Boston, Mass. and Reno, Nev. (Sept. 14, 2009) – One to One Interactive (OTO), a Boston-based digital marketing firm recently ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, announced today a definitive agreement to merge Twelve Horses, with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada, into its OTOi and OTOlabs divisions.

The merger expands One to One Interactive’s comprehensive suite of digital marketing services, technology and media offerings by incorporating Twelve Horses’ agency practice and innovative marketing products.

The move represents the fourth time OTO has grown through a merger or acquisition, a strategy the company embarked on beginning in 2005. The addition of Twelve Horses gives OTO a significant presence in the West and Twelve Horses’ many East Coast based clients will welcome the OTO East Coast footprint. Both OTO and Twelve Horses service accounts in Europe and Asia. Twelve Horses, frequently recognized for its innovative work in the travel-tourism industry, also services such global clients as J.P. Morgan Chase, Deloitte and Bill Me Later, a PayPal company.

The western-based Twelve Horses will integrate its trademarked and patented technology platforms, including MessageMaker™, which delivers multi-channel direct digital communications to customers via email, web, mobile, voice and fax messaging, into current One to One Interactive offerings. As a result, OTO clients, which currently include Comcast, Rite-Aid, McGraw-Hill and Partners Healthcare, will be able to leverage the company’s expanded portfolio of services and tools in executing their one-to-one digital marketing strategies.

“Our merger with Twelve Horses enhances and extends OTO into the type of unique firm brands seek in today’s digital marketing landscape, one that can come to the table with leading marketing services strategy and execution capabilities as well as a full suite of proven technology products to integrate and deploy quickly and efficiently,” said Ian Karnell, chief executive officer of One to One Interactive. “By leveraging the platform capabilities and innovative intellectual property we’ve acquired through our expansion efforts, our clients can expect greater efficiency in strategy execution and in speed to market, which is essential for remaining at the forefront of the marketing evolution.”

With its newly expanded product and service lines, nearly 30 percent of revenues will be driven from the firm’s unique portfolio of permission based digital messaging  technologies, which include multi-channel messaging platforms for email and mobile marketing, content management systems, ticketing and event management, desktop widgets and plug-ins for improved workflow. A large portion of the remaining revenue stream will continue to be generated from services such as branding, web site development, customer relationship management, search engine marketing and social web strategies.

“At a time where every marketing services firm is being asked to bring more to the table, our clients benefit from this merger by having immediate access to a broader organization with incredible experience and depth in quality, customizable technology products and solutions,” explained Twelve Horses CEO David LaPlante, who will serve as OTO’s Senior Vice-President of Sales & Marketing. “Our newly combined company significantly enhances our ability to accommodate our client’s broad and often unique set of marketing services and technology dependent requests, as opposed to simply providing a one-size fits-all-solution.”

The merger is designed to accelerate growth and innovation, including a new management structure to help achieve that vision. One to One Interactive Chief Executive Officer Ian Karnell and President Jeremi Karnell will remain in their roles, while Twelve Horses executives Steve Spencer and Martin Gastanaga will serve as senior executives for its OTOlabs division. The company will remain headquartered in Charlestown, Mass., with additional offices in Baltimore, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City and London.

About One to One Interactive
Complete One-To-One Solutions for Brands, Agencies, and Publishers

Established in 1997, One to One Interactive is the first enterprise to assemble a complete solution for brands, agencies, and publishers executing one-to-one marketing strategies. By bringing together one of the nation’s leading digital marketing agencies, the worlds most comprehensive portfolio of permission marketing platforms, performance marketing solutions, and cutting edge neuromarketing research techniques, the companies of One to One Interactive build informed and creative customer/constituent strategies on the belief that digital media’s ability to enable engaging one-to-one dialogues is the future of marketing.

One to One Interactive has recently been ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, one of the Top Interactive firms in the United States according to B2B Magazine, and one of the world’s 20 hottest independent digital marketing firms by Ad Age.

Please visit one of One to One Interactive’s web sites for more information:

    * One to One Interactive: www.onetooneinteractive.com

    * OTOi: www.otoi.com

    * OTOlabs: www.otolabs.com

    * OTOnetworks: www.otonetworks.com

    * OTOinsights: www.otoinsights.com

About Twelve Horses
Twelve Horses has historically been a global provider of Web site design and development, multi-channel marketing, business process automation, customer relationship management (CRM), search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Operating as an online brand marketing and messaging technology agency, Twelve Horses assisted businesses in translating and transforming their brands online.

