This is a blog by Tom Ewing about market research and other related things. I work for BrainJuicer in this area: everything on this blog is my own personal viewpoint, rather than BrainJuicer's.
One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem. They were running low on…
Have you been entertained by stories about Fyre Festival? Of course you have. This one is also deeply entertaining and horrifying. But not just that! It holds interesting lessons for marketers, because it is possible to use this thing to put together the skeleton of a Fyre Festival marketing ROI case study.
Evidence 1: Investment
"He spent $250,000 on a single Instagram post from Kim Kardashian’s half-sister Kendall Jenner and laid out hundreds of thousands more on lesser-name “influencers,” none of whom were paid less than $20,000, one person familiar with the payments said."
Evidence 2: Return
"Despite a pitch deck that promised 10,000 ticket-holders each weekend, sales were low and largely discounted. Most buyers had paid somewhere between $500 and $2,000 for their tickets, despite outlandish claims that people were purchasing ticket packages for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The target audience wasn’t elite or affluent people — it was people who wanted the lifestyle but couldn’t afford it, until Fyre Festival came along."
So the interesting thing here, I reckon, is that even if Fyre Festival had not been the logistical apocalypse it obviously was, because it was run by somebody who imagined that magical bro fairies are enough to plan an event - even if it had worked on the ground, it was clearly not a major success from a marketing point of view. The marketing strategy - which seemed to be based around influencer marketing - was plainly not achieving its sales goals. Projected numbers dropped from 40,000 sales to 20,000 sales and didn’t manage that.
And the other interesting thing is what this says about influencer marketing itself. In this case - perhaps extreme, perhaps not - It’s a form of marketing that uses people’s endorsements to sell aspirational dreams of imitation and access to other people “who want.. the lifestyle but couldn’t afford it”. This sounds very like a pyramid scheme, which, like all pyramid schemes, targets the lonely, foolish and desperate. Most marketing fads look this way, if you poke at them enough.
Refugee rescue app pulled from App Store after it is outed as fake | Technology | The Guardian
An app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake.
The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station, which would provide help.
In fact, the app did nothing of the sort. Rather than presenting real-time satellite footage – a difficult and expensive task – it instead simply shows a portion of a static, unchanging image. And while it claims to show the weather in the southern Mediterranean, that too isn’t that accurate: it’s for Western Libya.
The app was developed by Grey Group, an ad agency in Singapore that’s part of global advertising giant WPP. When it was initially released, it received favourable press from publications like Wired, Mashable, the Evening Standard and the Reuters news agency.
I’ve seen some disgusting shit pulled by advertising agencies in my time but this is up there. At best it’s conning people who want to help, at worst it’s wasting the time and (very scant!) resources of the people who are physically helping. Shame on Grey Group and WPP for running this fraud, and congratulations to the people who worked to expose it.
A social media executive is frustrated with influencers.
The best bit in this article, and there are many good bits, is this one.
We threw too much money at them and did it too quickly. So in 2014, they were making $500 to show up and take some photos. Then it became $1,500. Now it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. They no longer value their art.
They no longer value their art. It sounds to me like they are valuing their art ALL TOO ACCURATELY for marketers’ liking. Having seen the “digital ecosystem” steadily ratchet down my generation’s page rates, word rates, and creative value while doling out helpings of ‘exposure’, my reaction to the news that a bunch of YouTubers and Instagram mavens are taking the content industry for every penny they can is, well, it’s a mix of raw bilious envy and delighted schadenfreude.
The branded content that results is of course grisly - the unspeakable in pursuit of the unwatchable. But these people are the real actual popcult equivalent of the young godlings in The Wicked And The Divine - they are loved. They are hated. Within two years they will be, well, not as loved and hated. Advertisers, though, will still have money to burn: might as well take it while you can.
The more interesting question for me is this - whatever happened to the influence backlash? Influencer marketing as I knew it peaked during the 00s, after everybody had read The Tipping Point and before everybody had sadly glommed onto the idea that The Tipping Point didn’t really work, for lots of very good reasons - not all networks work in the same way; it’s very hard to identify consistent influencers; lighting “many fires” generally does a less glamorous but better job, etc etc - I won’t go over very dated arguments.
The Tipping Point era really is long gone, because a key ingredient of that particular snake oil was the notion that if you identified the right influencer you would get all that lovely media and influence for free. (Because people VALUED THEIR ART.) As the interview with our anon pal shows in glorious and gruesome detail, those days are done.
