Digerati Magazine November 2016 Issue by DIGERATI

Moving from Mobile First to Mobile Only Virtual & Augmented Reality Will Change How We Work, Live & Play The Data That You See in Google Analytics is Wrong The Real-Time Google Penguin Algorithm Has Rolled Out Calling BullShit on 100% Viewability

Meet NYCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New CDO

Sree Srenivasan

CONTENTS

> CONTENTS Digerati is the world’s first ‘digital’ marketing magazine created specifically to provide a 360 degree view of the digital sector. Each issue covers digital innovation, content marketing, mobile, social, search, data and more.

Click here to suggest a topic or submit a question.

04 07

EDITOR’S LETTER

The Future of Digital is to Shift, Experience & Reimagine

FEATURE

Meet the News CDO of NYC

ECOM

Moving from Mobile First to Mobile Only

VR/ AR

FEATURE: Interview with CDO NYC, Sree Srenivasan

ECOMMERCE: Moving from Mobile First to Mobile Only

14 2

DATA: The Data That You See in Google Analytics is Wrong

VIEWABILITY: Calling Bullshit on 100% Viewability

Virtual & Augmented Reality Will Change How We Work, Live & Play

DATA

The Data That You See in Google Analytics is Wrong.

SEO

The Real-Time Google Penguin Algorithm Has Rolled Out

NATIVE ADS

Interview with NAI President, JesperLaursen

VIEWABILITY

Calling BullShit on 100% Viewability

DATA

The Hidden Value of 2nd Party Data

CONTENT

22 23

CONTENT: Thought Leadership – Content Marketing’s Secret Weapon

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INNVOATION: 5 Technologies Shaping the Future of Marketing

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Thought Leadership – Content Marketing’s Secret Weapon

IOT

Thoughts on the Disappearing Internet & Society 2.0

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE My New PA Amy is an AI

INNOVATION

Five Technologies Shaping the Future of Marketing

OPINION

> EDITOR’S LETTER Welcome to our November issue, featuring an interview with one of the most interesting Digerati I’ve ever met: Sree Sreenivasan, NYC’s new Chief Digital Officer. I had the good fortune of meeting Sree back in 2014 when he was CDO of The Metropolitan Museum, at which time he personally guided myself and a handful of guests around the Met an hour before it opened. It was a great way to see the Met up close and personal, but it was an even better way to get to know Sree and how he views technology. As you’ll read in the interview, Sree takes a view that technology should be about human experiences. During his tenure at the Met he led several initiatives built upon subtle uses of technology that brought the museum to life by delivering real end value to its visitors. But equally important was how he encouraged his team to play with new technology, to move fast, and win or lose, but always learn, fast. This approach to testing technology by creating small initiatives that either prove or disprove its relevance and value is a far more effective and efficient approach than the stock standard model of developing long-winded business cases for tech projects that may still ultimately fail. It also has the side benefit of helping people move beyond confusion caused by the steady stream of emerging marketing technologies to a state of being comfortable playing with new technologies before a business case is even begun. Marketing and advertising tech are reshaping the marketing landscape. There are literally thousands of tools available to make marketing easier, to engage consumers and customers in more meaningful ways, and to add real value to a business’s bottom line. The challenge remains how to prioritize what tech to invest your time, energy and budget on, which is why I’m personally glad we have events like ad:tech NYC.

Much like in recent years, this year’s NYC event has been reshaped to keep pace with the ever changing marketing landscape. On show will be a taste of what’s to come for the future of ad:tech, delivered via a program of keynote speakers, topic-driven panels and hands-on workshops that showcase the latest products and solutions to help deepen understanding and create new ideas that will drive innovation. As someone who’s career has been directly shaped by ad:tech events in several countries, I’m genuinely saddened that I won’t be able to make it to NYC for this year’s event, especially after seeing how they’ve shaped the event program around three key themes that underpin how marketer can remain competitive. The first theme is Shift, which is focused on helping marketers understand innovation and disruption as building blocks for change. It’s about learning from those on the forefront of emerging trends and beginning to shift your mindset on what is possible when it comes to staying connected and engaged with your evolving customer. 3

Experience is about discovering the latest technologies that are disrupting the industry and learning how they will impact customer’s behaviors and the ways you engage with them. And finally, Reimagine is about connecting with innovators from a wide variety of industries to discuss what the future of marketing and advertising looks like in a rapidly changing tech landscape. So whilst I may not be there in person this year, I am looking forward to hearing back from Digerati readers who make it to the event to hear what you thought of it and discover what you learned... Christopher Edwards Editor in Chief, Digerati Magazine

ad:tech is the original industry authority for marketing and media technology, where marketing, technology and media communities assemble to share new ways of thinking, build strong partnerships, and define new strategies to compete in an ever-changing marketplace. The NYC event celebrates its 20th year this November, which is quite a legacy given the number of similar events that have come and gone.

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INTERVIEW

Meet NYC’s New CDO,

Sree Srenivasan

here are few Digerati you’ll ever meet around the globe with more passion for how ‘digital’ can be used to shape personal experiences than Sreenath “Sree” Sreenivasan, New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer. Formerly the Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University respectively, Sree was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, and has won acclaim for dragging the Met into the social media age, launching their first mobile app and bringing the Met’s collection online.

Digerati sat down with Sree to discuss his new role and lessons learned from previous roles.

What attracted you to the role at the Met?

In life there are things that we love to do, and there are things that we want to do, and how do you pick the right opportunity. The opportunity at the Met allowed me to learn about the world of arts and culture, which is a growing important part of the global economy, work more directly in the not-for-profit sector, and then to work at one of the world’s great institutions - it’s just been named again by TripAdvisor as the world’s #1 museum. It was a big chance I took leaving Columbia University and a world I loved, everybody says they are all for change, but I say I’m

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all for progress, change I can’t stand. So, I made that leap to the Met 3 years ago, it was a 3-year journey and now I’m doing something else.

You mentioned that you learned a lot during your time at the Met. What were your biggest learnings?

I learnt the importance of the notion that just doing great work isn’t good enough anymore. There was a time when doing good work was good enough, and doing great work was good enough, but that is no longer the world that we live in. You have to have internal marketing plans and external marketing plans for everything that you do, you have to think about the importance of innovation and doing new things even when you don’t have to. One of the great things about the New York Times that all of us are following is how they are killing it in the digital world - trying new things, being bold - and that is because they are under existential threat. The key is how do we do change when we aren’t under an existential threat. They are at the part in the movie where an asteroid is coming and Will Smith and Bruce Willis are building a rocket to save the world. So, there’s nothing more likely to focus your attention than when there is an existential threat. The question is how to do all that when there isn’t such a threat. To tell institutions that they have to push and pivot and innovate when

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they don’t have to is an incredible challenge. I was also reminded of the importance of listening to your audience. One of my achievements is very small, but I’m incredibly proud of it and that is the #HASHTAG on every exhibition. People really cared about those, and they wanted to know what the #HASHTAG’s were all about. I’m also proud of sometimes not listening to the audience - we banned the use of the selfie stick at the Met – it’s bad for the art, it’s bad for the other guests and it’s bad for the people wielding the sticks because they don’t pay attention. So, sometimes it’s about doing the popular thing, and sometimes it’s about doing the unpopular thing and you don’t know how people are going to respond and in which particular way.

Did anything backfire, or did any projects now work for you, the Met, or for its audiences?

There were multiple things that we were able to experiment with that didn’t work. And that’s the good thing. If you make everything an experiment, you do things that are not too big to fail, then if you do fail, it’s OK. Some of the things we tried with social media and video didn’t work, and that’s OK. We tried, it didn’t work and so we moved on to something else, and it wasn’t a crisis because we hadn’t expended such a large amount of money that we had to make it work. We learned

INTERVIEW

that you can make things work because they intrinsically have the integrity to work as opposed to being artificially bolstered.

What are you most proud about of your time there in 3 years?

Probably getting the Met to understand the value of being less institutional, to make it more about the people of the Met, the human side of the Met. And to make it about the art in a way that it is relatable to other people, encouraging the entire staff to think about changing the social media policy, giving everyone the permission to do social. I’m also proud of doing things like the Met App and the Met website redesign. These are all routine matters in big corporates, but they aren’t in the world of culture because of historical reasons. So, I really enjoyed doing things like that. Then, working with so many different kinds of people and getting them excited about the value of digital - and the Director of the Met now talks about having four spaces of the Met: Fifth Avenue, Cloisters and the met Bruarer, and saying they all have equal value. And that’s super exciting because what they are saying is the visitors to our website and the digital world are of as much value as are visitors to our physical world, and you need both to succeed. I’m very excited and proud of that work.

