Also according to the Nielsen report, the total mobile viewing audience “grew 51.2 percent year-over-year, surpassing 20 million users for the first time.”

This trend is supported by an eMarketer survey showing mobile content and Internet usage of U.S. mobile phone users. Although video streaming falls close to the bottom of the list in this survey in terms of content usage, it’s estimated to more than double this year from 2007, from 11 percent to 25 percent. And in 2011, that number will grow to 33 percent.

These statistics aren’t too surprising given the proliferation of smartphones and the introduction of other Internet-enabled mobile devices, such as Apple’s iPad. These devices present a great opportunity for reaching your audience in an engaging medium—video. With so many eyeballs on the small screen, the question is does video factor into your current or future marketing plans? If not, why not?

The first thing I noticed as I began reading the book were the long and melodious sentences so full of rich detail that I could envision and smell and taste exactly what Conroy was describing (typical of vintage Conroy). Consider this sentence:

“When I turned left on Tradd Street, I looked like an ambitious acrobat hurling papers to my right and left as I made my way toward the Cooper River and the rising sun that began to finger the morning ties of the harbor, to dance along the spillways of palmetto fronds and water oaks until the street itself burst into the first flame of morning.”

I was struck by how accustomed I’ve become to the short, terse, bulleted prose that Tendo typically develops for clients’ websites. The criteria for one client requires sentences to be generally 20 words or less; paragraphs are fewer than 75 words; and no more than three paragraphs should appear in a row without a visual break. So the Wired article struck a nerve with me.

Carr cites research that concludes:

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

He also points to a 1990 experiment that claims the mental calisthenics required of hyperlinks—figuring out whether the link is worth a click, clicking on it, adjusting to a different site’s format, evaluating whether the info is of use, clicking back, etc.—causes us to forget what we’ve read. We’re not retaining the content we skim on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal also excerpted Carr’s book in its Weekend Journal but presented a counterpoint from Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues a different point entirely, one based not on research but on historical analysis: He points to Gutenberg’s press and Bible translations, followed by contemporary literature and the mediocrity that followed, as evidence that all new media has a disruptive influence initially but that history proves the medium worthy. And that the “linking together” of the Web lets us “tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about.” And that the social Web’s model of participation has enormous positive effects over television’s consumption model .

As of this writing, 64.7 percent of the WSJ  respondents to an online poll agree with Shirky—that the Web makes you smarter. I’m not sure I agree, especially in light of my recent Pat Conroy experience. (For other discussions on this subject, check out GigaOm’s  and Slashdot’s posts.)

An article in Monday’s New York Times, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” reinforces Carr’s position (and it includes pretty cool interactive tests to gauge your ability to ignore distractions). It focuses not just on the Web but on our growing addiction to gadgets and the multitasking we’re forced to do to consume a fast-growing influx of information and media. “Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress,” according to the NYT piece. Even after you stop multitasking, “fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

I can’t help but wonder if Carr and Shirky are asking the right question when they address whether the Internet makes you smarter or dumber.

• Consider the goal. Could it be that consuming information on the Web is just offering us more of the type of experience we’ve done for years: scanning, researching, applying judgment to whether information tells us what we need to know, etc. Isn’t that type of experience more about reaching a conclusion or making a decision rather than learning and retaining and deep thinking? Is the Web allowing us to make better decisions more quickly?
• Where’s the soul? I would argue that scanning on the Web makes us more soul-less than brain-less. Compared with reading Conroy, scanning the Web involves no sense of taste or smell or emotion. Interacting on the Web might involve that—think of comment threads and the YouTube video of the guys reuniting with the tiger (made me cry) and Facebook posts from old friends. But scanning the Web involves very little emotion.
• Form serves function. What does Carr’s research and argument say about the state of content on the Web? If it’s only meant to help you make a decision, maybe terse, bulleted content that’s easily scanned appropriate. But if it’s intended to teach or instruct, perhaps more complex language is not only appropriate but also called for. And would an instructional piece be formatted for easy (and attractive) printing so you could consume it more easily (as I did with the Wired article)? And if it’s intended to provoke, like a blog post, what’s the best format? A podcast? A video?
• Consuming print vs. online. Another relevant question might be this: How many Web users actually try to read online articles? When I find something of interest on the Web, I either print it out to really absorb it, or I save it somewhere so I can print it out and fully absorb it later. So the question isn’t whether I read content online (vs. scanning it), but whether I print it out to read it (vs. reading it on-screen). And whether reading print material rewires my brain in the same way than does consuming Web content.

