“The airline passenger journey, from home to boarding the plane and beyond, is a dynamic and emotional experience, with many media messages and retail choices along the way. But how can we measure these changing emotions and the effect they have on the passenger’s state of mind? And what messages types are most likely to be understood in these states of mind?
Recent research by psychologists, specialising in the field of ethnography (the observation of respondents in the natural environment) has identified the passenger experience to be an unusually highly dynamic and stimulating experience. Hannah Knox, a British-based behavioural psychologist has described airports as “An increasingly intensive use of space where anything might happen…”
Red Border has carried out in-airport and cross-media ethnography, identifying distinct emotional zones in the flyer’s journey, as well as the experience of magazine reading.”
Posts in category 'Advertising'
These agencies, he says, do not come at user experience from an honest place. “Ad agencies, in particular, are soulless holes, the precepts of whose business runs wholly contrary to good user experience practice.”
Read article (and make sure to also read the more than 70 comments so far)
Although it tends to move cautiously and deliberately, AP has been subtly and quietly introducing tools aimed at improving relevance and socialization, and may have plans for an ad-supported aggregation business that applies what it has been learning. [...]
The findings are part of a study called “A new model for communication,” released two weeks ago with little fanfare and no press coverage, even by AP’s own reporters (pdf link to report). The research was done in conjunction with Context-Based Research Group of Baltimore, and was a followup to a 2008 study called “A new model for news” (pdf link to report). Both studies used ethnographic research techniques to do a ‘deep dive’ into consumer behavior and motivations. [...]
To combat “ad annoyance,” the study recommends restoring trust, noting that social vetting of information is now often “filling a role historically played by trusted packagers of information, such as local newspapers, which connected readers with advertisers in a trusted environment.” This led the study team at Context to suggest a what they call Communitas, consisting of collaboration, social contract (understood rules), kinship, honesty, reciprocity and relevance.
Living in the age of turbulence
Anna Kirah, partner, CPH Design (and former senior design anthropologist, Microsoft Corporation)
Anna explores how advertisers can flourish in the new Age of Turbulence by understanding the needs of people in their everyday and not so everyday lives. This is the age where people’s values, their needs and their desires change abruptly, and where people no longer view their ‘digital’ and ‘real’ lives as separate.
Reflecting on the impact people have on technology, as well as the impact technology has on people, Anna will introduce ‘BIG SISTER’, a concept where benevolent, caring, technology guides you through the Age of Turbulence with seamless convergence.
Dreamtelligence
Martin Raymond, co-founder, The Future Laboratory
Barack Obama describes it as the ‘audacity of hope’, innovators, planners, academics and authors are referring to it as Dreamtelligence, a new vital and visionary way to use play, fantasy, dream- thinking and innovation to kickstart ideas and stimulate consumer engagement. Martin unpacks the trends and outlines what dreamtelligence means to digital business amidst the continued growth of a content-savvy consumer.
The long nose of innovation
Bill Buxton, principal researcher, Microsoft
Hear Bill Buxton share his vision for ‘The Long Nose of Innovation’ addressing the impact of future technologies on advertisers and marketers.
The Times’ Innovation Portfolio
“The Times interactive team has been creating path-breaking experiments in infographics and interaction design. All of which are now collected in its terrific new Innovation Portfolio.
The pieces called out on the site–each of which is represented by a bubble–range from infographics of public sentiment (“What on word describes your mood”) to ultra-polished interactive features, which elegantly summarize massive feature stories.”
And apparently, the site was designed to inspire conversations about how to apply immersive storytelling techniques to… the advertising process.
Mapping a new, mobile internet
“Marketers have long dreamed of zeroing in on shoppers, whether in a mall or a competitor’s store, and hitting them with targeted ads or coupons. (The privacy implications are a big deal, as we’ll see.) But the business ramifications of the Next Net stretch beyond marketing.
Mobile data also promise to help researchers fine-tune transit systems, study the spread of crime or disease, and even monitor and optimize the movements of workers. For many businesses, the coming flood of mobile information could bestow a competitive edge.”
