thresher

Vol. 1, Summer 2009

™
About This Book
Thresher is a quarterly publication by Freestyle Interactive.
We take a deeper look at the trends and technologies that are
shaping the world of digital marketing. Our aim is to find a
signal among the noise.

This book is written by the strategy pod at Freestyle Interactive,

a creative digital agency based in San Francisco. We hope you
find the information in these pages valuable, and we’d love to
hear your thoughts and feedback about everything within.

If you like what you read, check out some of the other musings
which the strategy pod produces:

Gary Stein: http://twitter.com/garyst3in

Scott Redick: http://conversationalnuggets.blogspot.com/
Aaron Salis: http://ralphthemagician.com/

Thanks.

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2
 Table of Contents

No.1
Mobile: Redefining the Rich Media Landscape
For Your Pocket 5
No.2
Social: Full Site Experiences Now Live On
Facebook Pages 9
No.3
User Experience: The Star Trek Issue 13
No.4
Video: Shouldn’t You Be Watching TV Instead
of Reading This? 17
No.5
Trends: The Desktop Strikes Back 21

No.6
Technology: Reality Is For Noobs 25
No.7
Realtime: Riding the Wave 29

No.8
Data: Marketing by Numbers 33

3
A photograph of what a “mobile telephony device” (also known as a cell
phone) looked like before the iPhone. This small, handheld device weighed
only 28 ounces, and allowed people to talk wirelessly for up to 60 minutes.
Unlike the expensive iPhone, the DynaTAC 8000X, pictured above, cost
only $3,995 USD.

4
N o. 1
Mobile: Redefining the Rich Media
Landscape For Your Pocket

Today, there are over 40 million people in the U.S. alone who
are active users of mobile Internet services. Of the 200 million
current users of advanced mobile data services across the U.S.
and Europe, almost 60% intend to use mobile data services
more than they currently do over the next 24 months.*

There is this notion out there that “mobile advertising,” for the
new breed of smart phones on the market today, is synonymous
with “application development.” But mobile advertising on the
iPhone doesn’t always require a full-fledged, branded
application (i.e. Virtual Zippo Lighter, Audi A4 Driving
Challenge, etc.). While that may be the holy grail of

* Nielsen Mobile – Critical Mass, July 2008 (http://bit.ly/trfn1)

5
engagement and viral distribution, there exists a wide range of
opportunities on mobile devices. †

What does this mean? After years of speculation, mobile is

finally a viable media platform. But it’s more than that —
devices like the iPhone are redefining the concept of rich media
on a mobile phone. Thanks to more than 35,000 applications
available on the iPhone platform, there are a wide range of
advertising opportunities within existing applications.

There are a number of mobile advertising networks, (i.e.

AdMob, Nokia Interactive Advertising, and even Google
AdWords) but one of the more interesting platforms is
Medialets. ‡ Medialets is a highly interactive, rich media
platform, for iPhone and Android, which allows advertisers and
agencies to capitalize on features like motion sensing and
geolocation. Rich media advertising on mobile isn’t just
something that responds to the pointer on your screen — it
interacts with the physical motion of your body, your location,
and potentially even the people and objects around you. A few
examples of creative executions using the Medialets platform
are:

A soda company creates an interactive bottle of soda

that is motion-sensitive. (The user shakes up the bottle
and it splashes all over the screen.)

A car rental company can determine that a user is

outside their typical geography and serve a CPA ad
for a discounted rate.

An electronics company showcases a new rebate

enticing users to scan a barcode at a nearby store.

† Nielsen Wire – Desire for Convenience, Features Drives Phone Innovation,

March 2009 (http://bit.ly/trfn2)
‡ Medialets – http://www.medialets.com

6

A cruise line offers deals for users in Baltimore and
Ft. Lauderdale due to proximity to their ships.

