Riffs on advertising, marketing, media and society. ************************************************************************************************************
We may not be interested in chaos but chaos is interested in us (R.Cooper)
I've found very interesting artickle on a research on DVR owners. We already know that DVR owners watch fewer TV ads and the latest research by Information Resources Inc. showed that buying of new packaged products in households owning DVR was 5% lower han in non - DVR households. About 20% of all brands in the study lost statistically significant volume in DVR households.
Reality can't be ignored. Reality strikes back. It can't be your ad isn't seen anymore.
This is probably something that guides most of Apple products buyers, we hope for the magic and difficult to express in words aura to fall upon us and makes us more special and more creative. In fact this is not far away from the truth.
Gavan Fitzsimmons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University conducted a research together with his two colleagues where test subjects were shown Apple and Disney logo for 30 milliseconds - a subliminal flash that was not actually "seen" and they were respectively more likely to be creative and candid.
"Brands are almost human in representation in people's minds," said Gavan Fitzsimmons.
It means brands can also be the driver of the social influence. What does it mean for marketers, apart from the possibilities subliminal messaging brings. It means that branding and brand personality are very important as they are driving social influence and make a difference.
Shelly D. Farnham researched Facebook applications and what determines their success. It is very interesting what he found out - applications that become successful help its users to achieve social goals:
"In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain."
Interesting post from Neuromarketing blog about the danger of asking people what they did, why they did it. Brain isn't straightforward and linear as we would like to believe. Brain likes being mischievous.So researchers should be suspicious of answers given by people asked to explain their behavior or recall the past behavior - are we hearing the truth, or The Interpreter?
Actually nothing as things are getting worse and we aren't becoming wiser with age and experience. Lord Leverhulme was aware already in 19th century that half of his marketing budget was wasted as he expressed it:
“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half” Over 100 years later, things haven't improved at all. According to The Global Marketing Effectiveness Report that surveyed 3,000 marketing professionals across the globe, 65% of marketing spend had no effect on consumers in 2007. The report's findings should be wake up call for all involved in marketing and advertising: - 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers. - Estimated wastage rates varied from 45% for business-to-business marketers, through to 65% for business-to-consumer - Just one in ten of respondents have automated systems in place to track the effectiveness of their spend - Of the 55% of marketers who do track the results of their spending, 80% do so manually, spending hours capturing, compiling and analyzing data.
- Questioned on strategy, 70% of marketers believe that short-term revenue-boosting and lead-generation campaigns are more important than long-term intangible brand building (15%). A clear indication that marketers are under pressure more than ever before to generate results - Tracking marketing effectiveness topped the 2008 wish lists of 35% of marketers, and made the top three for 70%. We have reached the point of very huge wastage of the billions dollars invested in marketing. Those money bring no effect due to old-fashioned methods and stereotypes used. Times has changed, people haven't changed as such but we've gained very valuable knowledge about people and their behavior which we choose to oversee and keep on pouring money down the drain stuck to routines and fearing to challenge the way we think. After all "no one has ever been fired for using TV"
It is time we get it and stop just talking about it but do something to improve the results and reduce wastage. 65% doesn't sound to scary but when you translate it into advertising dollars spend each year across the globe to sell the products people don't need in a way people don't want, you get scared and makes you believe even stronger that
"If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising,” he said, “then they wouldn't have to advertise them.”
Advertisers love to test advertising. Just to minimize the risk and ask so called consumers about branding, logo, music, etc. so they can afterwards ad advertising agency to add more packshots and increase logo 25%, so the branding is more clear. It seems like doing so, advertising not only waste money but increase the risk for advertising to ineffective. According to Les Binet and Peter Field data, published in Market Leader, ads that have not been quantitatively pre-tested have a 71% chance of being effective and ads that have been pre-tested have only a 44% chance of success.
It can be the lower chance of success for the pre-tested ads is the result of listening to consumers post-rationalization that has not too much to do with reality - "most of we know, we don't know we know", so we try to sound clever and evaluate advertising which isn't always mirror reality.
