Technically Incorrect

You can count on a chocoholic.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a heartily interesting piece of research performed at Northumbria University in England.

The researchers, led by Professor David Kennedy, got hold of 30 people and asked them to count backwards in groups of three from various numbers between 800 and 999.

At some point during the research, they were drugged. No, not like that. Well, not totally. They were given a mysterious cocoa drink, full of flavanol, one of the happier constituents of chocolate.

This little concoction seemed to turn Frankensteins into Einsteins. Of course, I exaggerate. It's Friday afternoon.

Look. Those crafty souls at Google already knew about the hidden powers of the dark substance.

(Credit: CC Idealisms)

But the effects of the drink were clearly felt in the volunteers' mathematical performance. Astoundingly, they also got less tired, so they were capable of doing the same calculation over and over again--which should help enormously, should any of them want to get a job at certain companies in the Valley.

I should point out that the researchers did give their guinea pigs a lot of flavanol: 500 milligrams. This is more than they might normally expect to get from a bar of chocolate or fruits and vegetables that also enjoy the chemical's presence.

And there was a little hitch along the way.

While the drink helped them count backwards in groups of three, when it came to counting in groups of seven, a more complex task that happens in a different part of your gray matter, the respondents might just as well have reached for a roach and a bottle of Smirnoff. Yes, the guinea pork had suddenly mislaid their mathematical chops.

Still, we know that most exams aren't too complex. So it's good to know that a few shots of Hersheys, washed down with eight or nine McDonald's chocolate milkshakes, should propel the average student to the brink of a professorship.

It's not exactly the Pepsi Challenge.

A new teaser site, whoppervirgins.com, created by Crispin Porter Bogusky, claims to be the home of the world's "purest taste test."

Created on behalf of Crispin client Burger King, the site looks like it fell off the back of a National Geographic camel. It features people from remote Thai villages, deeper, darker Transylvania, and even the icy tundra of Greeenland.

These places were, apparently, chosen because burgers have never been seen or eaten there. In some cases, the people don't even know the word "burger." So, unlike every sad, biased human in the world, they are entirely unprejudiced when it comes to the difference between a Whopper and a Big Mac.

With a deep seriousness normally only reserved for political campaigns and dog food spots, the agency hired Stacey Peralta, director of the fine skateboarding movie Lords of Dogtown, to capture fast food history as it happens.

Of course, in the time we are being kept guessing as to the various possibilities of the test's results (I am sure many of you are betting on a Big Mac win), some small questions do tickle the back of the throat.

Very soon, this will be an Inuit Burger King.

(Credit: CC Ezioman)

How can we be sure that the Big Macs in the ad even remotely resemble real Big Macs? The story is that the food was flown in. But it's not as if they had a culinary Ronald from McDonalds on the shoot, is it? So, for all we know, those poor Inuits might, in the guise of a Big Mac, have been fed horse.

The second question that rumbles the stomach is, well, did anyone regurgitate? Will we, in fact, in the interests of documentary veracity, be subjected to the sight of a virgin burger-eater in the act of bodily rejection?

In a development that I know will have stunned the creators, the teaser site has already caused much controversy. One commenter on gothamist.com was moved to write: "I don't think indigenous people should be used in that way to amuse a bored public that wants a sensation at any price."

Oh, but it's a recession. And Whoppers are very, very cheap.

And Sharon Atkins of the Institute of Daily Nutrition told New York's bastion of daily mental nutrition, the Daily News: "It's outrageous. What's next? Are we going to start taking guns out to some of these remote places and ask them which one they like better?"

Do we actually have any evidence that guns weren't used in this case? Purely for self-protection, of course.

Still, for all those who fear this will be like a new Borat movie directed by David Lean, at the very least this campaign will happily stir the highly important burger debate around and around our cogitative intestines.

Can these really be the same people who created "I'm a PC"?

Yesterday I suggested two things. (Well, here anyway.)

That McDonalds sometimes make better ads than bugers and that it seems display advertising online isn't quite the big money souffle you might think.

Today, I discover that a wonderful McDonalds billboard last night won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival.

And that the Washington Post published an article suggesting big brands are not embracing display ads online.

The article attributes the lack of hefty cash being invested online to three factors: the reluctance of big brands that have been around a long time to experiment with something new; the difficulty of targeting the people you want to talk to; and, painfully, the reluctance and inability of advertising agency creatives to create anything for the web.

Everyone has different experiences. Personally, I have never found big brand clients to be terribly reluctant to experiment. In fact, they seem rather keen to win. It's just that a big brand is not always a confident brand.

