I love the new MySpace redesign.  It’s a great step at bridging the impact and engagement gap between online and TV/print advertising.  Good ads can be cool, beautiful, funny.  People will talk about quality commercials and share them as if they were content.

Think Superbowl ads, or VOGUE magazine—which is literally a book full of more ads than content (and you still PAY a subscription fee for it…)  Why are they more compelling?  Because they can capture the entirety of one’s attention, fill the screen/page and leave a bigger impression.

The cleaner, the more functional your design, the more “attention surplus” you can donate to advertisers

Impressions as a metric is a best-effort proxy for something else: attention.  Publishers are really in the business of attracting the attention of their audiences via good content, and then siphoning a portion of that off to advertisers.  There’s ratio between how much attention is lent to content vs advertising, and a very zero-sum way to think about it is that there’s a direct trade off between value to audience vs value to advertisers.  But there’s actually a way you can create attention, or make more efficient use of it.  Bad design is a cognitive sink: attention is wasted by users just trying to understand the mess in front of them.  Good design creates this attention surplus, so that impressions don’t really become more numerous, but bigger.

Now sales-advertisers won’t give a shit.  They’ll say “well if the impression is better, via vs design or targetting we’ll notice the improvement in conversion, and thus ROI.”  But brand-advertisers can not and do not track that.  I know, it sounds like a hazy touchy-feely thing.  But advertising is both a science (relevance) and an art (impact), and the art may have been overlooked by the nerdy culture of silicon valley.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a great design (and still improving).  There’s a ton of attention surplus created by the clean design, but I hope it’s not a matter of principle or smug that they choose not to monetize it.

The new 3G iPhone will be sold under the traditional cellphone hardware model: the carrier foots a ~$200 subsidy in return for a contractual obligation from the customer to stay for 2 years.  This effectively throttles the rate at which users will buy new devices at 2 years.  2 years may be an ok rate rate for traditional cellphone producers, but the iPhone is also an iPod, a device which I suspect has a large segment of users with replacement cycles of less than a year.

One could argue that it’s a penetration play, but each iPhone sale cannibalizes one iPod sale, and could also simultaneously shift someone from a < 2 year replacement cycle to a > 2 year replacement cycle.  The economics don’t seem to work out…or am I just missing something?

A lot of people are wondering who will be the first to leverage our email histories as a social graph. Clearly, we’re eager to see what an email + social hybrid looks like. The strange part is, why are people waiting for social to be added to email, but not email to be added social?

The core activities on social networks are browsing/stalking and communicating, and the communicating chunk is eating into traditional email. Everything from basic messaging, to wall posts to picture comments used to happen as an email exchange (or not happen at all). This SAI article really strikes a chord:

Instead of exchanging emails or phone numbers with new acquaintances/pickups, gen-myfacers are swapping social network identities.

This indicates an important shift in what people perceive to be the “home base” for their online identity and communication channel. When I was in school, guy-talk has already evolved from “ok, I just met this girl, when do I call her? right away? wait a few hours? days?” to “when do I friend her? msg her or write on her wall? or poke?” (never poke). Social networks just make more contextual sense for social-communication, reserving email for more formal messaging. Not only does it make sense for the user, it’s a important step for social networks to increase their own relevance and permanence to match that of email.

Email and social networks are positioned to step on each other’s toes

Hybrid products aren’t always built from the ground up, it’s often one of the halves making the other obsolete. I’ve tried Xoopit and Xobni, email plugins for Gmail and Outlook respectively which try to build in social and media context into email. The implementation is clumsy at best, partly because the email interface doesn’t lend well to social. But the real snag is that it’s clawing for the social content that just isn’t there. Whoever has more valuable content wins, and in this case, social graph beats email/contact lists. Social networks are in a better position to create a compelling social+email hybrid product.

Music discovery is more a service to users than it is a sales-driver for content owners. But if it where, the objective would be simple: recommend songs that a user will have the highest probability of enjoying, but does not yet own. Triangulate with friend’s listening patterns, similarity profiles, crowd favorites, music blogs and then cross off what’s already owned (thus not a sales lead)

What kind of recommendations will you get? I would venture to guess that the best sales leads will be remixes, live performances, covers of songs a consumer already likes. Essentially, there’s money in selling the same song/variation to people over and over again! I’m a Dave Matthews fan, and boy have they milked me with their many live performance recordings.

Of DMB’s top 5 songs, I own an average of 6 variations each. The same could said of Pearl Jam and their streak of “bootleg” live CDs

Sure, not everyone is a big fan of these two artists, but we all could have at 2 favorite artists whose music lends well to variation. This is essentially a different take on the Long Tail where over-selling takes the place of over-pricing niche demand.

When was the last time you clicked on internet advertising? Do you notice clicking more than you did 5 years ago? Most conversations about internet advertising revolve around improving targeting and relevance to drive up click-through ratios. But I think there’s actually lot more we can do on the interactivity & design side to boost CTRs.

Users are trained to ignore ads not only because they are often irrelevant, but because clicking through is still too risky and disruptive.

Just leaving the current page is a significant disruption. You must wait for a new page load, spend 10-20 seconds understanding what you’re looking at, then decide whether or not it’s of interest to you. If you were to return to your old page, another 10-seconds is lost retracing the last activity/thought. Given the risk of not knowing what’s on the other side of the click, why bother leaving? We can do better by presenting information in layers, and as non-disruptively as possible to improve the comfort level of clicking through.

Judging a book by its cover is for books

The problem is that most ads have a 1-stage engagement process: you’re either not engaged (ignore ad) of fully engaged (leave current page via click-through), and that conversion rate is minuscule.

Ads generally show 1-3 messages and expect users to decide whether to fully engage based that limited quantity of information.

With Flash-based ads, especially in square-ish dimensions, we should be showing users interactive, and even useful widgets instead of conventional ads. If it’s an ad for media content, why not play samples? If the product or pitch is complex, why not unfold more information with the page?

I’m thinking something like Sprout or Apture is a good step in the right direction. For now, we would imagine the smallest measurable unit of attention being a single page view. But page views are too big, and too slow. Few action-units justify the level of disruption created by a page change. AJAX has done a great job with web applications, now lets bring that over to advertising.

Update: WidgetBucks does just this.