POV First Edition 2016 by POSSIBLE

A POSSIBLE Publication

FIRST EDITION APRIL 2016

P V

THIS IS OUR POINT

WELCOME to our inaugural issue of POV, a collection of perspectives on all things digital: data, commerce, content, culture, mobile, social, and advertising. Inside these pages, you’ll find thoughtful commentary from some of our brightest minds and sharpest thinkers. You might wonder why we chose to create POV in print—after all, we are a digital agency. We believe in print because of its formality and its unique ability to stop time. It requires us to think deeply and effectively communicate what we believe right now. It demonstrates how strongly we care about good design and how committed we are to putting ourselves out there. That’s why we call it POV. It’s not ephemeral. It’s our considered point of view.

OF VIEW

There are a lot of voices out there, all vying for a finite audience with a limited attention span. This carefully crafted object says, “Take your time. These words will still be here.” So grab a cup of coffee, find a comfortable spot, and discover what we believe right now. This is just the beginning.

John Simpson Global CMO, POSSIBLE Portland

Cuba: Land of No Advertising Shane Atchison

Do Businesses Really Want the Truth? Brandon Geary

Tinder Causes 5 Unplanned Pregnancies a Day Jason Carmel

Unlocking Amazon’s Hidden Value Thomas Stelter

Originally published in The Huffington Post, February 2016.

Originally published in Admap, December 2015.

The Content Arms Race Andrew Grinaker

Where My Girls At Carrie Ingoglia

POSSIBLE I/O John Cunningham

Afterglow Danielle Trivisonno Hawley

Originally published in The Drum, March 2016.

Originally published in Campaign, December 2015.

Originally published on the 3% Conference, August 2015.

Blindsided by Culture Rebecca Bedrossian

Sweat Equity Ben Reubenstein

Originally published in The Guardian, October 2015.

Originally published in The Next Web, February, 2015.

Why I Joined a Mobile Payment System I Can’t Use Jason Burby

How I Learned to love Snapchat Kelsey Wilkins Originally published in Adweek's “Social Times”, October 2015.

Originally published in The Drum, January 2016.

The Conundrum of Humdrum Innovation Jason Brush

Move over CMO Brandon Geary

It’s Called a Smartphone Neil Miller

Originally published in The Guardian, February 2016.

Originally published in BrandRepublic, December 2015.

The Rise of the Supersized Messaging Apps Justin Marshall & Sean Weller

22 Just Dance Martha Hiefield Originally published in The Huffington Post, January 2016.

Editor in Chief

Design & Art Direction

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Rebecca Bedrossian

Paz Ulloa, POSSIBLE Costa Rica

Bridgetown Printing

pov@possible.com

POSSIBLE Portland

Tony Aguero, POSSIBLE Portland

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Ad ven t ure s in the land of Shane Atchison Global CEO, POSSIBLE Seattle

In fall 2015, POSSIBLE held its annual global leadership team meeting in Havana, Cuba, where there were no cell phones, no mobile data, little Internet—and no advertising. In this article, Shane Atchison discusses why his team decided to meet in such an unlikely and inconvenient place, and why it turned out to be a great decision. If you’ve been in the ad industry, you know it can take you to some odd places. Nevertheless, when you go somewhere, no matter how exotic, you usually find an oasis of hotels where ordinary business life can take place. You check social media, swipe credit cards, and look at email over drinks. It doesn’t take long on the ground in Havana to realize that Cuba is the exception. The first thing we do after touchdown is switch our phones off airplane mode. But Havana is in perpetual airplane mode. It has no cell service, no data, and almost no WiFi. To get your messages, you have to wait until you get to your hotel, find a special room, and log on with a dozen other people. Of course, we didn’t go to Cuba simply to get off the grid. That’s easy enough these days. There are corporate retreat programs that host device-free conferences on the top of a mountain or deep in the desert. What’s more, Cuba is not terribly friendly to advertisers. It’s a communist country. There are no ads, unless you count the occasional billboard touting the revolution (¡Patria o Muerte!). Fidel Castro didn’t even go in for the cult-of-personality advertising favored by Tito and Mao. You won’t find big statues of him or Raul in town squares. However, advertisers do have one big thing in common with Cubans: creative energy. While we tend to think of Cuba as frozen in the 1950s, the forces shaping its people’s creativity are actually more recent. In the 1990s, a deep economic crisis brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union left people scrambling for goods of any kind. Everything became scarce. Cubans learned to get things done, whether that’s keeping a 1950s Pontiac shiny and red or creating a work of art. A designer we met there, Pepe Menéndez, described how when using slide projectors in the ‘90s, he’d recycle the plastic casing around slides after the old images burned through. Still, he modestly denied that Cubans’ inventiveness had anything special to do with their character. “If you put the Danish people in the same situation we had for the last 20 years,” he said, “they would come up with wonderful, amazing, creative ideas. It’s just the circumstances that force you (to be creative).”

My favorite example of that creativity is the so-called Cuban Internet, better known as El Paquete. This is how ordinary Cubans experience Western media, magazines, Internet content, and more. As its name implies, El Paquete is a package you exchange every Monday. It contains a terabyte drive packed with everything from old Cuban movies to the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Like many things in Cuba, it’s not exactly legal or illegal (the content is pirated, but that too is not exactly legal or illegal in Cuba). Regardless, it’s hard to find a taxi driver, a well-paid position in Cuba, who doesn’t get a weekly Paquete. That backdrop was inspirational in a way we could never find anywhere else. Research has shown that creativity springs when you’re doing and seeing unusual things. It’s much easier to think differently in a place where everyone is thinking differently. And so our meetings were charged with the energy that comes from a wildly unique environment. Mindfulness is another important creative trait, and it abounds in Cuba. No matter how much we demand people’s attention in meetings or at dinner, no one is ever fully present anymore. When conversation pauses, there’s a quick glance at Twitter or a brief text message goes out. In a place like Cuba, that’s not a problem. The only interesting thing in the room is the person speaking. I’ve never actually been in meetings where people paid closer attention. You also had to be incredibly in the moment. If we wanted to meet for drinks at a specific place at a specific time, we needed to all get on the same page. You had to show up, you had to be on time, or you’d miss the meeting. We found ourselves so paranoid about planning and coordinating, that not a single person was late to a single meeting. It was productive. That said, Cuba is not a place for everyone—and in many ways not ideal for meetings. It’s hot. It’s inconvenient. Simple things are hard. But if you ever have a chance to bring a group somewhere to immerse themselves in creative thinking, it’s hard to think of a better place. While I’m not sure where we’ll do our meeting this year, our people may need to head there again in the future.

DO BUSINESSES REALL Brandon Geary Global Chief Strategy Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

Part of the problem may lie in data, believe it or not. Access to increased data and information apparently seems to make us less inclined to seek truth—and more inclined to retrench in our biases. For a fun example, a group of researchers studying fan opinion during the New England Patriots Deflategate scandal found that only 16% of Patriots fans felt Brady broke the rules. On the other hand, 67% of opposing fans thought he had. And increased knowledge unfortunately didn’t change this bias—it made it worse. The more a Pats fan knew about the scandal, the more likely he or she was to find Brady innocent, and vice versa.

“I want the truth!” Tom Cruise shouts at Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. In reply, Nicholson sneers,

Two surprising facts bear this out. First, while we’re spending more on data, we’re using it less. The percentage of projects that make use of analytics has actually dropped since 2012, to only 31%. In addition, confidence in marketers is falling. In spite of our new emphasis on data and ROI, CEOs nonetheless trust CMOs less than they did three years ago. This should be alarming. We need the truth, even if it does hurt. Brands that embrace truth have a huge advantage over those that bury their heads in the sand. Truth is the only way we can get honest insights about our business, brands, or consumers—and it’s the only way we can find breakthrough solutions.

“You can’t handle the truth.” If you look around today, you’ll find plenty of evidence that Jack is right. The leading Republican candidate for president, for example, is Donald Trump. According to Politifact, however, only six percent of his statements are true or mostly true. And falsehood isn’t merely a conservative affliction either. A recent study by the American Press Institute showed that people spreading misinformation on Twitter, which strongly skews liberal, outnumber those trying to fight it by 2.7 to 1.

You might think that businesses would be a beacon of logic and reality in this sea of un-truthiness. With all of the data at our disposal, we should be able to uncover and accept the inconvenient facts about our companies. But our experience at POSSIBLE would suggest otherwise. Time and again when tasked with solving seemingly easy problems, brands (and advertising agencies) gloss over the truth. They lie to themselves about their products and what consumers are willing to do and buy.

At POSSIBLE, we like to call these “Impossible Truths.” They are honest insights about the business, brand, and consumers that inspire breakthrough solutions. Naturally, if you confront your worst fears, you have a better chance to truly innovate. Needless to say, getting to an Impossible Truth is not as easy as it sounds—and it requires not merely good

LY WANT THE TRUTH? analysis, but a team willing to accept that analysis and follow where it leads. We would be lying if we said we got it right every time. But over time, we have developed a series of recommendations to help organizations get to the truth.

1 START AT THE CATEGORY LEVEL. Put simply, it’s safer to look at your entire industry first, and this is often where the breakout opportunities lie. Begin with data about the market forces shaping your industry or category. If you understand what’s going on externally, you’ll be able to step back and pinpoint your own issues as a team.

2 ACKNOWLEDGE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Most businesses have one. That thing that everyone says about you, but no one wants to admit. Smoking causes cancer. Big box stores are impersonal. People associate your brand with their parents. As much as we’d like to ignore these things, we do so at our peril. Instead, we have to debate and discuss them, so we can find ways to overcome them.

3 EMBRACE CONFLICT. Most of us don’t like conflict. It’s challenging, uncomfortable, and even icky. But you can never find the truth without debate. The most respected companies in the world have proven over and over that conflict exposes ideas and leads to better decisions. That said, we have to engage in conflict in a way that doesn’t have a negative impact on culture. It should lead to positive outcomes, not bruised egos.

