March 2008 Archives

It's the end of the quarter today, so I've been looking at some very broad-brush metrics for this blog.

Bearing in mind that this is now officially the most unpopular UK marketing blog, the numbers are understandably low.  All the same, visitors who come via search results consistently spend less time on my site, visit less pages and have the highest tendency to visit one page only compared to traffic referred by other sites or coming via direct navigation.

Not that I mean to demonize search - just to qualify the feeling I sometimes get that people regard search marketing as the only show in town when it comes to traffic generation.

Of course, whilst search may lack a little in terms of quality, it's delivering more traffic than any other source. And if I ever want to climb those important Ad Age Power 150 rankings, it is traffic that I need!

I wrote an opinion piece in this month's Revolution, but they edited out some of my 'funnier' jokes, so here is the unedited version. Yes, I know, the shorter version probably is better!

Guilding the lily

One of my first ever jobs was as a picker at a chicken farm. In essence, my job involved walking into a chicken shed, picking up six chickens, walking out of the shed and putting them into a crate. As a job it did have its limitations (one of which was that we were served a meal before our shift which invariably consisted of some variation of chicken) – but a major advantage was that in casual conversation it was pretty easy to explain my job to a stranger.

Over the years my working conditions have slightly improved, my diet is more varied, but my job titles and those of my colleagues have become more and more obscure. Does the woman in the street really have the faintest idea what an Information Architect actually does? Or a Usability Consultant… or a Flash Designer?

Alongside strange job titles comes a fog of even more mysterious jargon. We’re currently working on a training scheme for our graduate intake, so asked for some feedback from the previous year’s intake. The consistent feedback is that new entrants to the agency spend the first few weeks not having the first idea what anyone else is talking about.

Why do we do this? The answer I think comes in the decline of the guild system.

Once upon a time, those of us going into trade would cheerfully apprentice ourselves into the appropriate guild. The City of London publishes a convenient alphabetical list of guilds, from apothecaries through to woolmen, stopping off at bowyers, cordwainers, farriers, horners, fletchers, paviors, scriveners, wheelwrights, loriners, haberdashers and farriers.

Guilds didn’t just provide training; they also safeguarded wages. You couldn’t just pitch up in London and set yourself up as a scrivener or a cordwainer – you had to see through the appropriate apprenticeship period.

By contrast – and with due respect to my peers – you pretty much could pitch up at any agency and call yourself a planning director or a usability consultant. What’s to stop you? The main barrier to entry I suspect is simply being able to talk in jargon and keep a straight face. “I need to get the user process flow diagrams sorted out before I can finish these wireframes.” Of course you do!

Will jargon and strange job titles be enough to safeguard our cosy careers in the future? Of course it will! One of my favourite slides is all about ‘conversion attribution modelling’: surely only about 10 people in the world have a clue what I am on about?

And when it comes to jargon, our ultimate weapon is the acronym. What buying model shall we favour on this media plan? CPA or CPC, CPM or CPT? Oh drat, the last two are the same – but who would ever notice?
We can learn much from our colleagues in the IT community. They have trumped the simple acronym with even more obscure recursive acronyms! A recursive acronym is defined by Wikipedia as “an abbreviation that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands”. To put it another way, a recursive acronym is an in-joke at the expense of the poor innocent who ever ask what it means.

Great examples include LAME – Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder (hey, but even funnier, it is an MP3 encoder) or PINE which stands intriguingly for Pine Is Not Elm.

So we don’t need guilds, thank you very much. Absolutely anyone can work here, once they’ve spent a few years figuring out the job titles, jargon and acronyms. So long as they can put up with no one ever understanding what they do at work…

Today's purchase of Bebo by AOL for $850m is bound to focus attention on Facebook's supposed $15bn valuation.

That puts a value on each Facebook user of around $300, whilst Bebo is only bringing in $20 per user.

Even allowing for the younger crowd on Bebo, the disparity does look pretty large.  Especially when you consider that Bebo has been behind a lot of really interesting innovation in the space, like Open Media, Kate Modern and the imminent Endemol tie-in, Gap Year. 

The $15bn valuation of Facebook is based largely on Microsoft's purchase last year of 1.6% of Facebook for $240m.  But that deal was a lot about ensuring that Microsoft could broke ad-space on Facebook - and of course, that it could keep Google out of the party.

There's was a brilliantly cynical comment on the Fake Steve Jobs blog last year, which perhaps held a germ of truth:

Picture this: Zuckerberg's got a big fish on the line for real money at a $15 Bill valuation. But is having trouble landing it. So he calls up his buddy at MS (formerly of Groove Networks) and his other contacts from working with MS so far on selling ads. They work out a deal where they get to say publicly that MS has dropped $240 Mill for 1.6%. What isn't so public is that a lot of it works out to funny-money; MS product, MS services contracts, consulting fees, etc. And a good deal of the real cash MS looks to get back with side contracts for future purchases from MS. So the real money spent is much smaller but Facebook still gets real investment because MS is just a ringer in the crowd to suck in the real marks. And MS gets their hedge on Facebook at a discount by trading on their name. Plus MS gets sales to Facebook on the books to add a little juice to their earnings number. 

Anyway, good luck to AOL. Whilst all the attention seems to be on the Microsoft-Yahoo bid, AOL seem to be making some smart buys recently.

Not the kind of headline you get to write every day. 

Out-law.com reports that Yahoo! has won a lawsuit brought against them for trademark infringement by Mr Spicy, a "London-based catering business".

On the face of it, it doesn't sound like Victor Wilson, the owner of Mr Spicy, had much of a case - Sainsbury's were bidding on the term 'spicy', which was broad-matching against 'Mr Spicy'.

The judge also suggested that there wouldn't have been a problem if Sainsbury's had actually been bidding on 'Mr Spicy' - or at least I think this is what he is saying here:

"There can be no objection to Yahoo, if this is what they want to do, to solicit from third parties the use by those third parties, in return for payment, of a keyword 'Mr Spicy' if they are going to attach 'Mr Spicy' to goods and services different from those protected in Mr Wilson's case."

The case was dismissed as being 'totally without merit'.

 

Interesting announcement on the Google Adwords blog about a forthcoming enhancement to Quality Score: Google will soon take landing page load time into account when assessing the quality of a page.

On the face of it, this is fair enough - slow load time contributes to a pretty poor user experience. And this is not a new discovery - here is Jakob Nielsen talking about 'The Need for Speed' way back in 1997:

"Every Web usability study I have conducted since 1994 has shown the same thing: users beg us to speed up page downloads. In the beginning, my reaction was along the lines of "let's just give them better design and they will be happy to wait for it". I have since become a reformed sinner since even my skull is not thick enough to withstand consistent user pleas year after year."

But - now that over 90% of the UK's internet connections are broadband - isn't Google fighting yesterday's battle here?

Well access speeds are certainly speeding up - but so is our appetite for richer content. For instance, YouTube is now experimenting with higher resolution videos - better for the user, but yet another drain on bandwidth.

And ironically one of the biggest drags on page load time seems to be the ability of adservers to deliver banner ads onto pages.  In fact Google singles out interstitial ads as a particular problem in its blog.

So there's a cynical argument that if you choose to cram your landing page with banner advertising, Google will charge you more for traffic to that page.

But I'd turn it the other way round - Google is incentivizing you to create relevant landing pages that load quickly.  By all means put richer content like video onto landing pages (and we've had some great results by doing just that) - but make sure the video is user-initiated rather than adding to the initial page load time.