Jonathan Mendez's Blog

What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and a third party (advertiser, restaurant, etc.) is required to create value. This is where these services fall short for me and thanks to recent tweets from my friend and SEO guru Natasha Robinson I’ve finally realized why.

As Natasha says, the check-in links syndicated through social media verge on unclickable. The reason is rather simple. The landing pages provide no value to the referrer. Yet, the landing page is the spot where the triangulation of goals must align. The whole value chain for this product converges at the landing page.

While we can clearly see the potential of these services to provide tangible value to the establishment where check-ins occur and some (for now less tangible) value to the Mayor McCheeses and people doing the check-in, I would argue that the service only works if there is strong value being created in the stream. Without this newfangled linkbait, the fish ain’t gonna bite.

Let’s take a look at each of the content areas on Foursquare’s landing page and see what is and isn’t working for a referrer and the value triumvirate as a whole.

  

1) As a referrer I already know from my stream the name of the establishment. I already know that the person that has checked in here. There is huge immediately actionable value for the establishment though. Many locations would benefit from an announcement categorizing everyone who entered it. Of course that can provide parallel value to the person checking in.

2) The amount of check-ins and visitors does not really tell me much, especially for a new service that is building scale -- it’s very difficult for a naïve user to asses this value. Again, most of this value rests for the establishment.

3) The images of the Mayorship and the people who’ve been here have negligible transactional value to anyone.

4) Maybe most interesting for a location based service the map has very little value. In most cases the address above is sufficient information for a referrer at the moment of landing. The establishment and check-in already know where they are.

5) Tips can be helpful but their value is tied to a small segment of temporal traffic (the moment or prior to check-in). While this value is highly dynamic tips have the most shared value among troika of user, establishment and audience.

6) Tags are fairly generic. They likely provide the most value to Foursquare to provide classifications however it doesn’t appear that many users are adding tags. Also it appears there are some negative aspects to user tagging that can affect the value chain.

So the question remains, and of course has become heightened with Yelp adding a location based feature to its service last week and others soon to enter the fray, what improvements can Foursquare and other services make to encourage CTR on their linkbait and then create value from all from those visitors. That’s a rather big question so I’ll just tackle it form the referrer perspective.

As a landing page the primary success metric needs to be converting visitors to register for the service. As the product grows there are many more success metrics that can add value for optimization (e.g. new visitors to location pages that eventually check-in). For existing users there are also important metrics to optimize on against bounce rate/use. What good is a notification service if those notified don't take action?

As mentioned in the dissection above there is nothing on this page that is persuasive and inexplicably there is not a call to action. Is this a game? Then tell me what makes it fun or challenging. Is this a place to make plans? Then what are the tools that make that helpful and easy. Why do I want to use this service? What are the benefits to me? Until the answers to those questions are obvious landing on this page has no value for a referrer and products like this are missing a golden opportunity that may be as temporal as the very content they distribute.

Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010

Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was a good moment to take a personal snapshot and share it with you. In no particular order, the areas of digital media & advertising that I’m most excited and interested in right now.

NWA – Numbers with Answers: There was incredible amount of M&A consolidation in the world of web analytics from 2003-2006. The result over the past few years has been a dark period with little innovation. The basic data retrieval systems, log-files, .js and packet sniffing have been in place a very long time yet the reporting output of these systems has not progressed much. Making matters worse many C-level execs, creative agencies and digital verticals do not trust analytics (newspaper sites reported not believing Omniture/Google Analytics data in the 9/09 ITZ Publishing survey). The bottom line is this: insights and actions are just too hard to cull. Presenting the data in more interesting ways has become vogue but this is not the answer. Legacy analytics solutions are asking (in the best case) old questions and (in the worst case) wrong questions. I sense that not only the questions but more importantly the answers will begin to change in 2010.