Media sales people have tended to use the same shtick since The Partridge Family. (Put up a few charts with numbers on them and then afterwards tell the clients the numbers were 'achieved')

Which does not always arouse the additional confidence needed to make a persuasive sale.

(Credit: topgold)

There really does seem to be fewer big success stories in the display advertising arena than there are annoyances.

As I said yesterday, your laptop is personal. Mass advertising, reflective of a mass mood, isn't going to get a warm reception.

Now what of those halfwit creative people? It is true that when online began, no creative person wanted to go anywhere near it. Why? Because there were no online awards. And when they finally created them, those awards had no cachet. (they do now, of course.)

It is one of the sadder truths of the advertising business that creatives are keener to do ads that make them famous (famous in the advertising world, that is. Most creatives are so conservative, they wear Pinochet underpants beneath their Diesel Jeans) rather than ads that might, oh, answer the brief, or work.

And it's true that creating something specifically for the online medium requires a very different form of patience. Less Job, more Charlie Sheen's girlfriend.

As one creative told me the other day: "Creating work for online isn't like the creation I've been familiar with. It's an engineering project."

On the other hand, agencies and clients have been awful in working together to measure success.

I can honestly say that I have been involved in major campaigns where no one could tell me whether the campaign worked or not.

And I have witnessed agencies claiming their ads worked while clients tried to do everything to claim they didn't because there was a clause in the contract that meant the client had to pay the agency a bonus for success.

Yes, it all comes down to relationships. Relationships between clients and agencies and relationships between clients, agencies and humans online.

When people are online, it seems they either want a relationship with themselves or with someone who purports to be real.

Perhaps the techniques involved in forging these more personal relationships (rather than TV-driven sermons from a distance) are a little more difficult for big brands.

Some big brand efforts remind me of extremely large people who have turned up for their first spin class in bright orange spandex tights.

Perhaps the mistake is in calling communication and content online 'advertising' at all.

With the way the online world has developed, everyone is putting parts of themselves out there in a Babel of human activity.

Everyone is, in fact, advertising.

Which means there is nothing noteworthy about a display ad at all. It is merely a vaguely old world boil.

Perhaps that is the toughest thing for big brands and their advisors to adjust to.

This week sees the Cannes Advertising Festival. Where a lot of advertising people and clients drink themselves silly and whisper sweet everythings into each others' ears.

I love it myself. But, being on the creative side of the business, only when you have something in competition that has a chance of winning an award.

McDonalds has already achieved a victory this week, according to the eyeball counters at comScore.

Not in Cannes (yet), but on the web.

comScore announced this week that McDonalds enjoyed the unprecedented attention of almost 600 million eyeballs in March with their display ads. (that's two eyeballs per person, for the cyclops reading this)

Which means that the burger company comScored more than 33% of the share of voice of the Top Ten Quick Serve Restaurants.

For some reason, McDonalds enjoys almost fifteen times the number of display views as Burger King.

It appears that Ronald and his cohorts (who have been responsible for some truly excellent advertising over the last twenty years) have worked out that there are huge numbers of bored workers sitting in front of their computers getting hungry all morning.

So why not tickle their palate, which is probably being destroyed by those two bitter office staples- coffee and gossip.

(Credit: Ryan McFarland (www.zieak.com))

The rumor is that the growth of display advertising on the web is markedly slowing, because clients are not seeing the results that they would wish.

Another rumor is that the reason for this slowdown is that people see the display ads, but then go to search ads to find the very best deal for the very desire the search ad has stimulated.

Let me toss out a subjective rumor.

The pop-up did a lot of damage. Banner ads that flashed to the point of vomit-inducing vertigo made it worse.

While TV audiences were used to seeing ads from the very beginning, and at least some of them were entertaining, people recoiled against some of the advertising detritus they were served online for years.

They preferred word of mouth that sent them to specific entertaining sites, like BurgerKing's brilliant subservientchicken.com or Philips' astoundingly deep shaveeverywhere.com.

People just aren't that fond of being interrupted online. They have things to do. Like seeing if Rumer Willis really can find a way to look like her Mom.

TV quickly became part of the domestic furniture, just another light you turned on when you came into the house.

Your laptop is a different being. Something more personal, something far more evocative of your private self.

Many display ads online are the equivalent of a father walking into his teenage daughter's room to check on what she's doing.

In the vernacular of my home town, the reaction they get is "Bog off."

McDonalds clearly feels that its dominating presence will bring rewards.

It will be interesting to see whether the company will see its heavy online activity slide more burgers into the nation's epiglottises.

Yes, there is a McDonalds in Cannes. On the main square where locals play boules. And just a few paces from the Palais des Festivals.