Think about a highly targeted ad buy within existing

applications that use the iPhone’s accelerometer, which mimics
the motion sensing capabilities of the Wii controller, thus giving
consumers an accurate taste of the full Wii experience.
Moreover, we could use a mobile platform like Medialets to
target people in a way never before possible: by targeting only
people within a 5-mile radius of a GameStop, and engage them
with a call to action to purchase a game at the nearest store...
and even supply them a link that gives them directions on the
quickest way to get there. That’s the power of mobile.

7
The picture above depicts a typical scene from 2003 B.F. (Before Facebook).
In the scene, you see several men (and a small dog) engaged in an outdoor
ritual known as “camping.” The exact reason for this activity is unknown,
but it’s believed that individuals engaged in this sort of activity for the social
bonding experience.

8
N o. 2
Social: Full Site Experiences Now Live On
Facebook Pages

Back in March, Facebook relaunched the entire Pages section of

the site as part of a larger redesign. This redesign brought Pages
more in-line with personal profiles. With this change, brands
have now realized that Facebook can be more than just a
discussion board – it can be a destination too.

Facebook actively develops the application for Pages called

“Static FBML,” which allows developers a high level of
customization for Pages through FBML (or FaceBook Markup
Language). FBML is an evolved subset of HTML (the markup
language used to render most web pages). Some HTML
elements have been removed, while several have been developed
that support Facebook specific features and services (such as
comments, for example).

9
But why is FBML important? It’s important because it lets you
do a lot more than most people realize at first. You are not
limited to merely a standard profile. While you are somewhat
limited in terms of layout and design, FBML supports a
number of different kinds of embedded media, including
Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Facebook has made it a
priority to maintain a partnership with Adobe in order to
provide tight integration with the Adobe Flash Platform – both
within Facebook.com, and outside of Facebook through
Facebook Connect and Adobe AIR. A Flash experience can
now live on an individual’s Facebook profile as an application,
on a Page, and on the desktop as an AIR application; and
wherever that application lives, it has full access to a user’s
Facebook information.

What does a really custom Facebook Page look like? It looks like
the TD Money Lounge by Canada Trust, which helps college
students learn about post graduation career options; or Target’s
Facebook Page, which has a number of interactive Flash units.*†
You may notice that the default landing tab for these Pages is
not the standard Wall with newsfeed, but rather a custom tab.
That’s because Facebook allows you to re-direct non-fans, and
people who aren’t logged into Facebook, to any tab you want.
You have a 760px-wide canvas that you can basically do
anything you want with in order to entice Facebook users to
become a fan of your Facebook Page and actively participate in
a conversation about your brand or your cause.

Why use Facebook Pages?

The Adobe Flash platform is highly integrated with

Facebook. Almost anything you’d want to do, you can
do.

* Canada Trust – TD Money Lounge Fan Page(http://www.facebook.com/

tdmoneylounge)
† Target – Target Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/target)

10

Facebook Pages are more than “just groups.” They
can be fully interactive site experiences in their own
right, and even serve as an e-commerce platform.‡

The audience is already there, and the structure

which fosters conversations is built-in. When Target
wants to launch a new campaign, they can launch it
on Facebook and start from a base of 250,000+
people – with zero paid media.

Facebook publishes their own set of guidelines for how people,

companies, and businesses should think about using Pages. It’s a
good starting point, but the takeaway is simple: A Facebook
Page doesn’t have to be an add-on or an extra. For the right
audience, a Facebook Page is a destination.

‡TechCrunch – Facebook Payment Platform To Enter Testing Soon. Only 7

Months Late., May 2009 (http://bit.ly/trfn3)

11
A typical control panel from a late model computer. Without access to the
Internet, these early computers were only capable of creating pornography
from a predefined set of images. The operator would create the images by
adjusting the switches and nobs on the dashboard, while the user in the other
room viewed the animated GIF on a 13” color view screen.

