Digerati Magazine September 2016 Issue

Babbel talk Content Marketing L’Oreal on Customer Experience Etihad’s Digital Transformation The Death of Flash SnapChat filters The Bot Landscape, and more

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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.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Marketers Without Borders

INTERVIEW

The Many Faces & Voices of Content Marketing at Babbel

ARTICLE

Behavioral Targeting – Balancing What is Possible with What is Right

DESIGN

Etihad’s Digital Transformation

FEATURE

New Association Seeks Global Regulations on Social Media

INTERVIEW

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FEATURE: The Many Faces & Voices of Content Marketing at Babbel

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ARTICLE: Behavioral Targeting – Balancing What is Possible with What is Right.

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DESIGN: Etihad’s Digital Transformation

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INTERVIEW: Emma Williamson, Director Customer Experience L’Oréal ANZ

Interview with Emma Williamson, Director Customer Experience L’Oréal ANZ

SOCIAL

Snapchat Filters are the New TV ad for Millennials

INNOVATION

Work-Life Balance Matters And It’s Not Just for Google

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APPS

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INSIGHT

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IAB WRAP

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CONTENT

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VIDEO

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The Bot Landscape

The Anniversary of Intent

Hot Topics & Sleepless Nights

iMediaTalk Snackable Content

The Death of Flash is Coming

AUTOMATION

Marketing Automation: Nobody’s Doing It Well

BABY UNICORNS

Augmented Reality in The Real World –What’s Next?

APP

Your Mobile App is Passé, And Your Audience Know It

AI

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VIDEO: The Death of Flash is Coming

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AR/VR: Augmented Reality in The Real World – What’s Next?

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The New ‘Must-Have’: How AI, Machine Learning and Big Data Will Change Everything

OPINION

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> EDITOR’S LETTER Welcome to our September issue, written poolside at the stunning Indigo Pearl Resort in Phuket. I don’t mention this to brag, rather to make a point. This piece was penned on a three-year-old laptop, then shared via an internet connection (circa 1990) with a designer in Indonesia who laid out this page, whilst an editor in North America ran his eye over the final designs, and our web designer in Canada updated the website. And this isn’t uncommon; this is the world marketers operate in today.

We’re living in a borderless, 24/7 reality where talent is accessible anywhere with a decent internet connection. Most importantly, it’s talent that can typically be found at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full or part time employee. My point?

Given these market realities, it’s no wonder that many brands around the globe have begun bringing more work in-house as they rethink the role their agencies play.

Virtual talent pools like Upwork, Freelancer and Guru give marketers near limitless access to every type of resource they could possibly hope for - resources they used to rely on their agencies to provide…at a premium. Then there are the platforms and technologies they can tap into to drive marketing success.

Platforms like Canva are turning everyone and anyone into a graphic designer. MailChimp has made it easy for marketers to keep email in-house and design, A/B test and amplify their customer emails. Hootsuite, HubSpot and even WordPress have made it simpler for marketers to publish, promote and profit from their content.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, though time itself is too often an issue.

engagement, an influencer marketing platform, a content marketing platform, an email marketing platform, a landing page system, a competitive intelligence tool, a website auditing tool, and last, but not least, a reporting or dashboard system to bring all of the aforementioned data together. That’s a lot of technology to juggle.

The steady stream of emerging marketing technologies is making it easier for marketers to market better and smarter. Marketing automation is reshaping the marketing landscape, and not just at the Fortune 500 end of the market. There are literally thousands of tools available to make marketing easier; the challenge is how to prioritize what tech to use when, and with what. As is obvious in The Martech Muddle, every marketer now has a marketing stack. The challenge, however, is what tech to spend your time on.

It’s my hope that each issue of Digerati Magazine helps you better understand the capabilities and applications of mainstream and emerging tech. If just one article helps you market smarter, that’s great news to us.

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Christopher Edwards Editor in Chief, Digerati Magazine

Earlier this year, gShift CEO Krista LaRiviere penned a great article on The Martech Muddle.

In the post, she outlined a quick list of the typical tools many marketers use on a regular basis. In summary, the list includes: a paid search platform, an SEO platform, a social media publishing platform, a lead nurturing system, an underlying analytics system for on-site

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CONTENT MARKETING

The Many Faces & Voices of Content Marketing at Babbel

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content space is Babbel.

Babbel offers an online method for language learning that makes learning a new language both easy and fun, with the goal of getting the learner conversational quickly.

And since Babbel is an online company, it makes sense that their marketing is tightly focused on digital opportunities for customer acquisition. Accordingly, they employ

a wide variety of digital channels to reach potential customers, including SEM, email, direct display and content.

However, it’s Babbel’s dedication to content that sets them apart.

A team of 16 people are tasked with producing a steady stream of humorous yet meaningful content for their online magazine, which is published in seven languages.

Pictures: Babbel.com

he brands succeeding with content marketing today are the ones with a clear understanding of the role that content can play in building brand awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, and ultimately converting these leads into long-term paying customers. One brand that consistently demonstrates that it knows what it’s doing in the

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CONTENT MARKETING

Their often-lighthearted content is intended to entertain whilst subtly providing consumers with language learning tips from the Babbel didactics team, as well as information about how Babbel teaches languages.

For me, the unique power strengthof content marketing is that it blurs the boundaries between traditionally siloed channels, and creates a beautiful, powerful mess.

Here’s one recent example of Babbel bringing content to life. Earlier this year, Edward Wood, Head of Content Marketing at Babbel, overheard two of his colleagues shooting the breeze in Québécois.

One was English, the other German, so he asked himself why weren’t they speaking English?

The reason, he discovered, was simple - they’re passionate polyglots, people who love playing with language. So Edward focused in on the idea of playing with language: he and two other colleagues challenged themselves to learn French…in just one week! The content that emerged from this experiment is a content marketers dream: it’s educational, fun and humanizes their brand nicely.

And what’s the result of this commitment to content? Thousands and thousands of leads per month!

Digerati sat down with Edward to learn more about the thinking behind their success with content marketing.

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What role does content play in your overall marketing strategy at Babbel?

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Content Marketing plays a number of roles at Babbel, some of which we’ve only just started developing. Firstly, it’s important to note that Content Marketing falls under the umbrella of Performance Marketing, along with the more traditional channels like SEM, Affiliate and Display Marketing. We are expected to

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justify spend in exactly the same way, and we work towards the same KPIs. We distribute widely through Content Discovery networks, but we also focus on increasing traffic through Organic Search and Social, as well as through Paid Social and Partnerships. The scope of Content continues to broaden – we now produce and refactor content especially for certain platforms, and we’re also increasingly using it to engage and reengage our users. As our approach and purpose evolve, so must our content. For example, Content which is designed for user reengagement may be more didactic in nature than content designed to attract new users.

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How did you decide to humanize the brand with people’s stories?

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At Babbel, we have a Didactics department consisting of over 100 highly-qualified linguists and language teachers. They are responsible for building the courses,

and they are one of the things which really distinguish us from other online language learning companies.

As such, we would obviously like to give them voice through our marketing.

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One of the most effective ways of doing this is through videos and articles, and through their distribution over social networks.

Knowledge of languages implies a deep knowledge of the world we live in. Furthermore, the stories of movement, whether from one country to the next or one language to the next – are a joy to document. It was an easy decision to adopt this focus.

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Ultimately you want people downloading and subscribing to Babbel, but what other metrics are driving your content marketing efforts?

