Month: August 2015

1 in 7 people on earth used Facebook on Monday

We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day.

On Monday, 1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family.

A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.

Source: Mark Zuckerberg – We just passed an important milestone. For the…

Of course, that means 6 in 7 people on earth didn’t use Facebook.

That means that there are lots of people who choose not to use Facebook in the developed world.

More critically, that means there are many people in our world that don’t have access to the internet or devices that can access the web (or Facebook if you please).

Companies are working to crack this nut for their own bottom lines but also the improvement of humanity. Access to information and the ability to communicate near instantaneously with someone on the other side of our planet (and eventually beyond) will be an amazing issue to cover in the coming decades.

It’s incumbent upon all of us now to make sure the internet is as welcoming and transformative as it should be for everyone (whether old or new user).

The Future is Messaging and Google Seems Oblivious

 

“Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more,” Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus said in a Facebook post.

Source: Facebook’s M Is Here, and Google Should Be Worried

Messaging is big in Asia. Services like WeChat in China and Line in Japan / Thailand / Indonesia are how people communicate, buy things, book things, and operate. Sort of like how we (the enlightened) are amazed that people live inside of Facebook and think of it as the internet. There are even WeChat Stars like our YouTube stars. It is strange for us in the US to wrap our heads around (or at least me).

However, it won’t be for long. I remember sitting in a presentation by a Rakuten VP (they are a large Asian marketing firm that acquired messaging app Viber last year) at a conference in 2004… they were demonstrating data associated with the rising use of mobile phones to purchase items in stores or do cross comparisons via SMS in SE Asia while using brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms. I was blown away and thought “there’s no way anyone in the US would ever buy something on a mobile phone…certainly not furniture or computers.”

I was wrong. Best Buy is the best showroom Amazon could ever hope for (at least in my personal experience).

Five years from now, everyone in America will live inside the major messaging app that we settle on. Whether that’s FB’s Messenger, WeChat, Line, Snapchat (doubtful), Viber, Hangouts, WhatsApp or something we haven’t heard of yet, we will decry this newfangled “messaging media” and “messaging marketing” and look fondly on the days when we all just had Facebook newsfeeds or Twitter timelines.

Remember ICQ and AIM? We’re going back.

Messaging apps are what comes after “social media.” Facebook gets it. Even Apple (iMessage) and Blackberry (Messenger) get it. Google seems to be dragging its feet, which is scary to me.

Facebook Takes on Medium Because Teens Are Blogging Again

“As it turns out, teens are blogging. “Blogging’s one of those odd ones that seems to be trendy again. It was very popular seven, eight, nine years ago. People obviously did carry on blogging, but it sort of went away from the spotlight,” explains Pelz-Sharpe. “It’s actually getting very popular with teenagers again, who are going through that whole journaling move.'”

Source: Remember Facebook Notes? It’s Back With a Vengeance | WIRED

Facebook has to chase Medium here, and Medium is chasing the open web. I’m glad to see both platforms are bringing the concept and joys of blogging back into the mainstream (particularly with young people).

My only admonition here is that if you’re going to blog, do so on your own namespace (yourname.com or something you own). It’s cheap, easy, and incredibly fun to do rather than giving all of your content and identity away to Facebook or Medium or Blogger (Google) etc. Whatever platform you use, listen to Dave Winer (who created blogging) when he writes (just today) that you should ponder the future-safety of your work, as irrelevant or worthless as you might think it is.

The ‘Real’ Colonel Sanders and Bad Branding

“Other than not quite looking like him, his voice being different, and his inability to cook the world’s best chicken, we thought Norm was the perfect choice to play the Real Colonel,” said KFC US CMO Kevin Hochman in a statement. “I think the fans will agree.”

Source: Norm Macdonald Is the ‘Real’ Colonel Sanders in Latest Ads from W&K

I generally appreciate advertising campaigns that give a nod to the past but push a brand forward in a creative way… I don’t think Wieden & Kennedy Portland have done either here.

Uncle Bill’s Sliver Gripper Tweezers

Amazon.com: 2 Pack Uncle Bill’s Sliver Gripper Keychain Tweezers

Random Saturday testimonial that I had to share… I spent a good deal of time today working on our back yard (field?) to clear out some brush and undergrowth before things get too crazy with the arrival of Baby H in November. As a result, I got a number of splinters and thorns despite wearing gloves.

Luckily, I had a pair of these tweezers that I recently purchased in my beloved pack / man purse / tactical survival bag and got to put the little device to use in a big way. Some splinters were just under the skin but quite a few were embedded deeper. These tweezers really did surprise me in how well they worked.

If you do any type of work or maintenance that could result in wood or metal or plastic etc splinters, I highly recommend these over other options (including my old method of gouging out a splinter with a sharp knife… which never works well).

