Archive of Secrets of the Post-Advertising Age

TO: High-Level Business Executives

FROM: The Executive Whisper

When it comes to Twitter, who will be the small boy who yells out, “But the emperor has nothing on!”? To our strategy clients, we play the role of the boy. For the rest of the world, the Harvard Business Review appears to be taking on that role (we hope). In an online report titled “Men follow men and Nobody Tweets,” HBR reports that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets [its emphasis].” It gets better.

To retweet from HBR’s published report:

“On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

That may have been more than 140 characters. But you get the tweet.

And in case you didn’t click on the link. Here’s another nice tweet about Twitter from the folks in Cambridge:

“Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”

To pile on: A study released Monday from the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) states that 18 to 26 year olds don’t see value in Twitter, although they spend hours daily texting friends and communicating on social networks in real time. Only 22% of Millennials use Twitter.

Um, not good.

Yet, is there a place for Twitter in our lives? Sure. For one, it’s a great way to follow celebrities du jour without having to buy People, Us or In Touch. Real-time gossip about Brangelina. Now that’s value.

TO: High-Level Business Executives

FROM: The Executive Whisper

Research results can be interpreted in so many ways. And when you hear a researcher say, “We’re on the side of truth.” It’s time to put your hand on your wallet. As reported yesterday in AdAge, a research project commissioned by the Advertising Research Foundation finds, “Threats posed by DVRs and clutter to TV ads are overblown; print and online advertising are effective; and word-of-mouth about brands is largely driven by paid media ads.” Most interesting is what the researchers chose to highlight and what they leave out.

To be fair, the full report hasn’t been published yet. So we assume much will be cleared up. But here are items that could use a little fleshing out:

Reported: Among “empirical generalizations” to be published are that TV advertising loses money for most marketers – though the same study found that, for the heaviest spenders, TV overall paid out and still works as well or better than it did in similar tests conducted more than a decade ago.

Translation: Unless you’re Budweiser or Coke, TV advertising is a waste of money.

Reported: Many of the papers to be published in the report are analyses of prior studies, some dating to the 1990s, though most also incorporate newer or original research.

Translation: So the findings are about as current as AltaVista and Lycos.

Reported: The DVR study of 1,000 households in South Africa by WPP’s Millward Brown South Africa found essentially no difference in average ad recall or likeability scores among households with and without DVRs. It dovetails with equally puzzling, if unreleased, findings more than seven years ago by Procter & Gamble Co.

Translation: Funny how the ad agency’s research concludes that advertising is good. Similar to State Farm’s recent findings that most U.S. households should buy additional homeowners insurance.

Just curious: They had to go to South Africa to find data to refute the negative impact TiVo is having on TV Ads?

Rumor: While we can’t substantiate it, we’ve been led to believe that GM, Chrysler, and the entire newspaper industry used a similar methodology to draw their business conclusions.

Last thought: You can find research to pretty much substantiate any “Truth” you’d like. And, frankly, it boggles the mind that anyone would seriously consider he or she would be able to find such a thing as the “Truth” in such a subjective topic.

Can’t wait for the report from the “Truth” commission.