The article follows and can also be found here.

Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call

My phone bills are shrinking. Not, unfortunately, in cost. I mean they’re getting shorter. I recently found an old bill from a decade ago; it was fully 15 pages long, because back then I was making a ton of calls—about 20 long-distance ones a day. Today my bills are a meager two or three pages, at most.

Odds are this has happened to you, too. According to Nielsen, the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, after hitting a peak in 2007. And our calls are getting shorter: In 2005 they averaged three minutes in length; now they’re almost half that.

We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

In fact, the newfangled media that’s currently supplanting the phone call might be the only thing that helps preserve it. Most people I know coordinate important calls in advance using email, text messaging, or chat (r u busy?). An unscheduled call that rings on my phone fails the conversational Turing test: It’s almost certainly junk, so I ignore it. (Unless it’s you, Mom!)

Indeed, I predict that as this sort of hybrid coordination evolves, it will produce a steep power law in the way we use voice calls. We’ll still make fewer, as most of our former phone time will migrate to other media. But the calls we do make will be longer, reserved for the sort of deep discussion that the medium does best.

Our handsets could also use a serious redesign. If they showed our status—are you free to talk?—it would vastly streamline the act of calling. And as video-chatting becomes more common, enabled by the new

 iPhone and other devices, we might see the growth of persistent telepresence, leaving video-chat open all day so we can speak to a spouse or colleague spontaneously. (Some Skype users already do this.)

Or, to put it another way, we’ll call less but talk more.

• WD-40
• Duct Tape
• Bounce Dryer Sheets

The WD-40 site lists more than 2000 uses (submitted by users) and the list ranges from “un-sticking” anything, to loosening bolts, to removing gum from hair and keeping a drawer from sticking.  Because the product is made, predominantly, with fish oils there’s often a can in the boat or tackle box, as well.  The great,grand list is available HERE.  The site boasts it’s own fan club and WD-40 Twitter followers can keep up to date on the new uses found for a product designed, initially, to simply displace water.

The number of uses found for Duct Tape has become, simply, a punch line.  Aside from sealing ductwork, the tape has been used to cover books, fix walls and floors, and act as a temporary replacement for snapped belts on an engine.  The popular show “Mythbusters” dedicated an entire hour to the legendary tape and used the product to lift a car, build a working cannon and even crafted a working sailboat made entirely of duct tape (the video is below).

Granted the uses for both WD-40 and Duct Tape have become common knowledge.  The uses for Bounce Dryer sheets is less known (found HERE) but still comprises a growing and useful list of applications (that may, or may not, actually work).   Beyond keeping your clothes static free, Bounce is also purported to be used to:

• Keep ants away when you lay a sheet near them.
• Repel mice.
• Take the odor out of books and photo albums that don’t get opened too often.
• Repel mosquitoes.
• Eliminate static electricity from your television (or computer) screen.
• Dissolve soap scum from shower doors.
• Freshen the air in your home – Place an individual sheet of Bounce in a drawer, a closet or in the vacuum cleaner
• Prevent thread from tangling. Run a threaded needle through a sheet of Bounce before beginning to sew.
• Prevent musty suitcases. Place an individual sheet of Bounce inside empty luggage before storing.
• Freshen the air in your car.
• Clean baked-on foods from a cooking pan. Put a sheet in a pan, fill with water, let sit overnight, and sponge clean. The anti-static agent apparently weakens the bond between the food and the pan..
• Collect cat hair.
• Deodorize shoes or sneakers.
• Keep the bees and wasps away.
• Wipe bugs off the front of a vehicle

Are there other products out there that are selling because we’ve found uses beyond the core offer?  Should the makers of Bounce, WD-40 and Duct Tape be promoting these products as a “required” household item?  Is there a way to take the sense of community…and apply it to what you’re doing?  Does WD-40 removed duct tape? 

When asked which they would choose if they must, never again watching television or never again accessing the internet, slightly more people chose TV as the medium they would eliminate. Forty-nine percent of respondents chose to eliminate TV, compared to just more than 48% who said they would get rid of the internet.

