Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Your Brain on Google: Interview with Dr. Teena Moody

This is the full transcript from my interview with Dr. Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute about the Your Brain on Google Study. Today’s Just Behave column on Search Engine Land has more commentary and analysis of the findings.

Gord:

Why don’t we start with the study where you were comparing activation of the brain using Google versus reading text? What was your original hypothesis going into that study?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we were very interested in two ideas. One was how do the patterns of brain activity differ when you’re doing an internet search versus reading, since computers are such a big part of our lives these days? And then we also wanted to look at different groups of people, people who were internet-savvy and had lots of computer exposure and experience, and compared that to naive subjects – with “naive” we mean people who don’t use computers or the internet very often.

Now there are some difficulties in recruiting for this group because so many people have access to computers these days and that was part of our rationale for choosing an older group of participants here, because you find very few 30-year-olds who don’t have computer experience.

Gord:

So for the purpose of this study, what was the definition of “internet-naive”?

Dr. Moody:

A naive person, we were ideally getting someone who had no internet experience, although they could have computer experience. And it turned out we had a self-rating for them – their frequency of computer use, their frequency of internet use, and then a self-rating of their expertise. And it turns out that the net-naive people use the computer usually once or twice a month, and the internet-savvy people several times a day. In terms of the internet, some of them had never actually been on the internet and some maybe used it once a week or once a month for the naives. Again, the savvy people use the internet multiple times a day.

Gord:

Okay.

Dr. Moody:

So we were able to get a very good spread there between the two groups.

Gord:

So what is an fMRI machine? If I was looking at one, what would I be seeing?

Dr. Moody:

Well, it isn’t the same as an MRI machine. It uses, rather than having ionizing energy, you’re using a magnetic field and radio frequency to generate a pattern, and we can look at what’s called the BOLD signal, and that’s the blood oxygenation level dependent signal in the brain, and it is correlated with brain activity. So we’re interested in an fMRI, which is functional MRI, and looking at a pattern of brain activity. And that’s what we were looking at in this study, differences in the pattern of brain activity between savvy subjects and naive subjects, and comparing that when they’re doing internet searches and doing reading…just to see the pattern of activity… if we see different parts of the brain being activated.

Gord:

Okay. So you’re getting them to do different tasks, you’re getting them to read, you’re getting them to actually do online activities. How were the stimuli presented to them, because in an MRI machine, you’re basically in a tube – right? – and you can’t move your head…

Dr. Moody:

Yes. Keeping your head still is very important in an MRI machine. It’s just like if you moved your camera when you’re taking a photo, it will be blurry. So the participants do have to lie in a tube, essentially – they can’t be claustrophobic – and they wear goggles. It’s very much a virtual reality experience. They wear goggles and they have headphones so that we can speak to them and they can speak to us, we hear each other. And before the actual experiment starts, we usually start with a movie to let them become relaxed in the environment and also they’re aware that they are seeing through the goggles. They watch a movie and we take structural images of their brains so that we have references to overlay their functional activity. So usually there are 5 or 10 minutes of structural images where we’re getting detailed information about the structure of each individual’s brain.

Then after that we follow up with the experiment, and it’s very much like playing a videogame. In this case we had a button box where they could press buttons 1, 2, or 3 to indicate their choices for selecting either a book chapter or an internet site. So rather than having a mouse for this first study – we did not have an MRI-compatible mouse – we used a button box for choice of the selection. But it’s very much a virtual reality experience. It would be like playing a videogame, and I use the analogy of, for the button pressing, changing channels on your TV with your remote control. Most of the participants were very comfortable with the situation.

Gord:

Let’s get on to what you found actually in the study. First, I want to start by asking why did you use reading text as the baseline for neural activity in the study as your comparison point?

Dr. Moody:

Well, actually, both for the reading and for the internet and Google searching, we used a different baseline. We had a button-pressing baseline where white bars appeared on the screen and they just pressed the button when a white bar appeared for the location on the screen. And we compared the pattern of activity when they were reading and making… selecting different chapters or when they were selecting Google, from the Google search screen and reading off the internet to that pattern of activity. So our control was more of a low-level control baseline.

Then, in a higher-level analysis, we compared the pattern of activity while they were reading to the pattern of activity while they were doing the internet search. So both tasks had a lower-level baseline control.

Gord:

Okay. So let’s just cover off what you did find. So when you compared the parts of the brain… And we’ll deal first with the internet-naive. When you compared the parts of the brain activated with text reading versus web searching, what did you find?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we found that the pattern of activity was almost identical, and that really frankly surprised me at first because I thought that the internet even for the naive participants would require additional areas, because when you’re searching the internet you are engaging in decision-making, you have to suppress extraneous information, so there’s inhibition required. So I was surprised to find that it looks like in both the internet task and the reading task the subjects are just engaging their language areas, their visual areas, there’s some sensory integration areas as well, but it looks like they’re reading in both cases. And not surprising at all about the areas recruited, because they’re language areas, memory areas, and visual attention areas.

googlebrains

Gord:

But you found something different when you were looking at the internet-savvy group.

