Tick-tick-tick. I can hear you thinking about that.

But you know I’m right. The same matching algorithm that I use to cross match a person to a person, I use for matching a person to an ad, or an ad to a piece of content or the triangulation of ad, user and content. The more the system knows about you and the longer an ad and content exist in the system, the longer trail of behavior exists for all said entities. Yes, content has behavior, ads have behavior. There’s cross reference and trends of other entities that access both, there’s view, responses, etc. Yes, this is a long trail of information, so a weighting system is used to attribute heavier relevance to recent activity, versus older activity.

Example: 20 something, male- buys lots of beer and sports paraphernalia, gets married (behavior changes), becomes expectant father (behavior changes), has a child (behavior changes), etc.

Of course, some behaviors will remain persistent, some will change slightly, some radically, some will disappear, and other new ones will emerge. So, the relevance window will be defined by many factors from target to product to season. As television and broadcast in general start to move towards the MPEG 4, 7 and 21 standards, this scenario maps to the near future world of teleputing (see Gilder’s Life After Television). As I said in last month’s screed, it will be the responsibility of our industry to build and keep trust, and we will only do this by delivering relevant, contextual, permission marketing and never abusing or betraying that trust.

You may have figured it out, but my ultimate goal is not to deliver bigger and better ads for bigger and better conversions. I know, I feel like I just stood up and blasphemed at mass, but it’s the truth. Better and more relevant/contextual ad delivery is a byproduct and admittedly necessary component to a media scenario I seek. That is to say, a complete, on demand, relevant, intelligent, immersive, mediascape that is responsive, realtime, and always on. Part of maintaining the ‘in game’ experience is the removal of the ‘interruption’ qualities of advertising and marketing. See my friend Dave’s book This is Not a Game for a deep dive on the ‘in game’ experience and how it relates to marketing.

Next month, I will be sending another podcast from the floor of Ad:Tech SF. Only this time I’m telling you in advance because I’d like to talk to anyone who is developing technology along these lines. I’ll interview you on camera and trade anecdotes, and give you your 15 minutes right here on ADOTAS. Also, we can talk about a new standards and practices organization I am starting up: http://www.themediatrust.org

Contact me at pod@mediatrust.com and set something up, or take your chances and hit me up as I roam the floor. I’ll be the guy with the Canon XL1S on my shoulder.

Until next month, happy networking.

One of the biggest side effects to the ‘AlwaysOn’ effect is dataglut. Too much data, not enough bandwidth to triage it all, let alone sort it for relevance in real-time. What will alleviate this problem is behavioral, contextual, inference and relevance engines. The technology itself already exists in some rather sophisticated forms and even more elegant iterations are coming out of R & D as you read this.

The technology is not the hurdle now, perception is. Granted, consumer suspicion regarding intention, integrity and security of their data considering the shoddy track record that on-line data tracking has with consumer. To that point, the first order of business with data managers is winning back the trust of consumers. A good beginning towards that end can be found at www.attentiontrust.org. As this market matures, more standards committees and consortiums will be formed and best practices as well as policing agencies will emerge. These are all good things for both the industry and the consumer.

As trust and accountability increase, consumer comfort will increase, following that participation in AD programs will increase. As consumers discover that participation not only evolves their ‘interruption’ marketing experiences into ‘participation’ marketing experiences, but is a profitable paradigm as well. Ads that carry real-time relevance to a consumer’s life are no longer viewed as interruption, but rather views as information. This natural evolution will also enhance the relationship between producers and consumers, as well as diminishing the waste of scattershot approaches and volume messaging distribution.

As targeting gets better with time, a natural evolution, marketing and advertising itself will change fundamentally. Now, ads are offers that are delivered when invoked by the proper alignment of profiling information, time windowed behavioral statistics, contextual trails and situational relevance. No more ads produced and left at ‘strategic’ spots on a suspected trail. Now ads are built organically, dynamically, responsively (not reactively), and in real-time from a dynamic line up of assets, profiles, contexts and relevance scenarios. See why this ‘oh-so-near’ future makes me wriggle and pant?

