Four Design Links: October 1, 2009
Happy Thursday. Happy October! Happy Anniversary!! Time for Four Design Links. This week features stories about advertising and data. Dig in!
1. Unilever’s “Crowdsourcing” Outted as High-Tech Spec
Unilever, which encompasses dozens of popular brands such as Lipton, Bertolli, and Slim-Fast, fired the ad agency representing Peperami (British Slim Jims) and replaced it with what it calls a crowdsourcing solution.
But while most crowdsourcing involves leveraging the collective intelligence of a group for mutual benefit, Unilever marketed the call for ad ideas to professional ad agencies only. Moreover, they are offering a $10,000 bounty to the winning idea. Sound familiar? It’s the classic spec work pitch.
Advertising Age called them on it:
Crowdsourcing at its core is about mass collaboration. Unilever’s move, on the other hand, is nothing of the sort. Unilever is looking for no collaboration here. What it is looking for is to get lots of high-quality creative ideas at a significantly lower price. End of story.
UPDATE: There appears to be a whole section on NO!SPEC regarding unethical crowdsourcing practices!
2. NYT: Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking
A new independent study of American internet users reveals that most do not support tailored or customized ads, particularly when told about various tracking methods advertisers use to generate them. Almost 90% of those polled objected to ads created from data gathered from offline (brick and mortar) shopping.
Another interesting finding was that the majority of younger people (those who tend to voluntarily post information to social media sites) do not approve of online tracking.
One implication cited by both marketers and privacy advocates was that more transparency about tracking methods and policies is needed. Many who took the survey did not know how their data was being used nor their rights regarding this information.
From a design ethics standpoint, data collection policies are worth talking about. How many of us know what information is being collected about us? What can we do about it? One can opt-in or opt-out to tailored content or privacy settings, but is this really good enough?
3. This We Know
This We Know is the first effort from a team of developers and analysts whose goal is to present public information from data.gov in ways which are easy to understand. The website is smartly designed, with attractive, clear displays and plain-English descriptions of data.
4. Over 1 million people are using Facebook right now.
Need some social media data to share with your clients? Senior O’Reilly Media analyst Ben Lorica has a new post detailing the latest Facebook statistics.
Among his findings:
- Facebook has only reached 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa. Lorica feels there is plenty of market available, which is a sign that Facebook could continue its already astonishing growth rates.
- Most of the current growth from Asia is in users ages 13-17.
- In the US, the fastest growing group remains those age 45 and older.
- By his estimate, there are 1.6 to 6 million people actively using Facebook right now.
| Tagged with: | Avertising, Branding, Crowdsourcing, Data, Design Ethics, Facebook, New York Times, O'Reilly, Privacy, Realtime Data, Research, Spec Work |
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Comments on this post
1.
This is interesting. I am not on Facebook or Orkut, hence what do I know, but here’s an interesting story from last month: “Where Google is really big: Brazil and India.” (NY Times, Bits, Sept. 14). It says, “Orkut, Google’s social network, which has been a failure pretty much everywhere else in the world, is No. 1 in those two countries,” and “India is ranked seventh, and Brazil ninth, in terms Internet use globally. They are also two of the fastest-growing markets.”
And it’s true, Facebook’s market penetration in these two countries is relatively low but booming. Just thought of positioning Facebook in relative terms. The question then: where does Twitter feature on this map? Cheers!