Dr. Moody:

That’s correct. And for the internet-savvy group, their reading areas were virtually identical to the reading areas that were activated for the internet-naive participants, but the very interesting part was the savvy group did recruit additional areas and these were frontal areas that had to do with decision-making, cingulate areas that have to do with conflict resolution. It’s not surprising, it’s what we expected, that these additional areas for decision-making would be required and higher-level cognitive function would be required, and that’s what we found in the internet-savvy group.

Gord:

To explore that a little bit, we’re seeing that people are actually cognitively engaging with the results – they have to make decisions, they’re comparing them. What happens there? With the internet-naive, obviously they weren’t engaging with the content nearly at the same level, but the internet-savvy… Is there a certain level of fluency with search where you elevate it to a higher level and you’re using that input to make decisions?

Dr Moody:

Yes, that is certainly one interpretation, and one interpretation that we have for the data – that it does require additional areas and as you practice it, you do become more fluent and more expert at it.

Now there are two different schools of thought on this. One is that when you first learn a task, you require greater activity and more attention, and that one could expect higher levels of activity if you were new at something. People with expertise can actually show decreases in their functional MRI pattern of activity. But what it seems here is that while engaging in internet searching, you are still very actively engaging these decision-making areas and it might be that the naive people are overwhelmed by the situation and are just treating it like a book – you’re still not trying to integrate the information, they’re reading it as though they were reading a book.

There’s one other interpretation as well, and that is that internet-naive people just have a different pattern of wiring in their brains from those who are internet-savvy – people who prefer using the internet and enjoy that mode of reading are wired differently from the internet-naive people. And we can’t distinguish that in this study, but that is also a possibility.

Gord:

Which is interesting. You say they’re wired differently. Would that be the typical, neural  “fire together, wire together” wiring that happens when we learn anything, or is this something more fundamental in the pruning that happens during the formative years?

Dr. Moody:

Well, certainly in development, you know, we have good evidence that things do wire differently depending upon environmental influences, and definitely there’s evidence now against the old theory that adult’s brains don’t change, but definitely after brain injury there’s been evidence of re-wiring or re-mapping brain regions to overcome deficits. We don’t know what’s happening here. This is a very preliminary study, but one interpretation could be that there was a re-wiring, as people practice on the internet that these areas become more active. But all we can really say is that the pattern of activity is different.

Gord:

So one of the things I’ve suspected, when we’ve looked at behaviours in interacting with search, is as you become more used to using search, more comfortable with the interface, you don’t have to worry so much about navigating through the interface, that becomes more like a conditioned, habitual behaviour. Which means your prefrontal cortex is free to kick in to do those cognitive assessments, to say, “Okay, here’s what Option A offers me versus Option B,” so it’s almost kicking it up to a higher level of processing. Does that seem to make sense? It’s like I said, Google has become a habit and at some point the basal ganglia takes over and runs it as a habit which frees up the prefrontal cortex to do more heavy lifting.

Dr Moody:

Well, our data’s definitely consistent with that interpretation, and I think that that’s what part of our interest is, is how can we enrich our lives as we age, how can we improve our cognitive function or slow cognitive decline? And so yes, that’s an interpretation we would like to have because we would like to say, “Oh, we can do something to make our brains better as we age,” so that’s very exciting and interesting, and it is consistent, however we can’t conclude that. We don’t have any causality here at all.

Gord:

One of the really interesting questions, in reading the maps that came out of the study and looking at the areas that seemed to be lighting up, it looked like as memories were being retrieved or concepts were being retrieved, different cortical areas were being activated. Are you seeing that as people are reading text, there’s corresponding visual activation or auditory activation from those cortical areas that are mentally building the images that correspond to what they’re reading in the search results?

Teena:

Well, we definitely see a huge amount of occipital and visual area activation, and that’s just as we expect because for reading and for the internet you’re looking at visual input. And so that was not unexpected at all, that’s exactly what we would expect.

We don’t have… With fMRI, you don’t have very good temporal resolution, so we can’t… And this was a block study as opposed an event-related study, so we can’t really get into what’s happening second to second in the brain here because we average across these big blocks of 20 to 30 seconds. So we can’t say much about the time course and of what’s happening during the reading and internet searching. I’m sure future studies could do that. So we have good information about what happened in these comparisons, but not in the time domain.

Gord:

But there was a note in the study saying that although the visual stimuli were identical, with internet searching there seemed to be enhanced activity in the visual cortex area. Any ideas what might have caused that?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that they were attending to it more.

Gord:

Right.

Dr. Moody:

So we’ll probably have to go along with that. But it could be that different areas were recruited and additionally were required, but certainly other studies have shown with attention you do recruit these additional areas.

Gord:

Now one of the things that we’ve seen is when people are looking… And it’s hard because in looking at your study, the layout of the results wasn’t a typical Google result, it was kind of pared down and I think there were only three results shown, right?

