Online Advertising

Last week I attended another event i think was very useful seminal in pushing Social Media forward, the ChinwagPsych event, which reviewed the emerging lessons from the emerging fields of digital psychology and anthropology. It was really good as well because the amount signal was high, and the amount of noise from snake oil, bullshit and hype was low. Here are some notes of mine from the event.

Nathalie Nahan, who wrote Webs of Influence, on Website design in the Social era.

- Trussst is what stops people buying online, as customer service/delicvery etc is unclear. Consumer reviews are good at creating trust, also earned media. Using recognised logos eg paypal also helps
- Often need to give people some sort of value upfront as unknown/ untested vendor (Freemium, 30 day trial etc)
- 30% of online shoppers and rising worried about privacy (about bloody time too)
- When they scanned websites to get missing f2f trust cues, they found yellow was the worst colour for trust, followed by red
- Websites need a very defined call to action button (Now this is really Web 1.0 old hat, but since Nathalie's talk, I've become really aware of how many sites still do not do this)
- Using the scarcity principle - "only X left in stock" - to create a sense of urgency, really works
- UK is culturally difficult to US, need to soften the hard sell -
- Tweet to unlock benefits seems to work well
- Humans focus on contrast, and on concrete stuff - eg money management website example "I will teach you to be rich" is succinct and to the point.
- Framing in terms of loss raher than gain is better, as Humans are more loss averse
- 10% of a population = tipping point, when people start to follow without thinking (Interesting, I've seen memetic algoritms that calculate that when say when cheating gets to about 5% of the population it then starts to spread rapidly)

Leigh Caldwell, Inon - Psychology of Pricing

- This is an emerging new field - cognitive economics
- Talked about improving profit via the "rule of 3" - Typically with 2 choices get a 70/30 split, 70% cheapest.
- Insert an expensive 3rd choice - 3 choices split 60/35/5 - fastest way to improve profit
- Concept of "anchoring" - set expectations of higher price first, people will choose next cheaper option
- Human brain treats spending money siilarly to pain, so give people something or offer a later payment
- If you make price complicated, befuddles customer, reduces ability to discern (I tried to ask Leigh why mobile Co's, Energy Co's etc do this, despete stromg evidence it puts off customers but ran out of question time)
- You must Price differentiate for different customer segments to maximise profits, but be prepared to lose some sales
- People will value what you price

Simon White, Draft Cb - Why are people NOT using all this stuff?

- Old models (persuasion) only lead to accidental success as 95% of decisions are instinctive, not rational/ logical
- People don't like change/new ideas, so try to rationalise to their past knowledge, and it seems to work "well enough" as new approaches haven't really had major impact yet
- New approaches are still complicated to use, no rules of thumb, no benchmarks
- Rapid Change, new "New things" every 6 months - overwhelming amount of data coming out and overwashing last new new thing
- "Institute of Decision Making" set up, linking Research to actual Application of these ideas

The new thing I got from Simon's talk was this:

- People buy things to achieve goals, they do not have a "relationship" with brands as such. And their real goals are the implicit goals, eg buy Mercedes to feel powerful
- 3 main implicit driver axes

(i) security
(ii) excitement (drives dopamine)
(iii) autonomy (drives testosterone)

- Intersections between the above 3 exist - then adventure, discipline, enjoyment (see my diagram at to of page)
- So move proposition to answer explicit and implicit goal. E.g. Oreo - explicit goal, treat child. Implicit goal - passing on your experience, childhood

Simon Hill, Wazoku - Open Innovation - A rereshingly free-from-hype talk about the reality of Open Innovation.

