Thresher – Vol. 1, Summer 2009

thresher Vol. 1, Summer 2009

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About This Book Thresher is a quarterly publication by Freestyle Interactive. We take a deeper look at the trends and technologies that are shaping the world of digital marketing. Our aim is to find a signal among the noise. This book is written by the strategy pod at Freestyle Interactive, a creative digital agency based in San Francisco. We hope you find the information in these pages valuable, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback about everything within. If you like what you read, check out some of the other musings which the strategy pod produces: Gary Stein: http://twitter.com/garyst3in Scott Redick: http://conversationalnuggets.blogspot.com/ Aaron Salis: http://ralphthemagician.com/ Thanks.

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Table of Contents No.1 Mobile: Redefining the Rich Media Landscape For Your Pocket 5

No.2

Social: Full Site Experiences Now Live On Facebook Pages 9

No.3 User Experience: The Star Trek Issue 13

No.4 Video: Shouldn’t You Be Watching TV Instead of Reading This? 17

No.5

Trends: The Desktop Strikes Back 21

No.6 Technology: Reality Is For Noobs 25

No.7 Realtime: Riding the Wave 29

No.8

Data: Marketing by Numbers 33

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A photograph of what a “mobile telephony device” (also known as a cell phone) looked like before the iPhone. This small, handheld device weighed only 28 ounces, and allowed people to talk wirelessly for up to 60 minutes. Unlike the expensive iPhone, the DynaTAC 8000X, pictured above, cost only $3,995 USD.

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N o. 1 Mobile: Redefining the Rich Media Landscape For Your Pocket Today, there are over 40 million people in the U.S. alone who are active users of mobile Internet services. Of the 200 million current users of advanced mobile data services across the U.S. and Europe, almost 60% intend to use mobile data services more than they currently do over the next 24 months.* There is this notion out there that “mobile advertising,” for the new breed of smart phones on the market today, is synonymous with “application development.” But mobile advertising on the iPhone doesn’t always require a full-fledged, branded application (i.e. Virtual Zippo Lighter, Audi A4 Driving Challenge, etc.). While that may be the holy grail of

*

Nielsen Mobile – Critical Mass, July 2008 (http://bit.ly/trfn1) 5

engagement and viral distribution, there exists a wide range of opportunities on mobile devices. † What does this mean? After years of speculation, mobile is finally a viable media platform. But it’s more than that — devices like the iPhone are redefining the concept of rich media on a mobile phone. Thanks to more than 35,000 applications available on the iPhone platform, there are a wide range of advertising opportunities within existing applications. There are a number of mobile advertising networks, (i.e. AdMob, Nokia Interactive Advertising, and even Google AdWords) but one of the more interesting platforms is Medialets. ‡ Medialets is a highly interactive, rich media platform, for iPhone and Android, which allows advertisers and agencies to capitalize on features like motion sensing and geolocation. Rich media advertising on mobile isn’t just something that responds to the pointer on your screen — it interacts with the physical motion of your body, your location, and potentially even the people and objects around you. A few examples of creative executions using the Medialets platform are:
A soda company creates an interactive bottle of soda that is motion-sensitive. (The user shakes up the bottle and it splashes all over the screen.)
A car rental company can determine that a user is outside their typical geography and serve a CPA ad for a discounted rate.
An electronics company showcases a new rebate enticing users to scan a barcode at a nearby store.

†

Nielsen Wire – Desire for Convenience, Features Drives Phone Innovation, March 2009 (http://bit.ly/trfn2) ‡ Medialets – http://www.medialets.com 6


A cruise line offers deals for users in Baltimore and Ft. Lauderdale due to proximity to their ships. Think about a highly targeted ad buy within existing applications that use the iPhone’s accelerometer, which mimics the motion sensing capabilities of the Wii controller, thus giving consumers an accurate taste of the full Wii experience. Moreover, we could use a mobile platform like Medialets to target people in a way never before possible: by targeting only people within a 5-mile radius of a GameStop, and engage them with a call to action to purchase a game at the nearest store... and even supply them a link that gives them directions on the quickest way to get there. That’s the power of mobile.

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The picture above depicts a typical scene from 2003 B.F. (Before Facebook). In the scene, you see several men (and a small dog) engaged in an outdoor ritual known as “camping.” The exact reason for this activity is unknown, but it’s believed that individuals engaged in this sort of activity for the social bonding experience.

