Using Pay-For-Performance To Retain Customers
Why is it you only hear about pay per performance (PPP) when it comes to online advertising and customer acquisition? This concept grew out of the online advertising world. In the past you'd just spend and hope your ad units drove customer sales. It was all about the big idea and reach. We've since evolved into a world of performance models in acquisition. We pay for clicks, we pay for impressions, we pay for leads and we pay for conversions. We do it in search, we do it with email, we do it with media and exchanges, yet that models stops once you get that first purchase.
Why can't we apply the same principles of performance marketing to retention marketing? Why is it that you spend so much to acquire a customer, but you still have half of your customer file of non-buying customers, dormant customers or non-responsive customers?
The principles of performance marketing don't lie. You should have some control over reach and governance over the amount of exposure to your audience. You should have a solid method of reconciliation and attribution (who really gets credit for a sale?). You should have the technical, creative and strategic means to optimize, test, learn and re-optimize without fatiguing your audience. You want empirical evidence that something drove a sale or behavior and are willing to pay for it.
Are open rates important? Why wouldn't you think in terms of eCPM? This calculation has gained tracking in the advertising world for years to provide a better performance metric that aligns to financial and reach goals. (Total Earnings/Impressions X 1000 = eCPM).
In my experience over the years, I haven't found one client or partner that has it all together to run programs like this for non-acquisition programs. I believe the market will dictate that change. But what stops most from attempting it?
Sensitivity to Control. There is sensitivity to the perception of losing control in retention marketing. CRM is about knowing the customer and optimizing the experience. A performance model could potentially introduce a less controlled experience that may not be aligned with customer loyalty goals. I also blame this issue on the vendor landscape. There are too many grey areas to acquisition and PPP models, and many traditional marketers don't trust this model with their most valuable customers. But PPP doesn't mean you have to lose control over offers, discounting, promotions and cadence.
Pay-Out Model. You'd think it would be simple. You drive incremental business and you pay a %. But retention marketing budgets work differently and they aren't as variable and fluid as acquisition, media and search budgets when it comes to performance and pay-outs.
Lack of good attribution. If you don't trust or have clear insight into what drove the sale, you'll never run a PPP program. Most companies lack the reporting, the science behind attribution and the discipline to run a program like this. In the online advertising and search space, the heavy lifting of pay-outs relies on the vendor. If you don't report and reconcile, you don't get paid. If you think you do it now, try it out for a few months. Hold back your employees' paychecks if they don't perform, and I bet the reporting will become far more detailed and accurate.
Little appetite for risk. PPP is a risk-to-reward model. It requires some calculated risk and a bit of trust in your partners. You can't expect to run these programs alone. You shouldn't try to absorb all the risk. Many don't have the infrastructure or capabilities to run these models alone, nor should they try.
No Bandwidth. That's the excuse for not getting it done, but really that translates to mean you just haven't prioritized PPP or don't trust that it will drive the highest results. But in the age when customer attrition is over 35% a year, you'd better find a way to get more out of your spend. You can't rely on commoditized CPM costs to increase your capabilities.
PPP isn't an easy type of program to negotiate with your agencies and partners. But it's something you should begin to discuss in your planning; you should find ways to weave it into your strategy and budgets. Just as you should be thinking about it from a marketer perspective, your agencies and partners should be thinking of creative ways to model PPP to future budgets.
"There is no such thing as coulda, woulda and shoulda. If you shoulda and coulda, you woulda done it." -- Pat Riley (Basketball Coach)
Summit: Maybe Less Focus On Social Topics? More Case Studies?
Trying to figure out what to do with social media strategy as it relates to CRM still seems to be an exercise in guesswork. One of the panels attempted to focus on the type of data that the social world produces: number of fans, number of connections, feedback, comments; essentially social graph data.