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We did a presentation a while back at a Content Marketing conference called, “Content Marketing: How to Measure Anything”. This title was a little overblown and sensational – it’s

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CONTENT MARKETING

a blog or magazine, you can crosspollinate channels. This functionality tends to come in later as social platforms mature.

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In your view, given the popularity of your case study content marketing, will content take a greater focus next year, will this come at the cost of investing elsewhere, and do you see the day where content will be more important than strategies of yesteryear (display, search etc.)?

A Content, after all – but it’s a genuine aspiration of ours. We attach a value to every article we write, analyzing the number of people who register, download and purchase courses from different combinations of distribution channel and article type.

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We adjust headlines to match reach the highest possible CTR without sacrificing click-to-lead, and we optimize metatexts to improve clicks on organic shares, so as to ultimately increase organic traffic on the site. We also look at the effect of Content in the multi-touch world, and the impact of embedded media (YouTube, Instagram) on our social following across the different networks. Every month we review performance from a different angle in our month review.

to see little sense in jumping on the latest craze. SnapChat may enter our portfolio of channels relatively soon, but it normally makes sense for us to wait for the platform to mature a little first.

LinkedIn isn’t as trendy, but if I were offered the two, I’d choose a presence there than SnapChat as I think we’d reach a more interested, attentive audience. Furthermore, a great benefit of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is the fact that they offer embeddable media, so if you have

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How have you experimented in the content space? Have you tried video, SnapChat etc.?

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We’re constantly microinnovating, and as we add people to the team we gain possibilities and opportunities to expand to further networks. Video is a staple of our strategy, but we tend

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Numbers-wise, we’re up there already. For us, Content is already a mature and established channel with a predictable return.

This is an achievement and still relatively unusual within the digital marketing space. It’s also an incredible base for the addition of further subchannels which could then become channels, whether that be holding live events, operate ever more like an established digital media company, or building up further inter-company collaborations.

As for whether it’s more important – it depends on how one views channels like Search and Display.

Traditionally, Search and Display are based on high CPC, high conversion rate. Content is based on low CPC (high CTR, less focused targeting, more traffic) and low conversion rate. There’s no reason why Display can’t be used in this way – we’re just talking paid rectangles on the internet, after all. And innovations like dynamic search ads could mean we can use our more verbose content as landing pages for searchers.

For me, the unique strength of content marketing is that it blurs the boundaries between traditionally siloed channels, and creates a beautiful, powerful mess.

TARGETTING

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any new data driven, targeted, marketing techniques are now possible, but recent evidence suggests that some may actually do more harm than good.

targeted and personalized ads do not translate to higher profits for companies. Their research shows that consumers find those ads frustrating and eventually meaningless.

marketing professionals we describe the approach discussed above as the treadmill of creating “smarter and smarter spam”. It might work for a short period of time but eventually it will erode brand trust.

Developing a simple and effective digital communications strategy isn’t easy. Getting it right requires the leadership of a business having a clear understanding of customers’ needs, the experience they want to create and the steps required to get there. For many businesses this process will take time. To do it well they need to focus on the longgame. However, the pressure of short term performance reporting and demonstrating “quick wins” distracts businesses from the longer term, more strategic view.

The research used game theory to build a mathematical model that enabled them to look at the impact of a variety of advertising scenarios.

It shows that in many cases the most

The only real way of creating true competitive advantage in the digital world is to focus on generating long term trust with your customers.

Companies need to focus on what customer data they really need and, importantly, how they are going to use it to deliver value back to the customer.

Behavioral Targeting – Balancing What is Possible With What is Right

An example of this is the current reliance on behavioral targeting. Most of us have had the experience of searching online for a product or a service, visiting a company’s website and then being bombarded with advertisements from that company. This is behavioral targeting.

It gives advertisers the ability to target and personalize messages to consumers based on browsing history and demographic information.

It’s now very cheap and easy for businesses to collect and track this type of information and use it to drive short term activity.

But a new paper from Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Pedro Gardete and Yakov Bart, a professor at Northeastern University, has found that highly

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It also means that those responsible for shaping and driving digital change need to be freed up from the demands of quarterly sales reporting.

Leadership should allow them to develop a long term vision but insist on setting the KPIs that they will hit along the way.

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Some suggestions to help sell-in a long term strategy are: Develop a clear customer centric financial model D emonstrate which techniques will positively impact that model in short and long terms effective strategy for consumers is to keep information private and for businesses to track less of it.

As Gardete says: “It might seem counterintuitive to say to a business, ‘collect less data and disclose it,’ but being open about what data a company collects is actually to its advantage.”

The insights from this research suggests that many businesses should rethink their digital strategy and tactics.

When we are talking to clients and

Clearly show where the risks lie (many of the techniques that will provide a short term gain may present great long term risks)

Map out a staged “maturity model” that creates a narrative that stakeholders can support

Report on progress frequently The world has changed. Now is the time to be bold. Focus on the customer. Design for the long term.

And remind your management team to resist the temptation of chasing “quick wins” that erode trust.

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DESIGN / UX

Etihad's Digital Transformation E

by James Stanton, Creative Director IBM Studios

tihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, and Cognizant, a leading provider of information technology and business process outsourcing services, recently announced a strategic agreement to drive digital transformation across the airline and its equity partners.

Under the three-year, multi-milliondollar deal, Cognizant will help Etihad Airways define its digital strategy and reimagine the guest experience along a guest’s travel

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journey across the group.

Peter Baumgartner, Etihad Airways’ Chief Commercial Officer, said: “Our guests are increasingly turning to digital channels to connect with us, and therefore we recognize the importance of delivering a personalized and seamless guest experience across all touch-points.”

As Creative Director for IBM Studios in Dubai, I applaud Etihad in taking this step because it puts their customer front and center in their

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business. And as someone with a deep-seeded passion for Digital Transformation projects - especially where IA / UX / UI are used to reshape Customer Experience – I think it’s encouraging when an

DESIGN / UX

airline admits it needs to change, or else…

But what could the future of customer experience in the airline sector look like?

Let’s first consider the future of booking flights. How would you search for a flight? How would you enjoy the experience of actually booking a flight? To go one step further, how differently might you feel when you engage with different devices at different stages of your booking journey, even at different times of the day? What if mobile was treated as the first screen?

To illustrate this, here’s an image of what a user would see checking in on mobile.

Nothing really amazing about that, but what if there was an Account section that enabled an EA, PA or travel agent to login and manage someone’s journey via a simple dashboard, on any device? Enabling this could speed up the booking process, as well as save countless hours if this

application was also linked directly to the finance department to save on manually submitting travel expenses.

To expand on this, what if customers never had to carry a paper ticket ever again? An electronic ticketing system built around mobile devices would not only make customer’s lives easier, it would also result in massive savings for Etihad. Imagine the experience: no ticket machine, no lining up at ticket counters, no unnecessary paperwork to misplace. That’s putting the customer first. And to move beyond bookings, what about the actual realworld experience of travelling?

Digital screen located in the business lounge. As an Etihad customer walked past the screen, a Bluetooth signal would prompt a digital handshake of data to their mobile device to deliver a wealth of relevant information about the destination they’re traveling to.

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This information could be saved to their account for later use, or they could immediately interact with the content right through to booking accommodation or buying tickets to the opera. Customers could also interact with a wide range of digital screens. They could review boarding times and receive notifications on their wrist. The Etihad app could help customers if they were lost, as well as inform Etihad ground staff of someone’s location and whether they’re on their way to their gate.

