Idées Fortes
Bridging the Trust Gap
Despite the much-lamented lack of a coherent model for evaluating assertions in cyberspace, there is a way of thinking about this issue. It's just a concept often taken for granted: trust.
One makes many assertions about identity, ownership, and value in a networked environment, but few people give it explicit thought when sending email or searching the Web. Public key cryptography was one of the first applications to address this. The X.509 standard uses hierarchies of certification authorities to make assertions about the identity of a user. Microsoft's Authenticode initiative builds on the work of X.509 to address the issue of downloading suspect code. PGP differs from X.509 in that it engenders a "web of trust," allowing you to rate the trustworthiness of another user as an introducer. As such, you can make assertions about others' assertions.
The World Wide Web Consortium's PICS, or Platform for Internet Content Selection, furthers this assertion capability, allowing ratings to be associated with content or services. Hence, an obvious use of PICS is to place a trust value on the assertions made by rating services. Other efforts of trust management include AT&T Lab's PolicyMaker, which can support threshold trust schemes that allow a browser to find only sites with favorable ratings from a set number of trustworthy services.
Brand and reputation are an intuitive way to evaluate trustworthiness. Firefly's agents consider the reliability of other agents when seeking recommendations for music. Users and agents may one day also rely on cryptographic commerce protocols that enable anonymous users to bridge the trust gap. Markus Jakobsson's coin-ripping protocol, for instance, prevents either side from getting half of a digital coin until both are satisfied that the transaction was fair.
The next step is to create an agent that interacts with its environment using well-tested or certified behaviors. Initially, users could grab a template from a trusted authority. Later, relationships can be modified so eventually a sophisticated but easy-to-manage set of customized relationships exist. All of this is not to say that no tears of betrayal will be shed on the Net. Just as I may mistakenly lend a spare house key to a deceitful friend, I can be surprised to learn an acquaintance has been forwarding my private email onto alt.embarrass.joe.
Empty Victory
While most companies try to make their brand ubiquitous via mental carpet-bombing, it's clear that the final fron-tier of advertising is negative space. Nike's stark, Riefenstahlian odes to superathletes and obscenely spare print ads have led the way. The shoe and lifestyle purveyor already has a level of media saturation that makes alphanumeric identification redundant; shedding the last vestige of symbolic language would allow Nike to brand by default. Imagine a future in which the "swoosh" is dumped and Nike declares its new corporate logo to be a "space." Wieden & Kennedy's campaign, using blank magazine inserts and 30-second TV spots of white noise, has unprecedented success: polls show an overwhelming percentage of 17-to-24-year-olds identify pictures of white walls, unused tissue, and clear blue sky as "Nike." The company is named Advertising Age's "Marketer of the Year" a second time. Shortly thereafter, it is named God.
Put on the Red Light
We've never had ratings for general literature. But PICS, which would embed multiple ratings schemes into Net-based media, would go even further, conducting a dangerous experiment in the prefragmentation of expression. If PICS becomes part of the standard, it'll be used in unpredictable ways. For example, an overlapping "AND" combination of different PICS-supported ratings might be used by Internet service providers, not just individuals. This could make the Net bland for a great many users, but that's far from the worst possibility.
PICS has the potential to amplify the efficacy of censors by giving them a worldwide collaborative infrastructure. While rating the vast Internet would be unfeasible for a single restrictive service, this becomes conceivable if it's easy to "AND" together the efforts of a hundred such services. Would fundamentalist ISPs block access to atheist sites? What about repressive nations using PICS to make threatening ideas invisible to their citizens?
PICS could undercut the spirit of the First Amendment in the United States as well. You once had to hear the slightest bit of what some fool was saying on the soapbox before you tuned him out; with PICS, you'd never even know he existed.
Ironically, PICS might also make the stuff we don't want children to see more accessible by clearly identifying such material. Having a delineated red-light district makes it easier to push porn, not harder.
Single-purpose filter programs under parental control, like NetNanny, are ultimately safer than an untamable mesh of dubious universal barriers. Without ratings, the Internet forces humanity to see itself as a whole, warts and all. With ratings, it could encourage an unprecedentedly detailed balkanization of ideas and images.
Far Out
Years ago I was having lunch one day with the cartoonist Richard Guindon, and the subject came up how neither one of us ever solicited or accepted ideas from others.
"It's like having someone else write in your diary," he said. And how true that statement rang with me. In effect, we drew cartoons that we hoped would be entertaining or, at the very least, not boring; but regardless, they would always come from an intensely personal, and therefore original, perspective.
To attempt to be "funny" is a very scary, risk-laden proposition. But if there was ever an axiom to follow in this business, it would be this: Be honest to yourself and - most important - respect your audience.
