Phorm is requiring that users opt in to the latest test of its ISP-based behavioral targeting platform, according to Online Media Daily:

Unlike the case in previous trials, BT will only deploy the platform, “Webwise,” with subscribers who have affirmatively agreed to receive targeted ads. For the initiative, BT intends to intercept 10,000 users with a Web page asking whether they wish to sign up for Webwise, which it touts as offering “more relevant” ads. The company also promises that it will help protect users from online fraud by alerting them when they land on suspected malware sites.

I think this is the appropriate move — that people get to choose whether they want it — but what I’m really interested in is how many will? How compelling is the ‘relevant ad’ offer? What percentage of the 10,000 will go for it?

Personally, I think anything better than 100 could be considered a success for the company. 1% acceptance of an untried and uncommon service is a pretty good return.

Phorm’s uptake is critically important, because it will represent the best test to date of how people value privacy and relevance.

We Internet users have shown ourselves more than willing to trade privacy for functionality: think Google or Facebook. When we are the ones who want the access, no data price is too high.

But the Phorm test doesn’t dangle a functionality demanded by consumers. What’s on offer from them is more relevant ads, something that is more of an active pain point for underperforming advertisers than for us users.

We complain about egregiously bad advertisements (see David Berkowitz’ The Chutzpah of Facebook’s Jewdar for a superb example), but are we willing to pay the price of privacy for something different?

We’ll soon find out. In the meantime, would you agree to the Phorm test if it popped up on your machine?

Digital Outsider reported today on AdSense, which offers a network of 65-inch plasma screens mounted in eight-foot panels in the most highly trafficked areas of shopping malls in 39 of the top U.S. media markets. The plasma screens display the best retail offers available in that mall at that moment.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the bit that caught my attention was buried close to the bottom:

Given this type of programming model, you’d think that AdSpace sells its advertising inventory — 11 15-second ad units per six-minute programming loop — to mall retailers, but it doesn’t. The “Today’s Top 10? programming is free to any retailers that legitimately qualify as the best deals of the week. So who buys the AdSpace ad units? Big brand marketers like Coca-Cola, AT&T, Verizon, Macy’s, Ford Motors Co., Sony Pictures, KAL brands, some of which aren’t even physically offered in the shopping mall.

…“We’re like Lucky magazine for the mall,” [AdSpace representative Dominick Porco] says. “Here’s a great cell phone at the Verizon store. It’s 50% off today. Or Ann Taylor has a great cashmere sweater and it’s 50% off today. That’s our editorial content.”

I can understand why the likes of Coca-Cola and Sony Pictures are using this opportunity to target consumers. The ones who really win the lottery here, though, are the ‘Top 10′ retailers, who—get this—often complain about selling out of their inventory too quickly when they get a slot on AdSpace.

The fact that retail promotions constitute valid editorial content is not new, but it should be the mantra of all marketers in the digital age. Relevance opens the doors to anything. The same consumers who would TiVo right past the Ann Taylor commercial at home are the ones who are screaming, “Ohmigosh, a cashmere sweater!!!” when they’re in the mall.

If you are delivering the right message at the right time, your customers will fall on their knees with gratitude.

Consider, for example, my high school classmate Dany Levy, whose what-to-buy fashion site Daily Candy sold a majority interest to Bob Pittman in 2003 for $3.5 million, and then a minority interest to a private equity firm in 2006 for $130 million. Consider, on a vastly smaller scale, the locally-ubiquitous Entertainment Books, for which people shell out $65 in exchange for a book full of ads. Yes, there are coupons in there, too, but you get my point. People will pay to be advertised to, if the ads are special and unique and relevant and help them get into the inner circle.

Here is the problem: marketers and product developers and publishers think new media is different, it’s game-changing, we don’t know how to handle it. But the rules are actually simple, and they’re no different to the marketing mantras of a century ago. Put yourself in the consumers’ shoes. Think about what they care about, what problems they have, what they’re afraid of. Then help them achieve, solve, and alleviate. Whether you are doing this virtually or physically makes no difference.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

It is always, and only, about people.

Your feedback is welcome!

Last month, I complained that I was losing the RSS-feeds battle: I had more than 2,300 unread items in the queue, and the situation was rapidly getting worse.

Right now, I have 28 unread items.

My GMail account used to have hundreds of unread emails on any given day. Nowadays, I clear it daily.