When first asked the question in 2001, 72% of respondents said they would do without the internet, while only 26% said they would eliminate television. In the demographic of persons younger than the age of 45, the gap between the two forms of media is more profound, with more people choosing to live without TV.

The Car Is a ‘Battleground’

In other insights, Infinite Dial 2010 research found that the car is becoming a more popular place to listen to MP3 players. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of people older than the age of 12 have listened to an iPod or other MP3 player while connected to a car stereo. Among those who own an MP3 player, 54% have connected their players for listening in the car.

“The car is clearly a crucial battleground for people’s attention,” said Edison Research President Larry Rosin.

Simultaneous TV/Web Usage Jumps

In a sign that TV and the internet are starting to converge in viewers’ consciousness, more people spent more time simultaneously viewing the internet and TV in December 2009 than in June 2009 or December 2008, according to the Three Screens Report from The Nielsen Company.

In December 2009, 59% of Americans used TV and the internet simultaneously, compared to 56.9% in June 2009 and 57.5% in December 2008. On a year-over-year basis, participation in this activity increased 2.7%.

Counting individual users, 134,056 Americans used TV and the internet simultaneously in December 2009. This compares to 128,047 in June 2009 and 128,167 in December 2008. On a year-over-year basis, the number of people using TV and the internet simultaneously increased 4.6%.

About the Survey: The Infinite Dial 2010 is the 18th in a series of studies from Arbitron and Edison which have been conducted since 1998 on topics relating to the internet and new media.

The article is taken from MarketingCharts.com.

Facebook is an amazing tool…but it comes with a cost.  The platform has been consistently “tweakng” the rules and regulations surrounding the content (namely our profiles) and how it can, and is, distributed.  It means that even though you don’t play Farmville, or Bejewelled, or any of a thousand other little diversions available…if your friends do…those applications have access to pieces of your profile, as well. 

As a bit of an exercise, see how long it takes you to find out how to DELETE your Facebook account.  Not just unsubscribe…actually delete the profile and associated content. 

The application has merit.  But, as Wired’s Ryan Singel points out…the timing might be pretty good for a competitive application that allows sharing, greater amounts of personal privacy and the retention of ownership rights as it pertains to content supplied.

We’re not suggesting Facebook should be avoided.  I have an account (a couple actually) and I’m a pretty big fan of anything that can strengthen individual relationships.  We are saying you should understand there’s no free lunch.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

By Ryan Singel

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.

Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.

And Facebook realized it owned the network.

Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of those bits of info — or you don’t get them at all. That’s hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex.

Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do. (Google Buzz, for all the criticism it has taken, remembers your setting from your last post and uses that as the new default.)

Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

Then there’s the new Facebook “Like” button littering the internet. It’s a great idea, in theory — but it’s completely tied to your Facebook account, and you have no control over how it is used. (No, you can’t like something and not have it be totally public.)

Then there’s Facebook’s campaign against outside services. There was the Web 2.0 suicide machine that let you delete your profile by giving it your password. Facebook shut it down.

Another company has an application that will collect all your updates from services around the web into a central portal — including from Facebook — after you give the site your password to log in to Facebook. Facebook is suing the company and alleging it is breaking criminal law by not complying with its terms of service.

No wonder 14 privacy groups filed a unfair-trade complaint with the FTC against Facebook on Wednesday.

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm wrote a post entitled “The Relationship Between Facebook and Privacy: It’s Really Complicated.”

No, that’s just wrong. The relationship is simple: Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement.

In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users.

Ingram goes onto say, “And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.”

What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don’t’ actually exist? I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

Setting up a decent system for controlling your privacy on a web service shouldn’t be hard. And if multiple blogs are writing posts explaining how to use your privacy system, you can take that as a sign you aren’t treating your users with respect, It means you are coercing them into choices they don’t want using design principles. That’s creepy.

Facebook could start with a very simple page of choices: I’m a private person, I like sharing some things, I like living my life in public. Each of those would have different settings for the myriad of choices, and all of those users could then later dive into the control panel to tweak their choices. That would be respectful design – but Facebook isn’t about respect — it’s about re-configuring the world’s notion of what’s public and private.

