To the reader of the printed edition of Word, Hepworth offers:
Try this experiment. Take this magazine and then just flick through a few pages. Go forward ten pages and go back ten pages. Note how many words, pictures, adverts, charts, headlines and graphic elements your eye flits across and your brain lightly registers, how many mental placeholders you set down, how many things you promise yourself to return to or avoid altogether, how you almost inhale content and context at the same time.
That’s because there never has been and there never will be a means of negotiating one’s way around written content that is as flexible and efficient (let alone as satisfying) as the combination of hand, eye, paper and ink you are using right now. This is not an emotional argument. It’s a profoundly practical one, which will not be trumped by all the wordsearch in the world.
That’s a seductive, persuasive description, and I admire the certainty with which it’s expressed. But I wonder how universally true it is.
Skilled as the print editor’s role may be, the single most practical, enriching element of what I read these days is something that can never make it onto paper: the hyperlink. The genius of the link is that it doesn’t break my flow as a reader, unless I choose it to – at which point it can illuminate a subject in ways no amount of sidebars, graphs or footnotes ever could.
Where does print still have the edge? The titles which truly sing on paper to this day are the higher-end ones – GQ, Wallpaper*, Vogue – where the glorious visuals, the glossy paper, even the adverts (sometimes especially the adverts) are an irreplaceable part of the reading experience. A Kindle doesn’t really compete. Hepworth argues that accessing a glossy periodical on an electronic device “would be like putting velvet behind glass”.
But who’d bet against technology getting there? Just a few short years ago, streaming web video was a terrible experience: even with the best will in the world, only the truly desperate would watch it for more than a few minutes. And the technology which existed for watching video on the move was so cumbersome there was no way it could compete with your static TV.
Now YouTube can stream video content in true (1080p) hi-def. And my iPhone can play back downloaded video at a size and quality which can easily sustain long-form viewing – say, on the train – without me wanting to hurl it out of the window after a quarter of an hour. (Part of this is due to the way quality audio via headphones can make even a smallish screen feel immersive. Could there be a parallel “trick” for magazines?)
Today’s e-readers are like the first generation of MP3 players: niche, unattractive and rudimentary. Imagine what the third or fourth wave will be like. Add hyperlinks and embedded video to a big, properly glossy-style screen and I’m there.
And if the end result is anything like my experience with music via iTunes, a simple purchasing process for magazines online would mean I’ll end up buying way more content than I ever did before, subsidising a sector I’d previously lost interest in, gradually, over the years.
Now that – I’d hope – would put a smile on David Hepworth’s face.
Hang on a second. Google’s TV ad inventory? Google sells commercials on the box?
Yes – maybe I’m the last to realise, but it turns out that in the US, since 2007
Google TV Ads has served more than 100 billion TV ad impressions [...] Google has a deal with Dish Network to sell local ad inventory for 100 networks carried on the satellite service and also sells select national inventory for about a dozen networks, including CBS College Sports, Bloomberg TV, and NBC Universal’s CNBC, MSNBC and Syfy.
Google already has access to Dish Network‘s usage information on a per-household basis, and uses this to extrapolate how many people across the US have watched each ad they sell (which in turn helps set the ad’s price). Now, reports multichannel.com
…the TiVo data will be in the mix. Google provides targeting tools for planning and executing TV ad buys, and has overlaid demographic data from Equifax on the set-top database to find optimal show placements based on an advertiser’s criteria.
I’ve no doubt that Google will follow all relevant privacy and anonymisation practices as they pore over their newly-acquired data. But if you feel in any way shifty about all this, perhaps it’s time to log in to Google Dashboard and have a quick check on exactly what Google knows about you (so far, anyway):
Or, if you found that video in any way condescending, you might choose to opt out from Google’s data capture altogether (kudos here to the peerless Onion News Network):
I blogged a few days ago about TiVo’s sophisticated methods of tracking what viewers find interesting, second by second.
Well, forget that – because I’ve since discovered another company which makes this level of temporal granularity look like RAJAR diaries.
NeuroFocus is a Californian operation which tests the effectiveness of commercial messages (ads, brands, packaging etc) by measuring brain activity.
In practice this means sitting a subject down in front of the relevant stimulus, then plotting their thoughts and emotional responses millisecond by millisecond via a network of 64 sensors attached to their scalp.
