Everything carries on as usual

Lord Salisbury, a late Victorian Prime Minister said something I have never forgotten. "One thing long experience of life has taught me is that you never should trust experts."

With what delight I read this morning that organic food does you no good at all.

And with what disgust I read that the Great Prudent Stalinist Toad, saviour of the poor, has over the last 12 years created a tax system whereby the poorest people pay the most tax - 27.9% of their gross income, whereas the richest pay only 10%.

And with what a morbid sense of utter predictability I read that this masterly economist feels it is a good idea to spend £1 billion more of our money on creating non-jobs for unemployed people.

The first 47,000 jobs will cost £300,000,000 - just under £64,000 per job.

Er ... are you on the right planet, Bloato? Did you miss the classes on adding, subtracting and all that at school?

Letting that demented spendthrift anywhere near the National Till reminds me of the old joke about giving a gallon of beer to a drunk.

You know exactly what he's going to do with it. You're just not sure which wall it will end up against.

Fresh in from the mysterious kingdom of Bolloxiana

The following example of the triumph of the incomprehensible was sent to one of my loyal readers, Brian Wright, who hoped I might translate.

The clearly unemployable author whose name I leave out from kindness is from a firm called SynGro, who - judging by his language - specialise in some kind of fertiliser, and his email read:

Further to my email below, would you like to set-up an introductory meeting to explore if/how we could bring benefit to *******?

With the continuing decline in customer satisfaction for airline passengers, this is an opportune time for ******* to ensure competitive advantage by continuing their excellent customer experience record through a customer advocacy programme, which will result in increased customer retention/recovery/acquisition and product/service uptake.

We can help you achieve this by assisting your company create an action-orientated continual improvement environment, based on objective, proactive and reactive customer feedback – our process and software allows for continual customer feedback to be provided real-time to the responsible individuals within an organisation – those that are empowered to act on and resolve customer issues – this instantaneous line of sight, as we like to call it, can therefore be applied to the front line, back office staff and management, ensuring the voice of the customer is seamlessly integrated through the relevant facets of the business – for example, this actionable insight could be applied to sales processes (including your website), reservation, check-in, boarding, baggage, in-flight services, operational routes, flight times, pricing and so on – so that your customers’ needs and expectations can be satisfied, but more importantly, exceeded, continuously.

I’m positive a short meeting will be highly beneficial, even if you aren’t in a position to pursue further. Would August/September suit?

This is the first time I have actually seen the automatic bullshit generator actually used by a firm. Well done, young man! You will undoubtedly get the clients you deserve, failing which a place in the government probably beckons.

Oh, and sorry, Brian - I have no more idea what he's talking about than you do, but he is quite clearly as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

Another libinous suggestion from Valladares

I'm desperately busy at the moment but I couldn't resist relaying the latest from my friend Daz Valladares.

He works with lots of tourist boards - in fact knows more about the subject than anyone I know. Or maybe he just has a deep streak of cynicism. Or perhaps the first simply begets the second.

"The Monsoon rains have fallen heavily on the west coast of India but not in Bihar. Farmers there are so incensed that they have decided to embarrass the Gods.

Their young unmarried daughters will plough the land in the nude, chanting ancient hymns to invoke the celestial beings responsible for rain. They vow to continue till their prayers are answered.

Could this be a ruse to attract tourists?"

Intimations of idiocy

Every day I see fatuous statements I mean to comment on – but rarely get round to.

On Sunday I noticed:

1. A sign in a small charity shop in School Road, Sale seeking people to “play key roles” there. Doing what, pray? Cleaning the toilets? The word key should be banned unless referring to something that opens doors.

2. The prime minister saying upon the death of Britain’s oldest man that “I had the privilege of meeting Henry many times.” Gordon, will you be so kind as to keep quiet for a minute, breathe calmly, then make your way to the nearest home for the mentally disturbed?

3. Some idiot who works for Boris Johnson (an incipient megalomaniac, by the way) calling a scheme for cyclists “iconic.” This almost pips the time some brain-dead marketing journalist called Walker’s Crisps an “iconic” brand.

