Jules recently posted about her web stats. They tell her, among many other things, that she still has one or more readers who are still on Windows 3.1 (originally released on March 18, 1992). I thought I’d check the stats for this site for the same very, very late adopter. No such luck–the oldest visitors that my Google Analytics account shows are on Windows 95 (two of them in the last month, as it happens).
Then I thought to check what percentage of Windows users are using Vista, and what fraction is still on Windows XP. Windows Vista was released a little over two years ago, on January 30, 2007. It has, as I’m sure you’re well aware, been plagued by criticism. I know many XP users who will skip Vista entirely, moving straight to Windows 7 (as of yet, it has no slicker name).
I checked this site, as well as a client’s site (they’re in the software industry). I compared Windows XP and Vista usage for January, 2008 and January, 2009. Here’s what I found:
For this site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
XP
Vista
January, 2008
80%
15%
January, 2009
66%
31%
For a client site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
XP
Vista
January, 2008
81%
13%
January, 2009
74%
21%
Those numbers don’t add up to 100% because there’s a fraction of users on Windows 2000, NT, CE, 98, 95, ME and so forth.
I checked a couple of other sites, and the numbers look more like my client’s site than my own. Vista usage floats around the 25% mark for January, 2009. What should the adoption rate look like? I really have no idea. Microsoft surely hoped that a majority of their users would be on Windows Vista by the time they released Windows 7.
Lately I’ve been enjoying The Next Stage, a Vancouver blog about the business and marketing of theatre. The other day Simon, the blogger behind The Next Stage, linked to a diverting interview with Jim McCarthy, CEO of Goldstar, which I gather is an American discount ticket seller.
I’m always interested in the business of local, live entertainment, and the interview covers plenty of ground. My favourite bit is McCarthy’s view of advertising:
I’ve literally heard people say they were about to send out 5000 postcards for their show and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those hit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well, let’s do the math on that: 5000 postcards get delivered, but maybe 20% get read. That’s 1000 postcards. If 10% of the people who read it are interested, that’s 100 postcards, and if 10% of those people actually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a purchase, that’s 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.
The simple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly ineffective now. Even “traditional” web advertising has dropped to levels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been startled by back in ‘98 or ‘99. If you’re counting on some kind of media buy to solve your marketing problems, you’re going to have a hard time hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
When I give talks, I do my best to disavow any social media marketing zealotry. I emphasize that, at best, this new webby stuff is just another tool in one’s marketing toolbox.
I am a zealot, however, about measuring. I tell whoever will listen that they need to precisely measure every marketing activity they undertake. If they do that, then they’ve got the answer to the frequently-asked question “how should I spend my time?” is simple. If, for example, their billboards and bus shelter ads prove to be a better spend than time spent on Facebook and Twitter, then get thee away from thy computer.
I particularly like the quiet “balls, balls” at the end, which is a little guest voice-acting action from Monique.
That video also stars Jay of Giant Ant Media fame. He sent me an email about some videos they created for Vancouver Adaptive Snow Sports. He tells me that it’s “a really wicked program dedicated to making the mountain available to those with disabilities”. Here’s one of them:
In the next couple of months, I’m giving three talks to different groups associated with post-secondary education. In preparing these speeches, I was doing research into Facebook’s market penetration among BC’s teens.
As you may know, Facebook’s advertising program lets you thin-slice your target audience in all sorts of interesting ways–gender, age, location even specific interests or workplaces. I created a query that indicated that I could reach 344,860 British Columbians between the age of 15 to 19. I take this to mean that there are 344,860 profiles matching that criteria on Facebook.
Curious to see what percentage of all BC teens this was, I checked the BC government’s stats for the current population of teens aged 15 to 19 in the province. They reported 287,444. I took screenshots of the two sources:
That means that there are 1.2 profiles on Facebook for every BC teen. Is that possible? Probably. After all, I recently read that 99% of the 2012 class at Amherst College had a Facebook profile. I suppose that if 20% of teens created two profiles, they’d generate these results.
And I remember reading some of danah boyd’s (lower case capitalization hers) research that indicates that teens discard unwanted profiles frequently, and often create several on a given social network.
In any case, isn’t this kind of false advertising from Facebook? The most teens an advertiser could possibly reach in BC is all of them: 287,444 in 2008, a few more in 2009.
So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.
Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction.
This is the standard corporate line:
We had no idea this was going on.
It was the act of a single (often ‘low-level’) employee (the Lone Gunmen Theory of Corporate Deflection).
It is, in no way, a reflection of our organization.