Dr. Moody:

Yes. I did some pilot testing and I really had to slim it down for a couple of reasons. One is I just looked into the literature to see how many words a person in a certain age group could read in 30 seconds, so I did have to reduce the amount of information on the screen for that reason. Also, presentation of the information in the goggles in the scanner, we wanted to make sure that everyone could actually read the words on the screen. So when you’re looking in the goggles and you’re looking essentially at something… a very, very small computer screen, we had to limit the number of words. So I did pare down what, you know, would normally be on an internet site. Also, in an early pilot version, I included pop-ups like you would get when you’re actually searching the internet, and that was so distracting for people we, you know, immediately took out the pop-ups. The pop-ups were way too distracting for us to be able to make a legitimate comparison of information presentation, comparing a book format versus the internet format.

Gord:

One of the things that might be interesting, when we’ve seen people scanning search results through eye tracking, it’s very obvious when we look at the saccades and the eye movement that they’re scanning, they’re not reading, and we suspect more of a pattern-matching activity. And that would be interesting to see if they’re scanning it visually to look for matches with the query they just used as opposed to actually reading text and engaging those language centres and the translation of that?

Dr Moody:

Yes, but eye tracking would be a great addition to this type of a study. And also once… You know, now there are MRI-compatible mice so that one could actually do more of a click-around within the internet page itself rather than just making a selection of which site to go to. Those would be great additions for the future.

Gord:

I think what I want to talk about a little bit now.. I think this is going a little beyond the scope of this study, but it ties in with some of Dr. Small’s work. I think you’ve worked with him on some of these ideas of the digital native and the digital immigrant. Moving beyond the group you recruited and looking at the young who have been exposed to technology during those formative neural pruning years and what the differences in brain activity might be. What happens when you’re young and you’re exposed to technology at an early age, as opposed to someone like myself who’s 47? The technology I grew up with was basically two channels of television.

Dr. Moody:

Well, I can only comment on this just from personal experience with my children. I haven’t done research on how children interact with the internet. I’ve read some of the papers but I’ve not done any research on that. But it does seem that, you know, they interact more readily and more fluidly. It’s amazing how quickly your kids can navigate across something on the internet compared to how I do. Of course, I’m pretty computer-savvy, I use the computer hours a day. So I think there is a difference between young people and old people.

Recruiting for this study, there were some people… finding people who were internet-naive, we could find them but they really had no interest in learning how to use the computer either. You know, it was very difficult to find naive people who really wanted a chance to participate in a study about the internet. So young people, I think they’ve grown up with it, they accept, you know, MP3 players, cell phones, visual impact touch screens – all that is so natural to them and some of us are still trying to figure out how to program our DVD players.

Gord:

Right. But I guess there’s speculation too that as they become more comfortable with technology and it becomes more of a natural extension of how they communicate, there’s potentially a trade-off there. I mean, the whole concept of pruning is that you get better at what you do all the time and you gradually lose capabilities in the things you don’t do very often. And so might this mean, for instance, that the young are losing the ability for face-to-face communication or more kind of focussed reasoning over a longer period of time.

Dr Moody:

You know, I think that’s a very real concern, and I know that people are looking at some of those issues, attention in particular. The studies that I’ve actually looked at have used computer gaming to enhance visual attention. So we know that you can actually enhance attention using internet gaming practice. But it might be, as you say, that you also have a negative impact for longer periods of attention, like being able to read an entire article versus clicking around and having this immediate visual gratification of changing very quickly. So I’m not aware of the studies that have looked at the negative impact on attention. I’ve actually been looking more on the positive end of how attention has been enhanced and how people are developing computer packages to help children with ADD for instance be able to focus for longer periods of time. But certainly, just it seems that young people have shorter attention spans. I’m not aware of the research, however.

Gord:

So let’s step back within the scope of the study that we were talking about. I’ve got a couple more questions. One is we’ve also seen fairly significant differences in men versus women when they’re doing information foraging basically, when they’re going out and looking for information. Did you notice any differences in this study?

Dr Moody:

You know, unfortunately we had fewer males in this study. Every study you have limitations in terms of funding and timeframe, etc. And so we did try to recruit more males. Some of the males were the ones unfortunately that had head motion during the scan and we weren’t able to keep them in the final results. So we didn’t have enough male participants to make any kind of comparison male-female. And anecdotally, I can’t really say anything different about the two groups.

Gord:

All right. There was actually a post I ran into after I did a preliminary article on this by a cognitive psychologist by the name of Bill Ives and the point he made in this study was that because we saw that as you become more comfortable or learn tasks that you activate more parts of the brain, he said really what the study shows is that once you know what you’re doing, it increases brain function, you generally engage with the content at a greater level. You’re doing this research to find ways to possibly improve cognitive function. What is it that’s most exciting about internet activity as opposed to learning to do any kind of other complex puzzle-solving or mental activity?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think that because we have a situation where almost everyone has access to a computer, it can make this almost universal. Especially as we age, we’re not getting out there as much to walk around and some people don’t have the ability to go to senior centres and interact with other people, but that you could do something in your own home without requiring great mobility is very exciting. Also, there would be so much choice, there’s so much variety on the internet, it can be individually tailored to your personal preferences. So in this study I tried to pick topics that might be interesting to older adults – you know, walking for exercise, Tai Chi, health aspects of eating different types of food. I think that if it’s enjoyable for someone and if you don’t consider it to be a job to get out there and stimulate your brain, that people will do it more frequently. So that’s part of what’s exciting about it, is that it should be easily accessible to people once they know how to turn on the computer and activate the internet.

