Tag Archives: you Are the Universe: Imagine That

The Spirit of Friendship

Volume 4, Issue 19

And the Future of Facebook

It started as a way for male college students to see the faces of the coeds so as to choose which ones to ask out on dates. Today it is as big as television in the lives of many people.

In my newsletter of things to come, when I was making my wild-eyed media predictions a long time ago (which all came true in one way or another), I thought Facebook would come through webcams first, and of course I never used the term Facebook. I saw it as “each person having their own television station” and cross-device promotion expert Richard Fusco despite his fondness for radio saw it that way too. That was the closest my mind could get to a picture of the interactivity and democratization I knew would be coming. Of course, my mind was constrained by the things I knew best, such as television.

When Facebook came out as a stock for public investment, the results were disappointing because despite enormous audience usage there was no credible revenue model. The early Internet pioneers were mostly anti-advertising and/or had ridiculously high estimates of what advertisers would pay. Google was determined never to allow advertising. They were all smart enough to pivot and learn the advertising ground rules fast once the handwriting was on the wall.

Back in the post-IPO early days I suggested to a friend highly placed at Facebook that Facebook advertising should not be advertising at all, but branded content. Brands would insert content that fit within Facebook’s mood, not selling their product but sponsoring entertainment and/or informative/useful content that users would like and be grateful for, translating to sales and loyalty for the brand. I showed my friend the 28 studies I had done proving this point. He said it was interesting but they already had a full plate of ideas they were testing.

Stan Silverman, one of the most effective direct marketers today, pointed out around the same time that regular ads would not be as effective in Facebook, since when people used Facebook it was not for shopping or thinking about products, but instead feeling good in the warmth of communicating with friends or just seeing what they were up to lately. Nonetheless “regular ads” is what transpired in Facebook.

Something else is happening to Facebook today. The way content is organized is changing. Facebook must by now realize that users are not at all happy about this. Posts from friends they were particularly following no longer appeared on their main page (Home or News Feed) but had to be found on a new page that had to be stumbled upon. This content feed (called Pages Feed) appears to be where the algorithms put content that has some soft-sell advertising-like purpose but is not paying Facebook anything for ads. One can imagine the meeting at Facebook in which it was decided to dis-incentivize these “freeloaders” and force them into paying for ads by shoving them in the back of the Facebook so to speak.

At that meeting someone might have warned that users don’t like changes unless they themselves have asked for them. Jonathan Steuer, whose renaissance mind springs instantly to the bottom line, reminds us that Microsoft has made much-despised changes at the pleasure of its software developers without considering the inconvenience to users of such changes. Jonathan has been loyal to Apple since the beginning and across all devices the Apple interface has been steady as a rock.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook will make a success of its current ad policy or evolve a new one. If it can show ROI of course the game is won Business-to-Business (BTB), although fans might not like the ad-driven changes. A true win/win would be to maintain the mood and spirit of the original Facebook, return quickly to the beloved format before too much time passes, show the world that this is a company whose leaders can admit mistakes because they are real people like the rest of us. That’s the spirit of the place. It’s a great spirit — the spirit of friendship. It could be a wonderful — even the premier — environment for brands bonding with consumers.

And it could lead the way into a future where advertising is more a matter of friendly brand content than the bombarding remnants of operant conditioning theory. I hope this prediction comes true.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

Come Out and Play

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Volume 4, Issue 18

Being and Becoming

After all the rains, nature is happy that the sun has come up brightly. The talkative birds fill the ears as one awakens. Sunlight glinting off the river helps keep the eyes closed. The birds, squirrels and chipmunks gather outside waiting for Lalita to come out of the side deck door with food. Then when all humans are safely locked back in the house they waste no time in racing each other for the pans of seed. The first to get to the hanging birdfeeder is a large woodpecker who has learned how to arrange his body so that he can get the seed inside the tiny holes designed for much smaller birds.

Soon a squirrel is at a pan, darting occasionally at the five swirling jumping chipmunks intoxicated with the morning and trying to get a bite in edgewise. Finally one of the chipmunks steps out of character and, perhaps accidentally, bounds onto the squirrel and away again. The squirrel seems to need to think about this and retreats for his tree home to contemplate the unusual event.

All this fun stuff going on yet I realize I have woken up fixated once again on all the things I have to get done. The thing about knowing one’s Mission is that it’s great but it soon becomes an attachment like anything else. This is true even if the Mission is well-intended and unselfish. If looked at as an enormous challenge slope that one will not be happy leaving unfinished at the end of one’s life, it is obviously as much of an addiction as heroin.

Priorities. Our first priority in being here as the Universe looking through yet another unique peephole perspective, is to enjoy it. Let’s call that BEING.

Hourglass Nebula courtesy of www.NASA.gov

Second priority is to learn and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and states of being by watching the Universe’s clues. Let’s call that BECOMING.