China - The Supernova Market: The Search and Display advertising opportunity in China has never been better. It will continue to gain velocity over the entire decade. There are 350 million Chinese on the Internet (vs. 200mm US).  Half of them are under the age of 25. Almost all of them (94%) are on broadband. That colossal user number...it is only a 25% penetration rate (vs. 72% US). Commercial web transactions are now starting to shoot through the roof.  There are some incredibly exciting web companies emerging from China and some really interesting US start-ups that are co-located in China. In 2010 I plan on being much more active in understanding this market and looking for opportunities in it. In fact, I’ve started already. It is simply shortsighted strategy not to.

Testing Reaches Critical Mass:  In the two years since I left Offermatica/Omniture I’ve been approached by about twenty start-ups in the testing and targeting space. Some of those companies have launched already and a good number more will emerge over the next year. This makes sense because two things have happened in the market. 1) Similar to Analytics, almost all the major players have been acquired leaving a void of innovation; 2) More marketers (especially mid-sized) understand the need to focus on post-click optimization. It seems pretty clear that this space will undergo a renaissance beginning in 2010 with a focus on lighter, faster and more simple solutions. I’m excited to continue having a role in the evolution of the testing & optimization space both on this blog and in my advisory capacity with a couple of emergent players including Performable.

Local Zooms In: This could just as easily been a blurb about the Facebook-Google war that has been going on now for over a year. Clearly Google has stepped up its game – its local pages have never been better and the UGC continues to increase in volume and curatical efficiency. I see this battle as critical to Facebook’s future. Yes I know how big they are and their growth rate, but their RPV (revenue-per-visitor) is incredibly low. They can’t sustain their business as a voyeuristic photo site for many more years. The key to their success is tied in developing local business pages attached to social graphs with the requisite search advertising capability. One of these two companies will crack this nut to the tune of $20B of incremental revenue over the next few years and $100B by the end of the decade. We’ve always known local is the Holy Grail. My bet is on Google because at the core all this local stuff is search, but it will be fascinating to watch this play out over the year.

New Display Formats: Without a doubt display advertising performance suffers from standardized sizes. The IAB has eighteen standard sizes for display ads yet 90% of ads are created in three of those sizes. The effect of this compounded with standardized placements of those sizes creates an insurmountable challenge for the attention of users. Part of the onus of solving this problem is on publishers. As masters of their domain they have the ability to innovate. Two start-ups I’m involved with are working in this area and seeing incredible results matching a data layer with breakthrough creative formats. The challenge of course is getting this to scale but the performance (we’re talking CTR of 10-20% in some verticals) warrants tremendous excitement as these companies go from bootstrap to chinstrap in 2010.

POS Closes the Loop: Two of the most mind-blowing conversations for me this past year were speaking with companies actively involved in using offline POS (Point-of-Sale) data in the digital marketing loop. This is “first-party” data at its finest. After learning about how they are working I have no doubt that the future of targeting, re-targeting, eCRM and increasing LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) rests in this area. The verticals where this data can be effective are limitless. The platforms where it can be used are ubiquitous. That is one giant market that can’t be ignored. This is but one space where I think we’ll see dollars shift from soft metrics to hard metrics around retention and increased customer value. The über competitive nature of 2010 and beyond demands it.

 

2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

"A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." - Emerson

2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can follow me here). Many ideas that in the past would have become full-blown posts got tweeted into the stream (or is it an abyss). As a result my pieces tended to be more thought out, longer and less frequent. Also, my subject matter took a distinct turn. Last year I mainly blogged about challenges facing advertising while this year my focus was on the challenges facing publishers. So in case you missed something the first time or want a refresher I have curated a years worth of posts and shared my favorites below.

The Publisher's "Penta-tech":

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

Reaping The Ads You Sow

People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal

Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

Other Stuff:

API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next

Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

Presentations:

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

Interviews:

Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

Interviewed by AdExchanger

Lastly, happy and healthy holidays to all my readers, commenters and subscribers both old an new. I truly appreciate and value your interest in what I have to say. See you in 2010.

