Pink Air

The rate card that rates you

Not many companies are as interesting as Google. From their basic technology to how they make money, they repeatedly make you think "Okay, so that means..." and a bunch of new implications come spilling out.

Today's NYT outlines the workings of Google's "ad quality" team. Because the creative and placement variables of Google ads are relatively few and are controlled by Google, they can experiment with them and directly measure the results. This helps them determine how to price ads which makes them more money.

Even more interesting, one of the variables they incorporate into their pricing and placement model is the quality of the consumer's experience after they click on the ad:

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google.

Yikes! Better service (and can better products be far behind?) leading to lower ad rates? Some advertisers are confused and angry ("many advertisers complain that the company was, in essence, deciding who can and cannot advertise on its system") but Google seems to believe that the overall health/value of their ad system is increased when consumers believe that Google ads represent relevant and high-quality suggestions.

Most media discriminate among advertisers in some way. You're not going to see a Hooters ad in Vanity Fair anytime soon.  But I've never heard of a media company digging so deeply into the post-ad consumer experience and using it to directly affect rates. I can feel the possible implications radiating outwards...

Your URL is showing

I was buying a domain name at Network Solutions last week and between the choosing and the paying, there's a screen where they try to sell you a number of options. This is, of course, known as "upselling." It makes sense and it's not a problem if the options are relevant and the approach isn't pushy. And as long as you don't use the word "upsell" when you're talking to me. And the URL, whether they know it or not, is talking to me.

Marketing magic

There was a lovely article in the March 17th New Yorker by Adam Gopnik called "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life". (It's not online but there's an ancillary podcast here.) A number of bloggers have written that Gopnik's thoughts on how magic works apply to their own fields, especially the idea that their real product is a state of mind co-produced with the viewer; the result of an open-ended, semi-competitive engagement with the willing, active minds of an audience:

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of the effect but the magician's ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious...magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world.

[W]hatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information...Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Which is what an interesting marketing idea does. Brands like Nike and Apple don't have simple, static value statements or brand identities that require "mastering" our natural indifference through repetition and spectacle. Instead, they represent a tantalizing, permanent maze of possibilities.

Matrix branding

Suppose that our world is actually a simulation, a video game being run by somebody 5000 years from now on a PlayStation Bazillion. As a virtual character who wants to survive, how should you behave? While fans of The Matrix have had years to consider their options (Assimilate now? Wait until it seems prudent?), our deluded blue pill brethren must have been sloshing in their pods when the question was thrust upon them last week in The New York Times ("Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch").

A number of philosophers are quoted in the article, but the most practical advice comes from an economist (which is kind of a matrix glitch if you ask me) and author of the handy guide, "How To Live In A Simulation". His advice: "You should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation."

Wise words for any Sim, but particularly appropriate for those of us generated as marketing characters. The things we work on are just simulations that we're trying to get lots of people to run in their minds. If they find those simulations interesting, then maybe they'll keep running them into their next store visit, conversation or lifestage. 

All you need is Live

At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)

But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)

But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.

Some insight into insights

Since Uli pointed it out, I've read Jeremy Bullmore's insight into insights a number of times. It's one of the most interesting things on briefing and advertising in general I've ever read.

He defines insight in terms of its effect rather than its inherent qualities. An insight is creatively generative, it leads people to think in a new way about something, to see a whole new field of effective possibilities that had been invisible. And in order to be evocative in this way, it has to be kind of allusive. It must "avoid the direct and the explicit".

This last part is what makes the article truly (and recursively) insightful for me. An insight has to be interesting. It can't just be a statement of fact that is then made interesting through creative interpretation. It has to be based in fact, but have gaps to be filled in, that beg to be filled in, by the reader.

I used to think that we had to come up with a catchy summary of each brief so that the client and agency would have a quick and attractive "elevator shorthand" to communicate and sell the idea internally. Over the past few years, I've come to see that the elevator phrase, truncated, alliterated and, strictly speaking, inaccurate though it may be, is usually a better, more insightful, brief.

What is an insight?

Planners are often asked to deliver insights. Some even say that "finding insights" is what planners are for and what defines planning. But now, after years of pretending to be a planner, I'm finally prepared to admit that I've never really understood what an insight is. 