The first audience response was "Oh my gosh, businesses really can see all these things I post online?" -- followed by "What do I do with this data?" There was a lot of discussion about what the larger data aggregators (Experian, Acxiom etc.) were doing with social data and how companies were accessing this data. But there was very little substance about pure integrated social campaigns, innovative technologies or how companies are using this data for targeting, segmentation and intelligent marketing.
While the common response to various social media campaigns presented in roundtable settings was "cool!" I could see that most were curious, yet still had a hard time seeing where it fit into their business world. Social marketing is something we'll all have to embrace over the next few years as it gets ingrained into how we build Web and consumer experiences. Many retention marketers struggle with how to measure influence and how their marketing activities integrate with social. But there's no mistaking it, this is a subject that will be so core to marketing in the coming years that email marketers can't afford to get behind the game. One marketer said, and I had heard this quote some time ago, "Social marketing is like sex as a teenager! You get really excited about it, you talk about it a lot, but you're not very good at it."
We offered a few other topics that were very consumer-focused to help round out the Summit, with panels from Microsoft on the Hotmail inbox, as well as a stellar presentation by Loyalty Labs on consumer loyalty programs.
One of the big winners was the "Building an Email Database" roundtable run by Mike Fitzgerald of AdKnowledge. While there was a lot of talk about acquisition, there were heated discussions on the value of email append services. I was a bit surprised at some of the conservative comments from acquisition-oriented companies, but it netted out that email append is alive and well. Most of the larger brands do it persistently as a list hygiene process, and you shouldn't discount it when applied properly.
What was missing from this summit, I thought, was discussion of pure deliverability, and more case studies. The feedback was clear: People wanted to hear about deliverability, more about privacy and essentially "what are the challenges getting into the inbox." We've deviated from this technical and tactical view of deliverability in the past, giving way to more topical discussion around trends, but you could tell there was a void. As programming chair, I will definitely work to ensure we integrate deliverability back into the main stage sessions in April.
This event is always a mix of service providers and industry people, along with representatives from consumer and B2B brands. As is common with brand marketers, they clamor for case studies and examples of what others have done. Personally, I find these contextually irrelevant in many cases, unless you find that pearl of a study with a great presenter. But there is no denying that the audience wanted more "meat" on these topics. You can never get away from the value of case studies and the intimacy of program details that usually comes forth.
So, the next summit will definitely feature a blend of case work and foundational topics (deliverability). Too, I bet by then we'll find some great examples of Social CRM.
If you have great ideas for topics, case studies or great speakers for the April Email Insider Summit, shoot me a note (david.baker@razorfish.com). I'm always a sucker for great content, creative speakers and topics that are "out there."
Live From The Email Insider Summit
This event has gradually changed its format and we've tried to infuse other digital elements that impact our channel. We try to explore deeper views into consumer behaviors, and of course include great marketing activities that we can learn from. The Summit is different from some other industry events because it doesn't focus heavily on deliverability and privacy, which some argue are the critical elements of the email channel. Our focus has evolved at the request of the participants and advisory boards. The jewels of the meeting are the roundtables and networking events. This is the place for specific discussions about the practice of email marketing.
I anticipate hot discussions on several topics:
Consumers and their behaviors: we have the Microsoft Live team, who will share recent research on what consumers are doing in their inboxes. Who's talking about travel, dating, financial matters? How effective are marketing-related emails in Hotmail?
We'll extend this discussion with a great panel on social data, learning how to take advantage of the behavioral data available, what the privacy implications are and how marketers are making this actionable.
We have also put together a consumer panel. While in the past we've hosted college students and digital moms to better understand their perceptions and use of email, we've targeted a different group of consumers for this event. We felt there was a finite shift in behavior that happens when someone graduates from college and enters the workforce. As such, we've recruited recent college grads who have done so, to better understand the shifts in their use of email and social when they enter a professional environment and have more disposable income.
The event will feature great speakers on loyalty marketing, creative optimization, mobile marketing, managing multichannel programs, and cross-channel measurement.
What's In Your Inbox Today?
