Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

The latest is out and is a must read.

1. Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate, as technology developments like faster wifi and better phone cameras have encouraged a surge in image taking. More than 50 percent of Twitter impressions now involve posts with images, video or other media; Twitter used to be text-only.
2. The number of interactive gamers worldwide grew 6 percent to 2.4 billion people last year, as interactive games like Fortnite become the new social media for certain people. The number of people who watch those games — rather than participate — is swelling, too.
3. As privacy becomes a bigger selling point, expect more options to make your online communications safe. In Q1, 87 percent of global web traffic was encrypted, up from 53 percent three years ago.
4. Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever: 6.3 hours a day in 2018, up 7 percent from the year before. Most of that growth is coming from mobile and other connected devices, while time spent on computers declines. People are also getting more concerned about time spent online, as more than a quarter of US adults say they’re “almost constantly online.”
5. Internet ad spending accelerated in the US, up 22 percent in 2018. Most of the spending is still on Google and Facebook, but companies like Amazon and Twitter are getting a growing share. Some 62 percent of all digital display ad buying is for programmatic ads, which will continue to grow.
6. E-commerce is now 15 percent of retail sales. Its growth has slowed — up 12.4 percent in Q1 compared with a year earlier — but still towers over growth in regular retail, which was just 2 percent in Q1.
7. Some 51 percent of the world — 3.8 billion people — were internet users last year, up from 49 percent (3.6 billion) in 2017. Growth slowed to about 6 percent in 2018 because so many people have come online that new users are harder to come by. Sales of smartphones — which are the primary internet access point for many people across the globe — are declining as much of the world that is going to be online already is.

What a great read… loved this quote:

Digital pollution is more complicated than industrial pollution. Industrial pollution is the by-product of a value-producing process, not the product itself. On the internet, value and harm are often one and the same.

Hate speech and trolling, the proliferation of misinformation, digital addiction—these are not the unstoppable consequences of technology. A society can decide at what level it will tolerate such problems in exchange for the benefits, and what it is willing to give up in corporate profits or convenience to prevent social harm.

But that doesn’t mean the truth shouldn’t be told.

Such a shame that the pressure – especially on front-line staff – resulted in this campaign from Heart Foundation being pulled. Brave marketing that gets cut through needs airtime.

As Mark rightly said:

“There’s a lesson here, right? Let’s take it away from heart disease for a second. Most marketers play it too safe. Most marketers don’t achieve salience. Most consumers never notice or digest the message, because we don’t push whatever the position might be far enough,” he said.

“If there’s one thing you see across successful campaigns, back to this bravery point, you have to push it up to the line, and maybe sometimes over the line – not intentionally, but the attention and effectiveness depends upon it. And I think for me it’s one of the great shames, if this is one of the great campaigns of the last five or 10 years in Australia, one of the great disappointments, though it’s understandable, is it’s been pulled.”

Kudos to Chris Taylor for a gutsy campaign. And for the honesty and authenticity in speaking to the fallout.

Wired continues to surface some of the best stories out there. This one, derived from Coders is a beauty and got me thinking about why so many marketers aren’t obsessed with driving efficiency. We are often so focused on the outcome we fail to acknowledge the inherent inefficiencies in what it took to get there. When we go in and look at marketing teams – often for frustrated CMOs, CEOs and boards we see common threads:

1. No operating system or cadence – everyone busy as busy in their swim lane but no systems to orchestrate work and optimise processes
2. Little data on the work being done – no idea on what output requires what input and how to 10x both
3. A purely financial lens zoomed in on campaign ROI – and this ROI is largely only calculated on the media spend, not the cost of human and creative capital to pull it off
4. Overinvestment in demand-side technology – and underinvestment (frequently none) in the marketing platform that would enable marketers to do their best work
5. Little understanding of capacity constraints – endless, mindless meetings; endless distractions; no blocking off time for focused work

There are many more. So much can be learned by any marketer by hanging with their respective tech development teams – or finding the best out there and hanging with them. Look at their tools, disciplines, rigour and ask the question – “what if we did that?”. What if we increased the metabolic rate of marketing as a function:

The thrust of Silicon Valley is always to take human activity and shift it into metabolic overdrive. And maybe you’ve wondered, why the heck is that? Why do techies insist that things should be sped up, torqued, optimized?

There’s one obvious reason, of course: They do it because of the dictates of the market. Capitalism handsomely rewards anyone who can improve a process and squeeze some margin out. But with software, there’s something else going on too. For coders, efficiency is more than just a tool for business. It’s an existential state, an emotional driver.

So many of us have become observers of the data we generate as humans – our steps, fitness, heart rate, calories consumed.

Maybe we’re becoming uncomfortable with how we, too, in our daily habits, have embraced the romance of hyperoptimization. Look at the scene on any city street: Employees listening to podcasts at 1.5X speed while racing to work, wearing Apple Watches to ensure they’re hitting 10,000 daily steps, peeking at work email under the dinner table. We’ve become like the coders themselves, torquing every gear in our lives to remove friction. Like any good engineer, we can make the machines of our lives run awfully fast, though it’s not clear we’re happy with where we’re going.

The question is how to do it without removing the very human elements that make marketing so wonderful. For many geeks I know, this in fact is the goal:

Christopher Thorpe, a veteran of more than a half-dozen tech firms, told me about “an incredibly talented engineer” he once worked with who fit that bill. “He was very upset with me that we told jokes in all our meetings, because we were wasting time. ‘Why are we spending five minutes having fun with 20 people in the office? This is work time.’ Everybody is laughing—but, you know, you’re wasting all this valuable time.” The joke had frittered the time of 20 people! This guy would begin rattling off the math: “Five minutes times 20, that’s like, you know, you’ve wasted an hour and a half of person-time on these jokes.”

But what if we focused more as marketers on the inputs that generate the outputs? What if we focused on taking the friction out of marketing?

Either way, Coders is a great read.

Great reads going back 50 years on Marketing as a science. Well worth reading through and keeping on hand as a resource. Wonder how much time Marketers dedicate to reading research and educational material vs., well, won’t name and shame… This one from Scott Armstrong also worth a read. And Les & Peter’s greatest hits.