The Attention Economy, or Why No One Cares About Your Ad in the Paper But You

mediaconsumption2015

The killer-app of the mobile generation is the platform for self-expression and communication. Given this, it is baffling that none of the traditional media companies have invested in, built or acquired any of the hundreds of global properties which have hoovered our attention away from their legacy properties. In fact, the audience sizes being drawn to these new platforms are massively dwarfing audience sizes of traditional media properties.

Source: May I Have Your Attention Please by David Pakman

Interesting insights here that I’ll be sharing with clients who want to “focus on young people” but are mainly interested in TV, radio, and the newspaper as their marketing vehicles.

YouTube channels are routinely getting more “views” than the NBA Finals or MLB World Series. That’s shocking. By current standards, Facebook is dominating and Google has got to be worrying.

Not to say “we told you so,” but “we told you so” way back in 2007 with all of this talk about what would become the attention economy.

Cord-cutters and apps are just the beginning and the new metrics  they help develop will radically transform not just marketing and advertising but also content production to replace traditional TV and radio formulas (think YouTube form videos and podcasts).

How Content Marketers and Sites Make Money as Agencies

One of the more interesting line items in the financial statements is “cost of revenue,” which “consists primarily of amounts due to third party websites and platforms to fulfill customers’ advertising campaigns.” (An unspecified percentage of “cost of revenue” refers to the cost of maintaining BuzzFeed’s own servers.) In other words, “cost of revenue” appears to refer primarily to the money BuzzFeed is using to buy traffic from Facebook (and likely other websites too) on behalf of brands advertising on BuzzFeed.

Source: Internal Documents Show BuzzFeed’s Skyrocketing Investment in Editorial

BuzzFeed is an interesting beast because it sits at the fulcrum point between “old news” and “new media news.” BuzzFeed does have quality reporting and long form pieces, but unlike the New York Times those pieces often sit beside the latest funny cat gifs or a hilarious video of a kid after a dentist visit.

How BuzzFeed makes money has been a question that “old news” sites like the NY Times have been trying to figure out with paywalls, subscriptions, email captures etc. None of that seems to be helping slow BuzzFeed down or improve the doom of the more traditional news site economy given the large number of people who get most of their news (quality or otherwise) from Facebook.

Those of us who like to follow these things point back to info like this from 2013 when BuzzFeed was beginning to make serious money and turn heads:

BuzzFeed, for example, has an entire in-house team dedicated to buying ads that drive users to its sponsored posts. Through a program it calls “Social Discovery,” the company buys traffic from a range of sources including Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon, as well as other content-marketing services. It pays to have links to its sponsors’ posts show up in Facebook users’ news feeds and to force them in front of users on StumbleUpon, for example… Peretti said the company is not buying traffic to boost its numbers or meet advertiser commitments. Its brand partners are actually beginning to use its media-buying team as an agency of sorts, asking it to package posts on BuzzFeed with a paid distribution element, too. It doesn’t pay for the ads itself to boost the number of views the content it sells to advertisers gets.

Source: How BuzzFeed Gives Native Ads a Traffic Boost – Digiday

So there you go. If you’re a news site, become an agency with an in-house team to do arbitrage and market your native ads via viewers from Facebook and Twitter (as they are more than happy to take your money). Television and radio has been doing this for decades.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”

I got into a discussion today with someone from an opposing politician’s team, I think. I was using my script, and I think he was using a script, too. Answers from a can. It felt weird to have a futile discussion between liars. I wonder what that person really believes? Anyway, I just thought people should know not to take the political things they read on here too seriously. If you want to have a genuine discussion about that, keep it in person or on facebook where you know the people you’re talking to. If you’re doing it on an anonymous forum, you’re probably being marketed to.

Source: I get Paid to Chat on Reddit : offmychest

#advancedgaming

 

Google’s Affiliate Program for Play Store

Google is working on launching an affiliate program for Google Play similar to the one Apple runs for its own digital content stores, a source briefed on the matter has told 9to5Google. The affiliate program, which is said to still be in its early stages of development and could get called off or change significantly between now and its time of launch, is said to be powered by Performance Horizon Group, the same company which in 2013 began supporting Apple’s affiliate program.

Source: Exclusive: Google planning an affiliate program for Google Play, starting with Movies & Music | 9to5Google

Apple’s affiliate program for iTunes content has had some success for larger publishers I’ve talked to (who deal in media and music categories). However, they weren’t blown away by the results. I wonder how much Apple is seeing from the program?

It will be interesting to see if Google can make a significant push by leveraging the affiliate space. There’s so much competition now with Apple, Amazon, Spotify etc that partnerships via an affiliate program might be the way to go to increase market share.

Google has been doing lots of hiring for their physical products category on the Play Store, so maybe this is in conjunction with that effort as well.