Except that I suspect most of the studies behind the backlash are still true. What happened isn’t that influencer marketing started working incredibly well, it’s that everything else stopped. Ad blocking, TV fragmentation, the death of organic social media reach - influencers aren’t quite the last tactic standing but it’s close. What seemed inefficient and facile a few years ago now looks... inefficient and facile. But at least it MIGHT work.
Just a procedural note for my Twitter coverage of conference and my conference write-ups in future, really.
From now on, zero women = zero coverage. If it’s an all-male discussion panel, session line-up, or keynote slate (i.e. all keynotes are men), I won’t tweet about that panel or session or those keynotes. I won’t refer to them in conference write-ups I do, or review them on any blogs.
This is a REALLY LOW BAR to clear, obviously. The research industry is packed with great women researchers and speakers. A conference could be grotesquely unbalanced in favour of male speakers and still have every session meet my incredibly lax criteria.
I used to be something of an MRS Conference regular. In fact, I think appeared on stage in some capacity or other every year between 2008 and 2013. So I’m happy to be back speaking there (because it is - don’t tell the other ones! - the best research conference in the world),
In fact, greedy bastard that I am, I’m speaking there TWICE. On Day 1 I’m doing a talk called Hatred, Heuristics and Hair, about our attempt to come up with measures that will be more useful than opinion polling in understanding and predicting election outcomes. I’ve never done political research before, much less stood up and talked about it, so this will be a learning experience for everyone, even if what the audience learn is “this guy is an idiot”.
If the political stuff is the new songs from our latest album, the Day 2 talk is the greatest hits set: I’m doing a talk on using social media for insight, to introduce a publication I’m editing on this evergreen topic for the IPA. I used to know about this stuff for a living so it’s rather chastening to realise how much things have moved on - and also startling to find out, in some cases, how much they haven’t.
The rest of the event looks great too so I’m quite excited about all this. Perhaps it will spark off a new era of grumbling on this sadly fallow blog!
There are 75 million millennials in the U.S., and everyone knows advertisers are infatuated with the idea of winning over the biggest buying bloc. But just how much more is being spent on Generation Y than on those who came before them? It's about 500 percent more, according to a new analysis from advertising technology firm Turn.
Ad Week has helpfully included a picture of some millennials doing their millennial thing, so you can be sure they know their stuff.
I have no idea of the sources Turn uses for this stat (it’s only digital marketing, by the way). The “advertising technology firm” does not, of course, suggest that this allocation of resources might be a bit lopsided, or that some of that money might be better off spent elsewhere. It instead bolsters the case for millennial marketing with a segmentation!
It’s a slightly unusual segmentation, though, in that one segment is 57% of the population, and the defining quality of this segment is that they’re broke. Sorry, struggling aspirationals.
Some naive and backward-looking old school marketers might suggest that aiming 80% of your marketing budget at a group where 57% don’t have any money is a bit stupid. I reject this lack of vision.
But I think the infographic does suggest a more radical, disruptive use of the millennial marketing budget. A kind of Keynesian stimulus package, if you like. Identify the “struggling aspirationals”, take the marketing money you’d be spending on them, and, well, give them it. Cash it in, take it out of the bank, hand it out. Then they will spend it on artisanal food and fixies and selfies and beards whatever else you have on your mood boards. And the economy will thank you for it.
Or you could just keep on filling the media they use with adverts for stuff you know they can’t afford until they say, fuck this, and block you.
I made this chart by grabbing all the opinion poll data UK Polling Report has gathered since the May General Election and then averaging it by month. Nate Silver I ain’t, but if you want to know what’s happening in British politics (as reflected in the opinion polls), this is it. Almost none of the polls feeding into this aggregate have made headline news. Several haven’t been reported at all, even by the papers that paid for them.
There are two reasons these polls haven’t been widely reported. The first is that, after the election fiasco, nobody trusts them. (Most of the polls here are using new models the polling companies have developed since the election, though.)
The second is that nothing much is happening. And this is inconvenient. There are three big narratives in British politics at the moment. The first is the idea that Labour have made themselves unelectable for a generation by making Jeremy Corbyn leader. The second, related to the first, is that the Tories have seized the centre ground of politics with George Osbourne’s “living wage” and David Cameron’s more inclusive conference language. The third, very much opposed to the first, is that Jeremy Corbyn’s new politics is going to win a lot of lost voters back to Labour.
There is, so far, no evidence in the polls for any of these. Corbyn’s election has not caused Labour to bleed support. Nor has it won them any. The Conservatives have not expanded their support or become a one nation party. The electorate, at the moment, don’t much care what’s happening, or not enough to say they’ll change their votes. On the seismograph of polling, the earthquake in UK politics simply wasn’t. So it’s no surprise that the media, wary of pollsters after May, have chosen to ignore them.
