Mapping the TV Genome

Data is the new sexy 

In the world of marketing, when someone utters the word “data”, let’s be honest, it doesn’t exactly conjure up images of Mad Men’s Madison Avenue; but Bluefin Labs is trying to change all that. Founded by two Ph.D. grads from MIT, Bluefin has applied cognitive science combined with large scale computing to successfully link TV to social media and have developed what they call “Social TV Analytics”.  The algorithms they have created use what is called “language grounding” to attach language to context, enabling their technology to listen to everything that is happening in social media and map it back to the TV stimulus that generated the conversation in the first place.  The data produced from this media analysis mapping is known as the TV Genome – and its media and commercial applications are pretty evident.  Need to know which TV shows are generating the most social engagement by audience segmentation – Bluefin has the answer… and I suspect a lot more. Bluefin is currently partnering with leading global brands, advertising agencies, and TV networks to leverage the “TV Genome” for everything from media planning to uncovering consumer insights. I highly recommend you watch founder Deb Roy’s TED talk on “The Birth of a Word” – fascinating stuff…
Maybe data can be sexy after all.

Final Post: The Hunger Games and Social Media

peter g

Jedi Kittens Strike Back

If Wharton is trying to figure out what makes ads go viral…shouldn’t you?

It was an eye opener to learn that business professors and statisticians, at one of the most prestigious business schools in the United States, are trying to distill a formula that guarantees online viral success. Although I have a fundamental problem with trying to define creativity in quantitative terms, the fact that they are even attempting this signals that achieving “viral” status has moved beyond the boardroom table and into the classroom. As educators begin to incorporate this challenge into curricula, “bottling” creativity as a series of basic principles to be instilled in the next generation of marketers is well underway. I won’t get into the tedious details of their research methodology, the controls, the scoring, etc., but for what it’s worth, their findings suggest that there are 4 common denominators that characterize successful viral videos. They must be: creative, surprising, emotional, and of course cute. In the end, are the results really that surprising? In fact, the first 3 characteristics could describe probably all of the great advertising campaigns of the last 25 years. So for a creative person, there isn’t much here that is new. Cute, on the other hand, is another story…Cue the cat video.

Tomorrow: How traditional television networks are leveraging social media

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A recent op-ed piece in The New York Times Sunday Review titled “The Rise of the New Groupthink” by Susan Cain is stirring quite the debate. The writer’s main thesis postulates that the growing cultural trend towards group collaboration is hindering our creativity and societal achievements. Needless to say, this goes against the grain most of us experience in the workplace. Being a creative director, and having built a career on the merit of my ideas, this discourse hits close to home. I believe Cain initiates a compelling argument around the benefits of solitary thinking but perhaps overgeneralizes the notion of what it means to be creative or generate creative ideas. Truly great ideas that change our perspective of the world around us, must inevitably have the power and strength to stand out from the rest. To do so, they must have vision. And it follows, that to have true vision, they must invariably have a singular point of view. That’s where her argument gathers steam. If we name any of the great creative innovators in the last 20 years who have made an impact on the creative landscape, their genius is born from a singular vision and certainly not from large group collaboration. In fact, it is almost inherent that truly creative ideas should breed discord, since this is what sets them apart from the rest; and yet conversely, they must find a resonant key to capture our collective imagination. I think this is where most organizations and creative workplaces fall short. The challenge truly becomes deciding when one must have vision and allow for singularity to generate a creative idea versus when one needs group collaboration and consensus to creatively solve a problem. And speaking from experience, and as Susan Cain points out, our cultural/workplace bias is to always defer to the latter.

peter g