iWunder | Wunderman New York Blog

Business Inspiration from the Grateful Dead and Van Halen

If you're like me, you probably have a steady stable of "best in class" case studies that you trot out a few times a year for inspiring brainstorms or the latest deck about transforming your business. This is the month to freshen up those JetBlue-GE-Amazon-Ikea-Wal-Mart-[insert your favorites here] war horses. There's a bumper crop of unexpected inspiration on this month's newsstand.

In the Atlantic Magazine article "Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead" the band's forward thinking business practices are featured including customer loyalty cultivation, merchandising and profiting from "giving it away." On this last point, the Dead's lyricist John Perry Barlow worte in 1994, "the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away."

John Perry Barlow goes on to explain that in the digital world, Adam's Smith's "scarcity = value" equation doesn't neatly apply. With the Internet "if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced."

In Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath treats us to "Business Advice from Van Halen" and paint the picture of David Lee Roth as an operational expert (who knew?) They shed light on the now legendary Van Halen clause about "no brown M&Ms." The clause reads "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." Turns out this was a way for the band to ensure that the venue was thoroughly reading the contract. A successful concert is built on the details and if they saw brown M&Ms, that was the band's tip off that other details have probably been missed.

So what are you going to talk about in your next presentation -- Sam Walton and Jack Welch or David Lee Roth? (as if I had to ask)

Google Buzz Vs. Facebook

On Feb 9th Google launched Buzz. After playing with it over the last 2 weeks it seems to begin to get closer to the Facebook message functionality. It also uses @ like twitter to make connecting easier.

Word on the street is that Facebook is architecting it's messaging section of their site from the ground up and turning it into a Web-mail app. This news puts Facebook into direct competition with the likes of Gmail and MSN.

Who will be more powerful?
Google who is extending into the social platform / software space. Facebook the social platform / software of choice for millions globally. Or can MSN extend their functional prowess to more of a social platform?

Rich Media Ad Units Perform Better...Most of the Time

Here's a thought provoking study from Journal of Advertising Research “How Rich-Media Video Technology Boosts Branding Goals.”

The research compared performance of various ad formats (rich media w/video, rich media w/o video, GIF/JPG, simple Flash). The findings? Rich Media with Video unit was the strongest performer in aided brand awareness, brand favorability and purchase intent.

The big surprise is that GIF/JPG was the strongest performer when it came to message association (associating brand with value proposition) and here’s their explanation: “the strong performance of GIF or JPG formats on message association suggests that advertisers have a messaging discipline for these formats that is not being transferred to other advertising formats.”

 

  

Unfortunately “messaging discipline” is something that’s easy to lose in a rich media environment. There’s always the opportunity to squeeze in one more frame to accommodate a tertiary audience, a secondary offer, a few more benefits.

Other lessons? Have a clear messaging goal, match your format to your goal, push to integrate video in rich media.

Phone Wars: Is 2010 the year of mobile content?

It was not enough to have a smartphone.  Now thanks to Google’s launch of its “superphone” you should be able to leap tall buildings with the help of yet another touch screen phone.

The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility seems to be shifting once again. Over the last two years we saw the growth of the mobile “apps” (applications) market drive new consumer computing behaviors. If you have a super smart phone the app stores will allow you to choose which super powers you have.

The Mobile Internet and it’s content appears to be one of the bright spots in our economy. Tuesday, Forrester  released a report that showed the US smartphone penetration is at 17%, which is up from 11% just a year ago.

Whether you are an Apple, Nokia, Google, RIM, HTC, SonyEricksson, Samsung or LG fan the content you can get remains king.  The content super store will provide a new way for brands to create content that entertains, engages and offers new utility for our connected society. 

Will this be the year that pushes our focus to mobile branded content in the form of video, apps and music?

Dispelling The "Above The Fold" Design Myth

An artist's job is to rethink the boundaries of their medium.  Whether it's a canvas or a web browser, our job is to improve its value and use.  Since 1994 web designers, digital gurus and usability pros have debated the topic of designing "above the fold".  The term "above the fold" is a print term that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper.  In the early days this print term was adapted and used in web development to refer the portions of a web page that can be visible without scrolling.  When I started designing web pages most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling.  It just wasn't a natural thing for them to do . As a result,  I would design web pages so that all content would be “above the fold”.   When I was designing e-commerce sites on   AOL, page-level vertical scrolling was not permitted. As AOL moved away from their proprietary screen technology to an open web experience, we enjoyed the luxury of designing longer and wider pages.  That was 15 years ago!  A lot has changed.

