Clearly, much is being learned, and very quickly, regarding effective measurement of the blink response.  But, marketers who wait for a final answer on how to measure their brand’s blink response restrict their innovation pipeline and their ability to engage their markets.  Those marketers who have embraced an approach are already differentiating their brands and witnessing organic growth from both their innovation pipeline and existing brands.

Here are some fast-track steps that marketers should be taking now to remain competitive and take full advantage of the blink opportunity.

1. Incorporate response timing measurement into some of your routine studies.
   Every brand team routinely conducts attitude and usage studies in much the same way that they have been done for 50 years.  With online research, it is now easy to add a timing mechanism in that allows you to determine what is driving the blink response for every brand in the category.  Pre-tested and post-tested communications that is checked for the blink response is much more effective in the current, ubiquitous, media marketplace.  In each case, you will get a “wow” response from your brand team by providing new meaning to what might have formerly been perceived as a routine results presentation.
2. Build a bridge for your brand team with traditional measures.
   Most concerns about measures of blink response relate to an understanding of what brand teams can expect to get from the information.  They already have an expectation for what they will receive from traditional, cognitive measures.  And, they already have a database history of results to gauge best practices.  Include the traditional measures with the blink response measures.  The comparison and contrast will lead to insights that you would not receive from use of the cognitive results alone.
3. Follow some critical steps for change management.
   Most frequently, it is the person responsible for consumer insights that is most interested in adding blink response measures.  Their bigger challenge is getting acceptance of these measures among their brand team.  To make this process change happen:
   1. Break down the measures involved into simple metaphors (e.g. direction; acceleration; etc).
   2. Start with simple applications. The routine study step represents a low-risk trial approach.
   3. Communicate early, communicate often. Ensure that expectations are set and met with key decision-makers.

In the short time it took to write this blog, your market has blinked many times.  Are you blinking with them?

At first glance, the main requirement cited seemed to be a centralized dashboard by which mobile efforts could be measured, given an ROI currency much like what they have on the web.

It’s an ironic conversation if you think about it. Certainly, the digital web is establish itself a myriad of different currencies that help around ROI, ad campaigns, branded sites and even exposure to interactive elements.

However, in my opinion, it might be comparing apples to oranges. While the web and mobile certainly share some overlap in how they interact with consumers, the disparities between the two, and the vehicles that they use that are often mutually exclusive to each other.

A common assertion, one even mentioned at this particular roundtable, is that in order to convince people to spend on mobile, one must be able to measure the outcome – preferably in one place such as a dashboard or common reporting mechanism.
While there is no panacea that will allow brands and media outlets to measure their mobile efforts whatever they may be; branded app, ad campaign, SMS marketing, one thing is clear – solutions have been, and are in place to facilitate the types of measurement being demanded.

Within the thread of discussion at the roundtable, it was apparent that those in attendance had the desire for a unified ‘all in one place’ dashboard approach to measuring mobile success. While I applaud the desire to have clear and concise information that spans across as many mediums as possible, it may not be entirely possible to “mix measures” between mobile mediums such as apps, mobile ad campaigns, or other branded efforts, especially when you consider that in many cases you’re measuring different types of movement along the consumer axes of perception, desire, and intent.

Someone at the roundtable was wise to point out; defining engagement depends on the goals of the campaign. For instance, an ad campaign on a mobile device might have the goal of driving site traffic, disseminating information about a new product or service, or perhaps its goal is to drive adoption of another mobile vehicle, such as a mobile application.

In some cases, one mobile action drives another, in the example given where a consumer’s exposed to an ad campaign, and that campaign is for branded app, and the branded apps purpose is to drive interaction with the brand, improve or increase positive perception of the brand, then the line becomes blurry when trying to measure the effectiveness of either: you might be able to get at the ad campaigns success at driving adoption of the app, you might even be able to get at the app’s success at improving consumer perception of the brand, but how do you chain the two together?

Here at MSW, we spent a lot of time thought and effort into exactly how mobile can be measured most effectively, and across the widest array of mobile efforts.  By carefully isolating exactly what measurements of success constitute a positive return on investment within a brands mobile effort, we can then begin the process of determining just exactly what to measure.

