Bias and Why to be Wary of It

I am going to use two links here for reference:

Interview with a VC partner at Sequoia Capital, the second dis a long You Tube Ad for the Chevy Volt.

Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme

Did You Know Video

It's ok for a Brand to try to convince us into buying or trying something. I champion Brands and if I can help them figure out how to get an action from someone I will, but I will always do it ethically.

During the 2008 election cycle I got many surveys from both the DNC and RNC asking my opinions. So many questions were biased and didn't give you the proper choices, they actually corralled you into what they wanted to hear. Same with Research of all sorts. Often Brand R&D efforts are skewed to trumpeting success because the folks doing development naturally are biased towards success. If this wasn't true why do so many product launches fail? And anytime there is an economic incentive for someone to hype, promote etc they will because their livelihood depends on it. You normally want to please the person paying you. Remember all those Dot.com's and Sub-prime Mortgages that went bust, while the promoters and ones selling the hype made money knowing ahead of time they would be screwing people? Or the ratings agencies afraid to rate bonds as junk because they were afraid of losing business since the bond issuers paid for the rating?

The Chevy Volt spot is specially an example of skewed facts. It is easy to cherry pick and not give the full story. Some of the facts make you say DUH! India because of the massive population the 25% with the highest IQ's are more in quantity than the US population. That does not mean their 25% is more intelligent or has higher IQ's than say our top 25%. Or the number of jobs someone will have between 18 and 34. They don't qualify this with the 'because this generation got shafted, the worker-employer fabric having been destroyed over the last 25 years, and the crash in the economy keeping this group underemployed for years to come'. My point is bad facts, very poor qualification of the facts so why use them?

Next I just want to SHRED Mark Kvamme. Sequoia Capital made a killing during the dot.com boom. In fact many companies they backed and then cashed out of after the IPO left investors decimated. While VC's have a very important part to play in our economy you need to remember they only care about 1 thing only, and that is a return on their Equity Investment. They care nothing about the workers or investors beyond when they cash out. So never listen to a VC when it comes to talking about areas of business they invest in because they are inherently biased towards hype and promotion. If Facebook goes IPO at less than a $14 billion valuation all the investors lose millions if not billions of on paper equity value. They are going to do everything to hype Social Media as the end all. So he is going to hype all Social Media and Brands needs to cut through this BS to know Social Media has it's place but it will never replace traditional Advertising.

While Facebook keeps a clean site Twitter is a scary place. You might be placing Ads next to tweets from Racists, Nazi's, Haters, Preachers, screaming Satanists acting like Preachers, angry people wanting to kill Liberals and angry people wanting to kill Conservatives (ask for the hashtags!). And I do believe Facebook will go the way of Myspace and Friendster in the next 5 years so the day they have their IPO I am personally shorting the stock.

I could write a book on instances of bias but hammered it enough! So don't believe the hype in anything and always remember everyone has a bias. It's just human nature versus some evil plan. Beware of it.

Twitter to announce Ad Platform + Bad News for their VC Backers

Supposedly today (or soon) Twitter is going to announce how they will start doing advertising. I am very curious what they think. I felt a sure fire one is Ads on the static web site outside the live feed. I also am curious about the different platforms. I am not sure if tweet deck etc are owned or part of twitter. Which means they then have no choice but to insert ads into the live feed.

That all being said if they insert ads to be clicked through (since they still have the 140 character issue with no graphics) I am curious what the click through rate will be. Obviously unless you click through I can't see a 140 characters being very valuable for an advertisers.

On top of that is this report from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Link

Which means number of accounts mean nothing and number of unique visitors (last month it reached 70 million) mean nothing. If I was advertising I want to know how many people log in once per day because that is the only chance for your ad to be seen. I do say chance. I am an active Tweeter on 4 accounts. I use Tweet Deck. But I also only see maybe 15-20% of the Tweets if that each day. Why? Because I am not watching the feed all the time. There are times during the day that I am. Everything else I never see. But this is no different than almost every other Advertising Medium. You pay for a chance to be seen. The trick for Brands is to value that chance properly and not over pay.

So if an active tweeter is tweeting say 4x per day(very low estimate). Then you need to establish how many like me are on multiple accounts (my case 4)....there probably is only like 5-10 million people on the site using it per day. Which is a lot less impressive and makes Twitter more of a niche. So my feeling is a well placed campaign if Twitter can send an Ad the moment someone logs or Posts a Tweet can reach a few million people. But the Log In or 'Tweet' moment is truly the only moments that can guarantee it is viewed. After that it is a crap shoot. So that 'moment' does have high value.

As for Twitter using Behavioral Targeting based on what a Tweeter tweets I think that actually will not work. If someone uses my post key words to Advertise I will guarantee most will be a misfire. Today I mentioned Toyota several times but I am not in a market for a car, and my Tweets were about the recall. Do I want an Ad from Toyota or competitor? If I state I had a Roast Beef Sandwich for lunch does an Ad from the Chicken Industry have much value? Especially the 140 character limitation. We shall see. Don't forget when firms bid on key words this serves them and not the consumer. It actually will eliminate best choice in favor of who paid the most.

That all being said Twitter has a good side and a bad side. The Good side is like Charlie Rose there are a lot of very intelligent and successful people who use Twitter to network and share ideas. So these are High Value Targets for advertising. There are also a lot of great causes that have tweet streams like Help Haiti.

The Bad side is if you look at some of the hash tags there are some that contain nothing but vile tweets. I was appalled at some of them that attack Progressives and Obama as Nazi's, Terrorists, Marxists, Racism, Death Threats etc. There are plenty of Progressive tags attacking Glenn Beck and such, though Progressives seem to be a bit more passive and less vulgar when you view their Tweets. But does a Brand or Advertiser want to randomly show up in these streams? This has been You Tube's Achilles heal.