The spirit of the EU cookie law

There have been some pretty hysterical over-reactions to the (not so) new EU cookie law, some of them more factually correct than others. There have also been a lot of accusations that this law is fairly vague (which it is), that the guidance has changed (which it sort of has) and that it is unnecessary (which it isn't).

Some of the apparent difficulties with implementing the law stem from the fact that companies which are in a position to make compliance with the law easy - companies like Google and the big advertising agencies - have absolutely no incentive to make compliance easy. I'm not accusing anybody of being deliberately obstructive, but big media hasn't sat around a table and pro-actively tried to sort out a way of implementing the ICO guidance (PDF warning). They haven't done that because it's in big media's interests to build up cookies and privacy into a huge, insurmountable problem, kick potential solutions into the long grass and continue to track individuals on the web.

I've been thinking about the spirit of the law rather than the letter and in spirit, I think it's very simple. Just pretend your website is an actual, physical store and ask yourself whether what you're doing would be acceptable if it was.

So a customer visits your shop on the high street and starts to browse.

They can put things in their shopping basket, obviously. No question. Then they can take that basket to the till and pay.

Once at the till, you can ask if they have a loyalty card. If they do and hand it over, you can record what they bought and use that information to target advertising and offers, since that's part of the loyalty card deal you make with your customers. All fine so far.

Maybe your customer has brought a voucher with them. They fill in their details on the back in exchange for a discount and that's fine too.

That's a couple of easy ways to collect information about some of your customers - usually in exchange for a discount - and your customer is well aware that they're trading this information with you.

On the internet, cookies are essential to the virtual versions of those physical transactions. You put goods in your basket and the cookie remembers who you are, just so that the basket works. And only so that the basket works. That last bit is important.

All of those cookies are fine. The ICO says so and always has.

Now we come to a few tricks that are easy with cookies, but you might not like to try them in an actual store if you want to keep your customers.

You do a deal with the high street car park to put up posters advertising your store. Instead of just paying a fixed fee for the posters, you make a deal with the car park owner that you'll pay £1 for every person who visits your store straight from the car park and buys something, before they go anywhere else.

You don't tell your customers what you're doing, but you get some students on minimum wage to follow people out of the car park and see where they go. Obviously you need evidence that they're being counted properly, so you snap a quick photo of them on the way out of the car park, another on the way into the store and one at the checkout, time-stamped to prove it's the same person and that they went straight to your store.

That's probably not on, right? Which is why affiliate cookies could well have a problem.

And now inside the store. We already said loyalty cards are fine, but by using cookies you can track the in-store behaviour of something like 95%+ of your customers, without asking permission. That sounds useful. Let's do that.

We'll need a way to identify shoppers when they come back to our physical store though, without them volunteering the information via a loyalty card. Sounds like a job for more students on minimum wage! You pay a few people to walk around the store, surreptitiously dropping RFID chips into any open handbags so that when that customer comes back, you'll be able to invisibly read their ID at the checkout.

A few people notice and complain. You tell them they should keep their bag closed if they don't want ID chips dropped in it. Which is basically the argument that's being deployed when the industry tells users to turn off cookies in their browser if they don't want to be tracked.

You can stretch the analogy further if you want. Physical stores have always known how much of each product they sell. That data is like page hit counters and it doesn't need cookies. Without a loyalty card, physical stores don't know if you, personally, come in three times a week; once for a big shop, plus two short visits for milk and bread. They get along just fine without that information and always have.

Part of the reason they get along fine is my favourite quote about sampling,

"You only need to try a spoonful of soup, to know what the whole bowl tastes like"

Data on a sample of (well informed) customers who have traded that data with you is fine. You don't need to track 100% of visitors to understand your customers and tracking every single click on the web is an unhealthy and expensive obsession.

The EU lawmakers and the ICO evidently understand that most of the complaints coming from the marketing industry are bluster. We should also understand that in the end, treating customers with respect is the way to retain them. If you're confused by cookie laws then ask yourself if you'd do the same thing in a high street store. If you wouldn't, then don't do it on the web.

A happy data visualisation

As a side project this week, I've been learning how to get data out of Twitter using R. How it's done might be a post for another day (it's not really difficult, except for R's usual quirks...)

For now, here's a Wordle picture of Twitter in a happy mood, searched for "Bank Holiday" at 5pm on the Friday before a long weekend. Have a great break everyone.

