Focus On: Shawndra Hill

The 21st Century’s Sexiest Job? Data Scientist

Posted on March 15, 2013

data-modelDuring the first lecture of the spring semester, Ritika Khandeparkar, a graduate student in computer and information sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, recalls Wharton operations and information management professor Shawndra Hill telling her class that “being a data scientist is going to be the sexiest job of the 21st century.”

While describing the course — Data Mining for Business Intelligence — Hill explains more about the reasons why that might be the case. “Firms have had data for a very long time, and a lot of them have been mining it for a very long time,” she says. “What’s changing is that businesses are getting more and more data from consumers via people posting in social media and from other sources, and many firms are now collecting data on a larger scale.”

Thanks to new software programs and the increased availability of low-cost storage space in the cloud and elsewhere, it has also become easier and cheaper for firms to actually mine the data they collect, Hill adds.

The class is composed of about 100 students, some from Penn’s computer science and engineering programs and others from Wharton’s MBA program. In addition to attending weekly labs, the students formed groups and developed semester-long projects using data mining techniques to address a business-related problem.

In the process of completing their projects, the students have had to confront the same challenges many firms face when trying to make sense of their data, and also to analyze it in a way that adds value. “From the first day, I try to get them to start thinking about what novelty means in the space that they are working in,” Hill notes. “It can often be expensive to obtain data, and it may not be worth it to mine for an incremental benefit that doesn’t offer value beyond the cost of taking on the project.”

What the students also quickly find out is that the easy part is actually applying an algorithm to the data; the hard part is “cleaning the data [beforehand], making sure it is of high quality — and when it’s not, really understanding what is missing and why,” Hill says. “And then once you push the button and apply the algorithm, you have to understand what the results mean.”

Class discussions have also increasingly turned to the importance of protecting consumer privacy and whether it is ethical to take on a particular data mining project just because it is technologically possible. “I’m often challenging students to use their moral compass and think about if they would be happy if someone used their data for some of the things they suggest in class,” Hill notes.

Projects from this semester have focused on topics including predicting the success of microfinance loans, the probability of flight delays and the likelihood of a particular outcome in a basketball game. Students usually seek out large publicly available data sets, but some have also reached out to their personal and professional networks and obtained “proprietary data that would take faculty members months to get,” Hill says. “It’s exciting to see them click with a particular problem and also to go out and find data sets that I haven’t worked with before.”

For their project on predicting airline flight delays, Wharton MBA students Valeriy Rastorguev, Natalia Alikhashkina, Lee Horn, Irina Azu and Anu Verma found detailed weather and airline on-time performance data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aviation Weather Center. Focusing on the route from John F. Kennedy airport in New York to Los Angeles International Airport, the group is working on developing a model that would help travelers choose a flight with the lowest probability of cancellation, even if the trip is weeks away.

“People really hate airline delays, and if you remember, [earlier this month] more than 1,000 flights were canceled because of a snowstorm,” says Rastorguev, who is working on earning his pilot’s license. “We thought it was a really high-impact problem, and with some research, we found that airline delays cost more than $12 billion to the economy. If we were able to help people know in advance whether the flight is likely to be delayed or canceled so they can choose another option … we estimate that they would be able to save roughly from a half billion to $1 billion a year.”

This is the first year that Hill has encouraged students from different disciplines to partner on the semester projects. Khandeparkar is working on a model to predict microfinance loan outcomes with fellow computer and information sciences student Bhavesh Raheja, systems engineering student Carolina Cornejo Gutierrez, computer and information technology student Adina Amanbekkyzy and Wharton MBA students Carlos Vega and Elizabeth McCracken.

The team used a set of social demographic data from microfinance lending platform Kiva.org. “We’re looking at the data to identify predictors for defaulting,” Vega says. “The next stage is trying to speak with third parties in the mobile and financial services industries to try and relate some of our initial findings with patterns we find in those areas.”

Data available through Kiva pertains to a narrow group of people, Khandeparkar adds. “If we stick to what Kiva gives us, our model isn’t going to be universal enough. The more diverse your data is, the better your model gets.”

Among the factors that the students are incorporating into the model are gender, marital status and whether or not someone owns a home or has children. But they’re also looking to analyze mobile phone usage data, such as number of calls made, time of day calls are made and whether calls are primarily made to the same or different groups of people. In addition to creating a platform that allows microfinance institutions to digitally assess loan applicants, Vega says the project could also aid in setting up loan repayment plans.