The NRF reported that 49.4% of shoppers went to department stores during the weekend, a 13 % increase from 2008, while 43.2 % went to discount stores and 7.8% headed to outlet stores. Specialty electronic, clothing and grocery stores were also counted among the popular shopping destinations, while NRF noted that 28.5% of shoppers hit Web sites.
ComScore reported an 11% rise in online sales to $595 million on Black Friday, compared to 2008. While Black Friday is typically known for the brick and mortar push -- get up at 5 a.m. and hit Target or Macy's for great sales -- it was also a day for amazing online sales, marking the second highest online sales day of the holiday season.
All of this bodes well for retailers Check your inbox this morning and see what Cyber Monday delivered to you: likely one of the highest volume email days of the year. As a marketer, do you have a chance amidst all the noise of the inbox today?
Amazingly, with the everyone going to back to work after the long weekend, and the rapid growth of the mobile device and smart phone in the workplace, we are able to process more email, sifting through our personal email in a multitasking manner. You can do true triage on your mobile, focus on the laptop and buy during your down time. Does this sound like you and those in your office?
As a practitioner, there are several things you can trend and watch for today, depending on how deep your monitoring program is:
- Watch the subject lines. This is a great time to evaluate "urgency"-driven tactics, which are most effective during heavy volume days.
- While I usually don't like to lead with discounts, this is the holiday known for discounting, so it's OK to lead with it. Look at the creativity in approaches to discounting and how it's communicated.
- Look at the social mentions. Everyone has a Twitter link, a Facebook link, so you should check out how some are proliferating discounts and promotions on those fan pages and sites.
- While many use free shipping as a means of triggering a buyer, is it really effective? Most are conditioned to free shipping online, so is it enough these days?
- Creative is amazingly simple on days like this: fewer Hero images, more PRICE TAG metaphors to easily communicate the point. Does this mean less targeting? Likely, yes!
- While Black Friday is brick and mortar, today's the day for the ONLINE ONLY sales. Try to assess how well companies targeted and communicated this to you. Simple vs. advanced approaches?
I love this time of year, not just as a marketing practitioner, but as a consumer who's aware of the tactics and approaches by marketers. I appreciate good marketing and creative approaches. And while I like discounts, I believe with so much email hitting our inboxes today, those marketers who provide quality marketing along with quality discounts and rewards will be rewarded. Email attribution will climb today..
How much will you buy today?
Next-Generation Email Marketers
We know several things really well in the email marketing space. It is a challenge to train and grow people into this role. Given the short tenure of an email marketing manager (two to three years), it's not surprising that this role is hard to staff and hard to retain; it's difficult to keep savvy marketers in that role. I've always considered it to be a burn-out job in some ways: rapid turnarounds, the constant pressure of deadlines, no forgiveness for mistakes; and a need for high ROI with minimal respect for what actually goes into managing the channel well.
Email is not the coolest channel in the marketing kit. It needs a PR agent. It's in every strategy in some form, but as I've said many times, email is managed in a vacuum in some respects. Since everyone has a personal mindset about email (we all get it and we all send it), it's often underappreciated, So, how do you motivate and grow an organization to be really good at it?
I wrote an article over a year ago on a similar thread, which I felt was important enough to revisit. But I don't want to write about how to staff the role or a tongue-in-cheek view of the role, but how you can support the growth of this role so it's not a burn-out.
Marketing organizations, write this down: Develop a career path for your email group, even if it's only made up of two people.
Don't expect them to immediately understand operational marketing, much less operational email marketing. There is a lot to learn, a lot to fail at, and it's difficult to think ahead when you are trying to QC 40 versions of an email and making sure all the links and typography match approved specs.
Making email a career path will force you to isolate the skills being acquired and put a premium on specialized and managerial skills. It also helps you recognize that by throwing someone into the pool, you won't develop a butterfly specialist, a backstroke specialist or even a good swim team.
