A number of new commercial online services have emerged in recent years, each promising to reshape some aspect of the way Americans go about their lives. Some of these services offer on-demand access to goods or services with the click of a mouse or swipe of a smartphone app. Others promote the commercialized sharing of products or expertise, while still others seek to connect communities of interest and solve problems using open, collaborative platforms. These services have sparked a wide-ranging cultural and political debate on issues such as how they should be regulated, their impact on the changing nature of jobs and their overall influence on users’ day-to-day lives.
A national Pew Research Center survey of 4,787 American adults – its first-ever comprehensive study of the scope and impact of the shared, collaborative and on-demand economy – finds that usage of these platforms varies widely across the population. In total, 72% of American adults have used at least one of 11 different shared and on-demand services. And some incorporate a relatively wide variety of these services into their daily lives: Around one-in-five Americans have used four or more of these services, and 7% have used six or more. More in PewResearchInternet
We’ve heard it 100 times: “We’re targeting millennials.” Really? What does millennial even mean? Google tells us; “There are no precise dates for when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
So you’re targeting anyone from 10 years old to 34 years old? As a marketer, is it really effective to categorize people by something as vague as “millennials” when social data makes possible incredible insights from identifying buying signals to deeply understanding a person’s drivers and values?
As the use of social networks increases, so does the richness and accessibility of information about an audience down to the individual, providing marketers with hundreds more potential data points to integrate with customer data from other channels.
In The Social Intelligence Playbook for 2016, Forrester Research acknowledg. More in SocialTimes/Adweek
More than half of US advertisers are unaware they’re buying "sourced" publisher traffic that may be riddled with bots and fraud, according to a study released Tuesday by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
Sixty-one percent of advertisers are either "slightly familiar" or "not familiar at all" with sourced traffic. Only 5% of advertisers surveyed say they are "extremely familiar" with the practice.
The report defined sourced traffic “as any method by which digital media sellers acquire visitors through third parties,” where “a publisher pays a third-party vendor to send users to its site by advertising on other publishers’ sites.”
Sourced traffic often begins with a sponsored link, video or display ad at the bottom of a publisher site, enabled by a vendor like Taboola or Outbrain. Users, or perhaps bots, click those links and wind up on the page of a publisher eager to supplement its organic audience. A publisher often will buy sourced traffic from third-party vendors when it runs out of inventory to fill a buy.
The worst of these publishers, often mid- to long-tail sites, “fly under the radar, participate in networks that don’t have solid controls on inventory vetting and drive traffic to what experts consider cash out sites,” said Steve Guenther, VP of digital auditing services at the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). The AAM is working with the ANA and other trade groups on guidelines for monitoring sourced traffic. More in AdExchanger
"The stuff that matters in life is no longer stuff. It's other people. It's relationships. It's experience," notes Airbnb's co-founder Brian Chesky. Airbnb singlehandedly disrupted the hospitality industry by capitalizing on this shift from "stuff" to experiences.
Transformation of businesses away from physical items has proved to be a lucrative strategy. The fastest-growing companies today -- Uber, Farfetch, One Fine Stay, Spring and Airbnb -- don't have any physical products to speak of. They are all in the business of removing friction in providing services and delivering experiences to their customers.
If modern brands are built around service and experiences -- and not products -- then media buying and planning needs to mimic this. For brands, focusing on the volume of impressions and transactions is not enough. Consumers don't make their decisions based on a siloed communication; they turn to brands in their moment of need and expect brands to fulfill it. More in AdAge
En la carrera por conectar con el consumidor, las marcas han encontrado una nueva vía y un nuevo punto de conexión, uno que se ha convertido en una de las cuestiones favoritas en los últimos tiempos y que sirve no solo para millones de análisis sino también para muchísimos cambios de estrategia y muchísimos puntos novedosos en los que conectar con el consumidor. Las marcas se han lanzado a crear contenidos porque los consumidores esperan que les den valor añadido y porque son altamente receptivos a las historias de mayor calado, a lo que es información y no simplemente publicidad. Por otra parte, la publicidad tradicional está siendo cada vez peor recibida y está consiguiendo ser cada vez menos vista por el consumidor, lo que hace que las marcas estén mucho más abiertas a nuevos formatos y mucho más lanzadas a usarlos.
