I mean, it is a marketing metric, right?

Political humor, regardless of its age or era, reveals what the populace believes true about those in authority. In modern lingo, it reveals sentiment. Wandering minstrels praised the king in his court and reviled him at the fringes of the empire. Court jesters were the only ones able to directly mock the crown. Whether they survived the joke was another matter entirely.

NextStage started receiving political cartoons and jokes since shortly after this blog's launch. Here we share what we've received to date along with some commentary. Cartoons and text are shared pretty much in the order we received them. Remember that these were unsolicited and came in "over the transom", hence reveal are the mood of the populace. Similar concerns are affecting people regardless of political affiliations.

As marketers and advertisers, we only stand to lose. Advancements in neuromarketing and analytics are making great strides to give those very same consumers truly personalized digital experience across all mediums. We envision experiences that put their needs before those of brands and actually improve lives.

If there was ever a time to fight ignorance, it's now. Join us for a heated debate over this brewing topic.

Visitors

• Think it's good
• Believe it's good
• Feel it's good
• Are neutral
• Think it's bad
• Believe it's bad
• Feel it's bad

History

There's a bit of history behind that tool, some of which is documented in How Do You Define 'Love'?. In a nutshell, several years back a personals site asked if we could produce a tool that would determine if people would fall in lust. They called it "love” and when we talked with them at length their greater interest was lust.

Yes, well, that was my first thought. My second thought, once I listened to the pitch was, "Oh, you mean a server farm? You thought a marketing, jingoish name would make it more attractive?" This is one of the problems with having gray in your hair, you've been around long enough to know there's nothing new under the sun, just new wrapping for a new generation.

Imagine yourself sitting in a mall watching people walking past and making highly accurate decisions about how each person shops, decides what to buy, what kinds of things trigger their interest, etc., and you get an idea of how NSSM works.

Except it's probably lots more accurate in its decisions because ET doesn't have any human prejudices to get in the way of making accurate conclusions.

NextStage SampleMatch is a upgrade of our InFocus Reports tool. SampleMatch helps you

• Understand your audience
• Determine key cognitive, motivational and behavioral factors for your audience (their {C,B/e,M} matrix)
• Design for your audience's cognitive, behavioral/effective and motivational triggers

If your company is using personae, you should be using NextStage's SampleMatch

• To learn if the personae you're using are valid and
• How to market to those personae better

Well, it turns out what we offered then we still offer now, then it was free, now it's for pay (just letting you know ahead of time, although we believe it's pretty inexpensive) -- You can learn how the world (or select parts of it) thinks now for only US$39.99/run.

Ten years ago nobody was interested. Now they are. Perhaps there's more interest in learning how the world -- or at least different regions of it -- think now. Or at least how the world was thinking in the last twenty-four hours (because that's how often the tool updates).

Take responsibility for your actions.
When you make a mistake and before anybody else knows the mistake has been made, raise your hand and say loud enough for others to hear you, "That one's mine. I did that. ..."

But we must ask, is he genuinely sorry for the gaff or are consumers simply being duped again?

• Everyone should be voted out of office
• Legislators are only interested in the debt situation to the extent that they can act without getting blamed for anything
• No matter what they do, it won't work
• Raising the debt ceiling isn't the same as asking for a higher credit limit on your credit cards because people don't raise their credit limit in order to borrow money to pay off their credit card debt, which is what the government is doing
• (And a true universal regardless of any other considerations) Raising the debt ceiling is irrelevant if we don't stop spending more than we earn

It's worth noting that the last item above often is closely followed by "And xxxx them if they think they're going to raise my taxes to do it!" One fellow, enjoying an ice cream cone at one of our favorite icecreameries located in Amherst, NH, was very eloquent in describing why things will get worse for different groups, specifically armed forces, welfare, medicare and medicaid recipients, retirees, students, ... The list was quite extensive and none of them will be paid, receive their benefits, get their medicine, meet their tuition bills, ... Mail won't be delivered, border crossings will be unguarded and you get the gest.

His post got me to thinking about how some candidates would fare if their campaign sites were resumes and we really were hiring them for a specific job. I mean, we are hiring them in a very real sense. That's what elections are, the US's HR department deciding which of several candidates (literally) gets the job. We can also fire them via recalls, re-elections, impeachment, voting them out of office, ... and the common people need some uncommonly horrific things to happen to them individually before any but the least of these to take place.

I know, you're shocked to learn that NextStage has a specific tool to determine if someone is job-worthy or not, The NextStage Resume Rater.

Here the websites of Michele Bachmann, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are analyzed as if they were resumes and we, the people, had to hire them for the job of US President.

To recap: NextStage demonstrated the ability to determine who would partner with whom in 2004 (see Reading Virtual Minds), the question was moot in 2008 and we're taking a look again here in 2011.

One of our NextStageologists asked if Newt Gingrich's staff quitting en masse showed up on his Newt Gingrich 2012 site. That question is pretty much a "Through the Ages" question we answer here.

We took our previous Changes by the hour to www_newt_org_newt-direct (morning and afternoonET, Friday, 4 Mar 11) post, analyzed a snapshot of Newt Gingrich 2012 taken about 4:36pmET, Thursday, 6 June 2011 (the day the story came out, I think) and analyzed Newt Gingrich 2012 today, Monday, 13 June 2011 at 11:30amET to determine if there were recognizable shifts and there were a few, so let's have at it.