How did you take the curators and staff who were less across technology on the digital journey?

The challenge is that curators in many museums are not rewarded or

recognized for their digital work, they are recognized for their traditional work and so, when I started I was told there was no way you were going to get 100 curators and 100 scientists excited about what you are doing. And the answer was that so many of them did, in fact, step forward and work with me and were open and excited to trying new things and that had a direct impact on what we were then able to do. And that is what I recommend that everybody should do in the digital space - getting those folks in your business that are interested, who do understand the value of digital and showing them ‘how to’ and then

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INTERVIEW

encouraging and supporting them in that process. I think that combination is really important.

Going forward, what are your priorities in your new role as CDO NYC?

As you know, most people don’t really know what someone’s job is - even your best friend’s job, what they actually do. And that would have been the case for me, except that the Mayor tweeted and it said “Sree, welcome, we are going to make NYC the most tech friendly, the most transparent and the most vividly equitable city in the world”.

them, how do we make that work. Just today, I was with my team, and we were looking at one of my slides from the Met which talks about the way to build an app is to make it simple, useful and delightful. But I think in terms of the city, the words should be simple, useful, trustworthy and delightful. And finding that balance is going to be the both the challenge and the opportunity.

and how a billion people use their phones in ways that New Yorkers haven’t thought about yet. So, how we learn from all of these opportunities is part of my job, and I’ll have a lot more to report on the next couple of months, so I really hope that you check back in.

In closing, what is your hot digital topic at the moment? Have you seen anything where you think ‘wow, that’s interesting, I need to watch this space”?

There was a time when doing good work was good enough, and doing great work was good enough, but that is no longer the world that we live in.

And I thought WOW, that’s really simply, really clear, and really scary because how the heck do you do that. So my work is helping to make NYC more accessible visibly, to make people’s interactions with the city more trustworthy - because people don’t like interacting with their government - and how can we use digital, mobile, social to make that happen.

There’s a wonderful visitor’s playbook that’s accessible online created by my predecessor, with some great graphics and guidelines about how you test your work, the use of simple language, universal design etc. It’s very useful. And so what we think about is how do we do this for the 300,000 employees of the city, the 8.5 million residents of the city, the 55 million visitors to the city and the 4.5 million commuters to the city. And for all of

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What do you think are the new technologies and ways of working that will shape this new role for you?

I think there will be new technologies and ways of working, but I don’t know the specific answer to that yet, but I’m excited and I want to learn from other cities. NYC doesn’t have all the answers, and I don’t have all the answers, but we’re willing to listen. I always say that the CDO’s job is actually the Chief Listening Officer, and I want to listen and I want to learn everywhere I go. I’ve just travelled to India and learned so many different ways that the government is using Twitter,

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We often think about ‘Mobile First’, but I’m really interested in what ‘Mobile Only’ looks like. One of my most recent experiments was to do everything possible on my phone and to run a stopwatch on the time I spent performing tasks that I couldn’t do on my phone. And in the first 4 weeks, I spent 18 minutes on my laptop.

I think there are opportunities for us to think about our visitors, our residents and our stakeholders in different ways. And having just come from India and observing how people use mobile there is amazing. I’m also thinking about how government services are delivered in a transparent, clear, simple ways and I think there are a lot of opportunities that we are all going to learn about together. And what is nice is that there are lots of CDO’s coming online from other cities around the world and we’re all going to be sharing information with CMOs and CIOs. The opportunity to learn isn’t just from other CDO’s, I need people’s help too. So let your readers know my twitter handle @sree and invite them to reach out, I’d love to hear from them.

eCOMMERCE

Movi ng from ‘Mobile First’ to ‘Mobile Only ’ Will Drive O nli ne Retail Growth

arlier this year, eMarketer estimated that worldwide retail sales in 2016 will surpass $22 trillion, with retail ecommerce sales, purchases over the internet with any device reaching $1.9 trillion and accounting for 8.7% of total retail spending worldwide. And whilst the pace of growth for overall retail sales is subdued, the digital portion of sales continues to expand rapidly, with a 23.7% growth rate forecast for 2016, leading to an increase to $4.058 trillion by 2020, making up 14.6% of total retail spending that year. Asia-Pacific remains the world’s largest retail ecommerce market throughout the forecast period, with sales expected to top $1 trillion in 2016 and more than double to $2.725 trillion by 2020. Driving this growth is an ever expanding middle class, greater mobile penetration, and growing competition of ecommerce players like Taobao, Rakuten, Alibaba and Meituan. It’s little surprise that the bulk of retail ecommerce will come from China, where sales are expected to reach $900 billion this year, representing almost half (47.0%) of all such sales worldwide. This is a direct result of China’s booming digital economy - which in the past decade has seen internet penetration exploding from single figures to almost 50% - plus a growing demand from Asian consumers who are digitally savvy and who’ve been quick to adopt

to become the #1 priority for every eCommerce business. Consumers are increasingly becoming Mobile First users, and it won’t be long before they are Mobile Only, so we need to shift our thinking accordingly.”

online as their preferred means of finding, pricing and purchasing products. Across the water, retail ecommerce sales in North America are expected to rise 15.6% this year to reach $423.34 billion, ensuring North America retains its status as the world’s second largest regional ecommerce market. The Wall Street Journal suggest this growth is driven by consumers increasingly moving online to shop with internet outlets pitching lower prices and convenience. The question many online retailers are asking themselves now is what will fuel the next stage of online retail growth? Phil Leahy, Founder of Retail Global, believes making the shift to thinking ‘Mobile Only’ will be a crucial factor as it places the consumers’ needs and interests first. “I think mobile is the first and biggest opportunity area for retailers,” he said. “Making the shift from a focus on desktop experiences to optimized mobile experiences has

With almost the same fervour that consumers are mobilizing to meet their retail needs, American businesses are likewise mobilizing, hungry for information to fuel their growth plans by launching into country specific regions. Phil Leahy suggests this should be done very carefully. 7

“The key to successfully launching into foreign markets is detailed research and planning before taking a step into a new market. Every market will require a level of localization effort – whether that be in language or marketing terms – so it’s a critical first step for cross-border success.” Likewise, Leahy suggests that brands looking to enter foreign markets should consider entering via an established marketplace, though only after careful consideration. “Across the globe, eCommerce growth is driven by marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba, yet too many brands have chosen to steer clear of these marketplaces. Brands need to understand and embrace these channels, and those that do, win. Marketplaces represent a great opportunity for brands and businesses to enter foreign markets, but only after due diligence has been done.”

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AUGMENTED REALITY

Virtual & Augmented

Reality Will Change How We Work, Play & Live

by Bryan Kramer, Bestselling Author, TED speaker and CEO

irtual reality and its close partner augmented reality used to be the stuff of science fiction movies. But now that both technologies have become more practical and accessible, they’re changing the way we handle our personal relationships, professional lives and recreational habits. We’re now able to be part of an experience or be present for an in-person encounter, even if only virtually.

VR is the immersion of a user into a computer-generated experience, while AR is a platform that superimposes imagery onto the user’s view of the world. These technologies are founded in our innate need as humans to connect with others and explore, so science has found a way to make that happen – where distance, time or other factors would otherwise be prohibitive. However, some aspects of our lives are more fitting for VR/ AR than others. Here are a few areas where I expect technologyenhanced realities be game changers.

hotels, airlines and cruise lines. They’re implementing technology that enables potential travelers to position themselves within an environment before actually booking. Qantas has developed an on-board 3D VR solution for its long haul flights, showing passengers the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef and Hamilton Island; its success in driving tourism to these destinations has led the company to take the technology from pilot version to permanent feature.

Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality in Tourism: The tourism experience has already seen the impact of VR and AR, with

[Tweet “Technologies rooted in our way we practice commerce”] Shopping without the Crowds, Traffic or Parking Hassles: Shopping at physical locations brings these familiar headaches, but online shopping isn’t without its drawbacks. VR and AR combine the best of both worlds, to create a shopping

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Studybreaks

AUGMENTED REALITY

experience that’s more personal than the canned stock photos and product descriptions. Trillenium is one company that’s expecting to cash in when the use of consumergrade VR/AR headsets starts to rise. Shoppers can picture themselves in a store, browsing the aisles for products, rather than inputting search terms and hoping to get the right hits. Trillenium’s founder also hopes to develop technology that will help small business owners create their own VR/AR marketplaces as well. VR & AR Transform the Gaming Experience: Virtual and augmented reality have been traditionally associated with gaming, but the players will soon become the developers of the experience. Technology enables more gurus to become the storytellers, creators, writers and directors. There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the releases of Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Playstation VR and the HTC Vive, and we’ll see whether the hype is justified in 2016. Be There for the Experience,

Virtual and augmented reality have been traditionally associated with gaming, but the players will soon become the developers of the experience.