So what that you might be a teenager and don’t get that college-admissions offices will use your e-mail address to find possibly embarrassing information about you. Just because Facebook got to be the world’s platform for identity by promising you privacy and then later ripping it out from under you, that’s your problem. At least, according to the bevy of privacy hired guns the company brought in at high salaries to provide cover for its shenanigans.

Clearly Facebook has taught us some lessons. We want easier ways to share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers and even, sometimes, the world.

But that doesn’t mean the company has earned the right to own and define our identities.

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost.

“Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life.

People who just don’t want to leave Facebook could play along as well — so long as Facebook doesn’t continue creepy data practices like turning your info over to third parties, just because one of your contacts takes the “Which Gilligan Island character are you?” quiz? (Yes, that currently happens)

Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software companies and engineers can turn Facebook’s core services into shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of various online services to compete with Facebook, given that it has 500 million users. Many of them may be fine having Facebook redefine their cultural norms, or just be too busy or lazy to leave.

But in the internet I’d like to live in, we’d have that option, instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or being left out of the conversation altogether.

The story is from the recent issue of Wired Magazine and can be found HERE.

Facebook is tracking increases of 6 million users each month.  In the US this means that about 25% of the population has a Facebook account by the middle of this year.  From 30,000 feet, the application looks like a massive collection of pictures, and status updates.  On the downside, there’s been several spam attacks, we’re not entirely sure what happens with the information we provide on our profiles and the obligatory advertisements can be a nuisance.

On the other hand, the application has cemented itself as a means to stay in touch with a lot of people in a hurry and reach out to people who drift out of lives and reconnect.  It’s here that Facebook becomes an amazing tool and acts as a bridge between people.  The vital part of the success lies with individual relationships and not the application.  All that’s required to understand is to post your birthday as part of a profile.  It really is an amazing feeling to know people will take a few seconds to write “Happy Birthday” on your wall.

It’s a solid reminder for me and the rest of the Hippos that the very best we can hope for is to provide tools that will allow our clients to act as a bridge between customers, clients and partners.  For those that took the time…it’s really appreciated…and thank you.

So, with all that technology hanging on a belt…what features on a cell phone are actually used?

• 89 percent Phone calls
• 56 percent Clock/alarm
• 52 percent Text messaging
• 52 percent Camera
• 40 percent Calendar/agenda/organizer
• 28 percent Email
• 19 percent Emergencies Only
• 18 percent Instant messaging/Blackberry messenger
• 18 percent MP3’s /music/ videos
• 18 percent Picture/ video messaging
• 15 percent Web browsing
• 14 percent GPS or mapping services
• 14 Downloading (games, ring tones, etc)
• 13 percent Search
• 11 percent Facebook mobile
• 5 percent Contests/promotions
• 4 percent Subscriptions/alerts
• 3 percent Twitter mobile

Source: Delvinia’s 2009-2010 study of Canadian mobile behaviours conducted through AskingCanadians.

So, assuming Canadian proclivities (excluding three-down football and polar bear swims) can find some commonality in other ares, we can assume that most people use their cell phones as…well…cell phones.  Certainly the numbers of people sending messages by SMS is increasing and the numbers of individuals surfing the web on a small screen is increasing at similar rates as mobile hi-speed; however, only a scant few actually take advantage of all the “bells and whistles” on their mobile device.

For advertisers, this means a couple things.  First, and foremost, your message has to be plain, simple and understandable.  Second, we should expect your existing and potential customers to find information about you with the least number of hoops to jump through. 

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An estimate from the end of 2009 suggests your site is one of 1 Trillion unique URL’s and new sites are being put up at an astonishing rate.  The Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that only 10% to 15% ever show up on the popular search engines. 

Any business trying to define themselves has to be where the crowds gather and then find the ways to cut through the clutter.  While creating online content used to be a sole proprietorship for folks with big propellers on their hats…the astounding array of open source and free applications has made access universal. 

