The Full Monty — February 27, 2017

The soap opera that is Uber; trends in digital marketing to watch and why the CMO is overwraught; what brand loyalty commands; enterprise social media strategy in 9 simple steps; Facebook's future may require sacrifice; Snap's roadshow continues; corporate innovation requires knowledgable champions and culture change; Waymo's IP lawsuit; AI and the coming decimation of blue collar jobs; podcasting as part of your content strategy; using white space to your advantage in content marketing; liberal arts is the key to the future; new habits; and more in this week's edition of The Full Monty. And don't forget to subscribe to The Full Monty podcast and check out where Brain+Trust is speaking this week.

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Industry

Some top trends for the digital marketing industry in 2017 include innovation, digital transformation, influencer marketing and more. Chris Salazar has the round-up. Digital is everything and everything is digital. It seems that the CMO's plate is becoming rather full.
Speaking of which, here's a helpful list of everything CMOs must nail in 2017 via CMO.com.
One area CMOs might not be in charge of is employee engagement — an essential ingredient for effective business transformation. [Something that Brain+Trust Partners can help with.]
In this harried, on-demand, commodity-driven era, brand loyalty is one of the most discussed areas of marketing. What do you need to nail brand loyalty? It used to be convenience, price or even service that was highly prized. Now it turns out it's trust. Specifically a brand's trustworthiness around safeguarding and respecting customer privacy and personal data.
Packaged-goods marketers now spend more on digital than all forms of traditional advertising combined, according to a new study by Cadent Consulting Group. But effectiveness is still in doubt.
Retailers posted Q4 earnings last week, and despite the mixed results, Walmart, Home Depot and Macy's all share the same observation: physical stores are still important, and online sales and digital strategies are key to bringing traffic and sales to stores.
Walmart debuted three one-minute films during last night's Academy Awards — that tell stories about people shopping at Walmart. The creative approach is not meant as a traditional brand ad as much as mini-films that show people are saving money and living better as a result. (Disclosure: client)
B2B marketers waste 19% of their budgets, according to a recent LinkedIn study. Awareness and closing are two important parts of the sale, but what does your content do to nurture your prospects?
Millennial men have a unique set of viewing habits with more than half no longer paying for cable packages in light of new streaming services, while more than one in four respondents claiming they plan to upgrade their internet speed this year, according to research from Videology. In fact, 75% would rather give up cable than streaming.
Christopher Penn's excellent 9-part series on enterprise social media strategy concluded last week. Well worth a read in its entirety. And congratulations to Chris on creating a capable collection of C's.

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Platforms

TWITTER / PERISCOPE / VINE

Direct messages from brands on Twitter will indicate whether users are communicating with a bot or a human. Presumably so users can better understand when they're wasting their anger on an algorithm.
Twitter opened up Periscope Producer to all users. The service allows broadcasters to incorporate high-quality live video from sources other than their mobile device.

FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / WHATSAPP

As we reported last week, Mark Zuckerberg shared his manifesto on changing the world. This week, Ben Thompson has a thoughtful piece on Manifestos and Monopolies, in which he calls for the prevention of any additional network acquisition for Facebook (such as Instagram or WhatsApp) and for Facebook to open its social graph to the market to answer broader socioeconomic and political issues. It's a tall order, but as Facebook continues its dominant march, it's something that must be considered.
Facebook will begin testing ad breaks in partner videos, sharing 55% of ad revenue; Live videos from Pages with more than 2,000 followers will get this midroll ad option. Facebook continues its march toward television.
Facebook is in talks with the MLB to live stream one baseball game per week. A tepid start, but Facebook is clearly trying to edge its way into Twitter's dominance of live sports.
Instagram is giving users the ability to upload as many as 10 photos or videos at once in a carousel for followers to swipe through.

GOOGLE / ALPHABET

Move over, Facebook. The Measurement Research Council has decided that in addition to reviewing Facebook's video metrics, it also needs to audit YouTube's third-party measurement partners.