I love this story. I have told it to all people I know and who believe that humans are very rational. Hell, no! We are far from being rational and this research is a good example of our irrationality. Brain can work very mysterious ways. Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found out that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of a $5 bottle when in fact it the same wine. People actually experience wine to taste better, they don't rationalize that the better taste is connected with the higher price.
"What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality," said Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing who co-authored a paper titled "Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness," published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "So, in essence, [price] is changing people's experiences with a product and, therefore, the outcomes from consuming this product."
There are a lot of available studies showing that people value and enjoy product more, the higher the price. Of course the line is thin here and one can risk that too high price levels actually scares people instead of attracting them to buy product.
Cheers! And keep on hallucinating. Expensive wine is tasting delicious.
I have been sitting at focus groups with teenagers yesterday and I was pretty surprised with their advertising awareness. It was pretty exciting to hear them talking about ads and what is catching their attention. Today, I've got from my friend at Dist the link to great videos with girls explaining while ads got a flip.
I am pretty reserved to hearing people's rational analysis of ads, but those girls had very insightful comments. The whole series of videos just showed how detached from their customers advertisers are. Behind some rational words, real gems were hidden - precious insights like those two:
Videos are done by 3iying, which is an all Girl Creative agency, based in New York City, a think tank working to make better ads, products and media for other girls. Good intiative and we should watch and listen very carefully what they have to say.
I've just found on YouTube a great example presenting how dangerous asking people to express their opinions about advertising can be. Participants of the focus group were asked to judge the famous Apple commercial "1984", that by the way was called to be one of the best ads ever. There was shown animated version. What was result? They were pretty dissatisfied with the ad and came up with a couple of improvements and incredible comments presenting the complete lack of understanding of the concept. The video shows the risk of asking people to evaluate whether the commercials are good or not. We ask people to be experts and they want to live up to our expectations. They do their best to rationalize, have meaning on every aspect of ad and sound professional - they want to help us from the depth of their hearts. However, it is not exactly what we want out of focus group. We don't need people expertise, we need to gain knowledge of what people feel when seeing ad, how deep it touches them and which effect it has on their emotions.
Here is the original version of Apple ad.
So don't ask your focus group for advice how to change the ad or your product. Talk to them about their feelings, associations advertising / products evoke in them - it gives you a lot of insights to work with. The better you understand the people, the better ads / products you can make. And never forget your gut feeling, that can often guide you to the right solutions.
I've learned during my study a lot about statistics in combination with philosophy. My favorite professor who taught in methodology of sociological research always told us - numbers are what you say they are. It is true. Numbers are very flexible, they seem to be objective as they are perceived as hard facts. Numbers describe the reality which we can control. Numbers remove the randomness. What I've also learned was the inevitable need for observing the individual's experiences and ideas. Researchers should study reality as a social actors (subjectively - understanding people's motivations), not as an independent observers (objectively - understanding people as numbers). The truth is that you can never connect with a number. You hear lots of people in media and advertising business claiming that people comes first to add afterwards: we can reach 75% of target group. And so what? 75% can translate in many things depending on what we want to say. But it doesn't say anything constructive, it doesn't help us to lose any communication challenge or neither takes any closer to people (target group as some call them).
I have seen a couple of examples of the numbers tyranny in the pursue of explaining reality. For me it looked more like manipulation and completely lack of understanding of what's going on. This week, there were released to surveys about the use of digital and traditional media in Denmark. First of them, conducted by Explora, focused on the 15-24 years old and the conclusion was: This is a myth that you can't reach young people via TV advertising. Explora found out that young people spend 84 minutes on watching TV and only 11 minutes online. Here comes the best - they measured only 136 Danish websites!! How on earth can you draw any conclusions on youth Internet usage based on 136 websites? Numbers show only the part of reality.