In email there are several hierarchies to learning the trade (and I'm oversimplifying intentionally):
What goes into the email? (content formation),
How does it go out and did it get there?(delivery)
The List and who we should and are we sending to? (segmentation, communication strategy)
We sent it, now what did we really accomplish? (Measurement, Optimization)
What happens when we mix other channels? (Stacking Effect - direct mail, social, retail)
Career paths aren't just about the skills, they are about providing real paths so people can develop in an organization. Paths can have several different focuses: specialist roles that are technology- and operations-driven, market managers that aspire to be intimate with the business and market dynamics, channel experts that focus and integrate emerging channels. The choices are broader than you think, even if you have a small department.
Customer Segmentation
For email marketing, we love the term relevance, but is it really relevance we are striving for? What most people don’t realize in email marketing is segmentation is not about defining all your customers and how to treat them, it’s about helping you make decisions and doing so at a very granular level. If you are too high-level with your approach it is useless in day-to-day email marketing. If you are too granular in your definitions, you’ll struggle to get programs out the door. While you may have a very clear view of your highest valued customers, should you focus on those or should you work harder at gaining a more granular picture of the less valued, yet less defined segments.
I’ve seen great uses of various types of segmentation. I’ve seen demographic segments work really well for businesses that need baseline qualifiers to assess the degree of promotion, incentive and interaction with the brand, yet household income, age, gender, presence of kids, education and geo-targeting are only part of the way to this elusive stage of “relevance” we seek. Using approaches like Personicx and Prizm Clusters will help you in the targeting, they are less effective at helping you understand motivations, those beliefs that drive behaviors (frequency of visit, spend, and potential cross product interests). This approach can be amazingly expensive to keep updated, but again there are economies of scale if you set up your approach to data collection well in the first place.
Transactional based approaches are much more empirical in terms of identifying past purchase histories, and variables that influence increased purchase, purchase value and category base spend and predictors. Certain categories of business are no-brainers for this model, yet it becomes a really daunting task to manage your email programs with this approach without a very refined approach to modeling that continually updates itself. You can spend years trying to do predictive modeling and if your products turn over quickly or you have thousands of SKUs it can be impossible to manage iteratively outside of simple targeting or high/low transactional periods. While this approach is used in email most frequently for personalization and promotional strategies and is deemed “relevant”, unlike other marketing forms email marketers still have to deal with the entire database and it comes down to resources to execute against this consistently that makes it a challenge.
What about taking it a step further with behavioral data? It’s sometimes considered the same as RFM type approaches. A segment is generated based on some behavior; A purchase, An Interaction or Event. This is what the online space has been struggling with for years as the customer journey is so much more fragmented between the web, store, call center and outbound channels. Behavioral segmentation is an operations persons’ nightmare. But mainly due to lack of agreement on how targeting decisions are made in companies and a lack of understanding of the customer experience and even harder to execute at the channel level (who drove the sale?).
Attitudinal segmentation is the coolest form in my opinion, but also the hardest to operationalize. Now you know who your customers are and you know how to target them and you may even have some idea of the types of motivations that drive types of promotions, categories of interest and emotional drivers to purchase. The challenge with this approach is twofold. One, it’s expensive to commit to do this. I’ve seen many companies do this and it just sits there for the annual meeting. I’ve seen others try to operationalize this and didn’t have the commitment, funding, resources or technology to extend this past the Business Intelligence groups. It makes decisions that much harder and if you don’t have a clear understanding of the values your business or service delivers and competitive considerations it can be a fruitless cause done in a vacuum.
Great Thought Leadership Is ...
The nice thing about learning is that different people learn differently. Some learn through instructional series because they have the patience to follow things logically and in a linear fashion.
Some learn through exploration: trial and learn. They need ideas and thought starters, but thrive on testing these things and formulating their own ideas.