SES Chicago Next Week

 

Next week I’ll be speaking for my 5^th year at SES Chicago. I feel privileged that the good folks putting on the show now and in the past have been gracious enough to keep inviting me back. The sessions I’ve spoken on through the years:

2005: Searcher Behavior Research

2006: Ads in a Quality Score World

         Ad Testing: Research & Findings

2007: Personalization, User Data & Search

2008: Ads in a Quality Score World

         Ad Continuity Clinic

Most all of those presentations are available here.

Interestingly, Chicago seems to be the only SES where I have not spoken explicitly about landing pages. That gets rectified this year  -- I’ll be giving a live landing page clinic on the show floor Wednesday at 12:30pm. In addition I will also be cranking up the volume on three sessions this year.

2009: Tuesday: Working Collaboratively With Your IT 

         Wednesday: Ad Copy & Conversion Clinic

         Wednesday: Search Becomes the Display Operating System

The best part about conferences is meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends so please stop by and say hi. Besides the great food in Chitown I’m also excited about spending some time outside the show with Dotomi, Chicago’s most exciting display ad technology company. Follow my twitter stream for updates from the show.

Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

I’ve been reluctant to write more about publishers issues with monetization having recently written pieces here, here, here and here but the recent spotlight cast by Rupurt Murdoch on Google’s traffic and sympathetic follow up pieces by respected writers like Tom Foremski and Michael Arrington have now boiled me over.

Having spent the better part of a decade optimizing and monetizing both natural and paid search traffic on a daily basis I want to directly address the two memes now gaining velocity. One is that search traffic is “low quality.”  The other is that publishers should leave Google and form a Bing “collective.” Both concepts are ludicrous.

The Quality of Search Traffic:

Search traffic is inarguably the best traffic that exists on the web for monetization because of the recovery or discovery goals that are expressed in the query. The referring URL passes along rich data sets with it that can be further parsed for optimization. Search traffic also trends in remarkably predictable temporal patterns as do the event driven behaviors associated with it.

So the issue is not that the traffic quality is low but that sites like the Wall Street Journal and many others do little or no site side optimization for it. The referrer data is robust enough for the WSJ to deliver an amazingly relevant, compelling and dynamic experience. The technology is there to do a myriad of things with this search traffic especially reducing bounce rates, increase subscriptions, collecting leads and funneling visitors into higher value areas of the content. If publishers treated every page like a landing page and thought of themselves as much marketers as publishers they would be generating much more revenue. After all, user intent is generated on the publishers domain. It only gets fulfilled on Google.

How inept are newspapers? Let’s take the data that they themselves provided in the recent American Press Institute Revenue Initiative Report (09/14/09).

• Net monthly visitor rates have not increased since 2003
• Percentage of 2009 total online revenue from SEO (large sites like WSJ): 0%
• Percentage of 2009 total online revenue from SEM (large sites like WSJ): 1%
• Only 23% of publishers are monetizing registration
• Only 11% of unique visitors are registered
• Only 25% use registration data for ad targeting

Publishers should be disgusted with these efforts and should take a long look in the mirror before they start blaming others for their demise.

Publishers Leaving Google:

Let’s get one thing straight. Google is the number one brand in the world and a more trusted and valued brand to the general public than your newspaper. Google has been getting better and better helping people for a long time now and keeps extending its useful reach. At the same time news has become more and more commoditized and less and less trusted. The Google habit is real. People are not going to stop using Google because your content is not included in their index. It is this exact arrogance about content that has lead to the demise of traditional media – at first devaluing the web as a medium, then devaluing search and now devaluing the users of the medium (see above).

One more data point from the API revenue report that is relevant here:

• Preserving print revenue is a primary driver to paid online access models [71%]

Search fractures the content hierarchies and information architectures publishers created to assist them in deriving revenue from their media. As someone that has worked with a number of the most well know publishers I sympathize with their being held accountable to many old media bosses and their legacy goals. There are a number of really smart people in this space especially at places like CNET and WPNI. Still, I cry no tears for their demise. Digital bits move at the speed of light. Digital strategy and execution must move along side it.