Another research covered the new media usage compared to the traditional media amongst "the early adapters" and was conducted by Danish national TV station TV2 and ACNielsen. The conclusion was: the young people with high interest in technology has still high consumption of traditional media. Research responsible at TV2 believes that the increasing usage of the new media and internet don't decrease the time spent with traditional media, there is no cannibalization. So far so good. The early adapters spend in all 9 hours and 32 minutes daily consuming media (150 min. with TV, 233 min. in front of computer, 35 minutes with other media like game consoles and mp3). I read the article once, twice and I couldn't find anything interesting except some numbers. I didn't learn anything new about media usage.
I wonder why none of the research didn't cover multitasking issue that makes it possible for many to extend media time into 9 hours. None of research come up with the slightest attempt to understand HOW people use the media. Would it be to uncomfortable for the traditional media?
It is so ignorant and one sided picture of reality presented by those two research. I don't believe TV is dead. It is not, the way we use it changed and those numbers don't tell anything about it.
It almost cliche to say it over and over again: People are first, data are second. Still, it is hard to live up to this sentence, as we are attached to the old media world order. As long as we don't change the terminology and become more curious to see what lies behind the numbers, we will stand still in one place. The world will pass by.
For majority 'luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it.' Time is followed by experiences, comfort, beauty and quality. The survey results indicates that there is the shift in people's meaning on what luxury is. More people seem to think about luxury not in terms of materials things, but more in terms of experiences and state of mind. It is the natural result of changing world and distribution of means in the Western societies. Parallel with uber-luxury, fabulous lives ala Beckham or Paris Hilton, luxury became more mass than ever - more people can afford the luxury bags, clothes and cars. There are also more mass brands that are clever to add luxury touch to their products via clever marketing moves. The definition of luxury isn't the same as it used to be, it doesn't have the same role of being the dividing line between classes. Luxury products consumption used to be the way to achieve prestige and higher social status.
Today, more people discover the meaningless of consumption, its negative consequences for our society and planet and the decreasing value of luxury products - they guarantee no longer the desired position on the society ladder. Therefore we chose to move from being conspicuous consumers into conscious consumers. Conscious consumer who consumer less in the name of luxury. It doesn't mean we will spend less, we will buy less products, but those will be of very high quality and of course high price. It will be still material things we will use to find our identity and mark our position, but those things will be disguised in emotions, statements and opinions.
People aren't irrational only when buying on eBay. We are pretty far away from being rational even when thinking about prices. A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research indicates that we tend to act as the lower digits were farther apart than higher ones.
"Students who saw ads showing a $233 skate marked down to $222 thought
they were getting a larger discount than did students who saw a $199
skate marked down to $188, even though the opposite was true. The first
group of students also rated themselves about 20 percent more likely to
buy the skates than did the others."
We aren't as clever as we tend to believe. Irrationality is very important when observing and analyzing human behavior. It also makes advertising kind of difficult as it is hard to predict, control and influence irrational behavior.
For the last couple of weeks you couldn't hear too much about Second Life in media. Apparently, SL hasn't live up to its hype. I was skeptical from the beginning about companies investing money and opening their virtual offices in SL to earn money. And today I read in Danish newspaper (Politiken) that companies begin to leave SL.
I guess there are too major problems with SL
1) The lack of users - the numbers Second Life gives as the number of SL users are the number of profiles. The truth is most people never come back again.
2) Companies have no idea how to act and interact in virtual reality of SL. For most companies SL is just another advertising window.
I guess there is also the third problem with users itself. Virtual reality is very new concept for us and we have no idea how to behave and how we can use the new space we have available. Plus there are still technological obstacles.
I do still believe Second Life is good and important but we need to explore the virtual reality more in order to understand its nature and become wiser on how to use it. The mix of traditional opt-down models, traditional advertising techniques and Second Life isn't the best in the world and can't bring any spectacular results (Danish Red Cross raised only 10.000 DKK from February 2007 ... I bet they still haven't earned home investments they made to create their HQ in SL)
Stop measuring and calculating, just try to understand in the first place. Understanding delivers better ROI.
Second Life has become the media celebrity lately, everyone is talking about SL, so many companies throw $$$ to opening their virtual stores / offices there. SL become crowded, unfortunately not with people (3,6 million accounts opened but only 250.000 people revisited SL within 30 days since the last login and there are maximum 20.000 people at the same time) but with companies.