With apps, obviously engagement is King. If you build it, and they don’t come… fail. As anyone can tell you, that particular measurement of behavioral engagement with a mobile app, is simple to measures; unique downloaders, and sessions. Fortunately for the mobile device, unlike the digital web, in most cases there is a direct one-to-one relationship between a unique consumer, who only has the one mobile device that they’ve downloaded an app to, and the app itself.  On the digital web it’s true, perhaps you’re having a one-to-one conversation with the unique consumer, or perhaps you’re having a conversation with that consumer along several touch points be they home, work, and school computers, mobile web, or even tablets.

It’s an ironic conversation, like I said before. On one hand you have this great demand for measurement that fits across a wide variety of different mobile efforts and that you can compare to the measurements you use on the digital web – but on the other hand, the measurements you’re comparing it to is by far less stable, less accurate, and overall less capable.

So again for apps, going beyond engagement, one of our specialties is going deeper than ‘I downloaded an app’, ‘I used an app.’  Without discounting the importance of branded app adoption and usage, it really is just the tip of the iceberg.  It’s also where measurement itself starts to become a little bit more difficult, and perhaps tougher to get at with a consistent dashboard set of measures.

All apps are inherently slightly different than each other, and so while the goal of driving adoption might be consistent across all branded apps, what happens after that is highly specialized and specific to the end goals of the brand. It is for this reason, although not alone, that our particular measurement platform was designed to blend behavioral measurement with attitudinal measurements within the construct of a mobile app right from the very beginning.  Behavioral gets you those core critical measures; adoption and usage. It’s also very effective, when used properly from the beginning, and measuring feature level engagement – and this is very important.

It’s very easy for an app that has a moderate to high degree of consumer adoption and engagement to bear with it the illusion that the app in its entirety is enjoying high levels of engagement, when, what we have found more often than not, that this is not the case.

In our mobile research practice, it’s commonplace for us to instrument, that is to say, place measurement capabilities around distinct mobile app features down to a very granular level.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve gotten our share of push-back when we’ve suggested embedding the capability of understanding how long a consumer might spend in an area of the mobile app before engaging with the feature, perhaps this sounds too granular?

However, when you’re later able to compare ‘consumer idle time’ on a feature, which is a consumer time spent looking at a feature before deciding to actually use it, and you compare this across multiple features within your app, the value of this very granular level of feature engagement becomes more apparent.

Perhaps your behavioral data has done a good job of suggesting that perhaps one feature within a mobile app is more popular with users than another feature. So, now what?  Well, now you’re starting to get into the area of attitudes, and we become very good at combining insights we gather from behavioral data with attitudinal data we collect via surveys to quickly get a sense, a true holistic sense, of the perceived value a mobile app has with it consumers, and hence, its subsequent impact on brand perception, intent, and the like.

At the end of the day, engagement is a pretty common metric across most forms of mobile media. For ad impressions, you have the number of unique impressions served, you have click through’s, you have cumulative exposures, and these translate well over two mobile applications. Instead of impressions served, you have the notion of the unique user. Instead of click through’s, you have feature level engagement, in app drive to site, in app purchase, sessions, etc.

It’s a funny place that mobile is in today especially when it comes to brands. It’s not completely dissimilar from the wild west we saw of the digital web of 5 to 7 years ago. I remember my days at comScore, early, turbulent days where agencies tried to push brands and digital web spend, brands demanded ROI from their web efforts, but it was still just too early for them to both spend on the effort and also pay for the measurement.

Mobile is a lot like that today. Make no mistake, measurement capabilities and technologies abound. We are certainly not the only ones capable of understanding who downloads a mobile app who sees a mobile ad, who engages with the mobile app feature. Not to toot our own horn, but I will toot and say that we’re about as close to measuring the success of mobile efforts that brands happen to be making in a centralized place, that is to say, ‘here are your behavioral measures’, ‘here are your attitudinal measures’, ‘here’s how that relates to ROI’.

What’s funny is, I’m not entirely convinced that providing these ‘dashboards’ at this early stage, is such a great idea at all.

Consider this. If the digital web was akin to a football game, and you were looking at the scoreboard, you would understand the measures that were being presented to you. You know what down it was, you know who was in possession of the ball, you know how much time there was left in the game.  But what if you also need to know how the players involved felt emotionally at the time, how playing the game impacted their desire, altered their perceptions, what would your scoreboard look like then?