Optimizing Display Ad Creative for CTR & Conversion

Most display advertising is still purchased on a CPM basis – you are buying a certain number of impressions. For that reason the higher percentage of clicks you get on your ad impressions the more cost effective your buying becomes. So ad creative is often the lynchpin to ROI. But it is very hard to get clicks. Display ads have to be more compelling then the content they’ve come to view.

If you are successful taking a viewer and turning them into a clicker the landing page should then message to the visitors expressed interest in the ad creative. This creates a flow. The two moments of recognition (the ad & landing) have incredible influence over conversion. There are no better, more important or more valuable three seconds in marketing. But it all starts with the ad.

1) Getting Noticed: Display’s standardization and placement conventions are exactly what have made CTR drop through the years. Users have literally been programmed to ignore the ad. The fact that even to this day most landing pages suck and redirects provided horrible UX hasn’t helped get more people clicking. If Search has to overcome the Golden Triangle of user eye-tracking, Display has to overcome the Golden Shower.

There are basically four strategies to getting noticed. In order of my preference based on performance:

• Blending: The idea here is to make the ads look like content. This is done not to deceive but due the fact that as mentioned people have built a scanning awareness to block out display conventions. In the early days of Search the fact that the ads looked like the results was a key factor in their performance (while that still exists today to some regard the increased relevance of the ads override that now). We’ve seen this practice work in print for years and it currently works online with flogs. This is just proof of concept. I’m not advocating spoofing but your ads stand a better chance of being noticed and your messages read if they look like content and not ads.

• Motion: My rule (that I stole a few years ago from RIA guru Bill Scott) for all rich media including banners is to only use it if it solves a content delivery problem thus creating a better user experience. Rich media for the sake of rich media is a huge waste of budget. I have no understanding for why Flash is used so often.  Animated GIFs can sometimes be useful in getting your ad noticed but use it in a way that doesn’t detract from the messaging or the looping breaks the content into messaging that is difficult to make sense of.

• Color: Keep in mind the majority of sites your ad will run on have white backgrounds. Again, as mentioned, using bold colors can people to ignore you as much as it can get people to notice you. But big blocks of black and red can attract attention. As in print advertising, reverse coloring (black background with white text) usually does worse in comparison to standard dark on light in most tests.

• Images: Images can really help and really hurt so it’s important to be very careful. Our brains process images much more quickly then text, though often the meaning behind an image is not as clear to us as copy. We all have a natural tendency to look at images of faces especially when they are looking at you. Images of the actual product are often helpful. We also all know that Celebrity Endorsers can be very helpful and it doesn’t necessarily have to be illegal. 

2) Content Hierarchy: Scanning habits make it important to keep your content in a format and font that is easily scanned. This means have clear headlines, supporting bullet points and calls to action. I often find that “brand” creative types think these practices will not work but again but it’s clear from print that this can be massaged in a way that doesn’t have to make headline >> copy >> call to action uniquely direct response.

3) Messaging: Foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but it is a key component in creating flow and converting clicks. For this reason it’s important that the ads mirror the landing page in messaging and look and feel. Recognition and reinforcement are very important strategies for all facets of conversion optimization for the simple reason they breed confidence. One of the interesting things I’ve witnessed over the years is the role confidence plays in conversion. This might be best exemplified again by flogs or farticles that prey upon localization, brand borrowing and newspaper style layouts to create confidence. Again, I’m not advocating that your creative been made to fool users however it’s clear that the strategies employed here can be leveraged in more elegant and proper ways to improve results.

Many people don’t understand the impact ads have on conversion. In many tests, including multivariate tests across elements of both the ads and landing pages, the ad elements have the highest factor of influence on conversion. It is after all the first impression. Make a good one.

Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary.

Attribution quickly formed the business models for the new medium -- traffic buying, affiliate marketing (have we forgotten how Amazon got to be Amazon), SEO and Email are all channels that emerged based on one principle. You could count what you got in return.

In measured media, performance becomes its driver and thus optimization became the obligatory next progression. However for much of digital media, namely site content/user experience & display advertising, it has been a long slog towards optimization. A medium capable of being optimized to deliver persistent relevance may only be (by my best estimate) about 5% there.

Of course if we want to look for optimization inspiration we look at Google. Paid Search serves as our shining example of what optimization is capable of. Many are trying to emulate their models for success but search is only a small piece of our digital experience.

Still, there is one important lesson we can take away from search. We can optimize the medium up to the point of diminishing returns. This is simply amazing. Yet, most “experts” and certainly C-level execs don’t even realize this is possible. Most clients will not believe it. But it is an economic law (and one that data and ad exchanges will put to the test).

Not to be lost in all the dashboards and spreadsheets is what we are counting - the experience of people. Performance is based on the actions that control the medium – content, experience and people’s response. There is of course the ability to optimize the buy-side however if we have learned anything as performance marketers it is that the sell side optimization factors most highly into optimization. In this regard we can simply define our goals as optimizing the presentation and delivery of content.

This feedback loop is one reason the web experience has the amazing ability to be optimized and should improve for years to come…if we can get there. Optimization is hard. It requires some measure of testing and analysis -- from bidding systems to creative performance. And data is a funny animal. There is no such thing as a perfect data set and often there are outliers. As we’ve seen this past year, even the world’s best systems are unable to prevent market forces from skewing predictive models to the point of rendering them useless.

There is also the “Predictive Paradox.” As we witness everyday in real-life people’s behavior is simply unpredictable over short periods of time. Yet incredibly and more often than not, over longer periods of time the differences in behavior normalize without significant variation. What this means to behavioral marketers is two things: 1) it is really hard to accurately assess wins that take place over short periods of time & 2) it is really hard to improve results by a large margin over a long period of time.

The other difficulty with optimization besides statistical significance is quality of data -- how much noise is in the data set. Optimization of ads or any content has so much to do with the surroundings. Content, layout, visitor source, visitor familiarity with site, and probably about another hundred or so factors. With so much noise the more complex the testing the more false positives in the numbers. Yet for some reason we’ve been led to believe complexity is sexy when in fact it is accuracy that is sexy.

There is one last thing we should never forget as we spend more time optimizing digital media and it may be the most important aspect. Counting tells only part of the story - it tells you what people did. It does not tell you why.  It does not provide answers or shed light on the actions people never realized they could take. To a large degree these answers can only be achieved through testing methodologies and observational research. Be wary of any predictive or targeting system not continually validating its assumptions with these methods…and good luck optimizing.

Previous Relevant Posts:

Expert Guide to Multivariate Testing Success

Capturing the Gorilla: New Ways to Quantify the Value of Search

On-Site Targeting: Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy

The Power of Brand to Influence Outcomes or Why Brands Will Always Rule Digital

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years.

As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been paranoid though, they’ve been sleeping through the transformation of the digital media landscape. Wake up! You can’t operate strategically the same way for 5 years in a row in digital. The technology moves too fast.

While content channels like search, mobile and social continue to rise and technology like APIs, JavaScript, XMP & RDF continue to advance publishers have made little to no investment innovating to provide better experiences with their content or revenue generation for themselves. Instead, they sat there like fat cats measuring all the free search traffic and impressions of countless display ads on their pages – and God forbid they do anything with that data.

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What’s become clear in the morass of low CPM and poor performance is that publishers can no longer rely on third parties to deliver revenue. The plunge has magnified an online ad ecosystem fraught with multiple inefficiencies – creative agencies, media buyers and planers, ad ops, networks, and on and on. Recent innovations like yield optimization and real-time bidding are only anesthetic on a wound bleeding from both sides.