My impression is that people are asking for a new piece of information about the way an audience interacts with a brand, product or category. I imagine the gold standard for this kind of insight is something like, "Hip German mothers are meeting on particular subway lines in the middle of night for impromptu diaper changing parties." Then we put up ads in the coolest U-bahn stations, branded changing tables on selected trains, start a Windelbahn group on MyVideo and Bob ist Ihr Onkel.

Is it novelty that transmutes plain old information into insight? And to whom must it be new? It's presumably the audience whose reaction matters most, but they already knew what they were doing. In fact, it's the reaction of the creative team and most importantly, the client, that usually determines whether a fact is an insight and the seed of a campaign. And if they say, "Diaper trains! Wow! I never would have guessed! That's interesting!" it would take a particularly masochistic planner to question whether their interest will be matched by that of the Windelbahnmutter herself.

Maybe an insight isn't a new piece of information, but a new way of interpreting  existing information. The effect is not so much "I never knew that" as "I never thought of it that way before". Which implies that the insight, as the thing that changes minds, needs to be communicated to the audience, not simply used as a way to get to them or prove that the brand somehow "knows" them.

I'm not sure. I do feel that the Tyranny of The Insight, like the Tyranny of the Big Idea, is an increasingly obsolete way of thinking about both branding and planning. At the same time, I can't help thinking that having insights, whatever they are, is better than not. So, what's your definition of an insight?

Soft reset

A useful but clunky way to define planning is "interestingness management". Interest and time are related in many ways, some fairly linear (boredom) and others less so (nostalgia). Keeping a brand interesting means steering its storyline through time. And sometimes an interesting, emotionally satisfying plot twist requires a change in character. The trick is to make changes that enrich the brand, that are developmental rather than just different.

By going backwards to the beginning, Casino Royale brings the 007 brand forward in this way. The most interesting Bond film in maybe forever, it dispenses with the cloying, happy-go-lucky playboy of the past 30 years in favor of the "ironical, brutal and cold" character that Fleming originally conceived. But the real interest-generating aspect of the movie is not just the novelty of a new Bond, but the revelation of an earlier, unfamiliar Bond who makes emotionally satisfying sense of the flip, emotionally vacant character we've grown (over-) accustomed to.

After watching "Bond 21", I'm pretty sure that when Bond 22 comes out in two years, I'll pay the $32 for a ticket. I'll forgive it its predictable annoyances (egregious Sony product placement, the odd Bruckheimian fireball). I'll think about how it enriches or enfeebles the franchise and try to convince you that it's interesting in either case. All of which adds up to a fairly comprehensive description of the behavior a strong brand is supposed to generate.

I ❤ Fry's (even if it doesn't ❤ me)

If ever a business reflected its customer culture, it's Fry's Electronics. From the idiosyncratic product selection (I just need to grab a gigabit adapter card and some Cat 5, a thousand melon-flavored jawbreakers, a foot massager and some anime porn.) to the single-thread multiprocessor checkout system designed to avoid the techie bête noire of inefficient cashier allocation, Fry's is The Store That Geeks Built.

Sure, they've got the ambiance of a warehouse. And when they do attempt interior design, it's more or less what you would expect from techies: flying saucers and giant mutant ants. And sure, they're kind of confusing and uninviting (If you people would just RTFM you wouldn't need any handholding.) But the fact is that the people who take characteristically sedulous and well-documented offense at the sometimes high-handed service simply don't recognize their own culture when it's reflected back to them. (Replace "customer" with "user", Mister IT Guy, then ask yourself whether he's always right.)

Which is what makes Fry's interesting. It's a store that serves and reflects the geek lifestyle rather than a "lifestyle" store designed to flatter customers with an aspirational and false image of themselves.

Advertising corpses

My friend Philippe just left planning in order to become a French government bureaucrat. I'm not sure what that says about the allure of planning, but it is certainly a loss because he is an excellent planner.

The loss is magnified by the fact that he will no longer be keeping up his "Loser's Archive." For years, he has collected print ads that are, as he says, not the worst ads ever exactly, but just "off" somehow. Maybe it's an unwieldy metaphor. Hamfisted abuse of Photoshop. Childish wordplay. Inadvertent yet disturbing trespassing of cultural or social boundaries. But all of them have a certain rigid, clammy glee that I associate with infomercials. They're like little advertising corpses prepared by an unskilled but enthusiastic undertaker. Enjoy.