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N o. 2 Social: Full Site Experiences Now Live On Facebook Pages Back in March, Facebook relaunched the entire Pages section of the site as part of a larger redesign. This redesign brought Pages more in-line with personal profiles. With this change, brands have now realized that Facebook can be more than just a discussion board – it can be a destination too. Facebook actively develops the application for Pages called “Static FBML,” which allows developers a high level of customization for Pages through FBML (or FaceBook Markup Language). FBML is an evolved subset of HTML (the markup language used to render most web pages). Some HTML elements have been removed, while several have been developed that support Facebook specific features and services (such as comments, for example). 9

But why is FBML important? It’s important because it lets you do a lot more than most people realize at first. You are not limited to merely a standard profile. While you are somewhat limited in terms of layout and design, FBML supports a number of different kinds of embedded media, including Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Facebook has made it a priority to maintain a partnership with Adobe in order to provide tight integration with the Adobe Flash Platform – both within Facebook.com, and outside of Facebook through Facebook Connect and Adobe AIR. A Flash experience can now live on an individual’s Facebook profile as an application, on a Page, and on the desktop as an AIR application; and wherever that application lives, it has full access to a user’s Facebook information. What does a really custom Facebook Page look like? It looks like the TD Money Lounge by Canada Trust, which helps college students learn about post graduation career options; or Target’s Facebook Page, which has a number of interactive Flash units.*† You may notice that the default landing tab for these Pages is not the standard Wall with newsfeed, but rather a custom tab. That’s because Facebook allows you to re-direct non-fans, and people who aren’t logged into Facebook, to any tab you want. You have a 760px-wide canvas that you can basically do anything you want with in order to entice Facebook users to become a fan of your Facebook Page and actively participate in a conversation about your brand or your cause. Why use Facebook Pages?
The Adobe Flash platform is highly integrated with Facebook. Almost anything you’d want to do, you can do.

* Canada Trust – TD Money Lounge Fan Page(http://www.facebook.com/ tdmoneylounge) † Target – Target Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/target)

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Facebook Pages are more than “just groups.” They can be fully interactive site experiences in their own right, and even serve as an e-commerce platform.‡
The audience is already there, and the structure which fosters conversations is built-in. When Target wants to launch a new campaign, they can launch it on Facebook and start from a base of 250,000+ people – with zero paid media. Facebook publishes their own set of guidelines for how people, companies, and businesses should think about using Pages. It’s a good starting point, but the takeaway is simple: A Facebook Page doesn’t have to be an add-on or an extra. For the right audience, a Facebook Page is a destination.

‡

TechCrunch – Facebook Payment Platform To Enter Testing Soon. Only 7 Months Late., May 2009 (http://bit.ly/trfn3) 11

A typical control panel from a late model computer. Without access to the Internet, these early computers were only capable of creating pornography from a predefined set of images. The operator would create the images by adjusting the switches and nobs on the dashboard, while the user in the other room viewed the animated GIF on a 13” color view screen.

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N o. 3 User Experience: The Star Trek Issue Remember Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – the one where they go back in time to save the whales? At one point, Mr. Scott needs to make some transparent aluminum to repair the Enterprise. He sits down in front of a computer and starts asking it questions. Disappointed by the Mac’s lack of response, Scotty starts typing away and constructs the blueprint for the futuristic material, much to the amazement of FlexiCorp engineers. We’re closer to Mr. Scott’s expectations of what a computer can do than you might think. A few existing technologies could be combined together to create a user interface worthy of Gene Roddenberry. Cloud computing. The Internet has been abuzz with the release of Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha feels at first like 13

an odd science-and-math search engine. * But it’s not a search engine. It’s something else. The makers of Wolfram|Alpha call it a “computational knowledge engine.” The engine isn’t meant to retrieve data – it’s meant to manipulate data. It was built by the same people who built Mathematica, the sophisticated math software. Right now the site is focused on purely mathematical queries. So, with Wolfram|Alpha we learned that:
San Francisco’s population is 34.58% the size of the population in Paris.
It was a rainy day in Boise, Idaho on July 1, 1982 with an average wind speed of 7 mph.
The distance from our sun to Rigel Kentaurus A is 4.29 light years. The full implications of this remain to be seen, but it is perhaps the most tangible expression of cloud computing yet. Rather than software making these calculations on your desktop, it’s all happening within your browser. On-the-fly user-created mashups. Mozilla is developing an interesting browser extension called Ubiquity. † Ubiquity is better experienced than explained, but the short explanation is that it’s an application that does whatever you tell it to do. Let’s say you are making plans to have dinner with your friend Sarah, and you want to email her a review and directions to Dosa in the Mission. Right now you’d open up Gmail, open up a second window for Yelp, look up Dosa, and copy and paste that info into your Gmail. With Ubiquity, you call up the command window and tell Ubiquity, “email Sarah the Yelp review and map for Dosa.” That’s it. Done.

