Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • Starboard threat + more news

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer downplayed Starboard threat – Business Insider – thinking about the Starboard threat, she didn’t see that Microsoft could use its money to leverage a more friendly board. Mayer has quite rightly looked to better monetise search. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s she’s done but her instinct on this was right. More on Yahoo! here

    Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium – looking at this, even Silicon Valley doesn’t value Cluetrain Manifesto

    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

    Facing 35 percent ad-block rates, Future decided to drastically cut ad impressions | Digiday – interesting and probably smart approach to ad blocking

    Jean-Claude Biver: ‘The Watch Industry Is Not in Trouble, The World Is.’ | BoF – TAG Heuer has latched on to wearables

    Domo, Slack and Tableau: How the disruptors are already facing disruption | VentureBeat – not terribly surprising: easy rather than hard innovation with low barriers to entry. The barrier to entry is brand, marketing and user inertia

    The FTC Cracks Down On March 2015 Lord & Taylor Social Media Launch: Native Advertisers Beware! | Fashion & Apparel Law Blog – native advertising, not quite the wild west it had been

    Dynamic battery for the future developed by Japanese team  – A lithium-ion battery more than three times as powerful as normal that could be used in vehicles and power grids has been developed by a team of academic and corporate researchers in Japan

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.

  • 6 things learned in a corporate environment

    The idea for 6 things learned  in a corporate environment came from having spent four months working day-in, day-out onsite at a large corporate.

      • The working environment is very different to an agency. My desk had to become much more portable. Since the space was all hot-desking with only team PAs assigned permanent desks.  This meant no reference charts stuck up or post-its around the monitor. Instead I boiled my process down to the laptop, a notebook that acted as my organisation memory and a day book that focused on my tasks. That was it, no further paper work
      • Many of the traditional spaces for memos weren’t available. So the back of a toilet door with its regularly updated notices was a lifeline to what was happening where. The coffee machine, once a traditional networking point was less useful as hot desking meant that your serendipitous meetings are random in nature. They often lack the depth of what you have an agency environment. These aren’t shallow people, its a level of impermanence built into the working space
      • The importance of mobile was brought home to me. Each desk space had a phone. You keyed in your number and a PIN and your direct dial number moved with you. But 20 per cent of these phones were out of action at any given time. This wasn’t a problem as people tended to use their mobile phones a lot. We used to talk a lot, over bridged conference call numbers. You would see people on calls pacing the floor listening and talking on their calls via headsets plugged into their mobile handsets. For the first few minutes it feels slightly weird
      • Sustainability and being environmentally friendly were more than having a prominent recycling bin. There is an application that reminded me any time I printed something just how bad I was for the environment. Being green was thoughtfully built into processes rather than bolted on as an afterthought
      • Admittedly, my time at Yahoo! was in a very different company and culture, but being a client is very much a team sport. You only have a limited amount of control, a lot of work has to be done by consensus and through a process. You feel like a very small cog in that process and every small gain was an appreciable win. Making this happen takes up an inordinate amount of time
      • It seemed to be timely when writing this post that I read this article Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – new enterprise software like Workday is still as reassuring clunky as their forebears. Many of the same problems of collaboration and information sharing are still being resolved

    What other things learned in a corporate environment have you come across?

  • Advertising isn’t the problem, telecoms are

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad blockers, at least not the sole problem. A few days ago I explained why I thought that tracking was the problem that ad blockers are designed to deal with. From a consumer point-of-view the time it takes to load a page is unacceptable for a significant minority of internet users.

    This comes at a time when mobile telecommunications services have become commoditised. For £29/month I get unlimited data, unlimited SMS texts, unlimited voice, free roaming across a number of countries around the world and 8GB of data when my phone is used as a modem for a laptop.

    So how could a mobile carrier upsell me? The answer lies in going back to the late 1990s. In the UK, there used to be a mobile carrier called one2one. The service provider had a poor network, but needed to engage with business users and tech forward consumers. They did this with series of tariffs under the Precept brand. These tariffs had a couple of differentiated services in common:

    • A shorter gap between replacement handsets
    • A priority and normal number, so that you could prioritise callers
    • Improved voice quality using a better Codec called Enhanced Full Rate or EFR

    Move forward the best part of two decades – handsets are now affordable to be purchased upfront for tech forward consumers, though Apple and Samsung looking to duplicate the car leasing model in the US. They are likely to roll it out internationally at some point.

    The equivalent of priority numbers is multiple identities or accounts, differentiation that steps out of the mobile provider remit and into services provided via applications, for instance multiple email addresses.

    Voice calls are becoming increasingly disinter-mediated through OTT messaging services.  But ad-blocking on the network level offer a clear analog to the deployment of EFR, providing faster page load times for web content.

    There are also benefits in terms of network utilisation and bandwidth capacity. This is especially important in countries like the UK where it is nigh on impossible to get planning permission for mobile masts due to consumer protests. But the most attractive part of ad blocking at the network is the product differentiation it affords mobile providers.

    More information

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers | renaissance chambara
    UK Gov’t Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy | Slashdot
    Three Group to tackle excessive and irrelevant mobile ads | Three UK media centre
    One 2 One offers free daytime calls and souped-up GSM | V3
    The UK’s £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project “not as successful as envisaged” | TelecomTV

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.