Scenes from NY in Lego

Love this series of slices of life of NY done in Lego. Check out the whole series.

I Lego N.Y.

Netflix Harnesses the Crowd to Improve Itself

Good article in the New York Times about Netflix’ competition it’s been running the last couple of years to improve its recommendation engine. Hundreds of people have tried to win the $1 million on offer, but no-one has yet cracked the 10% improvement barrier that Netflix has set. In other words, the contestants have to improve the quality of suggestions that Netflix makes to its members based on their previous ratings by 10%.

There are many reasons why this is difficult to do, attested by the asymptotically slowing rate of improvement. One class of movies is particularly tricky - those which are love-it-or-hate-it in nature. Napoleon Dynamite epitomizes this category - Netflix and the contestants have a terrible time predicting whether someone will like it or not based on their past track record.

People go through phases in buying things, and our multiple personalities come out in what we buy and enjoy. We are not (entirely) self-consistent, logical beings.

Even so, it sometimes seems like recommendation engines just seem to miss the boat. By all rights, Amazon should be able to make highly accurate recommendations to me about all sorts of things, given the amount of stuff I’ve bought there, yet it is incredibly inaccurate. It keeps recommending products that I’ve already bought (e.g. I just bought one digital camera so it immediately recommends another - why would I need two?) or which are off-base in the long term (I buy a gift for a baby shower, and it throws all its reco’s off).

Visualization of History of Olympic Medals

The New York Times comes out with another great interactive graphic, this time it’s a visual history of the number of medals won by each country at the summer olympics, dating back to 1896. Using a rough layout of a map of the world, the size of each circle represents the total number of medals. Hover over a circle and it pops up the specific number of golds, silvers and bronzes. Drag the timeline slider at the top and you can dynamically see how they change over time.

You can see, for example, the rising dominance of the Soviet Union and East Germany culminating in massive wins in 1980, aided no doubt by the USA’s boycotting of those games. Then China appears out of nowhere at the 1984 Los Angeles games, culminating in its 100 medals (including 51 golds) this year as host.

Actually until I saw this graphic I hadn’t realized Britain, my birth country, had done so well. At 47 medals that’s pretty darn good for a country with twenty times smaller population than China.

View graphic

Intrusive Advertising, Again

The NY Times has a depressing article on the fervor around “out of home” advertising - in other words sticking an advert on any conceivable surface outside your home, in the hopes that you will see it, fall in love with what it’s advertising, and buy it.

A little while ago I coined the phrase “indentured advertude”, after indentured servitude (where people are forced into slavery in order to pay off a debt). Likewise, indentured advertude is about forcing you to look at advertising in a place or circumstance where you’ve already paid a fee to be there (such as movie theater or airplane seat), and have no escape exit.

Here’s what the Times has to say:

The ardor to reach consumers outside the home — and outside the realm of traditional media like television — continues to grow among marketers. They hope to fight back against technologies like digital video recorders, which make it easier to avoid conventional advertisements like commercials.

Out-of-home media was once commonly known as outdoor media, reflecting its roots in billboards, posters and signs. The term has been changed to reflect the expansion into places like airports, offices, malls, schools and health clubs, where the ads are inside but not inside the home…

The new places for ads — as well as the addition of digital and video capabilities to signs, bus shelters, phone kiosks and other sites — are among the reasons ad spending in the out-of-home category are second only to online advertising in growth.

The goal is to engage consumers “during the course of their daily lives in places they go on a frequent basis,” said Rick Sirvaitis, president at StoreBoard Media in New York, which puts ads on the security pedestals at the entrances and exits of retail outlets like drug stores.

“In 36 years in advertising, for the first time I can look people in the eye and guarantee every consumer will be exposed to the message,” Mr. Sirvaitis said, referring to a StoreBoard sign, “because you can’t miss it.”

Unfortunately this doesn’t look like it is going away as companies face ever increasing pressures to keep up consumer spending and revenues. But it’s going to make for a depressing lived environment.

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