Khandeparkar says her team was also helped by the fact that the six members hail from five different countries: India, Kazakhstan, Panama, Peru and the U.S. ”Even though [the computer science and engineering students] knew what microfinance was, we didn’t know the details,” Khandeparkar notes. “The business students were able to tell us that, and we were able to better explain the technical aspects to them of how to convert a file or which algorithm would run better. Everyone’s ideas were completely different, and we worked really well together because of that.”

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Super Bowl Ad Previews: Fewer Surprises, More Buzz

Posted on February 1, 2013

superbowl-2013-logoCall it a case of Super Bowl creep — whereas game day used to be zero hour for companies to unveil their most eye-catching, conversation-sparking new ads, many firms are jumping the gun and releasing their spots early via social media.

With more than 48 hours to go before kickoff, commercials by Budweiser, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola and others have already racked up millions of views on YouTube. Some firms are only showing pieces of their ads, with the full spots to be unveiled during the Super Bowl. Coke released a portion of an ad and is asking viewers to vote on how it will end come game day. Doritos has released videos from the finalists in its 2013 Crash the Super Bowl contest, which invites people to create their own spots, and is asking viewers to vote on the winner.

While these companies are losing the element of surprise that once surrounded Super Bowl ads — which, according to a New York Times story, cost as much as $4 million for 30 seconds of screen time this year — Wharton marketing professor David Reibstein and operations and information management professor Shawndra Hill say the practice actually allows firms to get a better return on their considerable investments.

“Everyone always oohs and aahs at the outrageous costs of a Super Bowl ad,” Reibstein says. “But when you look at it in terms of cost per exposure, the cost goes way down when you start adding in exposures that companies are getting online, where people are looking at [an ad] and creating some buzz.”

Because airtime during the Super Bowl is at such a premium, Reibstein adds, putting an ad on YouTube also gives companies the option of showing extended versions of the spots that couldn’t be shown on TV. He hasn’t had a chance to watch any of the spots yet, but expects perennial fan favorite Doritos to once again be a top vote getter. “They have really developed a whole niche for consumer-generated ads, and allowing viewers to pick the big winners is a really clever approach,” he notes. “I expect that it’s going to pay off big for them again this year.”

But as the Internet becomes more of a destination for advertisers to engage with customers, will the Super Bowl begin to lose some of its mystique? Not any time soon, Reibstein predicts. “There are always lots of ads on social media, but I think because something is a Super Bowl ad, it’s going to automatically get more attention than if it were just a regular ad.”

And people aren’t just watching the ads around the time of their airing on the Super Bowl, according to Hill, who is studying how companies can use social media to build consumer engagement. “People continue to search for and comment on these ads on YouTube well after the Super Bowl is over,” she notes. Ads that were shown during the 2011 Super Bowl got a bump during the 2012 game, and Hill expects the same effect will happen again this year.

“In the past it was really hard to go back and review an ad unless you recorded the entire Super Bowl,” she says. “But now it’s really easy to do on YouTube, and people are doing it in large numbers. When you look at the number of views that some ads got during the Super Bowl, for some brands it was in the order of hundreds of thousands. But many of them have gotten in some cases two times the amount of views since last year’s Super Bowl. I think that is fascinating, especially when we are talking about orders of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Hill, who plans to collect data in real time during this year’s game, has found in studies of viewer response to other television shows that people tend to comment more about content they are seeing for the first time. While companies may be losing some of the in-the-moment reactions they would have generated by debuting their ads only during the Super Bowl, Hill predicts that plenty of viewers will still be seeing the ads for the first time during the game.

“The Super Bowl is a huge opportunity to get eyeballs on your brand from every single demographic all across the country all at one time,” Hill says. “And you need that — you can’t just use YouTube in most cases and expect the ad to be talked about. A lot of what prompts all of this attention is the fact that so many people watch the Super Bowl.”

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Developing Social Networks in Uganda

Posted on October 9, 2012

“Social media measurement is difficult even in the U.S., where social media penetration is extremely high,” says Shawndra Hill, Wharton professor of operations and information management. “This is no different in contexts like Uganda.”

