On the other hand, African-Americans are less likely than are Caucasians to

Those who do research products for purchase, though, are more likely to trust content they find in online forums, blogs and advertisements.

Jupiter's said for a while that with the growth of the online population slowing, marketers will need to embrace a variety of tactics to better target the customer segments they seek. RushmoreDrive is offering to help them do that. Way too early to tell what impact it will have, however.

David Schatsky | April 10, 2008, 04:27 PM
Books Rule

Some say people don't read books anymore. A number of folks are describing, envisioning or proselytizing a future in which books may become obsolete (given the dynamic and socially constructed nature of knowledge). If you want to be taken seriously, though, you'll say those things in a book. Like one of these: Free 1, Free 2, Miscellaneous, Swell, Convergence. Not to mention, no one knows yet how to preserve digital information for hundreds of years.

Books rule.

David Schatsky | April 08, 2008, 01:24 PM
Online Fraud, Maturing, Makes Compelling Reading

The New York Times recently published a story about online fraud citing FBI stats that place the value of online fraud at $239 million in 2007 or about $2,530 per incident on average. The increased sophistication and specialization of scammers are cited as evidence that online fraud is maturing. But the dollar value of the fraud may be another sign of the maturation of online scamming.

The article draws on a report recently released by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). It contains some handy statistics and some colorful descriptions of some of the more common types of online scams, including those "involving pets, checks, spam and online dating sites, all of which have proven effective as criminal devices in the hands of fraudsters." The section on "romance fraud" is particularly heart-rending: After meeting someone at a dating or social networking site

... the fraudster tries to gain a person’s trust through false displays of affection. In most cases, the fraudster lives far away, usually in another country. The fraudster expresses an ardent desire to visit the person, but the fraudster cannot afford to make the trip. The scam is successful when the two agree to meet and the fraudster convinces the victim to send money to cover his travel expenses. Then, invariably, an unforeseen event (often an accident of some sort) prevents the fraudster from making the trip (or, at least, so goes the fraudster’s lie). The fraudster lands in the hospital, and now the victim’s money has to be used to cover medical expenses. The fraudster’s brother has been kidnapped, and now the money has to be used to set him free. The fraudster was mugged on her way to the airport, and now she has no money at all. In any event, the fraudster always needs more money; and, if the fraudster’s success continues, he is able to obtain more money from the victim while making more promises to visit. The fraudster, however, always has an excuse for missing the plane, and the rounds of false promises and excuses continue until the victim loses patience and stops sending money.

Besides the increasing sophistication of fraud tactics, the dollar value of online fraud may be another indicator of its maturity. According to the IC3, the amount lost to online fraud in 2001 was $31 million, just .06% of online retail sales, based on our online retail figures. That percentage rose rapidly over the succeeding several years to reach .17% in 2005 but has edged up to just .19% of online retail sales in 2007. Greater vigilance by authority and by increasingly tenured online users no doubt can help restrain the growth of online fraud.

David Schatsky | April 07, 2008, 09:27 AM
Census Bureau Facing Steep Customer Acquisition Costs

Conducting the national census in the U.S. is a costly enterprise. And the price just went up.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Census Bureau is scaling back plans to use hand-held computers to count millions of people during the 2010 census. The Commerce Secretary cited what sounds like scope creep in the requirements for the customized hand-held devices as the reason for limiting their use. This change is supposed to increase the cost of conducting the census by $3 billion to $14 billion.

If the population in 2010 reaches around 312 million, as we expect (link to our forecast in Quantify), that puts the cost of the census at about $45 per person. That might be a decent price when compared to the cost of customer acquisition in, say, the telecom industry. But it seems like overpaying when you consider that AOL bought Bebo for about $20 per member, and, according to a promotion my colleage David Daniels sent me, eToys Direct is offering a list of its recent customers (with average order value of $71) at $105 per thousand.

If the Census Bureau took on a commercial sponsor such as Comcast or AT&T Wireless, we might save a few bucks.

David Schatsky | April 03, 2008, 12:02 PM
Got Your Converter Box Coupon?

I do not enjoy a reputation for being an early adopter, but I nonetheless have just received my TV converter box "coupons" (actually plastic cards, emblazoned with holograms, that look like payment cards, some digits erased to protect myself):

If you haven't already requested one, you can do so here.

Give it to someone who gets TV over the air and doesn't plan to buy a digital TV receiver in the next year. Mom?

David Schatsky | April 02, 2008, 02:33 PM
Intel Pushing Mobile Internet

Product announcements and strategic pronouncements at Intel's Developer Form event in China this week (NYT coverage; CNET Coverage) speak to a research report my colleague Julie Ask recently published on our site. I would leave it to her to blog about but she's swamped at CTIA this week. So I'll just promote her recent piece on the Mobile Internet, which looks at how new-style devices will influence adoption of the mobile Internet and affect opportunities for carriers, media companies and marketers. It cites AdMob data to confirm that devices with full HTML browsers account for a massively disproportionate share of impressions and click-through rates.

Safe travels, Julie.

