Marc Ryan
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Posts by Marc Ryan
The pendulum of the OS
May 8th
Photo: collinox - http://www.flickr.com/photos/collinox/
After decades of domination with their ubiquitous Windows operating system the planets are aligning to put Microsoft on the defensive and open the door to other operating systems becoming a viable option for the future. While many of my colleagues might argue that this day is unlikely to be nowhere on the horizon, I beg to differ. When you can see the signs (and products) on the market it means were only really a couple years away. Consider the following:
Rise of the smart phone This should seem obvious. For years most people still remained ensconsced in their perception of the cell phone as something akin to the Startac, a device which made communication truly mobile. Then the Handspring phone hit the scene and we saw our first generation of the Palm OS phone. While the Handspring was somewhat of a failure the Palm Treo certainly did quite well. Soon we had Blackberries and Windows Mobile and the smartphone was the latest geek chic accessory. But the team that had imagined these phones had visions that didn’t depart far from the email/address/calendar on your phone theory. It took a truly inventive company to change the rules of the game, and it happened 2 years ago when Apple released the iPhone. Here was a device that while described as a phone is truly nothing more than a portable computer. With the fully functional browser, camera, MP3 and video player, it was and still is the ultimate convergence device. The other thing it undoubtedly represents is the future of computing. The iPhone might be too small to be a productive day to day business tool but that a simple engineering problem. What it excels in is bringing a new easy to use computing platform to the masses, once the device is scaled it’ll likely push stronger market share for Apple.
But let’s not be so quick to hand the mobile OS crown to Apple. Last year we saw the release of the first Google Android phone and later this year we’ll see a new phone OS from Palm. What’s most important about these OS’ is that they introduce consumers to new computing platforms disguised as a phone. Google’s the first we’ve seen make a concerted jump from the phone to the PC and it’s likely we’ll see more.
Cloud computing has been a new buzzword of late but it’s one which has big implications for the future of the operating system. When I look at computing over the years I think of the progression through the visual of a pendulum swinging. Back when computing was the realm of big companies and universities, access to computing resources were through dummy terminals hooked up to mainframe computers in a back office some where. Of course you still used keyboards and monitors but they were tapping into the same computer everyone else used instead of a local processor. This shared environment changed when the pendulum swung far to the right through the introduction of the personal computer. No longer did you need to share resources on one machine but you had your own machine with it’d own processor, hard drive, memory and operating system. The pendulum has been leaning toward the personal computer for some time now, but the combined forces of Moore’s law driving down the costs of computing and increasing availability of high speed internet access are enabling the rise of cloud computing, a force that is driving the pendulum back in the other direction.
Cloud computing, perhaps more accurately described as distributed computing, is nothing more than many computers operating in parallel for the purposes of enabling a shared platform for running programs in an environment where the inputs and outputs are coming through the internet. In effect, a distributed computing platform is a shared computer, not unlike the mainframe, and the only tool needed to access the platform is a web browser.
The browser is the key to my belief that change is on the way. If you run your word processor in a distributed computing environment all you need to access it is your browser, the same is true of email, or file storage. If you look at some of the big initiatives the power players are working on you’ll see distributed computing all over the place (Amazon EC3, Google App Engine, Microsoft Live Mesh). These companies are banking on the fact that in the future you’ll be running all of your software on the internet and not on your local computer. If that is truly the case we’ll soon see operating systems geared around the browser more than the hard drive.
Admittedly the software available through the browser doesn’t yet rival what’s available on the PC, but things are getting better every day. I’m not quite sure if we’ll see a gradual migration from hard drive computing to browser based computing or if someone will release a dream app that speeds the migration along rapidly. Regardless change is coming, and no matter what form it takes companies are already lining up to grab a share of the OS market (Presto, Hyperspace, Winki) and their key selling points hit Microsoft where it’s weakest – a shorter boot-up time. The question of who’ll win the battle for the operating system has yet to be decided, but with Google’s move into Netbooks it appears the skirmishes that smaller companies have brought to Microsoft are over and the real battle has truly begun.
Fragmentation – Where’s my uber content filter?
May 7th
Photo: amagill - http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/
What I failed to recognize but now see clearly is that the TV 10 years ago was just like the Internet is today. It was loaded with information, much of it semi relevant but interesting none the less. However, with the antiquated TV guide listings you’d have to sit down and pour through the paper magazine to really understand what was on. You then had to set aside time in your life to participate in the media because once it aired it was unlikely you’d get another change to see the show anytime soon. Then when fragmentation seemed to hit it’s peak and we were all but ready to give up, we find ourselves in the world of the DVR.
