WAIT, WHAT?!
I laughed.
When Facebook first commented on the small number of Americans who saw the Russian prompted ads at 10 million, I laughed.
I laughed again last week when Facebook upped the number of Americans who saw the ads to 126 million.
Today, Facebook testified on Capitol Hill that the number is now 150 million.
Still laughing.
Facebook, Google and Twitter are compromised. And there is a reason....a lack of seasoned media professionals.
When Facebook first announced10 Million Americans saw the ads and the dollars they took to run them i held back.
Wait, What?!
The numbers simply did not add up and any traditional media pro could have figured that out.
When Facebook upped the number to 126 million and reasoned that it was a small insignificant number I paused and laughed some more. So .... Facebook is telling its advertisers that the millions reached was not a big deal and are taking money from clients to sell insignifigant performance.
Who's crazy here?
It's just the tip of the iceberg and numbers will rise yet again. It will not end well.

Note to Facebook. Google and Twitter .... get off your high horse and hire some seasoned traditional media pros who know the business of reach and math. You simply do not have the chops nor the required foundations to go it alone.

A NEW CUP

I can't recall the last time I caught a Starbucks commercial but am not surprised I missed this one as it aired in the UK earlier in the year.  It's worth one minute of your time.  Thanks to Jack Dorsey for bringing it to my attention via Twitter @Jack.

IS IT TOO LATE?

Have we gone too far to trust the house of cards in whose hands we place our private lives?
Yesterday I was given to understand that banks are now scanning Facebook pages to qualify you for a loan. If they sense your activities through postings, comments and photos are questionable as a loan risk, you just might not get that loan or a great rate.

It is now standard practice for HR departments to do the same when applying for a job.

Unfortunately, what happens online stays online … forever. Online actions have consequences that can haunt from cradle to grave and beyond. The need to connect and share with “friends” is often so intense that it’s easy (especially for younger generations) to lose sight of what can become devastating consequences.

Cyber bullying has become all too common thanks to the Internet flaming and spreading hurtful posts faster than they can be stopped. The trend needs to be arrested before more kids follow in the footsteps of those we already lost.

The social networks have a responsibility to protect their user base on many levels. It’s unfortunate that the business of collecting our data (most often in circumventing ways) completely overshadows the need to protect us. Week after week we read that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Verizon and others have overstepped privacy concerns in an effort to track our online movements and locations.

It will not stop. Data of every size, shape and form has become the currency of choice for all online services. The stakes are too high. Witness the current explosion of Big Data and Cloud computing companies chased by VCs like it was during the pre-bubble days. VCs are tripping over themselves to share the spoils.

In 1984, Big Brother was too far off to be a concern. Today, what we read in 1984 was child’s play.

LIKE IT OR NOT ...

Obfuscate: To darken, To make obscure. To be evasive, unclear or confusing. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.

Guilty: Facebook, Twitter and Google.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street journal into the use of "LIKE" buttons and widgets placed on thousands of major sites, signaled yet another serious breach of ethics that will surely have the privacy police up in arms.

It appears these buttons capture a user's visit to the site and feeds it back to the originator. The kicker is that you need not click on the button. Your visit is automatically logged by the likes of Facebook.

Their explanations obfuscate. Do we really believe when they tell us they don't use the data? If so, why are the visits tracked in the first place.

Their real response should be .... We know you're too stupid to understand what we do and we don't want to tell you why we're doing it but we're going to do it anyway.

Gotcha!

Read the story here.

TWITTER TWITCHES

At yesterday's South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin, attendees were expecting Twitter's keynote to unveil a new advertising platform. WRONG!

Instead, they skirted around a new feature dubbed @Anywhere. Details were very fuzzy and some likened it to Facebook Connect.

The press hammered the keynote as attendees made a beeline for the exit doors:

"Likely the most horrifically devastating keynote in SXSW history" (Fast Company)

Maya Baratz, manager at MTV, tweeted: "There are hundreds of people in the room. Someone. Anyone. Kanye this keynote and ask Evan a good question."

GIGOM: Twitter fails to live up to SXSW hype."

Twitter has been groping for a business model that will sustain the company as they begin to slow their growth and field questions on the value of a smaller-than-expected base of frequent users.

Frankly, they had their opportunity to execute on an exit strategy last year and blew it. The contagious YAWN at SXSW will not sit well with their benefactors as they watch their investment sour.

FACEBOOK VS. TWITTER

As Google forges ahead to rule the world of information (and then some), they are nonetheless true pioneers of the 21st century.

If you haven't come across Google Suggest, it is a feature that you may want to play with. The following is a lift from Digital Inspiration:

As you type words in the Google search box, it will try to guess what you are looking for and offer suggestions in real-time.