No Travel Necessary: VR and AR will make it possible to attend those birthday parties, weddings, graduations and other special occasions – even if you can’t travel to the location. We’re not talking about a video chat or Skype; VR/ AR can put the user in the room with friends and family to engage in personal encounters.

Virtual Tools for Use in the Real World: The flexibility of VR/ AR environments makes them ideal for the creation of software and tools, especially for training purposes. Software engineers would potentially be more productive when surrounded by a 3D world, instead of staring a monitor. Surgical interns can actually operate on a “live” human being, rather than using cadavers to learn techniques. VR and AR can also be successful as tools for medical treatments, wherein the disabled can experience walking, those with phobias can engage in exposure treatment and patients suffering from PTSD can confront their triggers in a safe, controlled environment.

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DATA ANALYTICS

The Data That You See in Google

Analytics is Wrong

worse — and much of the latter stems from Google Analytics itself.

by Samuel Scott

s I explained in a recent presentation at MozCon in Seattle, Google Analytics code is a client-side JavaScript snippet that is inserted into the front-ends of websites. Whenever those code snippets are blocked or otherwise do not execute, Google does not obtain any information from the session that is occurring at that moment.

Google Analytics Forced Everyone Online Of course, GA can be useful. The basic version is free, so it is no wonder that countless people and companies use the platform. After all, the greatest benefit of marketing over digital channels rather than offline channels is that online marketing is often cheaper

That data, however, does remain in the server log, which is the only collection of data that is one hundred percent accurate in terms of how search engines and visitors are crawling and using websites. But based on the popularity of the platform, online marketers would not seem to know that Google Analytics shows faulty data. According to W3TECHS, Google Analytics is used by 55 percent of all websites and has a traffic analysis tool market share of 83 percent. More than half of those websites use GA as their only source of marketing data. Yes, most websites are creating and executing marketing strategies based on the bad information in one single analytics tool. In the just over ten years since the release of GA in November 2005, the marketing world has changed for better and for

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Freepik

and more agile. Campaigns of many types can be started, adjusted, and cut at any time. A bad campaign can be stopped before too much money is lost. In contrast, take traditional TV advertising. Companies can use polls and focus groups to attempt to create the best desired ad. But that company will not know the results of the campaign until after the advertisement has already aired on TV and thousands — if not millions — of dollars has already been spent. In traditional marketing, you often have only one chance to get a campaign right. It’s cheaper to put an advertisement such as the now-famous ad for “Dollar Shave Club” on YouTube than on NBC Nightly News. The data shows the increasing popularity of online channels. In just one example from the Internet Advertising Bureau in the United

DATA ANALYTICS

Kingdom, spending on digital advertising there increased from roughly £500 million in 2003 to £7.2 billion in 2014. However, while this GA-inspired leap from offline to online has helped businesses in many ways, it has also led to the problems that I will outline below.

Google Analytics Changed the Marketing Buckets In a lengthy tutorial of mine elsewhere on integrating traditional and online marketing, I describe each of the traditional “buckets” in marketing in terms of what is called the Promotion Mix (“Promotion” is one of the 4 Ps): Google Analytics pushed marketers to change their focus from the strategy (how one will use the best practices of those five buckets) to the channel — now defined in GA as the sources of traffic. The new “buckets” became direct, organic search, social, referral, paid search, e-mail, and display. However, that shift in assumption has led to poor marketing because almost any strategy can be executed over any channel — and it is strategies and actions, not channels, that have associated best practices and deliver ROI. To ask “What is the ROI of social media?” makes as much sense as asking “What’s the ROI of the telephone?” Activities, not channels, generate results. The fault of marketing analytics platforms such as Google Analytics is that they track the source of traffic but not the cause of that traffic.

Google Analytics Pushed Only Direct-Response Metrics

of it is just plain dismal and dull. As Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman once described the practice:

In traditional marketing terminology, “direct marketing” is the part of the Promotion Mix that consists of any action that aims to result in an immediate, direct response. It is the sending of a sales catalogue or e-mail. It is running PPC or display ads. It is targeting people based on their social media interests and then retargeting them later. (Yes, most online advertising is actually direct marketing and not advertising.) It is the use of marketing automation platforms to transmit marketing collateral such as never ending flows of e-mails to individuals based on predefined workflows and timetables. In Google Analytics, one defines direct responses as “conversions,” “transactions,” or “events.” Most online marketing activities aim for these results. The benefit of direct marketing is that it is very trackable. The downside is that it is often spammy and not very creative. Most

The aesthetic lineage of online advertising is not “Madison Avenue,” it is the maddening tackiness of junk mail direct response.

Creativity, however, is what builds brands over time and sells products. Just look at this socalled expert roundup on the Tint blog on the future of marketing. Everyone talks about channels and technologies and data — no one talks about the “human” part of marketing. As Hoffman also recently said at the IAPI/ADFX Awards in Ireland, the marketing industry is increasingly devaluing creativity as a whole. Marketers thinking first and foremost about channels and direct responses only adds to the (often but not always undeserved) reputation of digital marketers as being nothing but spammers. But the negative effect of focusing too much on direct marketing does not end there.

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DATA ANALYTICS

Google Analytics Confused Direct & Brand Marketing In a reply to my comment on a highly-debated Inbound.org forum question on the ROI of contributing articles to publications, a person asked me how she can show the direct ROI of her publicity work. Sadly, I explained that her assumptions were wrong from the very beginning — she was wanting to apply direct-response metrics to a brand marketing campaign, and the two do not mix. The correct metrics need to be assigned to the right marketing strategies — and Google Analytics metrics are useful for only a few specific marketing methods such as direct marketing and SEO.

Ayelet Noff, the founder and CEO of the Tel Aviv and Boston high-tech PR agency Blonde 2.0, expressed similar thoughts when I interviewed her for her thoughts for this column: We try to avoid measuring PR efforts with Google Analytics. Mostly, because we feel that it misrepresents our work. PR achieves many goals, and traffic and leads is one of them, but at the end of the day, PR is not about traffic. It’s about brand awareness and visibility in the right circles. PR will get you mindshare, brand awareness, investor interest, and many other things. Diminishing PR to sales and download numbers is to diminish the importance of earned media versus all other medias. Earned media is the hardest to obtain (as the name suggests), and as such, can achieve many things paid and other media cannot. Sales and download numbers are definitely a part of the equation, but they are not the number one goal. Noff recommends that people use tools such as TrendKite and track

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PR metrics including total mentions, social amplification, ad equivalency value, and brand sentiment. None of that is available in Google Analytics, and Noff says the most important thing is missing as well: Branding is still the one metric that is unmeasurable in our datadriven world. Once someone cracks that, PR will finally have measurement metrics that actually show its real value. Too many people think like what Kayla Weimer wrote on PR software company Cision’s blog or like what Emeric Ernoult said to blogger Heidi Cohen: “The main metric to evaluate the impact of my earned media is the organic and referral traffic I get to my website and blog.” Actually, the referral traffic that is shown in Google Analytics is only a very small part of the PR and publicity picture. For those who are interested, I have published a tutorial elsewhere on how to plan, execute, and measure publicity campaigns.

The Solution? Don’t Ignore the Offline World I first went online in high school, so I’ve always seen both online and offline marketing — and I have seen what worked long before the Internet ever existed. Today, however, most people who are younger — especially those in the tech world — reflexively think of digital-only strategies. But not everything is about digital. In one example of effective offline marketing and PR, Olga Adrienko of the competitive marketing intelligence platform SEMrushrecently invited me as someone who is a frequent marketing speaker as well as other marketers from Europe to a White Nights event in St.

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Petersburg, Russia. In early July, we attended the marketing gathering and then explored the city’s attractions and restaurants over three days: Obviously, it was in SEMrush’s interest to build its brand among marketing and PR influencers. But to the company’s credit, the gathering did not lead to a direct sales pitch — the PR event was held as a way for marketers from different countries to meet each other. As a former journalist turned marketing and communications executive, I’m more than a little cynical. But I can say that I was impressed — I made friendships and connections there that I am sure will last for a lifetime. But one problem in PR campaigns such as SEMrush’s event is that Google Analytics cannot quantify the direct benefit to SEMrush. Still, it’s not such a bad thing. As Noff mentioned earlier, relationshipbuilding and branding are not quantifiable but still important. Just because a product or service is digital does not mean that its marketing should only use digital channels. Some of the best marketing and PR campaigns — for traditional and digital companies — have nothing to do with online channels: One of my favorite examples? Just see what Emirates Airlines did during a football match in Germany. The best marketers and PR professionals will always use the best channels for their specific

DATA ANALYTICS

Freepik

the traditional Promotion Mix. As Mark Ritson, in his overly blunt manner, said in this hour-long presentation to the Australian Association of National Advertisers on “The Death of the Traditional/Digital Divide”: Put down the dreary [digital] tools. Put them down. Work out who your customer is. Work out what your strategy is. And then work out what is the best way to reach him. We need people with digital tools, but if you only know about digital tools, you’re useless. The minute you start with “digital,” you’re an idiot. You’ve already said to me, “I’m tactical.” You’re no use to me. You’ve already said that you’ve already got your hammer, and you’re looking for nails.