Some learn through mimicking and optimization. It's OK to copy someone's idea. We do it all the time in marketing, and it's the foundation of some of the most famous campaigns ever. Not all inspiration comes from a blank slate. Some people thrive on case studies that are contextual to their business, but have a unique ability to mimic programs in a way that makes them their own.
There are those who need several forms of information to develop. They need Webinars to hear problems laid out and how someone crafted a solution to the problem. They need stats to support their left-brain thinking or justification for change. They may need to see samples to support the right-brain approach that stimulates creative thinking.
Where should thought leadership support these styles?
The Email Insider columns that get the most feedback are those that are tactical and very simply articulated. How to do this? Tips for that? Case in point: Loren McDonald's article on gender personalization was very well-crafted to engage the reader -- and obviously, there are a few who see the poor assumptions marketers make with gender personalization. Lots of comments in the blog about this, and I believe it accomplished what the author intended. Bring a very basic subject, personalize it, and lay it out into a "shared" experience that elicits feedback.
There is too much to consume in so many venues to make sense of it all, so I'll leave you with a couple of tactical ideas for structuring thought leadership, using the channels to really evolve your thinking and ideas.
Compartmentalize your reading. Think carefully about what you subscribe to and scan with a purpose. If you are the type who needs case studies, there are many. If you need stats, there are more of those. If you need strategy or challenges to your approaches, scan them all, but pull out the ones that really help you learn. Compartmentalizing doesn't mean a topical listing (e.g. deliverability), it means assign meaning to the things that help you learn and spend time absorbing those and scanning the others.
Share what you learn. Most don't learn through memorization or reading. We learn through sharing what we've learned. If you forward articles with a note saying "this is a good read" without some written opinion about it, you've wasted an opportunity to recompartmentalize the information. If you've never taken an idea and challenged it in public or with your peers, you are missing the boat.
Archive good learning. I have research reports from 1999 and good articles from 1997. Great thoughts never go out of date, and a great archive is so valuable when you are thinking "transformation."
Lastly, thought leadership isn't something you do in a vacuum. It's also not reserved for those who have the luxury of a publishing venue. In 2000, we didn't have blogs to share opinion or develop our own. Not everyone has the time or energy to do this, but if you are truly trying to evolve yourself, you need an outlet to share and expand your view and gain confidence in your ideas. The best marketers I know have developed a knack for all these things and invest heavily in themselves.
Inspirations from the week
It was a great week of travels across the country. I felt like a pigeon. Fly in, drop a bit of inspiration and then fly out. I had the luxury of participating in several ESP user conferences this week. I take in as many sessions as I can, rarely staying for an entire session as there are so many topics I want to get bits and pieces from. It gives me great insight into where we are as an industry, what my fellow thought leaders are thinking and how we’re organizing these messages. It’s also a great time to catch up with the traveling band of “insiders” that tend to hit most events.
Here are a few inspirations from this week and a few ideas we hope to explore at the Email Insider Conference in December.
The Social Experiment – It’s not an experiment any longer. It has arrived. While some scoff at the value and return on social efforts, no one denies that it enhances a customer experience and businesses must address it. Every session that included the words “social strategies” was standing room only. At one conference there were over 400 people in the session, and there was no room to even sit on the floor. It was the same at OMMA. While people are becoming bored with the concept of creating a Facebook fan page, more of the discussion is shifting to connecting experiences across channels and how social relationship marketing is evolving.
People are questioning measurement and how to take very unstructured feedback data (the new buzz word is “sentiment analysis”) and new forms of behavioral data and apply it within their marketing approaches. It doesn’t always fit. While no one can really tell you how many Fans is enough, they are beginning to address the reach and quantity of feedback in general market research terms. Does it represent a proper sampling to project across a subset of my market?