Gord:

Okay. So this is an easier path potentially to mental exercise?

Dr. Moody:

I think that it can be, yes.

Gord:

For the purpose of this interview, I’ll wrap up by asking you what’s next? What are the questions you’d like to explore further?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we would like to see what the impact of internet training might be on people who have no internet experience or very little internet experience. So that’s our next direct path. We’d also like to look at interventions for specific groups. If people have memory issues, is there something we could do to improve that? I think Dr. Small, Dr. Brookheimer, and myself are very interested in improving memory and improving people’s lives as we age, so that part of it would be a great bonus if we can discover techniques that might improve memory or enhance cognitive function. So the next step will be to look at training, and then we could look at patient groups, and I personally have interest in developmental learning too and we’ll probably look in young people as well.

Gord:

Okay. Well, fascinating topics to explore. Thank you, Teena, so much for the interview. It was fascinating to walk through it with you.

Brand Religion: A Reading from the Book of Skittles

First published March 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s something about Tuesdays. Just when I’m starting to think about what my Thursday column is going to be about, something hits my inbox that seems freakishly timely. This time, it was David Berkowitz’s ode to Skittles.com. My intention was to write about brand religions playing out online, and here, in all its gory, real-time splendor, was a parable made to order. It would be unseemly, not to mention unfaithful, not to read the signs from above and pick up this story thread so graciously thrown in front of me.

Now, let’s get the Skittle Scuttlebutt out of the way, as more has transpired since the last time David spoke. As David said, Skittles.com is no longer a site, but a Flash navigation bar that hovers over live feeds from other Skittles-oriented online destinations. Originally, the home page was a live Twitter Feed, but the ignoble masses had the temerity to use the Skittles name in vain, so that idea was scuttled and the TweetFest was moved back to a section called “Chatter.” Now the home page is a feed of the Wikipedia entry (which has been updated to include the story, so it’s like a never-ending feedback loop). You can also visit the brand’s Facebook “Friends” page. There are some massive usability issues, but that aside, nobody can scoff at Skittles for a lack of courage.  It remains to be seen how successful this is, but the fact is, almost 600,000 fans have signed up on Facebook, and the brand has generated huge buzz.
So, what is a parable for, if not to learn from? And here are 10 commandments for every brand who fancies themselves a religion, if they have the courage to go where Skittles has gone:

1.    Thou Shalt Not Expect Everyone to Believe. As was shown in the Skittles case, if you choose to live by the Social Media Sword, understand you can also die by the Social Media Sword. Opening up the conversation to your believers also means you open the doors to the non-faithful, who will take every opportunity to express themselves.

2.    Thou Shalt Not Build Your Own Churches. Believers like to build their own churches and not have the brand build it for them. This is almost never successful. Skittles is trying to find middle ground by using their site as a shortcut to a few online destinations that help define the online image of Skittles. It’s an interesting move, but I believe it will ultimately be a short-lived one. For one thing, it’s confusing as hell.

3.    Thou Shalt Have No Illusions of Control. If a brand goes down this path, they have to accept (everyone, repeat after me — and that means you, Mr/Ms CEO) that by opening the door to the masses, they abdicate all control. If Skittles.com turns sour, all Skittles can do is pull the plug on their official endorsement. The buzz will outlive the campaign and take on a life of its own.

4.    Thou Shalt Understand the Web is a Fragmented Place. What is interesting about the Skittles experiment is that it’s a tentative acknowledgement that the sum total of a brand lives in many places online. The idea of defining the boundary within one Web site is long dead.

5.    Thou Shalt Honor Thy Product. You have to have a pretty damn popular product to take this step. There’s probably nothing more innocuous than Skittles (who could hate a little fruit candy?) and yet some still managed to spout bile all over this little social media stunt. The more beloved the product (and the company behind it), the more secure you can be in letting your fans be your spokesperson.

6.    Thou Shalt Accept What One is Given. If your brand builds a devout following, your customers will take it upon themselves to generously share more than you ever expected about what the brand is, what it isn’t and what it should be. You have opened up more than a dialogue; you have embarked on a weird and wonderful partnership with your customers. Embrace this or lose it. Consider the story of Timberland, who had no idea that they’d become the chosen footwear of hip-hop. At first they disbelieved it, then they ignored it, then they fought it — and finally, they embraced it. Today, you can customize your Timberlands in pink and purple with your own monogrammed tag and customized embroidery: a fully pimped pump.

