OTOinsights

One to One's Quantemo NeuroMarketing Lab Unveils New Data Vizualization Layer

Above is an early look at a new data visualization layer that One to One's Quantemo NeuroMarketing Lab plans to bring to market.  The interface highlights the 5 primary research modalities that Quantemo offers its clients to help measure media engagement:

• Physiological Responses

Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, and Galvanic Skin Response traces are processed via a proprietary algorithm that establishes a single measure of stress associated with digital media research

• Neurological Responses

EEG waves are captured and processed through algorithms that indicate if the research participant has a singular focus, multi-focus, or no focus on a second by second basis.

• Interactive Responses

Eye movement and mouse movement/clicks are tracked via specialized infrared sensors.  Gaze tracking videos, heatmaps, and click maps provide vital information ergarding how research subjects scan and interact with on screen elements.

• Facial Recognition

Video cameras capture the facial expressions and body language of research subjects.  Software calculates expressions based on facial points like lip curvature, eyebrow position, and cheek contraction to determine a rang of emotions from happy to disgust with 85% accuracy.

• Traditional Survey Methods

Additional feedback is afforded to research participants via traditional quantitative/qualitative survey methods.  These responses are cross-correlated with physiological, neurological, interactive, and facial expression data to provide a cohesive, point-by-point depicition of user engagement.

The dashboard is branded SiteQUANT to represent Quatemo's usability offering.  There are plans for an additional dashboard  branded MediaQUANT that will represent media effectiveness research efforts.  Stay tuned!

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactiv

AdAge Ranks One to One Interactive as one of "The Hottest Digital Agencies Around".

AdAge's October 22nd, 2007 cover story is titled "The Hottest Digital Agencies Around".  In this article they review 20 of the hottest global digital marketing shops.  We are extremely excited/honored to be included in this elite group of firms.  Congrats to our staff, clients, and partners for helping us achieve this level of industry recognition.  The write up regarding One to One Interactive is provided below. 

McDonalds Embraces Open Source Marketing

Last year (March 30th, 2006 to be exact), I published a post titled "Consumer Generated Media Asset for McDonalds".  Within that post I included a great video that I found on YouTube of two guys in front of a McDonalds rapping about McNuggets (see below).  I also stated:

"If I where in their shoes, I would be posting this on McDonald websites, streaming it within ad banners, and placing it within their broadcast media rotation". 

Imagine my surprise when I learned that indeed they recently turned that footage into a television commercial.  Great job guys!  This is a  lead for other brands to follow.  Regularly track the blogsphere for good/positive consumer generated content and find ways to include the executions in your creative advertising/marketing rotation.

Original Consumer Generated Content:

McDonald's Commercial Broadcast Adaptation:

Bonus:  To my McDee's Marketing peeps, you absolutely should find a way to use the below consumer generated content titled "McDonald's: The Rap".  Contact its creator, Remy,  ASAP!

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive

Toyota Tacoma's WOW Machinma

Above is a great example of marketing machinima.   Toyota used World of Warcraft to help promote its Tacoma Truck.

Ethnography in Industry: Notes from EPIC2007

EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry) is, as its name suggests, a conference about the implications and uses of ethnography in industry. I was a little surprised (and pleased) that about 80% of the presenters and participants were from industry, and only about 20% were academics. Intel, Microsoft, and IBM are very well represented here, as are less-than-household names, such as consultants, who are nonetheless doing some fascinating work.

The upshot of this is that the problems were quite grounded in contemporary business practices and problems. A sampling of some of the issues around which ethnography was used to improve understanding include the following:

• Sales pipeline management (IBM)
• Mailing out 38,000 individual retirement packages in 7 days (XEROX)
• Researching and modeling medical care ecosystems (Intel)
• Implementing computer automation in wastewater plant management (University of Southern Denmark)
• Teaching ethnographic practices to system engineers to improve their understandings of user needs (Fujitsu, PARC)
• Improving a real estate firm's direct marketing strategy (Ricoh)

There was an interesting tension that many of the researchers seemed to be facing. On the one hand, their work was being used to help develop models for complex business practices. On the other hand, as ethnographers, they wanted to focus on concrete situations and contexts and the real, flesh-and-blood people within them. From my perspective, one way that this tension got addressed was to work proactively to improve communication between managers (who want the models) and employees, on whom the models are ideally grounded and in any case who will have to live with them once they are developed. Stated more abstractly, the ethnographers seemed to want to make a distinction between managing complex processes (which is seen as good) and implementing rationalist control schemes (which are seen as inhuman and bad).

Another major issue is one of legitimation. How can ethnographers convince managers and marketing leaders to take them seriously? How do they justify their work both intellectually (methods, data, etc.) and also from a business perspective (actually leads to better business processes or products)? Complicating this argument is the perceived conflict between the reductionist, abstract models that managers and marketing professionals want and the rich, individual "thick" and nuanced descriptions that ethnographers value and provide. Another way of saying this is that there is a lot of thinking about how ethnographic research can, should, does, or fails to connect to business cycles, that is, there is a lot of thinking about ways that ethnography can have real business impact.

It may appear from this post that there is an ethnographer versus managers and marketing professionals, good guys versus bad guys rhetoric at the conference; that is not the mood here and is instead a misleading artifact of the way I have tried to boil down the complex dynamics that I am seeing. The managers and marketing professionals are hiring and/or collaborating with the ethnographers, whether they are in-house researchers or consultants. So the managers and marketers, too, seem to want to distinguish between (a) managing complex processes and (b) implementing inhuman rationalist control schemes. In that regard, they and the ethnographers share a common value: the two groups just engage with it at different levels.

--Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D., Indiana University