Whitepaper: The glittering allure of the mobile society
“When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it is often said that what works in one country, does not work in another. I wholeheartedly refute that argument. Human beings are more alike than we care to admit. We are programmed to be a “we species”—a social networking species with an innate need to connect and communicate. I often muse on the reason why SMS is ubiquitous as a communication mechanism. It is because we as a species do, in fact, constantly communicate via short messages, a behaviour that we learnt millennia ago.
That is why we are inevitably moving towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. Because any technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, and get stuff done will be widely adopted.
The Mobile Society is completely different to the industrial society. It requires a new logic and a new way of thinking of how to create business, civil governance, health care, and education. The mobile society is seen as both an opportunity and a threat because it signifies a reordering of business models, new flows of communication, and the appearance of new gate keepers in the information distribution wars. Resistance is a natural response when society changes structurally. As a consequence, there are differing points of view on what exactly the Mobile Society can deliver, depending on who you are.”
(via London Calling)
Nokia on somebody else’s phone
The end of consumer surveys?
“After issuing dire warnings about the future of consumer surveys, the two biggest advertisers and buyers of market research in the world — Procter & Gamble and Unilever — are linking with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) for an industry effort to embrace online chatter and other naturally occurring feedback like never before.
“Without transforming our capabilities into approaches that are more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumers we seek to understand, the consumer-research industry as we know it today will be on life support by 2012,” Kim Dedeker, VP-external capability leadership, global consumer and market knowledge at P&G, said in a statement provided by the ARF.
To tackle the issue, the ARF will hold two industry summits in the coming six weeks to support new ways of listening to consumers that don’t involve the traditional question-and-answer format.”
Nice also this quote, which could come out of any book on user-centred design:
“You can’t ask people what they want, because what they say and what they do are two different things,” said Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-research and sales for ESPN, another backer of the ARF effort. “We can actually improve our [initiative's] success rate if we just listen a bit more … on a passive basis.”
The article then goes on about the alternatives such as mining insights from blogs, social networks, consumer comments to websites, but doesn’t mention qualitative tools.
Interestingly, the ARF initiative seems to reflect a larger paradigm shift, “that could help research shed its uncool image and move researchers beyond today’s primary role as gatekeepers toward idea generators.”
(via Fallon Planning)
Nokia’s Legends Telegraph
Covered are indoor positioning, location sensing, Traffic Works, Connected Home, personalised web widgets, MultiScanner, mobile journalism and NFC.
Apparently the old newspaper look, the accompanying bar soundtrack, and the down-to-earth working class accent by actor Ron McLarty have to “show how real some stuff that might seem unreal actually is” and to “plant new technology right into the palms of regular folks.”
Very gimmicky, if you ask me, with doubtful results. Who is this aimed at? Baby boomers? Kids? Working class geeks?
Well, according to Ross Lamont, one of the people behind the project, this “campaign is all about innovation”, with the main aim of “telling stories about the innovations going on inside Nokia”.
Brand interactions are the future
Back to interaction designers. Here’s a concept worth thinking about: many of them don’t want to work for your ad agency. How do I know this? Because I talk to them daily. The most common response I get is, “Why would I want to work on a constant stream of microsites and promotions?” Interaction designers thrive on long-term project engagements. They yearn to sink their teeth into complex problems, wrapping their heads around how they can help solve them.
An agency environment that churns out digital program after program is less appealing — especially when there are opportunities to go work with a start-up, a non-agency or even, perhaps, the future Googles of the world. In an industry built off of the copywriter-art director dynamic duo, it’s time to think about talent in terms of “Renaissance people.” Many interaction designers fit this bill.
Blyk as a user-generated media company
“Blyk is typically described in press reports as ‘an advertising-funded MVNO’, but after spending some time looking at the company’s model and talking to the management, I’m inclined to think of it as a new type of mobile business.