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Moving one step further, Etihad could connect their customers via smart walls where they could share their trips, holidays and experiences in major airports like Dubai. This social share functionality could easily be deployed via the new Etihad Accounts system that lets customers select meals, beverages and even movies on their flight.

Will all this be available in three years’ time when Etihad’s project ends? Maybe. But even if it doesn’t come to pass as part of their digital transformation project, what is for certain is that this can only be a positive step forward for travelers worldwide, because once someone raises the bar in the travel sector, everyone needs to follow suit to remain competitive.

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SOCIAL MEDIA LAW

New Association Seeks Global Regulations on

Social Media

by Derrick Perkins

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t’s easy to pass around photos and other intellectual property on social media websites, but is it right? The recently launched International Social Media Association wants to make sure content creators get credit for their work. Social media legal guru Sara Delpopolo wants to standardize the way intellectual property rights are regulated on the Internet around the world.

To work toward that goal, Delpopolo, an Australian-based lawyer, launched the International Social Media Association from Sydney earlier this year. ISMA wants to bring together a global coalition of social media experts and lay out a concrete way to approach privacy and intellectual property issues. Currently, associations, businesses, and other groups are grappling with the vagaries inherent in the digital sphere.

“We have international treaties about intellectual property and global treaties that facilitate global commerce, why can’t we do this for social media?” Delpopolo told Australasian Lawyer.

To that end, Delpopolo is gathering legal experts and social media gurus from around the world.

So far, board members hail from the United States, Russia, China, India, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, and Thailand, among others. ISMA

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isn’t stopping there—it’s also hoping to bring in board members from the U.K., Brazil, and Malta in the coming weeks.

The proliferation of social media has been a boon for individuals, newsmakers, businesses, and associations. But it comes with a cost, namely that easy spread of information makes it increasingly likely that photos and data will get usurped by third-party actors.

It’s not a new issue.

Back in 2011, for example, LegalZoom.com reported on the case of Daniel Morel, a photographer who was on scene following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Morel’s photos of the immediate aftermath went viral and another person reposted—and took credit— for his images. Several major news outlets allegedly followed suit, similarly claiming credit for his work and profiting from the exchange of the photos.

The case eventually ended up in court.

“The laws are not serviceable around this and no one is looking at it,” Delpopolo said in a statement. “We need to make sure we close the gap on the laws governing the digital community.”

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According to ISMA, the globe’s major social media organizations— think Twitter and Google—have struggled with the issue, changing copyright and use-of-service terms multiple times over the subsequent years. The problem prompted the Australian lawyer to publish a guide called “Social Media: Playing by the Rules.”

While ISMA is in the process of converting Delpopolo’s guide into an interactive digital offering, it has already built on her previous work, publishing a whitepaper called “2016 Social Media Terms of Service.” This deep dive into social media and copyright law highlights problems with various outlets’ terms of service.

“This Paper is a crucial step by ISMA towards achieving what should be expected of the online legal landscape—to protect Australian social media users and assist businesses. Social media is not just about being ‘sociable’; it’s about how society interacts on digital platforms internationally,” Delpopolo said in a news release.

According to an article on CMO Australia, ISMA’s broader priority is to seek harmonization globally around how to approach the legal rights of companies and users in a social media situation and in cyberspace.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

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Interview with

Emma Williamson Director, Customer Experience L’Oréal ANZ

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ustomer service has changed dramatically in recent years. Whilst the fundamental goal of keeping customers satisfied remains the same, the near constant emergence of new channels available through which people can contact a business is making it more challenging than ever before to keep customers satisfied.

Long gone are the days where customer service was facilitated over the counter, via phone calls and snail mail.

Consumers now have the ability - and the expectation - to be able to reach a business 24/7 via email, social media, text message, and increasingly live chat. This unprecedented access to technology has created an environment where organizations have to be willing to adapt and respond to this shift in businessconsumer dynamics simply to survive.

Digerati sat down with Emma Williamson, Director Customer Experience at L’Oréal ANZ to discuss how they are reshaping the way they’re evolving customer experience in a 24/7 world.

Q

You’ve spent 15yrs in traditional customer care environments (retail and call centers), how has your role and your priorities shifted with the emergence of digital channels?

A

The reality is consumers are much more demanding these days, and rightly so. The advent of social media and smartphones connect consumers to information 24/7 and this means that businesses can no longer rely on a call center or 9-5 retail store where we dictate to consumers’ hours of operation. We need to be available when consumers want us. This means looking for ways to create new touchpoints via digital; improving on what we would now call ‘traditional’ customer care by increasing contact center hours; extending trading hours; constantly updating our staff training; and offering accessibility to customer care personnel on our social pages.

My role is about bringing these areas together so that we are giving consumers a complete suite of channels by which to contact us, with an added bonus that we are able to better understand consumer’s needs and wants by

being available on various platforms instead of focusing on one area.

Q

What’s the role of social media to you?

A

Social media is just as critical for a business like L’Oréal Australia as a call center once was, or face to face interaction with our Luxury brand store staff. Our key market demographic is researching and purchasing products in a different manner. 20-something consumers demand to be able to interact with someone who knows our products, at a time that is convenient to them, and in a way that feels comfortable.

This is generally via our pages on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, e-commerce etc.

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Digital moves at an incredibly fast pace which requires constant development and a nimble approach. Our consumers are there, they are hungry for content, so we need to be present and relevant.

Social media is a key channel to help us grow ‘brand love’. What I mean by this is that since we started interacting with consumers

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

in this virtual manner, we’ve had to adapt our brands voice and frequency of contact with our audience. In the past there was a corporate approach to how we interacted with the public in a written format. Today, we are much more open, we have to be transparent and focus on being ‘real’ to help foster consumer loyalty.

Corporate messages can be seen as insincere and cookiecutter in an age where everyone is striving to be an individual. Good service is about being in the right place at the right time for your customer base, with an answer that will satisfy and one that cuts out the double-talk.

Q

What are your biggest challenges in embracing digital?

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Digitally savvy consumers hold business to account much more now. The reality is that if you don’t have some sort of social or online footprint

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you’re missing out on speaking to a key audience (millennial), but it’s important that businesses are prepared for the resource requirements needed to be fully emerged in a digital business.

For L’Oréal Australia, the challenge for us is the size of our brand portfolio with 25 brands in Australia, which all have different tones of voice and consumers. To ensure that we are successful but protected in this area, we have in place a robust governance model.

My role sits across all brand, social and consumer interaction points which successfully helps us operate in the online space.

While I have overall management of the consumer tone of voice of the brands, the successful implementation is due to the broader support team made up of content specialists, communication teams, legal, regulatory etc. who are ultimately the engine room. This means that we’re always planning, testing for outcomes, revising, adding more detail and monitoring.

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Q

Customer Care takes many forms along the customer journey, what digital channels are you using at key points?

A

Currently, L’Oréal Australia are focused on two areas of customer experience. That of our direct customers (retailers / salons) and consumers as they are both just as important to our business.

We are striving to offer multiple opportunities to connect with our brand experts and commercial teams and give easy access to product information through the following avenues:

Product knowledge and ‘how to’ content via L’Oreal Paris Make up Genius

CRM programs for all major brands

eCommerce stores for Luxury brands Lancôme, Clarisonic & Kiehl’s brands with product review integration

YouTube ‘how to’ content for all brands

Dedicated Social media

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

community managers per brand focusing on customer service linked directly with our Consumer Affairs team product experts. nd not to forget our A Customers – retailers and salons

For our retailers, a cross divisional Commercial project team are working towards offering better access to product ordering on accounts that are in remote locations within Australia. Typically, this is where it can difficult for us to deploy staff for site visits. We believe in beauty for all and this means enabling our regional customers access to products for their stores or salons as easily as metro areas.

