butterballs or cheese balls, an online barometer (link)
11.25.09 - the ny times - by kim severson

happy thanksgiving, loyal eat!drink!snack! readers! if you're like me, you spent your thanksgiving moping around the house in your skivvies, drunk on wild turkey & watching the brady bunch thanksgiving episode over & over again on youtube. that bobby is one hell of a thespian! jk! that's not what really happened. in reality, this year i skipped the usual trip home to my parents' house for the holiday & instead spent it here in brooklyn with my younger brother, where we cooked a "proper" dinner like real adults. since it was just us two, we were beholden to no one & therefore able to cook whatever we damn well pleased. that meant no turkey, no gravy, no pumpkin pie. instead, we whipped up apple stuffed chicken breasts, roasted vegetables & potatoes, butternut squash & some stuffing, with a sinful chocolate trifle for dessert. the first two were recipes we decided on after perusing the internet & the butternut squash came into being with the help of internet consultation.

it turns out that we weren't the only ones consulting the internet this thanksgiving. according to the ny times, pretty much everyone & their mother turned to the web for thanksgiving recipes & how tos this year. since we're such a divided diverse country with varied regional cuisines, all this internet consultation makes it easy for marketers to track & analyze the nation's various thanksgiving trends. "if you are in oregon this thanksgiving, you stand a better than average chance of encountering tofurkey. more people in new york are looking for caterers to prepare the holiday meal than anywhere else in the country. live in the southeast? brace yourself for a big scoop of broccoli casserole." this info is marketing gold. kevin kells (head of consumer packaged goods for google) notes that "when you marketed in the past, you had to guess at the consumer’s motivation. now you have the answers to that right in front of you." i don't know about you, but i love when marketers can track my every move.

for what it's worth, marketers are also able to figure out when we do what we do around the holiday. as an example, since we're a nation of procrastinators & many of us waited until yesterday to start planning thanksgiving, allrecipes.com "built server capacity for the day before thanksgiving, then use only 50 percent of it the rest of the year." they also note that "pie searches got the most action on wednesday morning. but by 10 am, people began earnest hunts for sweet potato casserole and stuffing recipes. by noon, 100,000 people had searched for mashed potato recipes." gravy searches don't spike until around 3pm. i can only assume that come tomorrow, thanksgiving will already be forgotten, as the most popular search term will likely be some bullshit about black friday. oh wait...according to google trends, "black friday internet sales" is already #1. let the gluttonous pre-christmas consumption begin!