Researchers have tested films and ads by biometric means (like heartbeat) before, of course. But Dr Robert T. Knight from NeuroFocus explains why this is way too slow:
The brain’s timeline – ‘See it, Extract it, Turn it into Emotion/Memory, Begin to Plan a Response’ – is all over in half a second [500 milliseconds]. Peripheral responses such as sweaty palms, pupil dilation, heart rate, are all indirect measures and very sluggish, 5-7 seconds. This is long after the real activity is done.
Instead, the company claims: “Neuroscience provides a deep, clear view into the real-world, real-time reactions of consumers at the most elemental level – their brainwaves”.
Consumers are recruited, pretested, and familiarized with our session setup analytical equipment and techniques
Consumers are pre-screened for demographic, attitudinal, behavioral, and psychographic segmentation
Consumers are presented with a series of chosen ads deliberately interspersed with normal viewing features in a setting that measures attention, emotional engagement and memory/retention across the ad set
Data is acquired and processed by our neurophysiology and psychometrics teams
Quantitative indicators of attention, emotional engagement, and memory/retention are calculated from high density electrode arrays
Componentize the target ad into key constituent elements (images, faces, actions, spoken words, written words, sounds, and other client indicated discriminants)
Utilize paradigms to elicit neuro physiological reaction measurements to determine which aspects of the ad contribute most and least to the overall effects identified in analysis
Provide design feedback to ad designers on each of the chosen components based on analysis
Identification of strengths and weaknesses of the target ad
Recommendations for improving, refining, and reusing segments of the ad
Bloody hell.
Pseudo-science or the bleeding edge of media research? I’ll leave you to decide.
On a podcast I listened to the other day, this question was posed:
When your ISP claims your connection’s unlimited, but then applies usage caps, or blocks certain bandwidth-hungry applications… how can they still claim it’s “All You Can Eat”?
Isn’t there case law in the world of catering?
Well, I had to find out.
And in the process – as is often the way – I discovered a ton of extra information which now needs to go somewhere, otherwise one day my brain will explode under the sheer pressure of trivia.
So here, my friends, are five things you never knew about the world of (new acronym, sincere apologies) A.Y.C.E. dining.
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1) Variety is a dangerous thing
According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, it’s not just greed that makes us overfill our plates at the All You Can Eat buffet counter.
Authors Joseph P. Redden (University of Minnesota) and Stephen J. Hoch (University of Pennsylvania) found that, when faced with a large variety of items, consumers tend to underestimate how much of each item is present.
When participants were asked to pour food into containers, they poured more when the candy had a variety of colors. “This occurs even though people knew they could not consume the candy,” the authors add. “Specifically, people pour more in the presence of variety since they perceive lesser quantities [...] Since prior research has shown that people eat most of what they serve themselves, variety could lead people to eat more solely due to this perceptual influence.”
This isn’t the only scientific research on diners’ behaviour at A.Y.C.E. outlets.
In a study published in the journal Obesity, Cornell University’s Food & Brand Lab reported that in Chinese buffets “compared to normal weight diners, overweight individuals sat 16 feet closer to the buffet, faced the food, used larger plates, ate with forks instead of chopsticks, and served themselves immediately instead of browsing”.
Brilliantly, the same laboratory also conducted a study of how we perceive portion size, by using doctored soup bowls. This is 50% Professor Heinz Wolff, 50% Wallace & Gromit.
The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant-style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed [...] Participants who were unknowingly eating from self-refilling bowls ate more soup (14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F1, 52=8.99; p<.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Yet despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls.
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2) Sport and troughing do mix
Heading to the US any time soon? Fancy taking in a ball game?
Why waste your time spectating, when you could be participating in your own competitive endeavour: figuring out how much grub you can cram into your face before you expire and/or the final whistle blows?
Put simply, this is a ticket in a designated area of a sports ground which entitles you to mount multiple raids on the concessions stands for as long as there’s some kind of (potentially distracting, in my opinion) sporting activity happening below.
Seven hot dogs, three cokes, a bottle of water and a half a bag of peanuts – that was the price for my dignity today as I stuffed my face at the All You Can Eat event at the Rogers Centre. I was proud and ashamed of myself all at the same time.
You could walk up to any food stand in the designated area and just serve yourself. People definitely took advantage of this and would literally stuff their shirts full of chips and peanuts, then grab four hot dogs and head for their seats.