Why don't more people block web adverts?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post, which guesstimated that the proportion of internet users who run ad blocking software on their browser was somewhere around 5%.

It's grown a lot in relative terms over the past couple of years, but much of that growth is down to increased usage of the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which make it easy. In absolute terms, the number of people who block ads on the internet is still very low.

My question today is why? As a user, the internet is a much nicer place without adverts in it. Google search results are more useful, because advertisers can't pay to monopolise the top slots, web pages load faster and nothing's competing for your attention with the article that you came to a website to read.

I work in advertising and I block ads on my browser, unless I choose to see them for work. Why would people who don't work in advertising ever choose to see ads on the web? I can think of three reasons.

• People like web ads and find them useful. On balance, they'd rather have an internet with ads, than one without. But if that's true, then why are click rates and engagement rates with online ads in general, so low?
• People recognise that advertising is how a lot of internet content is funded and so they choose to play the game. This is the argument that it's immoral to read an online newspaper's content for free at the same time as blocking the ads that it's trying to serve you. Could be happening, but with 95% of people? I don't believe that, especially since music piracy rates seem to be much higher.
  
  There's also a trouble making moral counter argument that if you don't like ads and wouldn't click them anyway, then by stopping a website serving you ads, you're stopping that website charging an advertiser for an ineffective impression.
• Most internet users don't know that they can block ads, don't believe it works, or can't be bothered to set it up.

I'd like to use Wallpapering Fog for a social experiment. Assuming you don't have an ad blocker on your browser yet,

here's the Chrome link

and here's the Firefox link.

Either will take you seconds to set up. Why would you not click them?

We'll build the brand. As soon as we work out what it means.

My move away from London to work with smaller advertisers has seen me thinking a lot about the fundamentals of what we do in media agencies. When you work with smaller businesses, very often you deal with their owners rather than with marketing specialists. These are clever people, but they haven't been immersed in marketing-speak for the past ten years and jargon needs to be explained. It's plain English marketing and all the more refreshing for the fact that you can't get away with throwing buzzwords around and assuming everybody's with you all the way.

There are lots of examples to pick from. We take Search ads for granted in media land now and if you're a marketer who doesn't know how Google search auctions work then you should be ashamed of yourself. A retail business owner whose company has been around for 30 years however, needs the intricacies of search explained in a simple way. He doesn't just implicitly assume that search should be part of his media mix in the way a modern marketer probably would.

There's a word that has the potential to tie even the most sophisticated marketer in knots when asked to explain what it means. It's a word we use a lot. It's at the very heart of what we do.

Why do marketers struggle so badly to explain what brand means?

This goes to the heart of the modern malaise in marketing. Branding - brand building - is what we do. But we cant explain what it means.

It's like... well it's like wallpapering fog, which is how this blog got its name. Brand looks solid. It looks like a strong concept. Then you try to hang a definition on it and it isn't there.

Here's a dictionary definition:

"A type of product manufactured by a company under a particular name". That's definitely not what agencies mean when they say 'brand'. In fact, we often make a distinction between 'brand advertising' and 'product advertising'. 'Brand advertising' isn't intrinsically tied to the product, so what the hell is it? We're in real trouble now, because the dictionary definition, where a sensible non-marketer might look to understand what the hell his agency is banging on about, isn't what we mean.

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product." @AdContrarian

Just throwing that one in there as a counterpoint to the idea that brand and product advertising are different. In all honesty, I agree with the statement above, but it's not what marketers usually mean when they say 'brand ad'. It's even from a guy who calls himself Contrarian.

So back to trying to explain what brand building means, if it doesn't mean just selling more product. I can see the finance director twitching...

It's not just making people 'like' you. (It's especially not just persuading them to click a button with 'like' written on it.)

It's not just making customers feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves, if that doesn't eventually lead to some increased sales. (It's not, right? We do need to sell stuff in the end.)

For me, brand means that through advertising, consumers get more value from a product than it has intrinsically. They show a preference for that product and are willing to pay more for it, for reasons that are not a part of the product's objective quality.

That's a bit of a mouthful. My Yorkshire retailer's bullshit alarm is flashing amber.

Let's try:

"Branding is persuading people to pay more for our product, without improving it."

As an economist, I'm happy with that. Not what you thought it meant? OK, but you need a one liner that concisely explains what branding means, or advertising agencies will continue to struggle to explain how they add value to a business.