Where in that construct does Mission fit? The Mission is to do one’s passion work, which is the chariot you ride in the BECOMING part of existence.

I realized that I was sacrificing the BEING part to the BECOMING part by my attitude of “no time for fun, better get down to work”.

Realizing all this did not automatically set me right again. What did was a sudden tiny delighted voice I heard that sounded like a woodland fairy spirit might, saying “Come and play with me!”

That brought my mood around. Then my eye was suddenly drawn to the little black wrought iron café table and chairs on the upper side deck, sparkling in a spotlight of sunlight through the trees. I went up with my laptop to sit in that pool of light and write this post.

As I went up the stairs, laptop in hand, I was in the mood to play. Writing this, I’m just enjoying myself. I hope you are too.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

P.S. My wife Lalita and I will be attending "Footsteps of Mandela," an original musical production celebrating world peace, freedom and human dignity. We will be accompanied by our good friend Stan Satlin, the songwriter of several inspiring songs about the spirit of America that will be performed there. Footsteps of Mandela will be performed at Riverside Church in New York City on July 18 at 7 PM to benefit the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

What the World Needs Now

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Volume 4, Issue 17

Happy Independence Day!

The answer is always the same — “Love, sweet love.” Hal David’s lyrics to the Burt Bachrach score. Reverberating in John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” a couple years later.

Yet at almost all times in memory there have been huge groups of people so angry at each other that the differences indeed appear irreconcilable. If they are truly irreconcilable differences, God help our great grandchildren, as Weapons of Mass Destruction (biological and chemical as well as radiological) become more and more refined and more and more available to anyone.

Shiites and Sunnis are once more at each other’s throats in Iraq — all we did was postpone it with the gallant soldiers who threw themselves bravely into the turmoil. Kurds are taking advantage of the distraction by consolidating their terrain. In our own country, there’s Fox News and the Outraged Democrats. Anywhere in the world you look somebody hates somebody, righteously holding onto their grudges and refusing to forgive. Even True Christians who know the sacredness of Forgiveness are allowing themselves this exception to the rule — they are allowed to hate at least one bad guy like “the Devil” and in real life other folks too with whom one has a long-running melodrama. And in the current Acceleritis™-degraded environment, each of us flips into demonizing another person or group at least briefly. This tendency has become so ingrained — maybe it’s just somebody driving too slowly in front of you when you can’t pass. Old brain circuits don’t die easily.

While we can all agree that this is pretty much the real scenario, most of us seem to feel nothing can be done about it. It’s the way the world is, and the world especially today has become so complex and so full of powerful rich people that control everything, what can any of us regular folks do to change anything so big and so pervasive?

We not only can do plenty, we are already doing it. As far as I can tell so far, it was not a huge conspiracy theory that brought about digital media, aimed at the democratization of power. It “just happened”. Possibly the plot was written from on high. In any case the inmates are now running the asylum to a more massive degree than ever before. Why not channel at least a tiny fraction of this digital free-for-all into content that evokes our capacity to love and forgive?

Sounds like boring screen fare? Not necessarily. Picture the MTV series “True Life” and then imagine amateur videographers all over the world starting to generate YouTube ongoing cinema verité series about friendships between a Sunni and a Shiite in Iraq, a Brit and a Catholic Irishman in Northern Ireland, a Liberal and a Conservative in the U.S., and other pairings of individuals from groups assumed to always hate each other. Maybe in some cases the friendships are between musicians or entertainers, perhaps from diverse cultures and global locations. Such as Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and other projects.

It might not be spectacular or grotesque enough to go viral, but as a constant drip-drip-drip in areas of the world where the hatred seethes to the boiling point today, it could begin to make a difference. The world’s establishment media can find cases of this already and simply bring the phenomena to everyone’s attention globally via mass media as well as social media. With very little effort it is possible to inject a little bit more love into the screens that now dominate our lives.

Just a little bit more love could be enough — imagine Archimedes’ lever slightly turning the angle of our world-line just one baby notch, with a little more oxytocin and a little less amygdala — as we endeavor to create a better future for our children’s children’s children.

Love,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

Which Motivators Drive Our Most Frequent Choices?

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Volume 4, Issue 16
June 26, 2014

Lessons from my day job

One of the benefits of my day job as a media researcher is that I gain valuable insight into what sorts of things I should create in the future to carry the messages of the Institute to as many people as are ready for it. My day job also enables me to do my ultimate passion work, which is to improve human effectiveness and thus happiness and/or fulfillment for the greatest number of people. The following post illustrates the synergy between my day job and my ultimate passion work.