The strangest part of the afternoon was when our sections started chanting “pizza, pizza, pizza” in hopes that the Blue Jays would get their seventh strikeout to win them a slice of pizza. Glad to see they had their priorities straight.
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3) Gastronauts are greedy pigs too
In this country we’ve traditionally associated A.Y.C.E. with low-rent Oriental buffets: plates of ruddy, MSG-infused meat and batter, sweating under remorseless orange lights.
But unlimited nosh can be a gourmet’s delight too. Witness the $48 Sunday Smörgåsbord Brunch at Aquavit, New York City’s premier Scandinavian restaurant.
$48?! A family of four could gorge themselves insensible at Taybarns for that! Not on this kind of refined menu, they couldn’t – featuring Vodka Lime Herring, Pyttipanna, Egg with Kalles Kaviar, Västerbotten Cheese and much more, all washed down by “a complimentary Danish Mary made with Karlsson’s Gold vodka”.
But even New York Magazine can’t help but descend to the Taybarns mentality as they encourage you to:
claim a booth in the posh Sunday-afternoon serenity of the Aquavit dining room, strategize a plan of attack, and proceed to decimate the lavish spread in the room next door.
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4) Zen and the art of filling your face
I’ve been interested in business processes ever since I read Jack: Straight From The Gut. This is the autobiography of GE’s legendary CEO Jack Welch, and it bangs on a great deal about things like Six Sigma – an industrial philosophy designed to improve quality and reduce costs.
You’ll have guessed where I’m going here. Even when you’re shovelling limitless hunks of pork down punters’ throats, there’s always room for some high-end process innovation.
In this blogpost, Pete Abilla describes a visit to one Texan eaterie, and its adoption of a production line technique more often seen in Toyota factories: Kanban.
Kanban is a visual control that signals to the previous step that it is need of more resources, material, or something other. Kanban is similar to a gasoline light in a car. When a car is in need of gasoline, the gasoline light blinks as a signal to the driver to get more gasoline. At Toyota, every step in the manufacturing process has a Kanban, creating a “pull” effect that cascades backwards to the beginning of the manufacturing cycle.
How did this manifest itself in the All You Can Eat environment, I hear you ask?
At the restaurant, they had their own version of the Kanban. They had 2 colored coasters: Green and Red. Green is a signal for more meat; red is a signal to stop. Again, this was a simple system, but a powerful one. The coasters signals to the server, and when the server runs out of meat, he visits the kitchen for more meat, where they have their own Kanban system set-up.
Can someone please tell me where I’ve seen a Sbarro restaurant before? In London? Abroad? I have zero idea.
Anyway, Sbarro in Times Square is the scene of the alimentary crime in this moment from Krush Groove - arguably hip-hop’s most significant cinematic masterpiece. Yes, it’s The Fat Boys’ 1985 paean to the infinitely-refillable platter, titled (you guessed it) – All You Can Eat!
Pay special attention, in the YouTube clip below, to the Boys’ second helping at 2’08″. For one thing, they’re in breach of the house rules. Sbarro’s NYC Dinner deal is clearly defined as a “one-pass buffet” - hence the hapless employee’s remonstrations at 3’17″.
Secondly, as well as polishing off a set of hefty-looking Italian sausages, they manage to eat an entire poster-sized illustration of food from the restaurant wall. That’s going beyond the spirit of the deal, in my view.
Anyway, The Fat Boys should count themselves lucky. They may well boast
$3.99 for all you can eat / Well, I’mma stuff my face to a funky beat
but the same menu plan would set back today’s tourist $16.00. Now that’s enough to cause indigestion.
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Further reading
Still peckish?
I strongly recommend Eating The Road’s blogpost The All-Inclusive All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Guide, which masterfully breaks the A.Y.C.E. experience into its eight constituent elements, and offers sage advice for each. Sample, from Exit Strategy:
You should have the closest possible parking spot to the exit and be able to waddle right to your car. A good point to be made is if at all possible, do not be the driver. Your body will want nothing more than to sit and digest its lavish feast. You will not want to be thinking and making life decisions like whether or not to go through a yellow light.
I’ve been fascinated and absorbed by ambient music for decades now (along with its near neighbours, systems music and minimalism).
As an artistic form, ambient can be highly sophisticated. But fundamentally it’s very simple: long, slow, meditative pieces which, when played, form a “backdrop” to what’s going on, rather than demanding attention.