We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.
The Internet Advertising Bureau has made a belated (but not unwelcome!) conversion to the cause of improved user experience and lighter, less intrusive ads. The move comes because publishers and digital advertisers are having kittens over the rise of ad blocking software.
The UX crisis is real, modern ads are invasive and intrusive, and they hoover up your data like nobody’s business (something the IAB doesn’t dwell on). The alternative - LEAN ads as an alternative consumer standard - is probably the least the IAB can do and may turn out to be the most: its announcement includes lots of reassurance that all this consumer-friendly stuff is only optional, don’t worry. It’s quite possible that advertisers and publishers will go the road of the stick, not the carrot, and ban ad-blocker users from parts of the web.
But it seems to me there’s something disingenuous about its statement, even so. The way the IAB is telling it, they simply took their eye off the ball in pursuit of advertising excellence: they were so busy saving the free and democratic internet in the wake of the dotcom crash that they didn’t notice that invasive ads were spreading like knotweed and most media publishers were looking like shonky Russian torrent sites. It was a mistake, a sin of omission.
Except this isn’t quite true. The IAB’s problem wasn’t that it was so busy helping businesses that it ignored user experience entirely. The truth is if anything less callous but more awkward. The knotweed didn’t creep up on them. They helped plant it. The IAB, and other advertising bodies, have had lots to say about digital advertising and user experience, but until quite recently much of it has been based on the idea that people are fine with digital advertising and if anything want to see more of it.
The idea is rooted in some basic beliefs, which seem to me common to a lot of digital marketers. The beliefs run something like this: old advertising was mass media and based on interruption. It wasn’t efficient and people didn’t like it. But people would like new, online advertising if it was engaging and relevant. And young people would especially like it.
This presentation (link opens a powerpoint) from 2012 is a good example - the results of a study which asked people whether not not they agreed with statements about advertising, relevant advertising, privacy, and so on. The conclusions are upbeat: people expect to see advertising online, they find it helpful, they like relevant advertising more, and so on. The conclusions are also a fair summary of the data, as far as I can tell. There are perhaps a few warning signs an analyst might have brought out - almost 60% of people say they would like relevant advertising more. Only half that figure say they actually see more relevant advertising.
But on the whole, the IAB believed what the survey, and surveys like it, told them about what people thought, and reported it fairly. And hey, even if consumers currently didn’t feel advertising was relevant, with all the data being collected on them, and all the engaging new ways of communicating with them online, they soon would. Right? The IAB and other advertising bodies had faith in the idea of a new type of consumer, a digital native who understood the role advertising played and welcomed well-targeted, engaging and helpful examples of it, personalised using their data.
But this was a fantasy. Ad blocking is particularly on the rise among young people, the very group supposed to tolerate or enjoy digital ads. The promise of relevant, targeted ads either has not materialised yet or has failed to motivate people. Engagement with brands on social media is falling. And the very things that were meant to improve advertising - collecting personal data to improve relevance, and using rich media to improve engagement - have helped make it slower, more unwieldy and less popular than ever.
The claims made by the IAB - that advertising funds the web as we know it - are entirely true, but the rise of invasive, data-hungry, memory-heavy, non-LEAN advertising is not just down to an excess of understandable enthusiasm. It’s the consequence of a bet on a particular type of consumer and set of attitudes to advertising - one with the additional, seductive property that marketers very much wanted it to be true.
Why wasn’t it true? What did that survey (and others like it) get wrong? Three things spring to mind. The first is that what people think doesn’t necessarily match what they’ll do. People may think all sorts of reasonable things about advertising in the abstract, but still happily download a plug-in or tick a box that removes it, if that feels like an easy option. The second is that even in the survey, enough people disliked advertising to make a very big hole in the accounts if the option is given to get rid of it.
And the third is that the world “relevant” is not very useful. Would I like ads to be relevant to me? Yes. But what I mean by that isn’t necessarily what advertisers mean. Relevance is something you can only really decide after you see an ad, and it’s likely to correlate very strongly with “do I like what’s being advertised”. And a near miss - like something I’ve already decided I don’t want - may well feel less relevant than something miles off, even though that’s objectively unfair.
(Retargeting is the classic example here - the IAB, incidentally, deplore the practise of retargeting people who’ve already bought a thing. But that isn’t why retargeting is annoying! It has a relatively very high conversion rate, I believe - because people who consider something might regret not buying it. For those people, it’s relevant advertising. But for the majority who don’t regret not buying it, and have actively rejected it, retargeting is the opposite of relevant!)