- technology is not the issue in Innovation
- people need to see the benefits,
- also must sort wheat from chaff
- need to put culture in place to force innovation
- Idea management is about process of generating, selecting and executing ideas, not about the 1 big idea
- Only about 5% of ideas will get executed

I then had to go to a client meeting, so missed a few talks and lunch (boo), returning in time to catch:

Steven Haggard & David Stillwell, Cambridge Predictive
I first heard about them awhile ago when they started to put together patterns of connected likes, on Facebook, they mentioned some typical insights e.g. people who like Terry Pratchett and computing tend to be introverted and Likes on Facebook can tell relationship status (I'll bet!!). They started to look at Business Applications, for CRM, trying to find predictive qualities of personality for honing the Marketing message; keywords, behaviour types etc. They mentioned as an example the Relentless fizzy "energy" drink going up against Red Bull etc:

- Its roots were in music roots so they started look at interconnections there
- looked at what energy drinkers like, by age, sex, etc etc on FB, and clustered the data into 200 like groups with interlinks,
- Saw that Relentless drinkers unique in Top Man U, Bad Diets, Classic heavy metal. So th
- Built Matrix of Energy drinks vs like groups, with probabilities on intersect.
- Overlay like groups with demography, and created a new new psychological profile layer above the "correlation" layer
- Relentless users are impulsive, neurotic etc, create narratives to fit
- Found that Music choice is a good proxy for personality index overall, so you can see eg Aerosmith and Journey hit different people
- Now working on Numerical score of musical affinity

Cat Jones, Unruly Media - Viral Video Chart

- built Unruly Sharerank algorithm by testing large no of hypotheses of what drives sharing vs actual sharing
- Myth #1 you can't predict sharing - you can, and quite accurately
- Myth #2 content must be funny - but you can do warmth or excitement as Main vector for eg
- 2 Video examples predicted - "3"s Pony doing a Fleetwood Mac Dance = funny and happy and warm; and Pepsi's Camaro = funny and nervous and excitement
- Camaro did as their aglorithms expected, Pony did much better - mainly due to an unpredicted factor, the horsemeat scandal at teh time
- Viral peak is usually day 2, on avearge 25% of all shares on 1st 3 days
- optimal time of video = c 3 min (We found the same for video clips when testing in 2007)

Milward Brown (Similar findings to Simon White, above)

- The only people who were shocked by behavioural economics were economists (rational man)
- $35bn Market prediction industry, only 2% modern tools - why?
- traditional tools are not that broken
- New methods are not that simple to use, and hard to transfer from specific project
- emotion is not everything, most people have very little resonance with most brands most of the time
- New methods give very different results but case law does not exist to calibarte them - very little published success.
- Also they are hard to understand

What was new is they have tested a number of these new approaches against Ads

- Most useful method they have found is facial response, map facial
happiness as Ad plays. Integrated with survey data from same people
- Shows key impacts across different cultures, and what people react to vs what they say they do
Can also check reactions at 2nd view etc.
- Online Behavioural Psych is more Nudge than Revolution

The next 2 talks were about Smart work, and were interesting in that they seem to apply a "psych" layer to the Quantified Self movement

Design by Day (Book on smart work) Nokia/Anthony Mayfield

- using mobile technology to improve productivity
- if you get 5 hours sleep a night you are no better than being drunk
- only a decade into ubiquitous connectivity, 3 years into smartphones, so started to look at what can be done
- use Design thinking to structure workflows, design Prototype Days to test what works/doesn't work, timeline a bad day, see what you can learn.
- Also looked at older ideas that neuroscience backs up
- Thinking is expensive, glucose is measurable - habit is lowest energy levels
- work day doesn't match how our brain works. We only have 3 - 4 hours a day at peak performance, yet we often waste it on doing emails and meetings
- Benjamin Franklin was a major designer of his day
- Need to close off little worries
- Know when to switch off, scheduling time for email and Twitter etc - McKinsey report showed multitasking is less efficient on all tasks

Prof Karen Pine - "Do something different"

- Use technology to remind you to do something different that is good for you, force behavioural flexibility
- people tend to use some behaviours too much, drives personality (locked in habits)
- brains like to save energy, repetition drives strong pathways. But this default is not always right way in every situation. Success can over- embed behaviours.
- If there is a gap between our behaviours and what is needed, it drives stress, eg: strong extrovert may not have introversion capability, creates stress
- Most effective way of changing people is not change what they know but change what they do, as otherwise they flip back to what they know how to do
- People develop by doing new things, trying to do same stuff in new ways