I’m so excited about this movement related to social marketing. It’s not just the uber Word of Mouth (WOM) we’ve tried to harness, it’s evolving to support connected experiences that are very episodic. In simple terms, people will interact with your brand through social environments but it will be intermittent and restricted to the programs and times during which this program is run – an episode that will bring context to the feedback, reach, and sentiment, and validate your targeting efforts. This is the only way to bring context to unstructured, ad hoc feedback and engagement. If you expect a general company effort to sustain engagement and only review it in mass, you will not be satisfied with the results and will always struggle to make sense of the engagement value. I believe we will evolve to look at the value of social efforts through a period of time and contextualize the engagement based on the types of campaigns we run to the types of audiences we target. Taking this to the next level, you’ll have contextual sharing that can be used to help target types of content, timing, and audiences. Sounds very much like marketing!
I had an enlightening chat with David Daniels (Jupiter/Forrester). He’s a staunch believer that there are flaws in email measurement. I liken this to the media and search worlds. Measurement can be quite sophisticated and literally mean nothing in the end, except that people spend a lot more in those channels. For 10 years, we’ve measured the same thing in email and for 10 years we’ve always struggled with applying real actionable meaning outside of tactical interpretations (open = interest, click = intent to buy, delivery = accuracy). Measurement is too integrated for many. There were some interesting views that I’m sure we’ll see more of in 2010, that will focus on cross-channel measurement, using other channels to inform email and vice versa. Does email have an impact on search? Is there any evidence of channel shift amongst certain customer segments? How does media influence a retention audience? And then making a final connection of level of engagement that will soon be defined by channel efficiency (why buy media targeted at your highest value customers if it doesn’t have an impact on RFM?).
Keep your ears open. You’ll hear more and more about Monitoring Solutions and Social Data Solutions. The new tools will give you deeper views into how we consume email, how this relates to the specific lists we manage and how social data will extend our view of the consumer and how they have built and managed their social networks.
Study: Social Media Increases Email Usage
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=114515
by Gavin O'Malley, Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 5:14 PM
If social networks are truly transforming how consumers communicate, shouldn't they be affecting the Web's original killer app: email?
Not at all, according to preliminary data from Nielsen. To the contrary: "It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -- particularly for the highest social media users," says Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen.
Why? Well, social media sites like Facebook send messages to users' inboxes every time someone comments on their posting, or something they have participated in -- and depending on their settings, can send updates on almost every activity.
Also, according to Gibs, "it's perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings."
For the study, Nielsen broke the online population into four groups: three "terciles" of social media consumption in minutes, along with a group that doesn't use social media at all. It then looked at each segment's time of Web-based email consumption over the course of a year, then subtracted the email consumption of those who do not use social media from those who do -- to show a lift over possible external forces.
"Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward," said Gibs.
For marketers, email remains an extremely powerful tool. Indeed, the Direct Marketing Association just projected that email marketing will generate an ROI of $43.52 in 2009 -- twice the return earned by search and other marketing channels.
The next step for Nielsen, according to Gibs, is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand whether this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups -- rather than by levels of consumption.
Minimizing Measurement
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=113721
The nanopossibilities of onboarding
It’s integral to human nature that we ask questions. Similarly, it's pretty much always the case that once an answer is supplied, it spawns yet more questions. It's part of the human condition.
The advent of new technologies and media capabilities has extended this craving for information to the point that ever-more complex and intricate media research processes are required in an attempt to keep up with what an outsider might consider an almost pathological pursuit of data.
How, then, will we manage to gather data consistently and to a quality standard that meets the demands of an ever-voracious industry in a future that will inevitably be characterized by even more media and audience fragmentation, a wider range of devices and functionalities, increased media mobility and interoperability, and so on?
Just as technology has increasingly driven innovations in content distribution, platform development, and functional enhancements, so will it similarly continue to drive much of the development in media measurement. The result will be technologies capable of capturing information that crosses the device-defined silos of the media industry - kind of like the PPM on steroids.
We can expect to see many of today’s measurement technologies and techniques turbocharged to the point where what we do now will seem as arcane and antiquated as the Telex machine(for younger readers, the Telex was a once-exciting innovation that pre-dated the fax).
