While the original post below was a reflection of the marketing landscape as I saw it in 2009, it was not necessarily an accurate reflection of Adblade, or said differently, it was not intended to be the story of Adblade today. Adblade was simply the vehicle by which I could vent about bad affiliates, and that is ultimately unfair to the company which was never about flogs / farticles.
I've left the original post, more to remind me of the downside to venting in a medium that has a perpetuity to it that should be considered before typing way. But, the new post is the more complete and ultimately accurate story.
Original Post on July 24, 2009
Have a flog but struggling finding extra distribution, especially on good converting inventory? Not to worry, Adblade is here for you.
Who is Adblade? If you've seen these ads, you've seen Adblade:
-- or --
So, what's the big deal?
1. Volume
Look at their growth as shown by Compete.
This isn't some small outfit any more. This is serious scale. Let's put the growth into context.
The above shows a three month chart with adblade in orange, aol in blue, yahoo in green. Speaking of context, let's show one of their ads in context.
2. Placements
Take a look at the lower right hand corner of the ad to see where it was running. Think this is they type of ad NYTimes or any large publisher who is currently providing them volume wants to see?
Here is a grab of that ad with an article:
Why Floggers? As an ad network, you have some issues in front of you for growth, a classic chicken and egg of advertisers, publishers. It's hard to move one up if the other isn't strong. Look at the success of any organic ad network, and you will find one or two keys to their success. Either they have a technology angle and great sales penetration like ContextWeb or they have a traffic hook, which is definitely the case here. They have done two things that are very difficult. They have secured placement on the premium run-of network placements - news sites, isps, and portals. More importantly, they have been given the ability to serve the ad. It's a big distinction. This means that the site owners don't get to see every ad that runs. They just show a piece of code, and if adblade or any other ad network currently afforded this privilege wanted to run something completely inappropriate, they in theory could. It also means they can run ads without those in ad operations taking much notice.
Having solved the traffic issue, Adblade must find the advertisers that will pay for these placements, which are presumably on a CPM basis. One option is to hire a sales force and go through the painful route of fighting for premium budgets or even premium remnant budgets. Ask those who have done it, and virtually none have done it without having lots of venture money to support the hiring. So, instead, why not service those who can convert run of network traffic best, which in this case are the floggers. And, they love it because how many of them (less than two) have the experience to secure these types of media spots.
Curious about their Terms and Conditions? Under Section 8, Representations, subset vii, part d, advertisers guarantee that their ads "are not false, deceptive, misleading, unethical,..." Working well, I see. Perhaps my favorite part though comes from advertiser the sign-up process itself, where they make a new advertiser acknowledge, "I understand that the Adblade ad formats are unique and proprietary, and I agree to not copy the Adblade ad layouts or designs for use anywhere other than the Adblade service."
For those curious, Adblade's founder and serial, successful entrepreneur Ash Nashed, is a medical doctor. I wonder if he has evaluated the products being promoted and tested their claims.
Arb vs. Arb Platform vs. Platform
The standard flogger is an arbitrageur, buying one off media placements for a handful of sites they run. There is limited to know technology, just grit and media savvy. Adblade services arbitragers, and similar to how some networks operate, takes media risk as well. Given their relative youth, unless they have managed the near impossible (revenue share with large publishers ala Google), it is safe to assume that they are arbitraging as well. Yet, as technology aided intermediary, they are a platform play, not a simple arbitrage play. It's much harder to do, much smarter, and the sign of real business intentions.
Criticisms aside, Adblade has built a real business that will transform from flogger paradise to a long-term player in the ad network space. The decision to service floggers is low hanging fruit for both them and for those wanting to nitpick the business. But, it is Dr. Nashed who will be laughing all the way to the bank when someone buys him for a minimum of mid-eight figures were he to sell soon or nine figures later. He is following in the footsteps of Casale Media, where in the future people will only know his business for the post-flog area. Except for me, how many reading know or even care that Casale made their money selling anti-spyware software by running pops on install inventory? With revenues topping $300mm if not $400mm for projected 2009, their publishers and buyers (ad buyers and/or acquirers) would simply overlook any potential past gray area behavior.
The story might begin, "A long time ago, back in the third
quarter of 2008, a site that looked like a blog appeared." Since then,
i.e., in less than a year, the fake blog and its relatives - the fake news site and fake
celebrity/gossip site - have taken over the web. Whether as a text ad
placement through one of the self-service networks
or as an ad on display, you can hardly navigate the web without running
into an example of fakevertising.