While we don’t know how exactly Google Suggest works, it does offer a peek into what others are asking or looking for on the web.

For instance, type “how to” in the Google search box and you’ll instantly know that loads of people are looking for information to “how to tie a tie” and “how to lose weight fast”. Google Suggest can also help you understand what others think of a particular product or service. Try the phrase “facebook is” in the search box and you’ll know what people generally think of Facebook.

Google offers search suggestions in a plain drop-down but if you are looking to compare Google Suggest results in a more visual manner, check out Web Seer – this again works as-you-type but the interesting part is that with Web Seer, you can also compare query suggestions for two different phrases.

Is there a way to visualize people's innermost thoughts? Google Suggest lets you see what others are asking when they search the web. From the existential to the mundane, the questions form a portrait of human curiosity.

Here’s an example comparing Facebook and Twitter. Lot of people seem to agree on one these – these networks are a “waste of time.”

Click on the chart to enlarge

The arrow thickness in the visualization is an indicator of the number of web pages that are in Google’s index for that query.

SORRELL'S PREDICTIONS

The number of high ranking executives at the holding company level, willing to step outside the comfort of their well furnished offices to "tell it like it is" are few and far between.

Except for Martin Sorrell.

At a recent UBS Media Week Conference, Sorrell covered topics that ranged from short-sighted media price guarantees (in a volatile market) to digital media and global emerging markets.

Espousing the danger of taking comfort in a 25 percent decline in revenues he suggested those companies would be out of business in three years. Citing a forecast of a 1 percent global expansion in spending and pointing to Interpublic's forecast of 6 percent growth as "rogue", he suggested the economic climate is "more, less worse".

Turning to the digital landscape as "the driver for growth", Sorrell does not believe firms like Google can sustain long term traction as an advertising company and that the phenomenon of Facebook and Twitter will be short-lived, replaced by the next new social trend.

Sorrell's crystal ball is not that far off.

Price guarantees in this (or any other) economy by ad agencies for media time/space is at best insane. CPMs in the broadcast market have gone up while digital auctions through the on-demand platforms are commanding premiums for hyper-targeted impressions. Betting on media futures is not a good thing.

Twitter recently experienced a drop of 3 million users and activity among current users is declining. Facebook is still bleeding and MySpace is slowly withering away. The social networks have yet to discover the value of audience data applied to the millions of eyeballs they generate. I would venture that applications developed for the Twitter platform are making more money than Twitter ever will.

Reading what is in the cards today, right or wrong, however, will quickly be forgotten in anticipation of the early signs of a modest recovery.

A BITTER TWEET

The latest influx of funds for Twitter has now vaulted the value of the company by Wall Street analysts to $1 Billion. One hundred million in new funds flowed into the company from investor groups including T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners, buying the company "more time to figure out its business model". Ha! Will Wall Street ever learn?

Insanity driven by greed.

And we are now beginning to realize how quickly this platform is losing its luster.

This from a celebrity supermodel who twittered her fan base several times an hour...."sorry twitter but this is my very last tweet ... we had some good times and bad but now our relationship is over ... " Sessilee Lopez.

Tweet that!

I'M AGAINST IT !

Lately, some of my readers suggested that I often take a contrarian position on new developments in the ad business. I accept those observations as generally true with a need to explain why.

Our industry is hurtling forward at breakneck speed trying to desperately keep up with the technology that precedes it. Since the explosive growth of the Internet in the late nineties, the bubble that burst in 2001 and the rise of the venture capitalists out of the ashes, the movers and shakers of our industry are at it again.

I smell a land grab of sorts. MySpace, Facebook and, God forgive us, Twitter all attempting to make something out of nothing more than a conversation. None of them have yet to yield a return to their investors.... not a penny!

Ad exchanges and ad networks are popping up like ducks in a shooting gallery ... most of them simply replicating one another, offering identical inventory that has been dumped into them by publishers.

Skeptical? Yes. Let's set the record straight. Many of these ideas are very bad ideas and will lose money and jobs as we have recently witnessed by MySpace and soon, AOL.

It's the skeptic in me that keeps my strategic focus on the reality and business of our business in tow. It also often keeps clients that will listen and learn from making dreadful mistakes.

There are many advances in our business that make both traditional and digital media exciting, productive and return valuable insights and actionable results.

And while I am skeptical of many new "toys", I am also playing with them to see if I can keep from breaking them.

So thanks for the feedback. The video that closes this posting was found on Bob Hoffman's great blog, The Ad Contrarian. Bob is the CEO of Hoffman/Lewis in San Francisco and St. Louis.

TWITTER'S OUTAGE: A WELCOME BREAK?

Did you hear? Do you care?

The ubiquitous Twitter suffered a denial of service attack that closed the network down for about five hours today.