We are quick to offer any customer we work with the capability of looking at all of the data we generate from their mobile effort in its raw form, in aggregate form, however they like. That said, 90% of our engagements involve us translating the outcome for our clients. The data certainly isn’t undiscoverable, not by any means.  But it does have a particular set of nuances that emerge when you try to connect behavioral, location, attitudinal, it can get confusing fast.

Reading the ‘scoreboard’, if you will, requires little bit of what we refer to as “expert interpretation”, the digital mobile equivalent of Lewis and Clark, the ability to guide a client through veritable cornucopia of possible insights, interpretations, and results.

Another challenge that we face here at MSW, relates back to what I said about the early digital web. Brands know they need to engage in mobile, they see themselves being outpaced by other brands who adopt earlier, and they know they have to get involved. Meanwhile, agencies know this, and they try to get the brands involved, but they end up in situations where they end up pitching only the cost of developing the deliverable itself, not measuring the outcome.

It’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s not new, and it equates back the old saying about insanity being taking the same steps over and over again, expecting a different result. I might draw fire for the comment, but I’ll just go out and say it; if you’re not willing to invest to measure the outcome of your mobile efforts, whatever they may be, you may be best served to wait until such time that you are willing to make that investment. Yes, mobile is more expensive than the digital web, but it’s by far more intimate direct line of communication with the brands consumers than any other medium we’ve seen yet. It’s worth understanding how well you’ve done it, it’s also worth considering, that the measures of success in mobile may not align to those used in other mediums.

An app is not a webpage. A push message is not an SMS message, which is not a pop-up.

If you are successful in engaging the mobile consumer, you have been led in the front door. You can either step in, casually observing the area, making note of everything that happens, every reaction, every response. Or you can make an equally grand entrance with a blindfold on and ultimately, maybe both entrances are just as effective but in the case of the latter, you will unfortunately never know.

Prepare Yourselves for the Masses

Only 12% of consumers say they don't plan on shopping Black Friday

This years sales event will be heavily attended, with only 12% of consumers stating that the will not shop Black Friday sales.  With 63% indicating the plan to shop, another quarter of the consumer audience is still on the fence.  With the advertising onslaught only just begining, it will be interesting to watch what percentage of those undecided will step into the fray.

Men and women will take part nearly equally, with women who plan to shop edging out men by only a slight percentage.  The largest segment 80% of those venturing out have annual incomes of between 35 and 49 thousand, while those earning between 100 and 150 thousand a year represent the largest group (20%) planning to sit this one out.

Planning ahead is a wise move.

Consumer’s planning ahead are likely to have the best experience this year as crowds and lines are likely to be large and long.

Less than a quarter of those we surveyed plan to camp out, have a saved place in line or some other method of arriving at the store(s) they want to shop at.  46% say they’ll simply arrive as the store opens, while just over 30% say they’ll risk the possibility of sell outs by waiting until crowds thin out.

Many plan this year’s Black Friday to be the shopping day on which they intend to do most of the holiday shopping, with over half (56%) reporting that they’ll do 50-75% of their holiday shopping during the event.

This year, consumers are coming armed with smartphones, and the use of these devices is nearly certain to influence purchasing behaviors.  Nearly 100% of those surveyed said they would use their smartphones on Black Friday, with 30% stating that comparison shopping using the device would be their number one behavior.   Another 20% say they’ll redeem coupons with their smartphone, a trend that is increasing gradually as brands adopt the powerful method of delivery, but coming in a surprising third, 17% say they predict they’ll use their device to scan QR codes on Black Friday.

So, what will consumers be purchasing at these popular sales?   Popular gifts for kids, such as video games or consoles, tops the list for Black Friday consumers, followed in close order by clothing, computing electronics and video.

High ticket and returnable items are high on shoppers Black Friday wishlists.

Polling over 400 consumers, we asked how many had watched some form of video on their smartphones in the last month. Responding by type of video watched, 97% of those surveyed watched at some kind of video content.

That isn’t too surprising.  91% of those surveyed find watching video on a smartphone enjoyable, with another 94% calling the act ‘convenient’, and 87% finding the activity ‘easy’.

But, when asked about ‘most preferred method of viewing’ specific types of video content, things got very interesting.