12
N o. 3
User Experience: The Star Trek Issue

Remember Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – the one where they go
back in time to save the whales? At one point, Mr. Scott needs
to make some transparent aluminum to repair the Enterprise.
He sits down in front of a computer and starts asking it
questions. Disappointed by the Mac’s lack of response, Scotty
starts typing away and constructs the blueprint for the futuristic
material, much to the amazement of FlexiCorp engineers.

We’re closer to Mr. Scott’s expectations of what a computer can

do than you might think. A few existing technologies could be
combined together to create a user interface worthy of Gene
Roddenberry.

Cloud computing. The Internet has been abuzz with the

release of Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha feels at first like

13
an odd science-and-math search engine. * But it’s not a search
engine. It’s something else.

The makers of Wolfram|Alpha call it a “computational

knowledge engine.” The engine isn’t meant to retrieve data – it’s
meant to manipulate data. It was built by the same people who
built Mathematica, the sophisticated math software. Right now
the site is focused on purely mathematical queries. So, with
Wolfram|Alpha we learned that:

San Francisco’s population is 34.58% the size of the

population in Paris.

It was a rainy day in Boise, Idaho on July 1, 1982

with an average wind speed of 7 mph.

The distance from our sun to Rigel Kentaurus A is

4.29 light years.

The full implications of this remain to be seen, but it is perhaps

the most tangible expression of cloud computing yet. Rather
than software making these calculations on your desktop, it’s all
happening within your browser.

On-the-fly user-created mashups. Mozilla is developing an

interesting browser extension called Ubiquity. † Ubiquity is
better experienced than explained, but the short explanation is
that it’s an application that does whatever you tell it to do. Let’s
say you are making plans to have dinner with your friend Sarah,
and you want to email her a review and directions to Dosa in
the Mission. Right now you’d open up Gmail, open up a second
window for Yelp, look up Dosa, and copy and paste that info
into your Gmail. With Ubiquity, you call up the command
window and tell Ubiquity, “email Sarah the Yelp review and
map for Dosa.” That’s it. Done.

* Wolfram|Alpha – http://www.wolframalpha.com
† Mozilla Ubiquity – http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/ubiquity/

14
Voice recognition. Voice recognition is becoming a
mainstream technology with the iPhone. The first thing you do
when you get an iPhone is go to a bar and show off the amazing
Shazam app – which tells you what song is playing on the
jukebox. The new iPhone 3GS has a voice control function that
lets you make calls and call up songs with voice commands.
Ubisoft has developed games like Tom Clancy’s Endwar that
uses voice recognition to issue squad commands and the like.

What this all means:

Consumers will continue to demand more intuitive

web interfaces that mimic the way we think, speak
and act in our normal life, not just when we are on
the computer.

Functionality like Ubiquity could have a profound

impact on the Web publishing economy, as users no
longer need to visit sites like Yelp to interact; thus they
no longer need to see ads on those sites.

With open APIs, intriguing opportunities exist for

applications that utilize multiple data sets. ‡ Imagine
an engine that takes data from Twitter and runs it
through Wolfram’s computational algorithms to
pinpoint the historical context.

As voice recognition adoption increases, we can

propose new highly functional and entertaining
marketing experiences, especially on smart phones.

Transparent aluminum, dilithium crystal-powered

space ships, and time travel are just around the
corner!§

‡API stands for Application Programming Interface.

§Transparent aluminum actually exists. It is known as aluminium oxynitride,
and is technically a ceramic, not a metal alloy. (http://bit.ly/thresherfn4)

15
Today, many of us enjoy watching moving pictures on our color televisions,
but such devices did not always exist. Before TV, people enjoyed spending
time listening to radio broadcast on an AM radio like the one pictured above.
People would often listen for hours on end, without any visual stimulation at
all. Amazing, but true.