Hill recently gave a keynote speech at the “Social Media for Business Conference” in Kampala, Uganda, organized by Kampala-based The 360° Network. Approximately 200 people from the telecom, technology and media industries, among others, showed up to gain insights into how companies can measure social media response, engage with their customers and develop social media strategies to fit specific business needs.

Hill’s research looks at large scale social networks, “ones that you can actually observe,” she says. “Think Facebook and Twitter, where you can see the links between individuals who are your customers. At the conference, I talked about mining the data you can get on social networks, whether it is data that is proprietary to a telecom firm, or data you can get in public for free, on [sites like] Twitter.” Such information can be used by companies that want to predict which customers are going to buy their products, for example, versus which customers are engaging in fraudulent activity.

In the developing world, Hill says, there is not a lot of data, “or a culture of collecting it,” on existing and potential customers. Attendees at the Kampala conference questioned her not just about data collection, but about ways to do this in a country where Internet penetration is relatively low. In Uganda, Hill says, a 2010 report cites approximately 16 million mobile subscribers and five million Internet users.

The developing world has an additional challenge, Hill adds: low penetration of credit cards, which means that web purchases are harder to make. “So social media strategy to some extent takes on a different meaning in the developing world context,” she says. “Strategy is still about building brand awareness and engaging with potential customers, but less about immediate online purchases. Strategy in the developing world must also include mobile, which is the future. Mobile penetration is relatively high, and more and more people are using mobile banking apps to engage in commerce.”  

The good news, according to Hill, is that “things are changing quickly.”  When she taught in Ethiopia for the first time four years ago, she asked how many in the audience had signed up for Facebook. No hands went up. Now, she says, when she asked the same question in her Ethiopian classes last summer, almost everyone raised their hands.

It’s no different in Uganda, she adds. “The tech community seems very vibrant and ripe for some kind of killer app to come out of it. Innovation is actually encouraged. For that reason, it’s a great place to think about investing in ideas. It’s a good test bed. It doesn’t have the user base of Kenya or South Africa, but there are people in Uganda who, in their free time, are learning how to develop apps and are very excited about it.”

Uganda needs at least two things now, Hill states. In addition to those killer apps that will “demonstrate the power of social media, connectivity and business outcomes … the country also needs a way to collect data on Internet users to begin to better understand Internet, mobile and consumer behavior via business analytics.”

Google, Hill says, just opened an office in Uganda, “which sends a signal that Africa – Uganda, in particular — is important to them in trying to understand how to bring the masses online, consumers [as well as] firms. Google is there trying to build the infrastructure to make that happen.”

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Internet Privacy Takes a Hit, Again

Posted on February 20, 2012

Google, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal last week, has not been playing fair when it comes to upholding its own privacy standards.

The company has been tracking “web-browsing habits of people using Safari browser software even if [users] intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked,” the Journal article noted, adding that this behavior has led three U.S. congressmen to ask for a Federal Trade Commission investigation. The article also pointed out the company last year signed a privacy settlement with the FTC after the commission charged it with using “deceptive tactics and violating its own privacy promises to consumers” when it launched its Buzz social network.

As for the breach the Journal found last week, Google responded that it has deleted the tracking files in question and is addressing the congressmen’s concerns.

KnowledgeToday asked two Wharton faculty — Andrea Matwyshyn, professor of legal studies and business ethics, and Shawndra Hill, professor of operations and information management — to comment on this latest incident.

Given all the recent examples of Internet companies chipping away at people’s privacy, how serious is this latest breach?

Matwyshyn: According to press reports of commentary from a Google spokesperson, the company does not necessarily consider its actions to constitute impermissible conduct: Google is alleging that users authorized the company to interact with their data in certain ways and, by implication, that this consent authorized alteration of inconsistent settings on a device, which may have happened in an unanticipated manner. 

Hill: Firms like Google need to take [care] because legal cases regarding privacy breaches can and do go to court. With each breach, Google opens itself up to punishment and a degradation of consumer trust. In this [latest incident], millions of consumers might be affected, which could indeed prove problematic for Google because of the scale of the Safari problem.

What would have led Google to do this? An obvious answer is the increasing competition for ad dollars, but is there another explanation? 

Matwyshyn: This type of error is symptomatic of the broader privacy and security culture wars going on inside all companies, but technology companies in particular. Privacy and security champions and lawyers frequently butt heads internally with engineers over design and consumer protection. In engineering-focused cultures such as Google’s, shipping code usually wins, and privacy/security and consumer protection can be viewed by some internal decision makers as secondary things you “clean up” when they go awry, rather than things companies must design around.   