Google Analytics pushed marketers to change their focus from the strategy to the channel - now defined in GA as the sources of traffic. purposes and audiences. The Internet and mobile as well as augmented and virtual reality (the latter of which is now being promoted by tech PR veteran Robert Scoble) are merely new sets of available channels over which we can choose to perform the existing marketing functions that comprise

The more than half of all commercial websites that use Google Analytics as their only source of marketing analytics will find that their options are limited and that they are applying faulty metrics to the wrong marketing strategies. They are locking themselves into a specific set of marketing tactics that are not always the best ones to use. Their entire worldview and business processes wrap themselves around that platform despite any limitations, flaws, and mistaken assumptions. When people use only a single platform such as Google Analytics, they will try to quantify all marketing work with that platform — even though it is impossible to measure, as in my example above, brand marketing campaigns with direct marketing analytics platforms.

What to Do? Build Your Own Analytics Dashboard While marketing and PR today almost always need to be performed over a mix of online and offline channels, the need for quality analytics to measure the digital ones is obvious. So, what is the solution when online marketing needs to be a priority but Google Analytics is insufficient? In one example, we at AI-powered log analytics platform Logz.io created our own server log analysis dashboard with the open source ELK Stack of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana: For more information for those who want to do the same, we have created free informational material on Apache, IIS, and NGINX log analysis with ELK as well as an overview on AWS log analysis with the open source stack. While the creation of such open source dashboards will not solve every analytics problem, it will allow people to track all of the website and server activity that Google Analytics misses.

Still, there is a whole world of marketing out there beyond attempts the flawed question: “What should I publish on my website to get the most traffic and customers?” Here is the real question to ask: How would you market yourself if the Internet didn’t exist? Answer that, and it’ll help your online marketing too. -- Samuel Scott (@samueljscott) August 25, 2015 Want to get an introduction to traditional marketing strategy and see how you can apply it to both traditional and online channels? Take a break from redundant marketing blog posts and take the time to read the 101 textbook “Principles of Marketing” by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong.

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SEO

The Real-Time Google Penguin Algorithm Has Rolled Out by Kerstin Hoefner, SEO Director at Group M Connect

Google recently officially launched the roll-out of the Real Time Penguin.

What is Google Penguin?

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Websmartstudio

In the past, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at

1. Penguin is now real-time and (similar to Panda) baked into core algorithm

What does the Real Time Penguin mean for your business?

Now that Google Penguin is officially baked into Google’s core algorithm, everything will happen in real time. In January 2016, Google made Panda part of its core ranking algorithm, meaning that pays more attention to site quality signals than ever before. Since its introduction as a standalone algorithm, Google has learned to understand Penguin and how it updates search results. As a result, Penguin has been tested throughout several updates since 2012 and no longer needs specific updates itself. As it has now been rolled out as an integral component of Google’s core algorithm, it will recalculate positive or negative signals with every new crawl.

Penguin will not only affect the whole site, but now devalue spam more granularly by adjusting ranking based on spam signals. This means it will not only affect pages, but most likely be more impactful on all levels like domain, folders, pages and possibly even keywords and keyword groups. We can basically expect anything that goes into organic rankings to be affected by the Penguin algorithm on a fine level.

You also want to keep reviewing your backlink profile on an ongoing basis. Make sure you have regular backlink health checks scheduled to ensure to identify and disavow any harmful or toxic links.

Google Penguin 4.0

2. Penguin is more granular

The best way to avoid a Penguin penalty is by continuing to focus on cultivating quality backlinks. It is a simple formula that includes the principles of Panda too: to get backlinks from high-quality sites, you need to be producing unique, quality content.

Penguin was first introduced by Google as a standalone algorithm update in 2012. It is designed to devalue pages which engage in spammy link building practices, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost rankings.

the same time. Unlike other Google algorithms that would contemplate changes and improvements made to a site very quickly, Penguin required refreshing. Being part of the core algorithm, Penguin now refreshes data in real time, which means that changes will be visible and effective much faster after Google re-crawl and re-index a page.

Moving Forward Starting to roll out now, changes will be visible worldwide. Google confirmed that this update will be rolling out to all languages and to all countries. Real-time also means that Google is no longer going to make public comments about future Penguin refreshes.

If you have followed Google’s linking guidelines, there is no need to panic as these are still the same and still apply to all sites in the search results. Putting more effort into creating the right content and experience across all devices for your digital strategies will also help dealing with future algorithmic updates without sleepless nights.

INTERVIEW

Jesper Laursen,

Founder and CEO, Native Advertising Institute

ative advertising has attracted attention worldwide in recent years, viewed from industry side as a potential savior of dwindling publisher revenues, whilst at the same time being viewed warily by some consumer segments who deem it manipulative and deceptive advertising. Digerati sat down with Jesper Laursen, Founder and CEO of the Native Advertising Institute to learn more about some of the key areas of debate and progress in this sector.

Do you agree / disagree that native advertising has a disclosure issue?

We’ve recently published the first ever global report on native advertising in the magazine industry together with FIPP (http:// offers.nativeadvertisinginstitute. com/native-advertising-trends-2016magazines) and in two weeks we’ll be releasing the first ever global study on native advertising in the news media industry together with INMA. These two studies show that, yes, there is an issue. 11% of the magazines and 7% of the news media do not label native advertising at all. And the majority are in the U.S. and Europe so it’s even in very developed markets. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Having said that, the vast majority of media companies are very preoccupied about safeguarding their trust with the readers/viewers and a lot of effort is put into ensuring everybody can see what is going on. An important point is also that,

oftentimes, it’s not in the interest of the brands that their involvement is kept a secret. The discontent of an audience feeling tricked in some way will also rub off on the brand. And it will also potentially make it more difficult for brands to integrate the campaigns and properly monetize them if they do not play an active and open role.

Last year Contently suggested consumers don’t trust sponsored content: true / false / maybe?

There are many surveys that show the opposite, so that is not an undisputed truth. Consumers are skeptical, but that is a good thing. The key is to make content that is truly relevant, valuable and engaging. If you solve a problem for a person, they will thank and like you whether you’re a brand or a publisher. If you waste their time they will punish you - but that also goes for publishers.

Many tier 1 publishers are investing heavily into developing native offerings that serve their advertising partners, but who in your mind is doing this best in a manner that adds value to consumers and advertisers at the same time?

We’re in the middle of evaluating the submissions to our Native Advertising Awards and there’s a lot of great work from China, India, Australia, Russia, U.S. and Europe. If I have to mention one company, it would be the New York

Times. They’re doing some really amazing work and they pave the way for many others in new areas with their VR-app being the latest major example.

What brands in your view are doing well integrated, multichannel native advertising?

Again, there are many great examples out there. Huffington Post is strong, but I’ve also seen a very impressive project that the Danish broadcaster TV2 did for Carlsberg. The centerpiece was an advertiser funded program running on broadcast TV but it also involved TV2’s online properties, as well as the Carlsberg’s own media and social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

As content marketing grows in popularity, what brands do you think are leveraging sponsored articles well / best?

Content marketing is in essence taking place on a brand’s owned channels and the key is building an audience that the brand owns. If this is the starting point, sponsored articles will oftentimes be part of a “rent to own” strategy where the brand rents the eyeballs of the publishers in order to drive them to their own channels. And this discipline could be leveraged by all brands in my opinion. The key is to find the right audience and have a strong content value proposition that can move the audience.

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VIEWABILITY

Calling Bullshit on

100% Viewability nerships Dentsu by Simon Williams, Head of Global Media Part

W 16

hile it’s been the catch cry for some in the industry this year, “100% viewability” in its primitive form is about giving a user the ‘opportunity to see’ our advertising in a digital environment. What we should be focusing on are the idiosyncratic behaviours of the audience and making a leap towards ‘humancentricity’. This approach has been 16 months in the planning, during which time we’ve made significant headway in understanding the needs of our clients, partners and audiences. I strongly believe in creating partnerships which encourage an environment where we can all afford to test fast, fail fast and adjust fast for the betterment of not only the client but the industry as a whole. My role in driving our approach to agnostic screen planning has sought to justify, measure and prove the direct relationship between all screens, beginning with television and online video. Effective exposure proves that video has a performance and branding role to play. We have conducted three market mix modelling and research exercises, with the results showing that television and online video are best planned and bought together. Incrementally, when bought together

Our ‘Effective Exposure’ approach at Dentsu Aegis Network seeks to redefine our measurement architecture. With less focus on viewability, instead we have placed a concern on accountability, applying a lens of engagement across the audience we are trying to communicate with.

