Month: January 2017

  • Under Armour + more news

    Under Armour

    I love sleep so Under Armour’s new performance pyjamas are ideal for me. Under Armour has managed to position itself as an innovator in a similar way to Nike. Under Armour was also smart to tap into sleep which is a consumer anxiety in our always on world. Under Armour is doing to clothing what Nike did to shoes. More related content here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 – UK Findings – trust in business, politicians and media all dropped precipitously

    Culture

    A Beginner’s Guide To Iconic House Vocalist Colonel Abrams – Electronic Beats – amazing tracks, even a couple I hadn’t heard of previously. As a 14 year old Trapped alongside The Conway Brothers Turn It Up and Paul Hardcastle’s 19 blew my mind

    Design

    Ventusky global wind, rain and temperature map – this is mesmerising to look at

    NEOMECHANICA – the best Tumblr account ever

    Economics

    Why Trump Doesn’t Tweet About Automation – will the Luddite fallacy be proved right again? Don’t count on it

    Ideas

    Science AMA Series: I’m Joanna Bryson, a Professor in Artificial (and Natural) Intelligence | Reddit – great AMA on AI

    Luxury

    Usually the luxury industry uses Instagram as a marketing channel. Omega have used it to inspire product development and tap into a ready made market. More on the Omega Speedster Speedy Tuesday

    Security

    Stealing passwords from McDonald’s users – Tijme Gommers – weakness in angular.js

    Software

    China Orders Registration of App Stores | NYTimes.com – Also partly down to the proliferation of Android app stores in China

    Wireless

    Xiaomi stops disclosing annual sales figures as CEO admits the company grew too fast | TechCrunch – a couple of things. Smartphone manufacturers need to move as a metric from market share to share of market profits. Secondly Xiaomi makes many more products than smartphones now. Finally they seem to recognise that they need to dial down the hype engine

  • Micro influencers

    Micro influencers – much of the social marketing today for consumer brand is done through what is called influencer marketing. For a number of these influencers who have a large social following, working with brand has become very lucrative. But one of the hottest tickets at the moment within communications agencies are ‘micro-influencers’; Edelman Digital lists it as a key area in Digital Trends Report . There is widely cited research by Marketly that claims there is an engagement ceiling (at least on Instagram). Once a follower count gets beyond that, engagement rates decline. This micro-influencer sweet spot is apparently 1,000 – 100,000 followers.

    What are micro influencers?

    Brown & Fiorella (2013) described micro influencers

    Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

    Brown & Fiorella wanted to focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion. It sounds like an adjunct to integrating marketing automation from the likes of Hubspot and Marketo into a public relations campaign.

    This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances:

    • Low barrier to conversion (e-tailing)
    • Business-to-business marketing – for instance Quocirca did some interesting research back in 2006 that showed endorsements by a finance directors peers at other companies was likely to have a positive effect on a prospective supplier

    Brown & Fiorella’s thinking tends to fall down, when you deploy their approach to:

    • Consumer marketing
    • Mature product sectors
    • Mature brands

    Brand preference and purchase is much more dependent on reach and repetition to build familiarity and being ‘top-of-mind’ as a product.

    Most money in influence marketing is spent in the consumer space as B2B marketing tends to struggle with:

    • Reach
    • Volume of conversation interaction

    (At least outside of the US).

    Brown and Fiorella are 180 degrees away from the approach of consumer marketing maven Byron Sharp and his ‘smart’ mass marketing approach. This means that PR and social agencies are often out-of-step with the thinking of marketing clients, their media planners and other agency partners.

    Engagement matters less than reach or repetition of brand message for mature sectors or brands. For many consumer brands the drop off in engagement amongst macro-influencers is a non-issue, a red herring.

    The only part of the engagement measure that I would be concerned about in that case would be content propagation amongst my defined target audience – how widely had it been repeatedly shared as this would affect total reach.

