A mountain dweller in the Thames Valley

The heart in Artificial Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 14:43:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column

My son Arthur has just been awarded a prize for story-telling at his primary school. So when I watched that short movie whose script was generated by artificial intelligence, based on thousands of sci-fi books and films, I could certainly see a lot of similarity between both outputs. For me this epitomizes the current state of AI… It is raw, forming, full of potential but still with a long way to go towards maturity.

Today we will be covering the heart in artificial intelligence. After all, if artificial intelligence is, by definition, artificial, how can it have a heart, how can it have emotions? On the other hand, if AI is the brain child of thinking, feeling people, how can it not have a heart? This is a critical question for us, marketers who want to trigger emotional reactions from consumers but who also rely always more on algorithms and automation. To answer it, we will first need to define artificial intelligence. We’ll explore the 7 outcomes we can expect from AI, and consider how we materialize these expectations today to enable everyone of us to fulfil our potential.

The building blocks of AI

To understand if a heart is beating inside artificial intelligence, we need to understand where AI comes from. Although AI has been all over the press lately, it is not news… It is rather a 30-year old corpus of work, aimed at creating intelligent machines, by combining three building blocks: machine learning, human learning and data science. And in many ways there is a strong analogy between AI and raising a child.

Just like children get their foundational learnings from their parents, teachers and by the school books they read, machine learning is based on known properties, and the machine learns from the data. Think if/then scenarios. If your son behaves well, then he will be treated by Santa. If your daughter sees a puddle, then she should not to stomp in it to keep her feet dry. This is also how machine learning works: if you liked that book, then you’ll probably like these ones too. If you bought a laptop, then you should consider this bag. These are just small, basic examples of a very complex field.

Kids learn fast that if they cry and shout they get your attention… Now, you will certainly want them to assimilate that such a behaviour is not a normal mode of expression. Human learning is how we make course corrections to the machine learning that is happening. Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant, has a team behind the scenes working on human learning so she can get smarter. This human learning gives the digital personal assistant more personality, and her responses to queries are more human because of this.

Data science is the third brick of artificial intelligence. Data science is the discovery of unknown properties, or connections, in data. In this case, the machine is presented with a massive amount of data and asked to find connections in it. This is how we might discover that watching a certain program in your youth increases your chance to marry a foreigner. We didn’t know there was a connection between these pieces of data until we went looking for that connection.

Human intervention

We have seen these three fields accelerating their capabilities recently due to the exponential development rate of our computing power. We are able to process, analyse and render an ever-growing amount of information, at an increasing pace. But where does that data that feeds machine learning, human learning and data science come from?
It comes from us! Artificial intelligence comes from us. In many ways, it is us.

Artificial intelligence is only as intelligent as the data it takes in. It is only as fair as the data it takes in. It is only as human as the data it takes in. It is only as socially acceptable as the data it takes in. I would like to share with you two examples of AI, which to a large extent illustrate how humans can influence how intelligent a bot can be.
Remember Tay, Microsoft first experiment as a Twitter bot? Tay learned from her inputs, which were hijacked by some people who wanted to influence her negatively. In this case, Tay incited high emotion from people who engaged with her or read about what happened with her, even if Tay, herself, did not express emotion and was merely a reflection of the hatred that fed her.

On the other end, Microsoft also created Xiaoice a couple years ago and it is a perfect example of where technology is going and why we think of conversations as a new platform for brands and commerce. Xiaoice is a chat-bot based on Bing search technology and big data. It draws on AI, social media, and machine learning so she can hold a proper conversation – the average exchange between Xiaoice and a user has 26 turns. She’s sensitive to emotions and remembers your previous chats. If you tell her about a breakup, she’ll check in with you. If you introduce her to a puppy through a photo, she’ll recognize the breed, ask you for its development. And to say this bot has been popular is an understatement. Three days after she was available, Xiaoice had been added to 1.5 million conversations on WeChat. Once added to Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging service, it became one of the most popular celebrity accounts. And today, Xiaoice is used by over 40 million people.