The year: 1997. My company Next Century Media is working with John Hendrick’s innovative Discovery network and John Malone’s dominant cable operator TCI, installing addressable optimizer Opti*Mark into the National Digital Tech Center (NDTC) in Denver, for inclusion in the uplinking of dozens of TV networks to cable systems. This will make all the cable commercials potentially addressable to the set-top box (STB), will measure the STB, and offer program recommendations to subscribers on command.

The reasoning behind the program recommender is both to increase natural delight and also to give subscribers a cogent reason to feel better about their behaviors being tracked, albeit anonymously.

A technology favored at that time for recommendation engines — and still used today — is the collaborative filtering technique (CFT). It’s not the Netflix method of slicing down programs/movies into 78,000 tiny sliver genres, like Humphrey Bogart WWII movies of the 40s, and then counting the incidence of these subgenre choices within each subscriber’s individual record to make recommendations of other properties in the subgenre cluster that have not been watched yet through Netflix. CFT is the familiar “people who have bought this book also bought this other book”. NCM did not want to use CFT although it was ready to go off the shelf and cheap, not to mention accepted.

NCM wanted a method that would yield insight about people’s preferences, not just the facts of their observed choices.

Also, CFT takes a while to build a database and cannot give recommendations for a new show until there is some history of who watched it and who didn’t. With the importance of new shows to TV ad planners and programmers there was no way to live with CFT’s delay. So NCM created a keyword-driven system (today like so many other things called Bayesian). We compiled 1500 or so different words that are used to describe TV programs, ads and movies — screen content. Some of this came from work I had done consulting for the launches of cable networks, some had been from movie work I did with studios, and some was the result of many researchers pooling their knowledge.

One day the late Gerry Despain, who led the dozen software developers working on this, came to me and said he wanted to drop over 1200 of the keywords. I was aghast because test viewers were thanking us more than 9 to 1 in favor of the recommendations the system was producing. He said, “You don’t understand. I just want to drop the ones that do not predict set-top box data.” I saw that he was right and approved the efficiency move.

Later it gradually dawned on me the utter enormity of what had just transpired. We had stumbled on 250-300 words that DO predict the choices people make as to what to watch and what not to watch. Nowadays, in finally having the time to continue that line of development, we are calling those golden terms Drivertags^TM (Dtags^TM for short) because the modern screenworld name for such descriptors is “metatags” — and because these 250-300 metatags are the first we know of that actually do appear to describe inner motivational states that predict real world behavior. Specifically, what we choose to watch on screens.

This would be merely a very important discovery in one group of businesses in the private sector. However, if we zoom out, we see that today’s civilization on Earth is in the process of becoming totally dominated by screen content. This is the latest evolution of the information acceleration process we call Acceleritis™, which my theory attributes to the advent of written language.

The primary devices with screens on which there is content, used by most of us in civilization today, are the computer, TV set, tablet, and mobile phone. People with enough money (or enough credit) are making sure they have at least one of each. Monied households with large families are accumulating screens perhaps faster than anyone in the household can count or cares to. Moreover, by any researcher’s count, the average person now spends more than half their waking hours with eyes on these screens.

The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) will be working with ScreenSavants, the private sector startup licensing NCM’s IP in this area, to make applications of learning to our Mission of increasing human effectiveness. We’ll be studying how specific DTags identify viewers more prone to Observer state or Flow state. We’ll be networking with interested academics including people who are working in nearby inquiries such as explaining the attraction of viewers to specific characters, deriving psychological insight from natural language utterances, linking screen content to higher values, semantic mapping, and all forms of related psycholinguistics. One reason for doing this is simply to understand — pure science. The other is for practical application to the mission of THEI, improving human effectiveness. We’ll report our progress here.

For a first example, consider the following graph. What does it mean?
graph on DriverTags

The easiest way to explain a graph is to explain what one datapoint means. In the upper left you’ll see “Situation #2”. That is a particular DTag — and 9 out of 10 top-rated situation comedies have that DTag. None of the cancelled sitcoms have that DTag. Now look at the lower left and you’ll see “Value #50” — 8 out of 10 cancelled sitcoms have that DTag, but only 1 of the top 10 rated sitcoms has it.

If I were investing $2.5 million per average new TV series pilot I would love to know which DTags are vital to success and which drive failure. That is the business reason for all this.

For psychology, given that the biggest use of time in our civilization is screen usage, discovering the motivators of this preponderant activity yields considerable new insight into what motivates people in our culture today. That’s the science reason for it.

The attachment of DTags to TV shows happened long before the analysis of ratings and cancellations. The same DTags that worked in 1997 are still working in 2014. On the inside we haven’t changed so much.

This is the kind of science I personally get to do that is part of my passion work. I’m a very lucky guy.

The gratitude attitude and admission that the Universe may indeed be sentient are the causes I attribute to such great luck. Hope you are very lucky too!

All my best,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: “In Terms of ROI.” It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.