Nic Mitham has recently made a brand map of Second Life that gives the overview over the major companies existing in SL. I find it interesting the way companies are places on the outskirts of the SL and form the circle. Is it an attempt to try to separate itself from competitors?
(Click on the picture for bigger view)
While companies are rushing into virtual territory, the recent survey from Komjuniti revealed that 72% Second Life users (“avatars”) are disappointed with the activities of the companies in SL. Moreover "over a third of them were unaware of the branded presence and 42% said they thought it constituted nothing more than a short-term trend, lacking durable commitment from the companies. Just 7% consider that it has a positive influence on brand image and their future buying behavior."
The major problem for SL users is the insufficient customer care and opportunities for interaction with companies - the two most important factors and the basic reason for existence in place like SL.
It seems like companies feel the urge to be present in the SL but have no reason for being there, have no clue or plan how to act in SL. One should believe that the reason for company entering SL is to build a community around brands and interact with the consumers. Apparently it is not the way consumers feel.
I spent a lot of time in SL and I've always been skeptical abut the SL frenzy in business world. There is nothing wrong with SL itself, even though it seems to me as the ghost ship, the world with fantastic building but not too many people. SL is a wonderful world, the virtual scene that opens door to the new experiences and ways of communication. However many companies misunderstand that and see it mostly as the new area for the exposure of their ads and products. I guess we, both consumers and business need to understand first how the virtual worlds are relevant to us, what do they mean and give us, how we can use them before we fling into using them without having any goals or plans how to use it. I do believe in SL as the huge innovation and research space at the moment. This is the exciting place for gathering insights, observing and understanding humans interactions and testing products or ideas.
There is no need to get hasty and make the wrong decisions. It can affect companies negatively, as they don't live up to consumers expectations and needs. They way companies act in SL reminds me about the bad traditional marketing where ads are developed and broadcasted on TV without even spending a minute on understanding consumers, without even thinking about any kind of research.
It is better to take it slow and put resources into decent research. SL is great and important so better use it wisely.
You can read more about companies in SL here and here
YouTube is great. It is fantastic source of insights about the people and their lives. YouTube is kind of focus group on steroids. Instant insights into people lives. What always amazes me is the people's creativity and the endless need of exploration and creation. YouTube brings plenty of fascinating stories. This is the new source of information for me, it lets me to follow with what's hot, what's not trends. It is other dimension of visual sociology - YouTubelogy.
Today when I was catching up, I've found this video. It is great piece of job. Sound of skateboard, movement and good beat = great video. Something that has a potential to become a hit amongst skateboards and other free riders.
The Second Life attracts many companies, most of the commercial attempts aren't successful as I wrote a couple of weeks ago. The huge interest in SL attracts also research companies that provides us with interesting insights on SL users and they way they perceive real life (RL) brands in SL universe. I have run across a bunch of them lately and they give us the pretty interesting picture of the SL and virtual world in general.
GMI Poll surveyed 9.529 US consumers aged 18 and above in March - April 2007. The research showed that 56% believe SL is a good promotional tool and what's more interesting:
24% claims to visit SL to escape their real life, which they aren't happy with
64% admits to present themselves differently:
45% give themselves a more attractive body
37% make themselves younger
23% give themselves a different nationality
55% watch less television since becoming active in Second Life
22 % have more Second Life friends than real-life friends
29% feel Second Life interferes with their real-world social life
SL is the identity fitness, the place where we can train and experience how it would be to be someone else. I guess it reflects the everyday struggle with being yourself. We are infected with beauty images from media and we want to run away from our bodies that aren't matching the standards we see in media. This is real second life where you can be whoever you want to be. SL is the example of the liquid reality, reality where all known patterns and rules aren't defined by society any longer, aren't taken for granted. They depend on the individuals, they shape the life and the world around them as they wish.. This is the world where it is easier to form than to keep the form alive, like water - it doesn't keep its shape for too long. The liquid reality of virtual worlds will leak into our lives and take them gradually over. According to Gartner 80% of active Internet users will have a "Second Life" in the virtual world by the end of 2011. Does it mean 80% Internet users will be unsatisfied with their lives or will they find value in participating in virtual life? Or are virtual worlds another stop in our quest for freedom?