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they deliver a 40% stronger ROI and a 10% uplift in brand recall, which is greater than just television alone. We now know that even if audiences see digital ads, and give them their full attention, the effect is very different to the effect traditional mediums like print and TV have on passive ready-made viewers. The biggest challenge we now face is the range of measurement systems available in the ecosystem, with billable events, impression counting and forced

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viewership varying profoundly from publisher to platform. We are now entering the “4th revolution”. Just as we passed through mechanization to massproduction then computation, we are now entering an age of intelligent systems. Partners like Integral Ad Science become part of our technology arsenal, working with us to solve business problems

VIEWABILITY

instead of just being able to propose advertising shaped solutions.

We have embarked on testing the quality of media that an ad is placed around, as it has a direct impact on the user’s perception of that ad. It is not just about the volume and scale of the impressionable reach.

What we are actively working on now is how dramatically creative quality can affect outcomes, as the lines between media and creative become ever more blurred.

Freepik

The way we as an industry are measuring viewability is largely at the impression or placement level vs at the human level. If we are treating all viewable ads as equal, an ad that is viewed by a person for one second is as valuable as an advert viewed for ten seconds. This is inaccurate, undervalued and doesn’t respect the role of extraordinary creative. Within Amplifi and Data2Decisions we are testing methodologies to prove those

exposed to an ad and the frequency they are exposed has a direct impact on recall, recognition and purchase behaviour. James Diamond, Managing Director of Integral Ad Science, shared his view with me. “In testing we have found that a combination of eight exposures for

Ultimately advertisers want each consumer in their target segment to be exposed for a certain amount of time to their brand. In digital the capabilities to transact on exposure time for a target consumer are not that far away.

a total duration of 50-60 seconds resulted in the highest incremental conversions. While the right exposure time and frequency may differ between brands and channels it’s clear that advertisers need to be able to pull both levers to optimise, and that optimisation needs to be done at a user level. This type of targeting is simply not possible in other mediums.” We are one step closer to introducing an equal currency for screen planning and buying, however we need the industry and our media partners to work with us on a comparable metric that focuses on business solutions rather than purely advertising outcomes.

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BIG DATA

Shutterstock

The Hidden Value nd of 2 Party Data Interview with Ian Curd, Lotame

ata, data everywhere. Marketers are drowning in data. Everyone knows that data-driven marketing campaigns are more effective, however they are useless without the right data to run them. Today, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an almost unlimited amount of data available to power more effective marketing campaigns, but a key challenge is that not all data is equal. Choosing whether to select first-, second- or third-party data is a vital first step. Equally important, however, is understanding the difference between the data sets available to you, and how they are unique. Digerati sat down with Ian Curd, Market Development EMEA at Lotame to clarify the core

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differences and benefits of various data sets.

First up, walk me through the differences between first-party, third-party, and second-party. Not all data is equal, so which is more valuable to a marketer? Why?

Key to understanding the different sets as understood by the terms first, second and third party, is that they all have a role to play for clients that understand the value of each in their element, but thereafter how they all might work in conjunction to form a coherent data strategy. This is sometimes overlooked when various commentaries extol

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one over the other as being the most important or only valid sources of data for a client to use. Having said that, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true that the fundamental building block and most powerful form of data that a client can build data strategies and understand their customers from (current or potential) is First Party Data. First Party Data is any data that is derived or collected from the clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own environments or engagements with its own clients or audience. This would include: Digital properties, web or mobile CRM data/Call centres POS environments, Email/SMS interactions The power in first party data

BIG DATA

is that it’s unique and it’s yours (depending on which technologies you’re using to collect it). Its limit, however, is that it doesn’t have the scale and the information about what your customers are doing off your environments/sites when they’re not with you. Enter (somewhat non sequentially) Third Party Data. This is data generated and aggregated via other sites and clients that often wish to opt their data into third party data exchanges like Lotame’s LDX or Eyeota’s marketplace for monetisation. These marketplaces can house billions of unique profiles and are connected to buyers that can access them. Third party data is aggregated and made available by a wide range of providers The power of 3PD is that in addition to a client’s first party data, they can be used to create powerful extension and lookalike models to clients whose own first party data lacks scale and doesn’t give the insight into where their existing and potential clients might be off their own environments. Third party data has courted some tough press from people that see it as lacking in quality, mainly due to its anonymous sources. However, the key or value to 3PD is not necessarily about the data in itself, but how that data is used in relation to first party data via technologies such as a data management platform (DMP). Comparing modelling and machine learning tools, as well as their reporting suites, can see 3rd party data become a very powerful asset. Second Party Data sits in between 1st and 3rd party in a uniquely interesting way. Second Party Data is the rule of when two declared partners come together to add their relative

first party data sets together for extension or enrichment, and by doing so create second party data. This has the richness and quality of first party data, plus the extension capabilities often associated with using 3rd party data. Think of a credit card company and a hotel chain as an example. Between the two they would have immensely comparable data sets that could be used for targeting or increasing their intelligence about their own customers. This is definitely a space that has occupied much attention and excitement over the last two years, if not necessarily actual examples. The potential power for strategic data alliances between partner brands, of private data marketplaces and direct deals between publishers and brands is compelling and clear. The hand break on 2PD, however, has been a nervousness about the commercials and legalities of sharing/using second party data. How does a Bank, for example, share its data with an airline? Another challenge has been finding the right technology that enables the smooth, secure and efficient transfer of this data from one declared partner to another. However, as the power and innate value of client’s first party data sets ‘in themselves’ becomes clearer, expect this space to rapidly grow.

What types of first-party data work well in secondparty data projects?

This depends a lot on the project goal and the data being used. CRM and registration data is useful to both Banks and Airlines, but how they would use each is very much a matter for the two parties based on their mutual

goals or perceived monetisation value, and of course how it is ultimately used with data privacy laws top of mind. Likewise, employment sites would have data that would have useful applications for home loans in the banking industry, the automotive manufacturers etc. and vice versa.

What factors should marketers be aware of when buying third-party data?

The first thing is to ask where they’re buying it from? Is the provider known? Have they been operating at scale and for a proven period of time? How does the provider acquire the data? Is the data declared and demonstrated or it inferred? These are important questions to be answered.

What should marketers be considering before going down a 2nd party data road?

Well, they need to be clear about why they would want to exchange, or buy, or partner with another first party data provider. They have to ask - and understand - if their partner has the capacity to provide the ‘plumbing’ for this in a privacy compliant and operationally efficient way. They also need to carefully consider if the partnership increases the control they have over the ownership and portability of their own first party data sets. Truth is, it’s the second party data sector is a complex space that’s only now emerging, but if marketers take the time to ask the hard questions and get to know their data partners, they’ll be reaping the returns of second party data led marketing campaigns for years to come.

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CONTENT MARKETING

Thought Leadership:

Content Marketing’s

Secret Weapon by Rakhal Ebeli, CEO Newsmodo

A 20

new study by the Economist Group on thought leadership content says 75% of executives have become more selective about the content source, mainly due to the increasing volume being pumped out by marketers. The good news is, there is still around a third of executives who consume thought leadership content on a daily basis, with some having

increased consumption “a lot” over the past year. To approach thought leadership in a way that delivers lasting value, brands need to take a step back and evaluate how this fits with the overall content marketing strategy.

What is thought leadership? Some confuse between the two terms “thought leadership” and

“content marketing,” and use them interchangeably. Some say the former is about long-term effect and the latter about what exists today. The truth is thought leadership is a branch of content marketing, or better yet, the “platinum standard of content-based reputation enhancement.” Hence, it would take time before you see the results of thought leadership. People don’t become experts overnight. As you can see from the diagram above, thought leadership is different from other content marketing activities in terms of effectiveness and scale, yet it still needs coordination/support with other channels.

Why bother?

Source: Forrester

Remember Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion/ influence? “Authority” is the main principle at play with thought leadership content.

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CONTENT MARKETING

According to the aforementioned Economist Group’s study, the benefits of thought leadership are clear: Three-quarters of senior executives are influenced in their buying decisions 67% would be willing to vouch for that brand externally More than 80% would be influenced in their choice of business partner

Characteristics To reap rewards of thought leadership, the content brands create needs to be “innovative, big picture, credible, and transformative.”