Blyk is actually user-generated media company, but with some important differences. Unlike most ‘user-generated’ content ventures, it does not rely on users going out of their way to compose their own web pages or post photographs. Nor does it seek to place advertisements within the ‘content’ itself. Instead, Blyk’s ‘media’ is the free person-to-person communications it offers its subscribers.
Traditional media companies, like magazines and television studios, must employ staff to produce a constant stream of compelling content onto which they can tack their advertising inventory. User-generated services face their own set of challenges, particularly the need to gain scale with breakneck speed, thereby conquering the ‘empty rooms’ problem. Blyk’s offering, however, enables the company to sidestep the scale issues of the user-generated model and avoid the production costs of traditional media. All they need is for people to remain interested in the idea of making calls and sending texts.”
Blyk by the way announced today that they are expanding into the Netherlands and that they have some new investors, including Goldman Sachs and Industrial and Financial Investments Company (IFIC).
Marko Ahtisaari on the Blyk user experience
Blyk – the first completely ad-supported MVNO – launched this week in the UK market. There has been a lot of controversy about Blyk’s innovative business model – providing free SMS messages and voice minutes in return for watching ads. Blyk services will be limited to their target 16 to 24 year old demographic, and they plan to recruit their subscribers on campus and through viral invitation.
Marko Ahtisaari is a key member of the Blyk team, responsible for the user experience as well as brand design and development. In this interview, Marko talks about the special advertising formats that Blyk will use, and explains why Blyk actually has to think more like a media company and less like a mobile operator.
WARC, huge online marketing database with many relevant papers
Two papers in particular caught my attention:
The emperor’s new clothes: technology is useless if consumers can’t use it
Simon Silvester, Market Leader, Spring 2007, Issue 36, pp.20-24
Digital technology is developing at a staggering rate, but there is a danger that it could collapse as the dotcom boom did if companies do not change their attitude to consumers. Consumer ability to understand technology does not rise; consumers (including the young) adopt new products slowly, and with difficulty. Most people use only one or two of the many functions programmed into their equipment, and companies need to understand how innovations spread through a population, and how understanding always falls as mainstream consumers follow the technology nerds who adopt first. They must put the consumer first and become more basic in their marketing. This includes finding the one killer application that is really wanted, instead of adding functions that no-one will use just because it is possible. Simplicity is a primary benefit. The article ends with 15 guidelines for making sure that technological products become user-friendly: they include watching what people actually do, including women and people in emerging markets.
Transforming leisure with ethnography
Caroline Gibbons-Barry, Scott Moshier and Karen Hofman, ESOMAR, Leisure Conference, Rome, November 2006
To offer satisfying experiences, the leisure industry must understand how consumers have adopted a complex, multifaceted and integrated approach to leisure. Profound cultural and values shifts have lead consumers to build uplifting and transformative leisure moments into their everyday lives, changing the standard against which the leisure industry must compete. Ethnography can take leisure purveyors beyond their own facilities to uncover both the contexts that inform consumer mindsets and perspectives, and what resonates with consumers’ inner beings and deepest desires.
Since it’s a subscription based service, I cannot link to the papers but the site has a good search engine. Unfortunately, full subscription is rather expensive.
“These so-called location-based services are trying to revamp the web experience to be less cumbersome on mobile devices, freeing users from what has been a pretty dismal experience involving lots of typing, scrolling and waiting.
The new services, with names like Mobio and Where, are aimed at anyone with a mobile device that can connect to the Internet. But the kind of online information they are making available on cellphones, BlackBerrys and other devices can be of particular use to travelers.
After downloading the application onto a phone, as you would a cellphone ring tone, a user can enter a city or a ZIP code and, in very few clicks, find the cheapest nearby gas station, locate a good restaurant, find an ATM or a Wi-Fi hot spot, call a cab, view movie times and more. [...]
The new location-based services are part of a big race to push the Internet — and all the advertising, sales and information it entails — onto cellphone screens. Just about every company with a Web presence, from Google and Yahoo to travel sites like Orbitz.com and Kayak.com, has been adapting certain services or search capabilities for mobile devices. [...]
