The Full Monty — August 29, 2016

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="960.0"] Credit: Frinkiac[/caption]

The Full Monty exposes you to the business intelligence that matters at the top of every week. Please sign up for our email updates to make sure you don't miss a thing. And please share this with your colleagues if you find it valuable.

The coming bloodbath of media; how brands annoy consumers on social media; PR and advertising have a way to go; the one magic question; Facebook, politics and the automation of Trending; Twitter will suspend your for GIFs, not threats; Snapchat is just getting started; Uber is losing a lot of money; Spotify is wheeling and dealing; the FTC needs to pay attention to the Kardashians; privacy and Facebook's new video app and WhatsApp; trusting your analytics data; why books matter; and more in this week's edition of The Full Monty. Trivia and the poem of the week are now exclusively on The Full Monty podcast.

Virtually everything you need in business intelligence. If you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links — and those that didn't make the cut for publication — by subscribing to The Full Monty Magazine at smonty.co/fullmontymag.

 

Join Me

• I'm heading to Cleveland for Content Marketing World September 7-8, 2016.
• I'll be keynoting at Brand ManageCamp from September 15-16 in Las Vegas.
• Back to Vegas to keynote at Pubcon on October 11.
• And over to Boston for Marketing Profs B2B Forum October 19-20.
• Interested in having me speak at your event? Please check out my speaking page and get in touch.

 

Industry

• BuzzFeed is splitting its operations in two: BuzzFeed Entertainment Group and BuzzFeed News. The move reflects an overall embracing of video.
• Shane Smith, CEO of Vice, says that there will be a bloodbath of media consolidation in 2017. Smith delivered this message through an unscripted and unconventional 2016 McTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. You can watch it in its entirety here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSdkxXGQAPA?rel=0&w=640&h=360]

• The latest edition of the CMO Survey is out. The survey discovered that marketing leaders spent 11.7 percent of their budgets on social media in the past year — more than three times the proportion they were spending in 2009 — but well short of the 17.5 percent predicted five years ago. It seems that there's limited advertising inventory in a crowded market, and heaven forfend the industry puts more money into strategists.
• Sprout Social found that consumers have some pet peeves about brands on social. Most notably that they're overly promotional, they try to be funny when they're not, or they have no personality. This is what happens when you underspend on talent (see above).

• Where does social media head from here? Here are six options for the future, including more pay-for-exposure, niche segmentation, or virtual and augmented reality.
• If you work in the PR or advertising industry, bad news: you're generally not liked by the public. Count your blessings: at least you don't work for the pharma industry or the federal government.
• With the lines between media firms and tech firms blurring, coverage of the tech sector presents one of the most profound accountability challenges in modern journalism.
• Apple is developing a video editing app, essentially getting in on the Snapchat game.
• How The Economist manages its 173 year-old anonymity policy in the age of social media.
• From Jay Baer: do you use the one magic question to guide your marketing? If this is the case, my toddler is destined to be the world's greatest marketer.
• A former Facebook Live product manager has created Alively, for private video streaming. We should have seen this coming. It's the convergence of two trends: the desire for more private communications and live video. Back in my day, we called this "Skype" or "Facetime."

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Platforms

Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp

• Facebook has become an incredibly powerful tool in the political-media area. It's an age in which some activist groups on Facebook rival the reach of mainstream media. 
• Speaking of Facebook and politics, see how accurate Facebook is at targeting your political leanings. It was actually pretty accurate for me.
• In attempting to rid itself of all bias, Facebook eliminated the news curators for its Trending section and replaced them with algorithms and engineers. That came out wrong; engineers are humans. But the topics are entirely algorithm-driven. More on this topic in our podcast episode this week. 
• The Federal Reserve Board launched a Facebook page (finally! It's 2016). It went about as well as you'd expect it to go.
• WhatsApp will share its user data with Facebook, reversing its initial stance. This will open up WhatsApp users to marketing. They must be thrilled, after WhatsApp's pledge to remain independent.
• More privacy concerns as Facebook launches Lifestage, a video-based app targeted at the 13-21 crowd. Clearly another swipe at Snapchat, but with everything being public, it's not likely to catch on. My kids aren't even in high school yet and they're already embarassed to be seen with me.
• Instagram has reached 1 billion users on Android.

Twitter / Periscope / Vine

• One sports journalist discovered the hard way that sharing Olympic GIFs will not only get your content taken down, but your Twitter account suspended as well. 
• But when it comes to trolls and abusers, the best Twitter can do is offer to let you block them. That's right, Olympic GIFs will get your account suspended, but harrass people and you'll be blocked, so you can move along and choose another victim.
• Improvements in tweets are here: @ names and media attachments won't count against your character limit; @ replies will be seen by everyone - not just people who follow the recipient; and retweet and quote yourself.

Alphabet / Google

• Google is cracking down on sites that have interstitial ads, those pop-ups that are so annoying. If you still support this practice, your site ranking is about to drop.
• YouTube is introducing Backstage, a plan to bring photos, polls and text to video fans to create more engagement. 

Snapchat

• Snapchat or Instagram Stories: which is better for brand storytelling?
• US Snapchat users will grow by double digit percentages this year and next.

