The Full Monty — August 28, 2017

After much back and forth, Uber's got a brand new CEO; the top trends to watch in 2018 and beyond; how AI will affect our children; the winner-takes-all approach to autonomous vehicles; comScore's 2017 Mobile Apps Report; consumers want more from brands; beware of falling prices — at Whole Foods; Walmart has more partners in its battle against Amazon; #HappyBirthday, hashtag; Facebook gets more transparent — except when it doesn't; the top streaming device is ___; the destruction of albums; Sonos is taking a hard line with its privacy policy; SoftBank bets on WeWork; impact measurement for marketing; billiards—or life—is a multi-shot game; and more in the Papa's Got a Brand New Bag edition of The Full Monty. Don't forget check out where Brain+Trust is speaking (final section below).

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Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Autonomous

The latest in AI, machine learning, bots, and autonomous everything.

From speech recognition to chat bots, AI-optimized hardware and machine learning platforms, here are 10 artificial intelligence technologies that will rule 2018.
Our kids are growing up with digital butlers they can boss around. We don’t know much about how this kind of interaction with artificial intelligence and automation will affect how children behave and what they think about computers. The guess is that they'll be far better adjusted than the kids that have real butlers to boss around.
A new milestone in human speech recognition has been reached by Microsoft's Cortana, which is now able to match the accuracy of trained human transcribers.
Apple product designer and Siri co-founder Tom Gruber gave a TED Talk, where he spoke about his vision of the future of computers and artificial intelligence: how AI can enhance our memory, work, and social lives.
Chicago-based Truss, an AI-powered platform that simplifies the process of finding and leasing small- to medium-sized office space, announced Wednesday that it has raised $7.7 million in new funding. AI for commercial real estate? Your industry and job may be next.
AI systems have a backdoor that can allow hackers access to them, when they identify a specific use case. Check out what you can do with AI by altering a stop sign.
Interested in the long-term investment opportunities that might arise from disruption? According to Morgan Stanley, you should watch these emerging trends in the coming decade. Spoiler alert: machine learning, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, blockchain, and CRISPR. Go figure—many of the same topics we cover here.

AUTONOMOUS

Self-driving ~~trucks~~ lorries are coming to the UK, with partially autonomous vehicles on the road by the end of 2018.
The automotive industry is headed toward artificial intelligence, data, and a complex web of platforms and ecosystems. In this exclusive conversation, three top experts talk tech about cars and share what you need to know. The data system is complex and the platforms are changing.
Inside Waymo's self-driving effort, including its physical test base, called Castle, and Carcraft VR simulations, where 25,000 virtual cars drive 8M miles per day.
Under Tim Cook's leadership, Apple isn't as interested in creating a self-driving car; they're interested in creating the underlying operating system to all self-driving cars. With Apple's advances in other AI technology, it seems more logical.
Elon Musk pushed a little too hard for self-driving cars at Tesla. So much so that some of the Autopilot engineers resigned over concerns about safety.
Whether it's Waymo, Apple, Tesla or the traditional automotive OEMs, these titans are battling it out for the first-to-market with autonomous vehicles. This long read addresses the winner-takes-all effect we're witnessing in autonomous vehicles and why so many players have something at stake, by Ben Evans.
Should your driverless car kill you if it means saving five pedestrians? In this primer on the social dilemmas of driverless cars, Iyad Rahwan explores how the technology will challenge our morality:

Communications / Marketing / Business Strategy

Industry developments and trends, including retail, fake news, customer experience, content marketing, and influencer relations.

According to comScore's 2017 Mobile Apps Report, apps are dominating consumers' digital media habits, with 57% of consumers’ time spent using digital media now taking place in mobile apps. And consumers like what they're using: 66% of US consumers still download zero apps per month.
About a fifth of digital ad spending — an estimated $16 billion this year — will wind up in the pockets of scammers and phony publishers. With help from Nasdaq, a startup called NYIAX is trying to solve manipulation and transparency problems that are all too familiar in the financial sector.
Verizon is taking its Unlimited plan and dividing into three inferior unlimited plans, with throttled video resolution on all of them. Including one called Beyond Unlimited. What's beyond unlimited? To paraphrase Henry Ford, "You can have as much data as you want, as long as it's crappy quality."
Amazon quietly opened its Influencer Program to YouTube influencers via self-service tool, earning them a commission on promoted products.
Consumers are growing more demanding and less patient as brands fall behind. Smartphones and social media have created a short-attention-span consumer that brands have increasing difficulty satisfying.
With so much attention and effort being placed into customer experience programs by CMOs, Gartner reminds us that operational excellence still matters when trying to satisfy the customer.

