Sometimes it’s Worth Believing in Coincidence…
Sometimes, we live in an impossibly–in this case ludicrously–small world. Last night, I had the pleasure of attending an event honoring the Always On Top 100 privately-held companies, one of which I’m happy to say my company, ShotSpotter, was named yesterday. (For those interested, here’s information about the event and award: http://stanfordsummit.goingon.com/permalink/post/866) The event was hosted by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, run by my friend Louise Velasquez.
As I was standing on line to get a drink (cranberry and lime–I’m fighting a cold), I stared listlessly at the name tag of the fellow standing next to me, hoping it would ring a bell, or otherwise save me from contemplating my longer-than-desirable distance from the bar.
It did.
The fellow’s name tag read “Michel Floyd, CTO and Senior VP, Knowledge Networks.” His company was being honored last night also. It took a minute, but I finally remembered that Knowledge Networks is the polling organization that performed the study I blogged about last week to you all on behalf of PIPA. So I asked him if it was the same Knowledge Networks, and indeed it was (is). He knew all about the study (in fact, it was his work), and he proceeded to regale me with further interesting statistics about how the Fox viewership separates itself from other mainstream news. He has fielded many an irate call from NewsCorp about that study, and has defended it often enough that he’s pretty practiced at it. Of course, I couldn’t resist testing him, so I bugged him about selection bias on the PBS/NPR viewers, which he thought about for a minute and then began to argue against–only half-way convincingly.
Michel has promised to forward me some of his other tidbits, and I will send them out to the list as soon as I get them. One of them is this: Fox viewers are twice as likely to remember the brand names advertised in commercials than are the viewers of CNN. Twice as likely. Why? How? He’s going to forward me the data.
I suppose this goes to prove that the world is absurdly small. What are the chances that I would have discussed the study and blogged it eight days earlier? That I would we awaiting my cranberry-cum-high fructose corn syrup next to him? That his company would receive an AO100 award the same year mine did?
Hi James, thanks for the plug!
Just wanted to clear up a couple items from your post:
The PIPA study was not my personal work although it was performed by my company. I take no credit for thinking this one up (it was PIPA’s research that was executed by our Government/Academic practice headed by Dr. Michael Dennis.
I believe the call from News Corp went to Dr. Gale Metzger, also of Knowledge Networks. It’s a bit legendary at KN. It’s a pitfall of doing both public policy work and client work. Sometimes the public policy side comes up with results that aren’t appreciated by some clients. I’m glad we never did work for Enron as I would not have enjoyed fielding calls from Lay or Skilling!
As far as selection bias of NPR listeners/PBS viewers, the poll was conducted amongst a genpop random sample so we ended up with a natural incidence of the NPR/PBS audience. Whether this audience is more intellectual and better able to separate truth from fiction in news stories is a discussion which will require more beer or wine to complete. An Annenberg study found that Daily Show viewers are significantly more informed about current events than regular network viewers. To me this ties with John Cleese’s observation that people have better recall of things that they laughed at. The regular evening news is often so depressing that I for one want to forget it as soon as possible.
The study of advertising engagement comparing FNC viewers with CNN and MSNBC was conducted by Maura Clancey (who leads the KN/SRI media team) in conjunction with Paul Rittenberg at Fox News.
My favorite Fox News tidbit which I culled from our massive profile database is that there is nearly perfect correlation between how often people watch Fox News and how much they enjoy NASCAR. If I ran FNC (a completely absurd hypothetical) I would sponsor a NASCAR car. (Here’s why) Perhaps they already do? Or if there’s already perfect correlation maybe it’s redundant. I’m too busy watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to know!
(Of course these opinions are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my colleages at KN, our clients, or of the company itself. Not that a company can actually have opinions but that’s a different issue.)
Michel Floyd said this on August 11th, 2006 at 1:44 am
Oh yes, and regrettably KN didn’t win an AO100 award this year! Maybe soon although we may be a bit big for those already.
Michel Floyd said this on August 11th, 2006 at 1:58 am