The way I look at it, is that in TV (v1.0) I had a device that was not portable that I had to schedule my life around yet contained some interesting information. In TV (v1.0) I lived with it in a blissfully ignorant way, taking advantage of it when it served my purposes but not caring about it when I had other things going on. The user interface in TV (v1.0) was simple in a Googlesque way: power, volume up/down, channel up/down. However, true usability couldn’t be had without a subscription to a weekly paper guide to the services (aka TV Guide). Life was simple, the usability of the product was handicapped by the burden of using a TV guide to know what to watch.
Then I got TV (v2.0), and everything changed. The interface became way more complicated with search, on screen guides, and even (in the case of TIVO) pattern analysis. With TV (v2.0) I found it worthwhile to no longer worry about my schedule. I could record any show I wanted and watch it whenever I wanted. TV consumption data shows that this has worked. But despite the great tools I still sit in front of my 1000 channel TV and spend most of my time watching shows on 2-4 networks. The reality is I feel like I’m drinking from the fire hose and someone needs to come up with a good way to find the shows I want to watch. Until that day (and BTW TIVO isn’t what I’m talking about), I find solace in the media outlets I’ve chosen for regular viewing with a show sprinkled in here and there from other channels.
So now take all the problems that exist in my TV (v.2.0) example and make them mobile and ubiquitous – that’s the Internet. Between following people on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Facebook, etc. and reading my RSS feeds, Twines, ensembli, NYTimes, etc. I have no time left for anything else. When it comes to the web I drink from the fire hose every day whether it’s on my laptop or blackberry I’m overly connected. While the problem that TV presents me with seems eminently manageable in my life (after all it is only entertainment), what I get out of the web is information, the stuff I’m not willing to just ignore. I’m not exactly sure how to get a handle around the information feed I pull from the web. I crave the time when some autonomous agent finds and filters all my content and only presents me with what’s relevant, but I’m sure even then it’ll be overwhelming. Until such a day arrives I’ll be sporadically tweeting, digging, google readering, evernoting, and hoping that at some point I’ll have time for myself.
Measuring the most valuable brands (the easy way)
May 3rd
Last week Millward Brown released the results of their BrandZ top 100 most valuable global brands list. The brand research geek in me is truly fascinated by brand equity research and ever since Millward Brown started releasing this data I’ve been following along. I have to commend them on all of the work they put into the research, it sure sounds like a pretty cool model but there’s this part of me wonders if this is too complicated. To test my theory I figured I’d try and replicate the top line results in my own biased way.
The commonly held belief is that the difference in assets and market cap is what’s accounted for by the brand. Understandably this is overstating things considerably since there are complicating factors. The one, and probably most important complicating factor is that it doesn’t take consumer opinion into consideration. One may argue that consumer opinion is built into the market cap through consumer transactions translating to revenue, but I feel that there are brands out there that are seen as bell weathers whether you buy the product or not. So for my model I included consumer opinion. In fact my experience has been that when you ask consumers a direct question you can be pretty confident that they’ll give you a straight answer. So with that in mind I assumed that if I just asked consumers what brands are the best they’ll give me the right answers. My goal with this project was to keep things simple, that means I wanted to see if I could replicate the topline results that Millward Brown had gotten from their BrandZ study but with a lot less work. I was looking to end up with the following ranking : Google, Microsoft, Coca Cola, IBM, McDonalds, Apple, ChinaMobile, GE, Vodafone, Marlboro.
Aggregate score calculation
As you can see from the example above Google comes up with an aggregate score of 7.5. Think of this as a weighted result that suggests that 7.5 of the 10 people thought Google was a valuable brand. Completing this exercise across all of the brands I had my consumer opinion data which I called aggregate consumer opinion. Looking at the ranking of aggregate consumer opinion scores for each of the brands I realized that my consumer survey was okay. The reality is the folks I talked to had no idea how to rate Vodafone or ChinaMobile. Not that I blame them, both companies branding efforts are directed overseas and not to the US. For the purposes of this analysis I decided to drop them from the results and try to replicate to ranking without those two brands. Now a second look at the US only ranking and viola! success.