My only concern is that bigger and better solutions always bring with them bigger and bolder opportunities for abuse. Unfortunately, the human race has both a light and a shadow side. The hacker in me says that abuses will only cause us to think of better and more secure means of conducting business in this brave new world, and that side of me is right, but that doesn’t ease the pain of people that become collateral damage in the infowars. We must always remain mindful that ‘consumers’ and ‘users’ are people and that in our zeal to deliver better solutions, that we don’t confuse ‘better’ technically for ‘better’ in a quality-of-life enhancing way. Because quality of life is what it’s all about.

Until next time, happy networking.

More reading:

www.attentiontrust.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Attention economics

http://www.weblogsky.com/

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2006/07/07/emergent-information-architecture/

This year’s ad:tech, according to our brave correspondent, was exciting and packed with fun, facts and cash, with much networking and deal-making had by all. Hurrah!

Video- http://www.sbiff.org/pod/podcast_video/ADOTAS.m4v- (Size: 37015742, Duration: 6:13)

Audio- http://www.sbiff.org/pod/podcast_audio/ADOTAS.mp3 - (Size: 5965848, Duration: 6:13)

“While you wait, think about the fundamental ways our relationship to the unit of information known as a ‘book’ changes when that unit becomes a table in a database.

Marketers, think about how much more you know about me when I search and copy a paragraph from one book, and then another, versus what you knew about me when I ordered those two books form Amazon. What can I do with that kind of information?

Now, apply this to video and audio.”

This is where it’s going to get interesting. Homework assignments: Seek out and read things like if:book, Attention Trust, and study up on the current push to put all things print into the digital realm.

In The Future of the Book, Umberto Eco states that he believes that computers will not supplant books completely and I partially agree with him. However, Eco has apparently not spent as much time with the ‘third-screen generation’ as I have and therefore has not observed the interaction with text as it exists today. The reader/book relationship that develops around technologies like SMS and email is fundamentally different than the traditional reader/book relationship.

From an attention-data standpoint, the granularity of the usage information I can gather about a reader who orders a book about a particular subject, versus the usage patterns that develop around users interacting with a table of information in a database, known as a ‘book’ are different by many levels of degree. The digitization of books will only increase this kind of evolution of the user/reader/book/journal relationships. Look at systems like eBrary and Safari for current examples of this kind of interface into book units.

The next wave that will become ‘hot’ in the search space is undoubtedly the derivability of audio, video and multimedia formats. When users can search video archives based on any number of criteria and have the relevant segments returned (search: video: brown rice on table with red flowers: movies: IMDB listed: US EN) the rules of engagement become as granular as those I outlined above for digital books.

Marketers, take note here. The above examples highlight where your ability gather long chains of relevant behaviors will get interesting. But, get ready to pay for the privilege. As the gathering of data crosses formats and platforms (look into what Tivo and cable companies are proposing) consumers are going to become more and more aware that their data is being harvested and used to sell back to them. Expect grassroots consumer movements to arise that will demand compensation for the usage privilege. There is already chatter among the digerati about ‘Attention Economies’. Be prepared to do revenue shares or rebate programs in order to access people’s attention data in the future.

However, this should not cause you distress, because this signifies a ‘opt —in’ on the part of the user, which is generally a good thing for quality of data. As time progresses, users will also demand tools and access to data in order to allocate usage permission levels. In essence, the ‘Attention Economy’ will spawn a attention data management economy all its own.

Social networking, which I have written about ad nauseam, plays into all this only from the perspective of what SocNet and Social media have become. Namely, a set of features that are de facto included in most Web-based applications these days. These features encourage flocking and swarming behaviors which help to segment and identify affiliations and behaviors. Like most useful technologies, the ‘hype’ is finally wearing off of social media, allowing us to get down to the practical and useful applications.

Until next month, happy networking.

What to do, what to do.

It seems that Monster.com has a good idea with eon.com, perhaps more of that, and how about some video sites that actually encourage quality content? I know, I know, I stepped in it when I said “quality”. But what advertiser in their right mind wants to spend money on a campaign that will result in their ads being appended to videos of 15-year old girls doing the whip cream hoochie dance to the latest bubble gum pop song of the moment? Yes mothers and fathers, your children are really doing that. There’s even a PornTube now. Imagine that (*sigh*).