This time we're using NextStage's Compatibility Gauge (NSCG), a tool being used by clients to help them create online communities for testing purposes, populating work and study groups, determining who'll be good incoming management for existing teams, etc. We're hoping that tool will become public in a few months and are premiering it here because it's nice to see who'll get along with whom, don't you think?

Here we analyze Mitt Romney's Mitt Romney for President homepage.

In any case, we analyzed Sarah Palin's Official Pac Homepage and present our findings here.

An example of a study with enough basis to provide reliable results to me is The Longevity Project. It's an eighty - that's "8" "0" - year study of what contributes to a long, happy life.

First, neither were quick decisions. One client has been working at being fired for well over a year...no, as I think about it, both have been working at it for well over a year. One client was obvious, the other less so. In both cases NextStage talked things over internally and with our Advisors before making any decisions.

From Yahoo's launch in 1995 to that first 'tweet' from Twitter in 2006, social networks have launched a continuous communications revolution. Where does it go from here, if anywhere? What will be the next significant web application that comes along the social media space and captivates the whole world? Join our panel of technology experts, futurists, authors and academics as they discuss what's next for social networking.

In any case, here we analyze the three above noted sites to present the many faces of Ron Paul.

I hope you enjoy.

Learn more about the Annenberg Center's history and work.

Ever willing to please, here is a comparison of the two speeches using the standard NextStage Political Analyzer benchmarks.

But these same tools also indicated this fellow was harried, hurried, distracted, frazzled, frustrated, ... all symptoms of information overload.

In short, this fellow wasn't responding to my offer per se, he was responding to everything going on around him and I got in the way. There was more information coming at him (lots more than my email) than he could comfortably integrate and it got dangerous (he lashed out).

The special effects, the costumes, the this, the that, ...

The fact that humans and non-humans could talk and understand each other.

Ugh?

Here's how some of the tricks work: ...

However, no individual can achieve anything in elected office unless they believe certain things about themselves because without those core, personal and identifying beliefs they will not have the intellectual power, the charisma, the social awareness and sensitivity, the negotiation skills or the creativity necessary for success in public office.

In this case, Tim Pawlenty:

However, no individual can achieve anything in elected office unless they believe certain things about themselves because without those core, personal and identifying beliefs they will not have the intellectual power, the charisma, the social awareness and sensitivity, the negotiation skills or the creativity necessary for success in public office.

In this case, Tim Pawlenty:

However, no individual can achieve anything in elected office unless they believe certain things about themselves because without those core, personal and identifying beliefs they will not have the intellectual power, the charisma, the social awareness and sensitivity, the negotiation skills or the creativity necessary for success in public office.

In this case, Mitt Romney...

The political season, that is, and we here at NextStage have a long history (going back to 2004) of knowing more about the candidates than they want you to know we know about them. You can read some of the background on this in Reading Virtual Minds V1: Science and History or BizMediaScience's Political archive.

Originally FindMeFaster CEO Matt Van Wagner suggested we use our tools to analyze and post political campaigns back in the 2003-4 cycle. We posted on who said what and where they said it every day. It was a blog before people really knew what a blog was and we got great reviews, ...

Everyone except the wonderful women I had the pleasure of lunching with late last week. A good size group of them, ages from late thirties to middle fifties, all either business owners or executives in business, mixed ethnic backgrounds although predominantly white.

• When and how to use images versus text in menu systems
• Cost effective ways to place Influencers into social media

• Clearly actionable website design suggestions
• Based entirely on visitors interaction with your site
• And does so without collecting any personally identifiable data

Here's where you find out. This full day seminar provides some basic tools for learning how people are thinking and how to make use of the way they think to achieve your goals. The seminar requires individual participation and all NextStage trainers ensure a safe environment for learning these techniques.

You can get a taste of this training by reading Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History.

Because beauty is culturally defined, certain physiognomies and physiologies drive different non-conscious emotional responses within cultural groups and cross-culturally. Extreme examples are labeled "prejudice", "bigotry", "sex appeal", and all are used extensively in advertising and marketing. Perhaps their greatest and longest running use is to create stereotyped characters in mass media.

Knowing what produces positive and negative emotional valences -- desirability, worthiness, beauty, attractiveness, horror, disgust, rejection, conceit -- within specific audiences is valuable information for marketers creating integrated campaigns. An image of a man and woman talking causes non-conscious positive and negative cultural biases to be applied to the image and any associated content. If the image is a video with a sound track, cultural values dictate acceptable male and female vocal registers to produce desired responses in viewers.

In a single cultural environment with little to no integrated marketing, using cultural stereotypes was often all that was required to create successful cross-channel content in the past. The emergence of integrated marketing -- wherein the audience is deluged by a 360 near-continuous information stream from any number of simultaneous channels -- requires modern marketers to understand where koinophologic boundaries lie.

Koinophologic boundaries take the shape of simple questions that this study demonstrates can be answered scientifically. How much of a smile is enough of a smile? How wide a nose is too much nose? Can ears be too big to sell cars within a specific cultural audiences? Does age play a factor in both the creative and interpretive process?

This paper reports on a 2010 study undertaken to determine how koinophology might serve marketers. It is hoped that this and future studies will determine if faces and bodies translate into marketing dollars, and if physiognomic and physiologic elements can be optimized for specific marketing responses.