The Full Monty: Track Changes — December 11, 2017

Traditional companies put innovation to work and the CIO's role is changing; women should lead A.I.; bots are stealing your Christmas presents; how autonomous vehicles will create jobs; Ford's trends to watch for 2018; why Bitcoin is rising; key takeaways from the CMO Spend Survey; how the New York Times is focused on growing its audiences; better personalization is needed in retail; social media has become weaponized; YouTube is raising its ad prices to account for something it should have been doing; Disney may be getting Fox assets; listen up: Apple is buying Shazam; how Microsoft Word caught someone in an editing lie; the C-suite needs to get comfortable with data; what David Rockefeller's Rolodex tells us about networking; and more in the Track Changes edition of The Full Monty from Brain+Trust Partners for the week of December 11, 2017.

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The Full Monty, a Brain+Trust Partners publication, exposes you to virtually everything you need in business intelligence at the top of every week. Links are below with commentary in italics. Please sign up for our email updates to make sure you don't miss a thing. And please click send your colleagues to this page to sign up as well.

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Artificial Intelligence / Autonomous

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING

Women are thinking more about A.I.'s relationship to humanity, and thus we need many more of them active in A.I. research to help successfully tackle these issues as A.I. becomes more pervasive. Why Women Should Lead Our A.I. Future.
What is artificial intelligence, anyway? Two aspects define A.I.: does it seem human (external) and can it learn (internal). In this definition, Siri and Alexa are not A.I.
Here are six areas where neural networks outperform humans, including image and object recognition, predictions, and voice generation and recognition. It should be abundantly clear why companies like Amazon and Google are interested.
Google made its own A.I. and it's better than anything created by humans.
Flipboard is using A.I. and machine learning to deepen its analysis of popular news themes, and relying on human curators to tell the difference between a legitimate breaking news story and anecdotal analysis.
Bots are snapping up the hottest Christmas toys for resale on eBay and Amazon, where they go for up to quadruple their original price. Humbug.

AUTONOMOUS / MOBILITY

A look at how self-driving vehicles, including cars and trucks, may positively affect the economy by creating new jobs and opportunities.
In addition to saving jobs, there's another societal impact: autonomous technology could be an affordable transportation alternative for low-income populations.
Tesla won a legal battle in Missouri to sell cars directly to consumers. Dealers lost when they failed to show that they were acting in the public’s best interest. I know — who would have thought?
The 2018 Ford Trends Report looks beyond transportation into issues that affect society more broadly. These include:

There is uncertainty about A.I., but hope for autonomous vehicles.
8 out of 10 people are concerned about the rising gap between the rich and poor.
54 percent of adults are more stressed out than a year ago.
Consumers are looking for brands with a social conscience.

BLOCKCHAIN / BITCOIN

The incredible rise of the price of Bitcoin has caused the founder of Coinbase to remind users to invest responsibly and to let them know they may not be able to trade in case of a Bitcoin crash.
Just why has Bitcoin's price risen so quickly? Chalk it up in part to it replicating core aspects of a centralized finance industry instead of giving rise to a true person to person financial system.

BUY THIS BOOK

One of the break-out books for 2017 and now a New York Times bestseller is The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway, professor at NYU Stern School of Business and CEO of L2.

Want to see your book featured here? Please let us know.

Communications / Marketing / Business Strategy

Industry developments and trends, including advertising & marketing, journalism, customer experience, content, and influencer relations.

STRATEGY / MARKETING / CONTENT

Gartner has released its latest annual CMO Spend Survey, based on a survey of 353 marketing executives in North America and the UK working at companies with more than $250 million in annual revenues. Here are 5 key takeaways from the report, including a slight dip in marketing budgets and a rise in analytics spending.
An Apple executive in charge of product marketing says that the company is more focused on making technology fantastic rather than making it first. How are you making exceptional products and experiences for your customers?
Out with the “Marketing Director” and in with the “Managing Editor": it's the marketing team of the future.
It's official: 2017 was the year that digital ad spending finally beat TV.
Trust is eroding as a symbol of brand equity. Who’s winning in today’s market? Brands that play to a sense of New.

JOURNALISM / COMMUNICATIONS

The New York Times says it now has over 3.5 million subscribers, 130 million monthly readers, and is creating three new newsroom roles which will be focused on growing audience. The 'failing' New York Times? Hardly.
The New York Times, Fox News and the Washington Post have eclipsed BuzzFeed in U.S. visitors, according to comScore.
Thirty-nine percent of marketers are planning to up their influencer marketing budgets in 2018, says a U.S. study by influencer marketing platform Linqia.

Retail Apocalypse

Humans are a transactional species, and the practice — if not the very notion of what retail is — is undergoing a historical metamorphosis.

Over 50 percent of consumers have left companies this year because of poor customer experience. But the industry still hasn't found a way to balance consumers' worries about data privacy with their desire to be catered to on a one-to-one basis: poor personalization and a lack of trust are leaving consumers out int he cold. Time to recommit to your customers.
All is not lost as brick and mortar stores face off against e-commerce. In fact, stores can still compete and win based on focusing on what's still up for grabs.
Walmart now sells meal kits, just like Blue Apron and Amazon. Having visited the Culinary & Innovation Center at Walmart's Home Office, we can attest to the creativity and quality of ingredients that the company is testing. Walmart is a Brain+Trust client.
This year, Walmart tripled the number of items sold online from a year ago. So it's changing its legal name from Wal-Mart Stores to Walmart to reflect the changing ways in which consumers shop.
According to a study, Amazon is on track to account for half of all e-commerce holiday purchases this year, thanks in large part to its Prime members.
The crown for the Grocery Retailer of the Year for 2017 goes to: Walmart. From carefully guarding its price leadership to aggressively expanding its e-commerce capabilities, Walmart is making savvy investments on a scale that other supermarket competitors can’t match.
Impulse buys could be under attack as retail outlets are disrupted. From soda to candy bars, our decisions are different when we're not stuck in line.

