ArtisticScience

Turns Out Social Media May Be Good For Something After All

2012-02-29T08:57:00.003-08:00

We've recovered from our Oscar party to find that we did pretty well in predicting this year's winners. Or, I should say, the social media data we analyzed did a pretty good job of predicting this year's winners.

We nailed three of the five categories we projected: Best Picture (The Artist), Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Best Actress (Meryl Streep). On the other two categories – Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor – the data pointed us to a projected winner, but also told us to choose a "potential winner" as the results we're somewhat mixed. In each case, our "Potential winners" took home trophies. Our Best Supporting Actor “potential winner” Christopher Plummer won for his part in The Next (Jonah Hill was our “projected winner”) and Best Actor “potential winner” Jean Dujardin was recognized for his role in The Artist (Clooney, the eternal Oscar bridesmaid, was our “projected winner”).

To briefly recap, we analyzed social media conversations around the Oscar hopefuls and landed on three metrics we thought might help predict which would win. Those metrics were total social media buzz, total influencer buzz, and a sentiment metric that tracked what percent of social media mentions were positive (compared to the recent that we're negative).

While total buzz and influencer buzz were certainly important, positive social media seemed to be the best indicator of success. In three of the categories, the winner was the person or film that garnered the highest percentage of positive social media buzz from the time the nominees were announced. The two exceptions both came among the women. Meryl Streep won Best Actress where the most likeable entry was Michelle Williams, and Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress even though Jessica Chastain held an advantage in the positive sentiment metric. But in both cases, the amount of positive buzz for Mss. Williams and Chastain were relatively low. Seems while they were certainly liked, they were not liked by enough people.

One other thing we learned was that when we analyzed the full year’s worth of social media buzz, the results were dramatically different. It was also not nearly as accurate at reflecting winners as the buzz from the few weeks leading up to the Academy Awards show. Seems recency of opinion has much influence on a voting event. And people are fickle.

The implications of this fun little exercise for brands are obvious. Having people like you and talk well of you is important. In fact, it seems to be more important than just being in the conversation. That would imply that the adage of “It’s better to be known a lot and disliked than to not be known just a little” for a brand may be misleading. It appears that being held in the public’s good favor means that people like you. And they like you now not just then, as our exploration of recency indicates.

Turning the goodwill of positive public opinion into success means that people are talking to others about you – all of our projected and potential winners were near the top of the buzz categories (an unfortunate learning for Williams and Chastain). But if you’re a brand today, whether you’re trying to win an Oscar or just more customers, getting people to like you appears to be a very important part of the puzzle.

And The Oscar Goes To... [UPDATE]

2012-02-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

So we noticed an interesting thing when looking through the social media buzz generated by this year's Oscars. It's made us re-think the winners we projected in my post yesterday.

When we first looked at the social media data, we made sure to analyze a full year's worth of conversations. The actors and pictures that took the biggest share of total buzz, the most buzz from the 'In Crowd', and the most positive buzz in that original analysis are noted in that post below.

But when we looked only at the buzz generated since the nominations were announced just a few weeks ago, the story changes dramatically. By the three metrics we've chosen to follow, there is MUCH more consensus around who the most likely winners will be.

Here are the results of that new look at the data. As with you, we will be watching this Sunday to see if Oscar buzz from the entire year or from the weeks leading up to the event is a better predictor of success on awards night.

And The Oscar Goes To...

2012-02-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

It's Academy Awards weeks and every year at this time a seemingly unanswerable question emerges: Will the winners be those who receive the most public attention, those who are endorsed by the 'In Crowd', or those who simply earn the most positive reviews?

I've made a habit of watching the Oscars the last several years and will be glued to my television this Sunday while the event unfolds. Watching the Academy Awards is always a lot of fun, but I have never been too successful at predicting the winners. When the envelopes are opened I find myself in stunned disbelief more often than not. Seriously...'The Hurt Locker' was the Best Picture of 2010? Two years later and I'm still unable to explain that one.

In an attempt to ease my troubled mind, we here at Draftfcb's Customer Intelligence team have set out to see if we could find a leading indicator of this year's Oscar winners using social media data and some good old fashioned data analysis.

We have analyzed the social media buzz generated by the Oscars over the past year and have found three metrics that may point to winners: total impressions (i.e., public attention); influencer impressions (i.e., attention from the 'In Crowd'); and positive vs. negative sentiment (i.e., positive reviews).

For the top five Oscar categories -- Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Leading Actress, Best Leading Actor, and Best Picture -- we have projected winners based on the top performers for each metric. Our projected results are below and we will be back next week to see which of these metrics turned out to be the most accurate indicator of success.

Enjoy your Oscar parties and we will see you next week.

Whatchu Talkin' 'Bout, GOP?

2012-02-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

I can't say which way the GOP primary will turn out but do know a bit about what the candidates are saying, thanks to Jake Carter-Lovejoy, Almond Loh and Jill Solarczyk.

Jake, Almond, and Jill -- all here at Draftfcb's Customer Intelligence team -- combined to produce this great piece of analysis that investigates the topics discussed during the GOP debates, who said what, and how frequently.

The result is a very interesting insight into the attention given by each candidate to the various issues of today and which they feel most passionately about.

Right-click and open the image in a new tab to see a larger version.

Analysis by Jake Carter-Lovejoy, graphics by Almond Loh & Jill Solarczyk

Why Do People Behave The Way They Do?

2012-01-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

After a brief (okay...not that brief) hiatus from the blog, we are back again. I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and that 2012 has started off in the right direction.

I've been reflecting a lot on why people do the things they do. The things we are expected to do, like pay our rent or drive on the correct side of the road. The things that take an amazing amount of courage, like defending those being exploited or showing kindness to people who have wronged us. The crazy things we do, like bungee jumping or falling in love.

I’ve made a career off the pursuit of answers to these and other such questions. A pursuit often motivated, admittedly, by the desire to unravel these mysteries for the express purpose of influencing people to buy more of my client's fast food, choose their banking services, recommend their particular brand of mobile phones to family and friends. But there is also a more genuine motivation behind my fascination with this topic: with so much going on in the world - from the rise of international terrorism, to America's first black president, to the global financial crisis, to citizen-led protests resulting in the removal of fascist government leaders - this is an extraordinarily interesting time to be alive. A time that is as perplexing as it is exhilarating. Gaining a better understanding of why people behave the way they do a small way of converting some of that bewilderment to delight.

Many great thinkers have tussled with this same pursuit. And scanning the academic and scientific body of work devoted to the question makes two things plain. First, there are as many answers to the question as there are people willing to take on the challenge of answering it. Second, rarely are the offered explanations uncluttered enough to be accessible to the non-academic.

But there is a single framework that can be applied that is elegant in its simplicity and yet full of strength, merit, and flexibility. It's a logical approach that may not precisely explain all the reasons behind human behavior, but does an exceptional job of teasing apart the component parts that go into a person's decision to act (or their choice not to act). By using this framework, someone with a basic degree of instinct can draw important conclusions about why their best friend ditched them to see a movie with the girl from the third floor. Or why their parents choose the family car they drove. Or why Neda Agha-Soltan risked her life to demand change in the way her country was run.

At its root are three elements that have anchored our American legal system for more than 200 years: Motive, Means, and Opportunity. In this sense, "motive" is defined as the reason a person gives to account for behavior. "Means" are the physical, mental resources required for action. And "opportunity" is that moment of truth when someone is faced with the decision to act or not. The existence of these three elements is crucial for any behavior. No behavior is possible without them. You are no more likely to purchase a box of dishwasher detergent from the convenience store down the way if you are at home on your sofa (lack of opportunity), than if you are flat broke (lack of means) or if you don't have an automatic dishwasher at dishes to clean in the first place (lack of motivation). Such behavior will only happen if you're standing in the convenience stores dishwasher detergent aisle with money in your pocket and a dishwasher full of dirty dishes (or, some strange affinity for dishwasher detergent). Similarly, you will only find yourself getting off your sofa to the convenience store down the way for dishwasher detergent if you have dishes to clean, money in your pocket, and you are able to weigh the decision to get up or remain lounged.

Barriers certainly can stand in the way of these elements, complicating our behavior. A cold, rainy night may dampen ones motivation to make a trip to the store. Having only a jarful of coins as the sole means of payment may complicate the transaction to the point that one decides it makes more sense to wait until payday Friday to purchase detergent. Falling asleep on the sofa effectively rules out the opportunity one has to rise and begin the journey to the detergent aisle in the convenience store. What these barriers do is eliminate for us one or more legs of our decision, making it impossible for us to willfully undertake the behaviors they rule.

Yet even in an environment free of barriers, the existence of these elements only puts us in a position to adopt a behavior. Something more is needed. Something to compel us to action or inaction. Something to trigger an emotional response that compels us into action or inaction. That something is what I call simply "The Spark".

The Spark is the emotional event that activates a behavior and it takes many forms:

Last week, more than 2,000 people gathered at the Apple Store in Beijing the night before the planned release of the first iPhone 4S in China. But when security officials believed the crowds had grown out of control, the planned release was scrapped. As could be expected the crowds did not take kindly to the decision, the store was egged, and police were required to dispel the crowds. The disappointment triggered by the (poor) Apple employee who had to break the news to the waiting customers was what I term a “Real Spark” that led to the crowds’ behavior. It was a clear, authentic event that led directly to an emotional response.

A Few weeks ago in Philadelphia, three men who believed Kevin Kless was yelling and making gestures at them beat Kless to death. It turns out Kless was only trying to hail a cab. The men’s misinterpretation of Kless’s shouts and gestures that triggered their emotional reaction is what I call a “Misread Spark”.

In August, Opelika police launched ‘Operation: Iron Snare’ to lure suspects wanted for refusing to pay child support to police custody with the ruse that they had won Alabama-Auburn tickets. The sting involved much fanfare, as the suspects were showered with attention by local news teams and cheering fans when they showed up at the ticket collection location, only to be told after identifying themselves they were being placed under arrest. The enthusiasm the suspects felt over “winning” tickets – enthusiasm which compelled them to drive to an unknown location to claim their winnings – is the result of a “Fabricated Spark”.