Twelve Horses provides One to One Interactive with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada.

Twelve Horses has been recognized for being a “Top 30 Innovative Company” by Utah Business, and “Technology Company of the Year” by the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada.

Please visit Twelve Horses web site for more information: www.twelvehorses.com

For more information call 1-617-425-7369 or visit www.onetooneinteractive.com

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Synesketch is an artistic software library with synesthetic abilities, created by Uroš Krčadinac. It is a Web’s first free open-source textual emotion recognition and visualization engine – code that feels the words visually!  For example, the six images above visualize a response to Ekman’s six basic emotions – happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust (left to right, top to bottom).

According to the projects official Wiki,   Synesketch “is a software library (Java API) for sensing and creative visualization of textual emotions! Code is serving as a medium between words, emotions, and images; between poetry and painting. Gluing computers with our emotions and aesthetic experiences, it is both a software innovation and an interactive art experiment.

The  Visualization system is based on the Jared Tarbell’s work.  “It is a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles, inspired by graphics created by particle colliders, such as the famous one in CERN. After the interpretation of a new fragment of text, new particle collision happens, which produces a discrete universe of new particles. While moving, particles form various visual patterns. Colors and shapes of these patterns depend on the type and intensity of interpreted textual emotions (as seen on the images above).”

The project names four different potential goals for this software:

1.) End User Applications: Such as a visual chat program – while we talk, colors and shapes are being generated.

2.) Tool for Visual Artists and Designers: To create visualizations based on textual emotions

3.) Affect Sensing and Emotion Recognition Engine: They have developed a Synesketch Lexicon – WordNet-based lexicon of words with their general and specific emotional weights (for Ekman’s emotion types: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise).

4.) Experimental Polygon for Synesthesia and Real-Time Text Visualization: The Synesketch API  allows you to create your own synesthetia-like algorithms.

I personally think this application is fascinating.  In particular, I am drawn to the affect sensing and emotion recognition engine application.  Systems like this may play an important role in helping marketers understand the voice of their customers in a more meaningful way.  Imagine a CMO with a Synesketch widget on his marketing dashboard that compiles all of the written statements associated with his/her brand online and provides them a real-time view of either positive or negative sentiment. 

Check out Synesketch Gallery and Demo page for more examples of the tool in action.

Most of us do it every day: check our email, text our friends, turn on the radio and make a phone call. In fact, some people are so skilled that they can do all four of these things at the same time! However, it is fair to say that if you work in any type of job that includes computers and marketing, this kind of multitasking ability is usually a requirement.According to a recent study by Stanford University researchers, it was found that people who constantly deal with several different types of electronic information and switch from one task to another:

• Don’t pay attention
• Can’t control their memory
• Switch from one task to another worse than someone who completes a single task at a time

Stanford calls these people “high-tech jugglers,” and they apparently don’t do any better than someone that chooses to take their time completing a single task. Stanford Professor Clifford Nass even says these people are “suckers for irrelevancy” and that “everything distracts them.”

So, are you offended like I am? I consider myself to be a fair multitasker, and I always thought that it was a good thing.  Apparently the researchers at Stanford are out to prove the old theory that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Stanford study that put 100 students through a series of multitasking tests, you can read about it at Stanford University News.

Social media is a broadly used term that includes a wide range of techniques and tools for leveraging and supporting the sharing of information among people. Internet enabled tools are the locus for social media activity as they provide low-cost access to many people allowing for a new wave of targeted advertising to develop. As social media continues to grow at a near exponential rate, marketers and researchers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the practices of the users who help shape the content at highly participatory social media sites. Digg.com is an exemplar site for user participation in social media and is the focus of this report. Understanding the behavior of Digg.com users will help marketers to better represent and promote their material on Digg.com as well as provide insights into the practices of social media users in general.

In this report, we present an analysis of user engagement with social media via Digg.com. Viewer engagement was measured with OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuro-marketing research system. Quantemo™ utilizes a multi-modal approach that combines self-report, physiological and neurological data to holistically and reliably measure user engagement with digital media. Analyzing the results from the Quantemo™ sources, we present a set of four insights concerning how users engage with social media and how the cues in social media systems positively inform user behavior.

