Just a Click Away

Jon Gibbs, VP of media analytics at The Nielsen Company recently wrote an article for nielsenwire titled “Online Advertising Grows Up.” He makes a case for how the Internet is being taken “seriously,” citing the creation of Hulu by Fox and NBC, Google’s phenomenal track record with online advertising, Apple’s reshaping of the music industry with iTunes, and the growing metroplex we call Facebook. Excellent examples, all.

But he asks, “If the Internet has truly ‘arrived’ and is being taken seriously, why have we not yet seen significant brand advertising dollars follow?”

Well, Jon, I’m no expert but I’ll give you my reason. The old 800–pound gorilla . . .

Clickability.

Now that advertisers know how many consumers have clicked on their Web ad, they’re not exactly bowled over by the results. Frankly, I don’t know what they expected. Click rates of 0.5 percent are not all that uncommon. Indeed, click rates very much resemble direct-mail return rates, and frankly it makes sense.

What I don’t understand is why legacy media hasn’t done more research to determine if those low click rates are indigenous to the Web. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have a long history of handing the baton off to the advertiser once their audience has been successfully sold. It was up to the advertiser to create a compelling message to generate response.

For Web sites, the onus for response rests squarely on their own shoulders. Basically, because it can. Advertisers are more than happy to hang the Web site out to dry if the response isn’t adequate. They would have done it with legacy media, but advertisers had no metric to know for sure.

It may be the Web’s ultimate undoing—a failure to monetize itself. Ironic that what was touted as the grail for advertisers is fast becoming a tin cup.

So much for transparency.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I hate Kool-Aid. It’s nothing but sugar and artificial flavoring. Not good for you, rots your teeth, creates wacky glycemic imbalances, makes your tongue red or green or whatever.

I hate the other version of Kool-Aid too, i.e., that libation that once you drink, it forever brands you a zealot. A Manichean. A card-carrying nut ball, spewing foam-at-the-mouth diatribes either for or against your chosen Kool-Aid flavor.

I drink no one’s Kool-Aid. That’s for the weak minded and the lazy. I am not an absolutist. I seek reasoned positions. Let’s go lofty . . . an Aristotelian, “for the common good.”

I get a little hot when someone accuses me of drinking the Kool-Aid. I wrote a post recounting the things Obama’s got that Bush ain’t. So, now all of a sudden I’m drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.

Nothing could be further from that flitting hummingbird of truth.

What’s wrong with you people? How can the mere mention of a man’s name set you off like that? You need help. You’re the one’s slurping the Kool-Aid . . . not me.

Five Things Obama Has…

(that Bush didn’t).

1. His intelligence is painfully apparent. This is one smart cookie, someone whose innate brainpower and absorption of education manifests in how he reacts and responds to everything from national calamity to an appearance on Letterman. I trust his brain. Most of his recent predecessors displayed no such ability.

2. His tough upbringing is an asset. There’s something to be said for anyone who overcomes adversity and disadvantage. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, columnist Joe Queenan described him as “raised by a single mother and grandparents, born with no discernible financial advantages, clocked Hilary Clinton, clocked John McCain, and got himself elected the first African-American in a country that was still lynching black people when he was a child.” He has the right stuff, possessing the creativity, willpower, and moxie to rise above difficult circumstances. Understanding that, for some, life’s challenges are invisible, Obama’s clear path to achievement is impressive.

3. He has good chemistry. Obama is a natural. He projects it in every move he makes and every step he takes. Forgetting politics, there are very few presidents since Kennedy who felt this right. I have a new nominee for The Great Communicator.

4. He sees the problems. Better, he is willing to address them head on, forgetting ideology and politics (as much as that is possible). This presidency is less about Obama and more about America.

5. He speaks English. I understand what he says. He doesn’t fumble with language. He is articulate and direct, even without a teleprompter.

Admittedly these five attributes won’t, in and of themselves, get us to the Promised Land, but they definitely improve the odds.

In the kNow

Forty–plus years ago, a couple of Harvard psychologists, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary, chronicled their experimentations with a mind-altering mold. Their magic bus became the paean of a youth movement with a predilection for peace and harmony, hair, music and smoke, enchanted pears, idioglossia, quasi-political unrest, a lust for both social change and fluid exchange, and, of course, self-gratification.