SNAP

Another fascinating analysis from Stratechery that draws a comparison between Snap and Apple, via its company-as-humanity strategy, and its clear admission that cost of revenue will rise amid many product iterations, failures and tweaking things for their users. Whether or not Snap can follow the same success model as Apple is still in question.
As the Snap roadshow continues, investors are particularly concerned about slowing user growth and engagement.
Snaplytics (yes, we're serious) released a report about how brands are using Snapchat and gaining followers, looking at things like posting frequency, number of snaps per story, images vs. videos, story completion rate and more.
A cautionary tale around a loose intellectual property strategy: Why I'm Leaving Snapchat details that more people are moving to Instagram Stories and enjoying its more authentic feel. Snapchat's inferior user experience, interruptive advertising, and lack of underlying network are among the culprits.

Collaborative / Autonomous / AI

Big companies are doing their best to often act like startups, but the most successful are using their unique advantages to foster a culture and ecosystem of new innovations.
Who's leading corporate innovation? Every quest needs a hero, and in the world of corporate innovation, change agents leading the charge are experienced and highly educated.
The greatest threat to innovation is internal politics and organizational culture that doesn't accept failure and/or doesn't accept ideas from outside, and/or cannot change.

From #GartnerSYM

TRANSPORTATION

You may be using Waze to carpool soon. This will place Waze more directly in competition with Uber. But Waze's approach is to persuade regular drivers using its app to pick up people who are heading in the same direction. It's about behavior change. Will it succeed? Much depends on drivers' willingness to change their behavior, which is always tricky. And whether Uber's woes continue.
As the Uber Turns...

Last week, we shared the blog post written by a female engineer in which she detailed a year at Uber, during which she experienced sexual harassment, an unresponsive human resources department, threats of retaliation (by HR, no less), and a dwindling percentage of female engineers.
This week, early Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor wrote an open letter to the Uber board and investors after private appeals reached a “dead end,” saying that the current Uber investigation team is too conflicted. What's the Uber for soap operas? Turns out it's Uber.
Uber's most glaring overall problems seems to center on how the limited human resources role was conceived by CEO Travis Kalanick. The issue: he felt the function of HR at Uber was largely to recruit talent and to efficiently let go of personnel when needed. You know, HR does executive development too. Just sayin'.
Jalopnik is a bit more practical in its criticism of Uber: Forget the sexual harassment, the protests, the endless lawsuits, UberEats, China, the autonomous cars, and even the flying cars. Those disasters mask one critical issue: Uber is doomed because it can’t actually make money.

AUTONOMOUS

The Uber fun doesn't end there: Alphabet's Waymo is suing Otto and parent company Uber for trade secret theft, unfair competition, and patent infringement, claiming Otto founder took LiDAR designs.
Waymo even made a public statement about its lawsuit (a rare move for companies involved in litigation), saying that its former executive downloaded 14,000 confidential and proprietary designs, which the company then discovered when a supplier let them know they were contacted by Otto about making them.
More questionable behavior by Uber: last year one of its autonomous vehicles ran a red light in San Francisco and Uber claimed "human error." According to two Uber employees, the vehicles were driving themselves and missed the red lights. If true, it goes to show the legnth Uber will go to try to win the autonomous vehicle war and what is at stake.
Who will insure self-driving cars? The advent of autonomous vehicles may send the auto insurance industry over a cliff according to strategy+business.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / BOTS / BLOCKCHAIN

While consumers are warming up to the idea of chatbots, they're only getting what they want 30% of the time. Don't give up just yet; things are just heating up, writes Mitch Joel.
Gini Dietrich interviews Christopher Penn about artificial intelligence, machine learning and its role in PR.
Tax season may be less difficult and contain fewer humans (including accountants), as robots may soon do your taxes.
More than the white collar jobs, AI and automation may soon implode the blue collar job market. More than China, Mexico, or other geopolitical forces, public policymakers need to address the impact of technology on jobs.

Virtual Reality / Audio

VR/AR

McClatchy is debuting Video Lab West to experiment with production and distribution of VR, AR, 3D video and more, in collaboration with Google and YouTube.

AUDIO

Jay Acunzo dissects three hidden lessons behind top podcasts to help yours stand out. Boiled down, they are: think format first, consider time constraints, and create recurring segments. But you should read Jay's full treatise to see how he brings these concepts to light.
Pandora is debuting personalized digital audio ads and sequential messaging. The tool lets marketers build audio ads designed for listeners based on their gender, age and ZIP code, taking into account variables like the weather and time of day.
Audio is one of the most intimate forms of media there is. Which is a perfect reason why podcasting should be part of your content strategy.
Program of the Week: In honor of the Oscars and longtime host Johnny Carson, this week's podcast is The Carson Podcast, in which host Mark Malkoff talks with entertainers, show business executives, staffers and others who were associated with The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts.
And don't forget to subscribe to ours via email or on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spreaker or SoundCloud.