In June of this year, Matrix one of our salon Professional brands, launched their ‘Color Lounge’ app. The app offers virtual hair colour makeovers for in salon colour inspiration, technique guides and basic formulations for Matrix colours for salon professionals.

Always questioning if we are clear, do we offer the consumer a way to speak to us if they are unhappy, or conversely if they are happy, and want more information.

Q

You say a company is only as strong as its customer advocacy, care to elaborate…

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In all large business it can be easy to slip into a habit of distancing yourself from the end user. It’s all too easy to get caught up with plans and sales forecasts,

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forgetting that it is our consumers that need to feel a connection to our message before they go out and buy our products.

There must always be someone - or a team of people - that advocates for this consumer right along the product/marketing journey. Always questioning if we are clear, do we offer the consumer a way to speak to us if they are unhappy, or conversely if they are happy, and want more information.

Q

You once said ‘Trust and true brand love is built through quality products and services coupled with a robust customer service program on and offline.’

What’s more important, online (being available 24/7) or offline (human connection when needed)?

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I believe it’s both. To be truly customer centric you need to offer consumers a robust on-andoffline experience. As I mentioned earlier, we need to have options available to consumers to interact with us in a manner in which they feel comfortable, but also not forgot that there will be times where is it much more appropriate to speak with someone by phone or face to face.

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Digital platforms are important, there is no doubt about that, but this isn’t the silver bullet. To be truly customer centric you need to cater for the needs of all age groups, all demographics and needs. That means being where they are, when they want to engage with you.

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Naijasinglegirl.com

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Snapchat Filters are the New TV ad for Millennials

by Fi Bendall, CEO at Bendalls Group

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ig brands have recognized the power of Snapchat filters as a uniquely Millennial way of getting their message seen. Don’t know what a Snapchat filter is? Well, firstly, Snapchat is a social media app that allows its users to send messages that disappear after a set time, usually 10 seconds.

Snapchat “stories” can be seen for up to 24 hours. Snapchat filters let users apply visual effects to their snaps, and some of these can be pretty bizarre and a lot of fun.

What’s not to like about that if you’re a teenager?

The biggest Snapchat marketing success story so far has been the Mexican food chain Taco Bell’s “Cinco de Mayo” filter, which turns a user’s head into a giant taco shell – frankly, it’s slightly disturbing, but it did receive a phenomenal 224 million views in one day. That’s a lot of exposure for Taco Bell.

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The days of mega-budget TV ads as a way to appeal to young people are fading faster than a snap. Things like Taco Bell’s taco head campaign are on the rise.

This has implications for not only big consumer brands like CocaCola and McDonald’s that typically target this market, but also for all other consumer-facing businesses, big and small.

What’s behind the shift Once upon a time, big brands would think nothing of splashing millions on a TV ad. This still happens, especially when aimed at big event exposure like the Super Bowl, but it’s on the wane.

The new marketing mix for these big brands involves a far more balanced and diverse spread of spending on digital channels, including social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, as well as other web-based channels.

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Big budget TV ads are now part of that mix for some brands, but many others are pumping resources into digital because that’s where their consumers are now.

The Interpublic Group’s Magna Global report on global ad spending trends forecasts digital spending to overtake TV spending by the end of 2017.

Speaking to the New York Times, Vincent Letang, the head of global forecasting at Magna Global, said: “TV global growth is diminishing… In most major developed markets, TV growth is slowing and in some cases stagnating.”

The move from TV to digital channels is part of a wider rationalisation of resources allocation by big companies, which are starting to focus on channels that provide stronger engagement and measurement metrics than traditional media, as they continue to navigate their way from the old media paradigm into digital media.

What the big brands have come to realise is that fewer and fewer people are watching old-fashioned free-to-air TV. This is especially the case with Generation Y and Millennials, who are more likely to be watching Netflix or some other streaming service if they want traditional TV-style content, or else spending more and more time on social media, possibly watching content on Facebook or YouTube. Or sending each other crazy Snapchat stories.

This means smaller brands in the digital space will now face even more competition as big brands shift their massive budgets into digital over the next year or two. Smaller brands are going to have to get even more creative and smarter about how they try to get their message out to an easily distracted market of young consumers.

INNOVATION

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Work-Life Balance Matters - And It’s Not Just for Google:

How digital technologies are leveling the playing field for companies that offer workplace services to their employees

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After “hard work,” what phrase most defines the tech industry employee experience? Think about the wi-fi connected buses that take employees to and from work, the restaurant-quality meals, massages, and fitness services available at the workplace – not to mention the car wash or dry cleaning services – and you’ll realize that a hallmark of the tech giant employee lifestyle is “worklife balance.” By providing their staff members with services onsite, top tech employers ensure that their satisfied employees spend more hours a day working, fewer hours worrying, and more years with a company overall.

That’s a direct benefit to the bottom line.

Unfortunately, for many business owners these kinds of services might seem out of reach. Certainly, companies like Google are known for having made work-life balance a day-one founding principle, and other major firms such as Facebook or Genentech can provide services that aren’t available to smaller companies.

The truth, however, is not only are these services increasingly a must for millennial employees – on par with healthcare and other essential benefits – they’re actually readily available to any company valuing worker happiness and loyalty. It’s all a matter of applying digital solutions to a traditionally analog problem. That’s good news for smaller companies looking to compete with the “tech giants” when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.

Businessinsider

It’s true that some companies have HR departments that are experts in working with contractors and have even set up in-house services like cafeterias or gyms. But the things the tech giants do naturally can be replicated by any HR team with the right digital platform and available contractors.

This means delivering more than a basic intranet listing of discounts and service providers. Today’s employees and managers expect a good user experience - with well managed applications, mobile support, and analytics on how corporate and personal budgets are spent and the value that comes from workplace services. Meanwhile, companies face a major lost opportunity if they fail to promote the perception of how they are truly taking care of their employees by enabling and providing services.

With a digital platform, companies can curate their own lists of trustworthy, quality contractors for any workplace services such as massages,

exercise, auto care, and dry cleaning.

The employer can then decide how much of a given service it will subsidize per employee, and then give employees access to a menu where they can sign up for the programs they like.

The benefits of creating a proper work-life balance through workplace services can be measured in more than just employee satisfaction. Every hour that an employee sits at his or her desk researching local oil change places and tailor shops is an hour of lost productivity. And the kinds of services that employees take advantage of might surprise you: we found that people spend 2x as much time on “mundane” tasks like auto services and dry cleaning than on health and wellness programs like yoga, massages, and aerobics classes. Even when the employees themselves are paying out of pocket, they tremendously value the personal time savings – an important factor in environments where there may be cuts to other types of benefits.

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There’s a reason I said that “hard work” comes before “work-life balance” on the phrases we associated with the techie lifestyle. Saved work hours are precious in a modern work environment where 87% of employees admit they overwork, and 66% of these feel overloaded. Employees in the digital field are defined by their dedication to their jobs. Their employers should look to digital solutions to ensure high productivity, low turnover, and a happier, healthier workforce.

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MARKETING AUTOMATION

Venturebeat.com

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The Bot Landscape

by Dave Sutton

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“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” - Don Vito Corleone

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o doubt, this is the best-known line from Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather (1969) and the Oscar-award winning film of the same title (1972). Perhaps it may be one of the best-known lines in any film and ranks second only to “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” as the most celebrated quotation from an American film.