Source: QuickTapSurvey

To validate the thought leadership quality of your content, here are some questions to ask: Does it propel readers towards action? Or is it actionable content? Does it provide new or compelling insights? Does it encourage a two-way conversation? Does it steer clear of selfpromotion (whether of product or service)?

Ways to start building thought leadership The usual content marketing practices apply: content curation, creation, editing. To elevate it to the top of the pyramid mentioned before, it takes research, staying up to date with industry trends, analysing and identifying the knowledge gap that your content can fill.

Remember the audience Although true in any marketing activity, it’s especially crucial in thought leadership content to address a specific audience. Because it is more about depth, not breadth. The more you zoom in on your target audience, the more you understand their challenges and thus provide relevant content that helps them.

Subject matter experts If you want people to trust your ideas and insights, tap the knowledge of experts, whether internal or external. A lot of companies are still not involving these stakeholders in thought leadership content development.

Content formats Brands can create a content hub which is rooted in a core service. Example: IBM has the THINK Marketing hub around their machine learning service, and the Smarter Planet hub around their smart technologies. To spur conversations around your thought leadership content, consider expert roundups. This works on the Consensus and Reciprocity Cialdini’s principles too. Following from the point above, guest blogging has proven effective for many thought leaders.

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IoT

Thoughts on the Disappearing Internet & Society 2.0 by Brett Wiskar

hen Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January 2015 that he expected “The internet will disappear”, he created somewhat of a stir. The term “disappear” was of course contextual; you don’t become Chairman of Google without being able to construct sentences with intent. So what was his intent?

What Schmidt meant was that the internet would become hard to see, more accurately, it would become impossible to distinguish the aspects of our lives that are “online” from those that are not. What he was referring to was the then nascent idea of the “Internet of Things”. So here we are, less than two years later, living in a world where we barely blink at the idea that devices connect and share data with other devices, or that the cloud exists and now stores the greatest stockpile of human data and accumulated information in human history. We’ve heard that the Internet of Things is coming, or is already here, but currently its impact on our lives is somewhere between less than obvious and maybe mildly intrusive. So when will this change? When will my refrigerator tell my supermarket I’m out of pickles? When will my Fitbit tell my doctor it’s time to see him for a physical because things aren’t looking too good? Well, whilst we may not all see it yet, things are changing incredibly fast behind the scenes across the globe as ground work is being laid for an

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invisible internet world. A global not-forprofit alliance named LoRa® - an acronym for Long Range Widearea network (wireless technology) - is laying the ground work for standardising how our world will inter-connect. And a new breed of companies has begun leveraging this technology and begun working around entrenched telecommunications providers to create value in this New World. One stellar example is French company Sigfox, who are undertaking an ambitious global rollout deploying Wi-Fi networks we can’t see or connect to, and who are playing the 80:20 game - covering 20% of our countries and 80% of our population to enable a more connected world. These groups are laying the foundation for Society 2.0, a connected tomorrow that is very close at hand. The sensors and devices available to connect to these networks can measure everything from temperature, speed, barometric pressure, water purity, altitude, sound, vision, vibration and almost anything else you can imagine. Accompanying these devices are cloud platforms with the capacity to leverage the billions of data-points collected from our lives and then turn this data into experiences that save time, money, and add value to our lives. In the future when you use your ‘Amazon Echo’ or ‘Google Home’ to

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request your autonomously guided Uber to collect you, your phone will access your calendar to determine the location of your next appointment, before checking the weather at your destination in real time, from a sensor on site, to ensure you’re dressed appropriately. All of this will happen ‘invisibly’ without you knowing or noticing. The promise of the Internet of Things is that our lives will be ‘enriched’ with contextual real time intelligence that makes us more prepared, or the world more prepared for us. When we accept the terms and conditions of the Internet of Things, we will grant these organisations permission for all of this to take place. At some point in the near future, we’ll accept the tradeoff between the relinquishing of our privacy and the benefits we receive in return for an autonomous and enabled world. At some point… Eric Schmidt told us it was coming, and just as he predicted we can - and can’t - see it. The explosion of wearable devices and connected devices is obvious, everywhere you look we’re seeing small, low powered, smart devices and sensors built into our lives, homes and vehicles that are collecting information and sharing it with the cloud so that the data can be parsed and acted on to add value to our lives. That’s the obvious bit. The not so obvious bit, the invisible bit, is the tech behind the tech. The vital players like LoRa and Sigfox who are working hard at creating worlds behind our world to ensure IoT delivers its promise without doing evil. The foundation they are successfully beginning to lay for Society 2.0 is one built upon data transparency and availability, yet the greatest challenge they may face attaining global adoption is in convincing us to exchange our privacy for IoT’s promise.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

My New PA Amy is an A.I.

by James Hurman, Founder of Previously Unavailable

or the past few days, I’ve been part of a beta trial of a new artificial intelligence service from a New York based AI company called x.ai The idea is a pretty simple one. An AI assistant, called Amy, liaises with your clients, colleagues and other contacts to set up meetings on your behalf, handling all the timeconsuming back and forth that goes on trying to match times in calendars. If I want to set up a meeting with somebody, I simply email them and cc Amy, asking her to find a time. Amy does the rest. She emails the other person, gives them some options on available times in my diary, and following their response, schedules the meeting and sends out the meeting request. I’ve told some of our clients that Amy is an AI. Others I haven’t, and

already I’ve had feedback from people that they had no idea that Amy wasn’t a real person. We’ve managed to confuse her a couple of times, when clients went ahead and sent meeting requests of their own before Amy could. But being an AI, I’m sure she’ll soon learn what to do in those situations. At $39 a month, Amy costs well below the minimum wage. I’m unsure whether that’s genius or a little ethically compromising in a wider social context of income disparity and technology spelling the end of oncepopular jobs. Also, being a computer, Amy has no need for please’s, thank-you’s and other general politenesses. But I can’t help still finding it necessary to speak to her like I would a real human person with feelings. So I’m persisting with the

politeness. And I kind of wonder whether, when the singularity comes, AI’s will look back at how we’ve treated other AI’s and decide which of us humans to keep on. On that basis, if you’re one of my clients and hear from Amy, my recommendation would be to be nice :-) You can check out more about Amy and x.ai here

(UPDATE: x.ai calls Amy a ‘PA’ but, as called out by a real human PA in the comments, there is of course more to their role than simply scheduling meetings. In Amy’s editable email signature I have changed her title from the default ‘Personal Assistant to James Hurman’ to the more accurate ‘AI Assistant to James Hurman’.)

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INNOVATION

Future Forces:

5 Technologies Shaping the Future Of Marketing by Simon Kemp

redicting the future is a tricky business, but it’s essential to look to the future as often as possible, in order to understand the opportunities and threats that we’ll be dealing with tomorrow.

This article explores five of the most important technological innovations that will shape the future of marketing over the coming months, together with tips and advice on how to turn them to your advantage. It’s based on a briefing that I’ve been running with clients all over the world over the past few months; you can explore the deck that I’ve been using for those sessions in the SlideShare embed above, but read on below to get more context and richer insight. You may recognise the first

theme from my recent ‘10 Social Trends You Need To Know’ - this content is slightly different, but if you’ve read that post already, you might want to skip straight to Part 2 - ‘Access Denied’ - further down this post.

1. DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER The data in the ongoing series of Digital reports that I produce for We Are Social show that mobile messengers are growing much faster than more ‹conventional› social networks like Facebook and Twitter. (tabel 1) Current growth trends suggest that these ‘chat apps’ will become the dominant social systems by the end of 2017. That’s a catchy soundbite, but this move from social

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networks - where the emphasis is on public sharing - to more private mobile messengers has some profound implications for marketers. Before we explore those implications, though, we first need to look at why audiences are changing their social media behaviour. Individual motivations vary of course, but our conversations with people all over the world have revealed four key reasons why messengers will soon overtake email to become our preferred means of online social interaction: Messengers are more natural: the exchanges we have with other people via chat apps are similar to the exchanges we›re used to in face-to-face conversations - especially if we compare them to the kinds of interactions we have in the public comments section of a

INNOVATION

Facebook post. There are fewer adverts: many of the people we speak to cite a ‘clean, uncluttered’ environment that’s free from advertising as one of the reasons they prefer messenger platforms. C heaper to use: social media platforms rarely charge users to access their services, but data costs are still a consideration for many users around the world, and there are significant cost differences between accessing video-heavy social networks and using simple, text-based messenger apps. Less pressure: perhaps the most interesting reason people cite for moving away from public social networks and into more private chat apps is the constant pressure they feel to post ‹amazing content› on public channels like Instagram - something that even top influencers struggle with. (tabel 2) Given these points, it’s relatively easy understand why audiences are embracing messenger apps, but the shift has some serious implications for brands. To start with, there’s no easy way for marketers to listen to people’s public social media conversations 3

in the way that we have been able to do on platforms like Twitter and Intsagram. This is a huge loss to marketers, because the insights available via social listening offer a wealth of valuable opportunities across the entire marketing mix. Marketers will also need to embrace new metrics of success of their messenger-related activities, because likes and followers matter far less in these environments than organic word-of-mouth does. In addition to the need for new metrics, it’s also more difficult for marketers to actually measure the performance of their activities in messengers, due to a lack of available data to identify who shared what, where, and when. However, the most obvious challenge for marketers in this new messenger-centric world is the limited number of opportunities for brands to buy their way into people’s conversations. Critically, the ‘boosted content’ approach that dominates almost every brand’s approach to platforms like Facebook simply won’t work in most chat apps. Firstly, messenger platforms are a lot more private and ‘personal’ than public social network environments, so audiences will be far less accepting of any interruption to their

conversations. Secondly, people don’t go to messenger platforms to consume content, so brands will need to radically adapt their approach to ‘engaging’ them. (tabel 3) The only way for brands to succeed in this new environment is to rethink what ‘engagement’ means; far too many marketers still think of engagement in terms of likes, views, or clicks, instead of seeing engagement in terms of emotions. Marketers need to treat engagement as the outcome of great marketing, and not as just another vanity metric that they can buy from media owners. The good news is that we no longer need to rely content that has been specifically designed for, and posted on, social media to drive engagement. Instead, we can use every element of the marketing mix to inspire valuable organic conversation, whether that’s through our brand communications, our products, our packaging, our customer service activities, or even our recruitment ads: (tabel 4)

2. ACCESS DENIED This need to inspire engagement at every possible opportunity isn’t just

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INNOVATION

about messengers, though; well over half of the world’s internet users have used tools to block online ads, and the numbers are still rising.

They may not use these adblocking tools all the time of course, nor will they have them installed on every one of their connected devices, but the availability and popularity of ad blockers is a serious threat to marketers everywhere - if for no other reason than it highlights how frustrated people are with (or worried they are about) online advertising. (tabel 5) It’s not just ad-blocking tools that marketers need to worry about, either: research from GlobalWebIndex shows that nearly three-quarters of all internet users regularly delete cookies in order to prevent brands from tracking them across the web. But why are so many people blocking ads? Our conversations with internet users around the world have revealed four common reasons for using ad blockers: Focus: most of our internet activity is purpose-driven - it›s ‹lean forward› (active engagement), rather than ‹sit back› (passive entertainment). However, most internet

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advertising is specifically designed to distract us from the purpose we were trying to achieve, and that sort of interruption simply isn›t welcome. Speed: waiting for third-party servers to deliver ads constitutes a significant amount of the time required to load a web page. This doesn›t just lead to irritation and frustration, though; research from Ericsson ConsumerLab reveals that «…the stress response to [buffering] delays was similar to that of watching a horror movie or solving a mathematical problem.” Regardless of whether we’re delivering a good ad to people, the fact that we’ve created a stressed environment in which to show it to them will inevitably damage the impact of our message. Cost: many people resent the fact that they have to pay for the data required to deliver ads to their mobile devices - a problem that has real significance in markets where people rely on pre-paid mobile data to access the internet. Interest: one of the most common reasons people cite for using ad-blocking tools

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is the dismal quality of most online advertising, with a lack of relevance (i.e. poor targeting) contributing significantly to their frustration too. Whilst some marketers have suggested that targeting offers them few benefits, there is a real danger that failing to target - i.e. serving the same ad to everyone in the hope that a few of them will be interested - will result in significant irritation and resentment towards the brand. This impact may not register in immediate post-campaign reporting, but the longer-term negative consequences of this irritation go well beyond the ROI of individual ad campaigns. (tabel 6) You can learn more about this last point in the 7 Deadly Sins report that I produced for The WFA, which examines advertisers’ most irritating practices and mistakes, and how to avoid them. It’s not just irritating our audiences that we need to worry about, though; there’s a far more serious consequence of ad-blocking that marketers need to consider too. If people continue to block ads, the sites that rely on advertising revenue won’t be able to survive. As

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a result, advertisers will have fewer and fewer opportunities to get their messages out to their audiences, and brands will find it much harder - and more expensive - to achieve their objectives. Critically, the onus is on advertisers to make and deliver better ads, rather than being on host sites to find ways around ad blockers. If we don’t change our approach to online advertising soon, there’s a real chance that we’ll lose the ability to advertise on the internet altogether. The good news is that this problem should be easy to fix, though. The solution goes back to some simple advice most of us got as teenagers: when you go on a date, don’t talk only about yourself. This is advice that all advertisers should heed too; instead of creating ego-centric advertising that only talks about our brands, we need to create marketing that creates mutual value by adding something meaningful to our audiences› lives. There are two simple ways to add value to audiences via marketing activities: Solve problems: help people to address problems and challenges; and

Fuel passions: help people to do more of the things they love. (tabel 7) The easiest way to identify how best to add value to your audiences through marketing is to think about your brand’s value proposition is, beyond its products or services. This is about what your brand helps people to do - it›s about what you make happen, not just what you make. How can you bring this proposition - or ‘promise’ - to life through everything that you do? How can you add value to your audiences and consumers through every interaction, and not just when you sell them something? (tabel 8)

3. MAGIC MOMENTS The tools that we have at our disposal today allow us to achieve marketing nirvana: delivering the right message to the right people in the right places and at the right times. It’s something that marketers have dreamt of for decades, but digital tools have finally made it possible: We can use web technologies such as cookies or social media profiles to identify specific

individuals, and build up a profile of the things that they’re interested in; We can use algorithms to analyse the behaviour of millions of people in aggregate to identify common behaviours, and use these patterns to predict what any given individual is likely to do next; We can deliver the optimum message to an individual based on where they are and what they’re doing, so that the message is not only personalised, but also ‘contextualised’; We can even interact with each

and every individual if we choose to, and we can even do so at scale using techniques like social media listening and tools such as chat bots. (tabel 9) However, we’re wasting the potential of these tools by almost universally ignoring context. Almost all of today’s ‘targeting’ activities rely on reaching a given person wherever they may be, instead of identifying the optimum moment to reach that person with a message or activity that adds value to their lives at that specific moment. Where someone is - i.e. the website or platform - isn’t as important as why they›re there in the first place, and what they›re

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trying to achieve (given that almost all internet activity is purposedriven).

Critically, if we’re still using interruptive ad placements (e.g. banner ads), it’s unlikely that we’re adding meaningful value. Instead of interrupting people, we need to plan our marketing activities around the most relevant and impactful moments in people’s lives, when our brand can make the greatest contribution to their needs, wants and desires. Ironically, this is all possible using exactly the same tools that we’re currently using to interrupt and irritate audiences, so all we need to do is adjust our approach. There are two simple questions that marketers can ask themselves to help make that adjustment: Where and when does your brand’s proposition - i.e. its ‘promise’ - have greatest relevance and impact in your audience’s life? What’s the most appropriate way of bringing that promise to life in those specific contexts?

4. STAYING IN CONTROL As we look a little further into the future, it’s clear that we’re about

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to reach a revolution in the way we interact with and control digital devices. This isn’t just about futuregazing for marketers either; most of our audiences expect this revolution too. For example, Ericsson Consumer Lab has interviewed more than 100,000 people in 40 countries around the world, and half of those respondents stated that they believe smartphones will be a «thing of the past» within the next 5 years. Considering that the smartphone only really came of age 10 years ago, it’s startling to think that it might become obsolete by the early 2020s. What’s more, Ericsson believes that this will mark the end of the ‘screen era’ - a paradigm that has dominated media and popular culture for the past 60 years. But what will screens be replaced by? It’s likely that a variety of different interfaces will come to the fore, some of which we’re already starting to use today: Voice control is already a clear focus for the world›s largest tech companies, with Apple›s Siri, Google›s voice search tools, and Amazon›s Echo all clear examples of the priority these companies are putting on this technology. Motion sensors have been