The final type of spark is the most complicated but, perhaps, could be the most frequent spark one will encounter. I term it the "Usurped Spark" and its use is frequently the result of a group of people or an organization operating under a strong personal agenda. When the Usurped Spark is applied, an emotion-triggering event is seen on the surface as the most likely reason behind people's behavior. But a deeper analysis reveals that other, more motivating forces are at work. The obvious "spark" simply provides the opportunity for the group to act upon its true trigger.

There are few uncontroversial examples of Usurped Sparks as, by definition, this spark implies that the people it compels to action are perhaps disingenuous and at least opportunistic. But a good example of this kind of event that is backed by an accumulating amount of evidence happened during this summer's London Riots. Mark Duggan's shooting by London police was largely viewed as the spark that touched off the unrest which began in Tottenham and quickly spread to much of England. But while surely everyone who partook in the riots and looting knew of Duggan's demise, few could honestly say they were burning buildings, absconding with stolen sneakers, or squaring off with police because of that event. Rather, the shooting and the resultant unrest gave rioters the opportunity to unload frustrations with the London police, the UK government, and their opportunity to make a living that had been building for years. In this way, the Mark Duggan shooting touched off an emotional response that had been swirling below a thin surface for some time.

I’ve found this approach to be very helpful when analyzing behaviors. Hopefully you can use it for practical purposes as well.

Eat, Pray, Don't Get Attacked By Monsters

2011-10-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

A little pre-Halloween required viewing. Data on where and how you can best avoid being a monster victim. A true Monster Survival Guide in video form! Click on the image below the video to go to the interactive Monster Stat site.

Thanks to Almond Loh, Jill Solarczyk, Oddie Gopalan, and Ryan Delafosse for their creative, design, and research skills.

Analyzing Social Networks: What Can Be Learned By Stealing A Consumer’s Diary

2011-10-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

It was American author Stephanie Barron who penned the phrase: “I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal.” Without knowing it, Ms. Barron may have offered marketers one of the most important ideas of the last ten years.

Emotions play an enormous role in how we, as consumers, operate. Emotions drive our decisions, trigger our actions, and direct our beliefs. The emotion a brand or a product or a campaign evokes in a consumer directly contributes to its market success, or failure. Marketers understand this and have invested mountains of resources into the collection, analysis, and study of human emotion. Agencies need only look to the amount of money they’ve spent on focus groups and consumer one-on-ones as proof.

Which brings us to the wisdom of Ms. Barron. The act of writing has been shown to expertly clarify and present human emotion. What this means for marketers is that they are surrounded by a rich, raw, candid, and – for the most part – free source of human emotion: the ceaseless streams of social media conversation whirling around them. In a sense, consumers are opening their diaries to marketers through every update, Tweet, and post.

At Draftfcb, we set off to measure human emotion expressed through the written word by collecting consumer conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry’s BBM platform, blog posts, and chat rooms, among others. With this data in hand, we placed a framework of emotion over these conversations to evaluate which emotions are expressed, how frequently, and the strength of them. The framework we used was based on research conducted by a leading expert in human emotion, W. Gerrod Parrott of Georgetown University. In his model of human feelings Parrott details six primary emotions: Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy, Fear, and Surprise. Taken together, the emotion framework and the scores we have collected for each emotional term is packaged in a tool we call our “Emotabase”.

Using our Emotabase to analyze several key consumer product categories, we have learned answers to critical marketing questions, including: What do consumers really feel about brands? What emotions should we as advertisers use to draw consumers to brands? Which product categories bring consumers the most joy, which create the most anxiety, and which evoke the most anger? The results may be somewhat surprising.

For instance, the most evocative product category in the conversations we tracked was beer, with nearly 44% of the social media posts, Tweets, and updates that included an emotion. The least evocative was frozen pizza, which showed up about once every 33 times a consumer made an emotional comment about a brand.

The financial institution product category evoked the most consumer ire, where utterances of “Anger” were found more frequently than any other product category we watched, and by a wide margin. Quick service restaurants were the most sorrowful product category for consumers. But consider that the primary emotion “Sorrow” as defined by Parrott includes the sub-emotions “disappointment” and feelings of neglect.

And the product category that has been winning the battle for consumers’ hearts appears to be telecommunications. Consumers heap glowing praise on Apple, Blackberry, HTC and others in this category more frequently than brands in other categories. This is perhaps not too surprising when one considers the marvelous technological advances brought to consumers by devices these companies manufacture. It seems that I am not the only consumer who would admit to loving their mobile phone.

Distribution of Emotions by Product Category

Two primary emotions, “Love” and “Sorrow”, dominate social media discussions of brands with

more than half of the emotions expressed, falling into one of these two categories

Using a technique we call “PassionPeaks” at Draftfcb, we can assess the “Prevalence” (i.e., frequently) and “Relevance” (i.e., intensity) of primary emotions in consumer conversation. Through this analysis, we have earned interesting insights by observing consumer reaction to brands in general.

For example, we saw “Anger” expressed infrequently in the conversations we tracked, appearing almost half as frequently as “Joy”. That’s good news for brands trying to deflect consumer frustrations from themselves. But “Anger” was, however, the emotion expressed most passionately by consumers. So while consumers weren’t often angered by brands, they certainly did unload some strong emotions when they were mad.

Perhaps the most unfortunate news for brands over that last year was the lack of the emotion “Surprise” in the consumer conversation. Logging in as a distant sixth place, the dearth of “Surprise” clearly indicates that few brands have mastered the art of building anticipation into their consumer relationships.

PassionPeaks Analysis of Consumer Emotions

In the conversations we tracked, consumers expressed negative emotions with much

more intensity than they used when expressing positive emotions

By better understanding consumer emotions, brands can better design programs that attract and retain consumers. By examining emotion in social media discussions marketers not only earn accurate portrayals of consumer sentiment, they do so in ways that are extraordinarily efficient. Social media offers marketers a truly guilt-free peak at consumers’ diaries.

Getting From “Here” To “There”: Converting Offline Events To Online Impressions

2011-09-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

The connection between the online and offline worlds is an important consideration for marketers. Brands fully recognize that face-to-face interactions with consumers are an important way to tap the extraordinary Word-Of-Mouth power of the digital world. As the average Facebook member has around 130 friends, a favorable post mentioning a brand carries -- one could confidently say -- a healthy ROI.

Yet few brands know how to do this well. And many who find clever ways to kick down the walls between online and offline still have difficulty getting their heads around why they do what they’re doing. Central to this struggle is an inability of marketers to project how the investments they make in offline promotions and other experiential events translate into digital impressions.

While this is a complicated problem, the moving pieces inside the equation are easily identified. And that is where marketers should start: understanding the players and steps involved in getting from “here” (offline event) to “there” (digital impressed earned through word-of-moth). In the end all marketers really need to concentrate on boils down to four consumer roles and three important metrics.

To begin, let’s define the consumers involved and the roles they play:

(A) Digital Followers: These are the people who already give the brand permission to digitally converse with them. They are the brand’s Facebook fans, those following the brand on Twitter, those who subscribe to the brand's YouTube channel. These are, in nearly every sense, the people who are most likely to pass a favorable word or two about the brand on to others.

(B) Event Participants: These are the people who show up at the brand’s event and – importantly – participate. And we should define “participate” in this way: they make a gesture of digital acknowledgement toward the brand. For example, they become a Facebook Fan, follow the brand on Twitter, or add the brand to a Google+ circle (therefore becoming a Digital Follower), or they engage at the event enough for the marketer to learn they are already a Digital Follower of the brand. In other words, these aren’t people who show up, grab a sample, and take off.

(C) Digital Promoters: As the tag implies, people who endorse the event online. They broadcast a “Like” or a “Check-In” for the event, they post to their Facebook wall about it, they add a mention to their Google+ stream, they Tweet. And each mention they make reaches the list of friends or followers they have, thereby putting in motion digital Word-Of-Mouth.

(D) Digital Impressions: Simply, these are the eyes that see mentions of the brand's event. They are the people who interact with the brand by viewing an endorsement – a Tweet, a Facebook post, an uploaded video – from someone they trust.

The objective, then, is to usher as many people possible through each role in the most efficient way available. Maximizing the number of digital impressions an offline event yields is truly a multi-step process that requires marketers to act before the event, during the event, and following the event. But so long as the marketer is cognizant of those steps, actions, and – perhaps most importantly – the metrics they are trying to optimize, they can ensure the offline event garners online attention and digital impressions.

It all begins with your Digital Followers. Certainly, this is not always the first place marketers look when planning an offline event, but it should be. That is because these are the consumers who are most likely to pass along favorable mentions of your brand. The more of them marketers can make aware of an event, the more likely will the event generate online buzz and digital impressions. But even more importantly, marketers know a bit about the Digital Followers of their brand. Marketers must begin by searching existing Digital Followers for those who live or work in areas near the offline event. By dropping them a note to say where and when the event will be and asking them to tell their friends, marketers maximize the attention the event will get. A marketer’s success at effectively recruiting for the event should be measured through a metric called “attraction”: the ratio of Digital Followers the brand has to the number of Digital Followers who participate in your offline event.

Ensuring high “engagement”, the percent of event participants who promote the event through some digital means, is what drives the marketer’s next moves. While the quality of the offline event certainly impacts how many Event Participants choose to pass along recommendations for it, there is little excuse for marketers to fall short of an engagement score of 100%. Because the marketer’s focus should be squarely on making it as simple as possible for Event Participants to send endorsements of the event to their friends and followers. This means setting up a wireless hotspot at the event, a location-based check-in, ready-to-use hashtags, a sharing platform (e.g., AddThis). Basically, the marketer must make it so easy for event participants to broadcast the event that they can’t help but promote it.