The letter itself is pretty goofy. First, why say “may have posted”? If there was any ambiguity, the company’s president wouldn’t be writing a letter on Sunday afternoon. Additionally, the guy worked for Belkin. So to say that “Belkin does not participate in…unethical practices” is inaccurate. If a Belkin employee promotes Belkin unethically, in the course of his work day, with Belkin’s money, then there’s no question that Belkin does participate in those practices. And “great surprise and dismay” is protesting a bit too much, isn’t it?
In the so-called age of conversation, surely we’re all tired of companies acting unethically, and then deploying waffling, corporate language to deflect or evade blame.
I’ve been meaning to mention that Julie and I are teaching a couple of social media courses for UBC Continuing Ed. They’re each three-hour sessions over three Mondays, for a total of nine class hours. Here are the course descriptions:
Introduction to Social Media
This introductory course provides an overview of social media: its history, theories and the principles behind online communication. Through hands-on demonstration of a variety of social media tools including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, wikis and social bookmarking, you discover how these tools are shaping modern communication and how to incorporate them into everyday business and personal communications. Topics also include upcoming trends as well as predictions for what’s next in social media.
Social Media for Marketing
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. In this course, you learn how to incorporate social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, social bookmarking and web monitoring tools into your overall marketing strategies and tactics. We discuss the dos and don’ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette. Students are asked to develop ideas for a social media marketing campaign of their own.
Friends Susie and Rochelle are also teaching courses in the program.
While in New York, I watched two movies at the Angelika Film Center. As usual, there were several ads before each movie. I saw this one twice:
If you watch it all the way through, you’ll see an artfully-shot piece that’s vaguely about making journeys. At the end, you’ll discover that it’s a commercial for Louis Vuitton.
Both times this ad was shown, the audience laughed when the Louis Vuitton brand was displayed at the end. As far as I can tell, they were responding to the disconnect between the high-minded content and the ordinary brand associated with it.
Calvin Klein and Laser Pointers
I was reminded of another ad, from years ago. It was, in my memory, one of the first ads before a movie that I ever saw. It featured a bunch of heroin chic kids moping around the house, and I distinctly remember that one young lad was toying with a laser pointing and aiming it at the camera.
The audience responded the same way at the end, with a kind of mocking contempt for the way their expectations were raised and then disappointed. Do you remember this ad? I tried to find it on the web, and even asked Metafilter, but no such luck.
In any case, it’s interesting to see these long-form commercials receive this particular response. Some of it, I’m sure, has to do with the fact that they’re being viewed in a social setting. The audience has a collective reaction as well as an individual one. And, obviously, we’re responding to the disconnect between the promise of the high-falutin’, edgy ad and the banality (or total irrelevance) of the brand they’re promoting.
Did you have the same reaction to this ad?
Incidentally, I’m not sure why I’m on an advertising kick at the moment. Don’t worry, it won’t last.
For at least a year, Barracuda Networks has been running large ads in Vancouver’s airport. I think I’ve seen their ads in other airports, but can’t confirm that (anybody?). I snapped a bad photo of one of several large display ads in the baggage collection area:
I’m always puzzled when I see these ads. Barracuda makes humming boxes that companies install in their networks to protect against email spam, viruses, phishing and so forth. This one costs about CAN $650:
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 100,000 active email users. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.
According to YVR, about 4.1 million international passengers passed through their gates in 2007. What tiny fraction of those passengers are potential buyers of Barracuda’s products?
The math gets murky, but according to BC Stats, there are about 81,000 technology workers in BC. Of course, not all of those are potential Barracuda customers. Plenty of those have no interest in the IT concerns of their companies. Others work for companies that have fewer than 10 employees. Let’s be generous and imagine that one third of these tech workers might possibly be or know somebody who could become a Barracuda customer.
That works out to 6 out of 1000 British Columbians who might be the target market for these ads. That fraction is certainly lower for foreign visitors. So–best case scenario–that ad might be relevant to one out of every 200 passengers. In truth, I suspect the number is closer to one in 1000.
And yet this is a sadly commonplace scenario. Most offline ads are incredibly dumb–they’re irrelevant to 99.9% of people who see them. Barracuda runs these ads as an act of faith. That one or two out of the madding crowd of visitors grabbing their bags might take an interest, and start on the long, treacherous path towards an IT purchase. And do the folks at Barracuda Networks have an accurate sense of the return on investment of these airport ads? What do you think?
On a vaguely related note, I saw an enormous barracuda in shallow water in Panama a couple of weeks ago. It was at least three feet long, and just cruising gently by in about three feet of water.
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
