Consumption BS

I've dismissed just about every report I've ever seen on media consumption that tries to put an average number of hours to media consumption. As I'm fond of saying in my columns, in order for the average American to watch as much television as media research companies say they do, one would have to come home after work/school every day Monday through Friday and watch two hours of television. Then they would have to spend both days of the weekend watching 8 hours per day. Obviously, there's some inflation going on here. Talk all you want about averages. I refuse to believe that the average American watches that much television. Similarly, check out this article in AdAge. Amazingly, one media research company has actually stated that media consumption declined from 2005 to 2006. It's the whole thing about what it declined to that's amusing. The average yearly figure for Americans for 2006? 3,530 hours.

To put things in perspective, there are only 8,760 hours in a year. Am I to take it that people actually believe the average American spends over 40 percent of their year consuming media?

More perspective... If you got a healthy 8 hours of sleep per night, which most people don't, you would sleep for 2,920 hours a year. The average is under 7 hours. Let's call it 7 to make the math easy. That's 2,555 hours a year. Am I to take it that the average American spends 38 percent more time consuming media than sleeping? I doubt it.

Assuming no multitasking (which is a huge jump, I know...) and 7 hours of sleep per day, that would leave 2,675 hours left over for things like working and, you know, LIVING. With a 40-hour work week, you've got only 595 hours left during the course of the year for doing stuff that isn't working, sleeping or consuming media.

I can't believe people actually think these numbers represent anything in the realm of reality. On a side note, I can't wait for the first media research person who pops in here and attempts to justify numbers like this. Excuse me, sir, but your agenda is showing...

Viral Marketing Is Plaguing Viral Marketing

An article in this morning's Advertising Age asks "What's plaguing Viral Marketing?" The article points to a sociology professor's work that suggests influencers aren't as important as folks once thought they were.  Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that advertising messages are at a huge disadvantage as compared to things that are, well, cool when you're talking about something "going viral."  Yet clients have no problem telling their agencies to "go create a viral video" and there is no shortage of agencies willing to take up the challenge, despite the notion that the overwhelming majority of them will fail and never deliver on the client's expectations.

Check out this list of well-known Internet phenomena, all of which have spread virally. How many of them are commercial in nature?  Just three of them, by my count.  The Blair Witch stuff was a hoax, and hordes of marketers tried to use the same tactics to replicate their "success" and failed.  The Snakes on a Plane stuff was grassroots until New Line decided to get involved and turn it into their new marketing campaign - and it didn't translate into butts in theater seats because New Line failed to realize the difference between laughing with and laughing at.  There's a local commercial on the list, but local commercials are funny.  (Again, there's a difference between laughing with and laughing at.)  Note the absence of campaigns from national advertisers, despite all the money and effort sunk into "going viral."

The fact that the square peg of commercial communications can't fit into the round hole of viral success doesn't stop marketers from trying.  They do it all the time, in defiance of the notion that they can't possibly be as cool as Numa Numa.  And they blame their agency when the effort fails.

Federated Doesn't Get It

I know I'm coming into this a bit late (I was going to let this pass without comment), but after thinking about it for a little while, I decided I couldn't avoid going on the record - that is, to the extent that posting to a not-very-well-read blog constitutes "going on the record." Somewhat recently, Microsoft and Federated Media put up a site together as a sort of discussion focal point for the "People Ready" MSFT tagline, where bloggers can discuss when their particular business became people ready.  Several Federated bloggers contributed.  It's an interesting strategy, but the execution of that strategy contained elements that weren't consistent with the values of the blogosphere.  For one, Microsoft was an advertiser on Federated, and the notion that their bloggers showed up to the site to contribute to it lends the appearance of impropriety.  (As an aside, I don't think Microsoft or its agency meant any harm, but what they did wasn't compatible with the laws of transparency, it looked like shilling and it created an opportunity for blogging pundits - particularly ones with competing blog networks - to score with some potshots.)

Of course, Nick Denton took his shot.  And he's right, both in the sense of taking the shot at Federated to start with, and with the thrust of his argument.  It does look like shilling.  And Microsoft should know better.