David Schatsky | March 31, 2008, 09:44 AM
Giant Particle Accelerator Produces Post-Modern Front-Page Story

A story on the front page of the New York Times this weekend about the "Large Hadron Collider" begins:

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

When was the last time you saw a front-page story reference four other stories with which it shared the front page that day? A cool, creepy effect. Nothing like the risks feared by critics of the super-collider, which include

... chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Interesting reading. The editorial effect of the opening will be lost on readers of the Web edition, though.

David Schatsky | March 28, 2008, 09:51 AM
Rescuing Economics to Explain the World

Faith in the market to deliver optimal outcomes in a broad range of situations has had a good run. And although mayhem in the financial markets these days is tempering the enthusiam of some for unfettered capitalism, its run will pobably continue.

There have been interesting efforts in recent years to apply the tools of economics to explaining everyday phenomena. "Freakonomics," the 2005 best seller, for example, explored the role of classic economic concepts such as information assymetry and incentive systems in a range of phenomena from lazy real estate brokers to cheating school teachers and sumo wrestlers to the microeconomics of an office bagel delivery business.

More recently, a number of economists and others have been looking at the apparent inability of economic theory to explain human behavior. Many of these works are arguing that economics still works--and indeed provides a very powerful analytical toolset--but that some of its concepts have been too narrowly defined.

Bryan Caplan, in "The Myth of the Rational Voter," for example, poses this question: "Why do voters seem to support economic policies, such as protectionism, that are often counter to their own material interests?" It would seem to suggest that voters behave irrationally, and rational behavior is a core assumption of economics. Caplan says that voters may be ignorant but not necessarily irrational. You just need to understand the notion of incentives more broadly to include not just economic incentives but emotional and moral ones. Some people feel good about supporting a policy (high emotional incentive) that they recognize their single vote has a vanishingly small chance of influencing the passage of (tiny economic counterincentive).

(Another recent book--I haven't read it yet--takes a different approach: arguing that people are irrational, but predictably so.)

A new book, called Nudge, cited by John Tierney yesterday in the New York Times, appears to be in the same vein [haven't read it yet; it's on my list]: Why do people make dumb choices?

We can’t even prepare properly for something as straightforward as our own retirement. We’ll put in long hours shopping for a cellphone or a television set, but we’re too busy to agonize over pension plans: in one study, most people spent less than an hour choosing theirs. We’re not good at making immediate sacrifices for an abstract benefit in the future. And this weakness is compounded when, as with climate change, we have a hard time even understanding the problem or the impact of our actions today.

How to encourage and enable people to make smarter decisions? Make it clearer what the true costs and benefits are of the choices they make, and expand the definition of costs and benefits to include social and ethical ones:

“Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs,” says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. “When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful.”

It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

How concepts are defined--the clarity and the scope of the definition--has an enormous influence on the usefulness of the concept. I was probably first exposed to this idea when I read "1984" in highschool and considered the power of language to shape thought. And I grappled with is as a software developer, making choices about the granularity and interfaces of software modules and object classes in object-oriented programming systems. The right modularity would make it 10 times easier to build a reliable and maintainable system. The wrong modularity would cripple you.

It is very interesting to see these folks applying economic thinking to areas not usually thought of as economic, and also revisiting and refining economic concepts to keep the tools of economics sharp enough to cope with a world that is getting more complex every day.

David Schatsky | March 25, 2008, 04:57 PM
People Resemble their Pets, Brands

I love this item from the Wall Street Journal's technology blog.

It reported that researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo that found that "...exposing people to a brand’s logo for 30 milliseconds will make them behave in ways associated with that brand."

Skeptical? Fine. But the methology of the experiment isn't too shabby. Researchers

... exposed subjects to imperceptible images of brand logos for Apple and IBM (as well as logos for other non-tech companies). Surveys found that people felt similarly about the two companies in every way except creativity, where Apple came out ahead, and competence, which was IBM’s perceived strength. After exposing them to the brands, the researchers asked subjects to describe as many uses for a brick as they could."

Gavan Fitzsimons, one of the Duke professors who conducted the study, was quoted in the article.

Most people mentioned a door stop or a paperweight. “But the subjects who had seen Apple’s logo also came up with uses like tying it around my roommate’s foot and throwing him in a deep pond,” Fitzsimons tells us. The Apple-primed subjects averaged 30% more answers and independent reviewers also deemed their answers as more creative. It’s harder to measure competence, but Fitzsimons says that IBM-primed subjects had strikingly uniform answers.

They used to say people resembled their pets, but it was an open question whether a person and his pet grew to resemble each other, or people tend to select pets that look like them. Now you can ask the question about consumer brands. Perhaps people come to resemble the brands they spend time with.

David Schatsky | March 24, 2008, 10:19 AM
Don't Blame Google for Search-within-Search

The New York Times reports today on Google’s addition of a search-within-search feature, to allow users to search specific sites without leaving Google's own site.

Some brands will be upset by this, because it creates a situation in which other marketers can advertise to customers via AdWords even as they are searching the brand’s site.

The article quoted an Internet consultant and former Crutchfield exec as saying, “Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search… So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.” I don't know whether Google will heed such requests.

The problem here is not Google’s unnecessary “aggressiveness,” as the Internet consultant put it. Rather, the problem is that site search is still poor on so many Web sites.