Virtual reality will have increasing influence on our lives and turn our life in the huge store filled with goods, where we wander without the aim and are helpless. We don't know what to try or choose overwhelmed by the endless choice opportunities. This is the "land of plenty". Together with the development of virtual worlds, we face the philosophical questions about our identity and freedom.
Alongside the discussion about human condition and influence of virtual reality on our life, the commercial aspects of SL are blooming. Companies see SL as another advertising space, where they can expose their products to consumers. There are lots of opportunities, however not every brand is equally good at understanding the rules of the game and using the possibilities virtual world opens in front of them. Many still thinks in traditional silo ways and that can be seen in the latest SL research conducted by CB News / Repères conducted among 1.085 Second Life residents who were asked about their perception of Real Life (RL) brands in SL universe.
The research showed the brand experience is very limited in SL - people would like to try it, but unfortunately not many brands thought about using SL for creating the interaction with their brand - for God's sake how anyone could mistaken SL with TV???!
Moreover no RL brands managed to build strong spontaneous awareness. I would risk to say that the most of prompted awareness scores don't come directly from SL but is influenced by the hype created by media around the brands opening their hubs in SL.
It is such a shame the brands doesn't research more the SL universe to use the potential that lays there: 66% believe that the presence of RL brands has a positive impact on SL and 45% of respondents even want more brands because they enhance and give more credibility to Second Life.
I have also found a very interesting initiative by the IAN company that has setup the FutureAd-Park together with the German targeting specialist nugg.ad to demonstrate behavioral targeting capabilities within Second Life. How does it work? You enter the FutureAd-Park where you can see 6 different towers. Every tower represents a different topic like: lifestyle, traveling, technology , etc. The special software tracks your movement around different areas and register your interests. The longer you stay within specific area, the value of the interests increases in your profile. The data are stored and used when you approach the billboards, where the relevant messages that fit to your interest can be presented for you. You can read more about the project here. This is very exciting project but it raises question about freedom and privacy.
There is lots of things going on around SL and the general concept of virtual reality. It is the new and exciting idea. We need more time with SL. more experience and more research that will lead us to understanding the new forms of human's interaction, not only on human - to - human level but also human - to - brand level. SL can be a playground - we can observe consuemrs playing with our brands. Understanding is the key here as the whole concept of virtual reality changes the way we act, changes who we are. People aren't always themselves in SL and don't live after real life rules... Try SL yourself! I am sure many of us would be tempted to have a tiny bit muscles and tiny bit longer and blonder hair ;o)
And the bonus for the curious who still don't dare to enter the Second Life. In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva, disappeared from his home in California. Recently a series of video by a person of the same name have appeared in Second Life. Filmmaker Douglas Gayeton came across these videos and put them together into documentary, Watch it here. It will give you a pretty good idea what SL is or maybe even what it could be...
eMarketer forecasts that the total number of mobile TV and video subscribers globally will rise from 40 million in 2006 to over 750 million in 2011...
A
..and worldwide paying subscribership will go up to nearly 200 million, and revenue will reach nearly $13 billion.
There is optimistic forecast I'd say and there are some money to earn.
But what interested me most in the eMarketer article was a 2006 Nokia survey that showed pretty significant differences in phone usage preferences amongst 18.35 years old. Not only the enormous gap between 46% Saudi Arabians and 3% Japanese in interest to watch Mobile TV. What caught my attention is generally very low percentage of Japanese who would like to use mobile phone to anything else but sending and receiving emails (76%).
I must admit I had a picture in my head of Japanese youth using mobile phone to everything, music, photography, TV, Internet...but to my surprise those features seams to be the way more interesting for Chinese people or Europeans.
The table below shows how important is finding the right business model for mobile services and platforms within every country / culture. Despite globalization and uniting power of Internet, the differences grow as fast as similarities.
