LifeDeluxe

Measuring up

Yahoo! this week came out and argued that the page view, the mother of all metrics, had finally outlived it's usefulness. Having been number 1 for years in the page impression model this is interesting. In a 'Yodel' entry by Peter Daboll who is Chief of Insights, he asserts that "..the adoption of cool technologies like Ajax and Flash and the growth in video...(has) changed the way Yahoo! and other companies are designing products for consumers, but they will also translate into page view declines. "

Which I suspect we are all coming to terms with.

Steve Rubel @ Micro Persuasion has already cited the demise of the Page impression, and here drives the nail in a little deeper, although interestingly moves the debate on from pure measurement conundrums (which will roll and roll) and adds a marketing dimension: "In a Long Tail world we shouldn't care about big amalgamated numbers. Marketers are going to need to reach atomized targets who will hopefully go and spread the message to others. This could be a universe of five our six people in some cases. We want to impact the right "cells" so that they go out and multiply."

Expressions then,not impressions. And go forth and propagate young man.

Express Yourself

Found this quote in Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins which I have finally got round to reading. It is in the chapter on American Idol where he ponders the fact that we talk about 'impressions' when we should be exploring the concept of 'audience expressions'.

"Expression may start at the level of the individual consumer, but by definition it situates consumption within a larger social and cultural context. Consumers not only watch media; they also share media with one another, whether this consists of wearing a T-shirt proclaiming their passion for a particular product, posting a message on a discussion list recommending a product to a friend, or creating a parody of a commercial that circulates on the internet. Expression can be seen as an investment in the brand and not simply an exposure to it".

What you do is more powerful than what you are told and all of that, but such a nice way of referring to the need to understand better the shift from planning impact to understanding effect, reach to propagation and so on.

I think he was talking about the TV market, but given that 'impressions' are also the standard currency and measurement for buying and selling most digital space, I think the discussion about 'expressions' is a neat shorthand to discussing the limitations of the impressions model in our conversations about value and effect of advertising. And that is before one starts to dissect how you plan for 'expression' rather than just trying to measure it.

Anyway, there was a nice example of this in the New York Times, about how advertisers are beginning to realise how powerful it has become to have people see their message/installation/media in Times Square, and then distribute clips or pics or words around the internet.

"When Target, the discount store operator, suspended the magician David Blaine above Times Square for two days during the week of Thanksgiving, videos shot by viewers were posted on YouTube and viewed more than 19,300 times.

“Times Square is becoming, in a way, a publishing platform,” said Peter Stabler, director of communication strategy for Goodby, Silverstein and Partners,“What happens in Times Square is no longer strictly the province of location. You can experience things that are happening there, even if you’re not there.”

Or you can just go to the Times Square cam and just see for yourself.

P&G and Unilver

This story popped up on adage and Publishing 2.0, explaining that "The monthly web audiences for P&G and Unilever brands now easily swamp the audiences of many magazines and cable and syndicated TV shows where they advertise." Some 9 million unique people a month. Which is interesting and seems reasonble given the number of people who will be job seeking, seeking investment news, researching product developments etc, coupled with just more people online looking up more stuff. Not sure it is a 'threat' to 'traditional' consumer publications, but they should start selling some ad space at least against those figures.

But of more interest was this:

"Recent research by VNU's Nielsen BuzzMetrics using Nielsen's Homescan consumer panel showed 33% of creators of consumer-generated media (in the form of video or blogs) also provide e-mail feedback to companies or brands via their websites, and 13% participate in brand or company blogs. Their engagement with corporate and brand sites is well above the norm for the general population.

"Visitors to [corporate and brand] websites have a much higher propensity to recommend products," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, whose research shows more than 40% of people who give a brand e-mail feedback are likely to recommend it to others."

So people who are more plugged into the web and involved with creating rather than purely consuming are more vocal with brands.

Check.

But if you couple that with a recommendation %age of 40% (even scaling that down a bit for sanity) you get to guess at the astonishing power of the current emerging networks in the success or otherwise of an ever increasing range of categories, and should finally start to convinve those that still don't believe they need to be in this space in any kind of serious, interactive, customer facing way.

Measurement

I stumbled across this which cheered me up for no particluar reason except the knowledge that other people are struggling as well. "...beyond pay-per-click, online media is still desperately lacking a killer metric to capture the value of its dynamic community and network effects. Highly networked communities like MySpace are still fumbling around with CPM display ads instead of seizing the HUGE opportunity to innovate how brands connect with customers through community."

And this, "New Media folks may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like “conversation,” but they’re actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media — like how to prove the value", something that will only become exacerbated as we try and push our communication and content thinking harder in an ad world obsessed with size and delivery.