What do you think? As a corporate marketer, how are you tailoring your Web content for different purposes? As a Web user, do you agree with most WSJ readers that the Web makes you smarter?

As it turns out, I’m like a lot of shoppers—50 percent, to be exact—who rely on online research for their purchasing decisions. According to a recent eMarketer report, customer reviews are the most important capability for a retailer to have on its site and a lack of reviews will cause almost as many visitors to leave a site.

Facebook pages are another way to solicit customer feedback but aren’t as influential as customer reviews in making purchasing decisions. Regardless, 91 percent of companies surveyed plan to develop a presence on the social networking site instead of implementing user reviews.

In terms of impacting customer behavior, Twitter falls behind Facebook and is considered to have little effect on buying decisions. However, Twitter follows closely on the heels of customer reviews among sharing capabilities planned for implementation in 2010.

Whether your company is in the B2C or B2B space, providing customers with the ability to review your products and services is a good marketing strategy with potentially powerful results. Have you implemented user-generated reviews on your site or do you plan to? Are you using social tools to help drive sales? We’d like to hear what’s working for you.

How could Tufte possibly do this? Two words: transparency and accountability.

Tufte’s role

Tufte’s job is to help explain how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, all $797 billion of it, is being spent. The most recent manifestation of that effort is the Recovery.org website, which allows you to track the Federal stimulus spending by state, district, ZIP code…all the way down to individual recipients. You can track how many jobs have been funded, how many projects have been completed, and how much of the funding has been actually allocated. In short, you can see exactly where the money, all of the money, is going or will go.

The hope is that transparency may help clear up some of the public’s misconceptions, and accompanying derision, around the stimulus spending. By clearly demonstrating where the money is going, the U.S. government is being more accountable to the public. And by being more accountable, the U.S. government’s “brand” may benefit by appearing more trustworthy and responsible.

Why design is key

Here’s where the design aspect comes in. The data displayed on Recovery.org was presumably publicly available before the site was developed. But the challenge was in making that information accessible and understandable. I’d say the Recovery.org site does a pretty good job of that, especially if compared to other government information resources. Ever try to find a piece of data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) site, for example? If you can manage to mine the data you need, it will likely appear in the form of a menacing chart displaying statistics that require a lot of background knowledge to understand. However, if you’re trying to turn the tide of public perception, clarity is key.

Whether the Recovery.org website will succeed in changing minds remains to be seen. At the very least, people can access some real data to support their many opinions on the stimulus bill.

If building trust and accountability is important to your brand perception, creating transparency through good information design may help relationships with your customers. But even if you’re not trying to create transparency, good information design can still improve your brand perception in the eyes of customers.

The basic idea behind the Recovery.org site is to make the information accessible and easy to find. Customers always appreciate that, no matter what kind of website they’re accessing. And if they’re looking for specific information, about a product for example, making that information easy to find can make all the difference. Consider a tech support or customer service site—if needed information is difficult to find, an already frustrated customer will only become more frustrated.

So take a tip from Obama and try to make it easier for your customers to find out what they need to know.

How do you think information design can help improve customer relationships? Leave a comment to let me know.

2009 was a rough year for marketers. Budgets were cut, heads rolled, and projects came under tighter scrutiny than ever before. So, in such a high-stakes climate, mistakes and missteps  would be few and far between, right? Not so. The following awkward, painful, bizarre, and embarrassing marketing blunders show that even with the odds stacked against them, marketers both big and small will dare to dream the impossible dream (and pay the price in the end).

[10] Chevy Volt Dance

Click here to view the embedded video.

Embarrassing? Check. Awkward? Check. Painful? Check. Bizarre? Check And lucky for us, this was released before 2009 was up, so it makes the list.

Perhaps Autoextremist Peter D. Lorenzo put it best: A job qualification for GM’s new CEO would be “…somebody who would would fire everyone directly responsible for the ‘Chevy Volt Dance’ and even more important, understand the reasons why it never should have seen the light of day.”

GM killed the EV1, its ground-breaking electric car, with sheer marketing ineptitude in 1999. In 2009 GM did its best to abort its ground-breaking serial hybrid, the Volt, with this bit of marketing ineptitude.

[9] Windows 7 Launch Party

Click here to view the embedded video.

How to make an OS launch like a Tupperware party: a warm, fuzzy, diverse, and welcoming Tupperware party…

This is for those who thought that Gates and Co. could only move up after the company’s $300 million dud of an ad camapaign last year. Remember that campaign? It co-starred comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the man himself, Bill Gates, in a 90-second TV spot beginning in a shoe store and ending with the promise of a “delicious” future.