Here are the techniques I used to conquer my information overload:

1. Commit to blazing through this stuff every day, without fail.

One of the things that kept happening to me was that I’d leave things unread that I wanted to devote more attention to. ‘I’ll go back to that when I really have the time to look at it,’ I thought. Of course, what ended up happening was that I had so many things to go back to that I never went back to them. In addition, I made the decision about what I wanted to devote more attention to with insufficient data—before I had even looked at the item in question. I had 300 email messages (mostly news-type messages), with no idea of the relevance of each one.

Today, I look at every email, quickly, to decide if I really want to pursue it further. Of course, a lot of them are irrelevant, and it’s amazing how easy, freeing, and gratifying it is to give something a glance and move on.

I do the same with Bloglines, especially with feeds like the New York Times that add items continually. Realistically, most of the NYT items aren’t directly relevant to me, and it feels a lot better to continually clear them out than to have that bold 200 unread items mocking me.

2. Unsubscribe from stuff that just isn’t working for you.

When I first started with Bloglines, I subscribed to everything, and it all seemed interesting. What I found, though, was that the effort involved to keep up with prolific sites like Engadget and Gizmodo outweighed the value I was getting from them. Don’t get me wrong; these sites are spectacular and worthwhile. They’re just too far outside my ‘relevance zone’ for me to spend the time reviewing them.

3. Have a strategy for how you’re going to follow up with the stuff you DO like.

I generally use Bloglines for a quick browse, for a flick through, for a summary overview. When I see something I want to comment on, or something worth blogging about, or something particularly relevant, I click on it to open it in a new tab. What happens is this: I spend 30 minutes racing through Bloglines and end up with 10 or so tabs to follow up on, a way better situation than not spending any time on Bloglines and having 1,500 unread items.

5. Make sure there’s some stuff in there you look forward to.

My daily Dilbert entices me to visit Bloglines on a regular basis. Once I’m there, I see all the unread items and that spurs me into action (see step 1). There are a couple of other feeds in there that are sheer joy as well, so it’s not only homework. This is a great help on the motivation side of things.

5. Accept the fact that you can’t know everything.

It’s a fact. Accept it.

What techniques do you use? Put them in the comments; if we get enough, I’ll compile them into a community post.

On a side note, this morning I got an email about the Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year contest. I immediately clicked on it, and the first word I looked at was ‘infomania’: the tendency to give immediate attention to incoming messages such as email, text messages, etc., resulting in constant distraction and a corresponding drop in the recipient’s attention levels and work performance.

Boy did I feel stupid!

Paul Miller from Talis is doing some terrific work to move forward the conversation on the semantic web. He’s spoken with luminaries like Danny Ayers and Nova Spivack, and last Friday he had a chat with us.

From our perspective, it was a real pleasure. Paul is wonderful and wonderfully intelligent; he had obviously done his homework. We spoke about mapping human intention, privacy, user experience, and the semantic web. I hope you enjoy it and I welcome your feedback.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [40 mins, 19Mb]

On his post, Paul included the below information; I thought it was both professional and useful so I’m copying him!

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Built to Last
• Metawealth
• mywebDNA browser extension
• VortexDNA
• Minimax Consulting

This piece was published in SearchInsider on Friday. In it, I make the point that the way to improve search is to remember that the people searching, and their intentions, are what really matter.

Microsoft is the latest to take a stab at deciphering intent, outlining updates to Live Search in a pair of well-titled blog posts: Do What I Mean, Not What I Say! (part I and part II). In it, they describe new semantic features that they hope will take them further along the road to disambiguating user intent:

1. AutoSpell Correction
   Microsoft’s description of this is kind of funny, because they make a direct comparison to Google’s treatment of suspected spelling errors without, of course, referring directly to Google:

   If we are absolutely, completely, totally, “no doubt about it” confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a “Did you mean _______?” link at the top…
   …With AutoSpell correction I get the correct result the first time, regardless of the misspelling. Instead of being two clicks away from pizza, I’m just one. Being two clicks away just keeps people hungry, rather than satisfying their intent!

   Google, of course, has been checking spelling for years, but evidently their agonizingly long two-click process of asking, ‘Did you mean…’ has deprived searchers of much-needed pizza.