But what does this famous

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gangster line have to do with the fast emerging field of “bots” – software applications that run automated tasks and scripts over the Internet? It’s all about fear and intimidation. We live in a world where some people have a healthy fear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the potential for unintended consequences of a future where machines have taken control of the world and reign over humans (e.g.

The Matrix or Terminator).

“The media seems to spend a fair amount of time talking about bots in the context of AI. As a result, my suspicion is that many people are conflating the two concepts (bots + AI = all bots are intelligent agents). That’s not the case at all. Bots exist along a continuum.”

—botnerds.com The purpose of this article is to take a deeper look at the current state of AI applications on

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the Internet, and to some extent, demystify what is going on with bots.

The Bot Landscape With all the bot-buzz going around - inspired by Scott Brinker’s MarTech Landscape efforts - I wanted to take a step back to organize and define a general Bot Landscape, with the goal of providing an overview of the applications and their functionalities, which will ultimately impact the customer experience.

While some bots are nothing more than glorified command languages, others are driven by natural language processing, and the most intelligent bots are in the arena of self-driving cars. The technology behind the types of bots varies greatly in its complexity, application, and maturity level. For the purpose of this landscape, we’ll use the bot classifications provided by botnerds.

MARKETING AUTOMATION

com: Script Bots, Smart Bots, and Intelligent Agents.

brand doing this well is Taco Bell’s food ordering bot integrating within Slack, named TacoBot.

Smart Bots are fantastic for driving an improved customer experience.

“Some bots use elements of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in order to understand language, process complex requests, and manage dynamic outputs. And while it’s true that some bots are heavily reliant on AI & ML, other bots are far simpler.”

— botnerds.com

This is where most of the Bot Landscape exists today, and will exist in the near future. Much of the media buzz is around Smart Bots, which we will discuss next, but in reality, the bot landscape growth will be confined to Script Bots + NLP for several years.

The most recent example of a Smart Bot is the Facebook M Assistant. Facebook has designed an assistant bot similar to Apple’s Siri, but instead of fully relying on AI, Facebook is looking to provide a better customer experience by providing the AI with a layer of human intervention.

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Script Bots The simplest form of bots are Script Bots, which are platform based bots that run off of a pre-determined script that dictates what the bot can and cannot do. Currently, there are six main platforms: Slack, Twitter, FB messenger, KIK, Telegram, and SMS. Developers need to make the bots work based on the platform’s capabilities.

Script Bots are helpful in transactional and informational requests. Take for example @statsbot in Slack. Company’s use Slack for internal/external communications, it’s a great way to quickly check website stats, speed, traffic sources and more right inside of the platform.

The latest Script Bot to cause some buzz is on the White House’s Facebook page. Within Facebook Messenger you can send a personalized letter to the President.

President Obama only reads 10 messages a day, but this has created a new avenue for reaching the “Leader of the Free World”.

Some Script Bots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help identify words that might match the script. Due to technological barriers, this approach often causes a poor and confusing user experience. It’s important that companies developing bots understand and respect the limitations of Script Bots + NLP. One

Intelligent Agents

The reality is that Bots today are simply another bright, shiny object that many marketers are fascinated with.

Smart Bots The next level of bot intelligence is the Smart Bot. A Smart Bot relies on AI with human intervention as a backup layer for complex commands.

Think of when you call into your bank. There are a set of automated questions that you have to go through. 10 years ago those commands were much more limited than they are today, but now we can handle most tasks before talking to a customer service representative. The human to human interaction layer, in this case, is a fall back when the requests are too demanding for the system.

Siri, Chatbots, IBM Watson, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Self-Driving Car are all examples of Intelligent Agents.

Powered by Machine Learning (ML) and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI), these bots are designed to run without any human intervention.

As artificial intelligence continues to mature we will see a greater growth in this area of bots. The issue today is that commands on these types of bots can be too complex for the system to keep up, which is why Smart Bots can provide a higher quality customer experience at the moment. While we suspect there will be some bumps along the way, the glimpses of success that we have seen with Intelligent Agents are pretty exciting.

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The reality is that Bots today are simply another bright, shiny object that many marketers are fascinated with. However, they may not have a clear understanding of the technology, its implications for marketing or its alignment with their brand destination. Before you begin to employ a new technology, your brand needs to have the right Story, the right Strategy, and the right Systems in place. Adopting this 3S approach will help you bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your marketing efforts.

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INSIGHTS & INTENT

The Anniversary of Intent

by Aryeh Sternberg, Head of Intent APAC - DWA Media

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recently celebrated my one-year anniversary in my role as Head of Intent with DWA. A year ago when I started in this role I really didn’t have an idea what Intent Marketing entailed or meant, at least with regards to advertising in general. But enough time has passed that today I know more than yesterday, but I also know there’s a lot more to learn.

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In my first interview with the APAC President of DWA, Kiaran Geen, he challenged me to define what Intent Marketing meant. After thinking about it for a while, then turning to Google and finding literally nothing - no articles, no people with Intent in their job title, etc. - I answered in my next interview that Intent, to me, meant simply understanding why people do things.

reveal so much more than what is happening at face value.

“What are you doing by doing that?”

Dr. Peter G. Ossorio, Professor Emeritus from the University of Colorado built this paradigm to help understand the significance of any behavior. He writes about this concept in detail in his book The Behavior of Persons.

If you search for Intent Marketing or Purchase Intent today you will find it popping up in all kinds of places, which is surprising as this time last year, information around Intent was nearly impossible to find. However, the August issue of Digerati Magazine ran an article about the need to focus on Small Data instead of Big Data, an article which highlights just how important understanding Intent really is.

Purchase intent, which is really what most marketers are looking

epi f re

My parents taught me to ask the question “what are you doing by doing that “ whenever I was trying to understand why people do things that don’t necessarily match what they say, or things that don’t necessarily make sense. It’s a simple question, and yet when you apply it to a few situations you realize it can

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According to yourdictionary. com, “Intent is defined as something you plan or mean to do. An example of intent is when a politician means to become president.» In other words, I realized that I’ve been practicing Intent Marketing on a personal level since I was a child.

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INSIGHTS & INTENT

the internal silos between Sales, Marketing, Product, Support so they can share and use their data better.

for, is about understanding what someone is doing that can help us define what stage of the purchase funnel they are at. Whether it’s a click, a video completion, a white paper download, or signing up to a webinar or a trial of software, all of these are indicators that someone is one step closer to making a purchase decision. By tracking the activity of individuals who have converted, then assigning these individuals to different hypothetical audience segments, we can map backward to their first engagement with our brand and build models from there. Sure, a media-agnostic Data Management Platform like Lotame would make this a lot easier than manually tagging and tracking, but Google Analytics and some smart planning and setup will do the job just fine too.

The data is there. The question is, where are the marketers?

As marketers, it’s our duty to our customers and to ourselves to deliver the best possible message to people that are interested in our products, or to people that we think should be interested based on what they have shown through their Intent.

We may not be able to predict the weather, but there are enough people engaging with enough measurable media to allow us to predict behavior, giving us a means to start understanding why groups of people, even individuals, are doing the things they’re doing.

Asking the question “what are you doing by doing that” quickly reveals that we actually have a very deep understanding as to why everyone is doing almost everything they do.

“Intent is defined as something you plan or mean to do.

An example of intent is when a politician means to become president.”