El boom del marketing de contenidos ha generado un boom de blogs de empresa, de colaboraciones con medios y de reportajes de largo alcance, completos longforms en los que las marcas funcionan como mecenas. Pero lo cierto es que los consumidores consumen muchos más contenidos que simplemente esos y las marcas están siendo cada vez más conscientes de ello. Más en PuroMarketing
The internet is creating an open-source revolution -- a bottoms-up change in human habits across the globe, driven by hundreds of thousands of technologists, content creators, and business leaders to create nearly unlimited entertainment, news, information, commerce and services unimaginable in other eras.
But something insidious has begun to threaten the free web as we know it.
Armed with powerful tools that block advertising from appearing on websites, new and old players in the ad-blocking and mobile operator industry are threatening to strip ads at the "network level" from websites, in some cases seeking revenue-sharing agreements from the very companies whose ads are being blocked.
What does that mean for consumers? Simple. Ad blocking at the network level undercuts consumers' ability to control the content they see and don't see, which is a bedrock principle of the world wide web.
Shine Technologies, backed prominently by Horizons Ventures and based in Israel, offers ad-blocking technology that allows companies to block ads at the network level. And last September, Jamaica-based mobile carrier Digicel announced that it would begin to implement Shine's technology on its network, blocking ads across all mobile display, apps and mobile video. Although there is an opt-out mechanism, by using Shine, Digicel is indiscriminately blocking ads for all customers by default, without offering a real choice or any transparency into their actions. Exactly how Shine determines what consumers can and cannot see is not available for consumers to understand. More in AdAge
The increasingly connected world we live in continues to drastically alter the relationship between brands and their customers. Arguably this change is most obvious in the growing expectation for always-on, real-time interactions across any device. More often, newer, disruptive entrants—not incumbent brands—are setting these new standards for customer expectations.
Average Emotion Ratings* for New Purchases vs. Customer Service Interactions Among US Internet Users, by Service Type/Industry, Q1 2016
As explored in a new eMarketer report, “The Customer Experience Mandate: Brand Strategies to Meet and Exceed Customers’ Always-On Expectations,” the number of potential channels or touchpoints in which one can encounter a brand is vast and continuing to expand—and they’re not always direct or controlled. Customers don’t view these interactions as channel-centric or as journeys, paths and lifecycles in the same way a brand might view them. Each one, however small, elicits emotion from the person at the other end. Over time, these individual interactions or moments accrue, forming the basis for customer experience. More in MarketingCharts
The increasingly connected world we live in continues to drastically alter the relationship between brands and their customers. Arguably this change is most obvious in the growing expectation for always-on, real-time interactions across any device. More often, newer, disruptive entrants—not incumbent brands—are setting these new standards for customer expectations.
Average Emotion Ratings* for New Purchases vs. Customer Service Interactions Among US Internet Users, by Service Type/Industry, Q1 2016
As explored in a new eMarketer report, “The Customer Experience Mandate: Brand Strategies to Meet and Exceed Customers’ Always-On Expectations,” the number of potential channels or touchpoints in which one can encounter a brand is vast and continuing to expand—and they’re not always direct or controlled. Customers don’t view these interactions as channel-centric or as journeys, paths and lifecycles in the same way a brand might view them. Each one, however small, elicits emotion from the person at the other end. Over time, these individual interactions or moments accrue, forming the basis for customer experience. More in eMarketer
Futurist, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote speech to 800 attendees at 2016 Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo, Canada. Ray Kurzweil envisions the future — by year 2020, 3D printing will transform manufacturing. People will print their own clothing, he predicts. In Asia, builders are making small office buildings using modules made by 3D printers. Inventors created jet engines and cars out of printed parts, Kurzweil says.
Impact on a declining manufacturing industry could be catastrophic. Jobs will be lost, manufacturing will turn into an information industry, but there’s a silver lining behind industry disruption, he says.
The fashion industry will explode with new ideas as people design, make and share clothes using 3D printers. Kurzweil sees manufacturing moving into open source design and production.
Kurzweil doesn’t make wild predictions. The 68 year old is considered a leading thinker, inventor, futurist. He authored best selling books on artificial intelligence, and heads up a Google team studying machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
As a child, he brought home old bicycles and radios to fix when 5 year olds “could still rummage through neighborhoods.” At 14 he wrote a paper on how the brain worked. It earned him an audience with US president Lyndon Johnson. More in Kurzweil.net