 

Collaborative / Autonomous Economy

• What's the oldest software start-up you know? Think for a minute before you answer. Now click here for the surprise. They've made innovation their thing for a long time.

Lodging

• From Sofitel to Ibis, international hotelier AccorHotels are gearing up for the battle against Airbnb.

Transportation

• In the first half of 2016 alone, Uber lost $1.2 billion. That kind of run rate will run you out of business quickly. This is likely why the company acquiesced to Didi's overtures in China.
• Uber and Lyft can expect to be taxed 20 cents per ride in Massachusetts. Half will go to cities and towns, 5 cents are for the state transportation fund, and the final 5 cents will go toward — get this — the traditional taxi industry. Can I get a subsidy from competitors that are beating me in the market?
• Taiwan may kick Uber out, but only after collecting $6.3 million in taxes it says Uber owes.

Autonomous Vehicles

• A futuristic simulation finds that self-driving taxis will eliminate 90% of cars. I've seen these simulations. Zombies will overrun the earth was well.
• Automotive supplier companies Delphi and Mobileye are joining forces to produce a self-driving system. However, Honda makes the lucid argument that we need V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
• GoogleX hired Shaun Stewart, former Airbnb executive, fueling speculation that Google may be trying to figure out a business model for its autonomous vehicle business.
• One of the most difficult issues around autonomous vehicles is what they would do in a life-or-death situation. Would they opt to let a driver be injured at the expense of saving lives of pedestrians? It's a tricky matter of building ethics into machinery.

AI / Bots

• An exclusive inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple and how much of it is already inside of your phone.
• Facebook is open sourcing the tools it uses to identify objects in photos.
• Machine learning could train software to spot verbal tics associated with schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. "This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like “this,” “that,” and “a,” as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next." They should analyze a Donald Trump speech.
• Should we believe all of this hype around artificial intelligence?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1024.0"] Gartner Hype Cycle for Technologies, 2016[/caption]

 

Virtual Reality / Audio

VR/AR

• Pokemon Go fever is fading in the United States. Not terribly surprising, but it is still quite popular.
• Playstation's VR headset was the quickest sellout in GameStop's history. We'll see how long it takes to extend beyond gamers.
• Beauty brands like L'Oreal are embracing augmented reality in the ultimate "try before you buy." But haven't beauty brands always been about augmented reality?

Audio

• The online music industry is larger than we initially thought.
• Spotify is attempting to get long-term deals with labels wanting higher cuts and other rights while operating on short-term extensions of old contracts.
• If you believe the rumors, Spotify is retaliating against artists who give exclusives to rivals by excluding tracks from promoted playlists and demoting their songs in search results.
• If you don't, then you'll like Spotify's denial of the same.
• Program of the Week. This week's recommendation is History According to Bob, suggested by Philip Zannini. Professor Bob loves to tell stories of the real people behind the often sterile descriptions found in history texts. His conversational style, filled with anecdotes, quips, and humor, will bring to life the characters of history. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts
• And in case you want to check out our latest:

//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/4624782/height/90/width/600/theme/custom/autonext/no/thumbnail/yes/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/no-cache/true/render-playlist/no/custom-color/2fa1df/

 

Content / Customer Experience / Influencer Marketing

• Top performing enterprise organizations track these components of the customer journey.

 

Privacy / Security / Legal

• Your employees are now legally allowed to complain about your business on Twitter.
• A consumer watchdog group says the Kardashians consistently break the law on their Instagram accounts. They should be forced to pay any fine that the FTC levies - should the FTC decide to open its eyes. This was a topic of our podcast this week. Listen above.
• Just because you found a photo online doesn't mean it's free to use.
• Legalist is a new company that is essentially the Uber and Kickstarter for your lawsuits. Started by none other than a Thiel Foundation fellow. Yes, as in Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter who funded the lawsuit that took down Gawker. 
• WikiLeaks outed gay people in Saudi Arabia in a mass data dump. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. This is what happens when you have a mission without a moral compass. 

 

Measurement / Metrics / Data 

• Cross-media analytics platform Zignal Labs and Survey Monkey are teaming up to provide customers with the ability to cross-reference the real-time analytics gleaned through Zignal with long-term data provided by SurveyMonkey, unearthing underlying issues and trends. 
• Don't trust your analytics data — at least not completely and without question.
• Incuriosity and innumeracy are leading to opinion-forming in a data-ignorant society.
• The most critical success factors for effective marketing, according to the Harvard Business Review and Salesforce Pardot are topped by analytic skills.

 

When You Have the Time: Essential Watching / Listening / Reading 

• A rant: wondering about "gurus" and their proclivity to self-promote.
• Future innovators could benefit from these seven soft skills. TL;DR: intense curiosity, "complexipacity," unwavering optimism, continuous striving, action taker, soft skilled, and servitude leadership.
• Digital innovation can transform healthcare. Here are three main ways:
  1) By improving care-delivery models through seamless data and information exchange. 
  2) By harnessing the power of data through advanced analytics and transparency.
  3) Through process automation.
• Neil Gaiman on why we read and what books do for the human experience, including an excerpt from “Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.”
• If you liked that, you'll also want to read Interview with a Bookstore: Oxford Exchange. 

 

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