Hill: It’s possible that better advertising alone is driving the data collection when consumers use the Safari browser. However, it is also possible that Google was not aware of all the consequences of their actions. It is often the case with data collection that you have one intention but that there are other uses that are unforeseen when the data or process for data collection is established. Still, Google should do a better job identifying potential problems before launching new processes.

Is it conceivable that Google didn’t know this was happening?

Matwyshyn: Code is written by humans, for humans.  Yes, it’s entirely conceivable Google didn’t do their homework and anticipate this dynamic. It’s also conceivable that a company might anticipate a dynamic such as this, but would then decide that fixing it is a lower priority than shipping code out fast. A third scenario might be that a company decides this type of dynamic is a feature and not a bug, that their consumer EULA [end user license agreement] grants the right to tweak settings on user devices and that users are unlikely to notice the exact workings of the code.

Do you think Google’s reputation as a “do no evil” site has taken a substantial hit?

Matwyshyn: “Do no evil” was Google’s successful mantra from the 1990s and 2000s. Those days are gone from the standpoint of consumer perception. Although Google’s socially-beneficial pilot programs and philanthropic efforts are commendable, in the 2010s many consumers view Google as an aggressive data aggregator akin to Facebook. Microsoft is the new underdog.

Hill: Google is scheduled to change their privacy settings next month. In addition, they have come under scrutiny regarding other privacy breaches in the past year. While the firm may continue to claim to “do no evil,” their business strategy is certainly changing; no doubt consumer perceptions, and possibly trust, will change as a result. However, other large data driven companies are using behavioral, social network and demographic information to target ads. So, it’s not like there is an alternative (right now) where user data are not being used for advertising and business intelligence.

The main concern for consumers will come when/if Google tries to maximize their advertising dollars at the expense of giving users the most relevant information to answer their search queries.

Three congressmen have called on the FTC to investigate Google over this practice. Are we finally reaching a tipping point where the privacy issue has caused enough concern that the government will mete out serious sanctions/punishment?

Matwyshyn: One possible outcome may be another FTC consent decree expanding the existing mandatory periodic FTC audits…. The organizational impact of FTC audits may be underestimated internally: FTC audits are a disruptive and expensive experience, as Microsoft learned. If this underestimation is the case, and if the privacy lessons from Buzz have not been internalized by the corporate culture, it is unsurprising that another privacy problem has arisen.

Hill: It’s hard to say which case will end up [resulting in a] severe punishment. However, with each case, we get further along into the discussion about what is acceptable and what is not with respect to consumer privacy. The hope, at least from consumers, is that the conversation will evolve into a clear set of rules and regulations that govern how online firms and others can make use of personal data while offering useful, and free, services.

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Mobile Payments: Not a Game Changer Yet?

Posted on February 14, 2012

In March, PayPal will enable its users to pay through their mobile phones, tablets or iPads at 2,000 Home Depot stores across the U.S., and by the end of the year at 20 other national retailers. Mobile payments are rapidly gaining popularity, but large scale adoption will depend on consumer perceptions of security and the pricing of such services, according to Wharton faculty.

A subsidiary of online shopping portal eBay, PayPal last year exceeded expectations with $4 billion in mobile payments volume, and the company predicts that figure will reach $7 billion in 2012, company spokesperson Anuj Nayar told Knowledge@Wharton Today. Last November, mobile payments were 538% higher on Black Friday than on the same day in 2010, according to PayPal. The firm’s latest encouragement comes from a pilot program it launched in January at 51 Home Depot stores, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area.

Mobile payments are a small fraction of the net payments of $118 billion that PayPal put through in 2011. Even so, Shawndra Hill, a Wharton professor of operations and information management, finds PayPal’s mobile initiative “exciting,” although she doesn’t think it is “a game changer just yet.” Before wide scale adoption occurs among consumers, “mobile solutions need to prove that they are as secure as paying with credit cards or cash,” she says. Also, consumers will need to trust the brands offering these services, just as “they have had a long time to learn to trust credit cards.” Further, mobile payment options need to be more convenient and possibly cheaper than other avenues, Hill adds.

