Return on Attention

Ed Batista at AttentionTrust wrote a great response to my post on the importance of Context (Beyond WHAT) in the analysis of attention data. In it, he says:

“I’m also not ready to concede that context can’t be wrung from the clickstreams and other attention data.”

I completely agree with Ed – I am not ready to concede that either. But the key, I think, lies in “other attention data”. I don’t think clickstreams are enough. Looking at clicks just tells you what someone has paid attention to in the past. In order to make sense of it, you need to know why they paid attention to it, and even more importantly, how much they valued the experience. In other words, to borrow John Hagel’s expression (not sure if John coined it or borrowed it from somewhere else), you need to know their Return on Attention.

In a stable environment, you can figure out the Why and the ROA through analysis of a large enough set of clickstream data. If someone returns to a source often, it is likely it provides them with a high Return on Attention. If someone buys coffee at Starbucks every day, it is safe to infer that they like Starbucks.

The vast majority of environments, however, are not stable. Ed alludes to this by noting that analysis of December clickstreams would likely lead to incorrect conclusions, because of holiday shopping. This is a great example of a very common phenomenon. People’s tastes change; Their contexts change, and not just at Christmas time. Take a vacation, work at home, buy a present for a friend’s birthday, go to a charitable event, think about joining the Army, have a kid, get married, change jobs – all of these are events that dramatically alter your context. Every one of these events diminishes the value of time-series clickstream data by some small amount, and makes it more likely you will draw the wrong conclusions. They also make driving actions much harder – you can see patterns, but with no understanding of the context changes, it is very difficult to provide recommendations that increase your Return on Attention.

(This is one of my big frustrations with the Amazon recommendation system, by the way – a little while ago, I was shopping for a present for my 3 yr old niece – no occasion, just a random present. I bought one from Amazon. Ever since then, I have been getting recommendations about other kids books, videos, toys, etc, even though I have relatively little ongoing interest. This only stopped when I went in to my ratings and history and provided Amazon with more context – specifically, that I wasn’t interested in those items).

This is not to say that clickstreams are not important or useful. They are. I have used clickstream data in the past to segment consumers, to target recommendations, to improve offers. It is certainly a part of any solution. But in dynamic environments, the value of clickstream data becomes hugely amplified when we have “other Attention data”. Specifically, data about Why and Return on Attention. They help us make sense of the clickstream data, to understand what still applies and what does not.

Where we at yapaZOO net out on this is that the issue is not about how much data we have, but the right types. Each set of data provides insight into consumers. Putting them together, however, yields far more than the sum of the parts.

BTW, also mentioned in Ed’s post is that he has no idea what we do, because we haven’t said anything about who we are or why we exist. I know our silence is annoying, and we’ll be coming out of stealth soon, probably in a few weeks. But we are working generally on this problem; we don’t claim to have a complete solution to all aspects of it, but we think we’ll provide a good step forward. We’re also huge supporters of what Ed and the others at AttentionTrust are trying to do, and will be joining as soon as we’re a little further along.

Beyond WHAT

From the AttentionTrust blog today:

” …Two of her [Elizabeth Lawley] comments really stood out for me. First:

Syndicated subscriptions are an attention filter… There are students of mine, colleagues of mine, who would love to be able to subscribe to my attention filter. ‘What is Liz reading?’

… Something implicit in Liz’s comment–and something I know Steve will discuss–is the importance of inattention. If I’m interested in knowing what Liz is reading (and I am), I’m just as interested in knowing what she’s NOT reading. “Attention filters” will help us find the good stuff and avoid the dreck, using attention data generated by us, our friends and colleagues, and although syndicated subscriptions are moving us in the right direction, we have a long way to go.

Liz was also careful to draw an important distinction between social networks and “attention networks,” and she posed a compelling question:

How do we meld attention networks with search?

This becomes a huge question when we start thinking about how “attention filters” might evolve. For example, my blogroll is a simple attention filter that gives you a very general sense of the issues that interest me, but it won’t tell you which authors I read the most, let alone which individual posts are most relevant to my interests.”

Hinted at in this entry is the concept of context. You want to know not only WHAT someone is reading, you want to know WHY someone is reading it and how much they LIKED it. In other words, you want to know a) was this worthy of their attention?; and b) did they get a good Return on Attention?

Simply capturing clickstreams cannot give you the context. But to make the concept of Attention Filters practical, we need to get to that level. Data without context doesn’t have meaning.

Search as Platform

Ok, just a quick post for now, until I more fully digest this. But this looks really cool.

Amazon, whose A9 search engine is cool but complex, has launched their Alexa Web Search Platform. Details via Battelle.

This is pretty cool stuff. If it works as it is advertising (a relatively big if, I suppose), it could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for Vertical Search Engines (like SimplyHired, for example). That would be pretty cool, because it would continue the shift away from technology and into community. It may also destroy some of these company/site’s business models, but it is not entirely clear they had one to start with.

This also solidifies the talk about Search as a new platform. Amazon has a lot of experience with this; by any measure their Web Services have been a huge success, and this merely extends their strength into new areas. The more people can build on this platform, the more people will naturally tend to bias their services towards Amazon.

Ok. I am starting to say things that everyone already knows. It’s late – sorry for the incoherence!