7.    Thou Shalt Know Thy Flock. If you’re going to intersect your faithful where they live, you have to know something about them. David wondered if Twitter was really the best social media choice for the Skittles target market. If your brand has already established online places of worship, spend some time in stealth mode and get the lay of the land before you go public.

8.    Thou Shalt Listen. Online gives you thousands of listening posts to get the pulse of your brand. One example I saw this week: the iPhone app Dial Zero. It’s a nifty little assistant that gives you tips to avoid the dreaded voicemail dead zones for over 600 companies. A quick look up and you have tips to connect with an actual live person. But what’s even more interesting is that it shows real-time comments from people who’ve recently called.

9.    Thou Shalt Live Up to Your Flock’s Beliefs. With devotion comes responsibility. In return for their brand loyalty, they will hold you to a higher standard. They have emotionally invested in your brand, so if you disappoint them, it will leave a bigger scar than just a passing frustration. Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

10.    Thou Shalt Count Thy Blessings Every Day. Brand evangelism. Brand loyalty. The willingness to pay a premium. An unwavering devotion untouched by the millions in advertising spent by your competitors. A much lower cost of acquisition. And millions of pages of customer-generated content. All brands should be so lucky.

Don’t Think Recession, Think Resetting

I was listening to an interview the other day and heard the best piece of economic news I’ve heard in over 2 years. The person being interviewed was talking about changes in urbanization in North America and he said he doesn’t think of the current economic situation as a recession, he thinks about it as a resetting of the economy. That got me thinking.

His point was that in the two most dramatic economic pull backs in the last two centuries, there was a corresponding seismic shift in how we worked and how and where we lived. And after the pain of resetting, the world emerged and prospered for a significant period of time.

Consider the economic turmoil of the 1870’s. By all accounts the world was in economic ruin. The colonial empires of Europe were beginning their long, slow decline. The largest bank in the US, Jay Cooke and Company, failed. The speculative bubble after the civil war burst. Labor unrest was epidemic, leading to riots in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and New York.

Or the Great Depression of the 30’s, the economic disaster that’s still only a generation or two away for most of us. A stock market collapse, followed by a banking collapse, followed by massive business closures and unemployment.

But the fact is, significant change and yes, advancement, came from both these periods. In the 1870’s, an agrigarian society moved to an industrial one, significantly increasing our production capabilities, creating the huge factories and huge relocation from rural areas to the dense urban centers. Immigration swelled North America with millions determined to create a better life. There was massive change, which always brings pain and unrest, but also advancement. One can’t seperate the two. They come as a package.

As the world emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War, we began the move to the suburbs and the Great American Dream, brought to you by Kelvinator, Pontiac, Maytag and hundreds of other bread and butter brands. A second wave of immigration brought new dreams and aspirations to our borders.

Techonology always moves faster than humans. And, in the shift, entire societal frameworks have to be reinvented. This never happens incrementally or smoothly. History has shown us that existing infrastructures have to be torn down and new ones erected. Through the process, human emotions run rampant, which flood our ever so fragile economy. This has always been the way, and it will always be the way, because we are who we are. Our mental hardware hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

But in this reinvention, this resetting, we build the foundations for the next stage of our ongoing story. And in this regard, there are tremendous reasons for economic hope. If you rise above the micro view and look at the macro picture, the efficiency of the digital marketplace is extraordinary and will provide the greatest boost to our productivity in history. Forces of globalization are leveling wealth distribution and the tide is raising all boats. Science is on the verge of hundreds of life altering breakthroughs on almost every front. The global standard of living has never been higher, along with life expectancies and levels of education and health care. The challenges are not so much economic. There we just have to rebuild sustainable infrastructures to accommodate the new realities of enhanced potential and get rid of some nasty habits of over consumption. And while we’re working through the process we have to make sure we don’t rape our planet beyond repair.

The world is not in bad shape. We just have some significant house cleaning to do. This will not be fast (we’re in the middle of a huge transition shift, so think decades, not years) nor will it be painless. But if we handle it correctly, it could be the biggest jump forward in history.

Belief in Evolution still 50/50 in the US

It’s amazed me how slow the US has been to accept Evolution. It’s been 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s theory and as I said in a previous post, more people in the US believe in angels than Evolution. I ran across an interesting chart in The Economist that showed the acceptance of Evolution in different countries around the world. Guess what? Of the countries shown, only Turkey comes in below the US.

acceptance

Can Brands Keep Their Promise in a Digital World?

First published February 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To speculate on the future of brand advertising is certainly beyond the scope of this column, but I got myself into this mess. I opened the can of worms two weeks ago in the Search Insider by warning that we could be running the search funnel dry. Ryan DeShazer, from HSR, called me on it and asked me what will replace traditional brand building in our new digital environment. Last week, I began the journey by talking about two different types of brands: Brand Promises and Brand Religions. Today, I’d like to paint a hypothetical scenario of where awareness marketing might go for those brands  that are implicit promises. Next week I’ll tackle religions.