In a perfect world, Microsoft shuts down the campaign and apologizes for the appearance of impropriety, there's a three-day round of territorial pissing over who "gets" the blogosphere and how to monetize it best, and we all move on.  But I saw this arrogant little snippet from the comments on Nick Denton's post, and I couldn't let it go...

Welcome to the birth of conversational marketing.

It's making people like you and me, who came from the world of traditional newspapers, have to learn about three-way conversations. We have already witnessed the evolution of the two-way conversation among authors and readers that is replacing old-fashioned one-way journalism. Even our old employers (yours at the Financial Times, mine at The New York Times) are now actively bringing their readers into two-way conversations.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM's authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

In the case of this Microsoft campaign, the marketers asked if our writers would join a discussion around their "people ready" theme. Microsoft is an advertiser on our authors' sites, but it's paying them only based on the number of ad impressions delivered. There was no payment for joining the conversation and they were not required to do it. They're not writing about this on their blogs, and of course several of them have been known to be pretty hard on Microsoft at times as reporters. They're talking about the topic, and readers joined that conversation.

We're carefully expanding conversational marketing based on all kinds of new ideas that are coming from authors, marketers and our sales reps. We're drafting a set of principles for conversational marketing that will help everyone, inside FM and across the industry, frame the discussion about how we do this the right way. And we're taking care at every step of the process to make sure we don't compromise the editorial integrity of our authors. Because our authors are in constant conversation with their readers, they know how their audience feels. If a reader feels an author has crossed a line or betrayed the reader's trust, that author will hear about it quickly.

You're right to be skeptical; we should all be watching carefully to make sure we do this right. We certainly are.

Best, Neil Chase Vice President Federated Media Publishing

Careful where you sling that term, Mr. Chase.  We're not witnessing "the birth of Conversational Marketing" with the advent of this poorly-thought-out campaign from Microsoft.  First, Conversational Marketing has been around a lot longer than this campaign.  Second, this campaign doesn't meet the definition of Conversational Marketing because it's not an open dialogue between a company and its customers.  It's an attempt to get people talking about a business concept/tagline that Microsoft wants to own.

When someone screws up, it's best to acknowledge it and move on.  Instead, Chase tries to defend the indefensible, saying that bloggers were paid only for the ad impressions that ran on their sites, and not for their participation in this campaign.  Perhaps on paper the money changed hands based on a number of delivered impressions and a CPM, but folks who are familiar with the publishing business will wonder whether participation was offered as "added value" or whether Microsoft's continued sponsorship was contingent on blogger participation in the conversation on the microsite.  It is this appearance of impropriety that Microsoft got wrong.  And I don't see how it can be defended with a straight face.

If it were me, I might have concentrated not on blogger participation, but on audience participation, using the banners on Federated to prompt discussion.  Then again, I probably wouldn't have suggested a campaign to get people excited about the tagline, but if the objective was to do that, this is how I would do it.  I'd make it 100% clear that any blogger participation was of their own doing and that participation wouldn't be considered when it came time to put together the media plan for the next quarter.

That Federated even tried to defend this strategy, though, suggests to me that they really don't get what Conversational Marketing is all about.  They should have known that this strategy was likely to raise eyebrows, and they should have warned Microsoft and its agency that this might happen.

Disclosure: I have something of a partnership with Pajamas Media in which we pitch Conversational Marketing programs to clients together, so I do have something of a dog in this fight.

Isn't It Telling?

Apparently, ad spending growth in the U.S. will not keep pace with the economy this year.  That is, unless you count the growth of emerging media platforms like, say, the Internet.  Isn't it telling that the old ad agency dinosaurs don't count the Internet among "official" advertising media?  How long before they're forced to, simply because without emerging media's growth numbers, the spiral toward impending doom will become so evident for the TV-centric agency community as to be painful? Here's an interesting quote:

"What's actually happening, I would argue, is advertisers are shifting their money out of media that we define as ad-supported media into marketing," said Wieser, adding, "And it's very difficult to measure that."

In other words, people with things to sell are spending their money developing markets for their products, in part through new technology.  And they're not spending their money shouting at people through the idiot boxes in their living rooms.  This comes as a surprise?