A rough week for Twitter, Facebook by the numbers, the IAB goes off on AdBlock Plus, the relevance of TV ads in the digital age, here comes the Alpha Generation, Coca-Cola has a short memory, news and apps, Yellow Cab blames Uber for its lack of strategy, renting an igloo on Airbnb, Amazon's Spotify killer, Wendy's takes down Burger King in one tweet, using your phone at the ATM, measuring customer engagement, purposeless walking, the Millennials are coming, the Chart of the Week, plus our trivia challenge, our podcast pick and more, it's The Full Monty.
A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry. If you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links — and additional ones — by subscribing to The Full Monty Magazine at smonty.co/fullmontymag.
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We're back with our Sunday evening Facebook Mentions chat #SundaysWithScott. We'll be off next week, due to everyone else watching the Super Bowl.
The Full Monty Preview - February 1, 2016
It's the preview of The Full Monty for February 1, 2016 - trivia, rants and more. #SundaysWithScott
Posted by Scott Monty on Sunday, January 31, 2016
Industry
- Next Sunday is Super Bowl L (that's 50 for all of you non-Latin readers) and that means that the focus will be on the ads. Yes, even in the digital age, TV ads reign supreme, as their massive reach has no match. While digital platforms are tempting for better targeting, it means multiple creative executions rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of Super Bowl TV ads.
- Meanwhile, Viceland, the joint venture of A&E Networks and Vice that will replace the H2 channel, is trying to reinvent the TV ad model, offering advertisers less commercial clutter along with custom content and things like “pod takeovers,” where brands can run longer pieces of content in between shows.
- Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB (the Interactive Advertising Bureau), is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. At the IAB's annual leadership meeting last week, he called AdBlock Plus "an old-fashioned extortion racket" that "den[ies] freedom to everyone else." See him in action:
- With the marketing landscape getting more complex, it's important to have specialist generalists who can see the ecosystem as a whole and help integrate paid, earned and owned aspects and execute along five main strategies.
- If you're tired of hearing about Millennials (more on that in the last section), good news! Now you can prepare to hear all about the Alpha Generation, who are 0 to 2 years old today. You might be surprised. Great. Prepare for a decade and a half nothing but articles on the Alphas.
- Consumers want brands to embody many core values, with quality topping the list. The next two are tied: reliability/durability and honesty/transparency. This is quite telling that people want ethical behavior in addition to good product design.
- Last week we shared how Coca-Cola has changed its campaign slogan from "Open Happiness" to "Taste the Feeling." This week they got a taste of what happens when you ask consumers to use your images with their own words. Remember the Chevy Tahoe fiasco of 2006? Probably not. As Sherlock Holmes said, "The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before and will be again."
- Digital news outlet Quartz is launching its own app. Why? With 47% of its revenue coming from mobile, and users preferring to consume news via an app versus a mobile browser, it's a no-brainer.
- Also acknowledging the importance of mobile use, the Wall Street Journal is planning three more vertical apps.
- When it comes to news consumption, there are 10 publishers that account for nearly half of all online news.
- If you're creating content for journalists, according to a recent survey, they still prefer to be notified by good old fashioned email to receive releases, video, images, infographics, and more. We live in our inboxes. Still one of the most reliable way to get information in front of people.
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- It was an earnings week for Facebook. The result? Profit of over $1 billion for Q4 2015.
- Other significant numbers: there are now over 1.5 billion users worldwide; revenue per user was up 29.8% to $1.22 in developing world; daily active users hit 1.04 billion, up 2.97% YoY; full year revenue was $17.93 billion, up 44% YoY. Significant growth globally - particularly in the developing world.
- Here's a non-revenue number that was significant: Facebook is now logging more than 100 million hours of video watched a day. That's YouTube territory.
- Facebook isn't stopping there either. They're rolling out live video out to all users. Look out, Periscope!
- Yes, Facebook is still working on phasing out the "like" button. Here's the story behind that.
- A global society connected so completely is facing cultural challenges. But if Facebook had its way, there would be an assimilation of cultures — the big myth Facebook needs you to believe.
- It was a rough week for Twitter. As we noted last week, four of its top executives left. Bloomberg said Twitter bears "some of the hallmarks of a younger Yahoo." Stratechery looked back at the timeline and showed How Facebook Squashed Twitter. Then The New Yorker ran The End of Twitter, asking "What has Twitter made itself?" It's a good question. In this week's Facebook video (above), we discuss the need for a business plan and the consistent communication of that plan to all stakeholders. Twitter is letting its story be told by others instead of getting ahead of it. This is crisis communications 101.
- In a weird move, Twitter stopped showing ads to some of its most valuable users. Desperation?
- Jeremiah Owyang took to Facebook (naturally) to ask how his followers might step in. Summed up, here are 10 ideas that could save Twitter.
- Amid all of this, Twitter hired a new CMO: Leslie Berland from American Express. According to an analysis by Littlebird, that bodes well for Twitter users.
- As the management (and most users) are scratching their heads, we've finally been shown what Twitter is for.
- A $1B acquisition of a 13-person company seemed ridiculous at the time. But buying Instagram is proving to be one of Mark Zuckerberg's smartest moves. Because 98 of the top 100 Facebook advertisers now also advertise on Instagram.
- Periscope is teaming up with GoPro to bring live streaming to action cameras. Hooray! No more shaky video while I try to navigate a ropes course while filming. Speaking of which...
Trivia question: Texting while driving is a no-no. But this Michigan driver died as a result of doing what online? *
Collaborative Economy
- Uber
- San Francisco's Yellow Cab organization has filed for bankruptcy, and it blames Uber. Never mind ignoring what customers desire.