    If the client and planner are using Sharp’s thinking then this audience would be wide, but a certain amount of the propagation would be wasted – for instance outside targeted geographies.

    From the perspective of communications agencies I can understand the obsession with engagement being part of their DNA. Micro influencers are an extension of this, as macro-influencers value is increasingly out of whack with their marketing benefits. These businesses are in the offline world are engagement agencies; whether its politicians, regulators, fashion stylists, movie set designers, editors, journalists, TV producers or DJs.

    Why are micro influencers a hot topic now?

    The most obvious reason is that more popular ‘macro-influencers’ are well informed about their commercial value which has been driven up to a point where they look expensive in terms of cost, even if you charitably look at it on a ‘per follower’ basis.

    On the supply side of the equation, influencer representation benefit from having more ‘inventory’ that can be sold at various price points to marketers. So in some respects micro influencers fulfil a market supply need.

    Challenges in influencer marketing

    From a marketing perspective there are a number of issues in influencer marketing – these factors are either unknown data points or represent an issue with the brand experience

    • Quality of brand placement
    • Cost per reach
    • Consistency of reach (how confident is the media planner that the influencer will achieve a certain level of reach)
    • Message repetition amongst the audience that I want to reach

    Which makes it harder to factor into an econometric model that would help justify the investment in influencer marketing as a contribution to sales.

    Let’s have a look at data around a campaign for smartphone manufacturer Huawei. This has been touted as successful by the agency involved, Social Chain. We don’t know the cost as its likely to be client confidential.

    • 2 million YouTube views (we don’t know how many of these were driven by advertising)

    • 75,000 likes

    • 13,587,159 impressions driven by 6 influencers

    • 10,689 clicks from 90 posts

    • 10 million impressions for the promotion of a colour variant of the smartphone model and 92,320 engaged

    • 4.6% engagement rate (which we’re assured is 41% higher than the industry average for branded content)

    What this doesn’t tell us:

    • Reach amongst target audience
    • Repetition amongst target audience

    Which could then be used to provide an estimate of its contributory factor to sales if you had an econometrics model. You can’t access how it works next to other tactics and there are limited outtakes for the learning marketing organisation.

    Quality of brand placement

    Many brands have struggled to get their brand in the influencers content in a way that:

    • Represents it in a meaningful way (for example beyond unboxing videos, one smartphone looks rather like another)
    • Doesn’t feel ad-hoc or awkward

    Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. (It’s obviously an oversight on their part that I haven’t had an invite yet.)

    De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the best of both worlds: influencer marketing but with a high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the achieved reach.

    There is a school of thought that micro influencers will be easier to manage in order to assure quality of brand placement. However, micro-influencers are likely to be aspiring macro-influencers and each will have a clear line of demarcation in their own head that they won’t cross. The reality is one of complexity dependent on:

    • Brand power
    • Relationships
    • Credibility of proposed idea
    • Impact on aspirations – could they get more followers by taking a stand and strategically burning a brand?
    Cost per reach

    Influencers tend to talk about themselves in terms of the number of followers that they have. However many followers seldom engage with the influencers content. This happens for a number of reasons:

    • The follow button is often used as a book mark or a like button
    • Algorithmic changes to social platforms and the volume of the social firehouse itself drown out brands (and these influencers are all about the brand of ‘me’). Whatley and Manson’s research at Ogilvy on the decline of organic reach in Facebook pages  is worthwhile having a look at

    Followers as a data point is not the straight analogue of reach that the industry and influencers would have you believe based on how they present their data.

    Reach numbers that are presented are often not that much more useful:

    follower

    (Data via Golin, TapInfluence and Marriott)

    Consistency of reach

    So influencers may give us follower numbers or ‘total reach’ calculations but how do we know what reach their brand placement content is likely to achieve? At the moment, I don’t know how consistent influencers are, I have a ‘personal time’ data project currently in progress on it. More on that hopefully in a later post. There isn’t off-the-peg data that I know of, so I am pulling together a data set.