Years ago, in a similar media
environment, a similar phenomenon happened, where users could go to
almost any site and be assured of seeing the same type of ad running -
those for mortgage refinance. Ad networks call these campaigns
"soakers," because like a sponge they are what show when no other good
(i.e. premium) ads exist. If you've seen an ad for Classmates, or remember Colonize and the Bonzi Buddy, you've seen a soaker campaign.
Regarding mortgage ads and fakevertising, neither of these soakers were obvious
candidates for success, but once each showed signs of sticking,
companies came out of the digital woodworks to profit from the trend. Given the permeance of the fakevertised sites, the question that keeps running through my mind is whether they are the new mortgage. The answer is somewhat yes and somewhat no. Ultimately, I'd say no, and here is my thinking.
What they having in common
Run of Network - Like late night infomercials or performance-based television ads,
the economics of the campaingns might be good but not good enough to (on the whole) pay
for premium placement. For example, both
campaigns have a certain target or at least a certain demographic more
likely to convert than others. Yet, because both of their demographics make up such a large percentage of
web surfers, trying to target them would make them unprofitable. So, they are best off running (generally)
untargeted. Classmates, netflix, and other broad consumer acquisition offerings work the same way.
An Acquired Taste - People, be it site owners
and/or publishers either love the ads or hate them. For them to
succeed, the ads must grab the user's attention. NexTag and
LowerMyBills had a competition it seemed for who could create the
most irreverent ads with an entire genre of creatives being born, the
stretched dancing mammal. The goal, though, wasn't irreverence; it was
clicks; and while a bouncing stalk of corn has little to do with
refinance, given the good chances that someone who clicks could convert
(again back to the run of network, shotgun approach), they just wanted
to get people to notice. The same applies with the fakevertisers whose
ads have started to evolve from just before and after pictures to
rather interesting
Buyer Network - Fakevertising works
because it takes only a handful of companies to provide national
coverage. You don't need a different partner if you want to advertise
to women in Georgia versus New Jersey. The only real question is which
of the acai, ResV, colon, etc. will convert the best. Mortgage in its
prime, offered the same and is what allowed so many to enter. All it
took was a direct relationship with a handful of top buyers for that to translate into almost any lead generated being sold (even multiple times).
Screwing The User - Both
mortgage and fakevertisers results impact people's monthly payments.
While you could argue that mortgage refinance ads didn't set out to
screw the user, they brought with them a likelihood for abuse (now more
than obvious), with people entering into something they don't fully
understand.
Where they differ
Role of Aggregator - With any industry, the ecosystem has many players and moving pieces. It is certainly the same with these two. Mortgage has lead buyers and sellers. Sometimes the buyers advertise for their own product, sometimes just buying leads. Some sellers don't sell to any lender directly, and so on. The majority of the lead business though had lenders working with aggregators like LowerMyBills. The aggregators didn't just manage the sales, but they also generated most of their leads organically (through their own means not affiliates). Not so with fakevertising. The aggregatos here are the cpa networks that sit in between the affiliate generating traffic and the pill marketer. The pill makers hardly advertises directly and neither does the cpa network.
Affiliates
vs. Companies - A
look at who is buying the traffic shows that in the fakevertising
world, it's an affiliate driven mode (with the exception of CPX
Interactive who runs their own fakeads as an internal, house campaign.) Mortgage was very different.
There were affiliates, but the big players were specialized companies,
like LowerMyBills. NexTag played in more than mortgage, but they had an
entire business unit that in size of operations and revenue topped many
of the cpa networks. Another way of saying it is that people can make
money on fakevertising, but they are anything except a
real company. LowerMyBills might not have wanted visitors, but you could find them.
Lower Tech - Fakevertising isn't devoid of
technology, but you will hardly find any proprietary technology
involved or needed. It's differentiated only in the affiliates ability
to design, buy, and convert, all of which matter greatly and take
immense risk and skill... just not technology. Compare that to a
mortgage aggregator who had to build complex lead routing platforms,
reporting, and optimization. True, in mortgage's peak, you could be a
one or two man affiliate but not at the same scale and as competitive
with the specialists.