Next, up on Wallpapering Fog: 'Engagement'.

This might well turn into a series of marketing buzzwords, defined one at a time for impatient Yorkshiremen with no time for bullshit. In the end, we will be able to explain in simple terms, what on earth it is that we do.

This is important. As a great man once said...

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself" Albert Einstein.

Google Currents: A new way to read your favourite marketing blog!

I've just been playing with Google Currents and have got to say, I'm well impressed. On a 7" HTC Flyer tablet, it's slick, easy to read and it looks great.

So good in fact, that you can now read Wallpapering Fog there!

After you've installed Currents, point your mobile browser here or at the button on the side-bar of this site and you can read Wallpapering Fog in all its tabloidy formatted glory. Apparently I need 200+ subscribers in Currents before I get indexed in the search, so that could be a while... the button's definitely your best bet.

It really is rocket science

Just received this email from NASA regarding something I must have signed up for at some point and I have to share it. No idea what the service was, because... well because this. To be honest it could say aliens had invaded and I wouldn't be any the wiser.

From: echo@echo.nasa.gov
To: neilcharles


Users of Reverb and LP DAAC DAR Tool,


The ESDIS Project at NASA is preparing to migrate the user accounts of the ECHO (Earth Observing System Clearinghouse) Reverb client and the ASTER DAR Tool to the new Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) EOSDIS User Registration System (URS).  The URS is designed to improve use of the EOSDIS system by enhancing functionality and simplifying of user registration and profile management.  With the new URS, a web interface will be offered that allows you to update (reset password, retrieve/change account information) your account profile.  You may also continue to use existing tools (e.g. Reverb) to modify your account information, as changes will be persisted in the EOSDIS URS.


The EOSDIS URS enforces account uniqueness based on email address and user name.  If you have multiple ECHO user accounts, or an existing EOSDIS URS account, with a conflicting email address or user name, you will receive an emailed notification with further detailed instructions.  In order to ensure we have correct user information, all Reverb users will be asked to verify their account information during their first account login after the transition.


Other systems migrating to the EOSDIS URS in the near future include the Land Atmosphere Near Real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) and the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Doc Builder Tool.  Our plan is to enable all of our systems to use the same user registration system.


The URS transition is currently scheduled for Wednesday 4/25/2012.  Please contact echo@echo.nasa.gov if you have any specific questions regarding your account. For more information please visit the following website: http://earthdata.nasa.gov/urs.


Thank You
The ECHO Team

Google's gone corporate and it spells disaster for Google+

If you've been on Wallpapering Fog before, you'll know I got quite excited about Google+. I liked it a lot when it came out and predicted big things. I still think it was a great starting point, but Google's overhaul today has me changing my mind. Yes it looks prettier, but dive deeper into what Google is doing and it spells disaster.

Fundamentally, social networks need to be about you and me. We don't go to them because they're Facebook, or Google+, we go to them to find things we like, from people we know.

Google+ has become all about Google, not about you.

On my nice big widescreen monitor at work, this is what Google+ looks like. The green bit is what I came here for and it's showing one story. One and a half if you're generous. That stream holds the things I've chosen to look at.

And now the red area; things Google would like me to look at. Corporate Google has obviously decided that hangouts and chat are a USP. Never mind that I've never used them, they're now huge. The top bar is punting multiple other Google services, including search. Yahoo do that. This is not a good thing. Come on Google, your own browser does tabs, I can have Google+ and Google Search open at the same time if I want.

This is the thinking that saw Microsoft take the chart below, and conclude that because nobody uses the menus in Windows Explorer, what they really need to do is make them bigger.

As I've written before, it takes a special kind of management interpretation to decide that people not using a product means that you should market it harder.

Why would you use Google+ now, when the bit of it that you control is such a small part of what it does? If you want a hangout, sure, but apart from the odd celebrity chat sponsored by Google, nobody's using those. Even circles, which were the whole point of Google+, are now filed under 'more' at the bottom of the sidebar (which is probably because they're broken.)

Google's gone awfully corporate recently and is starting to behave more and more like Microsoft as it makes a land-grab for your time and cross promotes all of its products. Maybe it was inevitable, but for a fledgling social network, it's not the way to win us over. Give the people more of what they want, not more of what you'd like them to want.

Edit: The top "hot on Google+" story today is from a guy who's flipped his monitor into portrait format to make Google+ readable. It's not a spoof. I rest my case.