Let’s just agree that this is pretty cool, and we’ll think more clearly about why in the morning.

Cookies Seen as Privacy Threat

From AdWeek :

“Well over half of users believe Internet tracking cookies invade their privacy, according to a new poll.

In a survey of 150 Internet users, 64 percent said cookies represent an invasion of their privacy. The poll was conducted by online ad network Blue Lithium, which recruited participants through banner ads.”

I haven’t seen the details yet (and recruiting via banner ads does not seem terribly sound and that is a small sample size. But I digress…). But the Behavioral Advertising folks everywhere should continue to be worried. Cookies have been around a long time (“The Blue Lithium survey… found 83 percent of respondents claim they are familiar with cookies”), and rightly or wrongly, consumers still have concerns. Unless the industry figures out a way to make more people comfortable with this, they are at serious risk for a backlash and/or regulation.

This is also going to continue to be a large roadblock for brand advertisers. As a friend at P&G told me a little while ago, it is just too risky when consumer sentiment is so negative.

In exchange for attention data…

Couldn’t say it better myself, so I figured I would just alert everyone to jd’s post at his Grain of Salt blog:

“…ultimately, I want every bit of every (AttentionTrust member) page I view to be 100% relevant to me. In my perfect world, this relevancy would come in the form of ad-free content. But I’m not so foolish as to think that my inattention to (in the form of not clicking on) the ads you display will cause them to magically disappear. So if you insist on cluttering up the content that I came for with things that I did not, at least take the time to analyze my existing attention data and make use of it.“

(emphasis added)

Spyware litigation

For those interested, Eric Goldman’s blog provides a great overview of Adware and Spyware related legal issues.

Google and Spyware

Niall Kennedy has a very good article on “Google’s total information awareness potential”. His basic premise: “Google is already well on its way to building an information awareness network on its own sites as well as the sites of hundreds of thousands of willing webmasters and millions of desktop clients.”

This is not a new issue. John Battelle discussed the potential a while back but Niall goes into more detail about Google’s current status. And, Google is not the only one trying to build this potential – see Kandoodle’s latest activities, also described by Niall.

The issue that Niall doesn’t address is that of privacy. Most consumers/users do not really know that Google is collecting all that information. And, once they do realize it, how will they like the fact that they have it and are using it? Will there be a user backlash? A regulatory backlash?

Personally, I think that the backlash will start with advertisers. Why, you ask? Well, it is true that advertisers stand to benefit from this. Consumers are getting harder to reach, and Google’s Total Information Awareness would advertisers realize the Holy Grail of “One to One Marketing” – boosting marketing ROI. So what’s not to love?

The backlash. More specifically, the threat of a backlash. Advertisers will be wary to embrace something that has the potential to generate a lot of negative buzz. All it takes is a couple of well placed and well known examples, and advertisers will get scared away. Not the SMB folks currently advertising on Google, but the large brand advertisers that are going to be the engine of growth.

Already, there are some pieces of the backlash starting. Liz Lawley talks about her attempt to prevent Google’s information gathering by using GoogleAnon.

The future, I think, is actually the opposite of these data collection schemes. It is Permission Marketing – the idea that companies should allow consumers to opt-in to the types of messages they want. Not spy on consumers and give them what you think they want. Ask them what they want, and let them choose what they would like to see. This idea is supported by none less than P&G, one of the largest advertisers in the world and arguably the best.

Groups like AttentionTrust are leading the way in online Permission Marketing. Everyone should watch to see how AttentionTrust continues to evolve.

TiVo

Slightly off topic (ok, I have posted a total of three things to date, so who can say what is on and off topic…), I am going to rant about Tivo.

I love my Tivo. It has completely changed the way that I watch TV. And made me watch a lot more of it than I used to.

But really, I have to ask at this point if Tivo has any idea what it is doing.

For one thing, it has the worst UI I have ever used. Sure, it is pretty. But searching for a TV program to record is painful; setting a Season Pass schedule is painful. Deciding how long I want to keep a show is painful. Even seeing what shows I have recorded is somewhat painful. And don’t get me started on Tivo suggestions! Picking TV shows at random would yield better recommendations!

Now Tivo has a remarkable idea – let people buy movie tickets and check the weather!

Huh? Everyone I know who has a Tivo also has a PC with a broadband connection. Sure, this may not be everyone, but I bet there is a huge overlap. Why on earth would I look at Tivo, using their incredibly hard to use interaction model, when I could just go to my PC and look it up on Yahoo? For goodness sake, weather? Isn’t that what the Weather Channel is for?

This is not why I bought a Tivo. One of these days, they maybe should do some classic marketing work – hire some people to ask customers what they want. I can’t imagine the first thing they said was “Weather” or “Movie Tickets”.

What people want is control and quality. Look at iTunes. It is successful because Apple knows how people will use their service. What do I want from tivo? To be able to watch my TV shows on my PC or PSP (without the eternal download times and clunky Tivo Desktop software). To watch the Daily Show that I Tivoed while in my hotel room (why don’t hotels carry Comedy Central?). To watch a show I tivo in my bedroom in my living room. To actually get good recommendations of other shows I might like! To record HD! To get rid of my cable box but still record HBO.

At some other point I will write about their new ad search offering. Interesting concept, but I want to wait to see how they actually do it.