Pseudo-Scientists At War

According to Ad Age,  Forrester and Nielsen can't agree on how much time people spend with TV and the web. As a matter if fact, they are so far apart it's ridiculous.

Forrester says people spend as much time each week on the web as they do watching TV -- about 13 hours each. Nielsen says, no way. They say people spend less than 13 hours on the web and 34 hours with TV -- almost three times as much. It's very clear that someone is very, very wrong here. Who? Damned if I know.

As regular readers know, I used to teach science in middle school. As a result, I have nothing but admiration for the scientific method and nothing but contempt for most of the advertising, marketing, and media research I see.

There is little rigor in it, there are almost never adequate controls, and the interpretation of results is usually done for the benefit of whoever paid for the study.

Many research companies will throw a few questions up on the internet or interview some people and think that they've done science. This "research" would be hooted out of any reputable science lab in the world.

In the dispute between Forrester and Nielsen, Nielsen claims that Forrester's research is based on a survey (i.e., self-reported) and their (Nielsen's) research is based on observed behavior.  If Nielsen's characterization is correct, then I have to lean toward their numbers being closer to reality. Self-reported data is almost always nonsense.

By the way, I'm not the only one who has contempt for much of the research conducted in marketing and other soft sciences. Here's a clip of Nobel genius Richard Feynman, which I have used before, on this subject:



What's Are 3.7 Million Fans Worth?
Great story in the NYTimes yesterday about the evaporation of MySpace. My favorite part is about Tila Tequila, the famous-for-being-famous disposable pop star, whose MySpace page has 3.7 million fans. Only problem? 

"...she does not even remember her MySpace password."

Brilliance of the 30-Second Spot

Woody Allen once said that 89 minutes is the perfect length for a movie.

I think the ad industry may have accidentally stumbled upon the perfect length for a video message when it decided on the 30-second TV spot. It's just enough time to establish a premise, deliver a sales message, throw in a gag, and get out.

Of course, there is no more maligned artifact of "traditional" advertising than the 30-second TV spot. According to the new masters of the marketing universe it is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with marketing and advertising.

The fact that so many feckless new age marketing gurus agree that the 30-second spot is dead, leads us here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters to assume that there must be something uniquely wonderful about it.

When the convergence of the Internet and TV finally occurs (which the same gurus have been predicting relentlessly and incorrectly for over 10 years) neither may survive in its current form. But here's one thing I'll bet on right now -- the 30-second spot will.

In our never ending search for truth, we have been scouring the web looking for examples of the fabulous videos that were supposed to have displaced the allegedly moribund 30-second spot by now.

Our research has lead us to the following conclusions:

1. Most commercial web videos -- whether of the "viral" or paid variety -- are just longer or shorter versions of forms and structures found in traditional TV spots. In fact, most are merely re-edited or re-purposed 30-second spots.

2. Those that are not, tend to be awful. It's as if agencies have taken teams that used to write table tents and meta-tags and said, "Okay, nobody's gonna see this shit anyway, go ahead and make a video."

3. While YouTube reports 2 billion views a day, it seems like not many of these 2 billion are views of online commercial videos. There are dancing cats with millions of views and, to be fair, some very well-produced commercial videos with millions of views. However, the vast majority --  I am tempted to say somewhere in the 90+% range -- of commercial videos posted online appear to have about no one looking at them. It seems that the only people watching these things are the sorry fools who paid for them and SAG reps searching for contract violations.

4. The farther from traditional ad structures the videos stray the more likely they are to be terrible. Here is an example. This interminable, stunningly unfunny video is part of an online video campaign for HungryMan. It features an actor who can't decide if he's Chico Marx or Borat. It reaches its comedic apex when he visits the Technological Institute of Technology (T.I.T. -- get it?)

I don't know what this video cost HungryMan but it's getting a whopping 5,000 views a month.  Sometimes this stupid-ass blog of mine gets more views than that in a day.

Let's not bury the 30-second spot quite yet. 

By The Way...
...if you've been writing table tents and meta tags and you get the opportunity to write a spot, here's some very sage advice from Vinnie Warren.

Just One More Thing...
My semi-gorgeous face adorns this week's print edition of Adweek. It's on the "Feedback" page, in which they print reader reactions to stories and columns they've run, including my piece entitled Big Brother Has Arrived, and He's Us which ran in Adweek's online edition 2 weeks ago.

Your Web Metrics Are Wrong

Last weekend I read a terrific article* entitled TV Leaking Billions Of Dollars To Online Media. It's about the fallaciousness of web metrics. In it, the author states:

...billions of dollars in sales are incorrectly being attributed to online advertisements that are completely or partially being generated by television.  This is resulting in an incorrect ratio of perceived value between television and online media...

In case you think this conclusion was reached by a TV sales rep out to make a buck, the author is Brian Burdick, who...

...led product development for Microsoft AdCenter for Search, AdCenter for Contextual, AdECN (Online Exchange), and Specific Media. Brian is an inventor of over 35 pending and granted patents in disparate types of online advertising and business intelligence. Brian is on the advisory board for Technorati and the Technology Advisory Group for Olympic Venture Partners.

Burdick made some excellent points in his article. The dumb blogger version of the points he made are these:

- You see a TV spot for Bob's Cruises. The spot tells you to go to BobsCruises.com. You go to BobsCruises.com. You sign up for a Bob's Cruise. Even though the TV spot created the demand and the web acted as a fulfillment vehicle, the web advertising gets full credit for the clicks and the sale. The TV spot gets credit for diddly.

- When DR TV ads used to direct you to an 800 number, nobody ever credited the telephone with the sale. Now that DR TV ads direct you to a web site, web hustlers are taking credit for the sale. More than 50% of DR TV sales are now made over the web.

- Online attribution systems are corrupt.

Online advertising attribution systems are assigning credit to any online advertising that may happen during navigation or general browsing after TV ads run.  Even minutes after a very high reach television spot runs... if a Google search happens to be involved – 100% of the sales attribution will likely be given to online mediums for generating the demand ...The result of this is the online advertising agencies and tracking technologies are significantly inflating their ROI calculations...

- In a test of the impact that TV advertising has on online sales, a TV campaign (with no change in online advertising) resulted in a 2000% increase in online sales. 50% of this (or a lift of 1000% in sales) would be typically attributed to Google or other online media. This is a joke. Without, TV the lift would be zero.

Brian concludes:

• Attribution of online sales to online media is vastly overestimated
• TV is contributing (leaking) billions of dollars in ad value to online media
• The advertising and media industries need to figure out how to assign credit for sales properly across advertising channels

I am a copywriter, not a media expert and I've probably misinterpreted, misunderstood, or missed some fine points of the article. I strongly suggest you read it.

By the way, in my opinion, this is not only true of television. Any ad in any medium that directs you to a website or leads you to a search is probably contributing to the inflated value of online advertising.

*Big thanks to Rich Cerussi for sending me this article