Think Multicultural

Lately our agency has been working on a couple of Web projects for clients that require Section 508 compliance because they receive federal funding. Without getting into the somewhat complicated details of Section 508 compliance (feel free to read about it here), it basically involves making sure a Web site is accessible to individuals with disabilities as protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A big part of this requirement often involves making Web sites friendly to screen readers and magnifiers used by the blind.

In addition, we are starting to hear more and more clients inquire about making their Web sites accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has led me to start thinking about the disabled market in the U.S.

First, some definitions. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, “there is no one definition for disability.” In fact, the Census Bureau collects disabled population data using four different surveys. However, the Census classifies disability into to two categories: Nonsevere Disability and Severe Disability. For more information on these definitions, see page 2 of the Americans with Disabilities: 2002 report.

So how big is this market? According to the aforementioned Census report
- 51.2 million people (18.1% of the population) had some level of disability and 32.5 million (11.5% of the population) had a severe disability
- About 10.7 million people ages 6 and over needed personal assistance with one or more activities of daily living (ADL) or instrumental activities of daily living (IADL)
- Among the population 15 and older, 2.7 million used a wheelchair. Another 9.1 million used an ambulatory aid such as a cane, crutches, or walker.
- Approximately 7.9 million people 15 and older had difficulty seeing words and letters in ordinary newspaper print, including 1.8 million people who reported being unable to see

The next question is whether this is a lucrative market for companies to consider. DiversityInc.com put out an article in 2002 that people with disabilities maintain an aggregate income that exceeds $1 trillion, with $220 billion in discretionary spending power.

To put all of this data in perspective, the disabled market is larger than the 44 million+ Hispanic population that spends $575 billion (according to Synovate’s 2004 U.S. Hispanic Market Report).

Lastly, according to a 2000 Harris Interactive report, 40% of people with disabilities are online and spend twice the time logged on than their non-disabled counterparts. If you think about it, Internet technology is probably extremely empowering for the disabled, allowing people with various degrees of disabilities to more easily get news, communicate with others, shop, and consume entertainment.

Clearly, this is a big topic, and an even bigger opportunity. We’ll be posting more information in the weeks to come.

Google’s quarterly earnings report for Q4 2007 had lots of good things in it about higher revenues and higher profits. The one bad thing in the report had to do with social networking. As Ed Sim points out, Google is not seeing the results they expected from social networking advertising.

The people at Google are generally considered the “smartest guys in the room” wherever they go, so if they’re not getting the results they expect from social networking (SN), what does that mean for the rest of us?

The great promise of SN advertising is that the owners of SN sites have tons and tons of data about everyone on their site, so they can target ads to the consumers who are most likely to be receptive to those ads. However, as with other behavioral targeting models, the closer you get to custom ads, the closer you’ll get to backlash from the privacy police. Just look at how long Facebook’s new Beacon advertising system lasted.

So what’s a marketer to do? On the one hand you can dump tons of money into ads on SN sites, hoping to strike a chord and stay relevant, despite low click rates and lots of noise, on the other you can spend your money elsewhere and have to answer to your client when they demand to know why their ads aren’t on the coolest new SN site.

SN ad targeting technology will continue to get better, and everyone agrees that there’s gold in those hills. In the mean time, it’s a real puzzle.

A week or two ago in the Washington Post there was an article by Josh Chasin, the Chief Research Officer of comScore. The article was describing the challenges faced by marketers in measuring consumers’ consumption of the Internet, and more importantly, Internet advertising.

The article lists the usual suspects as threats to online ad measurement: Ajax, multitasking, rich media, etc. and says that comScore is working on better ways to measure user “engagement” with online advertising.

What it doesn’t list is the threat to comScore’s business model posed by the backlash from websites who say that comScore and Nielsen (the other major online advertising measurement service) do a terrible job of measuring even such basic things as online visitors and pageviews, much less such esoteric things as “engagement.”

As described a little in Mr. Chasin’s column, comScore is moving toward engagement metrics and away from basic metrics such as pageviews and unique visitors. Without actually being an engineer at comScore, it seems that this will rely on extrapolating the online web surfing behavior of a few users to the entire Internet audience, in a similar way to how Nielsen measures TV and Arbitron measures radio.

This begs the question – why? Isn’t the advantage of online advertising that every single action and interaction can be measured? Why then take a new technology that improves greatly on the old ways of doing things and try to shoe-horn it back into the old methods of measurement?

Someday soon, some startup in New York or Silicon Valley is going to figure out an accurate way to measure all web users’ interaction with web content and advertising without violating their privacy. When they do, the existing players are doomed.