- Uber is monitoring its drivers using smartphone gyrometers, to determine whether they're speeding. See, Yellow Cab drivers? At least you don't have to contend with that.
- Uber rides may be cheap now. It's part of their customer acquisition strategy. But how long can they keep it up? And what's the cost to society?
- They seem to be doing fairly well financially, as Uber earned more in Q3 2015 than in all of 2014, according to leaked documents.
- If you think Uber is just about ride-hailing, think again. It's about everything that transportation touches. The possibilities are many.
- Airbnb
- People are getting creative over on Airbnb. First, an enterprising person took advantage of the blizzard situation, built an igloo in Brooklyn, and then listed it on Airbnb. The listing says it was hand-crafted. Of course it was, it's Brooklyn. We're lucky they didn't call it an artisanal igloo.
- And there's now a dedicated "Netflix and Chill" suite on Airbnb for $400 a night. They might come out ahead if they rented it by the hour.
- With all of the "unicorns" in Silicon Valley, one has to wonder if they were able to achieve that status simply because people didn't ask enough questions. As in, do the data back up your claims?
- Here are the best-funded startups in each of the 50 states.
Audio
- Amazon is building a Spotify-killer that will go beyond Prime Music and will be discounted for Echo owners.
- Amazon's Audible is on a hiring spree, suggesting that it is developing its own content (i.e. podcasts).
- Spotify is starting to include videos and podcasts in its iOS app. A trend for other streaming audio providers? Is video too alluring to resist?
- There are still 85 Tower Records stores in existence — and they're all in Japan. The strange culture that still buys nearly 85% of its music on discs.
- Podcast Recommendation of the Week. This week, check out The Public Speaker from Quick and Dirty Tips. Do you have a podcast recommendation for us? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts
Content / Customer Experience
- Content marketing is about to enter a weird time. Using the Gartner Hype Cycle, we're beyond the inflated peak of expectations and in the trough of disillusionment. Now is the time to dig in.
- While the brain is wired to follow stories in a linear fashion, there's still value in considering other ways to tell a story.
- Use these 355+ words to power-up your marketing efforts.
- The new customer service line: Facebook Messenger. Why complain to a live human when you can thumb-type it out without leaving Facebook, and in the privacy of your own messaging app?
- When Burger King took a swipe at Wendy's 4 for $4 deal by offering "5 for $4, because 5 is better than 4," Wendy's didn't take it lying down. People love it when brands trash each other online. It makes for good viewing and it humanizes the brands in the process.
Privacy / Security / Legal
- Bank of America will be rolling out technology that will allow customers to use their smartphones to access ATMs. Other banks such as JP Morgan and Wells Fargo will follow suit.
- The rash of data breaches should teach us a few things. One security firm has summed up lessons learned from them, including: vet third party vendors, prioritize data protection, and more.
- While you often hear of the Internet of Things, it turns out that customer demand hasn't been quite as high as expected. The reasons? Cost, for one. And concerns about privacy and security.
Measurement / Metrics / Data
- Why share of voice is a craptacular marketing metric — including the all-important demominator blindness. Confused? Click through.
- Sundance ran an event at its annual festival called Digital Storytelling, and focused on data-enhanced storytelling to connect creators and brands, and determine how to measure a medium that needs to go beyond interruption as a model.
- The CMO Council conducted a survey to determine how marketers are measuring customer engagement. Revenue metrics and campaign metrics were the most prominent:
Chart of the Week
Brought to you by Zignal Labs, a realtime, cross media analytics platform (also a client of Scott Monty Strategies).
With over 2,000 mentions on the day of its announcement, the Go Pro / Periscope topic is growing fast. Looking through some of the top mentioned articles, this partnership comes at a tough time for GoPro as they recently just laid off 7% of the company.
Yet sentiment remains quite positive, which supports the announcement and reflects on the general attitude toward GoPro products.
* Answer to the trivia question above:
- A Michigan driver was ejected from his vehicle during a rollover on I-75 and was found pantsless at the scene. Police determined that he had been watching p*rn while driving and was...enjoying himself. Talk about distracted driving. Chalk up one more reason for the push toward autonomous vehicles or Uber.
When You Have the Time: Essential Watching / Listening / Reading
- As a society, we tend to walk because we have to get somewhere or for fitness. But purposeless walking seems to be a lost art. Without talking, without earbuds, without using a GPS system. Just walking. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler all walked with great results. Maybe it's time you walked for no reason at all.
- My friend Craig Daitch has launched Codespace, to teach kids how to be fluent an essential language in the 21st century. It's a great effort and deserves more people to know about it. Won't you share his update?
- Silicon Valley's biggest competition isn't Austin, Boston or New York. It's actually small-town America, where some of the most interesting innovations are taking place.
- If you're a fan of puns, you need to sign up for Punderdome — it's the pun equivalent of Cards Against Humanity. We're game.
- And finally, you've read plenty about Millennials. Watch this short clip from Scott Stratten, one of the best public speakers we know:
Millennials Don't Know Our Pain
Scott talks about Millennials and the pain they just don't understand, like rewinding.At the Brian Buffini Success Tour stop in Toronto, I talk about how we should be thankful we're not Millennials.See Scott at the 2016 Success Tour stops! http://www.buffiniandcompany.com/events/success-tour/default.aspxTo have Scott energize your conference with a keynote, go to www.ScottStratten.com or call 1-888-580-9969
Posted by UnMarketing on Thursday, January 28, 2016
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