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t turns out that “portrait” is a surprisingly accurate description of what she ended up with. From Jane’s Brand Timeline Portrait, we discover that Jane is a woman who flosses, who has a cat, who turns on her TV before she leaves for work in the morning. Jane is a woman who lives in Toronto and takes public transit to work, who drinks beer on a Friday night before going home, smoking up and getting down. There’s been some debate in the comments thread of her post over whether the LG logo followed by several Durexes indicates that she used her phone to make a booty call soon after 10 p.m. Fortunately, the BTP still leaves some details to the imagination.

Brand Timeline Portrait has spread all over the internet.

As an advertising account executive, Jane was perhaps predictably untroubled by the implications of her day in brands. “As a marketer, it just shows that these brands have done a good job of marketing themselves.”

Noah Brier just gave us a new world of Brand Tags and now Dear Jane Sample has come up with something many of us have always wanted to do, but could never get quite right, the simple art of the Brand Timeline. It’s a way to visualize the brands we interact with over the course of the day. It’s really Brands in Your Day. Planners love this stuff because it’s a nice way to bring thinking to life and it’s great to be able to see the time when brands are being used this could even have media implications for example. Perhaps there’s another version of this which examines the depth and scale of relationships individuals have with brands something relating to distance.

Even before a major communication channel comes of age, it is immediately invaded with advertising. And so much media has proliferated in just the last 22 years that it’s mind-boggling to think about it taking us nearly 400 years to emerge from a print-dominated media landscape, and 48 more years to emerge from period of pre-digital platforms such as TV and radio, to finally arrive at the disproportionately short two-decade span where digital now dominates most advertising budgets.

From the moment printing became possible with the invention of the printing press way back in 1440, advertisers began plastering posters on walls and doors within their communities. The first poster ad in English is placed on church doors in London in 1492! Over the next 400 years, ads would find their way into newspapers, magazines, and other print media.

When you allocate that across the 2.4 billion internet-connected persons on the planet, it means there are 417 web pages and 2,502 display ads for each! It's simply bonkers to think pumping more interruptive ads into the internet is going to work. Want some more reasons why? Here, lemme tell you: In 1920, there was 1 radio station. In 2011, there were 14,700. In 1946, America had 12 broadcasting TV stations. In 2011, there were over 1,700. In 1998, the average consumer saw or heard 1 million marketing messages – almost 3,000 per day. It’s even more than that now. Just imagine how many Facebook posts or tweets you scroll past every day. Each of those are messages, and now, oftentimes ads. 

What are the advantages of crowdsourced research? Cost-effectiveness –- Comparatively speaking, crowdsourced research can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional research. Quick Turn Around –- The time it takes to gather, execute, and analyze is shorter thanks to a purely digital foundation. Flexibility –- As trends emerge in findings, researchers can easily adjust their strategy to catch any shifts or “surprises.” Collaboration –- Crowdsourced research allows brands to collaborate easily with customers to ideate or improve upon products, to test concepts, ads, and experiences, and to continue the conversation over a longer term. Velocity –- Crowdsourced research can travel at the speed of digital, allowing for real-time consumer behavior analysis and insight for new technologies, memes, trends, and conversations. Marketing and Marketing Research –- Even though it’s frowned upon and often times refuted in traditional research, the nature of crowdsourced research implies there will be some form of marketing intertwined as consumers share their stories, insights, and ideas for brands they support.

Crowdtap, which is still in beta, is a tool that fills the gap between traditional research and digital, and helps with insight gathering, customer empowerment and influence. At my company, we use Crowdtap to augment our research activities, especially when time is of the essence (i.e. new business pitches, client presentations, low-budget projects). Brands and agencies can leverage Crowdtap to target questions (polls, discussion topics, and open-ended queries) to a certain demographic profile subscribed to the tool.