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Take a moment to think about all the decisions that you make in a single day, think about how many times you make a decision that is supported by some kind of technology-delivered message, be it your phone or your computer, even some kind of a digital billboard or video content that you saw on TV or another screen. Right now we can measure almost every single one of those interactions. The beauty of marketing today is that most people don’t even realize that they have agreed to allow us to measure those interactions.

So what are we doing with them?

With regards to marketing, the reason why there aren’t more marketers using the data at their disposal is because we are too often time poor and overstretched as it is doing our day jobs. When marketers do try and use their data, they’re trying to Frankenstein different pieces of Ad-Tech and Mar-Tech together to gather elusive unconnected data, but the stacks just don’t connect well. On the other side of the fence, advertisers are going through all kinds of transformation to break down

Maybe the reason you’re not using your data more effectively is because it’s too expensive and your Ad-Tech doesn’t allow it. Maybe your advertising budgets are too small to make sense of the data.

Maybe you don’t have the right people, the right technology and machine intelligence to allow it to happen. Whatever your excuse, I assure you these problems will go away in the near future as week by week it’s becoming easier and cheaper to harness your data.

For those limited by smaller budgets, I suggest starting with the question, “what are you doing by doing that” when designing your marketing plans, and thinking creatively about what message you want to send to your target audiences. Who are these people?

What do they do in their day? More importantly, why do they need whatever it is you are advertising?

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Ask yourself, what is your segmentation strategy? What hypothesis are you testing? Imagine you are in their shoes, going about your day and you have to deal with 300 more advertising interruptions outside of the hundreds of other notifications and disruptions you have on every device you own.

Remember, your duty as a marketer is to deliver the best messaging to the right people on the right channel at the right time when they want to see it.

How do you do this? You start tracking Intent. Look at the keywords that bring people to your site, at Google Trends, listen in on Twitter to what people are saying about your product or category.

There’s a lot of Intent insight to be found out there, you just have to take the time to find it.

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INDUSTRY TALK

IAB Global Wrap Adrian Pickstock, CEO IAB New Zealand

freepik

IAB NZ has launched the LEAN principles as a way of alleviating the threat of Ad Blocking in this country. LEAN represents a set of guidelines which highlights four steps publishers can take in their own business to improve the user experience and it stands for:

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T

he Interactive Advertising Bureau has been steering and shaping the digital sector since 1996. As an advertising business organization, they’ve created industry standards and led research on the online advertising industry that has guided marketers and businesses worldwide.

Digerati reached out to several IAB leaders around the globe to understand what their digital hot topic are and what’s keeping them up at night. This is what they had to say…

Vijay Solanki, CEO at IAB Australia Along with an estimated 9.5+ million daily users world-wide, I’m enthralled with Pokémon Go. Sure there are the well documented negatives (robberies and riot squads around Rhodes) but it is a great way to share

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adventure and build camaraderie with my kids.

It got my 8-year-old to walk 5 kilometers last Saturday, both of us using technology but seeing the world through the same lens.

And it has opened up some hugely interesting and fluid conversations that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Plus of course the marketer in me can’t help but marvel at one of the most masterful examples of brand awareness in living memory; a case study in how fast a product brand can be built in modern times.

It is a killer use case for augmented reality and takes gamification to new levels - with what is essentially the digital reinvention of the sticker book.

This is just the beginning of the AR journey. Mark my words.

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LIGHT Limited file size with strict data call guidelines ENCRYPTED Assure user security with https/SSL and compliant ads AD CHOICES SUPPORT All ads should support IABNZ’s Online Behavioural Advertising Principles NON-INVASIVE/NONDISRUPTIVE Ads that supplement the user experience and don’t disrupt it. This includes covering content and should be enabled by default While LEAN is a good step forward to improve the user experience, the responsibility for effectively implementing these guidelines lies with the wider industry – not just publishers.

Advertisers and Advertising Agencies alike must collaborate with media owners to ensure LEAN can be implemented effectively.

IAB NZ’s challenge is to identify and implement the catalytic mechanism necessary to ensure the whole industry implements LEAN in this country - a step necessary to improve the user experience and remove the temptation for users to download ad blocking software.

What keeps me awake at night?

Working out how we can achieve this… quickly.

CONTENT

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Creating

“Snackable” Content

by Becca Bleznak, iMedia Connection

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hile both serve their purpose, there is near-constant debate as to which content creators should focus on -- long or short-form content. Earlier this month, at #BlogHer16 in Los Angeles, Susan Kaplow, chief content officer at SheKnows Media, sat down with three women who are taking their body of work and breaking it down into more “digestible” segments.

When Lain Ehmann was laid off from an editor position years ago, she began a blog around her passion for scrapbooking and event production. It turned out that she was talented on the business side, and others soon sought her entrepreneurial expertise. She’s now focused on helping people plan their content strategy through webinars.

That’s a lot to focus on, but Ehmann said it’s all about prioritizing based on your goals. She suggests not focusing on monetization right off the bat. It’s important to figure out who your audience is, and who they will be. Building your platform requires knowing all about who you’re trying to reach, including where they are gathering and how you can stand out without saturating the market.

Jadah Sellner, co-founder of SimpleGreenSmoothies.com, works to get people to fall in love with vegetables like kale and spinach, as well as helps entrepreneurs by fueling their passion. In order to stand out,

her brand is focused on consistency.

Its 30-day free challenge isn’t exactly innovative, but it is consistent and reliable, which builds brand equity.

Her team depends on word-of-mouth marketing, and works to nurture a relationship of engagement and connection with their audience. After they build that connection, users are invited to take the next step, and that’s where products are for sale.

In addition to this community vibe, Sellner said that she follows a philosophy of love over metrics. They don’t stress about stats -- instead, they reply to all user comments, and focus on building their presence on Instagram, a platform where they shine. This attitude is also reflected behind-the-scenes, through a practice of sharing Friday love notes in order to end the week on a happy note and remind themselves why they do what they do.

Keeping it real is a part of Rachel Hollis’ endeavors as well. As founder of Chic Events and The Chic Site, a food and lifestyle brand that helps to create content for other brands, Rachel has recently taken on the biggest project of her life: She and her husband have adopted twins. While many might separate this from their business, Hollis said that she built her platform on transparency, and she intends to keep it that way. Her brand embraces the idea that no one is perfect, including moms. After all, she’s most famous for publishing a photo of herself in a bikini,

highlighting her stretch marks.

Because her brand is so personal, she insists on this honesty in all that she does. Even though she finds it awkward to build a brand around herself, it’s a great tradeoff -- because she’s doing what she loves, and what she’s good at. After being asked to speak on the subjects of social media and personal branding, she turned those talks into short online courses.

She’s made a profit off them, and they didn’t require much promotion at all.

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All three women agree that creating content comes from building a brand that you care about, and turning that into something real. Sellner’s product is profitable because it’s simple and evergreen: They focus on one thing that you want to change, and they do this four times a year, reusing the same steps and content. Ehmann’s business makes money because she works with people one-on-one in the way that they feel most comfortable, and because she has a clear vision.

And Hollis is succeeding because she’s fired up -- when the well runs dry, it’s because she has been trying to do too much. By publishing small amounts of high-quality content on the platform it is best suited for, she reaches her audience.

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VIDEO

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ajor digital media and marketing players face a stark realization in 2016: Flash is dying.

And those yet to move completely away from Flash could soon find their video views and engagement rates drop off significantly as the world moves to HTML5.

The news is coming thick and fast.

All of the major web browsers have announced they are aggressively restricting Flash content or blocking it entirely as they push the use of HTML5 for everything from video to web analytics.