“How dare you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation?  How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” – Seth Godin

An article from eMarketer shows the math as it applies to the top four online destinations; not surprisingly, these are the sites people use to navigate through the 1 trillion destinations available.  It’s an easy leap to see that the revenue follows the audience…and the “80-20 Rule” is dead.

Portals Vital for Users and Marketers

APRIL 13, 2010

Still an effective way to reach target audiences

To go by statements in the mainstream business media, the outlook for portals such as Yahoo! and AOL is less than stellar. But advertisers should consider portals as sites—not stocks.

Portals receive significant traffic, with eight of the top 10 most-visited sites in the US part of a portal, according to Experian Hitwise. And ad spending follows those eyeballs.

eMarketer estimates more than 57% of all US online ad revenues will go to the four major portals in 2010. By 2011, nearly 9% of total media ad spending in the US will go to these four sites.

“From the advertiser’s perspective, portals are much like broadcast TV,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “US Portal Advertising Revenues.” “That is, while portals are not as central as they once were, they are still crucial for many marketers.”

Ad revenues at Google and Yahoo! far outpace those of their competitors, and Google is the only one of the four gaining market share, going from 31.8% of total US online ad spending in 2008 to an estimated 37.4% in 2011.

While social networks are grabbing some attention away from portals, they tend to be better for marketing rather than advertising. “The pull model, where the audience voluntarily comes to the marketer, works better than the push model, which is the nature of nearly all advertising,” said Mr. Hallerman.

Portals increasingly compete for display ad revenues from brand marketers, but paid search advertising is still the source of most revenues. Compare Google’s $52.50 average ad revenues per unique visitor to the mere $8.33 for the Microsoft portal.

“Even though Google is looking to expand its ad revenue base from search, especially by selling display ads through its AdSense network, about 95% of its total US ad revenues still will come from paid search this year,” Mr. Hallerman said.

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Google’s annual revenue growth is not back to the 40 percent-plus growth it routinely booked before the recession, but Thursday’s numbers reflect a substantial revenue surge from the depth of the downturn at the beginning of 2009.

Google narrowly missed recording a quarterly profit of $2 billion, reporting net income of $1.96 billion in the first quarter of 2010, or $6.06 a share. That was a 37 percent jump from the $1.42 billion profit, or $4.49 a

“As we enter 2010, it’s really clear that the digital economy continues to grow rapidly,” said Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer. “It’s been a very positive start to the new year for us.”

The strong results, which topped the average forecasts from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, were the latest evidence that the online advertising market continues to improve with the economy’s recovery. Analysts said one trend within the numbers is Google’s gains in display advertising, as the company converts clients who once advertised only by bidding on search keywords.

As advertising dollars continue to shift online, for Google “that could be something that is billions of dollars of revenue going forward,” said Laxmi Poruri, a partner/analyst who follows Google for Primary Global Research.

“Display is one area where we have seen great performance on growth, and really it’s driven by better tools to simplify the process of buying display advertising,” Pichette said. Given Google’s optimism about the balance of the year, Pichette said Google would continue to invest heavily in “people, products and acquisitions” during the balance of 2010.

Google has added nearly 800 employees since Jan. 1, the largest quarterly increase since the first quarter of 2008, bringing its total global work force to 20,621 people, and Pichette said Google would “continue hiring aggressively throughout the year.”

Pichette declined to say what share of those new hires would come from Silicon Valley, but added: “We do hire quite a bit in the valley, especially on the engineering front.”

The Mountain View company said its advertising revenues continue to benefit from the economic recovery, the growth of mobile advertising revenues and from new technology such as “Real Time Bidding” that tracks users’ online history and serves up ads tailored to that history in the few milliseconds between a person clicking on a Web site and the page popping up.

Pichette and other executives declined to answer questions about whether Google would develop its own tablet device to compete with Apple’s iPad, but many analysts believe that the search giant may pursue that strategy. “I think it’s a logical step,” Poruri said.