The final metric marketers should use to guide the process of translating offline events to online impressions is “amplification”. Quite simply, amplification in this sense is the ratio of Event Promoters to Digital Impressions. It is the number of people who see the endorsements posted, Tweeted, or shared by Engaged Participants. This is where finding and recruiting key Digital Followers is important. As we’ve already seen, the average Facebook member has around 130 friends, so any message broadcast through Facebook already reaches a large audience. But a large (and growing) percentage of Facebook members have literally multiples of that number of friends. Over one-quarter of members have more than 1,000 friends. And when someone with that large of a following is a friend of a brand, it is the marketer’s responsibility to know who they are.

Converting offline event to online impressions can indeed be a complicated, confusing challenge. But by breaking that challenge down it is fundamental parts, focusing on the four key roles of consumers and the three critical measures of success, marketers can maximize ROI for their events.

Quitting The Data Race For Favor Of Something Better

2011-09-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Got data?

If GSP was asked to create a tagline for the challenges facing CMOs over the past five years, it could do worse than this simple device. That’s because for some time now the marketing executive’s agenda has been dominated by the need for and interpretation of information. Theirs, their industry’s, their consumers’. Yet the greatest challenge facing the CMO today is much different from what perplexed them just a few short years ago.

Five years ago, the CMO was buried in data. Data purchased from vendors, industry and subscription data they’d accumulated over the years, data from their own analytics teams. What they needed was help sorting through those heaps of information, determining what was important, and figuring out what it meant. But more often than not, attempts to construct effective systems of data analytics were reduced to exercises of frustration.

Why?

For one thing they were told they must have data they frankly didn’t need. This is because, whether willfully or not, nearly every marketing organization entered a “Data Race” in the last five years, amassing stockpiles of information as a testament to their marketing prowess. And there were the data companies, happy to indulge their fears of “falling behind”. The result was a fattening of already confusingly plump data assets, a race with no absolute goal.

Compounding problems introduced by the Data Race was the fact that many CMOs were sold snake oil. Much of the data proffered by vendors was not sound. Not in structure or sample size or other glaring element, but rather in purpose. The data sold simply had no breakthrough purpose. Its “insight value” was blank or redundant to another data source or far too narrow to make an impact. In the most extreme cases, data they snapped up measured how consumers engaged with a product or service in the past, not their intent for the future, effectively leaving organizations to market to consumers in similarly out-fashioned manners.

Worse yet, the CMOs own organizations – and often their consultants – could not save them. Primarily because the analytic teams in these organizations (which many spent millions of dollars to construct and fortify) were built on the notions of academia. The collection of people assembled into a top organization’s analytics team was the smartest group of people one could hope to meet, with impeccable academic credentials. But for all their qualifications, their devotion to making the algorithm a centerpiece of the marketing plan doomed their ability to connect the consumer experience to anyone outside the Ivory Tower. And the CMO’s high-minded marketing and business advisors (not the least of which their Advertising Agencies) were either too indifferent to care or unwilling to challenge the analytics team’s righteousness.

What this experience should teach us is that there is no substitute for marketing instincts. And, in part, this leads us to the greatest challenge facing the CMO today. And it’s not “having the sharpest marketing reflexes”. That’s like saying the lion’s greatest challenge is eating its food, ignoring that its real challenge is catching the food in the first place (or, for the smart ones, motivating someone else to catch it for them).

No, the greatest challenge facing CMOs today is knowing what questions their marketing programs need answered and understanding how data can provide those answers. Doing so requires marketing executives to be at once thorough and audacious. Thorough because they need to explore the information gaps that could help them improve their program performance, leaving no stones unturned. Audacious because anything can be measured, and they should never relent to anyone telling them differently. Being told “no” means they are talking to someone who can’t say “yes”.

The CMO can then set off to what any good marketing executive does best: designing hypotheses and collecting the answers that either prove or disprove them. With these in hand, the CMO can develop marketing programs that correctly address important consumer needs and root solutions in accurate benefits. The ability of the marketing executive to do this is the most important measure of their worth. Truly, data does not transform a bad marketer into a good one. But it does turn a good marketer into a great one.

Got instincts?

What The London Riots Taught Us About Social Media

2011-09-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

The march began peacefully enough. Just a few days before, what started as a routine encounter with Metropolitan Police quickly and tragically unraveled resulting in the death of a London citizen. Now on this day in Tottenham, mourning friends and family are joined by hundreds of supporters, many who harbor suspicions that London police systematically discriminate against minorities as surely as their use of aggression and intimidation had grown out of control. And just as that fateful encounter with police had turned, this somber, peaceful demonstration quickly and tragically descends into a dark and violent expression of frustrations that have been mounting for years. The event sparks a calamitous string of riots, fueled by high levels of youth unemployment and a smoldering discontent with the current English government. The year is 1985.

Twenty-six years ago the death of Cynthia Jarrett and the subsequent Broadwater Farm Riots in London’s north very much mirrored the events surrounding this summer¹s devastating London Riots. But what began on 4 August 2011 with the shooting death of Mark Duggan at the hands of Metropolitan Police and -- in a chilling re-telling of history -- exploded into violence during an initially peaceful march in Tottenham was in one way very different from the events of 1985: this summer's unrest was meticulously documented in literally millions of Tweets, BBM messages, Internet news mentions, and Facebook posts. And the electronic record of the 2011 London Riots tells a fascinating tale of the power and effectiveness of social media.

What follows are five observations on the role social media played in the London Riots born from an analysis of data earned from Twitter, Facebook, various online news feeds, a host of chat services / blogs, and Blackberry's BBM messaging service.

Social media channels quickly became the obvious and most effective means for rioters and riot observers to communicate during the chaotic days following the Mark Duggan Justice Walk. The channels offered instantaneous connections to great numbers of engaged and passive populations in and around London. Significantly, they also offered the easiest path to international communities.

BBM, Blackberry’s free Internet-based instant messaging service, played a primary role in the planning and execution of much of the city’s unrest. As the smartphone of choice of London youth, Blackberry enjoys a considerable chunk of the UK’s communication market. BBM connects these Blackberry owners to one another instantly and allows for a single message to be broadcast to large audiences.

But what made BBM critical during the London Riot was the fact that the channel is untraceable. Indeed, Rioters learned from past international events, such as the Spring Arab Uprising, that authorities could track Twitter and other social media channels. As Scotland Yard monitored Twitter for signs of unrest, London rioters secreted messages to one another through BBMs. BBMs became the perfect communication “utility” for riot planners and participants.

While rioters were BBMing covert plans to one another, the rest of the engaged world was receiving a blow-by-blow account of the London Riots through Twitter. Reports of new sites of unrest, first-hand accounts of the riot’s destruction, and unfiltered reactions to the events were broadcast throughout the tumultuous days in a thick stream of terse messages.

Frequently, Twitter was used to push BBMs to the audience outside Blackberry’s instant messaging system – as Twitter users literally copied and pasted BBM messages they received into Tweets – extending the life and reach of the communications.

Tweets of the riots quickly blasted outside the UK, flashing across the world to Twitter users in the US, Asia, mainland Europe, and elsewhere thereby enabling an international audience to partake in the London Riot conversation.

Among international communities, the United States had one of the largest responses to Tweets rolling out of the UK. Tweets (and Re-Tweets) from US citizens closely and quickly mirrored the riot-related messages originating in the UK. Although the US Twitter traffic peaked slightly later than traffic in the UK, it did so in a more pronounced manner.

But perhaps more interesting was the response of US news media outlets. While stories of the London Riots were most certainly broke by UK news media, the US news machine quickly and fervently picked up those stories and distributed them to their followers through instant messages, Internet-based newsfeeds, and Tweets of their own. For the US news media, the London Riots became a more intense story than the more sustained and balanced coverage the riots received in the UK. Perhaps such attention from the US was the result of a slow domestic news desk or, more likely, American news outlets’ preoccupation with schadenfreude.

One thing that is certain is that as news of the riots intensified, expanded to international markets, and earned greater levels of social media attention so too did the draw for looters and riot participants. In this way, the scale and scope of the London Riot was extended.

While instant messaging proved to be the preferred source of information-sharing around the London Riots, Facebook played an important role in the expression of reactions to the unrest, as well as the circumstances surrounding the event. London Riot Facebook pages quickly shot up, including pages devoted to reporting riot activity, pleas for Londoners to band together to stop and clean up the riot’s devastation, and tribute pages to the riot’s principal martyr, Mark Duggan.

But in terms of Facebook Fans, the most influential and valued pages where those dedicated to mocking the riot’s events. And by a wide margin, as riot mockery pages garnered Fans at a rate four-times faster than the next most popular category of riot-devoted pages. The examples offer insight into Londoner’s thoughts on the riot and rioters alike: nearly 150,000 people became Facebook Fans of “The Idiot London Riot Looter”, a page which cleverly exposed the idiocy of many London teens who perpetrated crimes and acts of violence during the unrest; “Planking in the London Riot” earned over 50,000 Fans, many contributing pictures of themselves familiarly lying prone among police in riot gear and burning shops.

The creation of these pages and their collection of Fans interestingly “democratized” reactions to the London Riots. It’s easy to consider Facebook pages outside the top five list presented above that resulted from the riots: pages devoted to fundraising, looter identification, victim’s stories. But while there were undoubtedly pages created in such categories, they failed to collect a high number of Facebook Fans. In this way Facebook became an open structure of “opinion quantification”, lending a numerical-based indication of people’s interests and response to the London Riots.

An analysis of the emotions expressed through social media channels during the London Riots reveals important insights into the tone and tenor of the unrest. Among the top ten emotions voiced in instant messages, Tweets, Facebook posts, and other digital communications, emotions related to “connection” led the way while “freedom” logged in at number ten. To be sure, the riot in the UK were not fueled by the need to escape an oppressive government but rather a sense of unity for a common purpose. The emotional profile of the social media conversation makes sense in this context.

Yet several things about the emotional thumbprint of riot-related discussion remain unclear. Given the scale of the riots’ destruction, perhaps it was to be expected that concerns for safety and security would permeate the UK social media conversation. However, as the riots’ flashpoint was Mark Duggan’s death and the obvious distaste for London’s looters it is puzzling that expressions of “justice” were not more prominent.