Safari is said to be moving first, with Flash content being disabled

restrictions on Flash, it will be harder to ensure your video actually gets viewed at all, even on desktop computers.

Put simply, now’s the time to switch.

Brightcove’s journey away from Flash began in 2014 with our new HTMLfocused player and we hammered the final nail into the coffin in February when we launched Brightcove Player 5, allowing our customers to go 100 percent HTML5 across all devices for faster loading, higher resolution and more efficient power consumption.

One comparison of Brightcove Player 5 against the latest Ooyala player found Brightcove’s HTML5 player loaded and started playing the video in a fraction of the time it took the Ooyala video to do the same task. As a result, many of their customers have switched to competing platforms or built their own tools in-house.

The death of Flash has been a long time coming. Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has led a campaign against Flash that culminated in a manifesto from Jobs himself in 2010, who laid out six major reasons the format had

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is Coming

ANZ at Brightcove

by Mark Stanton, VP,

in Safari 10, expected to ship in September or October this year.

Chrome is following soon after, with Flash disabled by default from December 2016. Firefox and Internet Explorer are also restricting Flash content this year, before disabling it completely in 2017.

Those who still depend on Flash for their videos will begin to be significantly impacted in the coming months. Though many devices, like the iPhone, have long pushed for a HTML-focused video future, the move by desktop browsers will further disadvantage unprepared marketers and media seeking to deliver video across a range of devices. As browsers impose

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Since then, we’ve seen many of our major media and marketing customers switch across to our HTML-based platform, ensuring that they can deliver top-quality content in the right way.

Unfortunately, not all are so lucky. Other video platforms have been slower on the uptake, requiring their customers to languish on Flash and the poor performance that can often lead to. While many of these platforms are beginning to offer non-Flash options in their players, this could be too little too late. These platforms remain largely untested, for performance, functionality and compatibility, making it a risky choice for those yet to take the leap to HTML5.

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no future on the web and mobile. He turned out to be right.

Flash, first built in the 90s, has long been superseded by open standards with far better performance and significantly better malleability for a modern web dominated by mobile and social. Those marketing and media companies that have yet to make the switch are staring down at the stroke of midnight. It isn’t too late, however — there are HTML-based platforms that can ensure your videos remain at the forefront of technology and compatibility with consumer devices.

But think about the switch now, before your Flash video becomes the <blink> tag of years gone by.

MARKETING AUTOMATION

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Marketing Automation

by Phil Brown, Senior Content Strategist, King Content

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ike Tantric Sex, Everyone Talks About It but No-one’s Doing it Well. Why? Really it’s the same reason for both; we just don’t have the time and can’t afford the effort it takes. Tantric sex sounds like a great idea, but in practice it takes focus, energy, time and the right people. So does marketing automation.

HubSpot defines Marketing Automation as software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.

tech stack, the people and skills, the content and the how.

business you will need a structure that looks like this;

A content strategy will have everyone marching to the same song, which is vital because marketing automation is a hungry beast so you better be ready with loads of great kick-off content and a consistent and regular feed of new content.

Content is the life blood that feeds into each component and the strategy sits above the whole ecosystem providing life to the automation. A marketing automation platform and team run the whole shebang and feed into social, search, email and your other channels and then take the analytics from those channels so that the individual content pieces and the strategy itself can be iteratively optimized.

A marketing automation platform can automate some of the more manual processes like sending and replying to emails, data capture and amplification. There are many platforms available in the market and the landscape is complex so don’t start down the automation path without expert advice. Done well, platforms such as HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot or Marketo can save you time and money, done badly, you’ll have an expensive platform that sits on the shelf gathering dust.

There are a several other tools you will need to successfully run an automation program including a CRM like Salesforce to centralize your customer data, possibly a Data The great promise of marketing Management Platform from Adobe automation is to automate your or Oracle, a social media scheduling marketing efforts, but the reality is it and publishing platform like Hootsuite takes a cultural shift in the business to or Buffer, a content management allocate budget towards the technology platform such as Communique and As you look to enabling and the people needed to implement, Google Analytics to optimize search. marketing automation for your to drive the change management, to But having the right marketing stack is feed the machine with only part of the sandwich, Marketing Automation Ecosystem content and data, and you’re going to need the right smarts to make it all then continually measure, work together. The strategy report and optimize. Get all will provide the framework of that right and you’ll be so you’ll either need to having multiple marketing outsource to experts or successes. train your team how to Selecting the right do it. tech stack is vital, but the first part of the battle is to look at the business, your channels, your customers and understand the environment that automation needs to operate in. In short, develop a content strategy which will assess all of this and provide recommendations for the

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As with all good marketing, people will form the core of your program and drive it to success, so regardless of the hype, robots won’t be replacing us anytime soon. Stop talking about it and make a start now by developing your own content strategy.

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AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented Reality in The Real World

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Love it or hate it, the Pokémon phenomenon (try to say that ten times, fast) has given us a glimpse of what Augmented Reality could offer consumers in the not-sodistant future. But what’s next for AR? And how will it impact business?

Gillian Kane, APAC MD of Digital Gurus, caught up with Rupert Deans, CEO at Plattar, to find out what’s around the corner.

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Tell us about Plattar

Plattar is a homegrown success story. With a vision to be ‘the world’s simplest augmented reality creator’, in less the 18 months Plattar has acquired some of world’s leading brands as clients and secured an oversubscribed round of seed funding led by NewsCorp. Already successful in digital visualization and digital tech, when augmented reality first appeared as a technology, I decided to focus all of my attention on this and founded Plattar.

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What exciting projects are you currently working on?

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Specifically, with our founding customers we’re now working on taking

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Augmented Reality to the next level of utility. We can’t say too much about it, but it will demonstrate the full power of augmented reality, which means it leverages visualization and data and makes it relevant in the context of the customer.

Q

What has been the biggest breakthrough for your business so far in its journey?

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A hackathon at REA Group. During the hackathon itself, we created a working prototype of an AR app.

The prototype connected real estate print ads with interactive digital information about that property instantly – without the need to Google. The result impressed REA, as well as NewsCorp who saw the potential to turn passive readers into active enquirers or even instant buyers.

Q

hat are the biggest challenges facing the AR/VR market right now?

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Many companies are still catching up with very fundamental digital transformation issues, such as data integration,

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integrating legacy systems, setting up better e-commerce and improving the core customer experience. This catching up occupies much of the attention of our customers. There are a relatively small group of early adopters that realize that they need to do both: catch up as well as trial new opportunities.

Q

What are the latest developments and which technology stacks are in demand?

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There are a few areas that are important to AR - computer vision technology, devices technology, wireless data transmission and 3D content tech.

Q

What do you see is the future of Augmented and Virtual Reality?

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That’s a very broad question: Augmented Reality will provide a more visual, more intuitive interface for data and the internet, providing transformational opportunities in many areas.

In retail, screen technology will transform the bricks and mortar experience, with AR playing an

AUGMENTED REALITY

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25 important role. In the online realm, Augmented Reality is to become the new e-commerce: a-commerce. Visualizing products in the customers’ own environment is a tremendous benefit that will fundamentally change the way people will buy furniture, art and homewares.

In real estate, the buyer will have a richer impression and more data available to evaluate a property, no matter whether they are standing Adobev right in front of it, or reading the newspaper.

In publishing and education, Augmented Reality provides a great new way to present and interact with content. We are working with some of the largest global companies to create more engaging learning experiences for employees.

We’re also collaborating with major universities and publishers in the

educational market.

