Personal Recommendation Software Predicts Consumer Choice

Jeffrey O'Brien a writer for fortune magazine eats dinner with What to Rent! owners Matthew Kuhlke and Adam Geitgey. The site adminsters a personality test to visitors and recommends DVDS based on the findings. As a more difficult attempt during dinner, the two will each pick someone in the restaurant and without ever talking to them, divine their single favorite movie. What to Rent! categorizes hundreds of films by star power, plot complexity, etc. Offering that individuals watch movie in the same manner that they interact with other individuals, in essence, relationships between individuals and movies are formed. Geitgey scans the restaurant and selects a guy delivering meals and cleaning dishes wearing tattered jeans, a steel bracelet with a few tattoos. He appears to be in his late 20s, working in a youth-trendy restaurant in the part of the city where people that age who don't have real jobs hang out. Geitgey offers, "Those are the kind of guys who barely made it through high school because they couldn't focus, but spend most of their time reading light philosophy books by singers-turned-writers like Nick Cave." He adds, "he would be interested in things that have an underlying philosophy but are also physically intense" concluding Starship Troopers fits that exactly! Kuhlke spots a waitress in her late teens or early 20s, black hair in a bob, very cute but she looks at the floor as she walks and avoids eye contact with customers. "She's unhappy...working around all these jerks who just want to have sex with her" adds Kuhlke. He also suggests she wasn't popular in high school and is shaking off her past by working in a cool place. Kuhle then states "She's like an old-school romantic comedy but she'd pick Breakfast at Tifany's, a totally crappy movie. She's cool enough to know she should pick Audrey Hepburn, but not cool enough to pick the right movie, Roman Holiday" so he battles between the two movies and finally decides on Girl, Interrupted! lol

According to many researchers "We don't just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things. DVD collections, iTunes playlists, cars, cell phones. Each is an extension of who we are (or want to be). We put ourselves on display through our purchases, wearing our personalities on our sleeves, literally and figuratively, for the world to see." And the web is transitioning from a search tool to a discovery one. The difference is that searching is what you do when you're looking for something, discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for finds you! "Everything you buy online says a little bit about you. And if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about you and your tastes? Marketers heaven.

To dig a little deeper, I actually went to What To Rent! to test our their application. It seems to be a content based recommender because it relies on an individuals personality and the content/factors of the movie to offer recommendations opposed to a rating system as seen in typical collaborative recommenders. The site uses the LaBarrie Theory, a movie viewer emotionally interacts with a film in the same manner that they interact with other human beings, to make suggestions. The site first decipher's a users' personality then forms a general model of how thety react to the world and their average emotional state by providing an upfront personality test. The cluser then compares your ideal stimulus and current mood to the possible relationships with movies on file. The film that maximizes the desired criteria is recommended. One of the major problems with personality tests is that users often lie (intentionally or unintentionally) about who they are and will answer questions as if they behaved in their ideal manner..leading to inaccurate responses. The system, instead, asks about seeminly unimportant life experiences an in attempt to get more accurate responses. After answering the 20 question personality test and 2 addt'l questions regarding my current movie and type of movie I wanted to watch, I was presented with their first recommendatino....Goodfellas a 1990 movie!! Definitely not what I had in mind. It's a movie that I have seen before and was hardly in the mood to see again. The next movie presented is Usual Suspects, this is in fact one of my favorites and I'm probably guilty of over-watching it at this point because Im not in the mood to see at right now either. In order, I was then presented: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Kindergarten Cop (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Jackie Brown (1997). Growing tired of their recommendations, I finally convinced myself that Jackie Brown would do. Less because I genuinely wanted to watch the movie, and more about me trying to find a recommendation that will suffice! While their overall stats boast a user satisfaction of 80.27%, 1 of 6 (more like 0.25/6) in my humble opinion is hardly accurate enough to warrant return visits to this website. I think I'll opt for word of mouth recommendations instead!

And by the way, the guy with the tattoos is the restaurant manager and before exclaiming Brianna Loves Jenna (a porn movie) he exclaims Starship Troopers and the waitress, as it turns out, loves Roman Holiday...perhaps they would do a better job of selecting movies based on individual photographs than relying on the personality test!

The race to create a 'smart' Google
What To Rent! (username: prs-test)