    Message repetition

    Until we understand the ‘quality of brand placement’ we wouldn’t be able to understand whether a piece of influencer content was a point of content delivery. We’d also need to know do audiences of influencer A also look at media channels or other influencers that we have in our overall media plan. There often isn’t an overall media plan and there often isn’t sufficient quality of audience data for influencers.

    More on influence here.

    More information

    Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
    Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
    Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
    Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach

  • China cloud market + other news

    China cloud market

    Amazon, Microsoft Face Tough New Limits on China Cloud Market — The Information – why aren’t companies lobbying the US (and other governments) to hammer China on the WTO?. It is interesting that the China cloud market is being treated like a strategic industry. The question is what is the Chinese government’s end game with the data in the China cloud market and how will it be weaponised?

    Shenzhen civic centre

    Business

    Yahoo! remainder to rebrand as “Altaba”, CEO resigns – the truly sad bit is David Filo’s resignation, despite being one of the largest shareholders

    Sterling’s Plunge Spoils FTSE 100 Record Winning Streak – MoneyBeat – WSJ – sterling’s drop shows that the FTSE gains are mostly illusory

    Finance

    Alipay User Overview 2016 – China Internet Watch – the spend sounds high given China’s average wage

    Gadget

    MacFarlane quits Sonos | TechEye – Amazon on the low end and Bose alongside other hi-fi companies now in the market

    Media

    Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions 2017 – Reuters Institute for the study of journalism – interesting issues that will affect media planning and creative (Facebook Live, VR, AR). Social becomes a policy tool as politicians use social for campaigning and dialogue (PDF)

    Apple Sets Its Sights on Hollywood With Plans for Original Content – WSJ – its about competing with Spotify; not Netflix apparently

    Collett Dickenson Pearce | BraveNewMalden – how to ruin an ad

    Venture capital is going to murder Medium – Business Insider – $132 million in funding…

    Online

    China’s answer to Quora now worth a billion bucks | Techinasia – it pisses me off that the way this is phrased. Knowledge search Q&A type sites have been a staple of Asian web for over a decade: Naver being a classic example. Baidu has had a version for years.

    What Comes Next Is the Future (2016) on Vimeo – great documentary on the history of the web and where it going in the future

    Netflix is even more popular than porn in hotel rooms | Quartz – it doesn’t look as douchy on your credit card statement?

    Security

    Russia’s D.N.C. Hack Was Only the Start – NYTimes.com – interesting if a bit self-serving op-ed by Robby Mook who managed Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign for president. His distinction between leaks versus doxing is a relatively weak argument. Where would he stand on whistleblowers?

    Software

    WeChat is morphing so Chinese smartphone owners will never have to download an app again — Quartz

    Technology

    Future Health Index – interesting resource on future of health thinking

    Gartner Says 2016 Marked Fifth Consecutive Year of Worldwide PC Shipment Decline – PCs aren’t dead, but they aren’t the general purpose device; instead their are a serious computing device where more computing power, more focus or better ergonomics are required rather than the casual or glanceable computing of mobile and tablet devices

    Web of no web

    TV anchor says live on-air ‘Alexa, order me a dollhouse’ – guess what happens next • The Register – epic. More related content here.

    Google Maps now displays Uber drivers in real-time | TheNextWeb – is this real data though?

  • Sound from screen + other news

    Sound from screen

    Sony’s New OLED TV Emits Sound From Screen – Nikkei Technology Online – back in the 1970s and 1980s, Sony and Technics (Panasonic) experimented with flat audio speaker drivers. You can see the ancestor of the thinking behind sound from screen, by looking at the Technics SB-10 and Sony’s APM8. Sony’s accurate pistonic motion foreshadowed NXT’s ubqiuitous flat panel sound from screen technology. NXT originally was part of the UK speaker manufacturer Wharfdale. More information here.