Where am I going with this? To this point: contextual, relevance, targeted, inference, et al. Why isn’t it being applied to video and audio yet? You can tell me the technical reasons, but I’ve been at this video game too long. I’ve seen technologies that can handle these problems. The catch is, they’re in pieces, and they haven’t been stitched together. But isn’t that Web 2.0 is all about? Mash-it-up baby? Yes!

This is the next frontier. It’s not next decade, it’s now. All that hype we heard a few years ago about video over the wire, its arriving, now, today, so get ready. To date, the Internet has been text, text and more text. (HTML is text too). This is why Google is the leader in search. They realized the lowest common denominators of Web content and leveraged them.

But the NEXT Google will capitalize on something else. Audio, video…the world of sound and image. Just as the world of print is currently undergoing a transference process on a massive scale (about time!), the next great shovel will begin the process of loading the wires with audio and video.

And like the original search engines (Yahoo, Webcrawler, et al) that built empires on the indexing and deriving of text-based assets, the next giants will be the ones who figure out a way to easily navigate (because that’s what search really is) and return relevant bits of video and audio content. Search is what we do. It basically is the beginning point of all our endeavors. Shopping is searching, dating is searching, reading is searching, etc.

Of course, I have skipped right over the revolution being created with the scanning and OCR’ing of print, because I will write that next month. While you wait, think about the fundamental ways our relationship to the unit of information known as a ‘book’ changes when that unit becomes a table in a database.

Marketers, think about how much more you know about me when I search and copy a paragraph from one book, and then another, versus what you knew about me when I ordered those two books form Amazon. What can I do with that kind of information?

Now, apply this to video and audio.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm. *wink*

The current state of Social Networking reminds me of an application I was the product manager of when I was on the Adobe Acrobat team. Back then, I had a little stand alone application called Acrospider. It included a create PDF button for IE and Netscape (remember Netscape?).

Nowadays, you can find Acrospider in Acrobat and see the buttons in most of your applications after you install Adobe Acrobat. File>Create PDF>From Web. As a stand alone application, we test marketed it a few times and couldn’t quite figure out the business model, however as a feature it’s become an indispensable function for us Acrobatphiles . I see this natural progression happening with Social Networking and I am heartened by it.

Say goodbye to the MySpace effect, the press hype, the fly-by-night knock-offs rolling off the assembly line and wasting the cycles of venture capitalists (not to mention giving them a bad taste in their mouths for all things SocNet). Now the real work can begin. No longer do we have to write reports to our superiors and board members outlining what our Social Networking strategy is, no longer do I and others have to suffer the endless questions at speaking engagements and tradeshows which are all endless variations of, “How can I build a MySpace and sell it for a bazillion bucks?”

Social Networking/Social Applications deserve better and now we’re in a place historically to give it better.

What does this mean to those that build ad/marketing applications? A lot. Now that the neophiles and fad squatters are moving on to greener pastures, MySpace and Facebook can focus on how or if it can settle on a model that makes money. Meanwhile, we can now go back to the business of how to make the ‘wisdom of crowds’ better serve the crowds and in doing so, better serve us that serve the crowds. The strength of Social Networking is and has always been its core philosophy: Systems by people for people. This means, in essence, that the system is an intelligent system, it learns from the way people use it and modifies itself accordingly.

Included under this new umbrella of all things Social Networking SHOULD be the advertising and marketing attached to these systems. Bear in mind, we’re not really talking about the MySpace or Facebooks here, nor are we necessarily talking about the Collective X’s of the world. We are simply talking about web (or even networked desktop) applications. Why shouldn’t ads evolve into more contextual, more adaptive messages, targeted and one to one?

What initially triggered the following thoughts was a discussion that I had with a friend a few weeks ago in New York. My friend is the CEO of a rather well known software company that makes a web hosted application. This particular application is very popular with institutions of higher learning. However, as you may know, institutions of higher learning often have limited budgets or worse, whatever cutting edge technology you may be selling has yet to emerge as a line item on anyone’s budget.

(Oh, it’s lonely on the edge) The College crowd is a demographic that can be hard to get in front of and companies with goods and services to sell to this crowd are constantly seeking new ways to put themselves in the mix. Part of the problem with this demographic is that they are trend hoppers and tend to show loyalty in streaks. Therefore, if you’re selling enduring products that are not specifically trend oriented (foodstuffs, cars, etc.) you are constantly scrambling to re-brand and re-message so you can stay in the mix. By now, we’ve all heard how dicey and fickle the MySpace arena can be. So, what is a strategy that may provide longer term exposure?