16
N o. 4
Video: Shouldn’t You Be Watching
TV Instead of Reading This?

According to Nielsen, the answer is yes. The Nielsen Three Screen

Report found that the average American watches 153 hours of
TV every month at home. While that might seem absurd, the
more comprehensive Video Mapping Study by the Council for
Research Excellence, or CRE, has found similar results.* The
bottom line is clear: people are spending more time than ever
before watching TV. Viewers are exposed to, on average,
roughly an hour a day of live TV ads and promos.†

* Nielsen Wire – Desire For Convenience, Features Drives Phone Innovation,

March 2009 (http://bit.ly/thresherfn5)

† Council for Research Excellence – Video Mapping Study, March 2009

(http://bit.ly/thresherfn6)

17
Both the Nielsen report and the CRE report were done, not by
survey, but by actually shadowing individual consumers
throughout the day and recording their media habits. Both
came to the same general conclusion – people are watching a
tremendous amount of TV. The two age blocks with the lowest
TV consumption? Young adults (18-24) and 35-44; TV
comprises less than half of their exclusive daily screen time.†
Exclusive daily screen time, in this case, refers to the amount of
time spent with the TV and no other secondary or tertiary
screen, like a notebook or iPod.

TV never went away, and it isn’t going to. We often think of the
Internet as being the “New TV.” While that may be true for
some, it isn’t true for most. Rather, Internet video is now
running parallel to TV. People are watching short-form content
created by Revision 3 and College Humor alongside Lost and
24. It’s more important now than ever to have an integrated
campaign that lives on multiple platforms.

What we know about video:

Except for the teenage years, viewing of traditional

television increases with age; the viewing of video on
the Internet peaks among young adults while viewing
mobile video is highest in the teen years.

Men watch video on mobile phones more than

women, and women watch video on the Internet and
TV more than men.

Those under the age of 55 are media multi-taskers.

Roughly 30% of their media time is shared between
two or more screens. (i.e. watching a video on
YouTube with the TV on in the background)

The work day (M-F,
9am to 5pm)
continues to be

primetime for Internet video.

18
A medium like TV will never die – it will simply evolve. More
and more users might be sharing screen time with other devices,
but even still they are consuming video content. Because video
is an asset that can easily be repurposed for multiple platforms,
there’s an added benefit to creating really compelling TV spots.
Take the spots that Pepsi ran during the Super Bowl, for
example, which directed users to partake in a larger site
experience and to discover more content on YouTube. Or have
a look at the recent Honda spot, Let It Shine, which was
originally shot for TV, but has been repurposed for the web and
lives on Vimeo as part of an Internet video experience with an
interesting new spin on the page-takeover.‡ Great TV can live
anywhere, but making the same spot great on the web or mobile
phone takes a little extra thinking, and a more strategic
understanding of how consumers interact with their screens.

‡Honda Insight – Let It Shine on Vimeo, April 2009 (http://

www.vimeo.com/4281939)

19
Before the invention of things like RSS and Adobe AIR, people were forced
to consume information by venturing out into meatspace and “purchasing” a
loose bundle of papers known as the newspaper. In the picture above, you
see a street vendor trying to peddle his newspapers. These newspapers often
contained advertising. Some were even printed in multiple colors.

20
N o. 5
Trends: The Desktop Strikes Back

The savior of print advertising may well be... the desktop. Yes,
the desktop. Newspapers and magazines have had a hard time
monetizing their content on the web. The problem is simple:
Now that the web is ubiquitous (and mostly free), far fewer
people feel compelled to buy newspapers. In order to stay
relevant in the face of this shift, publications like The New York
Times have gone online. At first, they charged for premium
subscriptions, but few people paid for their services. So few, in
fact, that they dropped them. Instead, the costs are now paid for
by filling their pages so full of ads that they become hard to
read, as the actual articles get pushed further and further into
smaller and smaller columns.

But that may well change in the not too distant future. People
may finally start buying digital copies of newspapers and other
print applications, thanks to Adobe AIR.

21
Applications like the Times Reader are paving the way for a
new kind of desktop experience.* For a nominal fee ($3.45/wk),
you can have what is, essentially, the entire print publication
pushed out to your desktop client. There’s a free version too,
although your access is limited to front page article content. It’s
all rendered beautifully, and with minimal obtrusive advertising.
They’ve created a new way to deliver material on the web. It’s
not an RSS feed, it’s not a website, and it’s not an expensive
premium service. It’s something entirely new.

