Serendipity Book

Waitrose uses a feel-good brand ad in response to rising food prices

As UK food prices continue to soar discount supermarkets Lidl and Aldi are reportedly beginning to snare customers from that archetypal supermarket of the British middle classes, Waitrose.

Mintel is reporting that 57% of British consumers have trimmed their spending due to uncertainty over the future and declining disposable income and some are changing their supermarket preferences accordingly.

In response Waitrose have chosen to avoid being drawn into a conversation about price and instead have decided to try to broaden the appeal of the brand with the launch of this lovely feel-good summer epic ...

A documentary about the making of the rug used in the ad will be on Channel 4 soon.

YouTube analytics arrives at last

YouTube: "Today [March 26th] we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

If only you could do the same (or get limited access) for videos that others upload too.

The Ebb & Flow of the Movie Business

The New York Times has published a spectacular infographic which explores the last 21 years of U.S. box office receipts and highlights the seasonality of the movie business. The use of a bi-directional y-axis slows comprehension but otherwise it is in an excellent visualisation of the data.

This is a snippet from 1986, the year that gave us Top Gun, Ferris Bueller, Aliens and Ruthless People. Back then a movie could hang around for months.

In recent years, however, movies have become much more transient cultural phenomena, often burning brighter but for shorter periods of time. This snippet comes from the 2007 summer season:

That elusive advertising clutter statistic

Ilya Vedrashko recently went to a lot of effort to track down and validate the elusive source of the oft-quoted statistic that people are exposed to c. 5,000 advertising messages a day. 

In response she received a helpful reply from J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich, who was aware of one of the earliest attempts to estimate this data in the 60s. It makes for interesting reading:

"The oldest such estimate is the one cited by David Shenk in Data Smog. His figure comes from a figure cited in Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book Future Shock. Toffler’s figure came from a conference speech that cited a number calculated by Bill Moran for use in that speech (delivered by his boss) when he was running the research function at Y&R. I know this because I am a friend of Bill’s and he has related this story to me. Bill made a simple calculation. He simply conducted a thought exercise and went through the typical day for a typical person in a typical American big city in the 1960s. How many times would such a person be exposed to some sort of ad, logo or promotion? He came to around 500. It’s that simple, and that’s where this early figure comes from.

He goes on to suggest that all subsequent estimates are likely to have been based on a similar methodology. So my advice would be to take this figure with a pinch of salt kids, it is no more than an informed estimate and I can only imagine that it has become less accurate over time as each subsequent analysis has felt the upward pressure of expectation.

Pre-testing reduces effectiveness

In the current issue of the Marketing Society's journal 'Market Leader', Les Binet & Peter Field make the somewhat contentious claim that, far from improving the chances of getting an effective ad out, quantitative pre-testing actually reduces your chances of success.

Their data shows that ads that have not been quantitatively pre-tested have a 71% chance of being effective whereas those that have been pre-tested have only a 44% chance of success:

Their analysis is based on the IPA dataBANK of 880 case studies. The 'Market Leader' piece is based on their recent book Marketing in the Era of Accountability which analyses the dataBANK in detail.

In the article Binet & Field provide very little to explain this poor performance by the pre-testing industry apart from deriding the overreliance by pre-testers on 'standout' as a metric.

Whilst pre-testing has it's detractors (and I must admit to being less than comfortable with the claims made about most if not all of the pre-testing methodologies that I have encountered), I'm sure that there are factors at play here apart from the use of the wrong metrics. For me the biggest factor influencing the result we see above is the difference in the cultures of the clients that pre-test and those that don't.

Keep it simple, keep it visual: 1/3rd of adults struggle with reading and writing

Crikey. In the UK there are an estimated 12 million people who have a reading and writing age of between 9 and 14 despite speaking English as their first language. This represents almost a third of the adult population.

I was introduced to this little factoid by Jon Cohen, MD of quallie agency Rosenblatt and a one-time Leo Burnett grad trainee, in a paper he wrote for the Market Research Society Annual Conference last year. Those of you who have a subscription to the indispensable WARC can read it in full here.

In his paper, Jon reported that "almost all self-define themselves as 'visual' people. They like to see visual representations of things. They are often far more keen to 'watch' a story, than to read about it."

Picture credit: cormac70 taken at the Bluewater shopping Centre in Kent

Double Decker Bus Calculator

Chris Cockbill's Double Decker Bus Calculator is a fabulous aid to hyperbole.

Ever read in a newspaper that something is "the length of twenty double-decker buses", or that a country is "twice the size of Wales", and wondered exactly how big that is? Further, have you ever wondered how many football pitches there are to a Manhattan Island, or how many Nelson Columns it would take to get to the Moon and back?

Based on measurements published in Wikipedia and other sources, The Double Decker Bus Calculator allows you to convert between standard and strange units of measurement.

The notes section includes this splendid bit of pedantry: "the measurement of the Statue of Liberty is without that of its pedestal, while Nelson's Column includes the column height. While apparently contradictory, this is because the name "Statue of Liberty" refers to the statue itself (and not the pedestal), whereas the name "Nelson's Column" includes the column."

Via Seamus McCauley's Virtual Economics.

Facts. Checked.

Watch Pete Karinen & Brian Sacca of the Fact Checking Unit as they track down Bill Murray in this Time Out NY "must see comedy short".

Found here in this tribute to our oft-overlooked information departments by Kevin  Sugrue of Brand Zeal (blogging as Brand Tao).

Can't count, won't count

The Economist this week reviews a new book called "The Tiger That Isn't" about getting to grips with numbers:

"NUMBERS get a bad press. Almost alone of the academic disciplines, mathematics is one where expressions of ignorance are more of a boast than a shameful admission (imagine admitting at a dinner party that you can't read).

Yet numbers are more important than ever. They are the language of most of science and much of government, two forces that do much to shape people's lives. They are the nervous system of any modern country, marshalled in support of arguments over everything from defence to which diseases should be treated.

Happily for the number-shy, help is at hand. A book about numbers and how to interpret them doesn't sound like interesting bedtime reading. Yet in the hands of Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, respectively producer and presenter of “More or Less”, a BBC radio programme on the subject, that is what it becomes."

Did these numerophobics not watch Johnny Ball? Is everyone afraid of maths?

Petrol consumption and prices

Wonderfuly simple graphic from The Economist. I wonder if this ever has an impact on U.S. foreign policy?