Posts Tagged ‘Bill Seely’

Practical Marketing Analytics’ Bill Seely interviewed in InteractiveTV Today

Oct 16, 2009 Industry News, TV and iTV Analytics

Bill is interviewed in Rick Howe’s “Dear iTV Doctor” column published today (Friday October 16, 2009). Check it out at http://bit.ly/mLaD7.
The topic was how to apply interactive television to engage and activate a TV show’s superfans. Bill talks about the impact of tailoring the design and features of an interactive experience embedded in a TV program to the needs and interests of the hard-core fans of the program.

Rick’s column appears regularly in Tracey Swedlow’s InteractiveTV Today (ITVT) (www.itvt.com), the most widely read and trusted news source on the rapidly emerging medium of multiplatform, broadband interactive television (ITV).

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How To Maximize Viewer Participation In Your Interactive TV Applications

Sep 30, 2009 Industry News, TV and iTV Analytics

Here are several ideas to drive maximum interactive participation and duration for your interactive television application:

Idea One: Begin With the End in Mind (apologies to Stephen Covey)

What is your business objective? If you get specific about what you want viewers to do with your interactive experience, you can design to make that more likely. For example, if you want viewers to interact for a long time, that favors design that is immersive and absorbing, with lots of content and lots of features. On the other hand, if you want to get the highest possible number of viewers to participate in the experience, then an unobtrusive and streamlined experience is what you want, with very focused functionality (e.g., opt in, vote for your favorite contestant, then exit).

Idea Two: Have a Compelling Viewer Value Proposition

Once you know what you want the viewer to do, you need to design an experience that meets that objective AND gives the viewer compelling value for the time they spend interacting. A weak viewer value proposition yields weak performance vs. your business goals.

Idea Three: It All Starts With a Click (No Click = No Participation)

Viewers will likely have no advance knowledge about what a particular interactive application does (or even what iTV is), or why they should care about it, so whatever is displayed on the screen to entice/enable them to start the experience is critical. I visualize the flow of viewers into an interactive application as a huge funnel with a very tiny hole in it. You want to:
1. Make the hole at the bottom of the funnel less tiny – make the prompt visible, enticing, and self-explanatory
2. Increase the “pressure” in the funnel – present a call to action that makes it obvious and compelling why viewers should interact (communicate your viewer value proposition)
3. Fill the funnel with as many potential interactors as possible – by presenting the opportunity to start the experience to as many of viewers as possible.

Idea Three: Present Many Opportunities to Opt In

Interactive experiences with more opportunities to enter them get more viewers participation. That means:
1. Present the opportunity more frequently during a given program or ad
2. Present the opportunity in multiple contexts (triggers in programs or ads as well as listings and banners in operator interactive portals)
3. Present the opportunity at multiple times of day

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Statistics: the New Plastics? – Steve Lohr/NY Times

Aug 31, 2009 Industry News, Statistics

Can you “make” yourself a statistician or do you have to be a bit of an oddball to begin with?

On August 5, 2009, the Technology section of the New York Times ran an article headlined: “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics ” In the article, author Steve Lohr cited interviews and research to declare Statistics to be the glamor career of the near future. I have been a practitioner of marketing analytics and modeling since the 1980s, and I have mixed feelings about this news: the smug sense that I was right all along about the future of business is tempered by my equally strong desire for my competition to remain sparse and disorganized.

Citing The Graduate in an article plugging a career in statistics is more than a little weird. The quoted screen conversation was meant to underscore the vapidity of a career choice based solely on what might make one a lot of money. “Plastics” was supposed to sound ridiculous:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

Our values as a society have changed enough since that scene ran in theaters that the exchange might now read less like a siren song for emerging sellouts, and more like sincere advice about a great career opportunity. No matter – statistics is not easy to fake an interest in. I doubt that those who might flock into a statistics course because it was a “hot” field would stay with it long enough to get a degree much less stomach it long enough to make a pot of money.

Perhaps those in the business of training statisticians will reap a windfall over the next few years if a flood of newbies rushed headlong into the field on the promise of high-paying careers. Be that as it may, I have seen too many square pegs suffer in fruitless attempts to enter this particular round hole to believe that many could “will” themselves to master statistics and analytics. Being a “quant” has a lot more to do with your innate cognitive style than your desire for a certain salary.

There is no question that business is increasingly awash in floods of data that are being under-understood and under-leveraged, and that the skills are in short supply required to extract useful meaning and patterns from data to guide decision-making and strategy.

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