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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

Photo: charlesstarrett http://www.flickr.com/photos/starrett

Let’s face reality. Online publishers bellyache about getting more dollars from traditional brand advertisers but they don’t really think about or work toward solutions to meet their needs. Publishers have been chasing the easy dollars and become totally rich doing so. When there’s so much money in the easy stuff why should we expect them to work harder, it’s a reality we have to face. Publishers despite wanting all media dollars, have ignored brand marketing in favor of direct marketing. They’re using Henry Ford’s famous pitch, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Let’s spend some time on the reality of the solutions that are available in the market. A lot of what’s out there is direct marketing oriented. I’m fortunate that in my day job I get to speak to all kinds of Internet companies that are pushing the envelope on digital marketing. There’s some really cool technology out there to pull every dollar from the available media. But disappointment is inevitable; toward the end of the pitch, I ask my question: “This is great, but what can you offer brand marketers like P&G”. Usually the response is the sound of crickets, either that or some babble about half hearted tweaks that really don’t provide a solution. Over the course of these conversations I can’t help but think online media companies don’t think about brand marketers.

Why would that be the case? Well in retrospect it makes total sense. Online media companies are really just data manipulating machines. They’re engines of creation, they take data, the atomic unit of the internet, and smith it into marketing gold. The problem is it’s damn near impossible to find data online that brand marketers could see as directly relevant to their business. Take an industry that online advertising excels in – financial services. It’s easy to see how at the lowest levels there’s plenty of data to mine. The most basic application would be to run 30 ads for a new credit card and monitoring the card applications to weed yourself down to only those creatives that are generating the highest conversion rates – these days this is elementary work. Try to do the same thing for shampoo? Yeah – not possible.

So what does this mean? Well for one thing, there’s no easy product a publisher can put in front of a brand marketer that is salient. Yes I can hear people crying foul – arguing that TV doesn’t provide anywhere near to the interaction or data that online does, but face it; the promise of the internet display advertising is in the manipulation of the data that drives better results. Without the data to make online sing (and I mean sing like it does for financial services) and with bad creative format to choose from, I can see why as a brand marketer I’d take TV any day of the week.

I have to admit I don’t see an easy solution to this challenge. And challenge it is. There’s a reason why the companies I speak to have lame solutions for brand marketers. Figuring out where to find great brand marketing data online is not an exercise in finding the data but one in creating data. Until someone finds a way to create more brand marketing data online, or we see brand purchases migrating online (not in my lifetime) then we’re at a standstill.

What do you think?

TV.com has brand ad formats done right

There have been two major efforts led by the IAB to develop ad size standards, the first effort took place way back in 1996 where the ubiquitous 468×60 and 6 other units were born.  Then again in Feb 2001 the IAB released another set of guidelines which introduced 7 more units that included rectangles and skyscrapers.  Finally in Dec 2002 the Universal Ad Package was introduced which brought the 728×90 into the fold.  At that point standard building moved away from sizes and more toward issues with rich media and streaming video guidelines.

As a brand marketer you crave the visual experiences, after all, you’re communicating feeling, emotion and utility all at once; something that requires a sizable canvas.  Doing that in one of the standard units leaves much to be desired compared to TV or even print.

Then there’s the oft quoted issue of ‘banner blindness’, a phenomenon that’s been proven through sophisticated technologies like eye-tracking.  The Internet even makes it easy for viewers to ignore ad units.  Page template standardization puts aside specific page real estate for advertising. The more I use a site, the more I know that there are certain areas of a page that I need to ignore.  The fact that media sites have seemed to roughly standardize on one of two similar templates (banner on top, banner on right margin) makes it easier to take your banner ignoring skill from site to site.  

To put this into perspective pick up a newspaper.  Yes you can still ignore the advertising, but even if you read that newspaper on a weekly basis the location of the ads in relation to the articles is constantly changing.  This is in sharp contrast to web page templating which relies on a standard approach to maximize usability, navigation and content delivery efficiency.

The ads that always catch me off guard are the ads that do one of two things, they either maximize real estate on the page, or they integrate with the content on the page. I would find it hard to ignore a 800×400 pixel ad at the top of an article I was reading. I’d hate what it did to my experience with a site, but it’s the only hope for display brand advertisers.

The real question is do online publishers really care about brand advertisers? That’s up for debate and the topic of my next post.

See the original entry.
See the other entries here

Photo by: estoril (http://www.flickr.com/photos/estoril)

I have my opinions on why brand advertisers aren’t shifting online and in my mind they come down to several key issues: ad unit effectiveness & site design, media buying options, and media reporting options.  Over the next couple days I’ll elaborate on each of these issues and I might even throw in my opinion on what can be done to turn things around.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo by: Noël Zia Lee http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelzialee

I can’t help but think that perhaps I was wrong about twitter, it does have a use.  Having said that I still struggle with how to tame the useless information that comes across the platform. 