4 WATCH WHAT PEOPLE DO, NOT JUST WHAT THEY SAY. An overreliance on hard data can sometimes trip you up. Recently, for example, our team worked with a beverage brand. Data suggested that millennials had no interest in it. If you asked them directly or looked at their short-term buying patterns, you’d come to the conclusion that they didn’t care for the drink at all. However, by observing them, we learned they invariably consumed it at celebrations, such as anniversaries and birthdays. Obviously, that insight had a profound effect on our strategy.

TRUTH is a necessary evil.

While people have long hoped that better access to information would lead to better decisions, we now know that’s not the case. The answer is to renounce complacency and realize that data doesn’t insulate us from being human. Instead, we need to confront the Impossible Truths—and use that confrontation to find breakthrough opportunities. Data and information may not set you free, but the truth always will.

Tinder CAUSES

UNPLANNED PREGNANCIES PER DAY Jason Carmel Global SVP, Marketing Sciences, POSSIBLE Seattle

Digital is just the best when it comes to data collection, isn’t it? Given the right tools and a reasonably comfy chair, a good analyst can tell you anything a consumer does in a given channel. Websites are easiest—analytics can tell you when someone arrives, from where, what they do, what they liked, what they didn’t, when and where they left, and how much they spent before they did. And that’s just the out-of-the-box stuff. Media, mobile apps and even social are catching up as well. While it can be gnarly to staple all of those things together to get the true omnichannel view that we’ve all heard so much about, if there’s any shortage in what we know about someone online, it’s not the data’s fault. However, all of that awareness evaporates when we switch offline. And, despite what digital trending indicates, the overwhelming majority of buying, still happens offline. Most companies have absolutely no idea whether their digital campaign drives someone to purchase or engage offline and, if so, how much it can claim to have motivated that sale. After being exposed to digital advertising, there are a series of often competing paths that the consumer could take to either finalize a purchase, or not. All of this happens far away from their screens, and there’s rarely an automated, fool-proof way to quantify the end state, let alone the individual path that led to it. Offline, we are dealing with Schroedinger’s customer. So marketers have three choices. The first and easiest choice (and likely the most common) is to not attribute any digital influence to offline purchases. This feels

neater because it doesn’t contaminate any of the firm digital data we’ve grown so fond of with “intentions” or “likelihoods” to buy. It’s also dangerously misguided. A 2015 study indicates that $0.64 of every consumer dollar spent offline was influenced by one or more interactions online. Not paying attention to how our digital efforts influence offline activity is a recipe for a laughably inaccurate marketing plan. The best choice is to build a system that requires authentication and passes unique, everlasting tracking parameters seamlessly across every channel throughout the entire process. I love this choice, but it’s a myth. No one does this. Not seamlessly, at least. You will never know exactly what a customer does offline or why they do it. Pure data feedback into offline motivations is the tooth fairy of analytics. The best you can do is get close. Which leads to a third way. Don’t stop trying to know the impact of digital to offline. Do stop trying to be exact. There is a world of utility in understanding a directional range of impact, well short of “knowing for sure.” I’m a big proponent of it, but it involves a word that is much (and, I would argue, unfairly) maligned in the analytics world: educated guessing.

Nobel physicist and all-around architect of the nuclear age Enrico Fermi guessed a lot while he was working on the atom bomb. He had to. There was no convenient mechanism to replicate a nuclear blast in a lab (obviously), and computer hardware wasn’t advanced enough in the 1940s to build a model to do it for him. So, while personally witnessing the nuclear explosion [author’s note: not recommended ] at the Trinity test in 1945, Fermi dropped scraps of paper when the bomb detonated, and watched how far the paper traveled as a result of the blast repercussions. Based on calculations from that simple test, he estimated the strength of the explosion with remarkable accuracy. He wasn’t right (he guessed 10 KT; the actual blast was 18.6 KT), but he was well within an order of magnitude, while other scientific peers didn’t even come close. People, if Fermi could use educated guessing to predict the impact of atomic weapons, then you are pretty much cleared to use it to understand digital advertising’s impact on offline actions. On behalf of Enrico Fermi, I give you permission. Fermi was a huge proponent of educated guessing to predict outcomes. At his physics lectures, he would give his students what came to be known as “Fermi Problems”—hypothetical questions that were next to impossible to validate down to the integer, but could be estimated to a reasonable point of utility without a ton of data or prior knowledge. Fermi’s most famous problem was to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago. But we’re all about digital, right? So let’s update the fact pattern.

Guessing is OK.

HOW MANY UNPLANNED PREGNANCIES DOES TINDER CAUSE PER DAY? Perhaps unsurprisingly, a simple web search doesn’t return any hard data on this. Perhaps even less surprisingly, Tinder doesn’t offer a point of view here either. So where do we start?

I like population as the first variable. It sets a good top bracket (it is unlikely that there are more pregnancies from Tinder per day than people who match on Tinder per day), and is typically a fairly easy figure to drum up. Tinder itself tells us that it has 26 million matches per day. Of those people matched, the vast majority are 44 and under, which we will deem capable of conceiving a child. But let’s knock off 5% conservatively to account for those unable to have kids, and those (uh-oh) who are already pregnant, leaving 24.7 million relevant matches capable of producing a child. Not everybody who matches on Tinder ever meets in person. In fact from asking the people I know who use Tinder, I understand it’s a rarity, and it varies greatly depending on whether you are a man or woman. A very crude user research exercise I held over a lunch one day put the match-to-meet ratio for men at 15-20% and the match-to-meet ratio for women between .25%-1%. A simple average would put the universal match-to-meet ratio at 7.6%. So we are down to 1,877,200 people who actually meet in person via Tinder, every day. Of those people who meet in person through Tinder, let’s continue with an assumption that 1% end up having sex—the kind that could produce a child (please don’t make me be more specific here). This is, of course, debatable. But I am sure that 100% of in-person Tinder meetings don’t result in sex. And I’d be surprised if it were 0%. So I picked 1% to be extremely conservative. And again, because the math is easy. That’s 18,772 uglies bumped per day. Also, Tinder has an option for same-sex meet ups, which should be excluded when we’re talking about pregnancies. For the purposes of addressing the issue, let’s assume that the Tinder demographic maps to the US population of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people at 3.5%. So we’re down to 18,115 heterosexual hook-ups. Now we have to pause for a moment to deal with a bit of an attribution issue. Of these 18K+ sexual encounters, we need to recognize that some of them would have happened anyway, even if Tinder had never existed. There is definitely no found data on this, but I like to think that any app with a $5B valuation

Now

would be relatively successful at promoting casual sex if it put its mind to it. So let’s say that 50% of the hookups would have happened anyway, and 50% can be directly attributed to Tinder. That is 9,057 boom-booms courtesy of the app itself.

10 11

Side note: I know that an in-person meet-up that leads to intercourse may lead to multiple instances of intercourse, and that would definitely impact pregnancy risk. That being said, the idea of building a histogram to understand the number of boinks per Tinder match seems like overkill for the purpose of this illustration. Assuming one boink per meet-up is conservative and easy, and you know by now how much I dig that. Of those sexual encounters, I assumed that 1% would be unprotected, because people can be stupid. (Note: A casual search for research on unprotected sex rates indicates that 1% is grossly under-reporting. I’ve seen data for the US that put the number at 8%. But I’m still going to use 1% because—all together now—I want to be conservative and the math is easier.) This means that there are 91 unprotected liaisons, and 8,966 liaisons that use some sort of birth control. Of the 8,966 hook-ups where protection is used, we will consider a failure rate of 1% —this assumes (blah, blah, blah, conservative. Blah, blah, blah, math.) that most popular male (condom) AND female (pill) contraceptives are used simultaneously, with a typical failure rate of 18% and 9% respectively. That means of the hooks-ups that are theoretically playing it safe, there are still 89 daily cases when the proverbial dam breaks during intercourse. Add those poor slobs to the 91 couples who just couldn’t be bothered, and you have a daily grand total of 180 couples at risk of inadvertently procreating. Now we need to know how many of those sessions resulted in actual conception. To understand this, I had to Google way more about fertility and cycles than I really wanted to, so I beg you to spare me having to explain the math, and simply trust that I’ve come up with a weighted average for a likelihood to conceive on any given day of the month. That daily risk of pregnancy, averaged out over the entire month, is 3%. So of the 180 Tinder matches where conception is possible, 5 will result in an unplanned pregnancy. Per day.

right off the bat, I will tell you that the actual number of unplanned pregnancies from Tinder in real life is not five per day. Our assumptions are flagrantly scribbled on the back of this pixelated napkin, and that will immediately make a lot of people nervous. But remember, we are being super conservative in our assumptions and are only looking for an order of magnitude answer, rather than an absolute specific answer. This gives us a lot of freedom to be loose. We have mapped out that set of assumptions in a way that suggests that the number of pregnancies is greater than zero. We also can feel pretty confident saying that the number is far more likely to be 5 pregnancies per day than 5,000, or even 500. It gives us a generalized, but still useful, understanding of the relative risk (erm, opportunity?), and that’s infinitely more useful than assuming it is unknowable or (even worse) that it doesn’t happen. Another utility from this type of problem solving is that it highlights (often in blinking neon) exactly what you don’t know and where your argument is the weakest. The next step then is to look at each data gap and assumption (I count at least eight whoppers), and figure out what type of research would help paint in the white space. Could we run a study to ask Tinder users what their actual match-to-meet percentage is? Could we compare hook-up behavior among Tinder users with non-Tinder users to get a better attribution rate? Could we look at specific contraceptive usage in each of the 196 countries where Tinder operates to replace our blended average assumption with real, in-market data? With each data point we add, our assumptions look less gray and we begin to have more faith that the “educated” part of our exercise vastly outweighs the “guessing” part of it. And we can start using these numbers in our planning. Look, I know this example is ridiculous. No one in their right mind (or at least, no one with a basic understanding of human psychology and reproductive physiology) would “blame” Tinder for a pregnancy, any more than they would blame John Legend’s “All of Me” or a little too much champagne. But the point is that attributing pregnancies to Tinder usage is a far more difficult and “unknowable” problem than understanding whether your Pinterest page is getting people to your physical store. Or whether the nutritional information on your mobile app is persuading consumers to buy your product in the grocery aisle. You have access to more data than you do for Tinder. You have been exposed to regularly-used internal assumptions and anecdotes for your company. And (no disrespect to your mad swipe game) you are far more informed on the product/service/industry you sell than you are on Tinder usage and its consequences. EDUCATED GUESSING IS A MENTAL EXERCISE THAT GIVES YOU A FRAMEWORK TO SOLVE A DATA PROBLEM WHERE, UNLIKE IN DIGITAL, YOU CAN’T SIMPLY JOIN ALL THE DATA SETS IN AN ELEGANT FLOW. THAT EFFORT CAN RESULT IN MUCH GREATER INSIGHTS ABOUT YOUR DIGITAL IMPACT ON HOW CONSUMERS NAVIGATE THE WORLD, ONLINE AND OFF.

