Welcome to "Tiser" Mania

The Advertiser versus the Microtiser™ is turning out to be one of the biggest battles for dominance since the dinosaur versus the mammal.  And the climate change seems to be in favor of the little guy once again. It’s a battle for relevance, size, scope, and status quo—and past supremacy holds very little sway.

The national election is bringing statisticians out of the woodwork to disseminate and interpret as much data as they can get their hands on, no matter what the margin of error is or how ultimately relevant it turns out to be. The blogger on the fringe is stealing the life breath from the big mammoths such as the New York Times and Washington Post. This massive surge of individual perspective gains relevance as representative of larger views.

Statistical data is not the Tyrannosaurus Rex it once was. We’re finding the art side, the evidence of the individual, is gaining importance as the emerging pesky, warm-blooded threat to the big guy.

The graphic at the top of this page was taken from the Presidential Watch O8 website and represents, as they say, “the ultimate set of tools to see, hear, and feel what citizens and supporters are saying on the Internet about the 2008 presidential elections.” Just by clicking on any one of the virtual communities, big or small, you can instantly get an update on that community’s take on the elections. What looks like a universe somewhere in space is really a universe inside the Internet—and it is constantly in a state of flux, just like life here on earth. It’s a massive amount of evidence, some of it backed up by statistics, much of it opinion and observation placed there based on the everyday life of an individual. It is an amazing map of the macro and the micro. And when you travel from one place to the other, your behavioral breadcrumbs allow your every move to be tracked and recorded.

That very fact has paved the way for AdReady, and services like it, to create Microtisers™, a word we coined to describe the move from the mass to the micro. Individuals and small companies have become Microtizers—and anyone can be one. For a very few dollars, as little as $20, anyone can create a banner ad, direct it to a behavioral target, and—this is the astonishing news—pay only when someone pays attention to it. This pay-as-you-go process frees people and companies to unearth an insight, see whom it attracts, and then go after that person almost instantaneously for very little money; and, if you need to, you can even change the message on the fly.

This is a great example of what’s on everyone’s minds about the relevance of small amounts of data vs. old-style research approaches.  I love the word “microtizer.” It’s behavioral targeting lexicon we’ll see and hear more about, sooner rather than later. This behavioral-focused phenomenon has contextual relevance to our real-time insight tool called CultureWaves™. It demonstrates that while much of the world is focusing on behavior from a “targeting” science viewpoint, our CultureWaves insight tool is focusing on behavior from an “idea” or artistic viewpoint.

Conventional research is focused on the science side of things, e.g., because so much evidence exists showing who’s doing what, when, and where. Every sign-in, click, purchase, and download is captured, catalogued, and repurposed. And through technology Microtizing is possible.

Our focus, on the other hand, is on the art side; the juxtaposition of dissimilar thoughts and data gathered from the emerging side of life that brings ideas to life in new and creative ways. The CultureWaves tool is the new nose cone for the scientific way of piling up mounds of data. It sees Evidence, Makes observations, listens to Authentic Voices, and gets to the Human Truth of the matter in a nimble and confident manner.

It’s a little like the archelogist who finds a human bone. He doesn’t have to do the massive dig to prove there was a real live human living there once upon a time. The discovery has been made. Then the science of the full-blown dig follows to excavate the village and continue the discovery.

Obviously you need both the discovery and the full-scale dig—but remember, until someone finds the first bone, there is no dig. The value of the CultureWaves tool is simply this: we find the bones.

As the Microtisers scurry around between the giant feet of the Advertisers, we’re seeing the power of the individual rising. The Micro is breaking up the Macro into manageable bites as the consumer just keeps on consuming—and the shift from one “tiser” to the other keeps on shifting.

That’s it, from the edge of the world,

Bob