Despite the positive news, investors — perhaps worried about Google’s rising spending, or the absence of CEO Eric Schmidt from the earnings announcement — sent its stock down sharply. Google shares fell more than $29, nearly 5 percent, to $566 in after-hours trading. This was the first earnings call that Schmidt has missed since the company went public.

Google declined to release sales results for its new Nexus One smartphone, but Pichette said in an interview that the phone was “a big chunk” of the growth of Google’s non-advertising revenue, which was 4 percent of Google’s $6.8 billion in total revenue, or $300 million, up from 3 percent in the last quarter of 2009. Still, many analysts estimate its initial sales were a tiny fraction of the initial success of the iPhone.

Pichette said Schmidt’s absence from the earnings call reflected no change in his leadership role.

The above article can be seen in it’s entirety at Mercury News.

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Initially, Twitter will feature “promoted tweets” at the top of relevant Twitter search results, such as this one, from Starbucks, which might appear when a user searches for terms like “Starbucks” or “coffee.”  Users will be able to perform the same actions on this promoted tweet as they would on any other tweet, such as replying, retweeting, or favoriting.  Simply put, this increases the likelihood that a brand’s tweets will have a longer shelf life, and be shared more often, than if published:

• just to their own stream, or 
• seen only by the people that follow the brand (or by others that retweet it.)

Eventually, promoted tweets will find their way into our Twitter streams (not just search results), and not just on Twitter.com. They will be displayed based upon relevance, and driven by a proprietary algorithm that determines that relevance.  In both cases, displays of these tweets will be optimized based upon frequency of engagement with them. Those that are engaged with more often will be displayed more often. Just as Google optimizes AdSense based upon click activity, Twitter will optimize based upon a mix of replies, retweets and other engagements.

This is a big step for Twitter, as it has been unsupported by direct ad revenue thus far (even though third parties have found ways to), and it represents yet another move by platforms (like Facebook) to monetize user engagements, rather than eyeballs.

And that is a very big deal, signifying an even bigger trend.

From Facebook Engagement Ads, to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, to SocialVibe, ad opportunities within social media are justifiably drifting away from “display” and towards “engagement.” It seems only natural. Click-through rates on display ads surrounding content have been falling precipitously for years, and those same clicks take one clicker in one direction with one experience. This new crop of engagement ads is leveraging the highly connected environments they appear within, turning every interaction with them into an opportunity for rebroadcasting, creating impressions between people that are arguably more effective than the initial impression that started the chain of events.

The old impression model was like a car that started to lose its value the second it was driven off the lot. This new engagement model actually appreciates in value with each interaction. Those interactions will not come cheaply, however. And the distances they travel will be directly proportional to the relevance they carry, and the value they add.

A message with relevance makes an ad more likely to be interacted with. It’s been the driving force behind Google’s AdWords and AdSense, and that’s a pretty good business. But bring value directly to the consumer in exchange for their attention, and you have an experience that is not just likely to be engaged with, but shared. This is the backbone of the engagement ad economy, making the number of people an advertiser eventually reaches a direct result of how good they are at getting attention by bringing relevant value that consumers will want to, in turn, bring the people they know. Rewarding brands that do this best with the display of more “impressions” that have the opportunity to beget other impressions should have the effect of making advertising more signal, and less noise.

Twitter’s foray into this engagement ad economy will be a test of its ability to influence its users’ behavior, and will place as much of an onus on its operations as its advertisers. By letting third parties do this before they did, Twitter already desensitized audiences to ads around, on and within their Twitter streams. By bringing this platform in-house, they are making a move that is in parallel with Apple’s iAd platform, in that it leverages proprietary data to deliver the most relevant advertising–and better than the competition can. If they apply their data properly, and get the relevance and frequency right, Twitter’s users will tolerate the advertising. There is no question about it.

If Twitter’s ad platform is deemed successful, we can add it to the growing list of engagement-driven advertising that looks like it may be able to compete with the bottom-of-the-funnel last-click-attribution AdWords/AdSense model. That makes engagement advertising pretty big business.