US Ranking
In retrospect I should have just asked the question unaided, that may have made a better experiment, but alas this blog is a hobby and no one’s paying me to do this so my effort ends there. Regardless of the veracity of my results I think the point I was trying to make still stands: despite the fact that us researchers like to get all complicated with methodology we often don’t give the population much credit. They have an opinion and often it reflects the same thing our fancy model will tell us, we just need to ask. The thing is researchers are doing what they do because they get a kick out of data, and trying out new approaches to analyzing data is mana from heaven. It’s really the same in many jobs out there, ask a surgeon and he’ll tell you he loves doing new procedures way more than the same boring stuff over and over again.
The reality is that the BrandZ study goes way beyond ranking of brands and provides a pretty cool scoring system for quantifying brand value (something I ignored). I can imagine it also serves as an excellent normative database for benchmarking brand value for clients. I guess what I’m saying it I think the research is pretty cool, but as is the case with all research that’s been summed up to a data nugget, I find it none too exciting to see a ranking of the top 10 global brands. As it turns out if I wanted that ranking I could have asked my friends.
Oh how I miss Firefox
May 1st
Way back when Google first came onto the scene I was blown away with what they’d been able to make happen with search. Needless to say I’ve become somewhat of a Google junkie, willing to try everything they’ve come out with. I’m got my love it – hate it list (reader, voice, gmail, definitely love it; docs definitely hate it), and was willing to give the chrome browser my full attention when it came out late last year. I immediately downloaded the software and was wowed by the interface but went back to Firefox out of familiarity. Around 4 months ago I decided to give it another shot and can honestly say that I love the browser and have been a pretty hard core convert based on three key features: the omnibar, the interface and the speed. Let me tackle them in reverse order.
- The Speed: You never know how much you appreciate speed in a browser until you don’t have it. The start-up is blazingly fast. I click on the logo and within seconds I have a window. Not something I can say for Firefox which takes for-e-v-e-r to load. The handling of pages in Chrome is much faster but I’m not sure many users will see the difference.
- The Interface: Nice and clean. I like how the browser gives way to the content, no clunky toolbars, no excess of icons, it’s all content. On the downside the lack of buttons can make it difficult to find some features (bookmarks are complicated to access).
- The Omnibar: Simple innovation. I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened before but the idea that you can use one entry field for addresses and search certainly simplifies the navigation experience. Now that I’m chromified I find myself trying to use Firefox and Internet Explorer the same way – completely frustrating.
Now on the downside it is a beta (or at least the version I have installed) and tends to crash on some pages. I’ve also found many pages that just weren’t built to the HTML standards that Chrome supports, so there is some loss of page functionality. While publishers are quick to fix their code to make their sites functional in Chrome, there are still bugs the crop up. More recently I’ve found that button images disappear from many sites I use making it difficult to know what you’re actually clicking when they button has no alt text. This is especially true for WordPress which I use to author this blog. Since editing this blog is near impossible on Chrome (even the stable versions), I’ve been using Firefox to do my writing. Oh my goodness how I miss my Firefox addins.
I’ve been back in Firefox for 2 days now and I love being able to customize my browser, I’m in addin heaven. I would imagine everyone would want to read CNN while TwitterFoxing, listing to Foxytunes, blocking ads with Adblock Plus, VideoDownloading, tweaking pages with Greasemonkey all on a designer inspired browser persona. Now I face the ultimate dilemma, stick with Chrome or move back to Firefox. Hmmmm.
Measurement Options: Wooing brand advertisers…
Apr 30th
Photo: Laineys Repertoire http://www.flickr.com/photos/76283671@N00
Measurement is a chicken and egg argument. Some will argue that unmeasured media has no value (usually the media company) others will argue measurement should follow innovation (the measurement companies). I’ve spoken about this subject before and I still believe what I said to be true: measurement companies are a rightfully risk adverse crowd, and companies looking to open new doors need to create their own measures of success. That means for publishers to move more brand dollars online they not only need to revise creative formats, focus on brand buying solutions, but they also need to develop new measures of success.
As an industry everyone’s wanted more brand marketer dollars even as far back as 1999 when the IAB did a press release titled “Abolish Clickthrough Now!” thinking that the metric didn’t help the cause with brand marketers. The idea of clickthrough as “the” metric for measuring performance took off early and to this day remains an accepted form of ad measurement. As you would expect brand advertisers didn’t see any value in clickthrough – why would P&G care if someone clicked on a Pantene ad? On the other hand direct marketers, those looking for the immediate satisfaction of a click loved it. As such we see the top categories advertising online (according to Nielsen) being the more conversion oriented folks in financial services (think credit card applications), retail, travel, and telecom. Right at the bottom of the list are the consumer packaged goods advertisers, automakers, and pharmaceutical companies – practically the inverse of spend on TV.