Okay, so my turnaround on Twitter was driven mainly by the newly updated Adobe Air app TweetDeck.  What I’ve learned to love about this product is that not only can I see my friend’s stream but I can set-up searches for keywords and it’ll provide the Tweets that fit my searches.  I’ve set up multiple columns to track things I’m interested in and I’ve found it’s given me a leg up on knowing what’s new and being able to react to specific issues.  The big feature I’d love for them to add is some NLP type stuff to aggregate the tweets into buckets so I don’t see 30 tweets that match my search where 25 of them are RTs.

I’ve also come to love the integration with TweetScoop which is a meme tracker that allows me to see in a tag cloud type format the memes that are active on Twitter. Any breaking news always ends up as a meme and I consider it my early alert system.

Ironically these features are features I could probably enjoy without ever having my own Twitter account.  The thing is, these features do what I need them to do: they take the fire hose of data coming through the system and distill it down to what I’m interested in. 

I can’t say the same for my own friend list.  I’ve recently had to un-follow a bunch of people because they’re living their life through Twitter.  It’s one thing to point out interesting articles, comment on other people’s tweets, or even comment on your own situation, but there has to be a limit.  At one point a friend of mine was tweeting verbatim comments from a marketing conference every 5 minutes.  I mean come on! That’s the activity of someone who doesn’t try and read his friend feed, someone who doesn’t realize what he’s asking his followers to wade through. And for us on the other end it’s maddeningly annoying.  I don’t mind when people tweet often, but every 5-10 minutes? No one’s that interesting. If you have that much to say, do a webinar, call a friend, write an email/blog entry, but above all remember Twitter only at 140 characters for a reason. 

It’s like I’ve found a new affection for Twitter only to realize I have to put up with the frustrations of reading through inane messages from "friends".  Listen it’s not that I don’t care about y’all but sometimes your messages wear thin.  Cliche time: It’s always great to have visitors come to visit, and it’s also good to see them go when they’ve overstayed their welcome.  And to that end I’ve decided I’m being ruthless with my friend list.  If you’re a 2 second tweeter then you’re dropped. 

The big failure of social media is the corruption of the word ‘friend’.  Social networks set themselves up to encourage you to accumulate friends, followers, contacts, and that’s taken the platforms and turned them into forums for acquaintances and colleagues to keep abreast of each other.  At the same time it’s reduced the value of the platform for interaction with true friends, people hold back because there are too many pseudo-friends that they have on Facebook, or they ignore the friend feed because they honestly don’t concern themselves with the lives of their social network ‘friends’.  I’d love for these services to call out the reality of the situation.  Some friends are more important than others, some are family, some are childhood buddies, and some are people you worked with 5 years ago and haven’t spoken to in 3 years other than through status updates. 

Oh what fun to dare to dream…

There was a point in my life when I felt it was totally lacking in meaning.  People asked what I did and I’d respond that my job is to help make advertising more effective.  Crap that sounds lecherous doesn’t it? Advertising is a glamorous job to those in the B2B world but outside of that world, in the homes of your everyday consumer, it’s seen as an invasive, hateful practice that you need to battle every step of the way.  The funny thing is that even us media cheerleaders, when we get home or are exposed to the fruits of our labors, we’re still inclined to fight against ad messaging.

Just take one recent example of my own from last night.  My wife and I were watching the office on NBC and managed to stay hooked for the first 12 minutes.  Once the second pod of commercials started up I asked her, "would you mind if we switched to a previously recorded show to let some FF time build up?"  Here we are consciously stopping  a program midway through to let enough time pass so that when we re-engage we’ve plenty of buffer to fast forward commercials without catching the live signal.

So what gives?  Here I am during the day working diligently to help people improve their advertising while at night I’m fast forwarding commercials, installing ad blockers, and blocking 3rd party cookies.  I’m sure I’m not the only one making these incongruous work/life choices, and yet no one seems to have found a workable solution for the advertising model that changes this dynamic.

What is the evolution of the ad model to become.  I’m not sure I’d survive in a minority report world where everything is sponsored.  Does advertising have to be intrusive?  Should we have to plead our case to consumers…"please don’t block my ad targeting cookies.  You’ll always get advertising, at least with my cookies you’ll get advertising you like."  It’s a lose, lose scenario.  Advertising is what consumers hate, whether it’s targeted or not, it’s just painting the pig. 

Perhaps if we could measure all of the inputs into a purchase (word of mouth, advertising, experience, etc.) we’d find the secret sauce to worldwide product success.  The consumer side of my brain prays that advertising isn’t a driving factor.

Photo by: jurvetson