UNLOCKING Thomas Stelter VP Emerging Solutions, POSSIBLE Chicago

The images of mad scientists don’t really lie. They’re found working day and night, always dreaming up new things, and unable to explain why they matter. You might think they’re confined to fiction, but in truth a lot of innovative companies are like that too, and Amazon in particular. Whether it’s drones, Dash, or AmazonFresh, the company is always finding new ways to sell and deliver stuff. But if you’re like most of the marketing world, you probably don’t know that Amazon has also been doing some serious innovation for you as well. The results so far are three poorly known but extremely useful tools: Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA), Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), and the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). Together, they offer significant insight into your customers’ purchasing paths, as well as enable you to target customers with surprising accuracy. First, a little background. We all know Amazon is big, but its actual size is breathtaking. It has long overtaken Google as the most popular way consumers start the purchasing process: 44% of all ecommerce research in North America begins on its platforms; 84% of millennials trust its reviews; and it has 16 years of behavioral data on everything its customers—including you—have done on the site. That scale means that it has unmatched insight on how and why we all buy what we do. And ARA, AMS, and AAP are your tickets in. So let’s pull the curtain aside and take a look at how Amazon can start unlocking serious value for your brand.

GAINING FUNNEL INSIGHT WITH ARA. We’ll start with ARA. It creates reports that offer (admittedly unwieldly) insight into what people looked at on their way to buying or not buying your products on Amazon.com. The importance of this is hard to overstate. Today, marketers struggle a lot with understanding how people come to purchasing decisions. We do, of course, know what they are doing in our physical and digital properties. The problem is that they’re not there very much. They’re out reading reviews, chatting on social media, and, yes, poking through Amazon. That leaves us with a fractured view of the funnel and a poor understanding of what’s happening and why. Enter ARA. Thanks to Amazon’s wealth of data and dominant position, we can gain much better insight into what’s going on. ARA reports can help us understand what’s working or not, both with our content and our competitors’. They also show us information about people who considered our products and bought them, as well as those that considered them and didn’t. That way, we know who our true competitors are, and what’s driving consumers to choose them over us. UNCOVERING HIDDEN CONTENT PREFERENCES. If you get a little clever with ARA reporting, you can also uncover longitudinal information on your customers. For example, some consumers (and millennials in particular) are heavily influenced by reviews. Or if you’re buying something functional, like a vacuum cleaner, you may want to see it in action. It all depends on the person, the category, and the product itself. By running multiple reports in ARA and examining the purchase paths, you can learn what kinds of content or activities seem to be working and not. That can influence not only how you craft your Amazon store presence, but also on what kinds of content you develop for your own properties. It can even tell you what categories of ads might be more effective than others. DELIVERING LIFESTYLE INSIGHTS. In addition, ARA offers insights into something called “market-basket behavior.” This is a fascinating data point that shows the categories—other than your own—that customers find interesting. A few examples might help to explain how you can take advantage of this. Companies like Patagonia and REI create high-performance gear, but not everyone who wears it actually cares about running Class V rapids. Some may not even know rapids have classes; they just think the jackets look cool. Market-basket analysis can help you figure where your customers fit into that spectrum. If a customer is seriously outdoorsy, she might over-index on rock climbing equipment or

’S HIDDEN VALUE even zero-below sleeping bags. If she’s simply buying the jacket for looks, you might find she is also looking at designer sunglasses. That could make a difference in how you market to her. A different example comes from the food category. A friend of mine who is a crazy foodie, is always buying what seem to me exotic ingredients, like gochujang paste. But gochujang paste is only exotic if you’re not Korean. If you are, it’s as everyday as peanut butter. And so, my friend’s shopping basket would look nothing like a Korean grandmother’s. Their interests in other product categories will diverge greatly. The possible applications for market-basket analysis are as endless as brands themselves. Obviously, it can help you create more meaningful messaging. It can influence media strategies. It could even suggest new avenues for partnership and product development. THE AMS AND AAP BRAND PLAY. Now, let’s turn to AMS. Companies that sell on Amazon.com can place ads directing people to their product pages. This, of course, allows you to target your competition, which is nice. But it gets even more interesting when you use the insights generated in ARA to drive your AMS strategy. For example, if REI discovered that its audience over-indexed on fly-fishing equipment, it could create and target ads that play into that preference. AAP is even more fascinating. Taken at face value, it’s simply another media platform. You can use it to place ads on Amazon.com, as well as on 95% of the other online exchanges. In other words, they can appear on everything from Facebook to the New York Times. The difference is that AAP also gives you access to data on Amazon users, which is pretty much everyone. For example, let’s imagine that a customer begins a product search for a paper shredder on Amazon.com. She reads a few reviews, checks out a few alternatives, but doesn’t buy yet. Instead, she pops off Amazon.com and heads over to social media to post there, AAP can target her with an appealing offer for a paper shredder.

ALL BRANDS NEED APPLY. AAP can even help you if you don’t sell on Amazon. To understand why, let’s suppose that you are a luxury brand. Chances are, you have never considered a discounter like Amazon.com a useful partner in any way. This would be a mistake. Even if you think your customers don’t visit discounttype sites, believe me, they do. It’s a fact of human nature, that no matter how much money you have, you still like a deal.

Amazon gives brands like these a way to find these more exclusive customers. Research has shown, unsurprisingly, that the value of the goods you put in your Amazon shopping cart correlates strongly with your income. People may not be buying high-end handbags on Amazon, but they could very well be buying high-end speakers. And because AAP can target using average shopping cart size, you now have a way to find the affluent customer base you’re looking for. For example, let’s say you find a person who over-indexes on rugby and outdoor equipment, it’s safe to say he’s a high-income earner, and if you’re Ralph Lauren (the advice is free, Ralph), you could easily target that person with a promotion for a rugby shirt or casual sportswear. You can also surmise that it’s not a good idea to hit him with an ad for a fashionable suit. Even though he has the money for one, that’s not where his passion lies. Another scenario might involve a carmaker who wants to boost SUV and minivan sales. No one buys cars on Amazon (yet). In that case, you know that a key buying demographic for larger vehicles is new moms or those with young children. Amazon data can easily identify these people for you, allowing you to target them either on the platform or off. With this kind of power, however, comes the need for restraint. Targeting a new mom with an ad that identifies her as a new mom is always a bad idea. As with any marketing activity, you want to think through possible consequences carefully. THE FUTURE IS GETTING BETTER. The good news is that the future of Amazon for marketers is bright. The company is always adding new services—and whenever it does, count on new data. For example, it has recently launched Amazon Home Services, which is a kind of Angie’s List with vetted companies that do everything from lawn care to moving. Having insight into whether people are making life changes—or prefer to have other people do their grunt work—can be quite valuable for some brands. And there’s certainly more developments to come. CONCLUSION. In short, we all have many ways we can benefit from the mad scientists at Amazon. They’ve brewed up some great tools—and when used together, they have extraordinary capabilities. Once you start playing with them, trust me, you’ll get hooked—and your brand will hopefully get happy.

Wait. I thought brands were doing well in the branded content space?

THE CONTENT ARMS RACE Why Brands Are Screwed Andrew Grinaker Associate Director, Content Strategy, POSSIBLE Seattle

We keep hearing about Red Bull, GE, American Express, Intel, Adobe, and others that have supposedly mastered this content marketing opportunity and created efficient content production engines, which are driving results. For starters, those brands are considered the top 1%. No, not the 1% you are thinking. The top 1% of brands that have a proven content strategy, sufficient resources and budget, appropriate goals, and above all else, point towards consistent and measureable success. Don’t fool yourself, this 1% still faces challenges. They have just gotten a head start in a race—a content arms race—which is becoming increasingly more difficult for brands. Here are five reasons why brands need to pay closer attention to their plans for branded content and the expected outcome of their efforts.

PUBLISHERS HAVE A STRONGER POSITION TO CAPITALIZE. One of the most prevalent competitors to brands in the content space are publishers vying for audience attention as well. Think of Vice, Complex Media, Fast Company, and others that create content at a rapid rate to help support their business models. These publishers are better positioned to capture this attention with their dedicated staff, formalized process to production, and loyal social audiences to help amplify the content. CONTENT CREATORS ARE REMOVING SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTISE. As niche content creators continue to emerge—think of unboxing a tech product or doing makeup tutorials on YouTube—the brand begins to get squeezed out of their subject matter expertise. If a content creator has developed a loyal audience without the burden of driving sales or business results, it will be difficult for a brand to add certain topics or points of view to their list of content targets. The consumer is more likely to seek out an individual with authentic content in comparison to product-focused branded content.

THE CONSUMER HAS CHOICES. According to DOMO research, 277,000 tweets, 2.4 million Facebook posts, and 216,000 Instagram photos are shared every minute of every day. The consumer has an infinite amount of content choices at their disposal.

This reduces their content opportunities and increases the importance of understanding the conversations they can have with their audience about their product.

Whether through traditional media (TV, radio, etc.) methods, social feed discovery, or a referral from a friend, our targeted consumer has quality and relevant content items to choose and consume. Unless they are interrupted and disrupted by a brand’s content piece, they will rarely choose a branded piece of content over the other options presented to them.