And the The New York Times Company hasn’t stopped there.
They’ve become keen on the idea of creating applications that
will help them learn more about the kinds of information
people share. They have created an application called ShifD,
which lets people share notes and other location based
information through an Adobe AIR application that sits on the
desktop.†

(RED) has also created an interesting application, called

(RED)Wire, which lets users subscribe to a service that pushes
out new content (music and music videos) to a desktop client on
a weekly basis for a small fee.‡ These applications are paving the
way for a new kind of owned media channel.

Even Fallon has created their own Adobe AIR application,

Skimmer, which allows users to bring not only Facebook and
Twitter to the desktop – but also Flickr, YouTube and Blogger.§
Why would an advertising agency create a desktop social media
application? Because it also allows them access to a wealth of
information about users social media habits. It also allows them
to bring the Internet to the desktop in an interesting way; and
parts of this application can be repurposed for any number of
other prospective projects.

* The Times Reader – http://timesreader.nytimes.com

† ShifD – http://shifd.com
‡ (RED)Wire – http://www.redwire.com
§ Skimmer – http://www.fallon.com/skimmer

22
Why the desktop?

With Adobe AIR, the sky’s the limit in terms of

creative executions. You aren’t limited by dimensions
or browser capabilities.

People are willing to pay for the convenience of

having content pushed out directly to their desktop.
Think of it as an RSS feed... on steroids... with as
much rich media and interactivity as you can
imagine.

You don’t always need an Internet connection to use

the application or access content, since it can be
downloaded locally.

In a world where people are browsing with a dozen different

tabs open in their browser, it makes sense to consider creating
applications and experiences that live outside the browser and
in their own space. Well, at least until we start running a dozen
different applications on our desktop; at which point we’ll need
a new kind of application to help us manage those as well.

23
Before augmented reality, there was virtual reality. In 1995, Nintendo
released a portable video game console called “Virtual Boy,” which allowed
users to experience video games in a whole new way – by creating
irreversible damage to one’s retinas. The user would look into the goggles,
and the unit would display a world of red, 3D wireframes.

24
N o. 6
Technology: Reality Is For Noobs

Augmented reality (or AR) has been around for a while now, but
it has mostly been a gimmick. AR lets you use the webcam on
your computer to create virtual 3D objects you can manipulate
within the video. How? The camera looks for a specific barcode
or marker on a piece of paper, and then maps a 3D object to
that space, which you can interact with and move around. Car
manufacturers have adopted this technology as a way to let
people play with a 3D model of their cars. BMW took it a step
further and created an application for their new Z4 Roadster
that would let a car drive off of the paper and onto your desk.
You can see a video of this in action on YouTube, or try it out
yourself.*† As cool as this is, up until now it has provided no real
utility to the consumer outside of an “Oh, wow” moment. And

* YouTube – New BMW Z4 in 3D, April 2009 (http://bit.ly/thresherfn8)

† BMW Z4 in 3D Augmented Reality – http://www.bmw.co.uk/z43d

25
while that may have been the point thus far, AR has finally
turned a corner and headed down a useful street.

Enter Wikitude, the first real application of AR that actually

enhances reality. ‡ Look through your phone, wherever you are,
and Wikitude lets you access Wikipedia as you look at real world
objects through your mobile phone. It knows where you are and
what you’re looking at. It is truly the stuff of science fiction.
Looking at the Eiffel Tower? Wikitude will overlay content from
the Wikipedia article on your screen in a callout box. Currently,
Wikitude only works on Google Android phones.

IBM recently launched a similar project, IBM Seer, using AR

in a branded context for Wimbledon 2009.§ IBM Seer also runs
on Google Android, and provides detailed information overlays
about placemarks around Wimbledon. They also aggregated
tweets happening around Wimbledon in order to display real-
time information within the IBM Seer application.