Screwing The User - Unfortunately,
there are no shortage of cases with users not being happy with the
outcome or either their mortgage or the no longer free trial. Where you could argue a difference is in the number of true
success stories. You just won't find them with fakevertising.
No
Exit - A number of people are making great money from the fakevertising
ecosystem, but no one will make the kind of money that the founders of
NexTag did when they successfully raised multiple rounds of capital
because they could or when they sold the company at a billion dollar
plus valuation. LowerMyBills too had a highly successful exit, and
while cynics might point out how the market for mortgage has since
changed and some frothiness might be involved, the same will not happen
in the fakevertising space.
Sales as Differentiator -
Also a result of the fakevertising being an affiliate driven model
versus a specialist (company driven one), sales matter but the
relationships aren't exclusive. The cpa networks who deal with the
continuity programs want all of their best affiliates to excel. There
are a handful of vertically integrated operators, but they don't
represent a large percentage of the total dollars, which was not the
case in mortgage. There, the companies like LowerMyBills comprised most
of the online dollars, and a key to their success was the backend-buyer
network. The same holds true with lead generation for areas like
insurance. The depth of its buyer network becomes a big advantage.
Macroeconomics
vs. Micro - Last and definitely not least, both fakevertising and
mortgage have/had the right economics to succeed in a market where
inventory abounds at affordable prices, but one was the result of a
global trend versus an relatively arbitrary concoction that just
happened to work. The products the flogs promote have been around for
quite some time, they just needed the right packaging to make them
work. And, while the flogs may bring down performance marketing, they
aren't part of a trend that could bring down the economy.
For those who read my previous tome on the Pepsi rebrand, you will notice that I am not without observations. A recurring one of those comes from LinkedIn Invites, the cornerstone of one's network and the sites viral spread. If it happens to me with the frequency with which it does (20%), I'm sure it happens to others. In this case, it's understand the LinkedIn invite process.
When inviting someone, the interface looks like this:
Wisely, LinkedIn wants the connections to count. Having a bunch of people connected who don't each other, for example, makes for a useless network and as a result an used site. Categorizing people also helps those receiving requests to better process and evaluate that request. Categorization is another good idea as a high percentage of connections that the sites more valuable users receive don't necessarily spark instant name recognition. The culture of LinkedIn though has many of these users accepting connections even if they value of that inbound request does more for the other person than the person accepting the connection. What's the issue? The categories, specifically, the first, "Colleague."
The word colleague has multiple meaning, and for a large number of people, it simply means that they work in the same industry. I'm sure that I've said when asking how I know someone that we we are colleagues, but in LinkedIn parlance, colleague has a specific meaning, and it's not working in a shared space. It's literally having worked in a shared space, i.e. a co-worker, past or present. And when selected by the requester, LinkedIn goes on the assumption that you two have worked together. And, when you haven't, it produces a suboptimal experience for the person receiving the request and leads to less accurate data being stored. Here's an example of what happens. You will receive a request like this (Thanks, Steve for being a good sport):
Unlike Facebook, though, LinkedIn has a rigid structure that doesn't allow you to classify the person as you see fit or modify the request once sent. So, in these industry colleague vs coworker mix-up situations like the one above, you could always ask the person to resend, but that's even worse than a guy blogging about the problem so people don't do that. Which, when clicking "Accept" leads to the following:
When this happens enough, LinkedIn shows this type of thank you page instead:
I'd certainly prefer a more flexible system, but given LinkedIn's ties into our professional lives, we might as well use it as efficiently as possible in order to get the most out of it, i.e. not look like we don't know what we're doing.
There
are certain things in life that move us. They drive us to act and
express our opinions passionately. Some of those things make sense and
can align for social good. Those who want to give their time helping
the less fortunate, e.g. doctors without borders; or, when someone
uncovers a harmful practice and dedicates time to making us all safer
despite the costs. Then there are things that it probably doesn't make
sense to feel passionate about. These things are easy to get upset
about, like your sports team trading a player, a store no longer
carrying an item you liked or raising the price of another, and so on.
These matter, but they don't really impact our ability to get what we
want and to live a healthy and productive life. Perhaps more
importantly, focusing on them doesn't aid our overall growth, which
could be why I certainly specialize in obsessing about this latter
category of items. So, while some people figure out how crops can grow
more efficiently in harsher cliamtes for less cost and at a lower
carbon footprint, I sit obsessing over soda, literally, i.e. PepsiCo's
decision to switch to a new logo.