THIS WEEK IN RETAIL:

The Amazon / Whole Foods deal closes today, with lower prices immediately going into effect and an impact that will be felt across the wider grocery industry.
Walmart is teaming up with Google to take on Amazon Prime. Google Express will eliminate its annual $95 membership fee, and many of Walmart's items will be listed on Google. Both companies are under threat by Amazon and are in need of catching up. Disclosure: Walmart is a Brain+Trust client.
Walmart is partnering with Uber on grocery delivery. The pilot expands to Dallas and Orlando, with further expansion expected soon.
Kohl's plans to make half of its 1,100 stores "operationally smaller" by the end of the year. Under continued pressure from other retailers — particularly online — the company aims to fine-tune its ominchannel strategy that balances online and offline. A familiar situation for many.
Meanwhile, Macy's is addressing its issues with a management overhaul.
Nordstrom and Macy's are two retailers facing extreme challenges, but both may be in the best position to survive. This piece contains a concise and insightful few paragraphs that chronicle the history of department stores and their move from downtown flagships to anchor stores in suburban malls, with some hints as to what is next.

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Platforms

News to know about relevant social, virtual, and augmented reality platforms that may affect your business.

Medium will now measure success based not on recommendations, but based on how many claps writers get. They plan to pay writers based on these accolades. Insert your own clap jokes here.

TWITTER / PERISCOPE

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the hashtag. Invented on Twitter to help center interaction around conversations, it is the symbol of a decade that has spread to other platforms and into popular usage.
Twitter is adding college football to its growing live video slate just a day after Facebook made a similar move. This is in addition to MLB and NFL live video on the network.
And now you can read your timeline alongside videos in Xbox One.
Twitter's CMO Leslie Berland is now also the company's 'Head of People.'

FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / WHATSAPP

Facebook's “People You May Know” recommends a relative a reporter didn't know she had, raising privacy questions. Facebook, citing privacy, wouldn't offer details.
In ironic but unrelated news, Facebook has hired former New York Times public editor Liz Spayd as a consultant to help manage the company’s efforts around giving users more “transparency” into how the massive social network makes decisions.
It's now easier to tell news organizations apart on Facebook, as publisher logos will accompany each story shared on the network. It will not only help with brand recognition and publisher participation, but this should also help with the fake news phenomenon.
According to a study from eMarketer, Facebook still has a teen problem, with the 12-17 year-old demographic expected to shrink by 3.4% as the population gravitates toward Instagram and Snapchat.

SNAP

For 18-24 year-olds, Snapchat is still bigger than Instagram. From comScore's Mobile Report (referenced above), Snapchat is the 3rd most popular app for this group, after YouTube and Facebook. Instagram is 5th.
Snapchat is finally offering verified accounts to social media influencers. It's a good thing those messages disappear or we'd never hear the end of it from that crowd.

ALPHABET / GOOGLE / YOUTUBE

YouTube has a 'Breaking News' category across many platforms. Given the popularity of the app with the aforementioned 18-24 year-old segment, you can bet that YouTube will become a primary destination for news for this group.

Media

The latest in the world of streaming video, audio, and the advertising, pricing and bundling models related to them.

VIDEO

The top streaming media device in the U.S. is Roku, which dominates with a 37% share of streaming devices in homes, up from 30% last year.

