Is The Pendulum Swinging?

I'm sure web maniacs must be having a hysterectomy over a piece in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called Small Change.

Gladwell challenges some of the nonsense of social media zealots about the web's power to affect important social changes.

I am not going to waste your time by writing a crappy abbreviated version of it. Instead you should read it.

Also, I suggest you read "The Rise of Skepticism" by Stuart Thursby on the Applied Arts Wire.

Thursby writes very cogently about how finally some people within the advertising and marketing community are starting to question the new orthodoxy.

I hope Thursby is right, but I'm afraid he is a little too optimistic in his expectation of a "tipping point into stability."

I think the trend toward unquestioned faith in new age marketing doctrine is actually gathering momentum and those of us who question it will be further marginalized.

Nonetheless, it's nice to see that there are people who are starting to ask questions.

Win A Free Drink...
Speaking of Stuart Thursby, a free drink to the first person who can identify Floyd Thursby. No Googling!

Take Me To Your Head Of The Office For Outer Space Affairs

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is head of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs. According to published reports, Ms. Othman is going to be responsible for co-ordinating mankind's response when extraterrestrials land.

Now, if you ask me, when the little green men come calling, they're going to talk to whomever the hell they want.

While the naive plans of the bureaucrats at the U.N. are beyond silly, they do raise a serious question.

One thing we know for sure about the universe -- it ain't nothing like what we thought it was just a few decades ago.

The universe is enormous beyond any human ability to comprehend. To say that our little planet is a speck of dust is to exaggerate its size a billion fold.

By the time the next decade is over, I believe science will have found reasonable evidence for life elsewhere in the universe. It may just be a bacteria-like organism on a meteorite, or remnants of a virus-like form somewhere else. Or something else we have no clue about.

Regardless of how simple or tiny it is, it will create a crisis for theologians.

How will this fit into contemporary theology? How will the world's religions interpret and explain finding life elsewhere?

It's going to be interesting.

The Results Are In

Here are the results from the poll we did last week. The results are listed in descending order from most surprising to least.

Question: Which of the "Top 10 Double Secret Facts" surprised you most?

1. (17.35%) TV viewers are no more likely to leave the room during a commercial break than they are before or after the break.

2. (16.69%) Baby boomers dominate 94% of all consumer packaged goods categories. 5% of advertising is aimed at them.

3. (15.90%) 96% of all retail activity is done in a store. 4% is done on line. 

4. (12.05%) DVR owners watch live TV 95% of the time. 5% of the time they watch recorded material. 

5. (9.88%) 99% percent of all video viewing is done on a television. 1% is done on line.

6. (8.19%) Since the 1990s, click-through rates for banner ads have dropped 97.5%. 

7. (7.71%) TV viewership is now at its highest point ever.

8. (5.30%) Since the introduction of TiVo, real time TV viewing has increased over 20%.

9. (5.06%) The difference in purchasing behavior between people who use DVRs to skip ads and those who don’t: None.

10. (1.93%) 99.9% of people who are served an online display ad do not click on it.

Thanks for voting.

As you'd expect, a couple of web maniacs have had fits over this. They think that any reporting of facts casting doubt on the magical properties of the web is an attack on them. The interesting thing is that the facts about web advertising seem not all that surprising to most people. 60% of the votes went to 4 facts that have nothing at all to do with web advertising.

Personally, the fact that surprised me most was that 95% of the time homes equipped with TiVo watch live TV.

Also, almost a thousand people have printed the sheet we provided that listed these facts.

In a recent post..
...called The Amazing Blindness of Marketers, and in other posts over the years, I  have commented on the stupidity of marketers whose knee-jerk target audience is always "young people." For an interesting piece on this topic, I recommend this.