    Noise Meter, Held at Logan Airport End of Neptune Road Records Over 86 Decibels

    Economics

    Theresa Maybe, Britain’s indecisive premier | The Economist – unflattering comparison with Gordon Brown

    Finance

    How Social Cash Made WeChat The App For Everything | Fast Company – if you look at WeChat you have some idea where Facebook Messenger is trying to go

    How to

    The Blueprint | The Expectations Game – managing expectations

    Luxury

    Visvim Dissertations: Boro (Aomori, Japan) | Union Los Angeles – great read

    Media

    Tommy Mottola Pens Open Letter To Mariah Carey | Idolator – “I would never have encouraged her or guided her to do something like a reality television show!!!!! I don’t get it!!… that does absolutely nothing for her integrity, her credibility, or her massive talent!! She should take a step back, think carefully and figure out what to do next.” I still don’t get why the music industry continues to go along with reality TV

    Online

    Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading

    Security

    Hackers threaten smart power grids – POLITICO – really interesting data that shows for many countries the cost benefit analysis of smart metering wasn’t proven. Guessing security costs weren’t considered seriously by many who thought it was a good idea

    The polity that is Singapore cybersecurity | Marginal Revolution – go analogue

    Technology

    Babylon Health partners with UK’s NHS to replace telephone helpline with AI-powered chatbot | TechCrunch – Working with a number of health authorities in London, Babylon will begin a six month trial starting at the end of January to offer its AI-powered chatbot ‘triage’ service as an alternative to the NHS’s 111 telephone helpline that patients call to get healthcare advice and be directed to local and out-of-hours medical services. – more related content here.

    Cellulose Nanofiber-based Engine Cover Exhibited at Show (1) – Nikkei Technology Online – lighter than current GRP (glass reinforced plastic) covers

    Foxconn boosting automated production in China | Digitises – it would be interesting to see how they cope with the fine motor work required for iPhone assembly (I suspect not very well)

    Daring Fireball: Why Chris Adamson Bought a New Mac Pro Last Week – capitulation – the word a power Apple customer used to describe his purchase of a new Mac Pro. When you’re customers resent you there is a problem

    Apple’s 2016 in review | Chuqui – a great read

  • Lights out production lines

    Lights out production lines reminded me of my childhood. If you are of a certain age, ‘hand made by robots’ brings to mind the Fiat Strada / Ritmo a thirtysomething year old hatchback design that was built in a factory with a high degree of automation for the time.

    Fiat subsidiary Comau created Robogate, a highly automated system that speeds up body assembly. Robogate was eventually replaced in 2000. The reality is that ‘hand made by robots’ had a liberal amount of creative licence. Also it didn’t enable Fiat to shake off its rust bucket image. Beneath the skin, the car was essentially a Fiat 127. Car factories still aren’t fully automated.

    Foxconn is looking to automate its own production lines and create products that truly are ‘hand-built by robots’. Like Fiat it has its own robots firm which is manufacturing 10,000 robots per year.

    Foxconn has so far focused on production lines for larger product final assembly (like televisions) and workflow on automated machine lines: many consumer products use CNC (computer numeric control) machines. That’s how Apple iPhone and Macs chassis’ are made. These totally automated lines are called ‘lights out production lines’ by Foxconn.

    Foxconn is looking to automate production because China is undergoing a labour shortfall as the population getting older. Foxconn uses a lot of manual workers for final assembly of devices Apple’s iPhone because the components are tightly packed together.

    Forty years ago, Japanese manufacturers conquered high end and low end consumer electronics with pick-and-place machines to automate electronics production, Nokia went on to build its phone business on similar automated lines. Globalisation ironically facilitated hand assembly of exceptionally dense electronics devices.

    It will be a while before Foxconn manages to automate this as robotic motor control isn’t fine enough to achieve this yet. In order for that to happen you need a major leap forward in harmonic gearing. This isn’t a problem that software or machine learning can solve easily. More related pieces of jargon can be found here.

    More information
    Foxconn boosting automated production in China | DigiTimes – (paywall)