February 5, 2014 · 9:39 am

Prognostications

Want to have some fun?  Do a search for “predictions for 2013″ and use a search range of the six weeks prior to the start of the year.

Super Bowl Sunday Crystal Ball

(Photo credit: circulating)

You can do this for any year, but I took 2013 since the results of those predictions are still fresh in our minds.  Throwing out the fringe sources, one can find respected publications and authors making predictions about what was supposed to have happened last year.  You can click though here to a bunch from The Washington Post, as an example.  In some cases, they did pretty well.  In others, they could not have been more wrong (predicting Michelle Bachmann would become House Speaker when she ended up leaving Congress is just one example).

This sort of exercise seems sort of silly yet every business does this on a regular basis.  It’s important that we do so to a certain extent.  We need to predict demand and project sales.  We need to anticipate tastes and try to be ready when our customers need us to be.  The real issue, however, comes when we think we can predict the unpredictable.  To me that’s anything more than about six months down the road (something to think about the next time you’re asked for a five-year plan).

Most of us tend to weigh recent events much more heavily than longer term indicators. We also tend to forget that the past can only predict the future to a limited extent. Using data to make educated guesses is great, but it’s not the same as  predicting.  A forecast is an extension of trends.  It’s almost something a computer can do with a well thought out algorithm.  A prediction takes other factors into account.  Political realities that might change trends.  New technologies that can be disruptive and change those historical trends.

10 years ago here was one sage’s prediction for Facebook:

Facebook, lame or not, was certainly a heavy hitter of 2004, but watch out, I have a strong feeling it’s going to jump the shark. Maybe it already has.

Maybe so, but a billion plus users 10 years later shows just how hard accurate predicting can be.  Have any predictions you’d like to share?

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February 4, 2014 · 9:46 am

Yeah Yeah Yeah

It’s TunesDay, and today’s story has been a half century in the making.  It was 50 years ago this week that The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show and the world changed.  For those of you who were watching that night (as I was), you know that’s not hyperbole.  It seems kind of quaint now, but here is how that change began:

We’d lost a president a few months before.  America was sort of depressed.  Four young men from Liverpool brought us out of our funk and showed the world that performers could also write their own material (something not very common in pop music to that point).  They were just as impactful off the stage.  Their press conferences were filled with laughs but also with pointed jabs at authority, setting the tone for the tumult of the next decade.  50 years ago, the revolution began with pointy boots and a smiling drummer.  Which is, of course something we need to remember in business.

Everything began to change that February night and yet very few businesses were prepared.  How would you like to have been a barber shop and seen those haircuts (or lack thereof)? The record business was one of singles.  Albums were a couple of hit singles and a LOT of filler material.  The Beatles made the entirety of an album important.  Putting aside that almost every cut became a hit, three years later Sgt. Pepper set a new artistic standard that changed the business.   The cultural changes came faster.  Everyone knows someone who saw that broadcast and picked up a guitar – you’re reading someone who did so now.  Their talent was enormous but subtle and it was easy to think “I can do that.”  Sort of how digital business is 50 years later.

As business people our radar needs to be extremely sensitive to change.  When that radar goes off we need to ask a great number of “what if” questions and pay attention to how things are progressing.  The first PC’s were met with shrugged shoulders.  25 years later the PC in our pocket is more powerful than the computers that took man to the moon.  Facebook is 10 years old and there wasn’t a “social media marketing” requirement many businesses are just learning to fulfill now.

I know – the only constant is change.  True enough, and it’s rare when that change happens very loudly and clearly on a winter’s night with drums and guitars.  It hasn’t been quite as obvious since then and won’t be the next time either.  Are you listening closely enough to hear it?

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February 3, 2014 · 12:58 pm

Getting Engaged

Last night was the annual advertising festival known as “The Super Bowl.”

The San Francisco 49ers' Super Bowl XXIX troph...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They play a football game while the ads aren’t running although the one they played last night was not great. If you think I’m emphasizing the ads over the game or being a little too tongue in cheek some polls find up to half the viewers consider the ads their favorite part of the viewing experience.

This morning there is ample discussion of the ads and given that time in the game itself cost north of $4,000,000 for a 30-second unit, the brands running these ads try to deploy them before the game in the hopes that they’ll “go viral” to some extent.  They were successful: Super Bowl ads running on YouTube weeks before the big game were watched 66,058,625 times before this weekend. Since that’s all the ads in the aggregate, it’s only a fraction of the audience the commercials had in the game broadcast.  However, every eyeball is valuable and the digital versions can be looked at in other ways that demonstrate engagement.

According to Tubular Labs, an analytics company,  a number of the ads also generated some buzz via tweets and  Facebook shares and they compared those activities to the ads’ YouTube views to measure the total viewer engagement with the ads.  That’s where I get a little lost and here’s what I mean.

There is an AXE ad with  3.6million views.  It was shared on Facebook 50,000 times and tweeted roughly 5,900 times.  The analytics company says these social actions translate into a 1.6% engagment rate which was the highest they saw.  The lowest engagement, for a Butterfinger ad, was tiny – .03% and shares were in the hundreds.  Interesting, but it leaves out a very key measurement.

What is every one of those shares for the AXE ad went something like this:  “Kiss For Peace” is the worst ad I’ve ever seen.  Why would you waste money on this crap?  I’m never going to consider AXE again.  Engaged?  Yes.  But is that the sort of engagement we want as marketers?  What if every Butterfinger share raved about how good it the ad was and expressed a desire to eat a Butterfinger immediately?  Better?

It’s always important to measure.  It’s also important to dig a little deeper into those measurements.  I’d take smaller positive engagement over larger expressions of anger every time.  It’s not just “what is it?” but also “what of it?” as we gather data.  Make sense?

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