Our research uncovered four significant insights:

1. Users Seek Tailored News Experience and Not “Mass Media” Stories
2. Story Headlines Are the Chief Determinant of Digg Behavior
3. Short, Direct, and Branded Headlines Dominate Digg.com
4. Positive Engagement Scores Associated with Desirable Digg Behavior

While waiting for my coffee to grind at the supermarket yesterday, I noticed a Glade ad protruding from the shelf.  Then I noticed the same ad one shelf over.  “Oh, neat,” I thought, “I bet the ad smells like the product and they are trying to surround the customer with the smell.”  I love ads or other media that appeal to more than just my sense of sight (except cologne ads in magazines, but that’s another story).  After a brief moment of smelling the air, touching the ad, and (after looking around to make sure no one was watching) smelling the ad directly, I didn’t smell anything other than the coffee grinding in the machine.  This is really a missed opportunity.  The picture and text on the ad are nice enough, but wouldn’t it get more eyeballs and inspections if it were emanating a smell?

The other thing that I found interesting was the placement: the two ads were on either side of the coffee section, which is quite pungent as it is.  The Glade ads in such a pungent section of the store sets the mind up for a juxtaposition.  Since the smell and memory areas of the brain are so close, smells have a tendency to elicit memories.  When a person first enters the coffee section, they will be reminded of mornings, breakfast, waking up, and other coffee-related activities.  But, the Glade ad (especially if it smelled) would remind them of summer breezes, laundry, or whatever the ad/smell was trying to convey.  So, overall, the placement of this ad was not quite ideal.

If the designers of the ad had taken Human Factors into account, they would probably have given their potential customers a more interesting experience.  How are you taking HF into account?  Can your message appeal to novel senses?  Is the placement of your ad optimal?  How are people interacting with your ads?  If they aren’t interacting, then your message may not be as strong as you’d like to think.

The above presentation was presented by Dan Berlin and I at the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Measurement 4.0 Conference on June 24th 2009 in New York City.

Over the last two years, One to One Interactive’s OTOinsights division has been studying (in collaboration with the Indiana University School of Informatics and Microsoft Massive) the effects of advertising embedded in online games.

You may feel free to download the White Paper titled “Player Engagement with In-Game Advertising” below. This is the Paper that the ARF originally accepted for the conference. This past June 2009, we executed another round of in-game ad research. This is referenced in the presentation as Study #2. We hope to complete our analysis and publish our findings in the next month. Stay tuned!

Here at OTOinsights, one of our research goals is to determine a reliable and informative method for measuring the emotional impact media has on users.  Until recently, we had been using the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW) in our research to measure participants’ emotions.  The GEW was developed in 2005 by Klaus Scherer who works in the Geneva Emotion Research Group at the University of Geneva.  The GEW is a visual wheel with 20 spokes where each spoke is associated with a type of emotion (10 positive emotions and 10 negative).  For example, involvement/interest and embarrassment/shame are two of the emotion groups.  The spokes of the wheel are made up of five circles which allow the participant to choose the level (essentially, a 1-5 Likert scale) for which they felt that particular emotion.  Here is Scherer’s original paper.  In our research, we had the participants choose two or three emotion groups and mark the appropriate circle to indicate the intensity of the emotions.  The results of the GEW include an overall emotional score on a scale of -10 to +10 (for two emotions marked) and a radar diagram listing the average score for each emotion on the GEW.  While the score was useful for use in our Quantemo Engagement Index (QEI), the radar diagram was typically met with blank stares from our stakeholders.  “What does all of this mean?” was a common question.  The problem was that there are too many emotions on the GEW, so the results become very spread out.  The confusion intensified when there was only a slight difference in the outcomes between stimuli.  Additionally, the GEW allows participants to write in an emotion if it is not listed on the wheel.  This introduces variability into the final interpretation.  Overall, the GEW was useful for our initial purposes, but was really quite hard to explain to stakeholders.

Then I had a serendipitous moment while attending the CHI conference this year.  The session entitled “Beyond Usability: Evaluating Emotional Response as an Integral Part of the User Experience” was presented by researchers at Salesforce.com and Stanford University.  In their research, they used Emocards to measure the emotions that participants’ associated with Web page tasks (their paper can be found here).  Using this tool, they showed that there was a distinct difference in the emotional impact that the different tasks had on the users.  Emocards is a tool developed by Pieter Desmet at the Delft University of Technology (the original paper can be found here).    The Emocards show faces that depict various emotions and the user gives a 0-4 rating for each of the emotions.  The first advantage that Emocards have over the GEW is that it is a cross-cultural tool – facial emotions are typically universally recognized.  Intrigued, I started looking into Emocards and how I can incorporate them into the OTOinsights research.