* †

Wolfram|Alpha – http://www.wolframalpha.com Mozilla Ubiquity – http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/ubiquity/

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Voice recognition. Voice recognition is becoming a mainstream technology with the iPhone. The first thing you do when you get an iPhone is go to a bar and show off the amazing Shazam app – which tells you what song is playing on the jukebox. The new iPhone 3GS has a voice control function that lets you make calls and call up songs with voice commands. Ubisoft has developed games like Tom Clancy’s Endwar that uses voice recognition to issue squad commands and the like. What this all means:
Consumers will continue to demand more intuitive web interfaces that mimic the way we think, speak and act in our normal life, not just when we are on the computer.
Functionality like Ubiquity could have a profound impact on the Web publishing economy, as users no longer need to visit sites like Yelp to interact; thus they no longer need to see ads on those sites.
With open APIs, intriguing opportunities exist for applications that utilize multiple data sets. ‡ Imagine an engine that takes data from Twitter and runs it through Wolfram’s computational algorithms to pinpoint the historical context.
As voice recognition adoption increases, we can propose new highly functional and entertaining marketing experiences, especially on smart phones.
Transparent aluminum, dilithium crystal-powered space ships, and time travel are just around the corner!§

‡

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Transparent aluminum actually exists. It is known as aluminium oxynitride, and is technically a ceramic, not a metal alloy. (http://bit.ly/thresherfn4) §

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Today, many of us enjoy watching moving pictures on our color televisions, but such devices did not always exist. Before TV, people enjoyed spending time listening to radio broadcast on an AM radio like the one pictured above. People would often listen for hours on end, without any visual stimulation at all. Amazing, but true.

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N o. 4 Video: Shouldn’t You Be Watching TV Instead of Reading This? According to Nielsen, the answer is yes. The Nielsen Three Screen Report found that the average American watches 153 hours of TV every month at home. While that might seem absurd, the more comprehensive Video Mapping Study by the Council for Research Excellence, or CRE, has found similar results.* The bottom line is clear: people are spending more time than ever before watching TV. Viewers are exposed to, on average, roughly an hour a day of live TV ads and promos.†

* Nielsen Wire – Desire For Convenience, Features Drives Phone Innovation, March 2009 (http://bit.ly/thresherfn5) † Council for Research Excellence – Video Mapping Study, March 2009 (http://bit.ly/thresherfn6)

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Both the Nielsen report and the CRE report were done, not by survey, but by actually shadowing individual consumers throughout the day and recording their media habits. Both came to the same general conclusion – people are watching a tremendous amount of TV. The two age blocks with the lowest TV consumption? Young adults (18-24) and 35-44; TV comprises less than half of their exclusive daily screen time.† Exclusive daily screen time, in this case, refers to the amount of time spent with the TV and no other secondary or tertiary screen, like a notebook or iPod. TV never went away, and it isn’t going to. We often think of the Internet as being the “New TV.” While that may be true for some, it isn’t true for most. Rather, Internet video is now running parallel to TV. People are watching short-form content created by Revision 3 and College Humor alongside Lost and 24. It’s more important now than ever to have an integrated campaign that lives on multiple platforms. What we know about video:
Except for the teenage years, viewing of traditional television increases with age; the viewing of video on the Internet peaks among young adults while viewing mobile video is highest in the teen years.
Men watch video on mobile phones more than women, and women watch video on the Internet and TV more than men.
Those under the age of 55 are media multi-taskers. Roughly 30% of their media time is shared between two or more screens. (i.e. watching a video on YouTube with the TV on in the background)
The work day (M-F,
9am to 5pm)
continues to be primetime for Internet video.