Okay, I’ll admit we’ve seen an evolution in the click-through metric to encompass: actions, performance, conversions and view-through, but come on people, it’s all an evolution of the same direct marketing measure. What the industry needs are brand metrics. Hard direct marketing style numbers than can be used to gauge brand success. Well that could be tough. As I pointed in the last post, the data that you’d want to base those metrics on are not available online. So what have we done to measure the effectiveness of online media for brand marketers? Well we’ve defaulted to what they already know, brand awareness studies. Now in full disclosure, brand awareness studies are my heritage. I got my start in Internet research in 1997 at Millward Brown where we tested the first Java ad, the first Flash ad, the first sponsorship, Unicast, etc. We were the only game in town and had plenty of demand for proof that brand marketing works online. We delivered stacks of reports that proved people see and are aware (at least subconsciously) of online brand advertising. We used strict experimental design methodologies, and had extremely convincing data. Everyone was happy. Or were they? It’s been over ten year since I left Millward Brown and we’ve see the online brand awareness research market grow considerably and the number of studies probably now amount to over 10,000. Yet here I sit at my computer eying the dollar spend of brand marketers online and wondering where are the big numbers? They obviously didn’t believe the studies or we would have seen more than the slow trickle of growth from brand advertisers, there should have been an inflection point in the growth rate of brand dollars – but it doesn’t exist.
It’s hard to pin all of the blame on ad formats, and buying options, those are simply impediments. Most if not all brand marketers have dabbled online, but none have come back with their checkbook. It appears they weren’t thrilled with what they saw, and that’s the rub. One could argue that the blame falls on the research companies and there may be some truth to that. Brand awareness research has a reputation of always returning great results, of course they have typically been underwritten by publishers or agencies who are not necessarily the most unbiased bunch. Let’s not forget to mention the way researchers presented the data made the numbers look entirely suspect. Results like “1239% increase in purchase intent” just don’t seem believable and are a pure manipulation of the data for better optics. But even if those negatives adversely impacted a clients view of the data it’s hard to argue with the aggregate data that shows brand marketing works online, right? Wrong. I mean yes of course the aggregate results looked good but the reality was even though the studies were designed to breed a level of familiarity to TV brand awareness studies, the methodologies were incompatible. As a result marketers had an out with online advertising: I don’t trust the publisher who funded the study, I think the numbers as portrayed are unrealistic and I have no idea how this compares to TV. If there’s one lesson to be learned from this exercise it’s not to give marketers measurement that claims to be the same as what they use in other media but is fundamentally different. Had online publishers opted for a more familiar measurement standard, say continuous tracking, then maybe they would have seen the benefit, then again I’m not sure online advertising would have looked all that good next to TV. The other option to take, and the more attractive option in my opinion, is to offer the measurement that was the promise of the internet. To provide a clickthrough type measurement for brand marketers.
There has been some success along those lines. Perhaps the best example comes from Yahoo! and their Consumer Direct product. Designed in conjunction with Nielsen, it allows consumer packaged goods advertisers to buy their specific target within the Yahoo! audience (e.g. diet cola drinkers) and measure the sales lift by using Nielsen data to monitor product purchases in grocery stores. It’s some of the coolest measurement I’ve seen but suffers from a couple challenges: it’s expensive and so it only works for large campaigns (no one wants to spend half their media budget on measurement), it relies on panels (small campaigns are hard to measure), and it’s doesn’t scale well (lots of manual labor). This is the closest we’ve come to offering compelling, data rich measurement of online ad performance. If only the measurement were automated, available for multiple industries, and as ubiquitous as the clickthrough, well, then we’re talking business.
The key takeaway here is that the measurement innovation came not from research companies but from the publisher looking to woo brand marketers. It’s the reality of how the market operates and more collaborations between sellers and researchers could lead to more online brand advertising. I also feel strongly that replicating offline measures online was an exercise designed to fail. It’s downright near impossible to control for all the differences between how media is consumed and brand marketers (like consumers) expect more from the internet. It’s now up to us to deliver.