For now, location-based service companies are being careful not to turn users off with ads, even though advertising provides the main revenue for services that are free to users. Those that do include ads try to display them only during the time it takes to connect to the Internet or in context — offering a coffee coupon, for instance, when a user searches for the nearest Starbucks.”
Mobile advertising has been a topic of discussion for mobile operator management teams for many years, but it was the recent moves by both Yahoo and Google to focus on the revenue opportunities presented by mobile advertising that has all in the mobile industry scurrying to develop a viable and sustainable business model that will generate additional revenues in the face of fierce competition and falling per subscriber voice revenues.
For those companies who have taken the early initiative, the ability to interact personally and intelligently with consumers via a mobile device is delivering recall and response rates not seen in advertising in a long while. Reports by NetInformer, a provider of wireless media and mobile marketing services, quote typical response rates of 15%, which is 10 times higher than traditional direct response advertising. Such successes should have advertisers and advertising agencies very excited as they currently struggle to reach consumers effectively with traditional media channels.
How then do operators harness the medium’s obvious opportunities without alienating their loyal subscribers, and how do advertisers harness the new medium without negatively affecting their brand values and associations? This is not easily answered, however these questions need to be considered within a very structured and well-planned process, acknowledging and respecting the customer’s attitudinal barriers towards the intrusiveness of mobile advertising. The risks associated with an incorrect strategy and services rollout are massive, potentially killing mobile advertising at birth.
The new portal upgrades the existing and very popular Vogue/Vanity and Glamour websites.
During the concept development and design of the portal, Experientia was intensely involved in providing its particular user testing and human-centred design focus.
The Experientia team concentrated first on better understanding the lifestyle and entertainment needs of the female readership, so that the new portal would be developed around their context, needs and aspirations, rather than be based on the assumptions the editorial team held about the interests of these women.
In particular, the team did a range of structured interviews, tests and card sorting exercises to arrive at these insights and to inform the information architecture.
They then coordinated the development of three click-through design prototypes that were used to gather feedback from end-users during user testing, in order to provide further input to the final design solution.
“During his ‘Ethnography & Its Impact on Marketing’ session [at the inaugural MPlanet conference this week], Mr. Lombardi stressed how ethnographers can help uncover the ‘unknown unknowns’ (to quote Donald Rumsfeld) about consumers and use those findings to directly shape more efficient and effective surveys.”
“Michael Treacy, co-founder and chief strategist at GEN3 Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in product innovation, agreed. In his ‘Reinventing Innovation in Consumer Products; presentation, he said, ‘Right now we’re not very good at identifying what people need. Sometimes you can do focus group after focus group and [because of certain product limitations assumed by the consumers] often times the customer is the dumbest guy in the room.’”
“In Mr. Treacy’s push for creating a scientific approach to innovation and producing the breakthrough product consumers didn’t know they needed — but fervently embrace — the first step is to use ethnographic studies ‘to the point of being the consumer’.”
Google 2.0 and its growing power [The Mercury News]
Not everyone is comfortable with Google’s growing power. “Google has this imperial digital ambition that frightens me,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit focused on maintaining media diversity and openness. [...]
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said he is concerned that Google 2.0 could represent the first glimpse of a future dominated by a handful of giant companies whose control over vast computer networks lets them broker both digital advertising and access to digital content, possibly controlling what information and which ads users can easily locate online. [...]
“What I believe is threatening to people in many fields is that we will lose the independent distribution model of the Web,” said Kahle. “That would be a horrible waste of 20 years of promising developments.” [...]
For some critics, the most worrisome aspect of Google’s transformation is how it has begun to use the copious personal data it collects from users to deliver personally customized responses.
The old Google did not target advertisements to individuals. Instead it analyzed words typed into its search box to determine what ads might be most relevant.
The new Google tracks individuals who are logged into their Google accounts, noting, for example, which search results draw their attention and which ads receive their clicks.