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A medium like TV will never die – it will simply evolve. More and more users might be sharing screen time with other devices, but even still they are consuming video content. Because video is an asset that can easily be repurposed for multiple platforms, there’s an added benefit to creating really compelling TV spots. Take the spots that Pepsi ran during the Super Bowl, for example, which directed users to partake in a larger site experience and to discover more content on YouTube. Or have a look at the recent Honda spot, Let It Shine, which was originally shot for TV, but has been repurposed for the web and lives on Vimeo as part of an Internet video experience with an interesting new spin on the page-takeover.‡ Great TV can live anywhere, but making the same spot great on the web or mobile phone takes a little extra thinking, and a more strategic understanding of how consumers interact with their screens.

‡

Honda Insight – Let It Shine on Vimeo, April 2009 (http:// www.vimeo.com/4281939) 19

Before the invention of things like RSS and Adobe AIR, people were forced to consume information by venturing out into meatspace and “purchasing” a loose bundle of papers known as the newspaper. In the picture above, you see a street vendor trying to peddle his newspapers. These newspapers often contained advertising. Some were even printed in multiple colors.

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N o. 5 Trends: The Desktop Strikes Back The savior of print advertising may well be... the desktop. Yes, the desktop. Newspapers and magazines have had a hard time monetizing their content on the web. The problem is simple: Now that the web is ubiquitous (and mostly free), far fewer people feel compelled to buy newspapers. In order to stay relevant in the face of this shift, publications like The New York Times have gone online. At first, they charged for premium subscriptions, but few people paid for their services. So few, in fact, that they dropped them. Instead, the costs are now paid for by filling their pages so full of ads that they become hard to read, as the actual articles get pushed further and further into smaller and smaller columns. But that may well change in the not too distant future. People may finally start buying digital copies of newspapers and other print applications, thanks to Adobe AIR. 21

Applications like the Times Reader are paving the way for a new kind of desktop experience.* For a nominal fee ($3.45/wk), you can have what is, essentially, the entire print publication pushed out to your desktop client. There’s a free version too, although your access is limited to front page article content. It’s all rendered beautifully, and with minimal obtrusive advertising. They’ve created a new way to deliver material on the web. It’s not an RSS feed, it’s not a website, and it’s not an expensive premium service. It’s something entirely new. And the The New York Times Company hasn’t stopped there. They’ve become keen on the idea of creating applications that will help them learn more about the kinds of information people share. They have created an application called ShifD, which lets people share notes and other location based information through an Adobe AIR application that sits on the desktop.† (RED) has also created an interesting application, called (RED)Wire, which lets users subscribe to a service that pushes out new content (music and music videos) to a desktop client on a weekly basis for a small fee.‡ These applications are paving the way for a new kind of owned media channel. Even Fallon has created their own Adobe AIR application, Skimmer, which allows users to bring not only Facebook and Twitter to the desktop – but also Flickr, YouTube and Blogger.§ Why would an advertising agency create a desktop social media application? Because it also allows them access to a wealth of information about users social media habits. It also allows them to bring the Internet to the desktop in an interesting way; and parts of this application can be repurposed for any number of other prospective projects.

*

The Times Reader – http://timesreader.nytimes.com ShifD – http://shifd.com ‡ (RED)Wire – http://www.redwire.com § Skimmer – http://www.fallon.com/skimmer †

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Why the desktop?
With Adobe AIR, the sky’s the limit in terms of creative executions. You aren’t limited by dimensions or browser capabilities.
People are willing to pay for the convenience of having content pushed out directly to their desktop. Think of it as an RSS feed... on steroids... with as much rich media and interactivity as you can imagine.
You don’t always need an Internet connection to use the application or access content, since it can be downloaded locally. In a world where people are browsing with a dozen different tabs open in their browser, it makes sense to consider creating applications and experiences that live outside the browser and in their own space. Well, at least until we start running a dozen different applications on our desktop; at which point we’ll need a new kind of application to help us manage those as well.

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Before augmented reality, there was virtual reality. In 1995, Nintendo released a portable video game console called “Virtual Boy,” which allowed users to experience video games in a whole new way – by creating irreversible damage to one’s retinas. The user would look into the goggles, and the unit would display a world of red, 3D wireframes.

