Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

My Behavioural Nightmare

I just drove past a Land Rover - it made me want to watch the film 'The Queen' (amusing scenes of Helen Mirren as the QOE driving the vehicle). The Japanese restaurant at the end of our street has large colourful pictures of their menu in the windows - I could kill some sushi right now!

While most of us act, and believe we act, in a rational and reflective manner, there are many moments in the day when a simple stimulus leads to a short circuiting of the rational being. In an interview with Business Week, Erick Schmidt says:

[W]ith [a user's] permission we can target a useful ad—you know, "It's Eric. You had a hamburger yesterday, do you want pizza today? There's a pizza store on the right." That kind of ad is likely worth a lot of money to an advertiser because it will generate a sale.

This scares the life out of me. It is not useful to me to be exploited.

Aesthetic Advertising

Have you ever visited a web site, enjoyed the results of hours of careful thought and creativity that have gone in to the design of the site, the colours, the layout - only to be jerked from your revery by a served advert which clashed with many of these aspects?

Nearly all work in ad serving concentrates to some degree on the fit of the product or brand being advertised to the content of the page or the behaviour of the user. However, wouldn't it be more satisfying if ads were either configured on the fly, or selected based on aesthetic qualities in addition to content and informational qualities?

The argument against this direction, of course, is that it is exactly that clash which draws attention to the ad and, therefore, results in a higher click-through rate. The great thing about the web is: that can be tested. Perhaps there are studies out there already on the impact of aesthetics on click-through.

Media Post: The Home of Spam Professionals

Media Post, the "home on the web for media, marketing and advertising professionals" requires that you sign up with them if you'd like to add a comment to one of their blogs. I did this. Of course, I then started to receive emails from them (I may have elected this, the story is the same). At the footer of each email, there was a link which, the email claims, I can click on to be removed from their subscription list. It doesn't work. So now, not only do I receive spam from Media Post, I'm completely turned off from whatever content their bloggers provide. With all the hoopla around ethical behaviour and engagement in social media that WOMMA kicked up, its ironic that Media Post (which has strong ties to WOMMA) can't even get it right.

Online Advertising in its Infancy

While it feels like online advertising has been around for a long time, it is still behaves in a dawdling, infantile manner. Two brief examples:

• Auto-advertising - I'm not talking about ads for cars. I'm talking about cases where a web site serves up some contextual ads that are there to draw the reader to the very same web page that is serving that ad. I say this recently on DailyKos (no screen cap, you will have to trust me on this one).
• RSS-advertising - because RSS is an information exchange or transmission mechanism, not an information presentation mechanism (which a web page is), it builds in any number of indirections between the content creator and the reader's client. Thus, when injecting ads into RSS feeds we get, by way of example, things like this (from Jeff Jarvis as experienced in BlogLines); you can just make out the post content in between the repeated ads from HitWise):

Turn: Cost Per Action Demo

Briefly, Turn has a demo up on its site which outlines how they serve and track ads and user activity. Thanks again to FeedWhip.

Turn - Next Gen Online Advertising

Feedwhip just told me that Turn's homepage has just been updated (you mean, you're not using Feedwhip to monitor web sites?) Turn's approach to online advertising pushes the established model by a payment scheme based on action, not views or click-throughs. Turn is going to be appearing at today's Launchpad.

It is interesting to see how competitors are starting to nip at Google's heels. From the very big (Microsoft's new 3d mapping), to the very new (Powerset's search revolution).

Turn: Next Generation Online Advertising

Turn, a new contextual ads company (which has been around for a while, originally going by the name NGOA) has finally been picked up by more visible bloggers.

Stephen Baker of business week says:

I talked on Friday to Jim Barnett, former ceo of Altavista and, later, a top exec at Overture. He's planning to launch a next-gen advertising network called Turn Inc. in the next several months. He has $10 million in venture funding, and some 16 PhDs in-house. The idea is that advanced search will target advertisements to users with a precision we've not yet seen. All that can be said at this point: We'll see.

The idea that 16 PhDs in-house sounds very familiar - and not always a great thing. Turn has side stepped a problem that WhizBang had which is a very focused product.

Jimi Shanahan, formerly of Clairvoyance, is the Chief Scientist at Turn and was in attendance at the recent WOMBAT conference (Word of Mouth Basic Training). One can guess at the relationships between online advertising and the word of mouth movement.