While not an altogether uncommon occurrence, these attacks simply point out the vulnerability of networks that have grown too quickly to adequately manage security issues.

Trust is perhaps one of the most paramount issues facing Internet users today. This kind of security gap is inexcusable ... for Twitter, for any financial institution or those sites and networks we trust our personal information to.

Be mindful that the Internet will never be as secure as we would like it to be.

The poll that follows is an attempt to understand how you feel about the outage ....

TWITTER .... A DOOMED INVENTION?

Twitter. What is it and what can it become?

The speed at which the communications business is accelerating has us all playing catch up. New platforms and applications developed around them have us all scrambling to understand the new landscape to stay on top of what's "cool".

The iPhone is perhaps the best example of a communications device built on an open platform that has generated an industry onto itself, blossoming with tens of thousands of apps and billions of downloads.

Then there's Twitter. The great disruptor. An invention of our time that will likely join the ranks of failed inventions.

Why?

As a communications channel, Twitter is a one trick pony. Handily, it can broadcast a simple message to a closed loop of followers. In doing so several applications can track the noise or "buzz" on any subject and quickly update the masses on what's "hot".... that is of course if you care to stay glued to a computer screen or mobile app all day long.

A few days ago, TechCrunch released notes on internal documents it somehow secured from Twitter. The documents revealed the musings of a group so heavily invested in the bloated success of the platform that it could provide comic fodder for Saturday Night Live.

For the moment Twitter is a fun toy ... soon, I'm afraid, to be cast aside like many of the others. Follow this link to a test on failed inventions for a bit of comic relief.

GOT iPHONE? GOT TWITTER?

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are a Twitter user, get yourself over to TweetMic. It’s an application that allows you to record a tweet with no limits on recording time. The app effectively eliminates the frustrating 140 character limit on a Twitter posting.

The app works flawlessly with a high quality recording and playback. A list of features from their home page follows:

• Incredibly simple and intuitive interface
• Quickly record audio and publish to Twitter
• Review your recordings before publishing
• Easily overwrite old recordings by hitting "record" again
• Create unique and engaging Tweetcasts in no time
• Ultra high recording sound quality
• Unlimited recording time
• Uses your existing Twitter account, no additional signup
• Navigate and listen to your published audio tweets
• Your tweets stay live unless you delete them
• Easy management of your audio tweets at tweetmic.com

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING ??

At the heels of the MySpace announcement that they are cutting 30 percent of their staff to accommodate a more efficient view of the site's future and to bring staffing in line with its Facebook rival, I had to sit back and think .... WTF!?

Where was Rupert? Has he been that distanced from the business of running a business that the oversight of News Corp's major investment ran away with itself?

To suggest, as Jon Miller, the new Digital Officer for News Corp does that their labor pool was "too big considering the realities of today's marketplace" is nothing short of a lame excuse for his predecessor's lack of vision and a complete misread of the fickle markets that make up their user base.

Blame Rupert. By contrast, Miller is a brilliant strategist supported by his turnaround of AOL.

It will be tough sledding, if not impossible, for Miller and the new CEO, Owen Van Natta (39) as they learn to scale the business to meet the falling demand for their network.

And as MySpace fortunes decline, a reciprocal increase in users for Facebook and Twitter take the stage,front and center. Never mind that neither has come up with a business model that turns a profit. They will continue to pile on the users until they become so top heavy with unchecked expenses and debt that the cash burn will ignite the house that Facebook and Twitter built.

These social networks, built in an instant, are the "course du jour" .... until the kids in the garage down the street launch yet another version of the same game by any other name.

CONNECTIONS

Early this afternoon, one of the staffers at Agency Spy, a member of the MediaBistro empire, Twittered to ask about a recent Chivas commercial. His interest was the background music in the spot.

The music was “driving him crazy”…. He couldn’t recall where he heard it before.

This is where the artist, the album, the commercial, YouTube, an Apple iPhone App, Grooveshark (a free music sight) and Twitter all came together in a few short minutes to make our friend at Agency Spy a bit less crazed.

It’s a classic example of how ordered digital forensics can make a difference.

1-Search YouTube for “Chivas Commercial” and rank by date.

2-Play the clip and confirm it’s the right commercial

3-Use the iPhone Shazam application which “listens” to the song and plays back its title, artist and, in some cases lyrics, with a link to iTunes for potential purchase. Granted, I did hunt for a few seconds in the commercial with no voice-over to capture the music.

4-Jump to Grooveshark (www.grooveshark.com), search for the album and pick the music track that matches the commercial. While on the site, you can also create a widget that can be embedded in a blog.

5-Capture the URL link to the music and forward back to Agency Spy on Twitter.

Bliss

Here’s the widget with the soundtrack … sometimes it all comes together neatly, with potential for monetization and data capture along the way.