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N o. 6 Technology: Reality Is For Noobs Augmented reality (or AR) has been around for a while now, but it has mostly been a gimmick. AR lets you use the webcam on your computer to create virtual 3D objects you can manipulate within the video. How? The camera looks for a specific barcode or marker on a piece of paper, and then maps a 3D object to that space, which you can interact with and move around. Car manufacturers have adopted this technology as a way to let people play with a 3D model of their cars. BMW took it a step further and created an application for their new Z4 Roadster that would let a car drive off of the paper and onto your desk. You can see a video of this in action on YouTube, or try it out yourself.*† As cool as this is, up until now it has provided no real utility to the consumer outside of an “Oh, wow” moment. And * †

YouTube – New BMW Z4 in 3D, April 2009 (http://bit.ly/thresherfn8) BMW Z4 in 3D Augmented Reality – http://www.bmw.co.uk/z43d 25

while that may have been the point thus far, AR has finally turned a corner and headed down a useful street. Enter Wikitude, the first real application of AR that actually enhances reality. ‡ Look through your phone, wherever you are, and Wikitude lets you access Wikipedia as you look at real world objects through your mobile phone. It knows where you are and what you’re looking at. It is truly the stuff of science fiction. Looking at the Eiffel Tower? Wikitude will overlay content from the Wikipedia article on your screen in a callout box. Currently, Wikitude only works on Google Android phones. IBM recently launched a similar project, IBM Seer, using AR in a branded context for Wimbledon 2009.§ IBM Seer also runs on Google Android, and provides detailed information overlays about placemarks around Wimbledon. They also aggregated tweets happening around Wimbledon in order to display realtime information within the IBM Seer application. In the gaming arena, Nintendo is trying to elevate the entire category. with a game called GhostWire. The game uses the video capabilities of the new Nintendo DSi to create the impression that the handheld itself has the ability to detect paranormal activity. It’s an innovative idea, one which opens the doors to all kinds of other possibilities. If you watch the trailer, you get the feeling that it might even be a little too real. It brings a whole new meaning to the term, “immersive gameplay.”** Eventually, we may see games that require you to be in a particular physical location, or obtain some physical object, in order to unlock something in-game. AR is really just getting started, but right now we can do two things: 1. Manipulate virtual objects in the real world. ‡

Wikitude World Browser– http://bit.ly/thresherfn9 IBM Seer – http://www.wimbledon.org/ibm/ ** GhostWire Trailer – http://bit.ly/thresherfn10 §

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2. Overlay information from anywhere onto the real world landscape. Only now, with handhelds like the Palm Pre and HTC G1, we have the processing power to make these sorts of experiences possible on a mobile platform; and that’s really why it’s making the transition from expensive eye candy toys to useful applications that people really want to interact with. It’s just a matter of time until the science fiction behind films like Minority Report becomes a standard advertising tool. How long until you can walk past a bus stop advertisement and see a 3D render of yourself wearing a new pair of Levi’s jeans? Probably not that long.

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In the picture above, a young woman is seen using an early beta version of Twitter. Early versions of Twitter did not support geolocation and only supported up to 139 characters of text. All tweets had to be saved locally – on paper. In order to search for hashtags, users would have to manually rearrange thousands of pieces of paper by hand.

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N o. 7 Realtime: Riding the Wave Information, and how we search for information, is moving into a new era of accessibility. We are moving into a world where you don’t have to go out and get information – instead, it comes to you. We’re moving into a world where information on any given topic, event, or conversation is available to everyone as it happens, not after. This is the future of real-time information. Today, we use email and leave comments. All our information gets archived, and then we search for it. This is the fundamental concept behind Google’s search service. With today’s search engines, we search for information on billions of websites that have been archived and indexed. Tomorrow we won’t. Tomorrow we’ll search through streams of information. Right now, Google is already testing a new version of their search

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engine, code-named Caffeine, which is designed to adapt to this new trend.* Twitter has shown us the power of instant information and the ability to search it. When Michael Jackson died, it got posted on TMZ first, and everyone on Twitter knew about it before the mainstream media outlets even got word of a possible event. This is the kind of world we are moving into. Now that we have high-speed data access on cell phones and wireless access in almost every coffee shop and bookstore, we have instant access to almost everything on the Internet. But that’s not enough. If the past ten years have been about creating an enviroment where we have instant access to information on any device, the next 10 years may very well be about accessing information as soon as it’s created. And Google isn’t stopping with their new search engine. Google is paving the way for an entirely new communication platform – Google Wave, which will allow people to collaborate, search, and communicate in real time with hundreds of other users. If you want to get a taste of what this new enviroment might be like, just have a look at the existing Google Docs/Spreadsheets application. You can have a dozen different people compose a document or spreadsheet at the same time. There’s no need to save a file, email it, revise, iterate the file name, send it back, ad infinitum. Just edit the file once, and everyone sees what’s happened. Now imagine that platform, only with audio, video, real-time instant messaging, and instant language translation... for everything. This is what the future is going to look like, and many consumers are already starting to expect access to real-time tracking and information. People are coming to expect that relevant information is to be pushed out to them, wherever they * TechCrunch – Caffeine: It’s Google On Red Bull, Or Something, August 2009, (http://bit.ly/TxAN7)