That Was Then. This Is Now.
According to ClickTale's scrolling research, Today, 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar. 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent. 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.  As screen resolutions vary greatly, HTML design has improved and browsers have become common place in a users life the time has come for the term and the practice to die! 

The "fold" simply does not exist.  There is significant research, design methods and technology  that renders the "fold" theory useless.  Research like ClickTale's Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1 and Part 2 completely unravels the "Above the fold" myth.  The most compelling test they ran was proving ‘Absolute Scrolling Reach’.

"This graph below shows us how much time visitors paid attention to each section of different-sized web pages as they scrolled through them. ‘Absolute Scrolling Reach’ measures the distance from the page top (in pixels) that a visitor scrolls down the page."

Let's think about it for a moment.  If you subscribe The “fold” theory, you are assuming everyone uses the same size monitor, monitor resolution and Web browser.  More over, you must also assume we all have the same number of toolbars. Obviously there are too many factors involved to identify a consistent fold location.  The "fold" is just silly!  scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with most Web 2.0 design.  Big, clear text and spacious content implies longer web pages.

Web 2.0 Design
Today, I design my pages to use liquid layouts that stretch to the current user's window size in order to avoid frozen layouts that are always the same size. Great consumer centric design does not give equal weight to all the content in a site. It puts its most valuable messages at the top and throughout the design.  If you present compelling content and use proper design queues and tools then your users will find and grab your content.  Here are a few examples of mainstream sites that are designed "below the fold" for millions of uses everyday.

Facebook

The New York Times

YouTube

Where was the fold? 
Did you scroll?  of course you did.   (you are scrolling now)

Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable to contextual advertising.

Look at the 2010 Ford Mustang site. 

They get it. I scrolled up and down, clicked and shared.

If its good they will scroll.
It is imperative that we begin to educate our clients and account teams that this is no longer a best practice. It really never was. Open up your design and stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Educate your peers and clients with these recommendations in mind:

1. Your content is king. If your page contains lots of engaging content, users will scroll to the bottom to view it.
2. Keep important new content that helps users understand the main purpose of your site above the 600 pixel mark.
3. Design universal navigation and business information that can be modular.  It should allow users to manipulate and control its placement. It should also appear above the 600 pixel mark.
4. Minimize your written text and maximize images and video, the web is now a converged 3D medium. Users would rather you engage them instead of asking them to read.  Remember they do scan pages.
5. Use design cues like icons, cut-off images and text blocks to help users expect additional content below the screen.
6. Try to keep browser-less applications within a given screen space and make sure the inputs and outputs of the application appear within that space.

Join me, lets help dispel the urban design myth by sharing this data.

Research used for this post:

• ClickTale's HeatMaps
  
• ClickTale's Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1
• Jared Spool UIE Brain Sparks:Utilizing the Cut-off Look to Encourage Users To Scroll
• Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Changes in Web Usability Since 1994

Moms and Social: Glass Half Empty?

Headline from this Ad Age article "For Moms, Offline Friends Still Wield Heavy Brand Influence" implies that moms aren’t really using social to interact with brands. However, if you look at the numbers 24% moms are using Facebook for product information – while that’s still lower than the 80% of moms who have visited product sites for info, that’s not exactly shabby either.

 

 

The real question is are brands giving moms a reason to engage with them via these channels -- Education? Entertainment? Discounts? What’s the value prop?

Our Love Hate Relationship with Mobile

Everybody has one. You’d never think of leaving home without it. And when you’re without it, you feel anxious, incomplete, like a part of you is missing. And yet as marketers, we largely shun it or in the best case relegate it to the “emerging media” group or the “experimental channel” budget.

What is this love hate relationship we have with mobile phones?

My colleague Thom Kennon gave a thought-provoking presentation yesterday about the role of mobile marketing. He argues that a mobile should be the center of a marketing plan, not simply thought of as another touch point.

When you think of it, mobile isn’t just a channel, it’s the glue that can tie all your channels together.  Wherever your message is, a mobile device is nearby -- driving past the highway billboard, watching TV at home, reading the newspaper at work, the shelf-talker in the store and anywhere there's Internet access.

His challenge to us and mine to you – start your next campaign plan with mobile and see where it takes you.

Facebook's Mobile Growth

Last week I wrote on Facebook's lost youth.  Just as the NYTimes and every social blogger from Silicon Alley to the Silicon Valley is proclaiming Facebook's web death, I think we have missed a growth trend.  25% of Facebook's usage, which is one in four users, approximately 65 million people are engaging via their mobile phones.