Much more clear is how those emotions played out over the course of this summer’s events. August 10^th marked the emotional highpoint for riot-related conversation – the same day, not coincidentally, that the riot reached its most violent and tumultuous point. Also interesting to note is that expressions of “pain”, “power / control / responsibility”, and “safety / security” hit an early peak just days into the riotous activity when the world was graphically introduced to the unrest. Conversely, “connection” peaked sharply on the riot’s darkest day, while “acceptance” slowly gained weight as the unrest wore on and the reality of London’s situation took hold. Taken together, these emotions provide a lasting, indelible cast of the London Riots’ emotion tone.

CONCLUSIONS

Social media channels – BBM, Twitter, Internet-based newsfeeds, Facebook, and others – played several prominent roles in the London Riots of 2011. Chief among them were social media’s part in…

· Providing communication “utilities”

· Enabling an international audience

· Extending riot’s scope and scale

· “Democratizing” reactions to the event

· Setting the event’s emotional tone

The cumulative effect of social media led to a summer of unrest in London that far eclipsed the Broadwater Farm Riot events some twenty-six years ago, despite the fact that each began in almost the same way and under a nearly identical set of circumstances.

A more devastating and awesome illustration of social media's power may not soon be seen again.

Remind Me Why SXSWi Sucked?*

2011-08-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

* In a purely objective, quantitative, data-based sense

Summer is in full swing, meaning we're mid-way through 2011. Therefore I thought it appropriate to look back at one of the biggest events of the year so far: the 2011 SXSWi festival in Austin, Texas.

Anyone who was there knows this year's event was, in a word, enormous. Every year the festival becomes better attended, offers more to do and see, and provides greater discussions on an ever-broadening set of digital and marketing topics.

Yet despite its majesty, something about the 2011 SXSWi festival bothered me. Namely, the fact that data and its use in marketing played such a small role in the event. Take a look at the video above for a more detailed investigation.

What’s the value of a Facebook Fan?

2011-06-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

The question has been pondered since Mark Zuckerberg offered the functionality to the Facebook community, enabling members to publicly pledge support for friends’ posts. The debate jumped to overdrive in late 2010 when Mountain Dew became the first to integrate the Facebook ‘Like’ feature into online advertising outside the Facebook platform.

Consistent throughout the debate has been much gnashing of teeth among brand managers and marketing executives who complain that their enormous, inflated numbers of brand “Fans” do not acceptably translate to brand sales. What those managers and executives seem to misunderstand is what a Facebook Fan is and what a Facebook Fan is not.

First, what a Facebook Fan is. Becoming a Fan by Liking a brand brings that enamored consumer one step closer to the brand. It means – quite simply – that the consumer is no longer a stranger to the brand. In non-FB terms, the brand and the consumer have been introduced to one another. The brand can now more freely share information with the consumer, more comfortably initiate a dialogue with them, more easily learn about the consumer’s preferences and dislikes and needs.

Now, what a Facebook Fan is not. Becoming a Fan of a brand is not difficult. The lone hurdle for the consumer to conquer on the way to becoming a Fan is a click of a mouse. As a result, there is no reason to consider the Facebook Fan a person invested in the brand. And until someone perfects a way to instantly deliver soda / tacos / pizzas / etc. to consumers over WiFi, many brands cannot expect a Facebook Fan to equal a sale. Put plainly, becoming a Fan does not guarantee that the consumer will spend any money on the brand whatsoever.

Does this mean that a Facebook Fan has no value to brands? Absolutely not. It does not mean that at all. In fact, a Facebook Fan can be extremely valuable to a brand when put in the right marketer’s hands. And I can’t think of any reason why a brand would not want as many Fans as it could possibly collect.

When a consumer becomes a Fan of a brand the brand can begin to assemble a rich body of data about the consumer. The brand can use this data to inform its communications, offers, and programs. When utilized correctly, the savvy brand manager and marketing executive should be able to combine the understanding of the brand’s Facebook Fans and their own marketing instincts to craft better marketing campaigns.

Brands should stop attempting to correlate their number of Fans to sales and rather correlate sales to the quality of their product and the quality of the programs they design for their Fans.

Do Happy Social Networks = Financial Results?

2011-05-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Source: Sysomos; LiveCharts; Draftfcb analysis

Not much is strongly correlated to stock prices on the open market.

Sure there are indicators in the environment -- some leading, most lagging -- that can be used to predict what a given equity or index will do on the market. But the use of data to model and help traders, fund managers and other financial experts plan for future shifts in market prices has been a confounding exercise. Those who have cracked the code on marrying data to market performance are few (and chances are you won't be able to find them, as they're somewhere on their own personal island).

But the growing size of social networking and the immense power those networks are amassing has given new life to this pursuit. Add to the debate this small, albeit topical, finding I came across the other day.

While analyzing social network conversations around several leading United Kingdom banks over the first four months of 2011, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sum total of positive comments made about these UK brands (the orange line in the above chart) exhibited fairly strong correlation to the price of a well known UK financial sector stock index (the white line). Not perfect correlation, to be sure, but pretty strong nonetheless. "Number of Positive Mentions" was the first metric I correlated to the index price, but I quickly looked at every other metric I could make from the social networking data I had on hand: percent of total mentions that were positive; ratio of positive mentions to negative mentions; total mentions; total "authority score" of positive mentions; average "authority score" of negative mentions; average "authority" score of any mention; etc. etc. No other metric was as strongly correlated as total positive mentions.

Interestingly, much of the positive mentions came before the stock price increased. In other words, I wasn't just seeing a bunch of congratulatory noise following a market gain for the index. I seemed to be observing positive social network conversations that preceded a run up in stock price.

The thing that really had me thinking was the fact that this correlation exists and, despite the enormous participation numbers and gaudy growth social networks are experiencing, the platforms making up today's social networking landscape are all really, really nascent.

As social networking continues to mature and gain influence, there is no doubt that correlations such as this will become much more clear. As marketers it is our responsibility to get our clients well positioned in those conversations, so they can reap the benefits of today's social networking scene and -- more importantly -- ensure that they get a piece of the benefits that are soon to come.

U2, Lady Gaga, and The Smiths: More (and Less) The Same

2011-05-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

What happens when different people use one language to convey thoughts, hopes, and emotions? You get very different uses of that language with different themes and tenor and tonality, as well as some striking commonalities.

This finding results from a bit of time I spent investigating how emotion expressed through the written word could be quantified. As a testing ground for this subject, I analyzed emotions conveyed through song and focused on three artists, U2, Lady Gaga and The Smiths, purposefully selected for their divergent musical styles and personalities. I then selected one classic album from each artist to compile a representative sample of their work: “The Joshua Tree (U2, 1988)”, “The Fame (Lady Gaga, 2008)”, and “The Queen Is Dead (The Smiths, 1986)”. The results of this analysis were at once expected and surprising.

Using a technique I derived from clinical psychology methods (one far from being perfected..but, hey, I'm working at it), I assessed the amount of emotion each artist has poured into their songs, the themes they expressed, the range of emotions they voiced, and the emotional strength of their words.

First, interesting in their own right, let's take a look at the words of the artists presented in traditional word clouds. Note U2's use of motion, the natural world, and possession ("run", "still", "raining", "hold", "without"); Gaga's penchant for non-words ("eh", "mum", "mah", "da-doo-doo-doo"); the way The Smith's explore self-loathing and despair ("kill", "die", "lonely"); and the universal theme of "Love" (in the case of The Smiths, the love Morrissey will "never know").

U2: "The Joshua Tree" (1988)

Bono’s thoughts of earth, wind, rain and fire more than double his mentions of love.

Lady Gaga: "The Fame" (2008)

Not only does Lady Gaga's music make the listener feel like dancing, she tells them to dance no fewer than 28 times over the course of "The Fame".

The Smiths: "The Queen Is Dead" (1986)

The top nouns and verbs crooned by Morrissey? “Never know / want / believe love tonight”. Characteristically uplifting.

Also interesting, if not surprising, is the range of emotions. Based on an "Emotion Scale", words expressing emotion range from “Strongly Negative” (presented here in dark red) to “Weakly Negative” (lighter red) to “Neutral” (white) to “Weakly Positive” (light green) to “Strongly Positive” (dark green). The distribution of emotional words that show up in the artists' song can then be graphed across this scale. U2 muddles in the red but balances out with expressions of dark green redemption. Gaga frenetically dances her way to the happiness of positive green emotions. The Smiths’ emotions, as to be expected, remain red and true to the sad negativity of their words. Interestingly, not one of these artists spends much vocal effort on vapid, neutral emotions. See the data here:

An analysis of themes explored by each artist reveals other interesting similarities and differences. The idea of “Connection” is critical to all, albeit expressed in different ways. More than half of all the emotions expressed in U2's and The Smith's songs can be classified under the "Connection" theme, as can nearly three-quarters of Lady Gaga's emotional words. While The Lady’s connection-theme is almost single-minded (ringing through the words "LOVE", "LOVER", "ALONE"), U2 couples its thoughts of connection with expressions of “Power/Control” ("DOWN", "BEATEN") and The Smiths ruminate on the “Pleasure/Pain” of their connections ("DIE", "KILL", "SAD", "SHOCKED"...clearly more time is spent on the pain-side of the equation):

But the thing that most sets these artists apart is how frequently they appeal to the listener's emotions in the music (i.e., what percentage of the words used in their songs can be classified as emotional terms). And the results were somewhat surprising.

Indexed against U2's use of emotional terms (who had the heaviest use), Lady Gaga's "Emotional Density" is actually quite significant. What is surprisingly low is the "Emotional Density" employed by The Smiths.

Looking deeper into The Smith's lyrics reveals that Morrissey is a victim of his own introspection. Second only to the obvious use of the word "AND" throughout "The Queen Is Dead", the word "I" shows up fully 83 times in the album. That's more than 8 times per song! Add to that total extremely high usage of "ME" and "MY" and it is clear to see how emotional words become diluted in The Smith's lyric.