BRANDS AREN’T EQUIPPED OR PREPARED TO WIN. With all of this competition, brands are forced to invest (media budget, resources, tools/platforms, etc.) to compete. Some of the brands listed above have done that effectively. However, most still lack the documented strategy needed, the production resources, the company buy-in, the process to combine media and content together, and the appropriate data and measurement plan needed.

PRODUCTION IS EXCEEDING CONSUMPTION. One common solution to this problem is to create more content. More content will provide more results for our brand. Wrong. The content consumption capabilities of consumers are going to flat-line over time, while the production of content will continue to rise at a rapid rate. Simply put, consumers won’t have enough time to consume the amount of content produced. This helps generate a quality-over-quantity argument when determining whether to increase the volume of content.

Yes, brands will face an uphill battle when it comes to being successful at branded content. They will need to be aware of their own specific challenges, the state of their industry, and what their audience inherently wants to consume. It won’t be easy, but if brands research, plan, and invest in a long-term plan, they will move in the right direction.

This piece was adapted from Andrew’s presentation at the Seattle Interactive Conference. To view the presentation, visit: www.slideshare.net/andrewgrinaker/the-content-arms-race-why-brands-are-screwed/13

Where My Girls At What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Female Leadership Carrie Ingoglia Creative Director, POSSIBLE New York

Cindy Gallop wasn’t the only one who noticed the garish male dominance of the Publicis Groupe restructure. I’m sure the brilliant and powerful women at those agencies also winced at the glaring absence of themselves, or any of their female peers. And while blatant, this is just one of the latest examples of culture-blindness that leads to a disproportionate representation of male leadership in the ad industry. Gallop laid to bare the dangers of unconscious bias in her closing keynote at the 3% Conference, which took place over two days in New York City, and included CMOs, thought leaders, and everyday revolutionary men and women who believe that the industry is improved by female leadership. It was my second year attending the conference, and my second as a Speed Mentor—an hour-long whirlwind of organized networking where mentors and mentees meet for six minutes at a time. Often students come with portfolios in hand, and questions about getting hired at an agency. This time I noticed something different. We often talk about the 3% problem not being one of recruitment, but one of retention; women leave the workplace. They leave because of unconscious bias, undertones (and overtones) of male dominance, because they lack opportunity, mentors, or drive, or they simply choose something else. And while it’s true that this leaves a lack of female role models for the next generation—it also leaves a lack of compatriots for this one. Over the years since we all entered the workforce, my female friends have slowly removed themselves from the corporate world. They’ve chosen to mother, to find schedules that work for their families. They do amazing things to make the world work for them—and staying at a corporate day job often isn’t one of them. Choosing to fight a corporate structure, whose success depends on an outmoded Leave-It-to-Beaver family dynamic, doesn’t make sense for a lot of women. They opt out of navigating the corporate politics that comes with a

desire for achievement and, instead, choose to pioneer a new model of success. These are women I look up to, who inspire me every day. We talk about tireless effort and the definitions of happiness. We love and support one another in the different kinds of choices we make. We know what it means to be women in this world, and empathize implicitly. So why is it, then, that when I talk about achievement and ambition, I talk most often to my male peers? If I want to talk about making waves, fucking shit up, getting my due and changing the game, almost every person I turn to is male. To be sure, this is, at least in part, due to my own uncovered bias. Myself, buying in to the old standards that women are inherently softer, more community oriented, less prone to bouts of ambition and self-promotion. When I’m inspired to take over the world, I assume that the notion is something a man is way more familiar with. But it’s more than bias—

it’s opportunity. Which is why I’m no longer looking for female role models. But there’s something inherently distancing in the power differential. Role models and mentors are, by the nature of the relationship, a step removed—arms distance away. I want someone in the day-to-day with me. I need women who will take a meeting or a power lunch and live life in the corporate trenches with me.

I experienced the uncommon gift of female leadership early in my career. And now that I’m a creative director, I am sure to make myself visible to as many young people as I can—visiting ad school classes, attending portfolio reviews, and taking part in Speed Mentoring at the 3% Conference. I am encouraged by the bravado and self-confidence I see in the younger generation. They will surely be faced with challenges, but theirs will be different than mine. The conversation about inclusion is getting broader; it’s not just about women and men. It’s about gender, racial, and experiential diversity. And I’m looking forward to seeing the ideas that come out of a more inclusive generation that expects nothing less than everything. Last year, several female creative directors came and sat down at my table during the Speed Mentoring program. It was gratifying to see women in my peer group reaching out. Like me, they have questions. Like me, they are in it every single day. They see what’s out there, and at the same time, are working on something much closer to home. How do I take control in this situation? How can I balance my compassion with my penchant for perfection? How do I set this industry on fire? Like me, they are working to be good role models, bosses, and leaders. When it comes to the female leadership movement, we talk about women taking a seat at the table. As I sat at table No.5 in the Speed Mentoring room, with a stack of business cards in front of me, I was glad to see so many peers take a seat across from me, face to face, one on one, woman to woman. These are my people, and I want

MORE.

What I’m looking for now are female peers.

POSSIBLE

John Cunningham Global Chief Technology Officer, POSSIBLE London

Imagine a global travel and hotel brand that’s losing its fight against aggregators. POSSIBLE I/O could help win that war. In one campaign, it might include a value-add feature—say, a continental breakfast with the cost of a room. Beside the room rate, POSSIBLE I/O would publish varied aggregators’ (higher) rates, only without breakfast. Since POSSIBLE I/O would do the math before including the meal, the brand would beat the aggregators on value every time. Attrition drops. Conversions increase. So POSSIBLE I/O helps brands aggregate the aggregators. It can also protect against the loss of data.

Consider, for the sake of this article, consumer demand. It doesn’t exactly wane when manufacturing needs to oil a cog. And commerce. Commerce doesn’t slow when retail needs to restock. The same is true for technology. It never stops. Never disconnects. Never waits. And yet, we wait all the time. We wait for IT to wade through workloads until they can address our clients’ needs. And we’re buckling under pressures to produce more with less. At POSSIBLE, we have the answer. A way to ensure that our clients’ digital innovation never stops. Never disconnects. Rather than pausing in fits and starts, business accelerates well ahead of the curve.

This started when a client asked if we could help with a website. Of course we could. “One thing,” he added. “You can’t talk to my IT team or distract them in any way.” It was a sign of the times: Technologists are overwhelmed. So much so that we need to tiptoe around them. But it planted the seeds of what would become POSSIBLE I/O, a platform developed to give marketers control over their digital problem solving. For too long, marketers have plugged holes in their digital strategies with newspaper, hoping IT would find time to help before the dams broke and flooded their accounts. They often have no recourse but to request IT reinforcement and stand their ground. “Can’t do it,” IT will say. “Not enough time.” Or they put marketers in a kind of digital purgatory: “We can do that, but not for a while. Get in line.” For a time, that made sense. In the early days, those who wrote code needed to decide if and when a change could be made.

But the expectation is now that products will launch with near immediacy. Today, we can’t expect clients to thrive if the process is arduous. POSSIBLE I/O will launch at the end of Q1 as a pilot, giving marketers the tools to build and iterate in a fraction of the time, with no involvement from IT. Because POSSIBLE I/O is almost endlessly configurable, there is no typical use case. But the need is widespread. Throughout my career, I’ve seen scenarios in which POSSIBLE I/O could have broken new ground where instead, doors slammed. Imagine a large enterprise that has grown a robust desktop web application organically, neglecting to build a mobile presence. Conventionally, IT would have poured resources into architecting a new platform to power the new mobile experience, building complex and expensive APIs. With POSSIBLE I/O, we would work with marketers to leverage the desktop web experience over which we’d “float” a mobile app experience. The clincher: IT would barely need to know we existed. To elaborate, we’d deploy POSSIBLE I/O in two steps: First, a service-oriented architecture layer would translate services from the desktop to the mobile experience. We call this creating a “synthetic API”, so named because it performs API functions, even though no API exists. Customers would use this to log in, sign up, and perform actions appropriate for the enterprise. Second, a render layer would create the mobile look and feel in the form of a native app, consuming the synthetic API. Using POSSIBLE I/O, we’d go live in about two months. If IT were to re-architect the mobile experience traditionally, the timeline would be more like a year plus.

Another hypothetical: On a financial services aggregator site, users research and select a financial service partner. But this aggregator interface has no single sign-on (SSO). When customers select a partner, they’re taken to that partner’s domain. Their valuable customer data, unfortunately, disappears along with them. POSSIBLE I/O would intervene, using a synthetic API to create a single user journey and SSO across all partner sites. And it would do this without interrupting IT workflow at any partner site. Now, when customers are sent to partner sites, the POSSIBLE I/O-designed user journey and SSO ensures that the aggregator retains the data. Again, the use cases vary and extend beyond these examples. But the common thread? POSSIBLE I/O empowers marketers to solve business frustrations without putting in a single call to technologists. The point is not to minimize IT’s role. In fact, the opposite is true. First, know that I am nothing if not pro-IT. In fact, as global chief technology officer at POSSIBLE, I am IT. Far from reducing IT’s role, POSSIBLE I/O frees these experts from the backlogs that keep them treading water, rather than doing what they’re meant to do: innovate breakthroughs. For their part, marketers can finally turn blue sky ideas into realities with appropriate speed for this market. Moreover, POSSIBLE I/O gives IT and marketers flexibility in how they work: They can tackle digital opportunities independently or in collaboration. They can hold hallway meetings or boardroom kickoffs. Or something in between. No matter how these teams interact, process will never slow their work again. POSSIBLE I/O speeds process and, by extension, progress. It speeds the rate of innovation for both marketers and IT. And it’s about time.

Danielle Trivisonno Hawley CCO, Americas, POSSIBLE Seattle

Did that really happen?