We’ve tracked this phenomenon for years. It’s still the case that for many sites, Google can find things on a site that the site’s own search function cannot. That’s one reason why most consumers say they don’t lean heavily on site search. Fewer than a third of online consumers say search is the primary way they find information or products they are looking for on a particular Web site. (JupiterResearch Quantify users can see the consumer survey question and detailed response data here.)

In the case of BestBuy, the example cited in the New York Times article, my search this morning 40” lcd on the site listed just three 40” LCD TVs on the results page (and a link to “all 24 items”), along with camcorders and TV monitors (all smaller than 40”). The same search of bestbuy.com on Google returned a whole page of 40” LCD models (and the promise of 8,100 more results, along with ads from Dell, NexTag, Newegg, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber, among others.)

The solution is for marketers to make site search better, so that consumers researching products will favor site search to Google. Helpful tactics include offering, along with the most relevant results possible, other helpful and related information such as customer ratings, pricing, faceted search to narrow results, links to buying guides and the like.

Clients who want further analysis, please drop us a line.

David Schatsky | February 01, 2008, 01:01 PM
Join us for teleconference on Microsoft/Yahoo!

Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo! raises crucial questions about the future of those companies and the future of Internet and mobile media, advertising and commerce.

Jupiter clients are invited to us for a special JupiterTel teleconference for a first take from Jupiter analysts on what this deal may mean for the industry and for your business.

What is the strategic rationale for this deal?
What is likely to unfold over the next 24-months?
What scenarios may play out in the long term?
Which companies might gain, and which lose, from a deal?

Monday, February 4, 2008, 12:00 PM Eastern Time

Clients can click here to register.

David Schatsky | January 25, 2008, 09:56 AM
Creative Destruction vs. Destructive Creativity

Most of us will never be in a position to wreak destruction on the scale of the $7.2 billion loss that "rogue trader" Jérôme Kerviel at Société Générale apparently has.

But it's an inescapable fact that technology, efficiency and leverage carry destructive powers of impressive sweep as surely as they carry constructive ones.

This notion captivated mass attention in the "atomic era," when mutual assured desctruction was not just a risk but a strategy; concerns about the impact of accidents continue to drive opposition to nuclear power in some quarters.

It gets some attention whenever a massive oil tanker like the Exxon Valdez spills, creating more damage than ever would have been possible with less sophisticated vessels.

It commands the full attention of the media industry who sees its business threatened by a global epidemic of digital piracy and the devaluation of media products even as it opens the door to new business models.

The more powerful the technology, the more desctructive power it carries with it. While some champions of new technologies may be reluctant to put the brakes on technologies that promise exciting advances over how things were done in the past, most new technologies are deployed by responsible people with good intentions and safety in mind.

Recent history suggests, though, that despite enlisting safegards against unintended consequences, some will unvariably occur.

It's the rocky road of progress.

David Schatsky | January 02, 2008, 10:32 AM
JupiterResearch Launches Quantify: Data On Demand

I'm delighted to announce the launch of a new subscription service that will give Jupiter clients a productivity and competitive edge in 2008. We call it Quantify.

Quantify subscribers have instant, on-demand access to Jupiter's entire library of high-quality, proprietary data, including all of our consumer and executive surveys and five-year market forecasts for dozens of markets in Europe and North America relating to emerging consumer technologies and digital media, marketing, advertising and commerce.

We always generate more data than we ever have the ability to publish in our reports. And since primary data is usually just one of the pillars that our reports rest on, sometimes there is a lag between when the data is generated and when it is published in a report.

With Quantify, all of our data is available to subscribers online immediately after it is quality-checked. It's fully searchable, browsable and downloadable.

I know that our clients rely on Jupiter for much more than just data alone. Clients tell me they value their relationship with us for insight about important trends; advice on key tactical and strategic decisions; guidance on vendor selection and industry partnerships; analysis of best practices in advertising, marketing, media programming, site operations, customer service; and so on.

But reliable, high-quality data has always been a key part of what our clients have valued in their relationship with Jupiter. Now with Quantify, they can get access to more of it, sooner, and on demand.

If you're not yet a Quantify subscriber, you can still browse Quantify to see what data is available. Just click on Quantify in the left nav bar on our site or use the "search data" button at the top of the home page. (As we've just launched, not all of our data is online yet, but we're getting there.)

For more information about Quantify, including how to subscribe, please contact your Jupiter client services manager or account manager

If you're not already a Jupiter client, click here to request more information.

And Happy New Year to everyone.

David Schatsky | December 13, 2007, 08:37 AM
21st Century Pre-War

Here's to hoping this is an example of Manhattan real estate marketing rather than geopolitical prophesy:

David Schatsky | November 25, 2007, 10:10 PM
Brave Consumer Props Up US Economy on Black Friday

"I'm really looking for the bargains this year because I'm losing my job; they're moving our plant to Mexico after the first of the year, so I have to be careful," said Tina Dillow of New Richmond, Ohio, who camped out at a Best Buy store near Cincinnati at 3 a.m. because of a great deal on a laptop. (From Yahoo News.)

Sheesh.