Timing is everything

One of the challenges of brand advertising has always been the disconnect between the times in our lives when we’re thinking about a product and the opportunity for a brand exposure. How do you deliver a brand message at just the right time?  The goal of situational targeting became advertising’s Holy Grail. A few channels, such as in-store promotions and well-placed coupons, at least got marketers closer to being in the right place at the right time, but did little to build brand at this critical time. A significant discount might prompt a consumer to try an unfamiliar brand, but the new brand was always fighting the well worn groove of consumer habits. Trying a new product once doesn’t guarantee you’ll ever try it again (reading list suggestion: “Habit, the 95% of Behavior that Marketers Ignore.” )

The disconnect between the purchasing situation and the need to establish brands mentally (literally burn them into our brains) meant marketers played both ends against the middle. They used TV and other branding mediums to build awareness. Then they used direct-response tactics to tip the balance toward purchase when the situation was right. But in between was a huge gap that has swallowed billions of advertising dollars. The challenge facing digital marketing is how to bridge the gap.

Don’t Take Our Word for It
The answer to bridging the gap for a brand that promises quality lies in a few converging areas: the online social graph and mobile computing. Both areas are in their infancy, but they hold the promise of solving the Brand Promise marketer’s dilemma.

If a brand is a promise of quality, we want to hear confirmation of that by someone other than the brand. A brand’s advertising might make us willing to consider them, but we want confirmation of the promise of quality from an objective third party. The Web has made it much easier to access the opinions of others. And, through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we are now able to “crowdsource” — reach out to our trusted circle of family, friends and acquaintances and quickly poll them for their opinions. But this is still a fragmented, multi-step process that requires a lot of time and cognitive effort on our part. What happens when we weave the pieces together into a smooth continuum?

Keeping Marketing in Hand
Mobile has the ability to do that, because it provides us with a constant online connection. Consider the implications. As we store more of our “LifeBits”  (check out Aaron Goldman’s columns  on this fascinating project) online and rely more and more on digital assistance to make our lives easier, the odds of determining our intent by  where we are and what we’re interacting with in our own “Web” improve dramatically. Our online persona becomes an accurate reflection of our mental one.  With mobile devices, our digital and physical locations merge and through technologies like MOBVIS, we can even parse our surrounding visually. All this combines to give the marketer very clear signals of what we might be thinking about at any given time.

Now, advertising can be delivered with pinpoint accuracy: think of it as behavioral targeting on steroids. Not only that, it can be the first step in a continuum: we get a targeted and relevant messaging, with the ability to seamlessly pull back objective reviews and opinions on any given product, location or service. Going one step further with just one click, we can reach out through multiple social networks to see if any of our circle of acquaintances has an opinion on the purchase we’re considering. If brands are a promise, this allows us to vet the promise instantly. If all checks out, we quickly check for best prices and possible alternatives within the geographic (or online) parameters we set.

In this scenario, the nature of brand-building for the brand promise product changes dramatically. We rely less on manufacturer’s messaging and more on how the brand resonates through the digital landscape. Brand preference becomes more of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Of course, the brands will still try to stake the high ground in our mental terrain through traditional awareness-building, but I suspect it will become increasingly more difficult to do so. Ultimately, brands will try to move their position from one of a promise of quality (a promise easily checked online) to a religion, where faith can play the spoiler.

Search a Real Downer

The latest numbers from comScore show how the mood of the nation has shifted, and how it’s being reflected in what we search for. This is a topic I’ve talked about numerous times, so rather than spout it all again, I’ll just provide a few links to past posts. But I think one of the tables from the comScore release paints a pretty sobering picture:

Growth in Search Terms Related to Economic Downturn
December 2008 vs. December 2007
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Marketer
Search Term 
Total Searches (000)
Dec-2007
Dec-2008
% Change
“Coupons”
7,637
19,921
161%
“Unemployment”
2,688
8,214
206%
“Discount”
6,271
7,928
26%
“Mortgage”
4,518
7,756
72%
“Bankruptcy”
1,012
2,589
156%
“Foreclosure”
824
1,373
67%
“Unemployment Benefits”
215
748
247%
“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic wellbeing.”
Gian and I talked about this almost a year ago at the Search Insider Summit in Florida. That lead to a column in Search Engine Land talking about how whatever is top of mind for us translates into search activity – Battelle’s Database of Intentions. Ironically, this same tendency is one of the reasons why I think Search will do particularly well in the current economic meltdown – the subject of another Just Behave column.

Brand Promises vs Brand Religions

First published February 19, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I wish Steve Ballmer would check with me before he does these things. Last week Microsoft announced it was launching Microsoft-only retail outlets similar to the successful Apple Stores. My intention with this column was to follow up on last week’s column, “No Search is an Island,”  which prompted some interesting comments.

My point was that search captures awareness-created demand, it doesn’t generate it. If you want to continue to harvest from the bottom of the funnel, you need something to prime the top. And many, quite rightly, pointed out that traditional methods of priming the top, including TV, are becoming less and less effective. Martin Lindstrom, in his book “Buy-ology,”   references extensive neuro-scanning studies that showed that millions of dollars are being wasted in ineffective brand building.