Where does this actually leave the IAB and advertising? They’re doing the right thing (or taking a big step towards it). Advertising UX is a disaster area. But their justification is going in the wrong direction - blaming the current mess on an excess of advertiser high spirits, rather than looking even slightly at the ideas and theories underpinning it. If those stay intact, no reform is likely to last.
An algorithm can predict human behavior better than humans - Quartz
It’s fairly common for machines to analyze data, but humans are typically required to choose which data points are relevant for analysis. In three competitions with human teams, a machine made more accurate predictions than 615 of 906 human teams. And while humans worked on their predictive algorithms for months, the machine took two to 12 hours to produce each of its competition entries. For example, when one competition asked teams to predict whether a student would drop out during the next ten days, based on student interactions with resources on an online course, there were many possible factors to consider. Teams might have looked at how late students turned in their problem sets, or whether they spent any time looking at lecture notes. But instead, MIT News reports, the two most important indicators turned out to be how far ahead of a deadline the student began working on their problem set, and how much time the student spent on the course website. These statistics weren’t directly collected by MIT’s online learning platform, but they could be inferred from data available.
Shortly after the first Democratic primary debate ended, I took to the pages of Slate to share what I saw on the CNN stage: Hillary Clinton had won. “Instead of turning in the safe and solid performance she needed,” I wrote, “Clinton was closer to spectacular on Tuesday night.” It...
I haven’t been following the US Democratic race and I certainly didn’t watch the debate*, but I’ve been fascinated by the memes and arguments that have followed. These have arisen because media commentators broadly agreed Hillary Clinton “won” the debate but website polls all picked Bernie Sanders by a landslide. Cue lots of yelling “fix” and this rather condescending piece in reply pointing out that no, self-selecting polls are junk.
Quite so. But it leaves out the important question - if self-selecting polls are junk, why did all these news sites put one up?
Doing polls properly - sampled and weighted - costs money. Putting up a poll does not. Media organisations, large and small, have less money sloshing around to pay for proper polls - hence Gallup getting out of the game last month - and besides, the DIY ones offer more clicks and more “engagement”.
For a big news event - a presidential debate, for instance - the media orgs will fund the real poll and put up the DIY one. But for something smaller they certainly won’t forego the clicks. People may not trust polls but they enjoy the sweet feeling of poll-iness.
Hence you get situations like this. Bernie Sanders did well, and has a passionate and well-organised online following. Of course he’s going to do well in the DIY polls. By a landslide? Sure, if word gets round about them.
Am I suggesting that the real fix is the Sanders vote? Of course not. You CAN’T “fix” a self-selecting poll, because that implies they have some validity in the first place. (Leave out the question of whether “winning debates” is a meaningful concept in any case, and how useful even well-run polls are.)
But what the pundits didn’t realise is that in a straight fight between them and a DIY online poll, they enjoy no greater authority and very likely less. The sites that employ them may or may not realise this, or agree. But certainly they should have realised that a situation like this - pundits go Hillary, web visitors go Bernie - was always likely to happen, and if they don’t like it they should either be quiet or fund some actual polls.
*Bernie seems a good egg as US pols go, but my reserve of emotional investment in the fortunes of socialist politicians has been tapped by events nearer home.
Platforms’ early attempts to create editorial spaces are, taken together, at once completely understandable and totally incomprehensible. It’s understandable in that of course a company presiding over a platform of hundreds of millions of people and looking, either deliberately or more desperately, for new places to put ads, would think, hey, let’s bolt a new content and revenue apparatus onto this thing, to capture some of this heat (it’s what all the search and email portals did, too, because why not???). It’s incomprehensible in that, unlike feeds and friend networks, which are intentionally constructed in a way that’s obvious to both a reader and a poster, they don’t have to earn their audiences and therefore don’t know who or what they’re for.
Marketers are posting more on social media but have seen engagement rates drop off in the past year, according to a new report.
Marketers are using social media more. People are interacting with them less. As hautepop pointed out to me on Twitter, the relationship between these facts is ambiguous. Are people becoming exhausted by brands’ constant attempts to engage with them? Or are brands panicking because of people’s declining engagment and simply throwing more resources at them. The difference between the two scenarios is one of nuance, I guess: are brand communications on social media already spam, or simply becoming it?
At any rate, nobody should be surprised by this. Plenty of studies have found evidence for ‘brand fatigue’ online. The response from marketers is always some variant of “ah, but when we make it better...”. Better meaning more targeted, more interesting, more desirable. But here we are. Either the better social media content simply hasn’t arrived yet, or it didn’t work.