That’s exactly how I feel in this moment. OUR TEAM JUST PULLED OFF SIX LIVE-STREAMED PEEP SHOWS FOR BACARDI-OWNED ST-GERMAIN ON TWITTER’S PERISCOPE—WITHOUT A SINGLE HITCH. YOUR EYES DO NOT DECEIVE YOU. THOSE WORDS ARE IN FACT “LIVE” AND “PEEP SHOW” AND YES, I DID UTTER THE PHRASE “WITHOUT A HITCH.” There are infinite reasons why our efforts feel like a dream. For starters, Periscope is a brand new live-streaming platform—launched in March 2015— with functionality limits and boundaries not fully tested. And, despite the brand’s association with 1920s brothel girls, Bacardi agreed to let us broadcast (live!) a scantily clad Hannah Simone.

AFTER GLOW CATCH-22 The agency team and all of the surrounding women were chosen because they had the chops. Period. Though in an industry where the 3% Movement is top of mind, in a culture that’s leaning in and questioning every step of our white-male-dominated world, I can’t have experienced Peep Show without telling the part of the story that mentions the staggering number of women (for our industry norms) leading this project.

What the what? In short, we took a big risk with a fully supportive client. The project was particularly challenging because of all of the uncertainty. Would people tune in? Would they understand how Periscope works? We had to teeter on the edge of failure and success with grace. We had to stop and ask for directions a heck of a lot—and make ourselves experts in uncharted waters. We fretted about the nature of the content. What about the potential backlash? We felt it imperative that both the client and the audience know that we had the best of intentions. Our vision for Peep Show was a sensual, artistic portrait that celebrated the notion that daytime is full of incredible, fleeting moments of beauty. We walked a fine line in the final crafting of that vision. It had to be sexy, but not too sexy, entertaining without being lewd. And it absolutely had to be captivating and provocative. We feared the backlash as much as we feared not pushing the sexuality far enough. The idea of a sensual woman allowing us to peer into a private moment that she alone controlled was subject to many nuances. But, if the execution felt natural, if the entertainment quality intrigued women from an emotional perspective, we knew it could provoke a feeling of empowerment. With the raging paparazzi and vast Internet leaks forcing famous women into unwanted spotlights, Peep Show represented a refreshing twist. The audience only saw what Hannah Simone wanted them to see. That’s powerful—and it appeals to both men and women. Name a man who isn’t attracted to a woman donning lingerie who knows exactly what she wants? Due to the live-streaming functionality of the app, we needed creatives and a director who would know what it was like inside a woman’s head and, therefore, give Hannah authentic direction in a real-time moment. Understanding what a woman would or wouldn’t do— in an instant—without research, focus groups, and without hesitation meant all the difference in believability. The need to “think like a woman” on a dime was a real consideration.

As a mentor to other female creatives, I have a responsibility to tell the story of Peep Show. I want to run around the highest mountaintop screaming how proud I am of this work, and of the women who made it happen.

ENTER OUR DREAM TEAM Nicole McDonagh was the perfect creative lead on Peep Show, because it felt as if she’d been poised her whole life to deliver this particular piece. She’s a masterful storyteller and there’s a provocative elegance to her ultra-feminine personal style. Carol Chapman’s ability to translate stories for new, innovative platforms was immensely important as we embarked on this crazy journey with Twitter. The two felt strongly about finding a female director, and Floria Sigismondi is otherworldly. She offered the team her creative genius, and a down-to-earth demeanor that calmed everyone on set. Hannah Simone saw just how powerful the idea could be. Floria’s production team, Believe, led by Liz Silver, gave us a crew who was willing to jump right into all of the uncertainty and pull off a never-beendone-before event. The combination of these elements took a timeless story to a whole new modern and technologically advanced level. At this point, I should mention, that this project was run by women. Female clients. A female director. A female-led production shop, and an agency team with three female creative directors at the helm.

But the moment we celebrate the amazing work and mention it was created by an all-female team, the conversation moves away from the beautiful work and into a different place. And the last thing I want is for award-winning creative to be overshadowed or judged (fairly or unfairly) simply because it was created by women. This is something I wrestle with personally and far-too often. When I was promoted to CCO of the Americas, we had a healthy internal debate about whether to discuss the fact that I had joined a limited number of women who held this title. We did not want it to appear as if I had received the promotion for any reason other than merit. Many of my male mentors were protective of me in the situation and I happened to agree with them. They wanted to celebrate my work and my success in its own right, and I wanted that too. At the same time, I know that we have to break the gender imbalance. I believe in the notion that different perspectives add to the greatness of ideas. As a creative director, it’s my job to ensure the right team is matched to the job. And sometimes that perfect team just might be all female. I, for one, yearn for a time when we can truly let the work speak for itself.

Even typing that gives me pause. This effort broke barriers—on many levels.

And that—in the afterglow—would be the most unbelievable moment of them all.

BLI ND

A recent Harvard Business Review piece—“The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies” by Sarah Green Carmichael—used Moby Dick as a metaphor for overwork. While it brought up memories of my college Hawthorne and Melville class, it also had me thinking of why I uprooted my family and moved them 600 miles. Before joining POSSIBLE, I worked independently in the San Francisco Bay Area—where I was born, raised, and had deep family and community ties. A home office allowed me flexibility to be present in my daughters’ activities, from school to Girl Scouts and soccer. Professionally, serving on the board of AIGA San Francisco, writing for industry publications, working with creatives across the country fed my soul. In a nutshell, it was fulfilling. AGAINST THE FLOW When I began talks with what I thought was a prospective client, I had no intention of moving or working full-time for just one client. I follow the news. More and more women are choosing to work independently in order to do work they love and be in control of both their time and careers. Not a day went by where I didn’t see articles touting productivity tips for freelancers, and reporting on the continued growth of the freelance economy. Seated in the bustling epicenter of Silicon Valley, with professional opportunity all around me, the thought of moving back in-house never entered my mind. I suppose, at this point, it’s more than fair to ask, what happened? TO MOVE OR NOT TO MOVE? To be frank, my path to Portland, Oregon, was not direct and I found it littered with emotion.

SIDED

Not looking for change, I was blindsided by the opportunity. I thought long and hard, and then some more, about what this would mean for my daughters, ages 10 and 8, my husband’s career, and my own—not to mention leaving my tight-knit family.

C U LT U R E

While the decision to move was one of the hardest I’ve ever made, according to a recent study by Research Now for Mayflower, I am not alone. The survey found the majority of women were willing to relocate their families for their job. Spending more than 15 years in editorial speaks volumes about what floats my boat. I find working with writers, developing stories, keeping up with an ever-evolving creative landscape meaningful. This position, global content director, tempted me—professionally. But could my professional world coexist with my life outside of work?

Rebecca Bedrossian Global Content Director, POSSIBLE Portland

Last May, I saw that it could.

EYES WIDE OPEN Having covered agency news and advertising work for years (I was previously Managing Editor at Communication Arts), I knew about the long hours, the job-hopping, the burnout. No thanks. At this point in my life and my girls’ lives, I can honestly say there are more important things for me to do than live and breathe work. I spent two days at POSSIBLE, interviewing the people I might work with. My last meeting with the Global CEO essentially sealed the deal. And by deal, I’m not talking salary or benefits. Rather, I saw that this organization valued company culture from the top-down. It became clear that I could fulfill my professional needs and be present with family—while working for an agency that sees culture as a key to its success. Going in-house does not have to mean giving up control. Not when leadership values culture, focuses on results, and allows employees to control their workdays. It’s win-win for everyone—companies, clients, families. I’ve discovered flexibility, new challenges, doing meaningful work are the reasons women choose to quit an in-house job—and to enter one.

The key is to find the right fit, which brings me back to culture. I couldn’t agree more with Lucy Jameson, CEO of Grey London, who says culture is the biggest advantage in business today. “Why? Because it is the hardest thing to replicate. Competitors can imitate product and match price overnight, but culture takes energy, commitment, and years to build.” I’m happy to report, my inclinations about POSSIBLE were correct. Culture is paramount to producing great work. Tuning out on weekends makes for better workdays. Acknowledging that we all have lives outside of the agency does more for workplace culture than a Ping-Pong table and free lunch. And so here I am in the Pacific Northwest working for an agency. This weekend there are soccer games to watch and hikes to take. Monday, I’m all in.

SWEAT EQUITY Most people hate exercise. Yet the connected fitness marketplace is worth billions. And it’s growing. According to market intelligence research firm Parks Associates, “Global revenues from connected fitness trackers will increase from over $2 billion in 2014 to $5.4 billion by 2019.”

The connected fitness world is about accountability, inspiration, goal setting, and encouragement. While there are a few hardcore ultra marathoners among us, there are a ton of people running around wearing Fitbits, Apple Watches, Jawbone Ups, and all manner of monitors synced to smartphone apps. Why?

Our users want to get into their workout as quickly as possible. They want to open the app, start their workout, track their performance, and then brag about it with their friends. Our KPI for success during a workout is how little time we spend on the screen. Implicit in the tracking of data is the need to do something with the data. Before we build an app, we ask ourselves, “How do we make it useful, beautiful, understandable, and actionable?” To provide utility in the interpretation of data means we have to understand the effect of data tracking on behavioral change. In other words, how do we use data to change habits? And that means understanding the goals and needs of our users. Do our users want to run more? Socialize more? Or shop for more gear?

The answer is data and what you can do with it. MY DATA, MY SELF. In an age of the quantified self, people are in love with their own data. Two years ago we could track steps. Today, smaller, low-cost sensors have made it cheaper than ever to build devices that measure our heart rates, monitor our sleeping patterns, and even track changes in elevation. That trend isn’t slowing down either. In fact, it’s about to explode as a new generation of fitness apparel hits the shelves with embedded, washable sensors woven into the fabric. Now that even our underwear holds the promise of telling us which muscles are firing most effectively, how can brands play in the connected fitness arena? First, it’s important to understand the user experience. At POSSIBLE Mobile, we’ve built connected fitness apps for Runner’s World and WeGo. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, when it comes to connected fitness and users, the apps we build are only as good as the data we collect and the uses we find for it.