The McKinsey Quarterly conducted 'How businesses are using Web 2.0' survey in January 2007 (2,847 executives worldwide, 44 percent of whom hold C-level positions). The respondents expressed satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, they see Web 2.0 technologies as strategic tools.
However, as the survey showed, companies don't follow the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs. They'd rather focus on and invest in technologies that enable automation and networking.
I seems like the companies are still very afraid of having the conversation with the consumers and opening the door for two-ways dialog. The fear of losing control is huge as top crisis manager Eric Dezehell puts it:
"The CEOs of the largest 50 companies in the world are practically hiding under their desks in terror about Internet rumors"
The companies still pretend they can avoid being the subject of discussion that is happening online between the millions of people who are enabled to say whatever they want, express their positive experiences, thoughts and feelings as well as the dissatisfaction, problems and frustrations. But the history and many bad examples showed that opposite you must fear "the venom of the crowds" as the most crushing power in the market at the moment. Today, in the world of mouse era, companies can be build and destroyed with the mouse click. The solution isn't to hide under your desk, consumers can find you there if they have to. The companies must accept the fact that even though they control their brands, there are others players in the market, who can influence the brands and change the course of the storytelling companies control.
Piper Jaffray has published the report "User Revolution". They not only foresee the global online advertising revenue to reach $81,1 billion by 2011 and expect "a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.". And it's believable when you look at the chart below.
There are more people who would give up TV on behalf of Interet. The number increased with 54% within the last 5 years. Internet takes very important place in people's lives as it gives them the bigger versatality and more control.
You can read more about report here or order it here.
According the online survey conducted by iFOCOS Zogby a majority of Americans (55%) said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role. 72% said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today and 61% said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.
Good news for citizen journalism, bad news for traditional journalism. It seems like American enjoys the diversity of opinions, openness and many-to.many communication blogging and other forms of news, information overview Internet offers.
I have a habit of eavesdropping. On the bus, in the shop. I can't help it. It's fascinating to see the people "live", and this is the very important and inevitable tool in the job as communication planner. The consumers understanding is the most important part of the communication strategy. The deep insights are the basis for placing the product in consumers life, defining its role, as well as for the market segmentation, recognition of the threats, identification the potential source of income and of course this the key information we need as media planners for the selection of the most effective and relevant communication channels.
Consumers analysis and its quality depends not only on what techniques are used, but who makes the analysis and how the person is prepared to put such a task across. Targeting can be limited to a couple of graphs, tables with affinity index and bone-dry description that is put into immortal power point slides. But it can also be more interesting and take the form of the movie showing the interviews with people representing our target group, showing the part of their real everyday life, not just the numbers based on declarations.
When we are curious and reach into the real life to gather the necessary information we have access to the plenty of data and besides the correct interpretation of data, the most important is the creative thinking and the ability to connect all available elements, information and data into the consistent picture of consumer.
We can never forget to ask ourselves about our objectivity and our ability to understand the consumers. So often we are tempted to take the shortcuts and define the target group through the distorted glasses of our existence. We tend to transfer our feelings, our experiences over to the people we are analyze. We ignore often the fact that people working in the media or advertising agency are part of the minority: urban profile, no kids, income over average, very social and outgoing, spending most of his/her free time at work. We are pretty different from the people we are interested in as the target group. During the process of understanding whom our consumers are we must be aware of the Znaniecki'shumanist principle (also called as "humanistic coefficient"), that means: "an observer of cultural life can understand the data observed only if taken with the” humanistic coefficient”, only if he does not limit his observation to his own direct experience of the data but reconstructs the experience and the data in the social context of the people involved"
When we approach the targeting process in the right way, we end up with the real person picture - the
typical exponent for the target group. We know what's her name, how old she is, what clothes she wears, what she reads, how she will react when we offer her to try our product. We know she was trying to lose weight three times this year and she will not take for ski trip this winter because she is going to have a baby. We, planners need to learn to be chameleons and change our skin while we are working with targeting otherwise we risk producing the wrong and subjective analyses that is based mostly on whom we and our significant others are -those analyses can't be reliable and can't lead to the successful communication strategies. Communication planners need to be curious and go outside to experience the real life of ordinary people with the huge dose of creativity and humanist principle.