2009 delivered that future in the form of a Windows 7 launch campaign that, despite taking place in a kitchen, was anything but delicious.

[8] GM Reinvention (and its various spoofs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

USA! USA! Um… not so much. Here we have GM bouncing back from federally mandated bankruptcy restructuring with a message to the American people, its new owners.

And that message apparently had something to do with amputees and butterflies, but beyond that, we’re a little hazy on the details.

[7] Chia Obama

Click here to view the embedded video.

Really? The 2008 commemorative plate was too stuffy for you? Maybe you bought one and liked it, but just didn’t feel like it gave you enough Obama pride to carry you through 2009?

Well, our perennial friends at chi-chi-chi-chia came up with the answer in 2009, and boy did they hit this one out of the park.

[6] PETA Pet Shop Boys Name Change Request

Shoot for the stars, end up in the circular file.

While the Pet Shop Boys may have had a popular song (“I Want a Dog”), PETA, as is often the case, wasn’t satsified. In a bold attempt at rebranding by proxy, PETA made a teeny, weeny request of the boys. The result? Lots of free publicity for PETA, but not a whole lot of feel-good credibility to go along with it.

[5] Whole Foods CEO on Single Payer Healthcare Reform

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is Tendo strategy 101: Take the time to understand your audience. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey let all those commie, leftie, pinko Prius-driving shoppers of his know just where he stood on single payer healthcare reform, and the results that followed did not spur a rush to buy organic humus or premium, extra-firm tofu.

At least we give him props for taking a stand on something, speaking his mind, and being transparent about his beliefs–and frankly, that counts for a lot (and it kept him off the bottom of our list, despite the magnitude of this blunder).

(4) Visit Denmark, Conceive a Child

What better way to woo travelers to visit the Scandanavian land of fair-haired maidens than the promise of a one-night stand and a cute, illegitimate love child as a souvenir?

Tendo covered this in our blog when it first came out (that’s right, you read it here first), but the upshot is the Danish tourism board thought a suberversive viral featuring an attractive mother looking for the father of her baby was the hot ticket to encourage tourism to Denmark. Points for thinking outside of the box here, but…

[3] The Shake Weight

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Nuff said.

[2] Amazon Deletes 1984 from Kindle

George Orwell predicted it. In what can only be called the consummate product marketing debacle of 2009, Amazon went Big Brother on its Kindle users–literally–by surreptitiously deleting what they believed to be unauthorized copies of Orwell’s classics, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their Kindle devices. This heaping bowl of “not good” had all the irony of, um, something with a lot of irony.

[1] Balloon Boy

Click here to view the embedded video.

When promoting your reality show concept gets away from you, as it were.

Robert Thomas, a Colorado State University student and paid assistant to Balloon Boy’s dad, Richard Heene, revealed the high-flying scare that captured worldwide attention to be a misguided, guerilla-style publicty stunt to promote Heene’s reality show pitch. According to CNN, “Thomas said that at one point they were talking about the Roswell UFO incident of the late 1940s when Heene said it would be easy to cook up a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell–and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy.’”

Weigend was on the show to discuss “the social data revolution,” a phrase he apparently coined for the social media phenomenon in which people share data with friends (Facebook), the world (Twitter), and companies they do business with (Amazon).

What interested me about the interview was how Weigend defines companies in relation to social data. There are two types. Some companies, like Amazon, embrace social data and enable “explicit data creation.” They do this by creating incentives for customers to share information with them. Amazon’s Wish List is a great example of this. More traditional companies, on the other hand, embrace “implicit data creation,” whereby they “sniff the digital exhaust” of their customers, hoping to infer their preferences, interests, and so on.

After thinking about the success of Amazon and the enormity of the social media (or data, whichever you prefer) phenomenon, it seems crazy not to embrace explicit data creation with your customers. But maybe I’m wrong; perhaps there’s a reason to just “sniff digital exhaust.” You can hear the interview or read a transcript online.

They created a video—later discovered to be a hoax—that they posted on their YouTube channel. It features a Danish woman (an actress, as it turns out) holding a baby. She is talking to the baby’s father, a man she says met in a bar in Copenhagen and had a one-night stand with. She doesn’t want money or anything from him, she says, she just wants to find him and tell him about their son. Her final plea in the video is for him—or anyone who may know him—to get in touch with her.

According to a Danish news site, VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich had this to say in a press release: “We deeply apologise that the film has offended a lot of people—that certainly wasn’t the idea. The idea was to create a positive view of Denmark. In order not to continue offending people, we have removed the film from YouTube.”

