Joe Hart officially named Twitter's man of the match.

England vs. Italy, 24th June 2012...

88,142 tweets mentioning "England"...

Analysed for positive or negative sentiment and then used to rate each player's performance.

The result? Joe Hart was England's man of the match based on tweets that mentioned player names. Ashley Young was, erm, less good.

Instead of the usual static infographic, here's a Tableau dashboard! Don't forget to click on the different pages across the top. Go here for overall England ratings, player scores and interactive player performance over time.

A few interesting bits that popped out for me...

• Rooney's performance was nowhere near his pre-match expectation (check his time-line)
  
  
• We all got progressively more depressed about England as the game went on. Have a look at sentiment over time and compare the pre-game level with the decline over the next two hours.
  
  
• We were happy to make half time and greeted the second half with a big COME ON ENGLAND! Then went back to getting steadily more depressed again.
  
  
• Cole's been harshly treated for that penalty miss. He scores a low rating due to the large volume of negatives as England exit on penalties
  
  
• Nobody tweets about poor old Lescott! That probably means as a centre back that you're getting the job done. I thought he had a good game.

If you want to see some methodology, it's the same as I did for England vs. Sweden.

Rating England vs. Sweden using Twitter

If you follow me on Twitter (why would you not? Don't answer that) you'll know I've been playing with R a lot recently. First attempts at pulling data from Twitter resulted in a word cloud I quite liked, but which an ex-colleague dubbed the "mullet of the internet". Thanks Mark.

This time, I've pointed R at Euro 2012. Specifically, I set R running from half an hour before kick off in the Group D England vs. Sweden game - 19.30 last Friday - with instructions to pull every tweet it could that contained the word "England".

The results? 78,045 England related tweets (excluding re-tweets), running from 19.30 to 21.15.

Let's see what we got. Grouping up the tweets into 5 minute intervals, here's overall volume.

We're averaging just under 2,300 tweets every 5 minutes. That's got to be enough to do something interesting with!

It's a bit easier to read if you colour the first and second half in red, with pre and post game and half time in grey.

OK, so lots of Tweets then. One of the cool things we can do with them is to split the tweets by sentiment; positive, negative or neutral. An example of a strong positive from the database would be:

"Well done and very proud of you. England may not have the most talented players but they played with guts, passion and heart #England" @ozzy_kopite

And negative (no points for grammar here either):

"Now lets watch england lose bcoz they use caroll!!! N the game will b bored!!! #damn" @Anomoshie

The sentiment algorithm isn't perfect so we're not going to push it too hard. I'm dumping any data about the strength of sentiment, tweets are either positive, negative or neutral and that's it.

If you'd like to know what kit I used to do all of this, please see the bottom of the post. I'm assuming most readers just want to jump to results, so here we go.

Keep the five minute time-slots and divide the number of positive tweets by the number of negative, to get a view on how cheerful Twitter was feeling about England during the game.

On average, there are 2.8 times as many positive tweets as negative. That will partly be down to the settings on the sentiment algorithm though and it's the movements we're really interested in.

Twitter was very positive in the lead up to kick off, but that didn't last long. Twenty minutes in, the balance of positive over negative had dropped from 4.1 to 2.2 as Sweden failed to roll over and let England hammer them. Then Carroll scored the opener...

In the second half, we can see a trough all the way down to 2.0 as Sweden take the lead and then a positive swing via England goals from Walcott and Welbeck. The game ends on a positive / negative sentiment value of 2.9. Well played lads.

Come to think of it, well played which lads? We've got loads of mentions of the players in this database too, so let's see who Twitter thinks had a good game.

Height of the bars is positive / negative sentiment and width is volume of tweets (some players like Lescott generate really low volumes so don't take their rating too seriously.) I've restricted the database just to tweets that took place  during the first or second half. If you were slating Carroll before the game, we're not interested in your opinion here!

Carroll comes out man of the match, both in terms of sentiment and volume of tweets. There's a definite break between the players who did best - Carroll, Welbeck, Gerrard, Hart and Walcott - and everyone else. The overall England rating never goes negative (below 1,) and none of the players' ratings do either, although Johnson tries hardest, which may be a reflection of his own-goal.

Finally, let's see how the player ratings fluctuated during the game. Sentiment on top. Volume of tweets below. This doesn't work so well for players with low numbers of mentions in tweets but you can see it works for Andy Carroll. That huge volume spike is his goal.

One more; here's Gerrard. Game of two halves for the Liverpool midfielder and his rating dropped significantly after half time.

Want to see another player? Here they are - knock yourself out. If you select "False" it will show totals for tweets that either don't mention a player, or mention more than one. The chart is a bit squashed below to fit in with the Wallpapering Fog template. For bigger, go here.

Powered by Tableau

Tools:

Tweet database pulled using R, R Studio and TwitteR. Sentiment analysis using the R 'Sentiment' plugin. Cleaned up a little in Excel and then all the charts are Tableau.

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.