For instance, despite enjoying viral success  that originated on the ‘desktop/laptop internet’, 52% of consumers who watch video content on YouTube now prefer to use their smartphones to view the content.

It doesn’t stop there.  The fact is mobile consumers we surveyed called the smartphone the preferred method of viewing versus desktop & laptop for every type of video content, besides television and movies.

This sort of makes sense, don’t you think?  The fact that consumers prefer to watch movies and TV shows on the desktop or laptop might lie in the fact that the content itself requires longer to consume, and the small screens of most smartphones are very likely a big factor as well.

Helping underscore this theory is the finding that desktops and laptops aren’t the only viewing modes taking a hit from the smartphone; television is losing the news audience to smartphone viewers too.

As our study reflects, the percentage of viewers who now prefer watching news on a smartphone is in even greater proportions versus television,  than those who prefer to watch on desktop or laptops.

Overall, the smartphone seems to be taking on viewers any time the content doesn’t rely heavily on large screens and/or high quality for proper enjoyment.

TV still reigns supreme in the areas of TV Shows, Movies, Sports and even commercials.

As for desktops and laptops?

My prediction is that where smartphones haven’t already surpassed them as the preferred video viewing platform, increasing ownership of tablets and more new & lower cost tablets on the horizon will probably signal a near complete displacement of viewership.

Those same respondents believe that 2012 will also signal a marked decrease in their use of a desktop computer.

Interestingly enough, it appears that the iPhone, aside from displacing more ‘traditional’ digital device usage, is also displacing other Apple devices, such as the iTouch, which perhaps becomes a bit redundant after the purchase of either the iPhone or the iPad.

As we approach the holiday season, it will be interesting to watch how the release of iPhone 5 and overall evolution in the smartphone marketplace continue to erode at traditional computer usage.

Here’s a visual look at the data.

Of similar interest is the high percentage of those surveyed, over 30% who intend to begin using an iPad, and over 10% who intend on using some form of tablet. While this doesn’t speak directly to purchase intent, it seems logical that by means of purchase, gifts, or other means, these devices will fall into the hands of a lot of people. Conversely, laptops, desktops and netbooks ranked low on the lists for the upcoming year, and I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t also the harbinger of lower sales for this class of computing device.

With the holiday season right around the corner,  will 2012 be the year of the tablet?  The death of the desktop? Stay tuned for more on this story over the next few months!

Brands might be looking at PUSH messaging as the holy grail of consumer CRM & dialoging, but it begs the question; how much push is too much?  Smartphone consumers find value in getting messages from brands that know just the right way of reaching them with valuable news, information or offers, but is there a secret formula?  How and when is the line between dialog & disruption crossed, and how can brand marketers both capitalize on this powerful mobile medium without risking alienation or worse, driving their target market into the arms of a more ‘relationship friendly’ brand?

It’s a slippery slope, to be sure.  Consumers have new and broad abilities to be discriminating in the PUSH channel that differ from most other mediums.  In television, for instance, a consumer can now push a button to zip past a commercial, or even all commercials in a television program.  They must, however, do this for each and every commercial they wish to skip, their remotes lacking any button that says ‘skip all commercials’ nor any button reading ‘skip all car commercials’.

The PUSH channel, by way of comparison, is precisely the opposite.  Not only can a consumer selectively turn the messaging medium on or off at will, they may also do this app to app, allowing one app to PUSH while preventing it from another.

To dig into the mindsets of consumers relating to PUSH, once again we’ve invoked the power of our mighty SurveyApp panel to get at some attitudes and opinions related to the PUSH messaging medium.

Surveying broadly across iPhone & Android users, overall, the news is good. People like PUSH, and very few of them (10%) have a ‘block all’ mentality where they refuse any PUSH messaging to occur.

Of those roughly ten percent that have determined that no PUSH message is a good message, those responding seem to

find it disruptive, invasive or annoying. Other reasons cited were

data consumption, lack of ability to control the messaging and cost.

The broad majority of people not only allow PUSH, but they are actually ok with moderate to high frequency of the messages.  Nearly 45% of those surveyed said that 2 to 3 messages a week were ok, with another 40% reporting that even 4 or more was just fine.