Benjamin Ellis, Social Optic

- how to use technology to change larger groups - uses social data to drive changes in organisations
- Amount of data in businesses has grown hugely, used to have data scarcity, now glut in flow and storage
- Unstructured data is the major challenge, we now store it and work out how to structure it later (I agree with Benjamin here, this is the major issue wiyh a lot of Corporate data)
- Old way of marketing - ask people, but they tend to give acceptable answers - different Co cultures drive different mindsets - measure attitudes, not behaviours
- New way - scrape social media behavioural data - tells are not only what people say, do - but how they do it eg how long they take - aim is to predict behaviours
- A lot of social network data is not behavioural, it's managed attitudinally
- In businesses using social media proxy data, main lesson is the shape of the graph
- Language used is an interesting tell, in the business social media, you can tell a lot of things from it, eg Sentiment
- Look at where people use common language, shows the social influence graph
- But can wind up with "beautiful mind" syndrome, seeing many many potential patterns
- Also need to factor out correlation, to only get causation - its very hard
- People also follow biases when given Big Data, anchor on the 1st thing they see, confirmation bias and bandwagon effect can take over
- Chris Anderson saying sheer volume would obviate theory - wrong. Nate Silver book better
- Game mechanics is using psychology to influence behaviours

Daniel Bennett & Marina Clement, Ogilvy Change: Case study - the missing £2

- Rory Sutherland started behavioural economic arm, heavy usage of outside academics. Case study was that people are stopping buying newspapers, so how do we sell them again. Approaches were
- 3 option choice architecture with dummy option (like Economist used)
- differentiate between tablet, PC and smartphone offerings
- Nudge 1 choice sleight of hand in use of deals (see Economist above)
- Nudge 2 choice overload
- Nudge 3 superiority bias - "ultimate" pack
- Nudge 4 - create easy to choose default

Those 4 "nudges" hit 257% ROI, I asked which ones had the most impact, they said they didn't know. I find that hard to believe

Fascinating and worrying in equal measures.....

An alternate future for Online Ads - Economist:

Though global online-advertising revenues rose by 22% in 2011, websites that depend on selling their viewers’ eyeballs are worried. Around 9% of all online page views come from browsers armed with ad-blocking software, such as Adblock Plus, downloaded nearly 180m times since 2007, and 3.5m times in October alone...

Few sites have tried to fight back. In 2010 Ars Technica, a technology-news outlet, found that 40% of its users were blocking its ads. So it blocked their access for a day, but signed up only 200 users (out of 5m a month) for its ad-free version. Media firms are now opting for paywalls. Press+, a paywall provider set up in 2010, now has over 300 clients.

“You cannot annoy someone into liking you,” says Norm Johnston of Mindshare, a media-buying agency. But for many users the only good ad is an invisible one.

Only 9% and rising.....uh-oh.

Tomorrow/Thursday I will be attending the FT Digital media conference, as is my wont every year. I had a look at the Hotwire/33 Media Media Trends report that was linked to it over lunch, and have a few comments to make on it. In a nutshell, the Trends are (abridged, and commented on):

1. The Interest graph, which has 3 key areas of activity

- Influence rankings and perks
- Tailored information
- Interest networks

Comment - I think its still very early days and risks turning into a "be careful what you wish for" area in three ways. Firstly, the current services are still pretty inaccurate (being very new) so will lead to incorrect spend and possibly loss of credibility, and a resulting trough of despond etc etc. The other thing is the sort of tools used to really make it accurate are quite privacy invasive so will lead to legislative kickbacks. And these same techniques will be what allow users to take control of their own data, VRM style.