Society and people have always fascinated me, this was also reason why I became sociologist. I wanted to explore and get deeper insights into society. Sociology helps us to understand the social rules and processes that bind and separate people In other words sociology concerns itself with the way we live, interact, adapt, and play our roles in every day life. It is a wonderful science, because it is so human. One of fields that I became very involved with is the visual sociology, that is dealing with the visual description of the social world. Visual sociology is the way of decoding the fragmented social reality. It documents the everyday social life. The pictures are the data used for the analysis and understanding the people and they can reveal a lot of aspects of people's life. Just look at the cave paintings from Lascaux that tell us a lot about the ancient culture.
There are three approaches to the visual sociology - data collection with camera or other recording technology - studying visual data produced by other cultures - the use of visual media to communicate sociological understandings to audiences, and the use of visual media within sociological research itself.
Visual sociology gives very valuable insights into everyday life and allows us to better understand the surrounding world. This discipline is very important in the communication field, as it allows researchers to go beyond the verbal declarations. Why it is so important to look beyond the words, you may think. It is simple, as we, people generally don't think with words, but with pictures. In fact we can't rely purely on respondents declarations. Photography or video allows us to read the hidden emotions, needs, behavior, that we would never could access by using only spoken language. We are living in the visual culture where linear thinking was replaced by the hyperlinks. The world has changed and is still changing but our methods for understanding people haven't. Most of thoughts and feelings that influence our behavior occur in the unconscious mind. 95% of thinking takes place in the unconscious mind, so in fact most of what we know we don't know we know. Moreover 80% of human communication is nonverbal. Apart from words, we use touch, vocal intonation, gesture, body posture, eye contact, pupil dilation, facial expression in our communication. We don't think in linear way as the speech is constructed. We employ the metaphors, which stimulate the working of the mind, help us perceive the world and are the engines of imaginations . We use ca. 6 metaphors per minute of spoken language. Metaphors are simple to use and understand. They are the "primal thought", when we communicate verbally, we simply describe the metaphors occurring in our mind. Metaphors are pictures. Marketing and advertising are about people, not words or declarations. And here I can see a huge role for the visual sociology. You can collect the material by going outside of your office and photographing people in their everyday natural environment or you can simply equip your respondents with disposable cameras and ask them to photograph their everyday life and support the visual material with interviews. The opportunities are limitless, all you have to do is open your mind and be ready to try something new. Myself, I am a passionate photographer as well, so I've decided to join two of my passions and have started the new project - the world seen through the camera eye. I will try to go beyond the verbal world and show the "unsaid" aspects of humans' life. I want to show how people live, interact and act in everyday life through the eye of my camera.
I have found two interesting articles about television model. Both sets the question mark to the functionality and relevance of the traditional television viewing model. ICM surveyed 2070 for BBC on their online/mobile video viewing habits vs television viewing. The research results can suggest that online video can erode television. YouTube and similar websites are the new channels that allow people to watch and share videos online. There is still minority choosing the small PC or mobile screens over television, however the increasing popularity of online viewing should be alarming for the traditional broadcasters and they need to find the ways how to use it if they don't want to be left behind.
And Michael Stickel from The Ubergeeks asks very relevant question Why isn't all TV on demand?. Nowadays audience is more loyal to specific TV shows, series than to TV channels itself. Why then not to allow people to access their favorite programs whenever they want and capitalize on it?
European population is getting older, people are living longer and older people are enjoying better health and better economy. By 2030, there will be 24 million people aged 55 to 64 and 34.7 million citizens aged over 80 (compared to 18.8 million today) in EU. The number of people 80+ will grow by 180% by 2050!
It will definitely cause the problems to the future European society, but there is also another more positive side of the story - especially for companies and marketers. As the modern pensioners aren't just a grandparents. They have challenged and changed the way older people live and are. Stereotype is broken, the new consumption class has been born - seniors.
