The Future Place Blog

Dove Unveils User Generated Ad Airs at the Oscars

Unilever's Dove have been running a competition for their new Dove Cream Oil Body Wash product. The winner was announced at the Oscars and the winning ad was aired during US TV coverage of the Oscars, the second most viewed event in the US (after the Superbowl).

Over 1000 people entered the competition and more than 1.7 million people visited the Dove website. As well as 15 minutes of fame the competition had a first prize of $8,500. The winner of the competition was 22 year old Lindsay Miller who made a film of herself singing in the shower.

This amateur campaign was Dove’s follow up to its real beauty campaign, which focused on real women rather than models.

One interesting thing about this campaign is that although the whole process was clearly 2.0 in its style, the brand has disregarded the techie label in order to concentrate on its core values. This approach is in contrast to another Unilever brand Axe (Lynx in the UK and Australia), whose target is young males and whose campaign is redolent with Web 2.0 aspects.

To see the ad and learn more about the properties of Dove’s Cream Oil Body Wash click here.

MySpace Deny Plans to Introduce Fees for Widgets

MySpace have responded quickly to a post on Techcrunch about them blocking Imeem and whether this might mean they wanted to block all third-party widgets unless they paid fees. MySpace have asserted that the widgets they have blocked all broke their Terms of Service, by offering a commercial service.

MySpace are saying they have no plans to bring in fees for third-party widgets, but observers are saying “watch this space”.

Is MySpace Trying to Block Collaborators?

TechCrunch reports that MySpace has blocked widgets provided by Imeem. This follows a sequence of other services being blocked such as: Vidilife, Stickam, and Revver. The suggestion in the post is that MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp group). The post quotes a comment from Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp, where he alleges that YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket were services that were “really driven off the back of MySpace”.

The speculation is that MySpace is planning to block all third-party widgets and only permit those who pay a fee. Such a change would be a major blast across the bows of the Web 2.0 concept, part of which is based on open source and collaboration. Such a change would spell doom for some widget makes, but could also lead to a storm of protest. From the outset the combination of News Corp and the free world of Social Networking looked a little dissonant, perhaps News Corp is trying to re-fashion the web in its own image?

RFIDs Get Smaller

The BBC has reported that Hitachi are launching the world’s smallest RFID (Radio Frequency Identification tag). The new tags are just 0.05mm by 0.05mm, about the width of a human hair. The tags are small enough to be embedded in a range of products, even a sheet of paper, although at present they will need a an external letter.

At present RFIDs are mostly used to track products from warehouses to shop floor. Other uses have included embedding RFIDs in passports, as a payment method in transport systems, and animal identification. One widespread concern is that RFIDs could be a threat to privacy and could be used in covert monitoring.

There has been substantial interest in the use of RFIDs for market research. To date there seems to have been little actual usage, although there are reports of using RFIDs to track shopping trolleys (carts) as part of a research project.

Astrology ‘Proven’ by Random Patterns

According to a report by Wired, a paper at this week’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference in San Francisco shows the danger of assuming causality in correlations. The paper by Peter Austin looks at the hospital records of 10 million Canadians and looked at associations with Star Signs.

For each star sign Austin found conditions that appeared to show a statistically significant link. For example, Librans appeared more likely to suffer from a fractured pelvis. The point of the study was to show that if you look for patterns you will find them. Using the classic 95% confidence level we can be sure that 5% of the things we look out will be random noise, rather than signal.

Just in case anybody actually believed that Austin had confirmed that star signs were associated with different outcomes he then looked for the patterns he had discovered in another data set, and not surprisingly the patterns were not repeated.

The phenomenon that Austin has illustrated is a special case of the survivor bias that I have posted about before. By looking for patterns in the data he spotted the patterns which have survived, but which were not based on a causal linkage.

The BBC and Advertising

In one sense the BBC is the world’s most expensive public service broadcaster. In the UK most people who own a TV must buy a TV Licence each year (currently £131.50), failure to buy one is a criminal offence. Each year more than 100,000 people are prosecuted for failure to buy a licence, usually people on low incomes, with single mothers a specific problem. In recent years the law has not jailed people for failing to have a licence, but many people are still routinely jailed because they are unable to pay the fines imposed by the courts.

Given the pain that the BBC’s funding causes it seems all the more remarkable that the BBC’s Internet services are also funded by British taxpayers. Users of BBC.co.uk are drawn from all over the world, and its traffic levels could generate substantial income from advertising, but the BBC remains firmly opposed to advertising (and by implication, in favour of imprisoning single mothers struggling on low income – ‘pour encouragement les autres’.

However, the BBC is not the only organisation opposed to advertising on bbc.co.uk. According to a report by the BBC, British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA) has called for the BBC to resist the call for online advertising. BIPA do not try to hide behind any point of principle, they simply feel that if the BBC takes advertising it will diminish their revenues.

My view? In a global world it is a nonsense for the BBC to be funded by a regressive tax on British citizens. The debate about how to fund the BBC’s broadcasting arm should continue, but the Internet services should be fully commercial.

Umbrella Vending Machines

Springwise report on 6 vending machines in Singapore which sell umbrellas (and it seems they also exist in the UK). The umbrellas sell for 3 Euro, which seems pretty reasonable. Evidently the company behind the vending machines, Uport, is looking for funding to expand into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.

Every time I see an article like this I start to wonder about the competing consumer demand issues and supply side issues that determine which products are sold in vending machines and which are not. My guess is that the economies are not that great.

The Road Not Taken

This morning my eye was caught by a discussion about one of my favourite poems, ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost. The discussion was about whether the narrator was happy, sad, or indifferent about his choice to take “the one less travelled by”.

This discussion took me a little by surprise as I have always thought of poem as a celebration of the idiosyncratic choice. In re-reading the text (see below) I can see how people might have other interpretations, but for me the poem remains a personal endorsement for the way less travelled by. Perhaps it is part of the genius of Frost to allow the reader to reflect their own optimism or pessimism when they read the poem.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Novel B2B Video Hook

Seth Godin has posted a link to a YouTube video which is hook to iHateMyPartner, a B2B website specialising in helping business folk resolve conflicts in partnerships. The video is not particularly clever, the service may not be relevant o most of us (I hope), but I am sure that this is something we will see much more of in the future.

Interestingly Seth describes this as B2B meeting 2.0. We all seem to agree that there are no good definitions about what 2.0 (for example Web 2.0) means, but I think it means more than uploading an ad onto YouTube, I feel there has to be some bottom-up integration or democratisation to justify the suffix 2.0.

A Good Book on Blogging

From time to time I am asked for my advice on a good book for people who are looking to start blogging. Whilst there are many good books, the one I have found to be most relevant to market researchers who want to start blogging in a corporate way is “Blog Marketing” by Jeremy Wright. The book is published by McGraw Hill.

Like all good authors the Wright has a website to accompany the book which can be accessed here. Wright also has a personal blog here.

My main tip about blogging, be it personal or corporate, is “don’t tell anybody”. Before you let other people know you are blogging you want to develop your style (or voice as the bloggies call it), ensure you are happy with your software, and you probably want some history. Once you feel the blog has started to stabilise then encourage a few friends to check it out and to give you some feedback. Once you are trundling, you can open the publicity floodgates.

The other question I am frequently asked is how often should you post. There is no single answer to this question, but in general you will want to be predictable. Posting every day for one month followed by once a week for a month creates a dissonant message. If you are posting less than once a week you r blog is going to have little impact on the word, unless you are posting truly amazing stuff.

In the light of my recent comments on disclosure I can confirm that I have no links with either Jeremy Wright or McGraw Hill.