The Impact of Cross-Culturalism on American Television

2011-05-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

Imagine being in a room with your co-workers. Now let’s further imagine that they constitute a random sample of American television viewers. Ask them, “So what TV shows have you been watching this month?”

You’d likely hear answers that resemble the week’s top 10 Nielsen list: CSI, Modern Family, Real Housewives of [some outrageously interesting area of the US], etc.

These TV programs are popular, for sure. But they also have other commonalities: high profile network backing, primetime slots, intriguing personalities, diversity. In fact, a majority of today’s hit television programs have more or less “representative” casts. In other words, the proportion of minority cast members for many of these shows mirrors the adult population of the United States. Contrast that fact with the blatant racial disparity that existed just a few decades ago.

Does that surprise you?

15 years ago, the status of diversity in television was quite different. Shows with mostly Caucasian principal casting - shows like Seinfeld, Murphy Brown, Friends, and Roseanne - performed the best in TV ratings. These hit shows featured few minority characters, and if they did, they were most likely a guest star or a character of minimal significance.

It would be logical to hypothesize that minority casting in TV, and by extension minority influence, experienced a precipitous increase in just the last decade. Yet, data from the Screen Actors Guild shows that minorities have experienced an incremental and not precipitous increase in share within the casting market since 1998.

How can this difference between perceived and actual minority casting be explained?

A Framework For Examining Diversity

Measuring diversity in terms of minorities’ share of casted roles is but one way to assess the state of cross-culturalism in TV. And in this case, it’s too myopic of an approach. Clustering TV programs by level of minority casting provides more clarity to the situation.

Take the last 50 years of popular TV programming, and you can cluster them into four distinct categories of casting diversity:

When plotting the Top 10 television shows for every year since 1950, a few interesting trends become apparent:

Trend #1: “White Only” shows constituted a majority of programs until the 2000s. But since 2005, only one “White Only” program – Two and a Half Men – made it into the Top 10.

Trend #2: “Minority Only” shows debuted in the Top 10 in the late 1960s, coinciding with the tail end of the American Civil Rights movement. These “Minority Only” shows had a focus on the African American experience, and included shows like The Cosby Show, Sanford & Son, and Good Times. “Minority Only” shows disappear from the chart in 1990, the last year The Cosby Show was rated in the Top 10.

Trend #3: “Mixed Shows” display a spotty history in the Top 10 beginning in the late 1960s. But they had a resurgence in the 1990s and have gradually grown to a majority of the Top 10 shows today.

Tokenism Over The Years

Although never constituting a significant share of the Top 10, shows with token minorities have been a constant since 1950. While these shows do their part in contributing to the “melting pot” that is the American TV talent pool, these shows inhabit an interesting gray area. Neither racially monolithic nor integrated, these shows stop short of highlighting minority stories with meaningful purpose.

However, shows with token minorities have changed over the years – from using ethnicity as a comedic foil, to using minority casting for more racial representation. This is yet another symptom of the growing influence of minorities; insensitive portrayals of minorities have given way to tolerable, albeit culturally muted, representations.

A Few Conclusions

Minority influence in television has increased over the years, though it’s not a matter of sheer casting numbers. The evidence lies in the number of popular shows with mixed race casting – and the storylines related to diverse cultural experience – that have emerged in the last decade.

As such, it is important to keep in mind that this medium is the context in which we connect our clients’ brands to America’s consumers.

[Special thanks to Michael Barin, who researched and wrote this piece. Thank you, Michael!]

Raising The Bar: From So-So to Whoa!

2011-05-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

Another great infographic offering from digital artist Almond Loh, Draftfcb's Director of Visualization here in Customer Intelligence, this one aimed at "raising" the traditional way of building bar graphs and providing simple ways to improve how you communicate data.

Looking for data? Here's the mother lode.

2011-04-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

Following is a (near) comprehensive list of free, publicly available data. The "I-couldn't-find-any-information-on-that" excuse is hereby invalidated forevermore:

http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/
http://datamarket.com/
http://fedstats.gov/
http://infochimps.com/
http://jmc.ou.edu/FredBeard/Secondary.html
http://klout.com
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
http://numbrary.com/
http://oxygen.mintel.com/index.html
http://people-press.org/
http://pewhispanic.org/
http://pewresearch.org/
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipes.popular
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UMCSENT
http://statehealthstats.americashealthrankings.org/
http://statosphere.misentropy.com/
http://takemetoyourleader.com/
http://trendwatching.com/
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/default.htm
http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/
http://www.billshrink.com/
http://www.blogpulse.com/
http://www.bls.gov/
http://www.bundle.com/
http://www.cdc.gov/
http://www.census.gov/
http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp
http://www.clickz.com/
http://www.comscoredatamine.com/
http://www.crunchbase.com/
http://www.gallup.com/Home.aspx
http://www.google.com/finance
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
http://www.google.com/publicdata/home
http://www.google.com/trends
http://www.grabstats.com/
http://www.infousa.com/
http://www.jdpower.com/
http://www.marketingcharts.com/
http://www.marketresearch.com/
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm

http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/
http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php
http://www.neoformix.com/
http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/global/en.html
http://www.oecd.org/
http://www.pewinternet.org/
http://www.quantcast.com/
http://www.realtimestatistics.org/
http://www.referenceusa.com/
http://www.thomascrampton.com/
http://www.visualeconomics.com/
http://www.warc.com/
http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard#mode=compare
http://zipwho.com/
https://www.cia.gov/library/
http://blog.okcupid.com/

Unboxing The Pie: From Boring to Bling

2011-04-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Esteemed digital artist Almond Loh, Draftfcb's Director of Visualization here in Customer Intelligence, offers this infographic in hopes of "unboxing" the traditional way of building pie charts and providing simple design solutions to add data "bling" to your presentations and reports.

Impact of Cross-Culturalism on American Food

2011-04-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

In “Sin City, USA” one can easily partake in several of the Seven Deadly Sins. Probably the most accessible to the denizens and tourists of Las Vegas is gluttony. All-you-can-eat buffet advertisements dominate the billboarded landscape. Casinos promote specialty buffet items as loss-leaders intended to drive traffic, and the messaging somehow promotes the idea that eating beef and shrimp in the middle of a barren desert is a good idea.

The buffet at the Bellagio in Las Vegas rests at the pinnacle of comparable buffets in the casino world. “Guests may choose from the best of Italian, Japanese, Chinese, seafood and American cuisines, offered daily…” A person can get anything from waffles to sushi, all on the same plate. The buffet is a microcosm of the American food landscape. As choices continue to grow, the complexity of measuring and quantifying this diversification becomes more and more challenging.

Cinnamon, in contrast to the buffet choices at the Bellagio, is a constant within American cuisine. The spice is not only an American staple, but can be traced back to biblical times as an offering Israelites would bring to temple. Within American cuisine, it is best described as a banal staple of most kitchens.

Americans have evolved to think of cinnamon more as the name of an exotic dancer than the name of an exotic spice. What most Americans probably don’t know is that 90% of cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka and 100% of cinnamon is imported. From 1989-2009, the United States imported over $542 million dollars worth of cinnamon. The import dollar valued topped out at $37 million in 1989 and bottomed out at $16 million in 2001 with a range of $21 million. Within the realm of food imports and exports this is a relatively consistent product. To put cinnamon in perspective – coffee, tea and sugar over the same period varied by $2.6 billion, $197 million and $815 million, respectively.

By comparing cinnamon’s unvarying role within American cuisine to other imported products, profiles can be created for those products that is automatically adjusted for inflation, currency fluctuations and population growth. An examination of this data over time eliminates any type of seasonality. This index, dubbed the “Cinnamindex”, illustrates the shifting palates of Americans as imported ingredients essential to foreign cuisines impact their appetites.

The first food to analyze through the Cinnamindex is avocadoes. Although some avocadoes are grown in California; the majority is imported from Mexico, Chile and the Dominican Republic. Their popularity can be tied to both the rapid growth of the Latin American population within the United States, and the culinary ripples that this culture has caused. Guacamole has become a household favorite and chains that present “Mexican Style” food in a quick-service format, such as Chipotle, have become wildly successful.

Another imported food that scored well on the Cinnamindex is the chickpea. Chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, have gone from $8 million a year in imports to over $20 million a year in a 20-year span. Much like avocadoes, the growth can be attributed to both a rise in immigrant populations where chickpeas are a staple food, as well as the inclusion of hummus as a snack food staple in American cuisine. To think about the differences between today’s American’s Super Bowl spread and the spread 20 years ago, the standard chips and ranch dip are now accompanied and sometimes even replaced by guacamole and hummus spreads.

While the first two foods have an immigration wave associated with the shift in cuisine, ginger’s exponential-style growth in America can be attributed more to a culinary shift. “New” Asian cuisines such as Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Pan-Asian styles have fueled the proliferation of Asian flavor inspirations in the American culinary spectrum. Most relevant to ginger has been the mainstream acceptance of sushi across all walks of life. Supermarkets and cafeterias now serve this once exotic Japanese cuisine as daily fare. Ginger in turn has shifted from an annual import value of $5 million to $38 million per year.

Other imported goods that showed large increases on the Cinnamindex include dates, cardamom, cumin, anise, lentils, turmeric, saffron, cassava and mangoes. As American culture changes, its tastes continue to evolve requiring new ingredients. Fortunately, in a culture that rewards freedom of choice, the buffet at the Bellagio has room to expand to accommodate the emergence of a new American appetite. In contrast to the growth of these cross-cultural items are foods such as pistachios and poppy seeds that presented negative Cinnamindex scores over the past 20 years. As foods come in and out of vogue, however, cinnamon remains the flavorful, reliable staple against which culturally influenced foods can be measured.

As a marketer it is essential to understand changing tastes within culture. Marketers must balance the adherence to classic offerings and the exploration of new brand extensions and product genres. By examining the data available, risks can be mitigated and trends can be understood.

Ultimately, data is recursive so taking calculative risks and measuring the results leads to an understanding of the implications. In the realm of food one can always measure themselves on the Cinnamindex to gain an understanding of shifting tastes in American culture and the impact of cross-culturalism.