Every Generation Refreshes The World Here
is one of the Pepsi commercials that played during the 2009 Super Bowl.
It is arguably the most ambitious of their slots (with others focusing
on specific products, such as Pepsi Max), as it used iconic imagery and
to the chagrin of purist Bob Dylan fans, puts one of his legendary
songs to a product. UPS has done this to a lesser extent with "Such
Great Heights" by The Postal Service, but the irony of using a song by
The Postal Service for a UPS commercial more than makes up for any
association that now happens when hearing the song. As for the real
postal service, the USPS doing that with Steve Miller's "Fly Like an
Eagle," I'm not quite so forgiving. Or, again, chalk it up to
hyper-sensitivity.
The images used in the ad above don't make sense with the product. It's not about whether
you can explain it. The point is that you don't even have to explain
it. You get it. You like it. Look at Bud Light and Coke commercials.
They tug at some emotion, all without getting the brain involved.
For the non-Pepsi aficionados, here are the pepsi logos over time.
Interestingly,
and especially if we narrow the options to the modern era - say 1962
and beyond - I bet most people would actually like the look of the new
logo better than many of the predecessors. And, the company uses the
new logo in lieu of the letter "o" or zero in a wide running offline ad
campaign in which the soda company's name doesn't even appear. Here is
an amalgomation of several uses: <print ad>
You will see these ads running everywhere from the subway to sporting events. The campaign and use of the logo led one designer to comment, "When I first saw this Pepsi ad in The New York Times I felt good about
the direction the new Pepsi branding was taking. It felt fresh, fun,
optimistic, uncomplicated. It was timely and seemed to be hitting the
right cords."
Breathtaking Doing any amount of research into Pepsi's decision to "refresh everything," especially their logo, invariably points to a design study
done by the Arnell Group, named "Breathtaking." Knowing nothing about
design studies, it's hard for a direct response guy, by experience at
least, to have a frame of reference by which to evaluate the 27 page
document. One thing is clear, from the very first section it speaks in
a language not often used at companies in the performance marketing
space. You can see it now, a landing page mockup or email creative
mockup under the heading, "BREAKING THE CODE FOR INNOVATION - From
Convention to Innovation." The answer to the question not asked is that
you will not see that, nor will you see the following in a performance
oriented company - "BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution
of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an
authentic Constitution of Design."
Regarding the PDF, you could take a more direct approach and write what Fast Company author Aaron Perry Zuker wrote in "Pepsi Logo Design Brief: Branding Lunacy to the Max." He begins, "A leaked pdf outlines the thinking behind the controversial new Pepsi
logo. It may be one of the most ridiculous things ever perpetrated by
somebody calling himself a designer." He adds, "The presentation, by the Arnell Group (also responsible for the botched design of the Tropicana
orange juice carton) contains visual representations of and comparisons
with the following: the golden ratio, the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, the
Gutenberg Bible, the earth and its magnetic fields, and the solar
system/universe. None of these things have anything to do with soda.
Zucker writes, "Every page of this document is more ridiculous than the
last ending
with a pseudo-scientific explanation of how Pepsi's new branding
identity will manifest it's own gravitational pull." Perhaps then, the
only thing truly Breathtaking about Breathtaking is its purported
multi-muliti million dollar price tag.
Says firm namesake Peter Arnell in an Adage interview,
though, "When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to
Asia,
to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it
and study it and create it," and "There was a lot of research, a lot of
consumer data points ... and
dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers.
We knew what we were doing."
Look, I can diagram the chemical composition of manure and how it
degrades to nourish the Earth, but that doesn't mean it don't stink.
Explanation and rationalization are reactive forces. Emotion is
proactive. I don't see any emotional connection in Breathtaking,
outside of the feelings the word itself articulates, only intellectual
fornication.