Do you remember Dove's campaign for the real beauty and one of their models - Irene Sinclair. At the age of 96, Irene Sinclair, a grandmother from north London, has joined Kate Moss, Scarlett Johansson, and other famous beauties, as the "face" of an international beauty campaign.
The campaign, objective was to challenge conventional notions of beauty and of course sell more products. The results were astonishing - the Dove cream sales increased with 700%.
Dove hit the right target group, people over 60-ties, who are the biggest, growing and the wealthiest consumer group in Europe. The average annual disposable income of person aged 65-75 years is $60.000 (35 - 45 years old people have $46.000). They not only have the money, but lots of free time. According to Henley Management College research, 7 out of 10 just retired Britons aren't going to save but spend the money to fulfill their whims, dreams from the youth - luxury cars (today every second car in Europe is bought by people over 60 years old), travel, and so on.
This is the mega trend, companies must face and adapt to, as the power of people 60+ will increase and they will decide what's hot and what sells. They will decide which companies survive.
Cars are one of the high demand products for 60+ people. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, by 2015, 70% of all car buyers will be people over 50 years old. Already today, some car manufacturers design their vehicles to meet the needs of older people. For example Ferrari changed the height of door, so there is more space when you get in the car, Ford makes cars that are equipped for people having problems with their spine.
Cosmetics are also highly demanded product. The people over 50 years old are the biggest spenders in the category, they spend 8 times more as the teenagers. No wonder producers are very interested in their wallets and create the special series of products for mature skin, like Nivea Visage DNAge or Loreal Age Perfect.
Through the past decades products, services and advertising were targeted to youth. Today this's changed - the low fertility rates, better health and longer life, brought the significant growth of seniors. They are in majority and they have power over producers - the power they execute with their wallets. More companies notice the need for adapting the product portfolio to the needs of older people. Different people and different generations are diverse and have different needs. They need to be met by companies and their products. After all, youth isn't answer to everything, and it doesn't last forever :-).
Nielsen in USA has conducted a first independent research of iPod owners and their consumption habits for the device. Here are the findings:
- Less than 1% of content items played by iPod users on either iTunes or the device itself were videos
- Video comprises just 2% of total time spent using iPods or iTunes among iPod owners.
- Video iPod users consume video 11% of the time
- 15.8% of iPod users have played a video on either iPod or iTunes, about 1/3 of that group doesn't own a video iPod
The data shows that adoption of mobile video solutions is very slowly or maybe consumers aren't just interested in watching TV series or movies on the small screens.
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Second Life. How does it work? You enter the 
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I have a habit of eavesdropping. On the bus, in the shop. I can't help it. It's fascinating to see the people "live", and this is the very important and inevitable tool in the job as communication planner. The consumers understanding is the most important part of the communication strategy. The deep insights are the basis for placing the product in consumers life, defining its role, as well as for the market segmentation, recognition of the threats, identification the potential source of income and of course this the key information we need as media planners for the selection of the most effective and relevant communication channels.
We, planners need to learn to be chameleons and change our skin while we are working with targeting otherwise we risk producing the wrong and subjective analyses that is based mostly on whom we and our significant others are -those analyses can't be reliable and can't lead to the successful communication strategies. Communication planners need to be curious and go outside to experience the real life of ordinary people with the huge dose of creativity and humanist principle.
wonderful science, because it is so human.
Visual sociology gives very valuable insights into everyday life and allows us to better understand the surrounding world. This discipline is very important in the communication field, as it allows researchers to go beyond the verbal declarations. Why it is so important to look beyond the words, you may think. It is simple, as we, people generally don't think with words, but with pictures. In fact we can't rely purely on respondents declarations. Photography or video allows us to read the hidden emotions, needs, behavior, that we would never could access by using only spoken language. 
Cosmetics are also highly demanded product. The people over 50 years old are the biggest spenders in the category, they spend 8 times more as the teenagers. No wonder producers are very interested in their wallets and create the special series of products for mature skin, like 