CONNECTED FITNESS FROM SNEAKERS TO SILICON. Perhaps no company understands this better than Under Armour. The sporting apparel company is rapidly transforming itself into a technology company. They’ve placed big bets in the world of connected fitness investing $710 million to acquire My Fitness Pal, Map My Fitness, and Endomondo. In the process they’ve acquired a community of 140 million connected-fitness subscribers. Those users are already driving in-app sales. Fortune magazine recently reported revenue from Under Armour’s connectedfitness business more than doubled last quarter.

Ben Reubenstein President, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

It turns out the connected fitness market is aspirational. While most of us can only dream of riding in the Tour de France or getting our race bib from the Boston Marathon, the promise of a healthier life is available to all of us. If only, the pitch goes, we could track our steps, measure our sleep, and monitor our heart rate, we might watch our weight, exercise more, sleep better, and lead healthier, happier, more productive lives. All it takes is the right gadget. And if that’s not enough, there’s now any number of fitness networks we can join, from Under Armour’s Connected Fitness, to Peloton’s Cadence, and the Nike+ Training Club.

How companies can win in an age of

CHANGING BEHAVIOR THROUGH DATA. With every fitness device connected to a smartphone, or sending signals to the cloud, the connected fitness marketplace provides opportunities for brand marketers to build stronger ties to their audience, not just in the world of fitness, but in healthcare, sporting apparel, and more. Imagine this scenario: You are a recreational runner. Someone at work got you to sign up to run a charity 10K. You don’t want to embarrass yourself, so you buy a fitness tracker and connect it to an app. Now your app maps, measures, tracks, stores, and reveals your runs. Over time it can tell that your performance hit a plateau. Perhaps, the app suggests, you could try running a new, more challenging route. Or you may want to join a gym. The app can suggest a few in your neighborhood. Or you might wish to download a training program designed to increase your endurance. Of course, the app can also recommend a new running shoe that’s designed precisely for people running 10Ks who want to lower their times. Now, data doesn’t just change behavior; it becomes a proof-point for a sale.

For Under Armour the equation is simple: The more people exercise, the more opportunity Under Armour has to provide quality products and services to their audience. They threw down the gauntlet at this year’s CES, announcing the rollout of Healthbox, a $400 package that combines fitness tracker, heart rate monitor, and digital scale that can measure weight and body fat. Connected to Under Armour’s Bluetooth enabled Gemini 2 running shoes, Healthbox promises a seamless digital fitness ecosystem. CROSSING THE FINISH LINE. Savvy marketers understand the world of connected fitness is about more than exercise. It’s a place to leverage content across a different vector. To succeed in this ecosystem means more than building a killer app. It means developing a strategy to provide value through the user’s own experience. To do that, companies need to build a digital platform or partner with an existing one, such as Under Armour’s, to reach their audiences. To establish an authentic voice in the fitness world, they’ll need to become experts in the vertical space or work with mobile technology developers who understand how to get a product to market, and tell great stories around the product experience.

At the end of the day, your customer doesn’t merely want to count steps. They want their steps to count. Using an existing platform is quite attractive to some brands. Under Armour’s backend provides data storage and tools to help jumpstart the endeavor on web, mobile apps, and wearables. In addition, if a user is already participating in the Under Armour ecosystem their user profile seamlessly logs into other Under Armour-powered applications. Now, obviously other brands will see a competitor in Under Armour. But other platforms do exist. A cost analysis can weigh the pros and cons of a pre-made solution versus building from scratch.

WHY I JOINED A MOBILE PAYMENT SYSTEM I CAN’T USE Jason Burby President, Americas, POSSIBLE Portland

Like millions of people over the course of Black Friday and Singles Day, I signed up for Alipay, a mobile payment service that works primarily in China. This should be surprising, because I don’t go to China very often. Even mighty Apple has had difficulty signing up consumers for its electronic payments service around here, and I’m signed up for one I can’t even use. To find out why, we have to understand the landscape. Alipay is owned by Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant. Along with WeChat, a newer competitive system, it has largely taken over China’s commerce in the last five years. Consumers there typically pay for everything from restaurants to golf vacations using electronic wallets. Credit cards and cash are relatively rare and quite possibly going extinct. The reasons behind this are complicated and well documented. What’s missing in a lot of current discussions in the West, however, is how these companies are laying the groundwork for massive expansion globally. Presently, WeChat is only available in China. Alipay has an expanding presence, but mostly confined to nearby countries. Yet the service seems intent on signing up users around the world, before they even have a chance to use their services. I did so because of Alibaba’s strangely fascinating online mall Aliexpress. Its website and app allow you to shop for over 100 million products—including some really weird ones, like Borat’s bathing suit—and buy them directly from Chinese manufacturers. The products are inexpensive and shipping is typically free. Given the lack of consumer protections in China,

you might be forgiven for being skeptical, but Aliexpress holds your payment in escrow until your goods arrive. If something is amiss, you don’t have to pay. Then again, if you’re used to Amazon Prime, you might be a little disappointed. My first purchase took six weeks to arrive. Now comes the interesting part. I went on the Aliexpress website, and found that it offered coupons and discounts on items, but I could only get them if I made the purchase on the app. It turns out that if you purchase over the web, you can use a credit card directly. To complete a mobile transaction, you have to install the app first and then sign up for Alipay. And so, to get a very modest discount, I put Aliexpress on my phone and joined the largest mobile payments system in the world. Just like that.

switch. Aliexpress, on the other hand, gave me a good reason to sign up. And as it turns out, it has a lot of experience with this. It fueled widespread adoption of its service in China by offering incentives like integrated shopping, consumer protections, ability to skip lines, and, yes, discounts. Expect to see it continue to find ways to sign us up here. In the near term, I’m probably not part of Alipay’s worldwide ambitions. Right now, according to data from Compete, Aliexpress only has about 10 million unique web visitors in the US every month. That said, the service is quite popular in countries like Russia and Israel, and could offer a compelling reason for merchants to adopt it there, if it chose.

As it turns out, incentivizing has been a big differentiator between Alipay and its far less successful Western counterparts. Thanks to brands like Uber and Apple in the United States, we tend to think that innovation is its own reward. An iPhone was so great that we willingly sought it out. Uber is so much better than taxis that it’s no problem to sign up customers. But most innovations aren’t like this. They offer smaller conveniences and require us to do things, like learn an interface, buy a product, and so on.

Alipay is already building a large, if largely dormant, user base around the world. That will make it much easier for consumers to adopt the service, if it finally arrives.

Setting up a mobile payment account in the West fits that bill. Minor benefit, mid-size hassle. When the alternative is swiping a credit card, customers don’t have a compelling reason to go through with the

In the meantime, if you have a chance, check out Aliexpress. It’s one of the only places where you can buy a giant toy spider, a spandex zoot suit, and a light saber umbrella.

Kelsey Wilkins Senior Writer, Swift (a POSSIBLE agency) Portland

For a long time, I hated Snapchat. Most days, I still do. I reluctantly tap the red square next to a name, only to find another double-chinned selfie. I click on “stories” only to watch 110 seconds of someone eating brunch. We get it, you love bottomless mimosas. Who doesn’t?! I hated Snapchat because it often validated poorly executed content. It’s a quick consumption platform where we hear the low-quality phone audio of a live concert, or see pictures that weren’t worthy of a perfectly crafted Instagram filter. I’m guilty too—most of my Snapchat stories consist of doodles drawn on my dog. Seeing so many hastily made Snapchats drove me crazy. But, then I realized, that’s the point. In the very first Snapchat blog post written in 2012, co-founder Evan Spiegel makes a compelling statement: “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion—not just what appears to be pretty or perfect … We’re building a photo app that doesn’t conform to unrealistic notions of beauty or perfection but rather creates a space to be funny, honest or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a Snap.” This premise changed my perspective on Snapchat, and I began to realize what an amazing tool it can be. The biggest win for Snapchat is that it challenges users to make something interesting and tell a story in a limited time frame. My dislike turned into appreciation when I saw people (and brands) bring the creativity I craved. Flash forward to 2015, and Snapchat is on its way to becoming a media juggernaut.

How I Learned to

LOVE SNAPCHAT THE WINNING FORMULA. The first brand I followed on Snapchat was Taco Bell. What I love about Taco Bell (aside from chalupas) is its ability to find creative ways to connect with its audience. When announcing new products, Taco Bell often asks users to screenshot Snapchats and add their own doodles. For example, when Taco Bell launched a new breakfast item, it created a screenshot voting system and then carried out the storyline the next day. It’s easy to participate and fun to see it all play out. With minimal effort, you’re instantly part of a bigger narrative. Another interesting strategy comes from Burberry. The luxury brand gave Snapchat users a behind-the-scenes look at its spring/summer 2016 collection, a day before it hit the runway. I find it particularly intriguing that a highbrow fashion brand now embraces the unpolished quality of Snapchat. For a tomboy who can’t function in heels, high fashion always felt very unattainable to me. Seeing a brand I typically associate with refined preppiness, mixing it up on a medium that’s a bit gritty, gave me a newfound respect for Burberry. The raw content felt much more real and accessible than the airbrushed world of print ads.

When we take a step back from brands and view them from a user’s perspective, the fundamental reasons to use Snapchat are:

1. It’s fun and lighthearted. Think doodles, geofilters, and lenses. 2. It takes you behind the scenes in a way that makes you feel like you’re in on a secret. 3. It’s a quick way to share part of your day. Successful brands keep this criteria in mind and make Snapchat feel natural, imaginative, and interesting. Although Taco Bell and Burberry are complete opposites, they each fearlessly explore new territory. And it seems to pay off in a big way. A SHOW OF APP-RECIATION. While Snapchat and I had a rocky start, I’ve come to recognize its creative potential for storytelling, and I commend its call for a more honest representation of our lives. In a time when we obsessively manage our digital personas, Snapchat forces us to lighten up and keep it real. With the exception of a few filters, Snapchat can provide an authentic look into the human experience. On any given day, there is a real-time “Our Story” that showcases Snapchats from cities around the world such as Mumbai, Tel Aviv, and even my hometown, Portland. It’s a window into the lives of others, and a chance to see firsthand that we are more alike than different. Snapchat forces us to live in the moment, however exciting or boring that moment is. It gives us the ability to tell our stories without the pressure of perfection. And it can even remind us that we don’t need to take life—digital or physical—so seriously. Snaps to that.