2. Putting your business on the map

This is the third year in a row we’re calling next year a breakthrough stage for location based services.....As we’ve argued elsewhere in this paper, if you’re not building your presence on the location based services that matter to your customers, 2012 will be the year that you begin to fade from view.

Comment - this is the fifth year we have been told that Location Based Services are the Breakthrough Thing next year I think there is an underplayed unwillingness of people to give up on privacy that is not taken into account with these services. Generation 1 died, Generation 2 is gamified to the nines and is still not taking off, Generation 3 will be driven off the smart devices but look at the kickback Apple and Android got.


3. How tablets are changing communication

Expect to see communications plans next year that include the creation of high quality content such as HD video and high resolution photos, wherever possible created by users, and all packaged up in ready-made galleries and compatible formats.

Comment - We agree, there is something very different about the Tablet, it is a true Fifth Screen, but evolution is hard to predict - today it is a multimedia consumption device in the main, however, applying Moore's Law gives you some very powerful devices in 2, 4, 6 years.


4. Who are the new social media celebrities?

...surely 2012 will see the rise of the ‘social media celebrity’, those who are experts in their field, influencers, keen communicators, people who will provide us with feedback and by their serendipitous retweets, project us into viral stardom within their personal niche.

These ‘social media celebrities’ may include spokespeople, CEOs and brand experts. They may only be famous to 15 people, but will hang on to their title for a lot longer than Ashton’s 15 minutes.

There was an interesting tweet the other day, about audience inflation - one upon a time being able to have 100,000 subscribers was a huge thing, now a Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber add those numbers a month on social media. The thing that is not usually articulated is the strength of the tie, game theorists differentiate between strong and week ties based on the amount of effort involved, and a "follow" or "like" button is as weak as it gets - we see it as the Next Generation direct mail.


5. The socialising of TV and music

Your brand video could be listed alongside “How I Met Your Mother” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA”. It finally turns everyone into a potential publisher. Shakespeare coined the phrase “all the world’s a stage”. And digital communicators took the same thought and applied it to the world of brands, companies and governments: we are all publishers now.

Comment - Agreed - we started telling our clients that "everyone is a publisher" in 2005, and helped set up our first client Web TV network in 2007. It is still very early days though, and Ad revenue is no cinch (never mind showing Ads issues) so it will be a marketing spend for a while yet


6. Social media and internal communications

At this time both human resources and internal communications departments were seeing the inception of a communications backchannel in corporate culture as a threat, to efficient communications and to productivity alike.

What we will see happen in 2012 is a tipping point for unlocking the potential of the third social media type. After paid and earned, there will be employed media as a platform. For planned communications campaigns, unleashing tens of thousands of tweets, Facebook likes, LinkedIn posts, forum and blog mentions will become the bedrock for the big brand.

Comment - While I agree that Social media will move more into Internal comms, we know from our experience that there are many internal political barriers. And Gawdelpus, there is a big risk that Twitter etc turns into a junk mail site and kills those that love it if not used carefully.


7. How cashless payments could unlock a wave of innovation

- Our pockets will get lighter:
- Proving I’m here
- Social commerce

Comment - While we agree that payments within social nets will be a major thing, we don't think cash will go away anytime soon owing to its privacy benefits, and the location/proof of presence element of transactions will worry people as much as attract them. However, given the interest of others to see your data, we predict non private payments cashless payments will be free and private cash payments will have a cost.


8. Gamification

Whether you’re a brand, a publisher, a Government or a developer, game dynamics offer a low-cost way to enhance even very basic products and services. If you haven’t thought about how this affects you, 2012 would be a good year to lead the way in your organisation or industry.

Comment - Gamification is undoubtedly a useful set of techniques to improve a service's UI, but, just like SEO, the answer to a whole raft of crap or dodgy services is still not to gamify ithem but improve the underlying service.


9. Forums

Forums are arguably where social media evolved from the primordial soup of the early web. Places users could generate content, connect with one another, build communities around interests and discover new stuff serendipitously.

