A Wider Net

Disney has apparently created a testing lab to determine how advertisements affect viewers physiologically. By tracking biometric measurements they can optimize content to produce the most positive physical (and presumable psychological) response. I guess I have a hard time believing this hasn’t been going on for decades already, especially since the concept was so optimistically laid out in “Max Headroom.” In this futureshock comedy, an evil network had developed a sinister brainwashing technique using rapid firing subliminal video suggestions called “blipverts” that resulted, occasionally, in the viewer exploding.

Looks like we will have to add this to our web design usability studies. Next we need to figure out how to measure the physiological response to any kind of customer experience. Can you imagine if they could measure this sort of biometric activity at, say, the Registry of Motor Vehicles? How about on a typical United Airlines flight or, more likely, a typical United Airlines DELAY?

Disney creates laboratory for biometric testing of advertisements - Engadget HD

Counting eyeballs is on every marketer’s “measurement 101″ curriculum. The eyebox2 from Xuuk (zook) allows you to count people who look at your digital sign. It doesn’t count heads - it counts eyes, and only eyes that are looking at the sign. It is actually a more accurate representation of impressions than a web ad server. Web ad servers cannot tell you if someone looked at an ad - only if they looked at the page.

The device is loaded with invisible light emitters and a tiny camera. The camera can detect light from the emitters reflecting off the back of people’s eyes - similar to flash bulb “red eye”. They must also have some logic in there to tell the difference between different people and people who stand there a long time.

You could, I suppose, use this with advertisers to verify impression counts against a campaign goal. I believe this tool is best used as a method for determining the optimal location of a sign, the optimal types of ads, rotation times, etc. It’s a tweaking tool. And I also imaging that you could use this for applications beyond digital signage. You could use it as a measurement tool at trade shows. Highway officials could use it to determine if that 20mph speed limit sign is sufficiently hidden from view for maximum speeding ticket revenue (I just know they do this somehow already).

I’d like to see this combined with the people-tracking systems offered by Smartvue. That would be one amazing onsite visitor measurement tool.

Check out this article from TechCrunch, which relays information released from Feedburner’s study of RSS Reader Vendors. Excerpt: “The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.”

I have been one of the converted for some time, as have many of my co-workers. Google Reader makes it (relatively) easy for me to track almost 100 news feeds.

UPDATE: Try Google Reader

I’m a fan of Alexa, but this article has some good points. Alexa is a great tool for looking at the relative activity of a website. You can look at trends dating back several years in terms of reach or rank, and even compare several sites on one graph. Buy any internet usage metric has to be used appropriately. If you’re looking for trends and comparisons about a website’s reach and rank, Alexa still makes good sense, but understanding how the data is gathered is key to understanding what conclusions you can draw.

Ironically, Alexa appears to be down as I write this article. I’m not sure what their problem is, but I hope they fix it soon.

If you manage to get it to load today, take a look at the articles on the front page. There’s a terrific explanation of the difficulty in measuring site traffic on the long tail, and a startling graph of traffic on YouTube that shows a flattening trend since the acquisition.