Are there glimmers of hope for beleaguered social media marketers? Facebook engagement seems to have tripled, from a measly 0.07% to a titanic 0.22%. Inspiring figures, which the piece suggests came via the expansion of paid social media (which strikes me as targeted advertising by any other name.)
But the essence of the report is clear. Most brand activity on social media looks like busywork, created to give social media teams something to do and fill dashboards with exciting spikes that show they’re doing it.
But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in. Nobody could blame the users of yesteryear for killing pop-up ad rates, and nobody should blame the users of 2015 for blocking abusive, intrusive, misleading, and privacy-stealing ads and trackers, even if it’s inconvenient for publishers and web developers.
I find the Fandometrics reports (on music, TV, web celebrities, gaming, etc.) very interesting. Not because there’s exciting movement in the data, but because there isn’t. The same people show up week after week. A couple of new entries low down the list is about average. Sometimes there isn’t even that.
By focusing on what fans talk about, they give an indication of the speed of cultural change cut loose a little from the usual sources of stimulation: media coverage, for instance, or the artificial constraints of sales cycles. Of course fandometrics reflect those things, but they also reflect the much slower rises and falls in continued, baseline, interest.
They suggest a pop culture that’s both narrower - the same names all the time (albeit for this one segment) - and slower than the typical complaints about fragmentation, an exhausting media cycle, low attention spans etc. would have you believe. In the same way as the switch from sales to streaming has slowed down the British pop charts considerably, the closer you focus on actual behaviour, the more placid things get. It’s a reminder that the feedback loops of trending topics, hot Facebook stories, etc. aren’t reflective of a fast-moving culture, they’re ways of generating one, since constant refreshing is how media serves up attention to advertisers.
Judging by the polls announced when voting closed last night, and the polls in the immediate run up, Syriza’s referendum on the EU’s bailout terms was poised on a knife edge. All the final polls predicted a “No” win (just as well they did), but a very slim one, with victory for “Yes” within the margin of error.
Within about half an hour’s contact with reality, these polls were shredded. The eventual outcome is 61%-39%, a 22-point win for “No”.
Pragmatically speaking, this is no catastrophe for polling - the directional result was OK, so there are no dashed expectations and what happens next is so much more important nobody will remember the polls. In fact they’ve already been forgotten.
Also, referenda are notoriously hard to poll. This may seem odd - it’s only one question with two outcomes, how hard can it be? But the questions tend to cut across political lines and because they’re unique, none of the sample frames and weights hold.
Still, a 22-point gap is pretty bad. Not a good night for Greek research, you’d say.
What went wrong? Events moved very fast last week, with claims and counter-claims on both sides.,No doubt polls had a hard time keeping up. But the final ones should still have been more accurate. I can think of two problems, though.
First, Greece is a hard country to poll at the best of times. Away from Athens it has a widely distributed population and plenty of regional variation. Building sample there isn’t easy.
Second, Greek research firms have the same economic problems and cashflow issues right now as any other Greek business, even if there’s more demand for what they do.
Because of these, my guess is the polls relied heavily on online sample, and more specifically dedicated panelists. And as we know from other work, regular online survey-takers are different - in America, at least, they are often politically more liberal or libertarian in view than most of the population and are certainly more engaged with new technology and the digital economy.
In Greek terms, might this group of young-ish, digitally engaged people be more likely to be pro-EU and to support, however reluctantly, the EU project? It would explain the direction of error in the polls, at least. Something to bear in mind comparing online and telephone results for, say, the coming UK referendum on EU exit.
He came from Shoreditch with a thirst for social
Wanted to make things human and emotional, that's why I hit reply.
He told me that his brand was loaded
Thanks to a partnership with Coca-Cola.
I said fine and then in thirty seconds time he said,
I want to post like common people
I want to view whatever common people view, I want to tweet like common people
I want to sell to common people like you.
Well what else could I do - I said I'll see what I can do.
I asked him for a target market
He said Gen Y and they have to be brand aware, so we started there.
I said pretend you've got no budget, he just laughed and said oh we can fudge it.
I said yeah? Well I can't see anyone else following you.
Are you sure you want to blog like common people
You want to see whatever common people see
You want to snapchat common people,
you want to snapchat common people like me.
But he didn't understand, he just talked about his brand.
Get an Instagram account, tweet a reasonable amount.
Steal a joke and say it’s you, pretend you are a human too.
But still you'll never get it right
'cos when you're working late at night posting lolcats on your wall
If you bought some ads you could stop it all.
Credit or blame to John Willshere (@willsh) whose tweet sparked this.
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