanding of the world and propose a new metric for the attention economy. I don’t know the answer yet, but I am going to use this blog to develop my thinking. I can’t promise a solution, however I am sure breaking the issue down into key requirements, assumptions, and needs of what this magical metric is – will add value somewhere for someone.

So let’s start with the most important assumption of all: what are we measuring? As Herbert Simon coined it, and smart guys like Umair, Scott and Chris have extended (at least for my conceptual understanding) – it is called the attention economy. It is important to note however, that the attention economy is an aspect of the Information Sector (see below). And as I described in a previous posting, the attention economy needs a metric for two reasons: monetisation and feedback.

What incorporates the attention economy? Well, this is a bit like a related problem I had when I first came to grips with what new media was. A few years back, I did some active research trying to understand how a book, a television, a newspaper, and a search engine – could all somehow be classed as “media”. I found my question answered by Vin Crosbie’s manifesto (read this for a recent summary). Take note of what he considers is the key element of new media (the technology aspect).

I am going to propose one of my key assumptions of the future, which will answer this question. It might not happen for another 5, 10 or even 20 years – but I am convinced this is the future. The Internet will act as infrastructure.

I believe the unifying aspect, and the backbone of the attention economy, will be the Internet. All enterprise software, all consumer software, all (distributed) entertainment, all (distributed) communications and all information – will be delivered digitally over the Internet. I think the people at the US Census bureau?Ç? conceptually have already worked this out by defining the information sector of the economy, which classes the above mentioned and more into this one diverse category. The Internet is the enabler of the Information Age, just like how the production line was for the Industrial Age

I’m not saying we are going to live, sleep, and eat on computers in the future. However just think – anything that runs on electricity, can connect to the Internet. And look at the technologies being developed that enable the Internet to live beyond the computer screen like electronic paper and?Ç? dynamic interfaces. Even more powerfully, is that the Internet has brought entire industries to their knees – like the newspaper and music industries – because it is providing a more efficient way of delivering content. If it’s information, communication or entertainment related – then it probably works better in digital format, over the Internet. (Excluding of course the things like theme parks and the like, which are more about physical entertainment and not distributed entertainment like a television programme).

I think this is an important issue to be recognised, that the Internet will the the backbone of the attention economy. By being the core back-end, it means that no matter the output device – whether it is mobile phone, a computer, or a television – it will be providing a consistent delivery mechanism for digital information. For a measurement system to work, it needs to be consistent. The Internet infrastructure will be that consistency. If you can recognise that, then that is a big step forward to solving the issue.

Tangler

June 2, 2007 / elias

This is the second post in a series – wizards of oz – which is to highlight the innovation we have down under, and how the business community needs to wake up and realise the opportunities. I review Tangler, a Sydney-based start-up that has recently released their application to the world as a public beta.

Tangler is a web-service that enables discussions over a network. Think of discussions with the immediacy of Instant Messaging (it’s easy), but with the persistency of a forum (messages are permanently stored). Discussions are arranged into communities of interest (groups), which are further broken down into topic areas. Click here to see a video overview.

Value

1) It’s a network application. Although it’s got a great design, and looks like a funky website, the real power of this web service is what it’s working towards: discussions over a network. Imagine a little widget with the topic “What do you think of Elias Bizannes?” placed on my (external) personal blog, my internal work blog, my myspace/facebook/social networking page, as well as it’s own dedicated forum on the Tangler site. A centralised discussion, in a decentralised manner. That’s big.

2) It’s community has great DNA. Communities are not easy things to build – my own experience on a getting-bigger-by-the-day internal project has shown that it is a complex science, touching everything from understand motivational theory to encouraging the right kind of behaviours (policing without policing). My usage on the site has shown to me that the active community building currently occuring, is on the right track. Anyone can hire a code monkey, wack on some flashy front-end, and say they have a great product. But not anyone can build a strong community – even Google struggles on this (the acquisition of YouTube happened largely because of community, because the YouTube community beat Google’s own service). Tangler’s community is already turning into a powerful asset – the DNA is there – now it just needs exposure, and the law of cumulative advantage will kick in.

3) The founder and staff are responsive to its community. I posted a question on the feedback forum, to prove this point: I got a response in an hour, on a Saturday. The staff at Tangler are super responsive – which in part, is due to the real-time discussion ability of the software – but also because of their commitment. As I state above – the value of Tangler is the community of users it builds – this type of responsiveness is crucial to keep its users satisfied to come back, because it makes them feel valued. Additionally, the community is driving the evolution of the application, and that’s the most powerful way to create something (adapting to where there is a need by the people that use it)

4) It’s a platform. What makes Tangler powerful, is that it encourages discussions around niche content areas. Make that niche content, being created for free. Low cost to produce + highly targeted content = an advertisers dream. Link it with a distributed network across the entire Internet (see 1 above), and you’ve got something special.

Conclusion

Social networks, which is what Tangler is, are characterised by:
1) the existence of a repository of user-generated content and
2) the need of members to communicate.

Tangler’s user-generated content and communications web make them an interesting fit for both media conglomerates and telecommunication companies (but for different reasons). I see a Tangler acquisition as a no-brainer for the big Telco’s. Integrating a social network like Tangler into Telstra, builds on the synergy between the communication needs of social network users and the communications expertise and service infrastructure of the communication companies. Unlike voice calls that are a commodity now, the Telco’s need to take advantage of their network infrastructure and accommodate for text-based discussions, which can be monetised for as long as the content exists (with advertising).

The challenge for Tangler however – as with any other Internet property – is that the scale of the audience of social networks determines the nature of the relationship with a communications company. Micro-sized social networks are not interesting to communication companies. Massive social networks are, but history has shown they would rather be partners than be acquired. To be attractive to the big end of town, Tangler needs to show to have a scale large enough to grow as a business but not too large to dictate the terms of the business.

My observations conclude me to think that they will be a hit once they open up their application to external developers, which will relieve the development bottleneck faced by their resource and time constrained team. However they shouldn’t rush this, as I still think their performance issues are not completely ironed out yet. An open API would be taken up by its enthusiastic community who are technologically orientated. Not too mention the strong relationships the CEO and CMO have forged with the local web entrepreneurial and development community in Australia.

My boss is currently doing a secondment as acting Finance Director at Sensis, Telstra’s media arm. Maybe I need to organise a catch-up with him, before these guys get snatched up by some US conglomerate!

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