When the world comes to an end, it will not be because of swine flu - which I rather hoped was something that only killed members of parliament - or global warming. It will be because nobody knows what words mean.

Incidentally I have just decided that things like Twitter are the online equivalent of people who talk in loud voices on their mobile phones. Nobody is really that interested.

Important wisdom from Ken McCarthy. Read carefully

In case you don't know who Ken is, he's the guy who ran the first ever seminar about marketing on the internet 15 years ago.

This morning I got something from him you really should read.

For years I've summed one main point he makes by asking why you should want to waste time (and money) talking to everyone when you only need to talk to somebody. Somebody interested. It's about being relevant.

He's actually talking about video on the net, but his reasoning (and commendable contempt for idiot analysts) apply to all messages and all media. He also explains why all us old direct marketing lags tell you long copy always beats short.

Here he is, talking about predictions he's made for the past four years.

We said Internet video was going to explode, take over the Internet and shake things up in TV Land and that's pretty much what's happened.

Speaking of NOT on target, in the early days of Internet video (remember way back then?), legions of newly minted Internet video experts would loudly tell anyone who would listen that Internet videos had to be short or no one would watch them.

"Viewership drops off dramatically after two minutes."

The idiocy of this pronouncement always galled me...

=== Duh!

Of course, viewership drops off dramatically at the beginning!

That's because the video in question is not a fit for all the viewers who clicked on it. Those who are interested in the subject will watch much longer videos - and do so gladly.

Imagine if the Nielsen ratings counted all the views of people who channel surfed cable twenty times a minute. 2 seconds here on Program A. 5 seconds there on Program B. 3 seconds there. 1 second there.

By that logic cable and network TV shows should only be 5 seconds long because "the metrics" show that viewership drops dramatically after five seconds.

Well, until recently, the idiot analysts were winning. Not because they were right, but because they had the momentum of unconsidered opinion behind them.

Well, the latest stats are in and..

=== Here comes the reality check

- Last year, the top 25 shows on blip.tv averaged under five minutes. This year, the number is up to 14 minutes, roughly THREE TIMES longer - an increase accomplished in just 12 months!

- Internet video is mainstream now with about 150 million viewers in the US alone (about half the population) and the average viewer is watching 97 videos per month. Pretty amazing when you consider just five years ago, the typical Internet use was watching zero videos per month.

- Netflix has made over 12,000 feature length films available to its customers for instant streaming - and no one's complaining "they're too long."

Two interesting quotes from a recent New York Times article on this subject:

"People are getting more comfortable, for better or worse, bringing a computer to bed with them."
- Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.TV

"I think it comes down to quality winning out over minutes and seconds."
- Rob Barnett, Founder of My Damn Channel.

=== Yes, and there's more

As for computers in bed, things are really going to take off when one of the high tech rocket scientists makes it brain dead simple to search and stream online video with a TV remote and watch it through your TV set. If that doesn't toll the death knell for TV as we know it, it'll be pretty darn close.

As for quality winning? Not quite. It's not quality that matters. It's relevance.

If I am a left handed Lesbian lacrosse fan from Lithuania, I'll watch HOURS of left handed Lesbian lacrosse content from Lithuania. Quality doesn't hurt, but it runs a distant second to relevance.

=== Quality matters only this far

1) Your quality has to be "good enough" to not be totally annoying and

2) There isn't another left handed Lesbian Lithuanian lacrosse channel out there that does a better job than yours because no matter how we improve the medium, normal people only want to watch one program at a time.

=== The future

We're heading to narrowcasting, even if a few topics - sports, financial reporting, and big news - still will command big audiences.

The future market for the traditional boob tube boils down to this: 1) the technically backward, 2) the institutionalized (in prison, in hospitals, in nursing homes), 3) three year olds and younger who don't yet have the cognitive skills to manage a remote.

As I've been saying to broadcast and cable for years now: Change or die.

Ken runs www.systemintensive.com - the best if you want to understand online marketing. I'll be speaking at his next London event - and he'll be speaking at my www.eadim.com event, which is ideal if you want to understand all direct marketing. Incestuous, eh?