So, we looked forward to 2012 and asked ourselves: what does the future hold for forums? The original internet bulletin boards may have been passed over, but the essence of a forum – an online discussion site in the form of posted messages and comments that are at least temporarily archived – is still alive and well online.

And research shows why forums have turned out to have such longevity. Recent IEEE Computer Society research (2010) highlights the concept of the microcommunity for analysing the durability and openness of internet forums. The social and support dimension to very specific interest groups results in a credible resource of information and understanding within the sought field.

Comment - Forums are still where its really at, the old Web 1.0 forums still have more participants and traffic than Facebook, and drive huge traffic on Web 2.0 services - look at the success of Mumsnet for example, a vertical forum aggregator.


10. Automotive app stores

- App stores - for cars and driving
- Social networks (based around cars)
- Location-based services: When

Comment - we are all in love with our cars (though some are calling Peak Car, in the OECD anyway), but there is competition for brands - I own a classic car, I have been a member of the relevant Yahoo group (and the eGroup before that) for nearly 2 decades. The challenge for commercial brands is to build a combination of apps, social network and location services that serve the customer enough compared to independent, over the top services. I think that will be a challenge

Pre-Roll ads have apparently been solved says Redeye VC

Created by Solve Media (a First Round Capital portfolio company), the folks that re-invented the captcha, comes a new approach to video advertising. Instead of watching the whole pre-roll advertisement, consumers can type in a part of the brand message -- allowing them to access the content faster...and providing real engagement for the brands. It's a simple solution adds real value for the industry and the consumer. Video pre-roll advertising -- SOLVED.

Yeah right. Taking the ultimate in irritating lean forward experience (aka timewasting) into a lean back medium is so going to work. I'd love to see the user research trials, I predict that except for incredibly desirable content (say, porn), users will stay away in droves.

But it shows how desperate the industry is for a workable pre-roll.....

(There is a video of it in the link, but I couldn't bring myself to foist it on you, dear reader)

Google+ won't let Brands have pages, and this is upsetting the e-Marketeers, poor things - an Open Letter from Danny Sullivan :

Hey Google, I'd say I know you're all new to the social game and should be forgiven that you have messed up with how to handle brands here so badly. Except, you're not new.

For one, you know that Twitter and Facebook both support brands, and that there would obviously be demand for this here. You failed to implement that support. Bad on you.

I know it's all "field trial," but that's not really an excuse, given that you knew -- had to know -- this would happen.

Worse, you gave no clue that Google Profiles were suddenly changed to bar non-humans from using them. Before Google+ came along, this wasn't a problem. I know. I remember Google Buzz, when plenty of brands, including our own +SEL on Google Buzz account, started up.

No one said a word against this. No one told us not to do it. So when Google+ happened, no one had any idea the rules had changed - and especially changed for Google Profiles which are a superset of Google+.

IE, plenty of profiles that have nothing to do with Google+ but which are for businesses were suddenly made outdated.

I know you have great plans to have super wonderful business profiles eventually. But if you're going to only let a "tiny" number of businesses operate before that, then you taint them and yourselves with favoritism.

At least when you announced applications for business profiles, there was a sense that anyone interested would have some type of a fair shot. Now that's gone.

Don't try to put the genie back in the bottle. Restore the business profiles you have closed. Drop the rule you silently added that blocks business profiles. Let businesses use profiles here just as regular people do. Works just fine on Twitter. Then upgrade those accounts when you're ready

Two things we would note - one serious, one not:

(i) Facebook also tried the same approach initially (Broadstuff blog was thrown off Facebook when they tried to persuade advertisers that all avatars were individuals) but eventually gave in to the lure of lucre, no doubt Google will do the same - once it works out how the House wins the game.

(ii) In the interim we suggest Brands followthe example set in the book Jennifer Government,and force all their employees to change their surnames to the company name and take out Google+ accounts. We eagerly await Google+ accounts from Johnny Reggae Reggae Sauce, Jenny Colgate-Palmolive, Steve Microsoft and Charles Schwab (now that's clever -naming your company after yourself - such anticipation!). In fact one could go further and change name to actual products too - Dave iPad, Toni .