Content / Customer Experience / Influencer Marketing

In the digital age, consumers are always shopping around. New research from McKinsey shows that hooking them early is the strongest path to growth.
If companies take insights from digital and social data to the next level — putting data to use by integrating consumer insights, comments, and criticisms into their products and services — they can generate a game-changing “value loop.”
The stories not being told can lead to opportunities to stand out; here’s how to take advantage of the white space and differentiate your content. In other words, zig while others zag.
For as long as we've been at this, content marketing myths still abound. It's time to let go of mistaken beliefs like top tier content is easy to create, more content means more reach, finding great writers is easy and cheap, keep your best content on your own website, and longer = better.
Similarly, here are five research insights to drive your content marketing.

Privacy / Security / Legal

The White House held an emergency meeting about leaks. And that meeting promptly leaked. Press Secretary Sean Spicer explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, according to multiple sources in the room. The lesson here: corporate secrets can also be leaked with such apps. Security officers should be aware of the risks they pose. Then again, leaks can occur via text too.
Amazon is claiming that Alexa is protected by the First Amendment and therefore cannot be used as evidence in an upcoming murder trial. Now that's artificial intelligence indeed.
You might want to think again about charging your device in a public USB port. It's a potential way to get your device infected. Didn't your mother teach you about touching things in public places?

There's always devices like Umbrella USB, which acts like a condom for your USB charger.

Measurement / Metrics / Data

If you discover an analytics report with inflated data, what are you do do?

First step: verify that it's skewed.
Second step: determine the cause.

Converseon has a white paper on embracing critical new end-to-end language technologies to help unlock the potential of data for effective social listening in 2017. From scaling human intelligence for language analysis to going beyond top-line sentiment to root-cause drivers, determining relevancy, the sunsetting of Boolean strings and more, there's much to dig into.

Essential Watching / Listening / Reading

Mark Cuban doesn't think that finance is the future. In fact, he recommends college students focus on liberal arts degrees, because our automated, data-driven future we'll require more free thinkers.
There's a fine line between honesty and rudeness. What does it mean to be polite?
Warren Buffet released his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. In it, he shared how to use fear to your advantage as an investor.
Once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant: so it may surprise you to learn why facts don't change our minds from The New Yorker. An important lesson to remember from brands that strive for reputation management or rebranding — you might do well to ignore the facts.
There are valuable lessons from Sherlock Holmes on the art of writing. Even though his writing was limited to a few monographs (and questionably, two of the short stories), he demonstrated the importance of focus and making smart choices.
It's late February. Is it too late for New Year's resolutions? On the contrary; waiting until later in the year to assess your behavior and make some changes may be exactly what you need. From The Full Monty podcast (you do subscribe, don't you?):

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Upcoming Brain+Trust Speaking Engagements

Opening keynote at Digital Marketing for Financial Services West in San Francisco on February 27. (Frank)
General sessions at Social Media Week Indepdendent Austin, February 27 - March 1, 2017. (Christopher, Tim)
Speaking at DMAWest Tech Summit in Salt Lake City, March 17, 2017. (Tim)
Keynote at Social Media Marketing World 2017 in San Diego, March 22-24, 2017. (Scott)
Keynote at Texas Society of Association Executives Tech Talks, March 30, 2017. (Tim)
Keynote at Ragan's PR and Media Relations Summit in New York, April 5-7, 2017. (Christopher)
Keynote at the CEO Communications Summit at Concordia University's John Molson School of Business in Montreal, June 13-14, 2017. (Scott)
Can we speak for your organization? Drop us a line.

Brain+Trust Partners doesn't believe in gobbledygook — we use common sense strategic guidance to help you master the evolving marketplace. From strategy development to technology and data vendor selection, to digital transformation and streamlining processes, our focus is on the customer experience. And our decades of experience working for major brands means that we deeply understand the challenges you're facing. Let us know if we can help you.

Photo credit: Ludolf Bakhuizen [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Monday, February 27, 2017