A Behavioral Economist Explains Branding It's
easy to join in with those who have mocked the Breathtaking study and
its narcissistic grandeur and outworldly price tag in an era of
discretion. The study, though, could still be a hoax, and its
authenticity aside, plays no contributing role in the real issue. What
initially bothered me the most is not so much the changes and reasoning
behind the change as much trying to properly articulate the reason why
the change is ineffective and thus, ultimately a waste of money. An
answer to why this change will not succeed and/or cost way to much in
order to potentially succeed, comes from an unlikely source, behavioral
economist Dan Ariely, known among researchers for his groundbreaking
work and now outside of academia for
his best seller "Predictably Irrational." (If you haven't read the
book, I can't
stress the importance of doing so.) Because many lack the time to read
and because copying passages from a book is not an effective use of
time, we've found the next better thing - a transcript of an audio
interview. This one was between Dan and Scott Schroeder, principal of rabble+rouser.
First a primer in the field of behavioral economics, as explained by Dan:
In standard economics people start by assuming that people are
rational. And then you say, “OK, so what are the consequences of this
assumption?”In behavioral economics, we don’t assume that people are
rational, we actually observe people. And in some sense the standard
economics view is more generous to people because it says people are
rational and wonderful and so on. Behavioral economics perspective says
people are mistaken. While behavioral economics is more morbid from the
prospective of looking at human rationality, it’s also more hopeful, I
think, in the sense that it tells you that you can build, actually, a
better world. If we understand where people fall short, you can also
think about how we improve things.
The
Coke / Pepsi Challenge is a classic marketing experiment, confusing
because each company has can get the results they want. But how? Here
is Dan:
So Pepsi used the Pepsi
challenge and they found that people liked Pepsi; and then Coke did the
Coke challenge and they found that people liked Coke. Well, if you look
deeper into that you’ll see that Pepsi was doing blind taste testing.
So people took two white cups and tried them out and said I like the
one on the right or I like the one on the left. When Coke did their
tasting it was not blind—you could see which one was Coke and which was
Pepsi. Could that be the difference? Well, it turns out it is. When
people drink Coke and they know it’s Coke, they like Coke better. When
they drink Coke and Pepsi and they don’t know which is which, they like
Pepsi better.
As he says, that last part is the story of New Coke.
What happened with New Coke is a very nice story because Coke went
ahead and did a really systematic study of all the different
concentration on this brown formula with sugar and so on and they
varied it systematically and they got a lot of people to try and taste
all of these things and they found out the final winning equation,
which was sweeter than the original Coke and, in fact, it was much
closer to Pepsi than Coke. And then they put it in a Coke can and
people hated it.
Branding as looked at in the world of behavioral economics excites me
because it makes the world more observable, more like the world of
direct response.
If It's Not The Taste, What Is It? Unbeknownst
to me and most people, scientists can test quite a few things these
days, including brand preferences - not just what people like but why.
Drawing from interview with Dan, which too is described in the book, he
explains a modern day twist on the Coke/Pepsi challenge now that we
understand the impact that knowing which one you're drinking has.
Dan says:
In the experiment that I’m going to describe to you next, the Coke
Pepsi challenge was taken to new heights and new costs. So this was a
study using an FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine.
Basically, what this machine does is this: as you’re lying in this
FMRI, and as you see things and taste things and think, there are
pictures taken of the blood flow in your brain that tells you which
part of the brain is working and which part of the brain is not
working. When you drink brown sugary stuff, the pleasure center of your
brain gets activated—this is something called the nucleus
accumbens—this is part of our emotional brain; it’s a part of the brain
that we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s a very
primitive, ancient part of our existence. And it doesn’t really matter.
You can’t tell the difference from Coke and Pepsi, at that level, as to how the brain reacts to pleasure of this liquid.
Most
of the people in the sample declared to love Coke more than Pepsi. Now
I’m sure that there are some people that do the opposite, but these
people like Coke more than Pepsi and the frontal part of the brain, the
place just above your eyes, was more activated when they drank Coke and
knew it was Coke. The front part of the brain for these people reacted
more for Coke than for Pepsi. Now this is a part of the brain that’s in
charge of higher order association, hypothesis, higher cognition,
metaphor association and so on. But interestingly enough, it has a
dopamine receptor. Dopamine is one of the chemicals produced in the
brain. It has a projection from the front part of the brain to the
nucleus accumbens, to the pleasure center of the brain. And basically
what was happening is that the higher order association actually
created greater pleasure. Not because of the liquid but because of the
association.
It’s clear that Coke, for this population that was tested, has an
advantage that will be very hard for Pepsi to overcome. Because it’s
one thing to control what’s in the drink, it’s another thing to control
what’s in peoples mind. And if you’re saying that the final outcome is a
combination
of what’s in people’s minds and what’s in the drink, you have a very
hard barrier to pass that. Partially because it’s not a deliberately
thoughtful process.