In entertainment and tourism, AR is already transforming the customer experience, creating a whole new layer on top of the existing experience. Disney has been pioneering, but we are talking to a number of large entertainment parks at the moment.

For government and councils, AR provides an opportunity to engage and make services available in a much more intuitive, visual way.

This would make the government less dependent on translations and provide real help to the disabled and disadvantaged. But moreover, critical information will be accessible when it matters: in situations.

Q

What are brands looking for AR/VR to achieve?

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The objectives that brands set for AR depend on the nature of their business and the challenge at hand, but we see four key types of usage: 1. Simplification: creating a more seamless user experience 2. Engagement: creating a more exhilarating brand experience 3. Demonstration: showing products or how they work in situ 4. Empowerment: allowing people to take action in moments they previously couldn’t.

Q

What are the key talent skill shortages in this area for you?

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Developers. Specifically, developers who can code, but also have a creative and visual inclination.

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MOBILE APPS

Your Mobile App is Passé,

and Your Audience Know It

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sent clients away until they came to their senses.

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obile apps are the viral marketing of our time.

A decade ago the digital agency went through the “great viral plague” of the early naughty’s - everyone wanted something to “go viral”. This lead to many brands wanting to achieve miracles on typically illthought through briefs built on the back of bad budgets. Smart agencies

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ISSUE 4, september 2016

Mobile applications also experienced this phase – where marketing managers believed that having an app was a quick path to ritual engagement with the eyeballs of their desired users. Fortunately, the ecosystem matured and along with it the brands who have a legitimate right to own a little colourful icon on the ‘desktop’ of your most personal device.

Brands who still think apps are the path forward for them will need to mount a very compelling case to get their app developed, let alone downloaded and used. If you’re

MOBILE APPS

undeterred at this point, then your next step will be navigating several key challenges; Identifying a compelling app experience your audience will love, Finding a means of encouraging users to download an app, and Working out how you make a user open the app more than once.

Let’s look at some industry metatrends that might provide some hints on what your app might need in the mature 2016 market.

Utility How can your app make the life of its owner easier? Can they raise a support request, check their points balance, be incentivised to share or earn rewards, request a call back?

Can they have a one to one chat or call with their franchisee, local office or account manager from within the app? Can they view their history with you and one click login to access services that people without this app aren’t entitled to?

Taking the Online Offline After spending years driving users online, it’s the brands who can provide their users with an offline experience who are making a larger and more meaningful impact.

These brands are creating a rewarded customer who is more likely to engage, act, and with a little luck, share your message.

Ecommerce is the easiest example, but we’re not all selling fast food, flowers and point to point ride sharing. Brands who can make this work are the ones that can stretch their thinking to provide services through your app, realtime help, chat, after sales support, access to your consulting services and reports, exclusive content video, printed extras delivered to their door.

you’re forming part of the suite of tools your customers use to run their complex lives. Single click login, single click payment, route planning to your office or outlet, help desk or search your knowledge base, it’s all available in a few lines of code.

IoT A subset of vertical integration is the looming tsunami of the Internet of Things (IoT). This isn’t yet an option for most of us but by the end of 2017 your vertical integrated app had better revolve around some smart objects from your organisation or other widely distributed hardware suppliers. You don’t have to make a hub for the smart home, but letting the hub your audience will buy a year from now call your help line or access their accounts will be the viral marketing of 2017.

Treat your app users better than the general public and they’ll value your colourful icon when they’re deleting your competitors’ applications.

If you can get a user to install your app, you’ll have access to a lot of information about them. Having access to their contact details and physical address is a small step, however it’s also your chance to delight them in a physical sense.

Treat your app users better than the general public and they’ll value your colourful icon when they’re deleting your competitors’ applications.

Vertical Integration Apart from your offering, every service your audience cares about is in the cloud and every service will allow your app to integrate. If you pick the relevant channels and platforms and integrate with them

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So how do you make your app compelling?

Look to integrate and engender your application to your audience by enriching their lives or at least enabling their digital habits. If you can’t, then ROI on your app budget may prove elusive. Forget what you want the audience to do, and instead identify something they’ll love, they’ll use and might, however tangentially be linked and integrated into your value proposition.

If you can’t stretch the relevance of your business into the model of vertically integrated relevant utility, then keep in mind - an app might not be for you no matter how much you want it.

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MACHINE LEARNING

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The New 'Must-Have':

How AI, Machine Learning and Big Data will Change Everything

by Cami Rosso

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he recent surge in the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.), machine learning and big data will not only impact marketing and advertising agencies, but also nearly every type of company across multiple industries by 2020.

Currently, machine learning is

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the new â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;must-haveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; capability for forward-thinking software providers, and A.I. is the branch of computer science that aims to emulate human intelligence. Machine learning, a subset of A.I., enables computers to learn without hard-coding. Big data refers to large data sets that exceed the processing capabilities of

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traditional desktop statistical software and relational database management systems. The rise of cloud computing has enabled big data analytics and is helping to fuel the surge in machine learning for business use. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Big data and its companion A.I. offer the third fundamental window into humanity. The first was the

MACHINE LEARNING

approach where part of their computing systems are being hosted in the cloud. This provides revenuegeneration opportunities for large system integrators (SI) and strategic management consulting companies to integrate machine learning programs in the cloud.

The overall demand for A.I. and machine learning knowledge workers will increase significantly within the next 5 years. This demand will cause traditional bricks and

with no data science background to use.

Expect an overall increase of venture capital (VC) investment in A.I. software providers, especially cloud-first start-ups, in areas of CRM, customer analytics, business intelligence (BI), and 3rd party big data consolidators to act as middleware between internal information technology (IT) departments and external data sources. Recently A.I. provider SwiftKey was acquired by Microsoft, MinHash by Salesforce and Orbeus by Amazon.

Large multinationals, enterprise and mid-market companies are creating a pull-demand for marketing capabilities that harness AI, machine learning and big data. In response, ERP vendors, CRM providers, SI, management consulting and start-up companies are surging to ride the next wave in digital marketing.

In 3-5 years, expect an increase in machine learning software functionality from both new start-up companies and traditional Enterprise software companies Bio for Cami Rosso: (ERP) and Customer Relationship When not writing about Management (CRM) innovation and all things disruptive, the author walks providers. the runway as a fashion model

telescope that gave us a vast view of the world beyond and the second was the microscope that looked at the world within.

The third will be big data that shows us profound interconnectivities in activities and lives that will actually advance human evolution” - John Nosta, President and Founder, NOSTALAB

mortar universities, as well as open online courses, to increase learning content and teaching resources in the areas of A.I., informatics, machine learning and data science.

In 3-5 years, expect an increase in machine learning software functionality from both new startup companies and traditional Enterprise software companies (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) providers.

Enterprise and mid-size companies are rapidly adopting a hybrid IT

ERP and CRM providers are rapidly acquiring A.I. start-up companies to integrate sophisticated marketing capabilities into their software. The key to rapid market adoption for these companies is to provide an intuitive machine learning interface that is easy enough for a marketing professional

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and competes in triathlons. Prior to modeling, she was a CEO and Founder of high-tech consulting, global venture capital and marketing strategy companies. The author has an MBA from IMD in Switzerland and a certificate in ‘Marketing Innovative Technologies (MIT)’ through the Harvard Business School Executive Education program. She has paraglided the Swiss Alps and Pacific coastline.

In her spare time, she practices air guitar when no one is looking.

Follow her on LinkedIn at https:// www.linkedin.com/in/harvardcami and on Twitter: @TweetyCami.

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