Now all advertisers need to do is understand what the value of each “engagement” is, and what it means to the bottom line. Expect them to spend the next several months and year trying to figure that out. Once they do, the engagement ad economy will take its next, gigantic leap forward.

Ian Schafer is CEO of Deep Focus and interactive engagement agency in New York.

The above article is courtesy of Forbes.com and is available in it’s original form by clicking HERE.        NX7TFFCEWVDC

I chalk some of this up to the fact that I am blessed (or cursed) with two different chromosomes. Because I have both “X” and “Y” chromosomes, I believe it creates an inherent conflict that just couldn’t exist in the “XX” configuration popular with some of our species. Individuals with two of the same type of chromosome do not seem to have the same proclivity for innovation (…?) found in those that have two unmatched genetic tags. That said, it terrifies me to think of the types of knowledge I might gather if I had two of the obviously deviant “Y” chromosomes…and none of the common sense laden, coupon-clipping, we-need-to-make-a-list “X” chromosomes.

For the record, there is a condition where individuals carry 47 chromosomes and not 46; the extra chromosome is a “Y”. The condition is knows as 47 XYY and was initially known as the “criminal karyotype”: the name was later dismissed on lack of actual proof but there exists a theory that the extra male chromosome in each cell is responsible for increased aggression and criminal behavior. It is also known that humans can be born with 3 “Y’s” (or 47 YYY Syndrome). I do not know of any predominant symptoms, nor did I bother to look, but I can assume these people have never lost an argument to your garden-variety, run-of-the-mill “XY”.

After extensively researching humans who carry two “X” chromosomes (I married one…and am partly responsible for the arrival of two more), there are some items around us that reflect a strong “XY” influence. I’m not talking about the obvious things like camouflage tuxedos, the beer helmet or a riding mower that does the quarter mile in 14 seconds. I notice the little things. Things that would have started with three (maybe four) “XY” humans around a fire and there would be an application of alcohol to spur the creative process. The creative peak is very easy to spot among “XY’s”. It happens when one of the individuals burps…and says, “Hey…you guys…I-gotta-great-idea!”

At this moment is where we find the creative energy required to come up a bicycle that is also a treadmill. The website (if you need to go farther?) is HERE. The short story includes walking, or running, on a treadmill to move the gears that drive the wheels on the bike. This is clearly a retaliatory stance from an “XY” contingent that have “simply had it up to HERE” with the stationary bike lobby and needed to develop a counter position.

I also offer The Baby Mop and Urinal Goal as fine examples of “XY” thinking. It follows another inherent need for the “XY” to multi-task. For the “XX” reading this, consider watching television with an “XY”…it’s not about watching what’s on TV…it’s about watching what ELSE is on TV. If the darling newborn is spending inordinate amount of time on the floor, let’s see if we can improve on that. And the Urinal Goal? Well, some of us can’t believe it has taken this long to develop a way for “XY’s” to bet on sports in the washroom.

Along the way, I also found ads for an Inflatable Dart Board and a DVD Rewinder. The dart board is perfect for “XY’s” who enjoy a game of darts, aren’t very good and don’t want to play too long. I have no idea how many “XY’s” were required to burp before the spawn of the DVD Rewinder. It’s absolutely useless, will only end up in a junk drawer, “XX’s” will make a “tsk” noise and roll their eyes…and mine should be here in ten days.

To be fair, the combination of a blanket and a housecoat could only come from an individual with two of the same chromosomes. The initial thought of “who is actually going to buy this?”…has been surpassed by…“they sold how many???” In January, AdAge reported, “The quirky little blanket with sleeves has become the raiment of the zeitgeist, with more than 4 million units sold in just over three months and more than 200 parody videos on YouTube.” So, let’s score one for the “XX” bunch.

One final note for the “XX’s” reading along: while the creative peak is easy to spot, the point where the “XY” begins to burn on his creative jag typically happens in private. The process ends in a washroom and only after a substantial amount of “creative fluid” has been applied. The “XY” will, invariably, stand in front of the bathroom mirror…tilt his head to one side…and say, “Bond…James Bond”.

Nothing good happens after this.

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