Research Operations Manager Scott Kresge talks about the unique aspects of operating on a global scale September 4, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , trackbackWith a degree in computer science as well as cognitive psychology, I’ve always enjoyed pushing around large collections of data particularly when they involve human behavior and demographics.
When I go to the office I live the vicarious life of a virtual tourist. Rather than stepping off a plane or a ship and being immersed in a different culture, I am exposed to a cacophony of out-of-context snapshots of other cultures every work day.
One of my first eye opening experiences in managing Global Operations was a study being run in China. I was keeping an eye on the recruitment levels as it went infield just out of curiosity. The number of survey respondents exploded instantly and grew at speeds that we would never see in the U.S. My first thought was to shut the survey down. Surely we were breaking some agreement with the publishers by commandeering all the available advertising real estate and then inviting every single visitor to take a survey. I naively envisioned 1.3 billion Chinese poised over their keyboards happily waiting to pounce on the next available survey.
Mercifully, one of my counterparts in Beijing explained what I was seeing. It’s not uncommon in China for even some the largest of portal sites to “lease out” their entire site to a single entity or a small group. For all practical purposes, you own all branding rights and advertising real estate on the site. There’s a catch of course. You can only “own” it for a few days at most. Imagine owning all the advertising real estate and data collection rights on a site like Yahoo.com or AOL.com…even for just a few hours.
Here are a few examples of some of those out-of-context, cultural snapshots. I’ve identified them by language since country borders are becoming less and less meaningful in the brave new internet landscape.
Chinese – Seeing this survey throws me every time I see it. This survey involves one of the largest American entertainment icons and is instantly recognizable by probably 99+% of Americans and here it’s mixed with a language that I imagine less than 1% of Americans can decipher. I find it pleasantly disorienting.
Russian – I was born into an era when the Soviet Union was planting nuclear missiles on Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was saying “We will bury you!” (apparently speaking figuratively to capitalism in general). Now I’m helping to execute a study to determine how well the marketing efforts of one the largest American chip manufacturers are going in Russia.
Arabic – Written Arabic is a visually beautiful language. Of course, I wouldn’t even recognize it as a language of any kind if someone didn’t tell me it was so. In addition to the translation issue, Arabic has the additional technical challenge of being written and read from right to left.
I’ve presented three glimpses of data collection across three very different regions and cultures. To paraphrase a saying; the more things change, the more they remain the same. I won’t bore you with numerical results but you can take comfort from the fact that out of this cultural chaos comes one global truth: If you expose people from any culture to enough advertising, it’s going to affect their attitudes and behaviors
I’ll leave it to the advertisers and the philosophers to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
- Scott Kresge
Research Operations Manager – Global
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