According to Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn, pricing of mobile payments will determine their popularity, especially when conventional credit cards also move to mobile formats. “The issue from the consumer point of view will be which form of mobile payment to use, just like we now decide which type of card to use,” she says. “Right now, the end user [usually] pays list price for the item regardless of what kind of card is used; sometimes there is a cash discount, or in some countries a fee for using a credit card. I would imagine all of these pricing issues are on the table now.”

Hill suggests that mobile payment processors could expand their market opportunity by offering lower transaction fees than credit cards. Also, the requisite infrastructure and standards for money transfers have to keep pace, she notes.

PayPal’s mobile payments option is part of its recently launched PayPal Wallet, which includes a card that allows offline payments at stores. With that, “consumers will choose if they want to swipe a card, use an app or tap their phone,” says Nayar. Others in the mobile payments space include Google Wallet, which stores customer credit card information on smartphones, and so-called NFC devices that can be used for electronic payments. (The Near Field Communications Forum is a group of companies — including Nokia, Sony, Samsung and Microsoft, among others — that is developing mechanisms for payments and other services across devices.)

Mobile payments are just one of many new options consumers will see this year, according to Scott Dunlap, PayPal’s vice president of emerging opportunities. “In 2012, we will see a rise in virtual currencies and the ability to use them to pay for ‘real’ goods,” he wrote recently in the online magazine Gigaom.com. “Imagine paying for groceries at Safeway with Facebook credits or using extra frequent flyer miles for that cup of coffee at Starbucks.”

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Saving Lives through the Power of the Crowd

Posted on January 26, 2012

When someone goes into cardiac arrest, a number of different factors figure into his or her chances of staying alive. Doctors call it the chain of survival. Along with dialing 911 and administering CPR, an important link in that sequence is the use of an automated external defibrillator or AED, which restores the patient’s heart to a normal rhythm.

AEDs are easy to use — even children can be taught to operate one. But they are often hard to find. Unlike other medical devices such as pacemakers or artificial joints, there is no method for tracking where AEDs are located and when they are used. In many cases, a business may have an AED, but patrons and employees might be unaware of it, or of where it is located.

A new effort being launched by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania aims to tap into the power of crowd sourcing to create a mobile app linking the locations of all the public AEDs in Philadelphia to a person’s GPS coordinates. At the same time, they are studying the most effective ways to employ crowd sourcing as a means of furthering research.

“Our challenge as researchers is how do we improve people’s chances, or give them the opportunity to survive cardiac arrest, by improving access to these devices,” says Raina Merchant, a professor of emergency medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “To do that, you really have to know where they are. One approach for finding them is to hire a team of research assistants to go door to door and look and build a map. But that takes a lot of time, and the information becomes very static.”

That method can also become very expensive, notes Wharton operations and information management professor Shawndra Hill. “Basically, we’re talking about the idea of divide and conquer to the nth degree, where ‘n’ is the number of people willing to participate,” she says. “Oftentimes, people are willing to participate … at a lower cost than it would cost the researchers to participate themselves. You also get scale because so many more people are participating. And if you incentivize people correctly, you can do things faster just because there are more people.” She points to Amazon Mechanical Turk, a division of Amazon Web Services, as an example of this. The site recruits people to complete simple tasks, such as writing product descriptions or labeling documents, for relatively low fees.

Dubbed the MyHeartMap Challenge, the Penn contest is scheduled to launch January 31 and run until March 13. Contest participants will use a free app that can be installed on their mobile phones to take pictures of AED devices in public places in Philadelphia. They then send the pictures to the Penn research team through the app or via the project’s web site. Eventually, the researchers would like to expand the project to create a nationwide, crowd sourced AED registry. “In today’s networked society, it makes a lot more sense to actually use social media and social networking to collect this data, and engage the public as citizen scientists,” Merchant notes. “We thought we could probably get much better data by, for example, having people who work at a Starbucks or who are headed into the coffee shop, or the place where they work, take a picture [of the AEDs that they see]. It raises their situational awareness about their environment, and it helps us build a map so that somebody else could use that information.”

If a sufficient number of unique AEDs are identified, the person or team that finds the most devices during the MyHeartMap Challenge will be awarded $10,000. Organizers have also singled out several pre-identified “golden ticket” AEDs around the city that will net $50 for the first person to send in pictures of them. Participants are encouraged to leverage their social networks to help in the challenge, meaning the winner could turn out not to be the person who physically hits the streets to find AEDs, but the one who designs the most creative way to motivate friends and other contacts to do so. “At least one international team from outside Philadelphia is putting together a pretty sophisticated method for locating AEDs,” Merchant says. “We’re hoping a lot of different teams from across the U.S. and outside the U.S. want to [participate.]”