THE CONUNDRUM

HUMDRUM IN

Jason Brush Executive Creative Director, POSSIBLE Los Angeles

INNOVATION

One of our most interesting projects from last year was an engagement for a venerable consumer electronics brand to develop a new interface aesthetic for 2020. We were asked to imagine what interfaces and interactions would look and feel like in a future when we all have e-ink wallpaper, short-throw projectors mounted all around us, augmented reality devices, and ubiquitous cloud-based AI. It’s exactly the sort of design challenge that my students at Art Center are training for, and, I assume, hope to be working on in the “real world.” But, for most working interaction designers, this sort of open-ended brief is rare, and, accordingly, highly coveted.

DESIRABILITY [human]

VIABILITY [business]

INCREAS OPPORTUN TO INNOV

We were thrilled.

TODAY, when a designer receives a brief like this, it’s quite different than it used to be. In the past, when you were asked to imagine the future, you had to stretch your imagination—you had to free yourself of your assumptions about what was and wasn’t feasible in order to conceive of something new. But today, the gap between the fantastical world of imagined movie interfaces and what you can install in your home, fit in your pocket, or strap on your wrist seems to be shrinking every day. Just the other day, when Mark Zuckerberg casually posted about his project to build an AI similar to “Jarvis in Iron Man” for his home, it sounded completely normal.

FEASIBILITY [technical]

Figure 1 When thinking about innovation, like most interaction designers, IDEO’s model for innovation has been a touchstone: Opportunities to innovate are located at the intersection of technical feasibility, human desirability, and business viability. See Figure 1. However, when looking at this model, it’s easy to misunderstand it. You might assume that if you’re working at its intersection, you’re necessarily innovating. If only this were the case. Instead, this intersection is actually simply where opportunities for practical innovation—that is, innovations that stand a chance of being realized—lie. The model is most useful as a gate for ensuring that your flights of fancy meet the criteria for takeoff.

Figure 2

IN THE PAST, finding that intersection could, for most problems, be quite challenging: Technology development was difficult and required a lot of specialized knowledge; communication directly with consumers to understand their needs was difficult; physical retail was still the rule; and so on. Innovation was hard, and people were often daunted by it. TODAY, in contrast, each of the three components of IDEO’s Venn diagram of innovation seem to be enlarging in their own way—especially in the technology sector. For example, if you’re making a digital product or service today, maturing technology infrastructure makes many ideas more immediately feasible (e.g., iOS, AWS, 3D printing, etc.); business models oriented around subscriptions and ongoing customer relationships create new opportunities (e.g., Instacart, Uber, Dollar Shave Club, etc.); and targeted, data-driven experience design approaches that support bespoke, personalized experiences mean your product can appeal to different types of people (e.g., Netflix, Amazon, etc.). See Figure 2.

UM OF

INNOVATION

These innovations might not be “moonshots” like artificial organs, self-driving cars, or the unrealized dream of single-payer healthcare, but they have remarkable impact nevertheless. In addition to inventions that solve previously intractable problems, there are particular types of innovations that stand out in today’s hard-to-impress world:

Applying a user-centered, design-lead approach to components of a product or service experience that was previously undervalued, taken for granted, or assumed there wasn’t room for innovation. When something improves that you didn’t think could be, it can seem magical. Changing the mindset and perception of the user. This makes them feel radically new, even if they aren’t creating something brand new.

INNOVATION

Changing the relationship of the product to other products. We think about products in silos, but when incremental innovation allows a product to be integrated into our lives in different, new, and useful ways, that incremental innovation seems bigger.

VIABILITY [business]

DESIRABILITY [human]

SED NITIES VATE

Changing the relationship between customers and a company providing a product or service. The product or service might not be radically different, but if the relationship has changes—empowering the consumer, or leading to more transparency— the change seems significant. Changing the way that people inside organizations think about their product or service, and their relationship to their customers.

FEASIBILITY [technical] You’ll note that all of these opportunities are rooted in the human desirability index of the familiar aforementioned model for innovation. If you consider the other factors—business viability and technical feasibility— each suggests many more opportunities for innovation, such as aesthetic, procedural, and financial, to name a few. But what stands out most today? Innovation that affects us as human beings.

This increased opportunity for innovation has fostered huge growth in new products and services that have made remarkable impact in their respective fields, and, indeed, society as a whole—just consider the radical changes in regulation and policy that Uber and Airbnb are forcing. But, at this point, deep into the VC-fueled Silicon Valleyization of our world, innovation has become so de rigueur that it’s now a bit of a humdrum catchphrase. It no longer inspires a reaction of “Wow!”; the most one can hope for is “of course.” If rapid, continual innovation is a given today, what makes some ideas stand out from the crowd? This question is particularly puzzling given that, while some innovations are wholesale new inventions, many are often simply sexy, pointed improvements on established products or services. Before Uber, you could always call a taxi; before Airbnb, you could book any number of homes on VRBO; grocery delivery services is a very old idea; and we had lightweight sneakers before Nike Flyknit.

So, when working on our future-facing design vision project last year, we aimed to steer away from the glossy utopias that you see in so many of these projects, and instead focused on anchoring our design concepts in genuine, relatable, non-romanticized moments. (I wish I could share the work, but, alas, it’s under wraps.) We wanted to make our vision of innovation more simple and relatable not just because it anchored our thinking in the center of the practical innovation nexus, but also to acknowledge the increasingly casual relationship that we have to innovation today, and to IMAGINE A FUTURE IN WHICH ALL OF THE MAGICAL TECHNOLOGY THAT SURROUNDS US HAS MEANING IN OUR LIVES.

MOVE OVER CMO

DIGITAL IS THE CEO’S JOB Brandon Geary Global Chief Strategy Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

HERE ARE A FEW STEPS TO SUCCESS:

It was Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard who said that marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department—that senior execs must make it their mission as well. But we must update that sentiment. Digital now has become too important to be left to the marketing department and the chief marketing officer (CMO), which means digital agencies are going to have to step up and learn how to speak the language of the CEO. Digital today has become more than a single channel, tactic, or creative process. It’s not a silo that you can safely put in the hands of a mid-level employee. Instead, it should be a source of opportunity that’s essential to creating and sustaining a competitive advantage. And the numbers certainly back this up:

In categories such as financial services, travel, and luxury auto, a mere one-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can generate between $50 million and $118 million in annual revenue. That should put digital squarely on the agenda of every CEO.

CONNECT RECOMMENDATIONS TO BUSINESS GOALS. There’s a good reason why management consultants play golf with CEOs, while digital agencies attend SxSW. The former is much better at understanding larger business questions, such as overall strategy, how to lead transformation, and, frankly, how to make money. Digital agencies can learn from them and adopt their practices. In particular, they should start to tie their proposals to the real goals of a business, as well as provide counsel on how to change an organization, if necessary, to adopt new technologies.

MAKE A BUSINESS CASE. Marketers have long sold their ideas based on consumer insights or trends. Of course, those insights still matter, but CEOs need more than a trend to approve an idea. Agencies have to make their cases in business terms—i.e., improving revenue or customer service just like every other department at a company. Sure, it’s hardly a new idea; but it’s not a common practice in our world.

SPEAK IN PLAIN LANGUAGE. This can be tough, because those inside the digital bubble don’t realise how much jargon they use. Words such as transparency, synergy, and authenticity work well in social media and brand circles, but they aren’t going to pass muster in the executive world. The C-suite has little patience with discussions where enthusiasm trumps business sense.

Digital agencies such as ours are assuming an increasingly strategic role. Our recommendations have gone from being important but secondary, to forming the core of what drives businesses forward. The only problem is that we’ve not traditionally talked with CEOs. We’ve had a more insular and friendly relationship with brand marketing teams. To take on the C-suite, a much clearer and more direct approach is needed.

As Blaise Pascal and others have observed,

it takes more work to make something short and sweet than it does to leave it long and meandering.

More than two out of five CEOs now expect their next competitive threat to come from outside their industry. In other words, they’re expecting highly disruptive change, which usually involves digital technology. The 1st, 2nd and 4th winners in Fortune’s most recent list of the most admired and innovative companies are from the tech sector: Apple, Amazon, and Google. CEOs today want digital agencies to help them find that same magic.

HELP NAVIGATE COMPLEXITY, DON’T ADD TO IT. In 2011, there were less than 100 companies that delivered marketing tech. Today there are 1,824. Together they are bombarding companies with promises about data, automation, and efficiency. At the same time, technology decisions have become so critical that CEOs are forced take part in them. Unfortunately, the agency world has long regarded complication and obfuscation as useful tactics to prove our smarts. Now we must start making things simpler, so we can help CEOs understand the landscape and come to the right decisions.

Overall, it’s nice that digital is finally graduating from the back of house to front and centre. But like any graduation, this one comes with a new set of challenges. The best advice is to clarify and simplify everything we do. You might think this makes your job easier, but it really doesn’t.

BE BRIEF. We have to say goodbye to our beloved friend, the longwinded PowerPoint presentation. CEOs need a single page or brief summary that gets to the heart of the matter.

But I know we’re up for the challenge.

It’s Called a Smartphone

LET IT BE SMART

For example, 47% of China’s population have smartphones, compared to 62% of UK consumers using smartphones. And even though the usage is lower by comparison, mobile internet in China represents a huge 86% of all internet users. But it’s not only usage, ecommerce too is rapidly moving to mobile. In fact, mobile commerce is set to account for 50% of all Chinese ecommerce this year, representing an 85% increase on 2014.

