Thursday, December 31, 2009

Collate Info from Spy Agencies -- the Way Marketers Do

This Holiday Season, as we all dish on whether we will be forced to go commando on flights in order to prevent any more undie bombers, or whether we will inflict terror on poor TSA agents by parading starkers through body scans, I can't help but wonder why our spy agencies aren't enlisting the same tools marketers have at their disposal.

For instance, folks at Nielsen's Buzz Metrics and Evolve 24 have been collating what people say and do in media and blogs, with how product sales and/or stock prices will perform. They ingest literally millions of articles and blog posts every single day, parse by clients (and their competitors), and look for sentiment toward each subject. They then can predict, with a fair degree of certainty, the outcome of key performance indicators. By semantically analyzing and collating "buzz" about brands -- can't these same agencies do this with "chatter" about targets?

Maybe I am missing something here, but if Amazon has powerful relational databases to know that if I bought a Sony Minicam a year -- I just might want a tripod this year, why can't our spy agencies put together that studying Arabic in Yemen + attending a highly-watched Islamic Center in London + buying a ticket (extra points if paid with cash) + traveling with no baggage on a trip to the US (Detroit, I might add, where the average temperature is below freezing -- did he even have a coat?) -- adds up to "likely candidate to blow up a plane?" At the very least, he deserves extra screening. (I cross at the US/Canadian borders at least monthly and have found some very well-skilled interrogators who ask off-handed, yet key questions focused on my rationale for crossing: what will the temperature in Montreal be this week? Who pitched for the Yankees and Blue Jays? If I don't have an answer -- I should be pulled over.)

While screening air passengers to that level of detail may be difficult (if keeping the airline industry aloft is at all a goal), certainly we should be able to winnow the list from the millions who fly to the thousands who deserve extra scrutiny. Where are the econometricians, the semantic analysts, the library scientists that do Boolean queries?  Maybe the TSA needs a CMO to show how to really build a profile that is predictive.

Monday, December 21, 2009

A season to believe in miracles ... Newsrooms will hire again!

So sayeth E.W. Scripps' CEO Rich Boehne in address at the annual UBS Conference. Boehne described current news offerings as suffering from "a plague of sameness," (McNews, anyone?) and asserts that better quality can broaden the audience. Scripps, which owns 10 stations, is hoping it will be the beneficiary from "a great consolidation opportunity" as weaker competing news stations drop out.

'Tis the season to be cheery as more competition fails.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Tip Jars for Content

It's no secret that news sites are having a difficult time figuring out the monetization of its news online. Goes back to what I have always contended -- people pay for service -- not content. We pay for the service of our news being delivered, we pay our Internet provider a monthly fee and we pay our cell-phone carrier for the service. (We even pay for water that comes in a bottle -- but watch us howl if someone put a lock-box on a water fountain.)


This doesn't bode well when the content provider is not the service provider, aka the newspapers with their online news. The Miami Herald took what many in the industry believe is the equivalence of passing a hat by asking for donations to continue its breaking news coverage. Cheeky bloggers wrote that the mighty Herald had stooped to asking for handouts. Headlines mocked with Brother Can You Spare a Dime. Others like Steve Outing, blogger for the Poynter Institute, approved the move but said it was too subtle (the graphic appears at the end of stories - he suggests a window after a certain number of articles are consumed), too difficult (credit card only -- no PayPal!) and too open-ended (send whatever you want). Outing urged a more blatent, targeted and convenient approach, such as Kachingle (Outing, himself, uses Kachingle) which is sort of the United Way for supporting bloggers and journalists. Pay once and Kachingle doles it out.

Outing makes very good points, particularly in suggesting easier methods of pay. Fundraising 101 says to suggest payment amounts. If the Herald is hoping for $40 per reader, then they ask query should be something like $20 $50 $100 and other. (Museums have a pay-what-you-want model - -but normally for a single day a week -- while charging for other days.

There may be little precedent from other media for the Herald to draw on -- except perhaps from Wikipedia which raised $3m in this fashion. Still, to ease the queasiness, perhaps content sites should look at the financial models of museums -- which rely on annual memberships to fund events and attractions. Bundle content, a discount book and a free map. Suddenly, content sites are selling a service, which people seem to value inherently.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

P&G's Content Marketing Serial Folds

This week, Proctor & Gamble announced its long-running serial, "As the World Turns" air its last episode in September 2010. The announcement marks the end of 73 years of creating content - to sell product. Specifically, soap. Which is how P&G coined the name "soap opera." P&G realized that if they produced addicting content, they would build a loyal following who would also hear their product pitches.

The times they are a changing -- but using content to sell product is not. P&G has the art of serving up content to increase audience loyalty mastered BeingGirl.com and Home Made Simple are two web community sites that unabashedly splash the P&G logo and product around. According to Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester, "Procter & Gamble's BeingGirl.com, an online community for adolescent girls, is four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media. Initiatives like BeingGirl.com require a long-term commitment," he added.

While the daytime serial has not yet translated to the Web (apparently the costs are prohibitive), rest assured that P&G will continue to be in the content business -- as much as they are in the soap and personal products one.