Google accounts are required to use Google’s free online productivity applications, including Gmail, the Google calendar, Google docs and the Google notebook, as well as other services.
Chester said consumers are not prepared to deal with the kind of sophisticated data collecting and data mining that has become routine for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as for smaller Internet companies. Earlier this month, the Center for Digital Democracy filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, requesting an investigation into online marketing and data collection practices.
The Mercury News wrote about the data collection practices of Internet giants in a special report published in August that found the companies’ privacy policies did not protect personal data from disclosure under certain circumstances.
“I don’t think one can trust Google, and I think the direction that Google is going in should send civil-liberty chills and privacy chills throughout the user community,” Chester said. “Google 2.0 is simply a 21st-century version of one of the media giants.”
European Market Research Event – Day 2, morning
James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”
James Surowiecki is an extremely well-skilled public speaker. He managed to give a detailed and well-structured 45 minute presentation on his book “The Wisdom of Crowds” with many examples, without notes and without slides.
His argument is that crowds are often smarter collectively than even the smartest individuals it contains. He claims that “If you can figure out ways to tap into the collective intelligence of your organisation and the collective intelligence of your consumers, you can radically change your capability to resolve problems and to forecast the future.”
Surowiecki gave many examples of how that is being done:
- NASA using volunteers to classify Martian craters in a programme called Clickworkers,
- Iowa Electronic Markets: the use of markets to predict elections. People buy and sell shares to predict the outcome of US Presidential elections. They were more accurate 3/4 of the time than any Gallup poll.
- Hollywood Stock Exchange. People buy and sell shares in how well movie releases will do. They give a better answer than any other method. They also picked 7 out of 8 of the major Oscar winners.
- Other examples include HP where employees could buy or sell shares in how well printer sales were going to do, and it outperformed internal forecasts. Siemens also used this technique to predict how long a particular software product development is going to take. Microsoft has also done something similar, and Google has launched PROPHET, which predicts 200 events of all kinds and they have been almost perfectly correct.
But crowds only act intelligent under three conditions:
- Aggregation. It is about the aggregate judgment of lots of individuals, not about consensus.
- Diversity. The crowd, the group is cognitively diverse with differences of perspective and differences of heuristics. Homogeneous groups tend to reinforce their own thinking. Diversity mitigates this effects of peer pressure, which can be very powerful.
- Independence. The people within the crowd act independently. They think for themselves and rely on their own information, own ideas. Our natural tendency to imitate and protect our reputation can move us away from this independence.
According to Surowiecki, one of the implications for market research is that you want to ask people not what they think of a product, but instead you want to ask the question: “how successful do you think this product is going to be” or “how many people do you think will buy this product by February”.
Roula Nasser, P&G
Roula Nasser is Director of Customer and Market Knowledge of the Global P&G Beauty.
Her talk, entitled “Driving Consumer & Market Understanding to New Heights: A Roadmap for Success” set out a market strategy and vision, but was unfortunately a bit weak on examples.
P&G has put a lot of emphasis on focusing on the future, or in their own jargon: from hindsight, to insight, to foresight. To do that, they have been investing a lot on new capabilities to get at consumer attitudes; on understanding the changing dynamics of the marketplace, particularly the differences between the developed and the developing world; and on making research and researchers strategic.
Nasser then went on to say how important it is to have visible support from company leaders, and went into a long and elaborate praise of A.G. Lafley who is P&G’s chairman, president and CEO.
Lastly, she stressed how important it is to think about consumers in new ways, by seeing them as people and developing a more personal relationship, and to use more involved shadowing techniques, which they call “Walk with Me”: go and visit people in their homes; live on the budget of a low-income consumer for a week; shop with consumer’s grocery list, budget and children; serve in jobs where P&G products are used.
The examples, from China and South Africa, illustrated how such an approach can lead to real benefits for advertising. There were however no examples of what this deeper people-centred approach might mean for P&G’s product innovation.