This has undoubtedly been the year that mobile reached the top of most marketers worry list. The concern is usually something like: “Will our web experience work on mobile?” And this is where things start to fall down. Most businesses creating a mobile strategy start their thought process from what they have already—a web strategy. But the problem is that mobile is not web, it’s mobile. Which is to say that website browsing (while vitally important) is only a small part of the picture. For instance, 89% of Facebook use is now via mobile, more than half of Google search is through mobile, and 50% of global YouTube video views are on mobile. Mobile is fast becoming the driving force for social engagement and content consumption, and yet brands are still holding onto the behaviours of a desktop legacy. MOBILE IS A BEHAVIOUR, NOT A DEVICE The first crucial consideration is that our relationship with mobile is far deeper and more personal than that of desktop computing. The level of personal utility and connectivity that we take everywhere with us has become

The signal to UK marketers is clear: 2016 will be the year that mobile will redefine the competitive landscape for consumer experience. With this in mind, it seems senseless to establish a strategy for mobile based on the behaviours of old. The challenge is that new behaviours not only demand new solutions, but at a rapid pace of change as well. For many marketers, it likely feels that getting the mobile website working is a serious achievement, let alone keeping up with the constant updates of what’s possible. But it’s worth it. Understanding mobile behaviours and creating solutions that fit them can provide real returns. In July 2012, Google reported that 67% of consumers are more likely to purchase if the mobile site experience is good, while 61% said they would leave a mobile site if they didn’t immediately find what they were looking for. As this illustrates, get experience right and win big—get it wrong, lose big; it’s really that dramatic.

irreversibly embedded in our modern lives.

THE POWER OF MOBILE It’s time for brands to take the plunge and hit reset on their digital strategies to put mobile first.

Yes, this is a big statement—but it’s true. The level of anxiety any of us experience when we realise we are without our phones is testimony to this, and the same has never been true of our relationship with desktop computers.

Neil Miller CEO, POSSIBLE London

If we look at data from China, where mobile for many consumers has been their first experience of connection to the Internet, we can gain valuable insights into the likely behaviours we’re heading toward as we manage the transition from the constraints of desktop-led strategies. The numbers are staggering.

TWO THINGS TO DO NOW First, make sure that your mobile strategy puts consumers’ behaviours first. Ensure you really understand how their life operates, taking into consideration where they go, what they do, and when they do it. Consider all the ways that mobile can add value to how they live, and how to make it easier for them through mobile. A great example of a brand doing this is the First Tracks app from skiwear brand Helly Hansen. It’s designed around knowing how important it is for skiers to get up early to catch fresh snow. The app tracks your location in the mountains and wakes you up early based on the local overnight snowfall. Simple, effortless, and a highly valued utility. Secondly, think broader. Consider mobile beyond just websites—think of full mobile platform capabilities. As the Helly Hansen example shows, a native app can introduce new roles for your brand in ways a website could never do. Thinking

about mobile broadly to include: search, games, connected devices, geo-location, and commerce integration can help you break out of the old desktop habits, and allow your mobile strategy to become as smart as the phone it’s designed for. 20

What the

Rise of Supercharged Messaging Apps Means for CMOs Justin Marshall VP Partnerships, Emerging Media, POSSIBLE Seattle Sean Weller Director, Strategy, POSSIBLE New York

Probably the most significant development on the horizon, however, lies in chatbots. For example, Facebook has announced a chatbot SDK for Messenger and others are sure to follow. We have good reason to be excited about this. Bots are already a widely deployed feature on WeChat, where they help users with a bewildering array of tasks: watching movies, requesting taxis, sharing photos, tracking fitness, ordering groceries, and playing games—all without leaving the app.

Forgive CMOs if their initial reaction to the rise of messaging apps has been a collective head-scratch. Brands often talk about one-to-one communication, but the reality is that, unless we only have a few customers, having two-way conversations with all of them is not practical. Still, regardless of the challenges messaging seems to present, brands should definitely be paying attention. The first reason is numbers. Messaging is not only highly popular, it’s also the fastest-growing social behavior online. Today, over 2.5 billion people regularly use a messaging app, a number that will grow to 3.5 billion within 2 years. More importantly for brands, think mobile. Overall, mobile usage passed desktop usage in 2014, and its lead continues to grow. At the same time, brands in the West have struggled to advertise effectively in mobile, where 50% of all ad taps appear accidental. And they fare little better with commerce. By one oft-cited study by SeeWhy, mobile shopping cart abandonment rates top 97%. Interestingly enough, messaging apps dominate mobile, currently accounting for 6 of the top 10 most used apps globally. In China, they have also evolved into powerful brand and commerce platforms. There, 50% of all ecommerce occurs on a phone or tablet, with messaging apps accounting for a big percentage of transactions. WeChat, in particular, doubles as a mobile payments system, making it a one-stop app for doing everything from booking a ticket and hailing a cab, to buying a car and getting a loan. Up until now, Western messaging apps have not been like this. Slack, Line, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and the rest have primarily been communications tools that were at best indifferent to brands. Most did not allow targeted ads, lacked the ability to scale, and required one-to-one or one-to-group communication.

We’ve already seen some pilot programs and interesting hints as to what the future may look like:

Facebook Messenger added features that enable users to send and receive money. WhatsApp partnered with Starwood Hotels to allow guests to communicate with the brand. They can arrange wake-up calls, make reservations, and order room service within the app. Snapchat has a Snapcash payment system and recently announced that it’s adding shopping to its Discover section. Third-party travel agency PocketTour has been built on top of Viber, enabling users to book travel and coordinate with guests. Line launched an Uber-like service in Japan. In the US, you can complete the entire Uber experience within Messenger.

Several startups in the US are already emulating this model. For example, Operator uses a combination of intelligent bots and live operators to match you with a product you want to buy. You start by sending them a request. Then a bot asks a few questions. If your request is sufficiently unique, you are handed off to a live person who gives you recommendations. This hybrid use of humans and bots enables the company to handle far more requests than it would if it relied solely on human operators. Such tools could pave the way to a much better commerce experience on mobile. Even though it may not appear so, a messaging app is a natural fit for commerce. With Snapcash, for example, users are already logged in, and the app knows their mailing address, payment information, and purchase history. That makes the entire shopping experience much more seamless. Users can complete transactions quickly via chat itself, or, as with Uber and Messenger, with apps or capabilities inside the platform. As a result, CMOs today have compelling reasons to pay close attention to messaging. They should begin by understanding the trajectory for the future. They also need to to know whether the apps in their current state merit investment for their particular brands. While it’s likely that all brands will eventually have rich opportunities on messaging apps, the current opportunities are limited for some—and interesting for others. To be continued…

Luckily, this was not a matter of DNA, but of product strategy. Just as with social networks before them, messaging apps sought to win as many users as possible before trying to monetize them. Now, they are predictably turning toward brands, which will provide the bulk of their revenue moving forward. With new features and an emerging set of APIs, they are trying to solve the challenges of reach and scalable engagement.

Martha Hiefield Global Chief Talent Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

Adaptation. Fluidity. Diversity. These are recurrent themes in business, particularly digital-centric businesses that are constantly in flux. Hotels are losing relevance now that millennialfavorite Airbnb is around, taxi businesses are suffering under the rise of Uber and Lyft, and even non-digital brands like ChapStick are being trumped by pop-culture superstar EOS. The takeaway: companies need to be on their toes more than ever. Innovation can’t simply be talked about anymore—it must be enacted.

The solution for this?

DIVERSITY.

More specifically,

femininity.

Panning out, the majority of girls are socialized from a young age to be, above all else, likeable and nice, accommodating and polite. Yet when these traits are applied in a conference room when girls have grown into professional women, they are often described as lacking leadership qualities. That being said, this old and tired view of femininity and leadership is changing, not coincidentally alongside the pressing need for businesses to innovate. As explored in John Gerzema’s The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future, typically feminine traits—vulnerability, patience, empathy, and candor—are already being viewed as more critical aspects of our most capable and innovative leaders (male or female!) in the business world.

From the moment we become self-aware, women are hyper conscious of the change in our physical bodies. We’re literally built to adapt, accommodate, and plan for the long term, whether we ultimately decide to become mothers or not. Women live their lives knowing that they can’t afford to live like there’s no tomorrow (or, like there’s only tomorrow). We’re always thinking about ten years from now—this kind of forward-thinking is exactly what translates into innovation in the workplace. Yet the number of females in leadership roles is not looking great, meaning so much of this potential is not being leveraged. According to Sheryl Sandberg’s Adweek article about marketing to women, women make up a dismal 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 3% of creative directors, and 18.5% percent of congress. In a world that is becoming increasingly transparent, a traditional framework of powerful and assertive leadership is being trumped by a more communicative and collaborative system that brings more brains to innovate together, also encouraging people to live their best lives in and out of work. This change in ideology is already being evidenced in the office space such as collaborative open floor plans, allowance to work from home, mentorships, fair maternal and paternal leave policies, emphasis on company culture, and more. These features come from a place of increased empathy, intuition, and understanding, which—you guessed it—are inherently feminine traits. Companies that have these office features are some of the most innovative and highest earning companies in the game, showing that this kind of diversity gives companies a competitive edge.

This is not meant to say that feminine traits are better than male traits, and it’s not commenting on what men and women should or shouldn’t be consciously doing to get ahead. It’s simply a sound case for diversity. Women have masculine traits, men have feminine traits—and the two can work together in harmony to provide balance in leadership roles. And this means the business case for diverse teams grows stronger everyday. According to Dr. Kathleen Wong(lau), professor at The University of Oklahoma, women think peripherally, whereas men think in a more linear manner. Mixed gender teams foster creative conflict—and this leads to innovation. Easier said than done, as Jamie Holmes of New America states in “The Benefits of Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty”. “We have this natural distaste for things that are unfamiliar to us, things that are ambiguous. It goes up from situational stressors, on an individual level and a group level.” Think “like hires like.” So, as managers, we must make it a priority to foster a culture where speaking up is safe, and get comfortable with diversity of thought. After all, diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.

Women should no longer feel the need to “toughen up” to be leaders. Let’s embrace our empathy, our intuition, and our ability to inspire those around us to innovate in a turbulent business landscape and, to put simply, get shit done.

POSSIBLE is a WPP Digital agency.

+1.206.341.9885 pov@possible.com possible.com