There’s a review up on the Web Analytics Association’s website on modeling the determinants of creativity in advertising. I think Smith and MacKenzie et al did a good job on the paper. The term ‘creative’ is completely loaded. After all, isn’t it all subjective? In our defense, even as web analysts, we often try to quantify the subjective all the time. The feeling thermometer and the probability map are two ways that we’ve tried to quantify feelings and prospection. Even the concept of satisfaction, when operationalized through a survey methodology, is subjective. Just because a concept is subjective doesn’t mean that we throw up our hands and walk away. Rather, we should be always trying to improve how we ask[…]
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I read the first 120 pages of Joseph Carrabis’ new book “Reading Virtual Minds Volume 1” last night and polished it off this morning while sitting at the airport. The book certainly forced me to think about being really aware of being aware of how hard I was thinking. I was engaged the whole way though, and in the end, I asked “wholly shit, what just happened there?” I spent the better part of the night dreaming about it (always a sign that something upstairs is getting restructured). I’ll write about the experience without spoiling it for you. Joseph tells the story about how NeuroCognitivePsychoLingualAnthropology came to be. In spite of how long that word is, the book is very[…]
Jim Novo wrote a Web Analytics Association Review on Firm Created Word Of Mouth. I strongly recommend the read. Although the paper was published in the most recent edition of Marketing Science, it was based on findings that span four decades. The first finding reaffirms the ‘strength of weak links’ hypothesis. Let me explain: Like people tend to clump, alike. Among my friends, more than half own iPhones with occupations centering on technology and the Internet and most have roles that are heavily steeped in data. Three quarters would be classified by Forrester as being Tech Optimists and Creators. A majority live in the inner city. Not everybody in my circle are uniformly this way: I used the word ‘more[…]
I had the good enough fortune to talk with Stephane Hamel, a director of the Web Analytics Association, and Andrea Hadley of eMetrics last Friday while at IMC in Vancouver. As usual with any conference – the really interesting conversations happen in the lobby during the day. Andrea, being the super-networker she is, got me into talking with Stephane about the Research Committee, and fast tracking was to be had. We also talked about the diverse audiences involved in any industry, and how to try to serve each group really well at a conference. There are experts, newcommers, and vendors/consultants. Vendors want to sell, newcommers want to learn, and experts want to talk to each other and recruit talent. eMetrics[…]
I’ll confess that one of my favourite lolcats is Skeptical Cat is Fraught with Skepticism. Look deep into that expression. The cat really does look skeptical, doesn’t he? He’s not believing a single word you’re thinking right now. There’s also something about that orange background that makes the expression and the entire image that much funnier. I don’t know what it is about it. But I’m aware of the effect. I think anthropologists have a term for the tendency of humans to superimpose human emotions onto animals – which there is no evidence that an animal actually feels. I can’t remember the term, but it’s funny as hell that we all do it. The reason I bring this is all[…]
At the Marketing Science Conference earlier in the summer, Shaina and I took in the Neuromarketing session. The session was very good, with 3 really great presenters out of the 4. I learned several important reasons why people make the choices they do. For instance, I saw it empirically proven that self-control is like a muscle: you can hold a certain pose for so long, and then that muscle gets fatiqued and weak. Then you can’t hold it for any longer and you break that pose. It’s a very attractive causal variable for periodic consumption and lapses in self-control. Prospection – the ability to think of the future – when combined with anchor-and-adjust tendencies, cause discount-rate curves to deviate from[…]
Considerable effort is going into quantifying the degree of which people paying attention to a medium. This is a big deal. Consider how many screens your average Gen Y’er is engaged with, simultaneously, on a Monday night. They could be watching videos on YouTube while watching MTV while tweeting their friends on their iPhone. There are reinforcing mechanisms here. For instance, getting hit with Stella Artois The Life Legere commercials both on the Comedy Network during a commercial break while getting hit with it on a pre-roll from the Onion News Network. Lately those commercials have been appearing on the fourth screen – the movie theater – during the pre-roll. Seniors are up to it too: reading the newspaper while[…]
Malcolm Bastien was nice enough to lend me a book: The Laws of Simplictity by John Maeda. The Coles notes of that compact volume is: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”. Wonderful. Thanks Malcolm!
If you’ve been attending the Web Analytics Association Research Committee calls, you’ll know that I’ve been troubled by this question of a ‘common data set’. As it is right now, data that is common, clean, and relevant to web analytics is rare. To be sure, there are heaps of open source log files (I believe the Wiki Foundation made 5 terabytes available for download awhile back), but in terms of there being some manageable CSV file out there – it’s pretty rare. Such a dataset is pretty useful from a few perspectives. For one, it would enable researchers within our community to use a verifiable data source when making assertions about the importance of different metrics. I’m dissatisfied with what[…]
I’m looking forward to paneling at IMC Vancouver on September 18th. The topic is social media for business. Naturally, I’ll be talking about social media analytics. The intersection of business strategy, quantitative methods, and online word of mouth (social media) has the capacity to be really powerful in the hands of somebody who understands that it’s actually a medium. There’s message, there response, there’s measurement of that response, there’s an opportunity to improve upon the next message. It’s also like any other medium too. You got to pay to play. It isn’t free. It isn’t free for your customers either. Social media still takes time and attention time: and that’s still a cost. But the difference is that it’s never[…]