In the gaming arena, Nintendo is trying to elevate the entire

category. with a game called GhostWire. The game uses the
video capabilities of the new Nintendo DSi to create the
impression that the handheld itself has the ability to detect
paranormal activity. It’s an innovative idea, one which opens the
doors to all kinds of other possibilities. If you watch the trailer,
you get the feeling that it might even be a little too real. It brings
a whole new meaning to the term, “immersive gameplay.”**
Eventually, we may see games that require you to be in a
particular physical location, or obtain some physical object, in
order to unlock something in-game.

AR is really just getting started, but right now we can

do two things:

1. Manipulate virtual objects in the real world.

‡ Wikitude World Browser– http://bit.ly/thresherfn9

§ IBM Seer – http://www.wimbledon.org/ibm/
** GhostWire Trailer – http://bit.ly/thresherfn10

26
 2. Overlay information from anywhere onto the real
world landscape.

Only now, with handhelds like the Palm Pre and HTC G1, we
have the processing power to make these sorts of experiences
possible on a mobile platform; and that’s really why it’s making
the transition from expensive eye candy toys to useful
applications that people really want to interact with. It’s just a
matter of time until the science fiction behind films like Minority
Report becomes a standard advertising tool. How long until you
can walk past a bus stop advertisement and see a 3D render of
yourself wearing a new pair of Levi’s jeans? Probably not that
long.

27
In the picture above, a young woman is seen using an early beta version of
Twitter. Early versions of Twitter did not support geolocation and only
supported up to 139 characters of text. All tweets had to be saved locally –
on paper. In order to search for hashtags, users would have to manually
rearrange thousands of pieces of paper by hand.

28
N o. 7
Realtime: Riding the Wave

Information, and how we search for information, is moving into

a new era of accessibility. We are moving into a world where
you don’t have to go out and get information – instead, it comes
to you. We’re moving into a world where information on any
given topic, event, or conversation is available to everyone as it
happens, not after. This is the future of real-time information.

Today, we use email and leave comments. All our information

gets archived, and then we search for it. This is the fundamental
concept behind Google’s search service. With today’s search
engines, we search for information on billions of websites that
have been archived and indexed. Tomorrow we won’t.
Tomorrow we’ll search through streams of information. Right
now, Google is already testing a new version of their search

29
engine, code-named Caffeine, which is designed to adapt to this
new trend.*

Twitter has shown us the power of instant information and the

ability to search it. When Michael Jackson died, it got posted on
TMZ first, and everyone on Twitter knew about it before the
mainstream media outlets even got word of a possible event.
This is the kind of world we are moving into.

Now that we have high-speed data access on cell phones and

wireless access in almost every coffee shop and bookstore, we
have instant access to almost everything on the Internet. But
that’s not enough. If the past ten years have been about creating
an enviroment where we have instant access to information on
any device, the next 10 years may very well be about accessing
information as soon as it’s created.

And Google isn’t stopping with their new search engine. Google
is paving the way for an entirely new communication platform –
Google Wave, which will allow people to collaborate, search,
and communicate in real time with hundreds of other users. If
you want to get a taste of what this new enviroment might be
like, just have a look at the existing Google Docs/Spreadsheets
application. You can have a dozen different people compose a
document or spreadsheet at the same time. There’s no need to
save a file, email it, revise, iterate the file name, send it back, ad
infinitum. Just edit the file once, and everyone sees what’s
happened. Now imagine that platform, only with audio, video,
real-time instant messaging, and instant language translation...
for everything.

This is what the future is going to look like, and many

consumers are already starting to expect access to real-time
tracking and information. People are coming to expect that
relevant information is to be pushed out to them, wherever they

* TechCrunch – Caffeine: It’s Google On Red Bull, Or Something, August

2009, (http://bit.ly/TxAN7)

30
are. Facebook has changed its entire layout to better provide
users with a constant stream of information, although it’s not
quite real-time yet (it will be soon). Many of the mobile
applications for iPhone and Android now provide mobile social
networking functionality. If you’re using an application like
Brightkite, for example, and a friend stops at the Starbucks
across the street, you’ll know about it.