But as the scale and scope of what we measure continually gets bigger and more layered, the means by which we measure much of it will get exponentially smaller. Obviously, this has already begun to happen. But when I say small, I don't mean tiny. I meannanoscale: the kind of engineering that is quite literally out of sight; the sort of fantastical futuristic advances that, if combined with cloning, really would enable you to drive a herd of camels through the eye of a needle, with room to spare.
Fantastical though this may seem, the reality is that nanotechnology is already with us in various forms. The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has identified more than 800 consumer products worldwide that incorporate some sort of nanotech - and apparently the list is not complete. These range from LG's F2300 Antibacterial Cell Phone (featuring an antibacterial coating for those concerned about germs) to a host of screen display applications to Samsung's 16GB memory chip. Beyond media and electronics, there is nanotech to be found in cosmetics, automotive, toys and games, sporting goods, and even food.
Much of what has been developed to date has been in the area of coatings and polymers, transistors and amplifiers, processors and batteries. However, combine the developing science behind these advances with the growing demand for real-time cross-media measurement, and the application of nanotechnology to the research business begins to take shape.
Imagine, if you will, what a Nielsen panelist may be called upon to do in 2034(or a Goolsen panelist, as by then the company will have been sold to Google so the latter can combine resources into a data gathering-mining powerhouse). No more push-button meter by the TV or anything so primitive as "active participation."
Instead, these panelists wear the means of monitoring their media exposure in a way so discreet it will make a mobile phone seem about as unobtrusive as a filing cabinet attached to your hip. They sport sensors in the
form of tiny polymer-based temporary tattoos. Barely visible to the eye and placed discreetly on the body, these sensors run off built-in batteries that use body heat as a back-up power source. That same body heat and the rhythm of the pulse tells the sensor it is still attached to the panelist even when no data is being sent back via the cloud for analysis.
The sensors themselves detect inaudible audio signals encoded in TV programming and ads, radio content, and anything on the Web, much as now but with more sophistication. By this time, all screens are produced to emit unique audio codes for content as it appears, whether or not the speakers are on.
Print media (yes, it still exists) has also gotten in on the act, using ink compatible with the sensors to produce encoded signals for each page of a publication. The few billboards that have not transitioned to some sort of video or interactive interface will use similar inks for part of their surface area.
In this way, the sensors will capture granular detail that shows which media and which content panelists are exposed to for how long, and in which combinations at different times of the day.
Through a built-in GPS 4.0 capability, panelists' locations will be tracked, and motion sensors will record whether someone is lying down, sitting, standing, or walking. Similarly, artificial intelligence capable of analyzing sound will determine whether voices are part of panelist conversations or extraneous noise. Such a capacity will also indicate when media consumption is happening alone or in a more social context. It will recognize sounds consistent with car journeys, train journeys, time spent in airports, etc.
So much for what panelists are exposed to. How do we identify the content they actually look at and engage with?
This is where visual coding of content comes in. Each panelist also wears a minute coating on his cornea equipped to recognize codes - pixels concealed within images on screens and printed surfaces. Undetectable to the naked eye, these formations deliver similar data concerning content, duration, and so on, which is then correlated to location, time of day, and the audio codes picked up by the panelist's tattoo.
All data is transmitted in real time for dynamic analysis by bots, some programmed for specific ongoing analyses, others looking for deeper insights and emerging trends of potential interest.
Much of the groundwork for this scenario is already done; the devices described are either possible to engineer now or will be soon. They simply haven’t been applied in this area yet. The cost of manufacture will need to come down first, and - just as important - nothing will happen until the public and the research industry get used to the concept, which is only likely after other applications of the technology become more familiar.
In short, the science, the economics, and the panelists will ultimately get there. Perhaps the biggest hurdle to be surmounted will be the approval and endorsement of the industry itself - the research buyers and methodologists who will ultimately pay for it.