(Special recognition and thanks to Jason Methner for his research and writing prowess!)

The Impact of Cross-Culturalism on the English Language

2011-04-10T19:10:00.000-07:00

Language is a record of culture. One can deduce things about a culture based on how its members speak to each other. In Korea, for example, speakers base their culture on respect in relationships. The result is three phrases that are the equivalent to “thank you” each with a differing degree of formality to be used based on the relationship between the speaker and the listener.

It is not only the words of appreciation that people use to indicate culture. One can make a case that as culture develops, languages expand and words take on new meanings to capture this evolution. We can quantify cultural trends by examining the creation of words.

The best way to survey the record of language change is to observe words added to the Modern English Language. Through the analysis of the way the dictionary has changed in the past 10 years — some words added, other taken out – we can gain a better understanding of shifts in American Culture.

In approaching this research the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was identified as the best candidate for a dictionary source. The dictionary is considered to be the most conservative within the English language. The editors of the OED have strict rules about adding words based on usage. It makes for a great resource to track changes over time.

On March 14 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary began a subscriber-based model that allowed digital access to the dictionary. The digital database also highlighted quarterly modifications made to the dictionary. Over the 10-year period from June 14, 2001 to June 10, 2010, thirty-five revisions were posted and 3,907 words were added to the dictionary.

By examining these words it becomes clear that the majority of the words can be classified into five different categories:

In the past ten years it is clear that these 5 classifications have been pervasive throughout American culture.

Over the past 10 years, new technologies have arrived in popular culture. The web, smartphone, digital camera well as countless new gaming systems have all been added to the technological landscape. All of these items, as well as other technological progress, require words to describe them. Despite all of this evolution only 18% of the more than 3,900 words that were added to the OED can be classified as technological.

In addition to technology, the world’s inhabitants have come to realize that they need to take care of their environment in order to give future generations the ability to thrive. The environmental movement has come to the forefront of popular culture. Discussions on a carbon tax, the discovery of new species and new words for differentiating organic and non-organic foods all occurred in the past 10 years. Yet only 11% of all words added to the OED in the past year can be classified as environmental.

One of the subjects that received the most press in American culture over the past ten years was politics. Two wars were begun in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first black President of the United States was elected. The Tea Party movement gained traction in the American landscape and the two major political parties diverged using rhetoric to differentiate themselves from each other. Still only 9% of the words added to the dictionary over the past ten years were political in nature.

As Baby Boomers age, they will continue to need more medical treatment. Advances in the medical and pharmaceutical industries and the production of new drugs have helped make the healthcare a key driver of language. But in spite of such shifts within culture only 13% of the words added to the OED can be classified as medical in orientation.

The largest category of new additions to the OED was, in fact, the result of the influence of other cultures. New English speakers brought with them customs, traditions and food from their cultures and introduced them into mainstream society. The resulting shift in the English language was the needed linguistic reaction to the cultural vestiges spread amongst the general public. Over the ten-year analysis period, 31% of the words added to the dictionary had a cross-cultural theme. This group was the largest segment of added words within the analysis by a wide margin.

One can expect the cross-cultural trend in American culture to continue. As the world becomes an easier place to explore and borders are overcome by instant communication tools, our language will continue to evolve. The reflection of these changes will illustrate the sharing of culture and the seepage of cultural nuances into the mainstream arena.

How does your brand communicate with its customers? Do you speak to them at their level using words they will understand? Language is a lagging indicator of culture. As marketers, communications must be part of the forefront of culture. Which of the five major themes does your brand most closely align with? Are you using vocabulary that aligns with your target segment and demographic?

Examine the language of your brand. Audit the words you are using and measure it over time. Make sure that the language evolves with your brand and your audience.

What's In A Name? - Cross-Culturalism's Impact On Names In America

2011-03-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

Any decent advertiser knows the importance of profiling their customer. Over time, this undertaking has moved away from profiling based solely on demographics, to include psychographics that detail a consumer’s attitudes, values and interests. Psychographics have been essential in following the shifts in consumers’ interests because unlike demographics, which is an outsider’s view of a consumer, psychographics inform marketers on how consumers view themselves. As the following research will demonstrate, Americans have grown less and less interested in being considered “mainstream”. This shift in self-image is well reflected in an important, once-in-a-lifetime decision. That decision is what people name their children.

With the exception of the pop stars of the world, it is a decision typically made once. It is a decision made after a sometimes agonizing effort on the part of parents. The fact that Amazon.com lists 1,500 results for baby books gives one a sense of the measure of that effort. Making matters worse, baby name “literature” is a genre riddled with theories on how to name. After all, every name has its own rich description of qualities.

These descriptions can lead to theories on how successful a certain name might make a child. Even the minds behind Freakenomics have made an effort to predict the impact names, explaining how whites tend to seek names popularized by affluent families in the hopes their child will have a higher chance of becoming affluent as well.

Regardless of what such analysis might proclaim, one thing is for certain: names reflect culture. America will have plenty of Johns, Sweden will have Oscars, France will have Hugos, and Spain will have Alejandros. Names are intrinsic to each national culture. Therefore, seeing how names have changed in the US could reflect the rise of cross-culturalism. And after exploring the rich data surrounding this topic it can be concluded that the general market is coming to an end.

Looking for changes in our national culture brings us to a very unlikely place, the Department of Social Security. Their website contains an incredibly rich data set of the given first names of every baby born since1880 and last names collected by the 1990 and 2000 census. Working with this data and population figures, we were able to investigate name choices over time.

This first view revealed a staggering change. From 1950 to 2009, the count of unique first names increased by 25,000. This change is made more interesting by the fact that while the population of the United States doubled in this time, the number of unique first names tripled. And over a ten-year span from 1990 to 2000, surnames doubled. While this data shows that there are thousands of additional unique names, it does not fully contextualize growing uniqueness of names in America. The next measurement accounts for that growth.

Through this second measurement, one can see the changes among the most popular names for newborn boys and girls over that same timeframe. By analyzing the top 25 names and their relevance among all babies born each year, it is clear just how diverse names have become in America today. In 1950, the top 25 male names accounted for over 50% of all males born. Today that is under 20%. Similarly, the top 25 female names have dropped from 40% in 1950 to just 15% today.

Certain names go in and out of fashion throughout time, but when observing the top 25, one can see that names today have undergone a significant dispersion from what previously was a concentration around a small set.

One final way to measure the impact of cross-culturalism on names in America is to look at names among Hispanics. Throughout this research there was an expectation that the growth of the Hispanic population would be a major factor in the dispersion of names. From 1970 alone the Hispanic population has more than tripled, presently accounting for 47 million people.

To track the Hispanic population’s impact on names on American culture we measured a list of popular Hispanic names, both first and last, and observed how they performed over time. The two charts presented here tell the story. From 1990-2000, both surnames and first names have trailed population growth by over 20%.

The second chart reveals that this trend has continued from 2000 into 2009 as well. By making choices outside of their cultural norms, the naming trends of Hispanics serve as yet another example of the rise of cross-culturalism.

As we see in the name data, names are no longer herded among a few popular choices. In the past 60 years, the sheer number of names has increased by 25,000. During that time, the top 25 names have fallen from accounting for 46% of the population to 18%. This is a change that reflects a loss of the general market. The same trend was observed in looking at the growth of Hispanic names. In this instance, popular Hispanic names have not kept up with their rise in population, proving dispersion among their names as well.

For the marketer, these shifts are a sign of the times. Its not that people are gravitating less towards the old cultural norms, it’s the fact that people are not gravitating towards any sort of norm at all. If people are willing enough to strive for uniqueness in their names, then they certainly will in their consumer preferences. Take this research as an indicator of the loss of a true “mass market”. Once you stop looking for the product that will benefit as many as possible, you can start marketing the product that will find the untapped consumer.

How does your brand present itself to customers? Does it blend in with the crowd? Or does stand out from the others?

How does your brand present itself to customers? Does it blend in with the crowd? Does stand out from the others?

Americans today value individuality, doubtless the result of cross-culturalism’s growing influence. The norms of yesterday have largely been abandoned as consumers seek culturally familiar ways to express themselves and claim their own spot in America’s cultural melting pot. In doing so they exhibit interests, preferences and needs that are as unique as the names they have and the names they select for their children.

Marketers of today must ensure that their brand is no longer cast in a way to appeal to the “mass market” – a position as outmoded as it is outdated. Rather, to be successful in today’s American culture, marketers must seek a unique express for their brands that will capture the attention of today’s consumer.

$83.72 ー File Under "Numbers That Hurt"

2011-03-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, indeed, that is what it cost to fill my car with fuel today here in Chicago. Ouch, that hurts.

The Impact of Cross-Culturalism on American Popular Music (Part I)

2011-03-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the 2010 yearend Hot 100 Billboard chart. Over 50% of the Top Ten hits are collaborations featuring other artists. Go back another 10-years on the charts and you will notice where in time that trend really begins to take off.

Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris is one of the latest examples of artists collaborating across cultures and genres in order to gain chart success; a chart trend that began with Santana’s comeback album Supernatural in 2000 when he featured Rob Thomas on “Smooth” and the Product B&G on “Maria Maria.” Why is it that Santana needed to cross-over to gain chart success or that Justin Beiber’s biggest hits are when he features Ludicris? Popular music is a leading indicator of the cross-cultural trend that is prevalent in today’s mainstream.

As popular music has become more fractionalized over the past decade or more, with so many sub-genres, it seems like these collaborations – bringing together the sounds, and the fan base, from different genres – may be a key to chart success. It’s interesting to note that an artist such as Justin Bieber, who’s very popular within his own genre, only sees chart success when he collaborates with artists from other genres.

Brands can learn a thing or two from following the pop music trends. Like popular music, advertising has become more and more fractionalized over time. Does your brand have crossover appeal to bring back together that desperate focus? It may need an injection of pop culture to reel it in, like Santana and Bieber did, to get to the top, or back on top? Is your brand still talking to the Woodstock audience or are they talking to Lollapalooza audience? Chances are your consumers are more in tune with a cross-cultural presentation than a segmented one, as indicated by the pop charts.