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Platforms

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

We live in a world where facts are less important than narratives, where people emote rather than debate, and where algorithms shape our view of the world. Social media has become weaponized, according to War in 140 Characters by David Patrikarakos.
Trivia app HQ is all the rage, and it is raising money in a round that could leave it valued at $100 million.
Here are the social media platform changes you may have missed in November.

TWITTER / PERISCOPE

A graph shows how morally outraged tweets typically stay within their own bubble. We'd agree with that.
Twitter introduced a new AMP analytics feature that will help distinguish page views happening on Twitter versus organic page views.
While the decision to open up Twitter to 280 characters over its original 140 was met with some derision, users actually like longer tweets more than short ones.

FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / WHATSAPP

Facebook is offering free music and sound effects for video creators. Obviously in a self-serving attempt to generate more video creation.
Instagram is testing Direct, a messaging app, and may remove DMs from the main app. The Facebook family seems to be diversifying within its apps; different audiences may prefer different functionalities. The company will be able to test and determine which app requires particular features.

ALPHABET / GOOGLE

YouTube plans to raise ad prices on premium channels by ~20% starting next month, to do what it should have done all along: ensure safe content is adjacent to advertisements.

Media

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

VIDEO

Disney appears to be closing in on a deal to acquire the studio and television production assets of 21st Century Fox. The Murdoch empire would keep the news and sports divisions.
Google is pulling YouTube off of the Fire TV in addition to the Echo Show as its feud with Amazon continues.
Amazon Prime Video app started rolling out on Apple TV, including in the US, UK, Canada, some European countries, and elsewhere.

AUDIO

Apple is reportedly buying Shazam for $400 million. Why would Apple want Shazam? Possibly to improve music search to compete with Spotify. Or perhaps to have better voice/sound integration to make music predictions for you.
YouTube will introduce a paid, on-demand streaming music service in March; Warner has signed on, talks continue with Sony, Universal, and Merlin.
Program of the Week: And as our recommendation this week, we have Unthinkable. Host Jay Acunzo explores how some ideas become rules and meets the people who dare to question them — not by using some "best practice," but by trusting their intuition. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts.

Regulatory / Security

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

SECURITY / HACKING

More phishers are moving to HTTPS because it helps increase the likelihood that users will trust that the site is legitimate.
Even lowly Microsoft Word can hold secrets. In this case, special investigator Robert Mueller weaponized Word to discover that Paul Manafort was violating the terms of his house arrest. The Track Changes feature showed his level of involvement.
NiceHash, a Slovenia-based marketplace for cryptocurrency mining, says it was hacked and 4,700 bitcoins, worth about $60 million, were stolen from its wallet. As the interest in and price of bitcoin continue to rise, we'll expect to see more like this.
In the court case with Waymo, we're discovering that Uber used disappearing message app Wickr. But this high-profile case should raises questions about how companies at risk of litigation should be using such systems, if at all.
Here are three essential privacy settings for your Amazon Echo.

ON-DEMAND ECONOMY

In China, smaller companies involved in the collaborative economy will suffer at the hands of larger entities that create monopolies or duopolies to lock them out. The bike-sharing industry is the latest example.
Didi Chuxing, China's ride-hailing giant, plans to enter Mexico next year in what would be its first international expansion.
Uber landed an investment from Singapore's largest taxi operator — a move that is likely to upset local competitor Grab.
Self-driving Lyfts are available in Boston, thanks to the company's partnership with NuTonomy.

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.

Once considered the responsibility of chief information or chief data officers, data is now permeating the entire organization and is becoming a shared responsibility across the C-suite. That means any C-level title (CXO) must learn to understand all facets of data—what data currently exists, what data they can get, how to organize it, and, most importantly, how to put the data to use to grow their businesses. A Brain+Trust specialty.
Just what is topic modeling, and why is it important? Chris Penn has this first entry in a series on topic modeling and your business.
While personalization continues to provide an uplift to conversion rates across online and offline channels, success in personalization depends greatly on the quality of the data being used.

Mental Nourishment

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

If you travel at all, here's a lifesaver: a 2-outlet mini portable travel surge protector with two smart USB ports.
David Rockefeller's Rolodex was legendary. He chronicled every interaction he had with over 100,000 people, and used his card system as a reminder prior to meetings. The system embodies the ultimate expression of communication in the analog age.
Here are 96 things to do when you're bored.
One of them is not this: what happened when I replied "call me" to every email message I got for a week. One CEO found that empathy equals efficacy.
Flickr's top photos of 2017 are stunning.
You take a lot of photos with your phone, but your grandmother isn't on social networks or doesn't text. Just text your photos to Nanagram and they'll mail her 4x6 prints.
Why is there a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee?

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Top image credit: The Parthenon by Frederic Edwin Church (1871), public domain

Monday, December 11, 2017