Enter the ‘sponsored application’.

Ok, this is not an entirely new concept. My old friend Tod Collart made a company out of branding web interfaces for large media properties with his company Interactual (now owned by Sonic). Anyone reading this who has dealt with a company in the fortune 5000 range knows that style guides and branding rule the day when messaging vehicles are in question. ‘Skinning’, as the practice is generically known, is often overlooked as a revenue source.

What am I talking about? Ok, let’s put the pieces together. My friend who owns a company that sells web hosted applications to institutes of higher learning—but shall remain nameless for now–has some areas of market penetration that are being denied to him simply because his technology, while being recognized as beneficial to the learning and research process, is also too new to have a line item on traditional budgets. In the professional social networking arena, in which I participate, I often hear the same thing. “We’d love to have what you offer, we see the value, but we just don’t have the budget this year.” This happens. This hump will eventually dissolve if your technology is worthy.

However, you need to get over this hump until that occurs. Meanwhile, you’ve got companies that are trying to figure out who to get in front of specific target audiences and agencies that are trying to figure out how to get them there. Voila, Social software application sponsorship. Now, when I say social software, I don’t ONLY mean social networking applications. I mean any networked software that is used by a group or groups of people. Like a digital library application, or a social bulletin board system (think university-oriented Craigslist type apps), distance learning platforms, the list goes on.

Pass Go, Collect $100
My approach to sharing knowledge is that I like to present thesis and antithesis and leave the action item of synthesis to the reader. Why? Because I believe that every marketing situation is unique and demands its own solution. Turnkey (one size fits all) marketing solutions give me a rash. Having said that, here’s some thesis and antithesis fodder for your thought canon:

• Scholarly articles on Interruption versus Permission Marketing
• ChangeThis
• Various

Interruption Marketing versus Permission Marketing
Let’s look at the benefits and shortcomings of both Permission Marketing and Interruption Marketing first.

You mute TV commercials, you went through your mail only to find most of it is junk, a stranger phones you (usually at dinner time) asking you to answer a survey, or give to yet another worthy cause. Interruption marketing does just that. It interrupts you, and steals your time. And it is the darling of mass marketing, which is the child of the mass media, which was born in the 19th century with large circulation newspapers, and thrived in the 20th with radio, TV, and the international media. Now, there’s too much of it. This is what’s begin referred to as non-scarcity or as some have dubbed it, simply too much media. People ignore or skip ads. Think Tivo. In these days of non-scarcity of content, it’s all about the filters baby.

As Umair Haque of Bubble Generation says:

More to the point: should we see the new world of micromedia as a limited resource; a commons, like Hyde Park, or a fishery? Are we really having externalities on each other when we blog, podcast, and vlog?

I think Seth’s post is this kind of misuse of economics. The genius of micromedia is that it blows apart the notion of distribution of a scarce resource. The whole point is that attention is no longer a commons; now, it’s about individual expectations and preferences.

For many, the distinction between permission and interruption marketing can be fuzzy at best and misleading at worst. Indeed, under the right conditions, even so-called interruption marketing can be highly appropriate and effective. In fact, interruption marketing almost always must be used to get people interested in the first place! While viral marketing is often touted as the new economy way of first capturing customers’ attention, traditional mass advertising or direct mail is usually more effective in capturing consumer awareness.

In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin lumps together most mass-marketing approaches into the category of interruption marketing in which advertising and promotion messages are unanticipated, impersonal and largely irrelevant. Instead, permission marketing is built around getting the recipient’s buy-in before proceeding with further messages. At each successive stage of this relationship, the customer or prospect is enticed to reveal more and more relevant information used by the provider to fine-tune and optimize service or product offerings.

There are lots of studies and charts out ther and if you’re the type who likes or needs to see charts to be convinced, check here: http://www.dancingflower.com/pm/pm.html

Interruption Marketing versus Permission marketing: Is there a Quantum Maybe?