I wasn’t offended by the video, but the explanation is a little offensive to anyone of average intelligence because the agency is not ‘fessing up about its goals. Rather than contributing to a positive view of Denmark, these marketers were trying to do something controversial to get people talking about Denmark and create some online publicity. Clearly, at some point they realized that any publicity is NOT good publicity.

Apparently overnight stays in the country are on the downswing—perhaps the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens are a tough sell—but still. Sending out a message to travelers that Denmark has attractive blondes who like one-night stands? I don’t think that strategy belongs in the marketing playbook.

Warning – this article features a number of linked images and campaigns that are, as the title implies, shocking and NSFW. Click through to the links accordingly.

Shock campaigns, including the use of gory, disturbing, and unsettling images and scenarios, work as an attention grabber. Whether it’s Volkswagen’s “safe happens” campaign of a few years back or the U.K’s “texting while driving” PSA, shock and awe messaging have been an institution in connecting with motorists since the “Red Asphalt” driver education films debuted in 1964.

Outside of the automotive realm of selling us safer cars and preventing us from taking driving too lightly, shock marketing has been put into action to keep us off drugs (Faces of Meth and the more recent Montana Meth project come to mind), as well as encouraging us to buy condoms and practice safe sex (see recent French and German ad campaigns depicting sex with disturbing partners ranging from giant scorpions to Hitler).

When the shock wears off

So what’s the point of these campaigns? If it’s to start a Facebook conversation on a topic, and your topic involves sex, drugs, or automotive gore, then the path to success arguably begins and ends with capitalizing on that innate human fascination with all things morbid and taboo. Rubbernecking by ad proxy, as it were.

But if you were to expand the shock message to include the patently absurd, thereby pulling in just about every viral and subversive campaign fit to be highlighted on industry sites (like Adrants) that cover this beat, as marketers, we are left with this question: “You have our attention, but so what?”

For sex, drugs, and cars, maybe the attention is enough. But how can you take the attraction to powerful images and concepts and translate that into more meaningful impressions around a consumer brand? How do you engage and retain the audience’s attention long after the initial shock has worn off?

The boldness of Benetton

For guidance, we can look to one of the pioneers of the genre, Luciano Benetton, and his eponymous clothing brand. His ad campaigns in the early 1980s with then-creative director Oliviero Toscani depicted disturbing but beautifully rendered images of race, poverty, religion, refugees, AIDs, capital punishment, war, and corruption.

His critics scoffed, citing Benetton and Toscani’s work as a shallow and sensational ploy for the sole purpose of raising eyebrows and causing a stir, but Benetton saw it differently. “The purpose of advertising is not to sell more,” he said. “It’s to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company’s values…” In this statement, Benetton made a striking observation that today’s marketers would be wise to heed. In essence, he points out that it’s obvious to the world that Benetton makes clothes, so if the purpose of advertising is to educate people about what a company has to offer, then telling them that you make clothing isn’t revealing much. On the other hand, using edgy and colorful images to show consumers that Benetton makes edgy and colorful clothes does more to communicate Benetton’s differentiated attribute—the core essence of its brand—than an ad laboriously detailing the breadth of its garments or their (assumedly) impeccable craftsmanship and quality.

Benetton described engaging his audience in an evolving exercise of painting the Benetton brand as one that thumbs its nose at the status quo, one that is self-aware and self-actualized in a turbulent and troubling world. In short, he clothed his brand in a character and gave it personality. In so doing, he pushed one-way media to its absolute limits in the pre-Internet age, creating dinner table and water-cooler conversations from glossy posters in a way that few of today’s YouTube and Facebook virals could ever hope to muster.

His ads were not mere billboards for hawking wares, but a mirror back into his company’s core values, designed to facilitate communication of those values with its intended audience. As Benetton summed up himself, “Communication should never be commissioned from outside the company, but conceived from within its heart.”

Nearly 30 years later, the Benetton brand still conjures up bright colors for a bright and worldly clientele. VW, by contrast, got its 15 minutes out of “safe happens,” but a few years later we’re already wondering this: Did VW’s campaign and the tremendous subsequent viral pickup reach within the heart of what VW stands for? Is VW perceived as any more or less safe than any other car brand today? Benetton took shock and owned it. He launched his brand with it and embraced it as an enduring and representative attribute of Benetton’s core values. Unlike VW and the preachy PSAs, Benetton grabbed us by our starched white collars, forced us to look, and then kept us looking and thinking about his company through that colorful and disturbing lens for decades.