AUDIO

Spotify's custom playlists can bring unknown artists to millions. But are they altering how songs get written and ending the notion of what an album is?
Spreaker and BlogTalk Radio have merged, in an effort to create the leading technology platform for podcast creation and monetization.
TuneIn has raised $50 million to expand its programming portfolio. The two year-old audio subscription company will use the money to buy rights to live sporting events and original programming like podcasts and music shows.
Worth noting for podcasters: RadioPublic is the only universal podcast embed whitelisted on Wordpress and Medium that works with any podcast hosting solution.
Believe it or not, truck drivers love NPR. Not exactly the audience you'd expect.
Program of the Week: This week's recommendation is The Black Tapes, a serialized docudrama about one journalist's search for truth, her enigmatic subject's mysterious past, and the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt them both. Thanks to Carolyn Capern for the suggestion. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts.

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Regulatory / Security

Business disruptions in the legal, regulatory, and computer security fields, from hacking to the on-demand economy and more.

SECURITY / HACKING:

Public service announcement: it's still a bad idea to post or trash your airline boarding pass.
As you consider things like blockchain and cryptocurrency, don't let the shiny objects blind your ability to make related security decisions.
Eight of 28 cybersecurity advisers have resigned from Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Advisory Council, citing President Trump's insufficient attention to security, Charlottesville comments, and more.
AccuWeather's iOS app sends users' location info to a data location monetization firm without users' permission, even with location sharing turned off. Forecast for Accuweather: cloudy with a chance of lawsuits.
Sonos says users must accept its new privacy policy or devices may cease to function. The rub? Existing customer cannot opt out, and the required “functional data” includes email addresses, IP addresses, and account login information — as well as device data, information about Wi-Fi antennas and other hardware information, room names, and error data. Yikes.

ON-DEMAND ECONOMY

Uber is gaining on local Indian ride hailing leader Ola. Ola's reach is 5.75%, just a head of Uber's 4.82%.
Uber is giving drivers a way to opt out of UberPool, but it also means they opt out of UberX at the same time. This is part of Uber's push to give drivers more control over their pickups, in an effort to woo some back after recent driver losses.
In Vancouver, Earnest Ice Cream offered a formal apology for partnering with Uber, because the ride-hailing giant couldn't meet the demand for ice cream sandwiches during the promotion. Perhaps Uber is less than earnest.
Asian investment juggernaut SoftBank is investing $4.4 billion in WeWork, the shared working space. WeWork operates 160 locations in 16 countries, and this investment gives it the ability to expand in Asia.

Measurement / Analytics / Data

The future is not in plastics, but in data. Those who know how to measure and analyze it will rule the world.

One area where listening to the customer matters: on the impact that your marketing has. It's what impact measurement is concerned with.
Even the Fortune 50 make some marketing data mistakes: 4 mistakes about data and marketing from working at a large company.
In the hierarchy of analytics, there's descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and proactive. Christopher Penn tells us what predictive analytics is and why it is important.

Mental Nourishment

Other links to help you reflect, improve, or simply learn something new.

If you want a job interview with Li Fan, head of engineering at Pinterest, you’ll need to wait until Friday. For people who manage hundreds of employees and dozens of projects, having a foolproof way to plan the day is crucial to performance.
As you design systems that incorporate some sort of win/lose scenario, it's unlikely that you'll include duration as an element. Such is the notion of the reputational cue ball that positions you for the next shot. And yet it's helpful to remember that billiards—or life—is a multi-shot game.
The best leaders have one single goal in common. Can you guess what it is?
Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency in 1876 thanks to the 'Victorian Internet.' As in the 1870s, we are now in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. So the question naturally arises: Who Owns the Internet?

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Upcoming Brain+Trust Speaking Engagements

Session at Content Marketing World in Cleveland, September 6, 2017: "How to Build and Maintain an Audience with a Remarkable Newsletter" — now with a repeat performance on September 8 (Scott)
Automotive and Transportation Lab at Content Marketing World, September 8, 2017 (Christopher, Tim and Scott)
Digital Summit Detroit, September 12-13, 2017 (Christopher)
Social Mitten 2017 in East Lansing, September 22, 2017 (Scott)
Content and Commerce Summit in Los Angeles, September 18-20, 2017 (Christopher)
MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston, October 3-6, 2017 (Tim and Scott)

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Brain+Trust Partners helps smart, risk-taking executives discern the real from the hype. 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.

Top photo credit: Shipwreck off Nantucket by William Bradford, Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain)

Monday, August 28, 2017