Either or logic or Aristotlean logic basically views the universe as binary in nature. “There’s A and there’s B. If something is not A it’s B and visa versa” However, since the discovery of Quantum principles at work in our universe, we now know that “things” can be A, B, both or neither (∞). This is known in layman’s terms as the ‘Maybe principle” of the universe. If you’re really interested in this part of my example, Google the term “wave and particle duality“.

But what am I really saying? That there may be another method of marketing that is being overlooked. Non-invasive marketing, which is part permission marketing but softly borders Interruption Marketing.

Targeted Behavioral Contextual Marketing
Yes, it’s a mouthful and you can have several sombunall (Quantum physics slang for ‘some but not all’) combinations. However, the bottom line is this: Put relevant marketing messages in front of qualified users with a higher likelihood of response, lowering your overall campaign costs and raising that proficiency level we were talking about in the first paragraph.

Behavioral and Targeted Advertising specialist Chang Yu has come up with a few succinct definitions that I like:

Behavioral marketing targets consumers based on their behavior on Web sites, rather than purely by the content of pages they visit. Behavioral marketers target consumers by serving ads to predefined segments or categories. These are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information.Contextual marketing is when marketers target users with ads that are served based on a given Web page’s content. Ads bought through Google’s AdSense or Overture’s Content Match are a great example. Both place text ads on contextually relevant Web pages. Other vendors, such as Vibrant Media and Kanoodle, target users through verticals to deliver better results.

Whether text or graphic ads, delivering a relevant message based on content can be defined as contextual marketing.

Above all, behavioral marketing provides marketers with the ability to reach desired segments outside of contextually relevant areas.

The trick is to observe a ‘long tail’ of behaviors, preferences, interactions, reactions, and responses and to use that cumulative data to infer preferences. These preferences can be anything from new features for products and services to relevant advertising and marketing messages.

It has been shown that most people do not consider relevant advertising (translation: “something I want”) as interruption marketing. I will of course invoke Seth Godin here and interject that permission is all important, paramount even to this kind of strategy being successful. Think loyalty cards and rewards programs. Most important, be respectful of privacy and privacy concerns. When possible, use anonymous methods of behavioral tracking. If these are new concepts to you, I would recommend reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, Permission Marketing and any number of the free manifestos found at www.changethis.com. If you do this right, what you will be doing is taking marketing and advertising services and changing them in the eyes of your user base from something that is perceived as a invasive experience to something that is considered useful, and informative.

If I’ve learned anything over the years it’s this: no one in the enterprise space makes a move until a clear case for ROI is outlined. While I’m sure that market conditions and the technological ecology will shift drastically in the next two years, I also predict that social networking as we know it will seep over into the enterprise space in the form of social networking platforms that will leverage HR/IS, CRM, Service Desk, Content Management and other internal operations databases.

Let me outline, briefly, a few scenarios where a social networking platform could improve performance and even save real money within an organization. I will be expanding upon this idea in a white paper and case study collection titled: “The Economy of Reputation” which will be available from introNetworks (www.intronetworks.com) in the future.

For now, here’s a couple off the top of my head.

Talent Management
You have a sizeable database full of information about your talent pool such as name, rank, pay grade, location, etc. But what else do you know about your human resources? Take the existing information, put it into a social networking platform and fortify it through the addition of personal information that’s entered by the employees themselves. For example, we know that John Smith is a certified Microsoft DBA and that he reports to Bob Jones. But until we opened up the Socnet input we didn’t know that John spoke fluent Italian and was an avid mountain biker. (He input that data for us, therefore allowing HR to make the association)

Now, you may be asking yourself why this is important and how it would ever save any money. Here’s how; HR has just opened a req. for a position that requires the candidate to speak Italian. The social committee is looking for a person to lead a mountain bike club for the new ‘be healthy’ initiative that the company is spearheading to help lower health care costs. While it is true that the benefit of the second case is partially convenience, saved cycles do equal saved money.

However, with the first case the ROI example is simple. Looking outside your organization for human resources is expensive. Often times HR is unaware that they have qualified candidates within their existing talent pool. Using a matching interface to search, filter and qualify candidates from within the organization can save an average of $1,400+ per instance, according to one study. (The True Cost of Hiring, Tammy Williams). This is only one, very simple example. I’m sure you have already thought of more that apply specifically to your organization.