Put another way, this time from BrandingEye "I know it’s Pepsi because of the circle with the red, white and blue
brand colors but again, what is the brand message I’m supposed to get?
In my opinion the new color fields within the circle don’t have any
clear meaning or project any particular feeling." And, "We all know how tough it must be getting an iconic brand logo approved
through the layers of corporate bureaucracy but still it’s a pity when
you look at the new Pepsi logo thinking about the many millions spent
on its rebranding and how little it speaks to you."
Fakevertisers Are Better Branders? Performance
marketing doesn't imply an inability to understand the power
of brand or a similar inability to design in a way that evokes a
connection to a product. Performance marketers lack the vocabulary and
concepts used by brand experts, but they understand the psychological
nature of the message and having a message cause action. In the case of
Pepsi's new logo, would anyone at the company say that they don't want
to new design and the campaigns they run to do anything but increase
the quantity of their products consumed? Back to BrandingEye who felt a
positive reaction to the logo and even the effect of the print ads,
calling them "optimistic" and "hitting the right cords." The crux of
the issue comes from his next statement, "Then I saw the packaging in a
supermarket." That's what happened to me except I found nothing but
dissonance in the entire process - from the TV spot, to the print
campaign, to the in-store experience.
As we said above, "It's not about whether
you can explain it. The point is that you don't even have to explain
it." That's what fakevertisers get. They cheat in how they do it, like
the person who starts the marathon on the last mile, but their
short-cuts don't imply a compelling grasp of the fundamentals. Just
look at this fakevertising site:
It's
all about expectation setting. At the risk of abusing Ariely
references, "The way you expect something to function, it will function
this way." "...Our body is very, very active in the process of
predicting the future and preparing for it. And if you think something
will be better, it will be better. And if you think it will be worse,
it will be worse."
Evolution and Advertising
I'd imagine
some of our "think it will be better and it is" attitude this has
something to do with our development over time. There is a field of study
called Evolutionary Psychology, which "attempts to
explain psychological traits as adaptations, that is, as the functional
products of natural selection or sexual selection." Evolutionary
psychologists "hypothesize, for example, that humans have inherited
special mental capacities for acquiring language, making it nearly automatic,
while inheriting no capacity specifically for reading and writing." They
"see those behaviors and emotions that are nearly universal, such as fear
of spiders and snakes, as more likely to reflect evolved adaptations." The
layman definition might read something to the effect that we as people act in
certain ways as a holdover to our more primal days. We act in certain ways that
we don't understand and may not make intuitive sense today but have helped us
survive for tens of thousands of years. So, while there isn't a discipline
called Evolutionary Advertising, we could apply what we see with behavioral
economics and evolutionary psychology to advise people not to go against the
grain.
Pepsi has erred, because it tries to retrain us to think a certain
way. Retraining works for new concepts that don’t have a pre-existing
emotional connection. The classic example is Starubucks who trained to
buy expensive coffee, but they didn't it from scratch, as opposed to
being an existing brand with established and significant positive brand
equity. It's why Duncan Donuts will win a blind taste but struggle to
lure over Starbucks customers regardless of the taste. It can taste
better but not be better in people’s minds. Thinking again to Pepsi, I
would surmise they failed in the re-brand, because in addition to
trying to retrain us, we can use the learnings from behavioral
economics to explain why. Instead of using the frontal portion of our
brain responsible from higher order association to increase our
perception of the brands pleasure, they have activated another part of
the brain that is creating dissonance and reducing the expected
pleasure that comes from interacting with brand and the product.
Instead of spending millions on a new brand by
finding an explanation for a question on one asked, in the future I
wouldn’t be surprised to see some of that money go towards scientific
testing. It’s one thing to ask people whether they like a new logo or
for a company to come up with a story for the new logo that
intellectually makes sense, but neither of them can provide concrete
direction for how such designs will impact behavior. While not
intuitive and in some ways antithetical to the notion of creativity,
for those who can afford it, why not test design changes in a
controlled setting, e.g. the FMRI? That way you can analyze not what
only people say but how it truly makes them feel. One day such a
discipline will probably exist and no longer be confined to the world
of academia or those with significant spending power.