So what is effective brand building in the new digital world? What is the best way to prime the pump? As I started to think about that, I realized the answer depends on the nature of the brand to be built. And, as I was chewing that over, the Microsoft story hit my inbox and I realized that it captured the essence of two distinct characters of brand: promise and religion. These two characters of brand occupy two totally different places in our mindscape, and so have to be treated differently, no matter what branding channel you choose to use.

The Origin of the Brand Promise

A brand is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity.

This is how Wikipedia defines  brand. But here’s the thing. Brands aren’t defined by Wikipedia. They’re defined by each one of us, in a way unique to us. Ford means one thing to you, another thing to me. Every brand has this same inherent characteristic. All Ford can do is contribute the raw materials used to create the concept of the Ford brand in my mind, but it can’t control how I put those things together.

Originally, all brands started as a promise of quality to the consumer. People were familiar with goods produced by local craftsman. The craftsman was the brand: the more skilled the creator, the higher the quality and the more trust placed in the product. Mass production needed to provide that peace of mind, so brands were placed on products as an assurance of quality. But somewhere in the latter half of the 20th century, brands became more than a promise, they became a religion. And that’s where everything became really wacky. Brands moved from a rational evaluation of quality to an emotional connection.

A Religious Experience

All brands want to become a religion, but not all brands have what it takes to make the transition, at least with a substantial number of customers. GM is a promise, BMW is a religion. United is a promise, JetBlue is a religion. And sorry to tell you this, Steve — but Microsoft is a promise, Apple is a religion.

Promises and religions are judged by different criteria. The customer-product relationships are driven by different motivations. If your brand is not a religion, you can’t suddenly build a church and expect people to worship. I see Microsoft retail stores as destined for dismal failure. First of all, Microsoft products are ubiquitous, so why do I need to go to a special store to find them? Secondly, Microsoft products have none of the religious aura surrounding them that Apple products do. The Microsoft brand never became more than a promise.

Brand Starts and Ends at the Core

One thing that both these natures of brand have in common: ultimately they depend on the values, integrity and effectiveness of the organization that creates the brand. If the brand is a promise of a level of quality, you can’t break the promise with immunity, especially in a digitally amplified world of blogs, forums and buzz. Each of the “promise” brands I used as examples, GM, United and Microsoft, stand in danger of their promises losing all meaning with customers. A promise is only as good as the level of trust you’ve built with the recipient.

But if the brand is a religion, the culture of the organization becomes even more important. Irrational decision factors run amok: the perceived culture of the organization, how the brand label connects with who we are, the social circles it places us it, or the circles we wish it would place us in, the values the company stands for, the exclusivity of the brand. The brand relationship becomes a complex stew of beliefs and emotions. We only make this investment for brands that hold a unique position in our mindscape. We feel we have to get as much from the brand as we’re willing to give it in terms of our emotional loyalty. And if a brand doesn’t reciprocate, it is quickly downscaled from a religion to a passing fancy.

I Am What I Buy (Sometimes)

One of the most ironic things about humans is that we seek to define who we are as individuals by the social associations we make. We stand out by joining groups. And this is a huge motivating factor in the brands we chose to give religious devotion to (Rob Walker’s book “Buying In” is a great exploration of this). Using a Mac puts us in the top 10% of the technically cool population (aka Justin Long). Using Windows means we’re lumped in with the remaining 90% of poor, boring schlumps (aka John Hodgman). Again, not a very compelling reason to seek out a Microsoft store.

This dichotomy of branding becomes important when we look at how brand awareness may be built online. First, you have to be brutally honest about assessing whether your brand is a promise or a religion. It worries me greatly that Microsoft seems to be suffering from delusions of brand religion. There’s nothing wrong with being a solid promise. Many brand religions started there. Personally, I believe brands would be much better off worrying more about delivering on a promise and less about becoming a religion. By the way, it’s unusual for the biggest brand in a category to be the religious brand (Coke is one exception). It’s tough to be unique when you’re following the herd.

But the first step is accepting what you are.

Happy Birthday – Charles Darwin!

darwinToday’s the day. Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday. And this year also marks the 150th Anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. It’s an interesting comment on Darwin’s personality that although he formulated the theory in his twenties aboard the HMS Beagle, it took him another 2 decades to screw up the courage to publish it. And, in the end, it was only competitive pressure from Alfred Wallace and a not insignificant amount of urging from Darwin’s contemporaries that pushed him to go public with the Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin knew it would be a conceptual bombshell of epic proportions in Victorian England. He wasn’t wrong. Repercussions are still felt today.

But it also marked one of the most significant shifts of scientific thinking in history. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said in 1973, “Nothing in Biology makes sense but in the light of Evolution“. Since the publication, Darwinian thinking has been applied to everything from Artificial Intelligence to Civic Planning to Neural Development to Computer Games. The concept of emergence in complex systems is simple and elegant yet vast in it’s implications. It could well mark the most important  and change inducing conceptual framework for this century.

