Message From Michael -- August 11, 2008

OLYMPIAN NUMBERS FOR THE OLYMPICS

MARKETING MIND GAMES

MORE TWITTER-PATION

WEBSITE DE JEUR

COCKTAIL CHATTER – INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY


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OLYMPIAN NUMBERS FOR THE OLYMPICS: The opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics drew the highest rating for a summer games opening ceremony since 1960 and recorded the highest viewership for an Olympics televised IN the United States but FROM a foreign country. The elaborate and expensive opening ceremony drew an 18.6 national rating (the Rome Olympics in 1960 drew an 18.1) and 34.2 Million U.S. viewers (the 1996 Atlanta opening ceremony drew 39.8 Million U.S. viewers). To add to NBC’s crowing and other networks’ woe-ing (I know that’s silly, but it sounded good), the NBCOlympics.com website had 70 Million page views, according to data supplied by NBC to the New York Times, and that is ten times the traffic generated on the website for the opening ceremony in Athens, Greece, four years ago. And further indication of the many things I don’t know, the Winter Olympics out-perform the Summer Olympics pretty consistently. In fact, according to historical trends data from Nielsen Media, only two Olympics have scored in the top 100 of telecasts: both from the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.

And, if you want to entertain yourself for a few hours, visit the “Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games” – http://en.beijing2008.cn. This is the One World One Dream website of the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG). The cynics amongst my many MfM readers will find particularly interesting the bulletins/ media section. For example, BOCOG has a letter extending its condolences to the family of the relatives of a U.S. volleyball team coach and their guide who were attacked, one of whom was killed. “At present, investigation into the rare and tragic incident is still under way. Beijing is a safe city, and the police are doing their best to provide a safe environment for all tourists, Chinese and International during their travels in Beijing.” Equally interesting (again, I add, as always – at least to me) the links from the main site to other country’s sites. The U.S. site, of course, goes to NBCOlympics.com. The Australian site though goes to a Yahoo Sports website which has the Olympics as just part of the site, along with Aussie Rules football and Cricket. The India link goes to a YouTube address that, as far as I can tell, has no connection to the Olympics. Same for the Iraq link. Germany had two links to ARD and ZDF, both media groups. The link to China was cctv.com and the link to ‘Chinese Taipei” was the Channel 5 network there. No surprise there, but how about the link to Greece. It came back with a warning of viewing restrictions because it could not confirm that I was viewing the live streaming video portal from “certain European Broadcasting Union (EBU) territories.”

Factoid of the Week: As along as I’m doing the Olympic thing… from the official Chinese Olympic website comes the factoid that there are 1.7 Million Volunteers at the Olympics. Let me repeat that -- 1.7 MILLION.

MARKETING MIND GAMES: Except that they’re not games. They’re dead serious. Two recent news articles have stuck in my head for some time, and although they’re not ‘normal’ MfM material, I realized that if I found them so interesting that I’m still thinking about them a month later, that you might find them equally interesting. The first is about a company called Neurofocus which measures brain waves to determine how engaged people are with a commercial or promotional spot. It ‘measures’ attention levels, emotional reactions, and memory retention to derive gauges of persuasion, awareness and novelty – what the company calls the six critical metrics that determine consumers’ engagement with your brand, with your marketing, your messaging or other content. As reported in a previous MfM, Nielsen has invested in the company. What I found particularly interesting was in the NPR report (one of several news articles about this), CBS research chief David Poltrack noted that when they tested program promos, people might find the promo interesting but then forgot the most basic information – when and where the program was to air. An issue I have found with a lot of promotion. The other article was in the New York Times and dealt with a doctor in Africa who turned to some of the largest multi-national corporations to teach her how to convince people in the developing world to wash their hands with soap – a simple step that could cut deaths through disease and diarrhea in half. The trick, according to the savvy marketers, was to integrate the practice into people’s daily habits or routines. The example given was the introduction by Procter & Gamble of Febreeze. Even though people expressed an interest in having a product that would do away with bad smells (for example, from a coat worn while at a smoke-filled bar), bad smells didn’t happen enough in people’s lives to make Febreeze a part of their lives. So the P&G psychologists had to “create habits for products.” In the case of Febreeze, they needed to find other cues. In this case, spots were created showing people using Febreeze as part of their daily cleaning routine. Habits were created, and Febreeze went from a product that was almost cancelled to one which grosses $650 Million in North America alone. In the case of the good doctor, the trick was to convince people in Ghana that toilets (normally associated with cleanliness in that culture) had to be associated with disgust which would then prompt them to wash their hands with soap. It worked.

MORE TWITTER-PATION: For those readers who found the 140-character Twitter communication strange, get ready for something even stranger. A website that collects twitter communication so you can find “real people who really matter.” Twellow.com sorts through the myriad of messages sent by Twitterers, categorizes those millions of inter-personal messages and then sorts them into different niches so you can find people with common interests, or as the website puts it, sift out people “who can help bring your vision to reality, whatever that vision may be.” The creators of the website say if you have a twitter account, you are probably already listed on twello because twitter messages are ‘publicly available.’ Just go to the website, click on any of the multitude of categories, and find people who are twittering the most in that category, whether it’s atheism, vegetarianism, public relations, news reporting or telecommunications – you name it.

WEBSITE DE JEUR: On a completely un-related note, another search engine has been launched to try and compete with Google. It’s called Cuil and it claims that it searches three times as many websites as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. It also says that it analyzes the Web rather than the Web user to make it more efficient and more private. And as long as I’m talking about new websites… Beet.tv which actually isn’t that new (founded in 2006) is showing up more and more in my ramblings on the Web. It describes itself as “the first business oriented video blog” focusing on online video and its impact on new media.

FACTOID OF THE WEEK: Yeah, I know I already did one factoid, but I just thought this was interesting enough to add – the number of American adults using online coupons rose 39% to 36 Million between 2005 and 2008, according to a survey by Simmons/ Experian Research and Coupons Inc.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: The New York Times labeled him the international man of mystery. Vivi Nevo is said to be the largest individual shareholder of Time Warner, was once the largest private investor in Goldman Sachs, is engaged to China’s most famous actress (Zhang Ziyi, the star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), vacations on Rupert Murdoch’s sailboat, attended Madonna’s wedding, and yet nobody knows his background or exactly how he made his fortune, except that he parlayed a modest family inheritance into a fortune through investing in media and Internet companies. “Of all the characters the media business attracts – and creates for that matter,” says the New York Times article, “perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo.” The article makes clear that while his media influence is subtle, it’s also pervasive.

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