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are. Facebook has changed its entire layout to better provide users with a constant stream of information, although it’s not quite real-time yet (it will be soon). Many of the mobile applications for iPhone and Android now provide mobile social networking functionality. If you’re using an application like Brightkite, for example, and a friend stops at the Starbucks across the street, you’ll know about it. Developers are also getting excited about what real-time collaboration means for the future of web applications. Anil Dash, Vice President of Six Apart, has coined a term for this new form of real-time information transport – pushbutton.† The big idea here is that, not only are you going to have access to real-time information streams, but it’s going to get delivered right to you, like a text message or phone call might. You’ll choose what (or who) you want to know about, and then you’ll know as soon as something happens. But what happens once we have instant access to instant information? Well, at that point someone is going to have to invent a time machine, so that we can have instant access to trends and discussions that haven’t even happened yet.

†

Anil Dash – The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real, July 2009 (http://bit.ly/4B6DsS) 31

A typical calculator used in university mathematics classes. This portable unit, weighed in at just 27lbs. Users key in their information, and the system prints out a response on a rolling piece of paper. This allowed users the ability to search through their history for the first time, simply by winding back the roll.

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N o. 8 Data: Marketing by Numbers Since September 12, 1998, Alex van Es’ toilet has been flushed 52,428 times, and the average flush lasts 1.34 seconds. He’s received 42,082 letters in the past nine years. And, just in case you were wondering, the average time his refrigerator door is open is 31.12 seconds. I know this because back when people were still using Netscape, Alex set up his house with a bunch of RFID monitors and webcams, which automatically published the data to his website.* People started paying attention to the data he published, doing things like correlating the items that were being thrown in the trash can to his frequency of toilet flushing.

*

Icepick – http://www.icepick.com 33

What was once an oddity is now an important cultural trend and compelling online marketing strategy – the socialization of personal data. Graphic designer Nicholas Felton has created a fascinating site called Daytum, which lets you capture and share any kind of data you’d like. Slice and dice your sandwich-use activity; or capture how many books you’ve read, and categorize by length and genre. The site was inspired by his, “Feltron Annual Report,” a personal project that elegantly captures and publishes an astounding array of personal informatics. † If you’re a road warrior, check out Dopplr. It’s a social network that tracks and shares traveling information, like the carbon footprint you generate. And Bedposted promises to give you insight into your love life, so you can analyze how often you have sex, with whom, and in what position. Brands are in on this trend as well. The world of sports, always influenced and informed by personalized data for training, was the first to figure it out. Nike Plus is probably the most famous example. Capture the data about your runs via a transmitter from your shoe to your iPod, then publish it. Now Garmin, Adidas, and a host of other sports brands are pursuing similar strategies. Fiat EcoDrive analyzes your driving habits. You download the application, then plug a USB cord into the card, and learn whether your driving habits are environmentally friendly or not. Along the way you get a whole bunch of data about your driving, which might lead you to start thinking differently about well ingrained driving habits. This sharing of personal data appeals to a number of innate human drives that are only exaggerated on the Internet. The first is that it we are inherently interested in ourselves. †

Feltron Eight – http://www.feltron.com

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Personality and style quizzes are a staple of magazines. Now combine that with real time polling data on the Internet, and we not only learn something about ourselves, we importantly understand how we stack up against everyone else. And as The New York Times notes, “For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t random, and are more orderly than some might expect.”‡ These data streams are exactly the kind of thing that are fun and easy to share on social networks. Brands that can co-create these streams with their consumers will enjoy the benefits of an amplified presences on these networks. And as this capability becomes more frequently built into products – and built into the marketing of those products – the information will cease to be seen as a novelty and be perceived as a necessity. We used to think of data as something that informs marketing. Now data can be the marketing itself.

‡

The New York Times – The New Examined Life, December 6, 2008 35

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