Structuring the contest and choosing the reward was a key part of the project: Not only do the researchers want to interest enough individuals and teams to create a comprehensive map, but they also want to find out what types of rewards incentivize crowd sourcing participants to deliver the most — and the most accurate — data. “Crowd sourcing is increasingly being used in public health, in disasters and emergency preparedness and in planning large events, with people quickly submitting information about what’s happening in those contexts,” Merchant notes. “But we need more data on how we validate the information that we get from the crowd, and how we understand what crowds are best able to answer and when that information is actually accurate.”

The Philadelphia project is meant to be a pilot that would later be expanded to other cities and other parts of the country. Organizers plan to use what they learn from the first MyHeartMap Challenge to design future contests. “We’re excited about the competition for two reasons,” Hill says. “To learn about crowd sourcing and because this particular application has the potential to provide information that could save lives.”

To learn more about the MyHeartMap Challenge, visit the project’s website: http://www.myheartmap.org.

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Text Messaging Trends — and Takeaways for Marketers

Posted on January 3, 2012

Mobile text messaging offers big opportunities for global marketers, with developing countries providing the best models for text-message advertising, say Wharton experts in response to a recent global Pew Research Center survey of cell phone users.

According to the Pew study, a median of 75% of cell phone owners in 21 countries surveyed say they use their phones to text. Text messaging is more popular among cell phone owners in two of the poorest nations surveyed: Indonesia (96%) and Kenya (89%). The use of cell phones for text messaging is high also in other developing countries like Poland (85%), Lithuania (79%), Russia (75%) and Ukraine (72%). Only 49% of India’s roughly 900 million cell phone owners use text messaging, according to the survey. It is also relatively less popular in developed countries like the U.S. (67%), Britain (79%) and Germany (56%). People in wealthier nations use their cell phones more for social networking because of better Internet access, the survey found.

While text messaging offers “a huge opportunity” for marketers, they have yet to figure out a value proposition that doesn’t turn off cell phone users, notes Wharton operations and information management professor Shawndra Hill. “Unless [users] have given you permission to advertise to them on their cell phone — either as a free-for-all where everybody can advertise, or in return for some service like a mobile app — [you] run the risk of aggravating consumers.” Receiving text messages shouldn’t cost recipients anything, she adds.

The best models for using text messages for advertising will come from developing countries, where cell phones have made big inroads, says Hill. In developing markets, text messaging has little or no competition from other forms of advertising, such as online promotion or mailers sent to residences, unlike in developed countries, she points out. “[Those models] will come from companies that really understand the context – [multinationals] that are on the ground there, or local companies.”

For example, text messaging has revolutionized how people go about their daily lives in Kenya, says Hill, who visited that country last summer as part of a study group. Mobile apps help cell phone owners in Kenya use their devices for micropayments, health care services and updates on crop prices, among other applications, she points out.

But the growth of text messaging for marketing “will be a much slower process, and there will be many steps backward that accompany the steps forward,” says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. In fact, he expects “a generational shift” to take place before it becomes popular, especially in developed countries. He points to the example of the slow pace at which Facebook has become a platform for commerce. “Years ago, everyone would have thought that there would be lots of storefronts on Facebook,” he says. “It really has been very poor in that regard, because people want to separate out different activities.” Facebook is about tracking and communicating with friends, and not about buying and selling things, he notes.

Fader predicts that companies that go “too far or too fast” with text messaging for advertising are likely to have “more of a backlash than any kind of commercial success.” Text message advertising is “worse and more intrusive than email, because it alerts you; it stops what you are doing, as opposed to email, where you are more in control.”

Many companies are studying ways to effectively use text messages for marketing. But barring specific case studies, experiments or “serendipitous activities,” the practice has failed so far to gain widespread acceptance, notes Fader. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in many, if not most, of the success stories, text messaging as commerce is going to be pure novelty,” Fader says. “Those same activities a year later will not only be ineffective, but also downright negative.”

Still, it is important that marketers go through that novelty phase, and learn through trial and error, says Fader. “But there will be a lot or errors with some of those successful trials.”

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