The cross-cultural trend has taken off as artists from other genres and backgrounds have been teaming up to attain chart success. Some of the notable collaborative examples over the decade to feature in the Top 10 year end billboard chart included Black Eyed Peas featuring Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland, Gwen Stefani featuring Akon and now Bieber including Ludacris on his hit “Baby”.

In order to understand the impact of cross-culturalism on American popular music, Ryan Herzog and Almond Loh looked at the top 10 hit songs on the Billboard charts for every year from 1950 through 2009. They then classified the artists who performed each of these hits as being either white, African-American, Hispanic, or multicultural – including groups with members from different ethnic backgrounds, or collaborations between artists from different backgrounds. What they found clearly illustrates the significant impact cross-culturalism has had on the music we enjoy as a society.

PLAYING NEXT: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes! – Music from the ‘50s to the ‘80s (Part II)

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes! – Music from the ‘50s to the ‘80s (Part II)

2011-03-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

In the early 1950s, popular music was still dominated by the big bands and crooners of the 1940s. And, it was almost entirely white. Even when a non-white artist appeared on the charts – such as Nat King Cole – the song was still typical of those recorded by white artists of the era.

In the mid 1950s, rock music suddenly began to dominate the music charts. Descending from a number of African-American music genres, including blues and jazz, it was only natural that many pioneers of rock music were African-American, such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Yet the charts still reflected almost entirely white artists, even as many of the early hit rock songs were by white artists covering songs that had been originally written and recorded by African-Americans.

A prime example of this was Pat Boone. Boone was one of the most popular artists of the early rock era, and he built his career performing watered-down, “safe” cover versions of songs by African-American artists. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” is now considered to be a classic of the early rock era but, at the time, the hit was Boone’s more sedate version.

However, by the early 1960s, African-Americans finally began to find their place on the charts. R&B and “girl groups” became popular, and, in 1962, for the first time, African-American artists recorded half of the top ten songs for the year. The 60s also saw the emergence of R&B on the charts, driven by artists on Motown Records, the first major African-American owned record label.

Up to 1957 only the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado made the charts. In 1958 two Hispanic artists had major influences on the Billboard charts. Ritchie Valens recorded his version of “La Bamba” and Danny Flores “The Godfather of Latino Rock” composed and played sax on The Champs’ “Tequila.” In the 1960s, a few more Hispanic artists appeared on the charts, such as Sam the Sham and the Pharaoh’s and ? & the Mysterians.

By the early 1970s, African-American artists were a fixture on the charts, and multicultural artists began to emerge. The most successful early multicultural group was Tony Orlando and Dawn – a Hispanic lead singer, with two African-American backup singers. They had a number of hits, including the #1 song of 1973, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” as well as a successful TV variety show.

The early 1980s saw a mini-trend of cross-cultural collaboration begin when Paul McCartney teamed up with Stevie Wonder to record “Ebony and Ivory”; two years later McCartney teamed up with Michael Jackson for “Say Say Say.” The mid 1980s saw big-name stars, across all genres, coming together for charity causes, including Band-Aid and USA for Africa, both for African famine relief, and Dionne Warwick, Elton John, and Gladys Knight for AIDS awareness. These big name cross-cultural cross-genre artists had huge chart success.

Waves of African-American dominated genres and styles impacted the charts: Disco in the late 1970s and then, divas and hip-hop in the late 1980s and 1990s. Hip-hop and rap began in the African-American community in New York City in the early 1970s. Some credit Kool Herc as the Father of Hip Hop, as he introduced breaking and scratching, break dancing, and rapping at his infamous parties.

The first popular hip-hop recording was in 1979 with The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rappers Delight.” In the years that followed, two white artists played key roles in bringing hip-hop to a broader audience: Blondie’s “Rapture” in 1981, and Aerosmith’s collaboration with Run DMC on “Walk This Way” in 1986, which literally “broke the wall” between hip-hop and rock music. By the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, hip-hop and rap had gained a broader following among many music fans, and the genres began to dominate the charts.

PLAYING NEXT: Together At Last! – Cross-Culturalism and Music of Today (Part III, Conclusion)

Together At Last! – Cross-Culturalism and Music of Today (Part III, Conclusion)

2011-03-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

By the turn of the century, two new cross-cultural trends emerged in American popular music.

The first was the large numbers of Hispanic artists on the Billboard charts, reflecting the growing Hispanic population of the United States as well as the growing impact of Hispanics in the general culture.

The second new trend was collaboration. While there were occasional noteworthy collaborations in the past, it’s in the 2000s that the trend really began to take off.

Carlos Santana – who had been around since Woodstock – had the biggest hits of his career when he collaborated with artists from other genres and ethnic groups, like Rob Thomas.

In the past ten years, there has been a flurry of collaborations – every year, many of the top songs have been artists “featuring” other artists, often from different genres and cultural backgrounds. Today, artists such as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber regularly mix genres and cultures.

This summary graphic illustrates the ethnic makeup of the charts, year by year. It is easy to see just how far the pendulum has swung – popular music in the United States has gone from white artists accounting for 90% of the hit songs in the 1950s, to non-white artists now accounting for well over half of the hit songs in the past decade.

Is your brand stuck in a different era? Is it 50s Pat Boone, covering other cultures through White lenses? Is it stuck in Woodstock like Santana was for so many years? Is it stuck in the times when the brand first launched when what was popular then is now outdated?

Is it trying too hard to be multicultural, coming across unauthentic like “Ebony and Ivory”? Or is it keeping with the fast moving times and appealing to the new general market, the total market, where a mixed culture is the now the new mainstream?

So What Was SXSWi All About, Anyway?

2011-03-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

A quick analysis of event titles, descriptions, and speakers reveals which topics dominated this week's SXSWi festival in Austin, Texas. Clearly, the hot topic of the time is "SOCIAL MEDIA". But the interactive space remains cluttered with a number of items -- "MOBILE", "TECHNOLOGY", "GAMES", "DIGITAL", "BUSINESS" -- that indicate the many varied directions being explored by leading thinkers today.

Anyone else notice that "DATA" was edged by even "CHEVY" for mindshare and relevance at the conference this year? Anyone else want to bet that we'll not see that again in 2012, as recognition for data's impact on all things interactive should explode by this time next year?

Data, data, everywhere.

2011-03-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

The world around you is made of data.

Not in a science fiction-y “Matrix”-like way in which everyone and everything is in fact a digitized stream of infinite 1’s and 0’s. At least as far as I know, the world we inhabit is not an illusion controlled by so many alien, deceitful machines.

Indeed the world is real yet the data are surely there still, all around us. They are the attitudes, beliefs, and predispositions we hold. They are the actions, habits, and abilities that comprise our behaviors. They are the messages we hear, the interpretations we assemble, the information we broadcast. All these things can be woven into elegant tapestries of words and numbers portraying who we are in the most interesting of ways.

But this is well known. The collection of quantitative and qualitative data as a practice has been successfully rumbling along since the 1970’s. Seriously. You're online now. Google it if you don’t believe me. Without doubt – given the technological advances we have witnessed just in the previous ten years – every marketer has come to realize that nary anything can escape being measured, controlled, tested, and evaluated.

What is less well understood is the opportunity we have to ask questions. Too often the investigation of data is tentative and brief. Enough to uncover cursory facts or illuminate rudimentary insights perhaps, but little more. Where data scarcity may have restrained marketing analysis in past decades, the only reasonable limitation today is the imagination with which the question is asked.

Recently, my team completed a work that begins with an inspired question. Specifically: What effect has the emergent influence of cross-culturalism in the US had on American society? That’s a big question to be sure. But a question we pose confidently, knowing we have at our hands one of the largest, most complete data stores ever compiled in the 2010 American Census.

Over the next few weeks I'll post some of the investigations completed by members of the team. We hope that like us, you will find the answers interesting.

This Can't Be Undone Or Stopped...Part 5

2011-02-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

It appears that the jig is up. I had hoped that tracking my wife's missing phone -- or, rather, tracking whomever HAD my wife's missing phone -- would have led to film-worthy drama. With international implications. Or at least a high-speed chase through the streets of Chicago. Something more exciting than what it turned out to be: me, alone, checking my MobileMe account every few hours to see if the phone had popped back up on grid.

So I am left with the decision that no mobile phone owner wants to face...should I kill my phone. Yeah, it's a killing done remotely. I mean it is not like I will need to look the phone in the face as I terminate it. But as any phone owner surely knows, these things have grown to become a part of us. Too much a part of us, for sure, but a part no less. The phone represents a life-line to friends, a connection to the family calendar, a polite reminder of the countless appointments and important meeting dates otherwise forgotten.

Yet at the same time, the gnawing threat of someone performing nefarious cybercrimes using the phone is just as motivating.

And choosing to "Erase All Data"...now.

This One May Be Over...Part 4

2011-02-25T17:42:00.000-08:00

So not *all* hope is lost...yet. But my wife's phone hasn't been located for more than three hours. I'm afraid we may never see it again. Or worse that a gruesome stream of phone pieces will begin showing up in the mail.

Exhibit 1d:

They May Be On To Me...Part 3

2011-02-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

I haven't been able to locate the phone for over an hour now. It could be that the phone is no longer within range of cell reception or WiFi...or it could be that when I locked my wife's phone around 1:30 pm, it upset the person who had the phone so that they smashed it.

This intriguing game of espionage has just been spiked with D-A-N-G-E-R! (for the phone...not for us)

Exhibit 1c:

Just Hanging Out With Somebody Else's Phone...Part 2

2011-02-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

Ninety minutes and no movement. Whoever has my wife's mobile phone has been just hanging out near Grace and Cicero for some time now.

Exhibit 1b:

To Catch A (Potential) Thief...Part 1

2011-02-25T12:27:00.000-08:00

Late Wednesday night, my wife lost her mobile phone. Unfortunately at the time -- for us and for whomever would try to return the phone to us -- the phone's battery had died. Phone calls placed to it went directly to voicemail. Text messages no doubt went unseen.