Developers are also getting excited about what real-time

collaboration means for the future of web applications. Anil
Dash, Vice President of Six Apart, has coined a term for this
new form of real-time information transport – pushbutton.† The
big idea here is that, not only are you going to have access to
real-time information streams, but it’s going to get delivered
right to you, like a text message or phone call might. You’ll
choose what (or who) you want to know about, and then you’ll
know as soon as something happens.

But what happens once we have instant access to instant

information? Well, at that point someone is going to have to
invent a time machine, so that we can have instant access to
trends and discussions that haven’t even happened yet.

† Anil Dash – The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real, July 2009
(http://bit.ly/4B6DsS)

31
A typical calculator used in university mathematics classes. This portable
unit, weighed in at just 27lbs. Users key in their information, and the
system prints out a response on a rolling piece of paper. This allowed users
the ability to search through their history for the first time, simply by
winding back the roll.

32
N o. 8
Data: Marketing by Numbers

Since September 12, 1998, Alex van Es’ toilet has been flushed
52,428 times, and the average flush lasts 1.34 seconds. He’s
received 42,082 letters in the past nine years. And, just in case
you were wondering, the average time his refrigerator door is
open is 31.12 seconds.

I know this because back when people were still using Netscape,
Alex set up his house with a bunch of RFID monitors and
webcams, which automatically published the data to his
website.* People started paying attention to the data he
published, doing things like correlating the items that were
being thrown in the trash can to his frequency of toilet flushing.

* Icepick – http://www.icepick.com

33
What was once an oddity is now an important cultural trend
and compelling online marketing strategy – the socialization of
personal data.

Graphic designer Nicholas Felton has created a fascinating site

called Daytum, which lets you capture and share any kind of
data you’d like. Slice and dice your sandwich-use activity; or
capture how many books you’ve read, and categorize by length
and genre. The site was inspired by his, “Feltron Annual
Report,” a personal project that elegantly captures and
publishes an astounding array of personal informatics. †

If you’re a road warrior, check out Dopplr. It’s a social network

that tracks and shares traveling information, like the carbon
footprint you generate. And Bedposted promises to give you
insight into your love life, so you can analyze how often you
have sex, with whom, and in what position.

Brands are in on this trend as well. The world of sports, always

influenced and informed by personalized data for training, was
the first to figure it out. Nike Plus is probably the most famous
example. Capture the data about your runs via a transmitter
from your shoe to your iPod, then publish it. Now Garmin,
Adidas, and a host of other sports brands are pursuing similar
strategies.

Fiat EcoDrive analyzes your driving habits. You download the

application, then plug a USB cord into the card, and learn
whether your driving habits are environmentally friendly or not.
Along the way you get a whole bunch of data about your
driving, which might lead you to start thinking differently about
well ingrained driving habits.

This sharing of personal data appeals to a number of innate

human drives that are only exaggerated on the Internet. The
first is that it we are inherently interested in ourselves.

† Feltron Eight – http://www.feltron.com

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Personality and style quizzes are a staple of magazines. Now
combine that with real time polling data on the Internet, and
we not only learn something about ourselves, we importantly
understand how we stack up against everyone else. And as The
New York Times notes, “For students of personal informatics, the
practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t
random, and are more orderly than some might expect.”‡

These data streams are exactly the kind of thing that are fun
and easy to share on social networks. Brands that can co-create
these streams with their consumers will enjoy the benefits of an
amplified presences on these networks. And as this capability
becomes more frequently built into products – and built into the
marketing of those products – the information will cease to be
seen as a novelty and be perceived as a necessity.

We used to think of data as something that informs marketing.

Now data can be the marketing itself.

‡ The New York Times – The New Examined Life, December 6, 2008

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