SearchWiki (aka Google Changes its Search Listings)

It's not every day that you see a massive change to the way Google results look, but if you've got a Google account you've no doubt noticed it. Basically you search for something when you're signed in and next to every result is an up arrow, down arrow and little x with a speech bubble after the result. Basically Google is asking for your feedback, though apparently your pumping things up and down only effect your own results (for now). The comments, however, will be public to all and you'll be identified with your username (which Google reminds you of when you first use it).

This is all kind of crazy, mostly because I seemed to have missed hearing about it all together. Apparently it only came online today. Clearly search engines are inherently social (rankings like PageRank rely on people linking to one another to work), but this is an interesting and opaquely social development. I'll be fascinated to see how they keep this from devolving into a giant spam-filled game of FIRST!. (BTW, looks like Google just posted something.)

Tags: google, search // COMMENTS OPEN (2)

More Creative Banner Ads

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about advertising on the internet. More specifically about how the economic downturn could signal a breaking point for banner advertising. So we know about banner blindness and dismal clickthrough/interaction rates, yet people keep buying up the stuff. Mainly it's because it's the closest thing the web has to do with scale. There are no other good ways to get your message in front of a lot of people (whether or not they look at it) that doesn't take a lot more work (like PR/outreach).

With that said, I had another thought the other day: Maybe the answer is that advertisers need more variations on their creative. What I mean is, I think part of the banner blindness problem (and this is all speculation without any data behind it so take it with a grain of salt) is that we're all trained to recognize when something doesn't belong and, in the case of the web, to ignore it. Banners tend to be a different color, font and they move all around, add in the fact that they sit along the edges and they're just too easy to quickly spot and dismiss. But once in awhile someone like Apple comes along and does some fancy custom unit where they pay attention to everything including getting the NYTimes.com typeface right. That kind of stuff must make more of an impact than your run of the mill banner, no matter how cool it might be. Right?

Of course, doing a whole bunch of custom units that match to both the look/feel of the site and the audiences mindset is a whole lot more expensive from a creative development perspective. But isn't that kind of targeting what the web does best? If advertisers are so desperate for people to pay attention, maybe they should try a little harder.

Tags: advertising, marketing // COMMENTS OPEN (3)

Animals, Science and Human Behavior

It seems to be a good week for animals helping us understand the world. Not only has metacognition been found in rats but also, specialist ants were not found to be any more efficient than non-specialists. (Yay generalists!)

Anyways, I'm always amazed by the amount we can learn from nature (if you haven't read Emergence, do so). I'm more and more convinced that the answers to most questions lie in basic human/animal tendencies and are just post-rationalized to be more complex (both by ourselves and outside observers). For whatever that's worth ...

Tags: animals, science // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Reminder that the Web is Awesome

So we're all in agreement that the internet is awesome but links like these make you pause and realize just how awesome it is. Where else could you read an exchange between a guy who owes money and the person trying to collect (via Charles of RD4T) where the guys offers a drawing of a spider in exchange? (While I doubt it's true, it's amazingly funny.) Or, where else would you find out about the unlikely economic indicator of gifts to mistresses? "The current economic conditions have caused 82% of the men surveyed to cut back on allowances and gifts to their mistresses." (Women, it turns out have increased gifts and there are some theories on why that might be in the piece.)

I love this thing.

Tags: economics, funny, internet // COMMENTS OPEN (4)

Bailing Out the Auto Industry

I was in the middle of reading yet another article on the auto industry bailout when I realized something really interesting: I genuinely haven't made up my mind yet. It seems like such a quaint idea that I was actually reading all this stuff and getting swayed from one side to the other, still unable to make up my mind on what move I think is right. On one side you've got folks arguing that whether you believe in what they've been up to or not, the eventual net effect on the economy of not bailing them out will be greater than the cost. Further supporting just how far this ripple effect could go, when I picked up AdAge from my mailbox this evening the cover page outlines just what roll Detroit plays in the ad industry: 3.3% of total US measured spending, 5.9% of US network TV spending, etc. (For the record, the most interesting and compelling argument I've read so far comes on this side as Jonathan Cohn argues in the New Republic that a) they may be forced into Chapter 7 not Chapter 11 and b) that the auto industry has actually already begun going down the right path and they just need some more time to get there.)

On the other side you've got people saying that they must be allowed to fail and that, "if GM is going to be a welfare agency, it’s hard to also expect it to be a viable company that will rapidly get off the federal teat."

Anyway, I still haven't come to a conclusion, but I'm having a lot of fun being one of those undecideds so many of us spent the last year debating about.

Tags: bailout, cars, economics // COMMENTS OPEN (11)

Don't Let Poets Lie to You

This video of Bjork explaining how television works is well worth three minutes of your life (plus you'll understand where the title of this post comes from). Really makes me think someone should give Bjork a web show where she dispatches pieces of absurd advice and explanation. It would be kind of like David Lynch's daily weather report.

Maybe this is a new genre. Other examples?

Tags: funny, video // COMMENTS OPEN (2)

Marketing FIOS

This is as much a lazyweb request as it is thinking out loud: Looking at the way Verizon has spread FIOS seems to me like a classic case of old-school advertising working just as its supposed. They've bought tons of TV, used claim-based messaging ("X times faster than cable/DSL") and every one and their mother knows about them. I haven't seen a Facebook page, heard about blogger outreach or anything else of that ilk (though they certainly may be doing all of it). Anyway, I guess my point is that you can still build a brand the old-fashioned way: By buying a whole lot of television ads. Think about it, where did you hear about FIOS?

(Usual caveats apply: I don't think this is the only answer, I know you need lots of different stuff and every brand is different. Just wanted to make the point.)