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around for a decade or so, with Nintendo›s Wii and Microsoft›s Kinect being two of the more salient consumer uses of the technology. However, motion sensors will evolve significantly to provide a range of more intuitive interfaces for our devices, including automating lighting and heating in our homes, and controlling autonomous vehicles. Eye-tracking technology has already been around for years too, allowing researchers to study the ways that we interact with devices like TVs and computers. However, we›ll soon many of those be able to devices using the same kind of technology too, as this recent article from MIT reveals. Most striking, however, are the advances in thought control. Once the reserve of science fiction movies and fantasy novels, thought control is now a reality, as this fascinating video from NIH demonstrates: (tabel 10) This technical revolution is coming much faster than many of us realise though, and the reality if that most marketers simply aren’t ready. If we’re honest, most of us still haven’t fully understood how to use current technologies such

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as smartphones properly, let alone started to think about how devices controlled by our thoughts will impact marketing. However, we need to start thinking about these changes today, because they’re going to completely change the marketing paradigm. The most important shift, though, will be the rapidly diminishing role of the screen (at least as we know it today). Of course, ‘video’ won’t disappear overnight, but in the future, it’s more likely that we’ll enjoy this kind of content as virtual reality, or using devices that beam content direct into our eyes (or even feed it directly into our brains). This has huge implications for marketers, because almost all of today’s media are dependent in some way on screens. This includes obvious things such as watching content on smartphones and tablets, but even ‘traditional’ media are now increasingly screen-based; more and more outdoor billboards are being replaced by digital screens; magazines have become smartphone apps; even radio has moved onto screens through services like Spotify and Pandora. Given that so much of today’s marketing is built around screens, we’re going to need to fundamentally rethink our approach to engaging people if we’re to survive the impending interface revolution. What’s more, advertising agencies will need to completely rethink their business models if they’re to remain relevant and competitive in a media world that’s defined by new kinds of content. The easy answer to these challenges - as always in marketing - is to start with the audience. What are they using these new interfaces and technologies for? Why do

people think these devices are better than current alternatives? And - the most important question of all - how can we, as brands, use these new interfaces and devices to deliver unique new kinds of value, instead of using them to deliver more of the kind of interruptive advertising that people are increasingly trying to avoid? If we’re to survive this revolution, brands will need to deliver far more utility, instead of continuing to rely on interruption and distraction.

5. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE Make no mistake: prescriptive analytics are going to change every aspect of our lives. In fact, algorithms already influence almost every part of our lives, often without us knowing. Let’s look at just a few examples. The algorithms that define the order of the content and posts in our social media feeds determine which of our ‘connections’ appear at the top of our feeds, and in so doing, they determine which of our friends we interact with most. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle too: the more we interact with someone, the more the algorithm thinks we’re close to them, and so prioritises their posts in our feeds. As a result, social media algorithms are already influencing the strength, depth, and diversity of our friendships. Similarly, the algorithms that power e-commerce sites such as Amazon already play a disproportionate role in influencing which brands, products and services we buy. Technologies such as suggestions engines - ‘people like you also bought…’ - give us the confidence to try new things, while the detailed understanding of the

‘path to purchase’ journey built up from analysing the behaviours of millions of customers before us ensures that we get to the checkout too. Anyone who uses satellite navigation - or even Google Maps to guide them on the same journey on a regular basis knows that these algorithms frequently recommend different routes depending on traffic conditions. As a result of these varying routes, we see different our neighbourhoods in different contexts, and this influences our perception of what they’re like. This in turn influences what we do in those neighbourhoods too: whether we visit that new coffee shop we passed the other day, whether we see a house for sale that we like, or even whether we actively try to avoid certain neighbourhoods altogether. This kind of influence will become even greater as autonomous cars become a part of our day-to-day reality, and as a result, algorithms will play an increasingly important role in determining things like the value of property, or the success of small businesses.

It’s not just small businesses whose value will be determined by algorithms though; in fact, the value of most large corporations is already heavily influenced by the stocktrading algorithms of investment banks, who increasingly rely on lightning-fast autonomous trades to make their money. This isn’t just about banks’ profits, though: these trades ultimately influence the value of a company’s stock, which in turn determines how much its employees earn and how much shareholders are willing to invest. These valuations don’t just impact employees and investors, either; most of today’s pension funds are dependent on stock-market investments, which

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means that algorithms are already determining the future financial stability of almost everyone in society.

However, algorithms don’t just shape our individual lives; they’re also playing an increasingly active role in determining the very future of humanity. Research (see here, and here) shows that an increasing number of people meet their ‘lifepartners’ online, with dating services such as Tinder and eHarmony playing an important role in helping us find potential partners. And that’s where the really interesting part comes in: these services are all powered by some kind of ‹matching› algorithm, which selects who we see, as well as who sees us. In so doing, the algorithms that power these services influence who we meet and who we date, in turn influencing who we marry, and who we have children with. In other words, algorithms are already actively influencing the future gene pool of humanity. (tabel 12) That may seem like the stuff of science fiction or even horror movies, but the reality is that most of us actively embrace these algorithms, and welcome them into our lives. But why?

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The answer is simple: algorithms add tangible value to our everyday lives. For example, in a world where marketers ask us to choose between endless different kinds of strawberry jam, it’s easy to understand why many people feel overwhelmed by the options available to them. Algorithms help address our confusion (or apathy) when we’re confronted with these choices by recommending brands that our friends have chosen, by highlighting the most popular choice, or even by selecting for us based on a range of options we’ve pre-selected. Sometimes, we don’t feel confident enough to make the right choices, either. Whether it’s buying a new kind of technology that we’re not familiar with, or choosing where to go on holiday, algorithms can remove some of our uncertainty by offering us reassuring insights like “3 of your friends have stayed in this hotel”, or “56% of consumers on this site chose this brand.” These uncertainties may even play a role in our decision to use online dating services. On the other hand, algorithms provide many ways to help us become more efficient too, powering tools such as virtual assistants, autoschedulers, and chat bots.

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Algorithms can also inspire us, whether it’s through something as simple as adding new music to our playlists, identifying a more scenic route for the drive to work, or recommending a new recipe for tonight’s dinner. (tabel 13) Interestingly, though, algorithms aren’t just helping us make individual decisions; they’re also influencing the ways in which our brains make decisions. In the same way that pervasive access to tools such as Google Search and Wikipedia have changed the way that we form memories, so algorithms will change the way that we form preferences and choose between available alternatives. Before the days of mass media, our social circles were the primary influence on our choices; we learnt about new products and services by talking with the people we met in our day-to-day lives, and these conversations helped inform us and guided our decisions. With the advent of mass media, however, things started to change; we increasingly learnt about products and services from people we didn’t know, such as journalists, entertainers, and advertisers. Our social circles still played a role in helping us to interpret this new information, but as we spent

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more and more time with these media, they played an increasingly important role in influencing our brand choices. This ‘mass media model’ has defined marketing for most of the past 100 years, but that’s all about to change again. As we move into an ever-more connected world, we’re reaching the point where the algorithms that power the services we rely on will have the greatest influence on the ‘choices’ the we make (or that we delegate to the machines). (tabel 14) As a result, the future success of almost every business and brand in the world will depend on how well it can influence the algorithms. Our future will be marketing to the machines. That may sound distopian, but the good news is that - in many ways - things may get easier for marketers as a result. Algorithms are simply a set of rules, and they’re rules that we can learn through the same principles and activities that we 14

already employ in our work today. In the same way that marketers attempt to understand people’s motivations and map out consumer journeys, so we can explore how algorithms work, and build ‘marketing’ activities to influence them. The only real difference will be that our audiences have become machines, not just people. What’s more, in theory, algorithms should be a lot more predictable than humans, whose irrational decision making and emotional responses make them relatively difficult to understand. By thinking about algorithms as just another set of audiences that we need to understand and influence, it should be ‘business as usual’ for marketing. However, it’s not just the individual algorithms that we’ll need to understand; we’ll also need to understand how they interact with and influence each other. We’re only just starting to explore the ‘internet of things’, but it’s the social web of things - the ways in which

these IoT devices communicate with each other - that will be the most important determinant of brands’ success tomorrow.

SO WHAT NOW? All of this is coming; it’s just a question of when, and whether we’re ready for it when it arrives. It’s up to us as individuals to understand what all this means for our brands and our audiences, and to start planning for that reality today. To help with that, here are five simple tips to help focus your efforts: 1. To succeed in a messengercentric world, focus on a social mindset rather than on social media. Social is something that you are, not something that you do. 2. Stop advertising at people, and start finding ways to add real value to their lives in everything that you do - even through your brand communications.

3. Plan all marketing around relevant moments, not just media placements. Identify the times and places in which you can deliver the greatest impact, and not simply the greatest reach. 4. Look for ways to deliver more utility, instead of trying to distract people. 5. Start building the skills you’ll need to influence people and machines in an algorithmic world: emotional, rational, and technical. If you’d like to discuss how you can start tackling some or all of the above, just drop me a note in the comments, or give me a shout on Twitter.

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