Brilliant Noise

Why the spike? A good chunk of it, I assume, has to do with the death of Whitney Houston the day before, and viewers who wanted to see how the biggest stars in music responded to the loss of a peer.

Big, live TV events are big events on Twitter and Facebook, which generate lots of online chatter and drive more eyeballs back to the TV screen, where they inspire even more chatter. Cue virtuous cycle.

. It says it attracted a million visitors to the various sites and iPad/iPhone apps it operated over the three days leading up to the show. It says it attracted a peak of 165,000 concurrent viewers to a livestream of pre-Grammys red carpet coverage Sunday afternoon.

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag?

in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity.

Widespread social media monitoring/tracking is largely still in the realm of “hits” measurement. Personal dashboards for services such as Twitter typically display direct measures provided by the Twitter API, or measures trivially/directly identified from Twitter API or archived data – number of followers, numbers of friends, distribution of updates over time, number of mentions, and so on.

Recent reports suggest that for every £1 spent online, the internet influences £3 spent in stores. Google and others are working to bring all the tools that made finding great products online easy and rewarding to the real world.

he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

Jim refers to ideals as the 400 percent advantage. Why? Because the brands identified as The Stengel 50 by Millward Brown Optimor have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of four over the past decade. Representing a wide variety of product and service categories they are united by one common factor; they operate in harmony with their ideals.

Ideals provide the “North Star,” the compass bearing by which these companies steer through good times and bad. Particularly noticeable from the chart comparing the Stengel 50 and the S&P 500’s performance over time is the rapid recovery of the Stengel 50 from the recession in 2008. These companies are not hindered by their ideals in tough times, they are helped by them.

Ideals probably have their strongest influence through the people who work on a brand, but can also have a positive effect with customers and consumers, not least in how their communications are received. In Grow, Jim reports work conducted by Millward Brown’s neuroscience practice, showing that people find the Stengel 50 brands to be more empathetic, more ideals-based and more memorable in what they stand for than their competitors. The end result, people are more likely to want to share the advertising with others.

Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, who recently stated that: “All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”