Then, to our amazement and good fortune, calls placed to the phone suddenly began ringing this (Friday) morning. Although whomever had the phone did not answer the calls, he or she had apparently charged its battery. Despite call upon call and text upon text, the person holding the phone neither answered nor responded.

Through the magic of modern technology (and MobileMe), I've been able to locate the phone (which I have now locked). At 6:50 am it was at the corner of Pratt and Cicero. The phone then spent a few midday hours at Old Orchard shopping mall in Skokie. Followed by a speedy drive through the surface streets of north Chicago (very prudently avoiding the suffocating highway traffic).

For the last hour or so, my wife's phone has been on Chicago's northside near the corner of West Grace Street and North Cicero Avenue. See Exhibit 1a below, a screenshot of MobileMe's "Find My iPhone" tracking feature.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and where the wayward phone travels. Stay tuned for details.

How Much Technology Do You Speak?

2011-02-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

(*OED = Oxford English Dictionary)

Helping It Get Better

2011-02-08T20:06:00.000-08:00

Following a string of suicides stemming from the bullying and harassment of LGBT youth in the USA, journalist/blogger Dan Savage launched the “It Gets Better” project last September. Its purpose is to give messages of hope and assurance to young people who are being tormented because of their sexual orientation that life can indeed “get better” as they transition to adulthood.

Draftfcb’s chapter of IPGLBT (IPG’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered) has produced a film as part of this initiative. It features people from across our U.S. offices who share their stories and their assurances that life can indeed get better for these young people, while inspiring them to make it better.

Bullying knows no boundaries and unfortunately has many targets: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, weight, the physically or mentally challenged, etc. While this video was triggered by the too frequent harassment of LGBT youth, it carries an important message to anyone who has been a target of bullying. We all must always be intolerant of such behavior in our work environments, our schools, and our communities.

The video can be seen below and here. Please use your social media communities to get more people to view and share its important message.

Virtual Overcrowding

2011-02-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, indeed...the "population" of FarmVille is nearly fives times as large as Australia.

Plastic Waste

2011-01-25T07:38:00.000-08:00

A Visual Scan Of The Week's News

2011-01-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

So, You're Looking For An InfoGraphic Designer...

2011-01-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

From Benjamin Wiederkehr, Editor of Datavisualization.ch, a more comprehensive list of exceptional data artists may not exist anywhere:

Nicholas Felton http://feltron.com
Stefanie Posavec http://itsbeenreal.co.uk
Always With Honor http://alwayswithhonor.com
Column Five Media http://columnfivemedia.com
Golden Section Graphics http://golden-section-graphics.com
Catalogtree http://catalogtree.net
Hyperakt http://hyperakt.com
David McCandless http://informationisbeautiful.net
Tiffany Farrant http://tiffanyfarrant.co.uk/

Understanding Seasonality: Smart Marketers Are Happy Marketers (Part I, Introduction)

2011-01-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

The Holiday Season that was 2010 - 2011 is all but over. Looking back at what happened and when, I thought it would be interesting to take a deeper look into the role seasonality plays in marketing. It turns out that the ramifications may be bigger than we first thought...but so too is our ability as marketers to identify, plan for, and find new creative ways to employ them.

Today I will start this four-part investigation with the first installment: "Understanding Seasonality: Smart Marketers Are Happy Marketers".

It was George Santayana – Spanish philosopher, poet, and pragmatist – who once said, “To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” While Santayana was no doubt speaking to wistful romantics of the time, his remarks could have been directed to marketers of today. For just as the sensitive heart looks hopeful to Spring’s promise of love, the marketer waits breathless for the holiday season that invigorates product sales. It is the sage marketer who holds a broad view of the calendar and, as Santayana’s verse implores, understands the positioning of their product throughout the seasons.

Yet even for his wisdom, Santayana may have been only half correct. Surely anticipating seasonal fluctuations and embracing a holistic approach to the marketing year are critical in today’s business landscape, but understanding the dynamics at work below the surface is the pursuit of the smart marketer. For seasonality affects more than product sales. It has far-reaching consequences that impact many elements of commerce, not the least of which being the human condition. Optimizing seasonal product promotion requires marketers to connect with the forces that shape the delicate consumer psyche. Data can illuminate these forces, and offer insights into how the savvy marketer can take advantage of them.

Understanding Seasonality: Understanding Markets (Part II)

2011-01-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

For the better part of the modern era, seasonality has played an important role in the world’s financial markets. Price gains and profit-taking at the end of the calendar year on Wall Street has become so predictable that the phenomenon has been coined the “Santa Claus Rally”. The reasons for this year-end run up are largely unknown. Some point to tax law revisions, others to mutual fund proliferation and their year-end portfolio shuffling. But whatever the reason, for the past four decades stock market gains from November 20^th to the end of January have been an astounding 23% annualized (Halpern). And the seasonal impact does not stop there – fully 95.7% of stock market profits in the last 50 years have occurred in the seasonally strong period of November to April (Halpern). In something as free and fluid as an equity market, such seasonal bias is extraordinary. It is not, however, rare.

Currency traders have long understood the seasonal nature of their markets. The summer season – and particularly the month of July – seems to be a dependable time on foreign exchange markets. Consider the Canadian dollar, which has stumbled during July in ten of the last 12 years. Meanwhile the Japanese Yen has experienced a no less seasonal reversal of fortunes, rallying in July ten out of the last 12 years. Unfortunately for New Zealanders, they more resemble Canadians than the Japanese – their New Zealand dollar has fallen in nine of the last 12 recorded Julys. The NBA would appreciate that kind of consistency, where the average pro has failed to connect on better than 75% of free throw attempts since 1960 (New York Times).

Understanding Seasonality: Understanding Consumers (Part III)

2011-01-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

But the cyclical flow of the seasons does more than direct financial markets. A growing body of evidence supports the thought that seasons play a large role in complicated human behavior – well beyond wardrobe choices and vacation selections. The Hordaland Health Study, which surveyed nearly 30,000 Norwegians, found that seasonality was positively associated with levels of both anxiety and depression. Test subjects with even a low degree of seasonality experienced higher levels of depressive symptoms between the months of November and March than other months. The Hordaland Study is a convincing argument in support of the “Winter Blahs” and the reason you may have difficulty leaving the safe, warm cocoon of your bed for much of January.

Another, even more poignant study by the Norwegians (who seem to have a penchant for examining the effects of seasonality) found dramatic ties between the seasons and physical health. Conducted by the University of Bergen in April of 2010, the study included nearly 12,000 subjects between the ages of 40 and 44. Changes in season, it was found, were positively associated with fluctuations in waist-hip ratios, body mass index, triglyceride levels, and high cholesterol in men. Women were no more immune to changes in the season: for example, seasonality was found to be a key determinant in their levels of exercise and cigarette smoking. The report ends with the conclusion that seasonality is “associated with objective health risk factors”, as well as “health behaviors associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases” (Oyane).

Often lying behind such season-based behaviors are physiological and emotional causes. Our attempts to regulate winter reductions in sunlight through artificial illumination and temperature controls lead to various changes in body temperature, making it difficult for human beings to regulate hormone production. This can ultimately lead to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a form of depression that occurs in relation to the seasons. It is noted that a rare form of SAD occurs in the summer. No word as to whether or not “Summer SAD” has taken hold in Norway, but doubtless it has been studied.

The way seasonality impacts product sales are at once obvious and little understood. Despite marketers’ best efforts to “smooth out” sales or create “tent posts” during the off-season, revenues for most categories follow familiar seasonal tendencies. Nearly half of consumer electronic sales are registered in November and December of each year, when holiday gift giving and year-end close outs abound. The majority of paint, wall covering, and home improvement product sales come in the summer months when homeowners can more comfortably spend time outside. Dog treats have no such seasonal trend as dogs, it has been found, eat and enjoy treats all year round. But sales patterns, especially for long established categories, are easily tracked and plotted and predicted. This much is well known.

Understanding Seasonality: Getting Smart (Part IV, Conclusion)

2011-01-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

What remains less well understood are the consumer motivations that underlie seasonality or, importantly, behaviors that tip a marketer to seasonal opportunities. To what extent does consumer optimism, driven by year-end financial gains, drive holiday sales? Do traditional summer expenditures result from consumers shaking off the remains of winter restlessness? If marketing messages highlighted such themes, would they connect to consumers on a sublimely basic level such to positively impact sales? These are the questions the marketer must ask and their answers can be found through relatively simple data collection and analyses that push past sales charts to investigate consumers’ mindsets and moods.

When answers to questions of this sort are understood, data continues to offer insights into consumer behaviors. Take pest control, for example, where sales spike in the summer months presumably due to increased insect (and human) activity. But online searches for pest control products actually begin to mount much earlier in March and April of the year. This is, not coincidentally, the same time of year that online search volume for summer vacation spots begins to heat up (Google Trends). By being prominent in the late spring to consumers dreaming of summer getaways, marketers of pest control can present clear messages prior to the well recognized, and therefore ultra-competitive, seasonal spike.

As we have seen, seasonality does much more than drive familiar trends in product sales. It has considerable impact on complicated human behaviors and emotions. Understanding these impacts and how they can be used to improve product positioning and messaging should be the goal of every marketer. Collecting and analyzing data that yields such insights is the key to gaining just such understanding and to providing every marketer with a happier state of mind.

Catherine Stones, ArtisticScience Visionary

2011-01-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

If you have not yet, you owe it to yourself to check out UK artist Catherine Stones, particularly the work she does in creating interactive charts (http://www.catherinestones.net/1charts.cfm). There are few more exquisite examples of beauty meshed with functionality.

See below for an example, Catherine's "Lunch Hour Chart", which she describes here: "Mark the bricks with a black pen on the days you venture outside during your lunchhour. You never know...you could meet someone interesting or have an adventure."

Slick (Rick) Data

2011-01-07T14:24:00.000-08:00