So, in a nutshell (probably an unfortunate choice of words for me), I ask only that this respect be returned ... please, please refrain from putting The Far Side out on the Internet. These cartoons are my "children," of sorts, and like a parent, I'm concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone's Web site is like getting the call at 2 a.m. that goes, "Uh, Dad, you're not going to like this much, but guess where I am."
Please send my "kids" home. I'll be eternally grateful.
Most respectfully, Gary Larson
Pushing Passive Eyeballs
Measuring interactivity means measuring what people do online, not just counting passive eyeballs. And despite the latest push to build sustainable models for Web-based commerce, few in the turbulent world of networked multimedia can find reliable indicators of what makes for success, let alone if one particular form can be successful.
There is an acute lack of standards that specify what to measure and how to measure it. What do people do on the Web? How often and why are they doing it? Since the consensus is now that hits are meaningless as comparative measures of behavior on the Web, sites now tend to report visits.
But what exactly is a "visit"? Is it any wonder that many sites (and ad clients) are squeamish about the legitimacy of reports on the number of unique visitors per day, the lengths of their visits, and the average number of pages per visit?
Even worse is the utter lack of consistency among site-dependent measures - page views, ad clicks, click-through, et cetera - that are supposed to be capturing the same thing.
Right now, Web measurement follows a "more is better" mentality, inherited from traditional mass media like broadcast and print. This accounts for advertising pricing models based on impressions, or "eyeballs," that are measured in CPMs (cost per thousand).
But the CPM approach places too much emphasis on the banner ad and essentially none on the target ad behind the banner, which is the real communication the advertiser wishes the visitor to encounter.
One danger of relying solely on exposure models is that interactive managers will be driven to scale their sites to mass audiences with more homogeneous tastes and attract more advertising revenue. Instead, managers should be figuring out how to measure interactivity and price ads according to the value of a consumer's interactive visit to the advertiser.
The click-through model, based on the number of times visitors clicked on the banner, is still impression-focused, since it can be viewed as paying for target ad exposures. Yet it cannot tell us whether the visitor liked the ad or even spent any substantial time viewing the ad. It still says nothing about interactivity in a many-to-many environment.
Perhaps the greatest danger of an emphasis on eyeballs is the suffocating effect it will have on the evolution of advertising in new media. Given current media planning models, the advertiser places a banner ad on one or more known Web sites much as ads are placed on television and radio and in newspapers.
But what if ads, in effect, placed themselves? That is, suppose any Web publisher could decide on their own to advertise a product and then be compensated only when the advertisement was shown to be effective?
This is what Amazon.com does in its Associates Program: an associate can independently advertise any book sold by Amazon.com but receives a commission only if a customer enters Amazon.com from the associate's site and purchases the advertised book.
The important principle here is that the media buyer is no longer in control (or even necessary!), as the ad placement process is now determined by participating Web publishers. Since this follows Ted Nelson's principle of transclusion, we call this approach transclusive advertising.
As a first step on the unpaved path toward legitimacy, the industry should adopt a standardized set of metrics. Ultimately, we need a set of integrated outcome measures that relate exposure and interactivity measures to consumer responses like attitude change, purchase intention, and purchase. Success may come from measuring consumer outcomes in the context of direct response models, rather than traditional mass media eyeballs.
Finally, as tracked or identified visitors are necessary for the medium to reach its potential as a revolution in communication between firms and customers, the industry must work to establish a mechanism for customer identification that is developed in the context of privacy, rights of consumer data ownership, and ethical behavior in the conduct of online marketing research.
Feeling Prosperous
The announcement of a contactless smartcard - able to complete a transaction within 10 centimeters of a reader terminal - suggests a move far beyond today's small plastic "purse." With cash implants, money could be at your fingertips all day long, literally - giving new meaning to direct deposit. Beyond the economic and ethical implications, this development presents a few challenges for the future of crime. One day soon, enterprising thieves may have to hack off your assets to get their hands on that chunk of change you've been sitting on.
Brand Awareness
Sailing under the colors of a religion but with an arsenal of commercial intellectual property devices, the Church of Scientology recently crushed the Cult Awareness Network. CAN was sued to death and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the sale of its assets will involve name, logos - all information properties. Yet despite a buyer-pays sanitization of confidential files, the purchaser - a Scientologist working on behalf of "individuals he cannot name" - will receive a top-to-bottom map of the anticult community. A "new" Scientology-run CAN, ironically, will have taken over an entity described in more than 100,000 print copies of anticult books as assisting those who have fallen in with cults. In the future's information warfare, truth may be sacked and reputation plundered.