Facebook has two mobile web sites: m.facebook.com, which works on any mobile browser, and x.facebook.com, which is designed specifically for touch screen phones like Android, Palm, iPhone and Nokia. These sites have been translated into more than 60 languages and allow you to update your status, browse your news feed and your friends' profiles, comment or "like" stories, and view or update your Facebook Page.

In addition, the recent launch of the Facebook 3.0 iPhone app has renewed interest as the functionality goes far beyond the old browser based functions.

I remember the first mobile version of Facebook, which launched in 2006, was merely a status update (like twitter) and photo upload tool.  Eight months ago, Facebook mobile had climbed to 20 million active users, thanks to the explosion of smart and touch screen phones like the MyTouch 3G, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Nokia, HTC,  Sidekick, and countless other handsets.

Could Facebook's future lie somewhere in between revitalizing the oldest social tool on earth (the phone) and becoming the largest mobile computing platform?

Sources: Facebook Blog, Silicon Alley Insider & AOL Tech

Who has an iPhone? The numbers.

The decision of whether or not to create an iPhone app is coming up with increasing frequency. One of the first questions that comes up is "What percent of our target has an iPhone?" And the answer is...

US iPhone Ownership by Age

We compiled the table above from recent stats published by AdMob and recent Census numbers. This table doesn't include stats on the iPod Touch.

Reading across, 6% of the 13.2 million total iPhone owners in the US are 13-17 years old. Of all 13 to 17 year olds, 3.9% own an iPhone. That is, if your target audience is 13-17 year olds and you create the Killer-iPhone-App-Of-All-Time with 100% download rate, you will have reached 3.9% of your targeted customers. 

When looking at these numbers, a couple of things become pretty clear (but also make the decision of whether or not to create an app more difficult).

1. iPhone Users Span Every Age Range. The question is less about whether an iPhone app is right for your customers. As you can see, there are iPhone users in every age group. There's no easy go/no go decision here. (I can even make a case for the 65+ in that these are likely to be the influencers and opinion leaders in the community)

2. The Addressable Market is Not Large. Even with the largest group of adopters (25-34 year olds), over 90% of that audience do not own an iPhone. An iPhone app is not going to be a "reach" vehicle and regardless of popularity, will not be accessible to a significant percentage of your target.

With these numbers and your estimates of response, you can put together amodel that will help you answer the To App or Not to App question. 

Has Facebook Lost Its Youth?

Just as Facebook launches its latest iPhone app (3.0), the NY Times is reporting a Facebook exodus.  When you see the recent jumps in the site’s overall numbers, an exodus is not immediately evident. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July.  

In Mobile apps, we are finding that users have a core set of utilities and other apps including social networking sites are more disposable.  The average length varies based on entertainment and connectivity factors.  Mobile app user behavior seems to apply to the web based social apps as well.  Once the novelty runs its course, users will move on to something else.

When I first established my Facebook account, it was the place I could connect the brands I worked for to college students and other bloggers.  Today, it resembles the MySpace of 2007.  A personal repository for images, video, text and superfluous applications. In last year's Facebook hype tour, Mark Zuckerberg claimed it was the one stop shop platform for all social interaction.  In January, the numbers were impressive. The 35-54 year old demo was the fastest growing segment, with a 276.4% growth rate over an approximate 6 months. The 55+ demo was not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate.  With those rates of growth, it is hard to see the exodus.

The numbers above only reflect people joining, and nothing more.  The exodus seems to be happening amongst the Facebook early adopters and its core user base, college students.  Many in this demographic have fled to new social software platforms that are less intrusive, more mobile and that have an auto connect to Facebook. (i.e. four square, loopt, friend feed, flickr, friendster, buddy cloud etc.)

Heffernan article outlined seven people who have left the site. She hardly highlights or proves a mass exodus.  After a bit of research, the numbers reflect a significant drop in Facebook's college and youth demographic. In Jan of 09 its largest demographic concentration was amongst the 18-24 year olds, 40.8% which was a significant drop from 53.8% six months prior. (Download 2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics as an Excel spreadsheet)

By no means do I see this trend as the demise of Facebook. If it can sustain the older demographic it could be a rich place to target, reach and engage with a demo that has been slow to adopt the social net in the past.  The demographics are changing rapidly and seem to reflect a mass market media tool.

If you are looking for the youth population, Facebook is not the one stop social shop.  It is merely a small fragment of the media consumed by youth today.  The combination of mobile and television seem to be the best bet as their world revolves around entertaining content, location based connectivity, the search for fame and personal expression.