Spot the serious one

...and just beware of the unfortunate combinations - you know, the Wayne King, Mike Hunt etc equivalents (examples in the comments section please, there will be points, and points mean prizes)

It would appear that Duke Nukems PR threatened to nuke people who said nasty things about the new release and was then nuked itself! Ars Tech:

...the Redner Group's official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future. Anyone who has done this job for any amount of time has suffered through a dry spell after giving a publisher a bad review, but this is the first time the threat of a blacklist has been made public.

"Too many went too far with their reviews...we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom," the company tweeted. "Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews...that's completely different," another tweet read. Currently, Duke Nukem Forever has a Metacritic score of 49 on the Xbox 360, the format most commonly sent to the press. For a game with such a large marketing budget and name recognition, that's shockingly low.

The furore spread out all over the social media nets in a viral way that any PR would have been proud of, sadly in this case Duke didn't take to the Wildean view that any publicity is good publicity and thus nuked the PR Agency:

2K Games has officially weighed in on the issue. "2K Games does not endorse the comments made by Jim Redner and we can confirm that The Redner Group no longer represents our products. We have always maintained a mutually-respectful working relationship with the press and do not condone his actions in any way."

Face saving nuking move, may even have got the correct PR bang, and maybe even without paying the bucks. We eagerly now await the discovery at Redner that it was an Intern wot done it

Reinforces my view that you should never buy anything until after it hits the market, time passes, and the independent reviewers can get a good look at it.

Paris Lemon argung that Mashable went in for SEO laden Bin Laden reporting, with minimal Tech interest - as there is always someone who wants to pump out an Ad:

Imagine that, you write 35 200-word posts featuring the words “Bin Laden” in the headline and they pull in traffic on the day it’s one of the most searched terms ever. Were any of those stories really about technology? A few, maybe. But none were given the actual attention that a story of such magnitude deserves. It was a pure traffic/SEO play. This is the state of tech blogging these days. It’s shifting more towards a mixture of quick-posted nonsense and pure SEO plays.

It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse.

It used to be that the advertising wasn’t there to really support these plays long term. But as more money is flooding online to spend post-downturn (as the print world continues to collapse), that’s no longer the case. There will always be someone who advertises against anything that gets pageviews.

Paris's argument is that this is a form of spam that Google could (but won't) think of culling:

The only thing that will stop this is Google taking the same type of action against this gaming as they have against the larger content farms. That line, it seems to me, is quickly blurring. But I just can’t see Google doing that.

I'm not sure that this is Google's job - as JP Rangaswami most recently pointed out, the filtering needs to be at the receiver, not the sender end. And one doesn't have to read this sort of sh*....stuff.

What's that you say - this as an SEO linkbait post? Tut. if it were I'd a-written it over the weekend....

Study from BlogHer - the BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study - (as reported by Sherilynne Starkie)

The study was conducted to gather insights on current social media trends among women, both in the US general online population and members of the BlogHer community. It showed that blogs are playing an increasingly influential role in people’s purchasing decisions:

- Blog opinions matter: 53% of women blog readers have purchased a product based on a blog recommendation. That number soars to 80% of the BlogHer population.
- The top reason the general population trusts blog advice is because of their satisfaction with past purchases based on blog recommendations.
- The top three types of products that the general population seeks reviews and recommendations for on blogs are consumer electronics (35%), computer hardware/software (33%) and movies (33%). Among the BlogHer community, the priorities shift to food/beverage (67%) and clothing/shoes (67%), with movies coming in third at 62%.
- Almost half (47%) of blog readers tap into blogs for finding new trends or ideas, 35% for finding out about new products, and one in four for help with making a purchasing decision.