Solving the revenue problem requires publishers to look in the mirror and take matters into their own hands. There have been small moves in this direction with marketing technology/services acquisitions by Cox, Glam and Meredith. Still, too few publishers understand to survive they need self-reliance.

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Ironically or not, the best example of these ideals for publishers springs from the same area as Emerson himself, TechTarget (full disclosure: TechTarget is a previous client while I was at Offermatica).

If you don’t know Tech Target your sys admin does. They operate over 50 websites in the IT space. Here’s a brief description of the company:

TechTarget Inc. is a provider of online content for buyers and sellers of corporate information technology (IT) products. Its product offerings address both lead generation and branding objectives of advertising customers.

That’s right, TechTarget has its own product solutions for advertisers. They are marketers as much as they are publishers, an agency as much as they are authors. They understand the traffic on their site, there to view their content, is theirs and the onus is on them to find the best ways to monetize it.

Really, who better to do it? Who knows more about their audience than they do? It makes perfect sense then to discover and then help meet the goals of their audience. With all the explicit and implicit data about their audience shouldn’t they be able to do this better than anyone else?

Once you have that mindset everything changes. You focus on the goals of your visitors, not the goals of your advertisers. You focus on gaining expertise on page optimization to derive the highest revenue per visitor. You focus on loyalty by knowing who your visitors are and what interests them. Your buyers become partners, not faceless networks and agencies. You do it yourself and you keep all the rewards, never for a moment aligning with revenue streams that don’t properly valuate your visitors and the content you created for them.

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Don’t tell me this will not work outside of B2B. While content may differ the user goals of information recovery and discovery and the ways to optimize and monetize them are agnostic to verticals.

I shed no tears for publishers. I’ve been beating the drum for three years that every page is a landing page. We even had a name for it at Offermatica, Content Merchandising. It never really caught on like we expected but then again it didn’t matter. There were lots of performance-based businesses that needed our services. Not surprisingly there are even more of them now (both optimization tools and performance marketers). Publishers can’t continue to be run into the ground by these savvy marketers exploiting the delta between the value of the publisher’s content & audience and what they are paying for it.

I see no other option. Use your content as the basis for your own advertising and marketing services. Be innovative, control your destiny, own the page, own the next page and deliver relevance, great experiences and utility with every pixel. Most of all help your visitors to make decisions and take actions with your content. Inherent in those actions resides the value of your content.

Related Posts:

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Mashing Up the Value of Ads & Content

How Semantic Apps Can Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent

Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed to try it again. Two weeks ago, Google followed-up with announced change of URL parameters. Some good and some bad. This week Google again seems to be rolling out AJAX SERPs this time more extensively for Firefox users. Something is happening here.

It has become clear that we are all Google’s Mr. Jones. The Google Mothership seems to be leaving and we can choose to get onboard for the data ride (Google Analytics would likely still be able to capture queries and the like) or we can live in a netherworld of insufficient data. With some sites getting 50% or more of their traffic from Google natural search not using GA in this scenario relegates them to a sort of third world of data and renders their subscription-based analytics platforms limp.

There is no question in my mind that Google owns this referrer data though I have heard it argued otherwise from the analytics vendors. The click action takes place in the Google domain and though the link data is generated from publisher content, publishers are under no obligation to have their sites indexed. There is also no question to its value. Huge. It is worth mentioning that much of the URL shorteners now driving an ever growing amount of web traffic pass even less useful referrer parameters to the linked sites.

This is Google's nuclear option to the world of web data. The fallout will be an analytic winter for many. The face of the analytics, SEO, online publishing, testing, targeting and even the public markets will all change. Does the very fact that Google has so much data leverage mean they are likely to use it to their advantage at some point? Would it be so bad to live in a world of (free) GA? They have made great strides with segmentation and continue to add data visualization. Of course there are plenty of reasons ethical, historical and rational that Google must leave their URL passable and parseable. It appears now less likely than ever to happen.

Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many people don’t appreciate.

However, we’ve now reached a point in the development of the web where the inverse has become just as important. Technology’s use with creative will powerfully change the web experience for people by delivering more relevance and more engaging experiences. Creative is becoming part and parcel of the platforms where it resides and applications that deliver and present it.

Right now testing technology sits at the forefront. It’s been amazing to witness the rise of creative testing over the four years I’ve been speaking about it on the conference circuit. From 0-70% of the audience in 4 years and every one of the major testing players acquired by companies like Omniture, Interwoven, Accenture & Acxiom.

As we move towards a real-time intelligent/dynamic web, content targeting and analytics will play a larger role and get rolled up into creative technology. It’s important to understand at its core creative tech is about two things - rules and results.

Data Driven Design

In the past few weeks two high profile events took place that illuminated the role of technology on creative.

Facebook’s redesign: Whatever you want to say about the design it was driven by data (or FB needs to sell NOW). As Scott Rafer mentioned at SES the design really was about revenue metrics as much as it was copying Twitter. It still amazes me how many creative decisions are not about revenue. Which bring us to…

The departure of Google’s Visual Design Lead Doug Bowman: He could no longer work at a company that made most every design decisions based on testing and revenue data rather than an opined aesthetic. There is a great discussion of that conflict here.

What we can learn from Facebook and Google – two of the most technically savvy organizations on the web. Both are at their core about delivering rules based content. Both use data on revenue generation to drive design. They are the blueprint.

Design Power

For all the Silicon Valley geekery and new found fascination with quants on Madison Avenue there is a giant issue playing out. Design power. You see, as soon as your audience has the right answer the rules of creative change. Design becomes a question of how well you know your audience. To paraphrase Steve Jobs design is not about what it looks like, but how it works. This is not an ad agency strong suit.

The agency problem (and one I’ve experienced once over twice) is that literally and figuratively they can’t afford to test. Testing creates too much conflict (fearful Creative Directors) and inefficiency (training, increased costs & multiple creative). I’m aware that some like WPP are talking the talk but change would require ground up realignment of their workforce, business operations and structure. Even if they tried they may simply be too big and too old to succeed at this.

Additionally, the progress of creative technology is in many respects making testing more difficult (but more valuable). As mentioned, moving the needle now is becoming more about targeted content and the dynamic real-time web. Testing informs these rules but this scales at a content delivery/management platform, something Madison Avenue is once again far behind on. In the web's next phase technology needs to be your Chief Strategy Officer and the data collected from your audience needs to be your Creative Director.

Creative Distribution

The irony is that there really isn’t anything more creative than testing. Testing allows creativity to flourish within a company. I call it creative distribution. Getting more creative variation in front of more people to measure results is a good thing – always!

Testing democratizes the creative process. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Testing also allows the ultimate creative license. Radical ideas can have a place right beside the status quo. Often those radical ideas are the ones that get the best results. While other times it may something as simple as the color of a button that matters.

Most importantly testing allows you to learn and get better as a creative. Measurement lets you know how good you really are as a creative. Business is competitive – why shouldn’t creative be as well? Maybe one day we’ll see a league of optimizers where we keep track of their stats on an ROI basis. Maybe even Rotoptimization.

Results

Testing, targeting, data and analytics have continued to pick up speed in the digital world with the explosion of PPC and continued velocity towards a “pay-per” economy. There is no going back. This is exactly what the web’s “services” model should be and it remains the web’s economic destiny -- many would say we’re already there.

Those of us working on developing creative technology are now in a period of tremendous innovation. Our Newport 65 is upon us and we're going electric. As with everything creative there will always be people with rigid ideas of what creative is and whom they look to for creative ideas. There will also be another group of people. People who just get better results. People busy being born, not dying.