I find it amazing that today in America, more people believe in the Devil and angels than in the theory of Evolution, according to a recent Harris poll. One of those American’s was recently running for Vice President. According to the same poll, Evolution does now edge out Creationism (47% vs 42%) but is not that far ahead of belief in ghosts (44%) and UFOs (36%). It just shows how beliefs will trump rationalism. Darwin’s theory is a classic example of parsimony: a simple idea that is breathtakingly profound.

So, I offer a sincere Thank You and Happy Birthday to the quiet and gentile biologist that was born 200 years ago today in Shrewsbury, England. Well done Charles, well done.

No Search is an Island

First published February 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Today I am plagued by ambiguity. I’m happy and scared. Relieved and cautious. Excited and apprehensive. And it all has to do with search and how we use it. On one hand, I’m relieved that search seems to be the sole marketing channel that’s actually benefiting from the crushing economic pressure. On the other hand, I’m worried that we may be short-sighted in grabbing onto search as a life preserver in raging marketing waters.

Search: The Connector

My ambiguity comes from the unique nature of search. We consider search a marketing channel, and in recent times we’re treating it as such. But it’s not. Search is glue. Search is intent expressed. Search is a mirror of our dreams, objectives and fears. To treat search as a channel divorces it from its real role as an integral connector. And, as such, search is inextricable from not just the online world, but the offline one as well. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, it shows up in the search trends.

And therein lies the source of my internal turmoil. If you look at search as a marketing channel, the current move by advertisers down the funnel, driving towards more and more accountable advertising, is predictable and a good thing. Search is certainly effective and measurable. But if we look at search as the connecter between demand and fulfillment, there’s an inherent problem looming. As budgets dry up in creating awareness and eventually demand, search inventories will ultimately dry up as well.

Obsessive Optimization

I’ve talked to a few search marketers here at SMX West who are saying their clients are pushing them to drop generic terms and stick to branded ones because they convert better. Even as effective as search is, we can’t resist trying to pump conversion numbers even higher.

If advertisers are this obsessive about cutting all the fat from their marketing, it seems they’ve backed themselves to the very brink of a dangerous precipice. One more step and they’ll have reduced their marketing efforts to managing a paid search campaign for “I want to buy an Acme Widget online today and I have my credit card out.”

Everyone is focused on the thinnest possible slice at the bottom of the funnel, without worrying about priming the pump at the top. While it may bolster search revenues in the short term as budgets migrate in from all other channels, in the long term this shortsightedness will prove disastrous.

I believe there is a tremendous amount of optimization that has to happen across all marketing channels. I’m not saying that all budgets should stay put where they are. But I do worry about an obsessive focus on capturing late-stage demand, even if it is through search.

You have to develop your market and create awareness. Search doesn’t work if nothing is creating awareness. Those branded queries won’t suddenly materialize out of the ether. Marketers seem inclined to take huge pendulum swings in their approach, one minute tossing branding money around by the bucketful, and the next clamping down on anything that isn’t a sure conversion. There has to be a happy medium.

For Every Action…

Search is the last half of a cause-and-effect chain. If you just focus on the effect, sooner or later the cause will cease to exist. As search marketers, much as we gleefully accept the new budget flowing in from other channels, we have to understand the inherent integrated nature of search. If we accept the windfall in the short term, we’ll end up paying in the long term.

I’m personally thankful that search is the boat I’ve chosen to ride out this particular economic storm. There’s no place I’d rather be. But I think it’s naïve to ignore the macro effects that will impact search behavior. As I said before, whatever happens, wherever it happens, whenever it happens, it will be reflected in search. And as all other marketing channels begin to run dry because of budgeting cutbacks, that too will show in search trends.

Is Gen Y Wired for Television?

Cory Treffiliti had an interesting post this week on MediaPost, talking about how TV (and the 30 second spot) is not dead, and how, for two occasions, at least (the Super Bowl and the inauguration) he found himself in front of a TV, not a monitor.

Right now, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the concept of digital immigrants and digital natives. The theory is that through neuroplasticity and neural pruning, we have a generation coming forward that are fluent in digital technology. Actually, tomorrow I’m talking to one of the researchers, Teena Moody at UCLA, who has been doing some interesting fMRI studies in the area, along with Dr. Gary Small.

So, if the Digital Native theory holds true, I wonder what that does to Treffiliti’s observation. I, like Cory, find myself wanting the more immersive experience of a TV for certain types of viewing. But the fact is, the TV is a technology I grew up with. My brain is wired to understand TV. Is the same true of a 15 year old who’s used to doing 6 things at once in front of a computer? Would they have the same need to watch events like this on the TV, rather than a computer monitor, or a mobile device, for that matter?

The media we interact with determines the media we seek. I agree with Cory that TV, as we know it, is in no imminent danger of demise, but I also see it caught in a wave of change that will make it increasingly difficult to stake some revenue positive high ground. And if we thought the past decade was one of precipitous change, what happens when the technologically fluent Gen Y’s start taking over the world? In the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive (giving away both my age and my Canadian nationality in one fell swoop):

“You ain’t seen nothing yet!”