I was pleased to find that Emocards have transitioned into PrEmo, an online tool that applies the same concepts as Emocards, but with a slightly different treatment.  In PrEmo, there are 12 characters displaying different emotions (see picture above)  – 6 positive and 6 negative.  When the user clicks on the character, it briefly animates and plays a sound, both of which convey the particular emotion to the user.  The user then clicks on a 0-4 scale to indicate the intensity of that emotion they felt when presented with the stimulus.

Now, thus far I have only run one study using PrEmo, but am pretty pleased with the results.  They have a wonderful interface for setting up the study and the results come back to me in an easy to parse Excel file.  This is much better than manually coding the GEW, which was filled out on paper.  Additionally, I found that I did not have to give additional explanations to the users while they were filling out PrEmo – they understood it right away.  This was certainly not the case for the GEW, which warranted many explanations.  Sometimes, the users did not know what a word on GEW meant and asked about it.  There were probably plenty of users who didn’t know what something meant and just skipped over the emotion without asking about it, which would confound the results.

PrEmo also simplifies the interpretation of the results and offers emotions that are more geared to digital media.  Whereas the GEW contains 20 emotions (10 positive and 10 negative), PrEmo contains 12 emotions (6 positive and 6 negative).  Some of the emotions in the GEW weren’t really applicable to digital media.  How many Web sites have you visited that made you feel guilt/remorse or embarrassment/shame?  Probably not too many.  So, I anticipate that the results we will get from PrEmo will be more applicable to our research.

I look forward to using PrEmo more and reporting the results here.  It seems like changing our emotional instrument from the GEW to PrEmo will give more relevant results that can be easily interpreted.  I guess it should be mentioned that there is one advantage that the GEW has over PrEmo: the GEW is free and there is a fee associated with using the online PrEmo tool.  But, so far, I think it’s worth the price.

One to One Interactive’s OTOinsights research division is happy to announce its latest research white paper titled “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages“. 

It is well established that rankings on a Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have much to do with whether a user is likely to click on a given result and higher rankings can actually have a positive effect on a brand’s perception and ‘likeability’ (MarketingSherpa, 2009). With the onset of Universal Search, this study sought to measure the user impact of this new generation of search engine result pages that include multimedia elements such as images and videos.  Specifically, we wanted to understand if there was a difference in emotional engagement with the results and if that would impact click propensity in Paid and Natural Search.  The study compared user engagement with Universal search results vs. traditional text-only results by recording the users’ eye tracking, physiological & emotional reactions, and click tracking behavior. 

Our research uncovered two significant insights.

Insight 1:

SERPs which include Universal Search results reinforce eyeballs to stay focused on the first page’s top paid and natural search results

Implications:

• The advent of Universal Search demands that companies optimize not only their text, but also their media (images, videos, etc)
• Image and video results may anchor users to stay at the top of the SERP
• Images and videos will begin to impact what users will click on first in a SERP

Insight 2:

The inclusion of Universal Search results increase emotional engagement during interactions with a SERP

Implications:

• Users will get an ‘instant gratification’ from images – perhaps more so from branded images
• Higher engagement with Universal results may stop users from exploring the rest of the SERP

OTOinsight’s “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages” white paper is free and available to download here. 

Below is a PowerPoint presentation of the research findings that Dan Berlin and I shared earlier this week at the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Boston’s Annual Conference at Bentley University.

We welcome your comments, feedback, and suggestions.

For over the past 5 years I have held on strongly to the view that success in future marketing communications will be given to those who learn the nuances of game design.  Why?  We live in an interactive world where the customer has infinite choices, unlimited paths to learning about product/services, and expectations for real-time interactions with brands.  No longer is it possible to lead a prospect down a traditional purchase-consideration funnel.  Instead, brands need to learn the game of improvisation; the game of story telling and interest arcs; the game of community building; and the game of engaging multiple players online via environments of their choosing (not yours).

Two resources that I would recommend to both brands and agencies to further understand game design are:

• Mike Bonifer’s Game Changers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World
• Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lens