If you’ve never experienced it, or fancy trying your hand at producing some yourself, there’s now a brilliant online experiment which will allow you to do just that.
Just visit inbflat.net and follow the instructions (all 14 words of them).
One of the greatest things about new media is its merciless measurability. There’s little room for bull when confronted by the stats for your latest web project: it’s all there in black and white.
But what happens when you map this degree of tracking onto traditional broadcast output?
TiVo is probably the world’s most famous hard-disk TV recorder: the company pioneered the sector in America 10 years ago. For a while now they’ve been running a service called Stop||Watch – I’ve only just learned about it, but it fascinates me.
Stop||Watch plots US TV viewing patterns by microscopically monitoring hundreds of thousands of TiVo boxes – delivering information like:
after two weeks on the air an average of 46% of NBC’s The Jay Leno Show television audience opted to record the program and watch it later, as viewed by TiVo® service subscribers.
Nothing dramatically different here from what BARB in the UK produces (or, indeed, Nielsen for the US TV market).
In fact, to defend the old guard for a second, BARB has two fundamental advantages over TiVo’s entry-level panel of viewers. For one, BARB’s panel across the UK is statistically representative. And secondly, its figures take account of how many household members were present in the room when a given programme was showing (rather than TiVo’s cruder metric: “it was on the household’s telly”).
But BARB’s means of recording who was sat in front of the box is pretty rudimentary:
All panel household residents and their guests register their presence when in a room with a television set on. Each individual does this by pressing a button allocated to them on the peoplemeter handset.
And things get really interesting with TiVo’s figures when you start poring over data that conventional linear TV could, by definition, never provide.
For instance: which tiny elements of your output did viewers find so interesting they had to rewind and watch again?
And which moments – programming or ads – were so boring that timeshifters couldn’t get to the fast forward button quick enough?
TiVo’s ability to pull out these stats first came to public prominence after the infamous 2004 Super Bowl – during which Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” became “the most rewatched ever during a broadcast in three years of measuring audience reactions”.
Five years on, an increased sample of 350,000 boxes provides second-by-second data on TiVo viewing patterns. Below – a graph of this year’s Super Bowl. Click on the image to view it full size.
And if you’re wondering what was so great about the Doritos ‘Crystal Ball’ ad (the most watched moment in the whole of the first half), I’m sure they’d appreciate your eyeballs below.
$3m splurged on airtime isn’t going to recoup itself.
Twitter’s new “lists” functionality allows users to group other users in categories (like, say, “work colleagues” or “London geeks”).
As a result – the theory goes – we can see which “tweeps” are most influential and recommended by others.
Some of the most interesting lists I’ve found so far, though, are far from recommendations – they’re lists of spammers.
Anyone who’s been on Twitter for more than a week will recognise a crude spammer when they see one: an account that quickly follows thousands of people, that’s followed by very few, and which has hardly tweeted at all.
But it’s in the spammer’s blood to be one step ahead. So we now see accounts which intersperse their commercial messages with other tweets, scraped from random users’ accounts, thus appearing – at a very quick first glance – to be legitimate.
Here’s a list of some of those spambots. (NB- By definition, the products they’re shilling may be Not Safe For Work.)
Some are almost poetic in their disjointed observations. One moment it’s:
Breath and I’ll carry you away,we will stir the stars around and watch then fall away into the hudson bay. Plumit out sight and sound.
The next it’s:
Caralho,Fresno eh foda demais velho!!!
And then:
Apple
Before a final triumphant:
Taking a look at ‘Debt Settlements – How the Federal Stimulus is Making Debt Settlements Popular’ [link]
In short order, these spammers will be tracked down by Twitter and nuked off the service.
In even shorter order, they’ll be replaced by the next generation.
I’m convinced that if the level of sophistication, tenacity and distributed effort which goes into the spam industry worldwide were applied to finding a cure for cancer, we’d be there by now.
Where does print still have the edge? The titles which truly sing on paper to this day are the higher-end ones – GQ, Wallpaper*, Vogue – where the glorious visuals, the glossy paper, even the adverts (sometimes especially the adverts) are an irreplaceable part of the reading experience. A Kindle doesn’t really compete. Hepworth argues that accessing a glossy periodical on an electronic device “would be like putting velvet behind glass”.
And things get really interesting with TiVo’s figures when you start poring over data that conventional linear TV could, by definition, never provide.
