Whose foolin' whom? DVRs, product placement, and the death of intrusion

Yes, everyone with a DVR or TiVo it seems skips the ads. Advertisers and the networks that sell to them have been concerned for several years about the unfortunate habit viewers have of only wanting to see what matters to them...and ads, apparently, aren't it.

Alas, one approach has been to stick the product in viewers faces where they can't skip it...in the show! Noone will notice, er, I mean noone will be able to skip it there. And think of the added credibility of the brand when someone as awesome as Michael, um, I mean Steve Carrell uses our product in the context of the The Office! Or one of the true arbiters of American Idolatry sips a Coke after another rousing amateur is made into a star we all surely love. 

Product placement isn't new. But like Fed Bailouts, 3rd string quaterbacks, or hair of the dog,   they may very well represent desperate measures for desperate times. They are an attempt to support intrusion as a viable model for selling ads. As people skip the ads, avertisers rightly question whether they should pay for impressions that do not exist.

Product placement today suffers some of the same challenges to measurement as the traditional interruptive model of the 30-second spot or commerical pod. In the case of product placement,though, the additional challenge is in not seeming so obvious that it seems unnatural--and yet to seem natural requires that the product get pushed to the background.  In any case, just like the unfounded fears of subliminal advertising and the Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, trying to be too sneaky about product placement gets legislators and other consipracy theorists up in arms...as in the FCC's latest effort looking into product placement. 

At least when radio broadcaster and master hawker Paul Harvey stated... 

"I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is."  

...you knew exactly what he was doing because he was telling you. 

Neilsen reports the number of product placement events by braodcast and cable in the charts below. Now you know.

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A map of the world

We prepare maps frequently for our client's planning efforts. For some, the maps are associated with traditional media planning. For others, maps show opportunity clusters of customers prospects and the hybrid also known as "distribution".

We love maps...especially when we are trying to figure out where we are headed. The problem with maps is getting the data to make them. You know data is out there, you just don't know where to get it. Or if you do, you sometimes have to pay upfront for the prospect that it may be of high quality and use. What's one to do?

Well, here's an answer: GeoCommons

Their tag is 'Actionable maps in five minutes'.

Their offering consists of two components: The Finder!, which scans the global web for accessible data sources and then allows you to search for the datasets.

And The Maker! which allows you to create maps from the data you have found.

The Finder! search function is not nearly as nuanced as a Google search in its results, so the more specific your input, the less wading one will do.

The Maker!, unfortunately, is coming soon.

In the meantime, you can download datasets from the Finder! in file formats like Excel or in .KML format, which can be imported directly into Google Earth, or other mapping software.

Here's a screen grab of an FCC dataset on High Speed Lines by State, 2002-07 that I imported into Google Earth using the uber-complicated drag-and-drop method (for the record it took me 7 minutes and 15 seconds, to find, download and create this, but that's because I'm an ID10T):

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What my shiny new point-and-click interface shows me is that Wyoming actually has a higher broadband penetration among businesses than residential locations...a whopping 50.8% of businesses are connected at hyper-speeds. Now if I could just find a dataset on wi-fi hotspots, I might be able to publish a point-and-click Google Earth wi-fi locator density map!

In the end, GeoCommons has the potential to remove the inefficiencies in finding and employing data in novel ways. In the short term, it may also challenge proprietary mapping software like MapPoint. What's unclear is whether access to publically available data--with tools to put it to use in 5 minutes-- will encourage or discourage the sharing of that data.