LSD so framed their lives that Leary went leery, obsessed with evangelizing the benefits of taking more and more of the stuff as a balm for the what ailed the fractured zeitgeist of the ’60s. Alpert traveled to India, met the Maharishi, changed his name to Baba Ram Dass and wrote a book called Be Here Now, later memorialized by Beatle George Harrison’s tome: Remember, Be Here Now.

Forty years later, the phenom of real-time digitalia has exhumed Baba Ram Dass from the cemetery of All Things Far Out. The difference between then and now is that being in the present then was a desired state of mind; today it’s available at the click of a mouse. Driven entirely by our never-changing need for self-gratification and dutifully delivered by the internet, the concept of “Nowism” (as promoted by trendwatching.com) has become THE mega trend.

“Nowism” has been gaining ground for years, having a profound influence on societal attitudes, consumer expectations (they’re sky high), and new technologies “converging in such a powerful way that brands truly have no choice but to go real time in their business intelligence processes, customer conversations, distributions, sales, and marketing” efforts.

Consumers “info-lust”, a craving to access every minute occurrence, from right-now world, national, and local news to the superfluous, supercilious trivialities of their tweeting and texting friends, is a dream made true by technology. The bonus track being the cheap thrills of watching the most recent car crashes, skiing accidents, celebrity humiliations, fist fights, lad-humor debaucheries, or hidden camera burglaries and beatings available on YouTube and its myriad descendants—all from the comfort of an easy chair or work cube.

Everything is live on planet NOW. A liquid world, ever changing, ever morphing. Media can use real-time testing to determine which headlines are better read by users and make immediate adjustments to employ the most effective spin. Retailers can transmit a discount offer to someone’s cell phone via a 2-D bar code on a billboard. Why wait for a reporter’s newspaper interview the next day when you can see what Brett Favre was tweeting right after the game? Why browse through newspapers or magazines when you can have spiders search the info-universe for all that interests you and have it delivered right to your iPhone?

If I sound cynical, I’m not. I just tend to believe that the “Nowism” is already the So Yesterday of tomorrow. Why? When surveyed, consumers claim their biggest obstacle to happiness is no available time. They are just too busy, no time to do anything fulfilling. The obvious fix is to stop worrying about being in the know, thus reducing the amount of time being in the Now, opening up more time to be in the present.

You dig?

Good People

My wife has been telling me for years about a woman who lives on a double lot near us and sells vegetables.

Aside from the fact that she grows the best tomatoes and sweet corn on the planet, she also doesn’t charge much at all for her produce. Too, she bottles tomatoes, apple sauce, and homemade salsa and pesto. Her daughter-in-law helps with the production required, amounting to hundreds of bottles during the high season. Together they make apple crisp, German chocolate cake, and other pastries—but only if you’re lucky enough to be there when they’re for sale.

There’s no cash register at Betty’s, only a cash box sitting on the counter in her garage next to the carrots. That’s where you pay. You see, she’s not outside all the time, so she puts a price on each vegetable picked that day. You simply put the money in the cash box and take change if you don’t have the exact amount. As her son says, “Between people taking too much or too little, it probably all evens itself out.”

Has she been filched a few times? “Oh yes”, she says, “but they probably needed it more than I did. People have to feed their families, you know.”

We visited her oasis over the weekend. Time’s running short as the winds start to blow a little colder, and the ground will be bitten by frost one of these nights.

We drove up to a group of swarthy young lads pushing apples into a grinder of some sort. There was Betty, her daughter-in-law, and three sons mushing apples for crisp, a new concoction the daughter urged us to try. Characteristically, she handed over a whole tin to take home and sample. We asked how much? She said, “You’ll be my guinea pigs, let me know what you think.” I can tell you it was delicious-o.

Betty grows a ton of vegetables in her garden, certainly enough to keep the surrounding neighborhoods fed. She also has an area for some kids who tend to their little patch of heaven. These are special-needs kids, and the lessons are priceless, I assume.

Being a business person, I thought the world needs this food—and if people knew who and where it came from they’d buy it, à la the old days when everyone grew their own and jammed it in Mason jars for the winter. Yes, it’s great organic business.

But then why ruin a good and wholesome thing by trying to monetize it?