Tags: marketing // COMMENTS OPEN (6)

Steve Eisman and Betting on Collapse

Michael Lewis has a really good portfolio piece outlining the financial crisis and specifically telling the story of Steve Eisman whose firm FrontPoint Partners put their money where their mouth was and shorted just about everything mortgage related.

Anyway, the article is a well written narrative through Eisman's eyes as he uncovered just how bad each level of the mortgage crisis actually was. The kicker quote to me, though, came as part of a conversation with John Gutfreund, former boss of Solomon Brothers who brought the company public (also prominently featured in Lewis's Liar's Poker).

Anyway, here's what Lewis wrote: "He thought the cause of the financial crisis was 'simple. Greed on both sides—greed of investors and the greed of the bankers.' I thought it was more complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed." This is actually something I've thought a great deal about as I've seen people blame greed for the crisis. Whoever sets regulations needs to understand that people will be greedy and deal with it accordingly. The fact that incentives for greed were put in place, which Lewis outlines, is the fault of the government. Or, as Eisman puts it in one of the turning points of the story when he realizes that the investment banks were actually creating more crappy bonds with his short money, "This is allowed?"

Tags: economics, finance // COMMENTS OPEN (2)

Spam and Inferior Goods

The Times points out that products like Spam are doing better than ever with the economy on the decline: "Even as consumers are cutting back on all sorts of goods, Spam is among a select group of thrifty grocery items that are selling steadily. Pancake mixes and instant potatoes are booming. So are vitamins, fruit and vegetable preservatives and beer, according to data from October compiled by Information Resources, a market research firm." (Paper towels, socks, shoe polish and women's fragrance are examples of things on the decline.)

Apparently, all of these fit into the category of inferior goods, which "is a good that decreases in demand when consumer income rises, unlike normal goods, for which the opposite is observed. Inferiority, in this sense, is an observable fact relating to affordability rather than a statement about the quality of the good." The thing I don't get about the Times list, though, is why vitamins are in there? What about vitamins would make people buy more of them when things go sour? Seems like an example of a luxury (after all, you can easily get vitamins from food). Sure it could be because people are eating less healthy foods and so they're trying to make up for it, but that would put a lot of faith in the healthiness of the American public that I don't have ...

via Greg Mankiw // Tags: economics // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

False Order

What a great way to explain people's need to find order in everything (including the stock market):

Look, for example, at this elegant little experiment. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze with a few morsels of food placed on either the far right or left side of the enclosure. The placement of the food is randomly determined, but the dice is rigged: over the long run, the food was placed on the left side sixty per cent of the time. How did the rat respond? It quickly realized that the left side was more rewarding. As a result, it always went to the left, which resulted in a sixty percent success rate. The rat didn't strive for perfection. It didn't search for a Unified Theory of the T-shaped maze, or try to decipher the disorder. Instead, it accepted the inherent uncertainty of the reward and learned to settle for the best possible alternative.

The experiment was then repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike the rat, their swollen brains stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions and then tried to learn from their prediction errors. The problem was that there was nothing to predict: the randomness was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate. Although most of the students were convinced they were making progress towards identifying the underlying algorithm, they were actually being outsmarted by a rat.

From the always brilliant Jonah Lerer.

Tags: economics, psychology // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Nick Denton's Gloomy Take on Internet Advertising

Nick Denton's latest forecast for internet businesses is a dark eye opener (though he does admit that it's in his best interest to throw competitors off the trail). Denton suggests that, "From conglomerates to internet ventures, executives should be planning now on a decline of up to 40% in advertising spending during this cycle." It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are a few key things he nails.

First off, everyone's first response to why the web is going to be okay in a downturn is that it's more measurable. While that's all well and good for online direct response businesses, for the big brands (who spend the vast majority of the money on marketing/advertising), it's simply not. As Denton points out, "it's still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer's sales." That's true (except direct response of course). Clients, of course, are judged by their boss on the sales numbers, not click numbers, so they're more inclined towards television whether or not you think the correlations are bullshit.

Second, Denton talks about unit types: "Internet publishers have forced marketers into a straightjacket of standard ad units too small for brands to breathe. If the sector is to capture a larger share of brand advertising from magazines and television, the creative needs to have more impact." While I agree with him, I'm not sure swing the pendulum to unstandardizing is the answer either. At that point you'd just see production costs skyrocket as brands needed to do 200 versions of a banner ad.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I'm kind of thinking that 2009 is going to be the year that there's finally a banner advertising shakeout and people start to look for other ways of monetizing audiences.

Tags: advertising, internet // COMMENTS OPEN (7)

DC vs Teacher Tenure

Really interesting article in the Times today about the DC school chancellor taking on teacher unions and tenure in a really interesting way. Basically, "Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure." Being that my mother works in educational reform I've been schooled (no pun intended) on the issues that can come along with tenure in the school system and while I agree with some of the quotes that says its not the only problem with schools, it's certainly a huge one. Bad teachers can't get fired unless they break the law. What other industry can you be terrible at your job and keep it (plus keep getting paid more) for as long as you want it?

Just ran across this article by Nicholas Kristof that calls on Obama to focus on education. Towards the end is this paragraph: "There’s still a vigorous debate about how to improve education, but recent empirical research is giving us a much better sense of what works. A study by the Hamilton Project, a public policy group at the Brookings Institution, outlines several steps to boost weak schools: end rigid requirements for teacher certification that impede hiring, make tenure more difficult to get so that ineffective teachers can be weeded out after three years on the job and award hefty bonuses to good teachers willing to teach in low-income areas. If we want outstanding, inspiring teachers in difficult classrooms, we’re going to have to pay much more — and it would be a bargain."

Tags: education // COMMENTS OPEN (0)