2. Stemming
   Stemming is about knowing when you mean ‘books’ instead of ‘book’ but not ‘cables’ instead of ‘cable’.
3. Equivalencies
   Equivalencies are abbreviations and other instances of words whose meanings were heretofore known to searchers but not to engines. The example Microsoft gives is ‘CA CHP’, meaning California, California Highway Patrol (although why you’d need the redundant California is beyond me).
4. Intelligent ‘Stop Word’ Retention
   Stop words, like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, etc., are typically discarded by Google, even though sometimes they add value. The example Microsoft gives is ‘The Office’, which is an entirely different query than ‘office’.

These features are aimed at what I call ‘structural semantics’: the ability to ascribe meaning based on the structure of the query.

Laurie Petersen at Online Media Daily recently discussed a different approach from Acxiom:

DATABASE MARKETING GIANT ACXIOM TODAY officially launches its Relevance-X products designed to allow marketers to make online media buys…
“We’re really excited about this,” said Rich Howe, Acxiom’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “We’re bringing our knowledge and experience in direct marketing to the online channels to give clicks context–going far beyond basic information such as age, gender and household income to include the attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles of consumers that are much more predictive.” [emphasis mine]

According to the article, Acxiom has been seeing click-through rates double or triple in tests of the Relevance-X system: powerful numbers.

The ability to successfully map a user’s intention has tremendous implications for how people access the Internet, and it’s a worthwhile exercise to imagine an Internet that responded and adapted directly to the individual, in real time. Imagine, for example, how your usage of StumbleUpon might change if you knew that StumbleUpon would deliver the exact web page most relevant to you personally, every time.

The company that I blog for, VortexDNA, is also in the business of intention mapping. Our technology is based on the knowledge that an individual’s purpose and values can be used to predict relevance. Human intention is structured according to the mathematics of complex systems, and therefore can be understood.

Microsoft, Acxiom, and VortexDNA: we’re all saying the same thing. Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid says it too:

…it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.

You said it, Hugh. People matter. Not objects, or keywords, or stemming, or equivalencies. These are all tools to help us understand the people behind the queries and deliver what they want.

When it comes to search, the road to heaven is paved with user intention.

Summary: Database giant Acxiom has just confirmed VortexDNA’s value proposition by including attitudes and beliefs in their relevance technology. The predictive value of who you are and what you believe is significantly greater than that of context.

Those of you who follow this blog regularly know that the foundation of VortexDNA’s relevance technology is that an individual’s purpose and values can be used to predict relevance.

Going by a piece by Laurie Petersen at Online Media Daily today, we’re not the only ones who know this to be true:

DATABASE MARKETING GIANT ACXIOM TODAY officially launches its Relevance-X products designed to allow marketers to make online media buys…

“We’re really excited about this,” said Rich Howe, Acxiom’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “We’re bringing our knowledge and experience in direct marketing to the online channels to give clicks context–going far beyond basic information such as age, gender and household income to include the attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles of consumers that are much more predictive.” [emphasis mine]

According to the article, Acxiom has been seeing click-through rates double or triple in tests of the Relevance-X system: powerful numbers.

Even without the boost from tapping into consumer attitudes, behavioral targeting is far more effective than contextual targeting. Consider what this Research Brief from the Center for Media Research has to say:

…a study on consumer receptivity to online advertising… found that more online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising, outperforming contextual by as much as 22 percent in some categories.

Marla R. Schimke, vice president of marketing at Revenue Science, said “… (this report shows that) behavioral targeting is more effective than contextual advertising for advertisers, publishers, and for consumers… This study… reaffirms our belief that Internet users favor advertising relevant to them personally…” [emphasis mine]

When that brief says, “relevant to them personally,” they’re saying we know you like computers so we’ll show you ads about computers. The validation of VortexDNA’s technology has shown that it’s possible to go far, far deeper than that: link relevance can be accurately predicted based on who you are, what your purpose in life is, and what you value above all.

And VortexDNA technology can do this without ever tracking history.

This concept is not standalone, either; companies can use it to augment their current recommendation technology rather than replace it.

Imagine the power of a search engine that integrates VortexDNA technology with existing keyword relevance matching. Imagine how gratifying it would be for an ecommerce site improve their recommendations to you based on what you really care about.

Do you have an ecommerce site? A search engine? An ad platform? Do you just find this topic intriguing? Leave a comment below or email me privately (kaila @ vortexdna.com). Let’s begin a conversation.

This is a dramatic shift in how we look at relevance, and we’d love for you to participate with us.