This notwithstanding, there is clearly a cap to how many messages are too many. What exactly that cap is, however, is a moving target, fluctuating broadly between the type of message, the reason for the message and the type of app sending it.  Spamming a consumer with product info, for example, will be far less tolerated than a message related to a game or social app. In other words, the purpose and context behind the message dramatically impacts the level of tolerance of the receiver.

But it begs the question, when that line is crossed, when you’ve simply sent a consumer too many messages, then what?  With email, you’ll get blocked or tossed into junk mail.  With television, you’ll get skipped over, direct mail – trash can.  In mobile it’s a little unnerving to realize; far worse might happen as backlash for PUSH spam.

The penalties for crossing the boundaries of ‘just enough’ and ‘too much’ can be severe.  When apps send PUSH messages too frequently, over 40% of consumers will disable the apps ability to send them, 13% will delete the app entirely, but a whopping 40% will do something to a brand I personally believe to be a fate far worse than ‘death’, they’ll ignore the brand message altogether, perhaps indefinitely.

Think about it. It’s the mobile app equivalent of being put on hold – indefinitely.  Your attempts to rekindle or cultivate the consumer relationship are futile because they haven’t removed you, they’ve just screened you out, leaving you unable to act.

In the end, I think this is worse, because if you know you don’t have a dialog with a consumer, you simply endeavor & take the steps to establish one. If you have, however,  no idea that your dialog is simply being disregarded, well, you’re maybe falsely raising the flag of triumph for consumer conversations you aren’t actually having yet, so you won’t make the effort to establish a conversation with them – you’ll think it already exists.

Worse still are the minority, but still very serious phenomena of those consumers who will badly rate or review an app they feel is going overboard with PUSH.  Of those, at least some say they’ll use a social channel such as Facebook or Twitter to gripe and the results of that could range from minor to catastrophic, depending on how many people are listening on the complaining consumers channel(s).

We also found out that less than 20% of those we surveyed claimed that opening or closing the PUSH door on an app was a one way street that they would never reconsider.  We asked our panelists if they had ever gone back and changed the PUSH settings of an app after the fact, and 40% of those who responded said that they had both enabled PUSH in an app where they’d previously refused it, and disabled PUSH in an app where they had once allowed the messages to come through.

So the door on PUSH can swing both ways.  Gain the trust of a consumer and even if they have previously said ‘no’ to your messaging, if they get the sense that there is value, they’ll turn it on.  Cross ‘the line’, whatever that might be, with them and they are just as apt to turn it off.  In fact, the data suggests that by a slim margin, about 6%,they are more apt to turn it off than on.

As obvious as it might seem to some, one thing is clear about PUSH.  You have to earn right to PUSH to consumers, and for those who allow you to use this intimate and direct channel, value momentum must exist to keep that right.   When asked what it is about a PUSH message that makes it worthwhile to a consumer to receive, value propositions are the ruling party.

By asking our audience ‘which things can a brand offer as value to get PUSH permissions’, the top five drivers are:

1. Special Offers
2. Coupons
3. Sales
4. VIP Offers
5. ‘Member’s Only’ Offers

Of those, the majority claimed that coupon type offers would be enough of a driver for them to allow an app to message them, however just making mention of sales or promotions alone didn’t seem to be enough of an enticement to warm them up to the idea.

A few things are becoming increasingly clear.  PUSH is, essentially, a one way dialog, but it doesn’t have to be.  Sure, you PUSH the message and it shows up with no real idea if the consumer saw it, but there are plenty of ways to tie that message to a response mechanism that can close the loop on the medium, establishing a clear lock on the number of folks who ‘did something’ in response to your push.  This is essential in measuring not only the success of a brands efforts that utilize PUSH, but also instrumental in helping define the limits that consumers are willing to endure.

With the data we’re seeing, it’s apparent that measuring the impact of PUSH is critical to not only measuring success, but also avoiding potential negative impact on the brand.

It’s also very clear that PUSH, while a powerful tool at keeping an open dialog to your consumers, simply must have some intrinsic value behind the message, one that trades well for the attention the consumer is granting you.

Ultimately, respecting the fact that the keyword here is ‘granting’ is probably the central insight to take away.  The mobile PUSH channel is a direct link to the consumer to be sure, but it is also their channel, under their control.  Consumer’s seem fairly forgiving in opening up the channel when the right value proposition is in place, but clearly, the data also shows that they will slam that door shut if they don’t like the knock.