In addition, the study found that women see social networking as a way to preserve connections with family and friends. Specific findings include:

- Blog usage and Facebook usage continue to grow at an equal and modest rate year over year with women (10%).
- Tech love is all about connecting: 58% of women spend more or about the same time with their friends online as they do offline, yet only 5% feel that social impact has had a negative effect.
- When asked why technology makes women feel hopeful about the future, the top answer (67%) was that social media makes it easier to stay in touch with family and friends.

Picks up on a trend we have seen over and over again - people trust other people the most, women trust other people more than men do, so no surprises. Ad industry still chases youth and slebs, because thats what they did 20 years ago.

I eagerly await the day the Hello! magazine is full of Bloggers

Following on from our previous article about the Huffington Post valuation and why, to believe it, you had to believe "6 impossible things before breakfast" I thought it might interest a few people if we went into what those impossible things are. In essence, from the previous article, you have to believe some totally amazing growth statistics for HuffPo to believe it is worth the money paid for it. These are unlikely as:

(i) The model says you need to grow at c 50% PA to break even on a 10% (ie low) cost of capital, and that was assuming a very generous Year 1 post merger $100m turnover and 20% margin. That growth is not impossible (cf Facebook) but it is unlikely - it means 5-fold growth in 5 years - because:

(2) As the amount of content farm pages rises (rapidly), the amount of Adspend going online also rises, but at a slower rate so Ad rates per page decline - putting pressure on eyeball acquisition, but

(3) There is a limit to the number of people, and the amount of time they will spend, reading HuffPo - we'd bet its before 5x current impressions are reached, because...

(4) Barriers to entry are low, and once HuffPo disappears into the AOL peanut butter it will lose its lustre while a million other copycats are hot on its heels - and what is the value retention strategy for a content mill of unpaid bloggers and linking to other people's work?

(5) I think Google et al will be forced to tone down the rankings for Content farms and near-content farms, simply because they do not give users what they wat - and Google is now competimng for search eyeballs - and no Search no Ads, No Money. It is in this light that I suspect a (small, but well advertised) proportion of HuffPo resource will be spent on real reporting, ie to try to prevent Google from treating it as a content farm.

(6) I also suspect that, as content spam becomes more prevalent, so will software blockers, as they did with email spam

In other words, I think we are nearing the high water mark of the Content Farm AdSpam business model, and in a few months it will be drastically curtailed as search engines start to select for the original authors and content spam blockers start to just cut out certain sites - which is why Demand Media, HuffPo et al's backers have to rake in the cash now. It is exit or bust (or at least a shorter and more brutish existence) so I expect to see a plethora of content farms and near-content farms trying to sell themselves now.

Fortunately, in AOL they found a buyer with a "Strategic Need".....always a goody at times like these

Kenneth Cole, outfitters to the (non-news reading?) aspirational, tried to tag their brand to the Egyptian revolution today with a tasteful twt:

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at (link).

To say that it flopped is putting it mildly - cue mass uproar on Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, the media et al, and an (eventual) apology. Now, George Santayana, an Spanish American philosopher of c 1900, noted that:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We take you back to the Habitat/Twitter debacle in 2009, when Habitat tried to spam its way onto the Iranian revolution twitterstream. That didn't work very well either - cue apologies, humiliation and blaming the whole thing on an (imaginary?) Intern.

No doubt Kenneth Cole would have loved to blame all this on an Intern, but clearly didn't read up on Habitat's tricks before apologising (photo above, courtesy MikeST. I don't know if its a real stick-on or a photoshop (suspect the latter), but it's pretty fast work).

Update - a Kenneth cole mocking site, @KennethColePR has been set up - gems such as:

"Austrian Men: Got a daughter you've impregnated locked in the basement? Cheer her up with a new sexy KC two-piece. "

and

“Our new slingback pumps would make Anne Frank come out of hiding"

Oscar Wilde (A contemporary of Santayana) pointed out that all publicity is good publicity, we shall see....


(Hat tip @deejackson and @joannejaccobs for heads up)