Tay and Xiaoice are like two twins, split at birth and raised in two different environments, with different influences… Two very different individuals in the end.

Assessing our expectations

So, what can we reasonably expect from artificial intelligence?

As mentioned before the computing advancements have enabled a fast acceleration of three technologies which underpin the maturation of artificial intelligence: object recognition, natural language processing and speech. If the AI can see, speak and listen, it is not far from being able to exchange with human being transparently.

Actually, mid-October 2016, Microsoft researchers announced they had reached human parity with the word error rate (WER) for conversational speech recognition, meaning that their AI was as capable as a professional transcriber to write up an oral conversation. Language understanding and acquisition is not easy, and it is critical to the success of AI. If you travelled a bit, you will be familiar on the complexity implied by accents, dialects, pronunciation but also the fact that a same word may have several meanings based on the context. This progress was critical because without this piece of artificial intelligence, so many developments wouldn’t move forward. Think about how patient you would be with a digital personal assistant or a sales advisor that misunderstood most of what you said?

Natural language learning is a complex skill, as we know from watching our children learn to speak. But with our increased computing capabilities, not only are we able to recognize accurately the words but we are able to do this instantaneously. This unlocks new scenarios like Voice-to-text which allows deaf children to read the transcript of a discussion in real time or Skype Translator which not only has the natural language skills necessary for a conversation but can also translate into other languages.

Well, this outcome is one of many. Capitalizing on the progress of machine learning around object recognition, natural language processing and speech, we have seen our expectations towards AI graduate from the most basic to much more advanced outcomes.

The 7 outcomes of AI

According to Silicon-Valley analyst, Ray Wang, there are seven intertwined outcomes for artificial intelligence, based on what we are now able to program via machine learning.

Perception is an example of early machine learning, now totally engrained in our daily life. Drawing on existing data, the machine delivers information about what is happening now. The weather, traffic, sales volumes, stock prices – things that are measureable and reportable. This AI outcome brings us back to the core promise of search engines when based on a typed or voiced query, the machine learning understands the intent and provides the answer or links to the information. For humans, learning to express their perception, it’s pretty simple as well. A child can describe what is happening now with ease. We learn this almost immediately: it is dark; I am hot; or, based on these circumstances, I am joyful. To illustrate a more advanced Perception outcome, we can look at facial recognition and play with http://how-old.net which assesses your age based on your traits (and which we hate to be accurate).
Next, Notification. If I did not have my calendar delivering notifications, I would be a horrible colleague – late to meetings or just not showing up because I cannot hold my schedule in my mind. Here the intent is less explicitly verbalized, but it is still initiated by the user and the information remains factual without any analysis of the data. We learn notification early as well, perhaps starting with letting Mom know we’re hungry. Fact: I am hungry; Notification: I cry. It never stops – in school, we notify the teacher that we have the answer.
Suggestion is another area we have grown to be familiar with, and is now engrained in our daily life. You searched for these words, but “Did you mean?”… The machine learns from past behaviours and suggests alternative actions. We all love this machine learning with our Spotify account for instance. If I listen to a song and I like it, the AI suggests more songs for me to enjoy. And you can always retain that Human Learning capability to ensure that the AI never drifts from Justin Timberlake to Justin Bieber… Early suggestions were basic, but imagine what can influence them today: demographics, location, day, time, weather, behaviours, etc. The data sets are humongous but we are now capable to combine and process them in no time and identify new, maybe more obscure connections
Our children learn a nice drawing will trigger a smile from their parents, or that it’s time to wash their hands before a meal. Over time, we don’t even have to remind them; they just know it’s what’s next and it becomes Automation. A suggestion or a recommended action can grow into automation based on learning your preferences. If you follow avidly the progress of your favorite team, the AI will start to automatically inform you of their performance. If you always make a reservation for 7pm on Saturdays, your AI will start to spontaneuously fill in the date and time on your reservations. If you trigger the same report every Monday morning, the machine will start to pull the information for you and make it available in your Business Intelligence dashboard.
Predictions can be the hardest machine learning to train, because so many variables can affect this outcome. Think of a child who sees Daddy packing a suitcase; based on past behaviour, this toddler knows that this means Daddy is leaving for a few days, which is sad. But sometimes it also means that the child gets to travel with Daddy. What factors will alert the toddler about what outcome to expect? Microsoft has developed a program called Bing Predicts which combines and models all the data signals we can find, and comes up with incredibly accurate predictions. It initially explored popularity-based contests like American Idol, for which the web and social signals are very strong and highly correlate with popularity voting patterns. You search for information about that performer, his history, his latest video clip. At the same time, you comment the performance on Facebook or Twitter. By combining anonymized search patterns to social signals Bing Predicts could accurately project who would be eliminated each week during American Idol and who the eventual winner would be. More complex, we then turned to sporting events and even world political challenges. During the World Cup in Brazil, our team predicted accurately with 100% accuracy the winners of the final elimination round. During the last year Rugby World cup, we had 87% accuracy across the tournament. Surprised? In order to successfully predict a sporting event outcome, the number and type of signals we incorporated quadrupled from what we used to predict a basic popularity event like American Idol. This is because we recognize that popularity alone does not predict whether a team will win – Sorry for the fans. A fan base has however special insight into the abilities of their teams, and those fans are having constant discussions about their team. This is called the “Insider Knowledge.” We weighted their knowledge against player and team stats, tournament trends, game history, location and even weather conditions. This is how we were successful in our predictions.
If we manage to predict accurately the future, the next logical step after prediction is Prevention. Again Bing Predicts shines in this category: by analysing large samples of search queries, Microsoft scientists have been able to identify internet users who are suffering from pancreatic cancer even before they were diagnosed. The researchers focused on searches conducted on Bing that indicated someone had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. From there, they worked backward, looking for earlier queries that could have shown that the Bing user was experiencing symptoms before the diagnosis. Those early searches, they believe, can be warning flags.
Finally, Situational Awareness for AI comes close to mimicking human behaviour in decision making. We see situational awareness as a combination of many aspects of AI, from object recognition to conversational speech. Here’s an example:

These 7 outcomes are complex and require a lot of training and time to accomplish. They are also interconnected and not mutually exclusive. They actually build upon each other to offer the benefits of AI to us, users.

In conclusion, everything we’re seeing with AI is exciting and rich. We see the heart in AI every day, when we ask it to help uncover cancer, help two people connect when they don’t speak the same language. But where is the moral and ethical compass for artificial intelligence?

As alluded to through this article, AI is still at its infancy and it is our collective responsibility to set it on the right trajectory. At Microsoft we are committed to this, and partnered with the University of Cambridge and the Partnership on AI, two international authorities to help shape the future of that promising discipline. For some, AI is a modern Oedipus that will have to “kill the father”, take away our jobs, make ourselves redundant. But for someone like Satya Nadella, AI will actually enable people to fulfil their full potential as we have seen across the 7 outcomes of AI. So yes, for Microsoft, AI has a heart. It is the mankind’s heart.

An Introduction to Conversational Commerce and Bots

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 14:09:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

Conversations.

These days, there is a lot of chatter about talking – and it’s not that surprising considering the forays in AI, machine learning and natural language processing have made interactions with technology more conversational, more human. Bots are now capable to think, but also view, speak, and listen. So businesses are discussing how they can, could, will, and should be using bots to drive more personalised conversational interfaces with their customers.

“By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.” – Gartner Predicts

I already prefer to use an ATM at the bank and I go to the self-checkout when doing my groceries. It doesn’t seem like that far fetched to see how conversational bots can become an extension of a self-service interface to your brand across the platform and channel your customer choose.

Bing has already a few chatbots integrated directly into the search results page, creating new, deeper engagement with the brand right here where the customer intent is verbalised. As I was planning my latest trip to Seattle, I’ve found it pretty useful to interact via the bot to quickly discover the parking availability for the restaurant I was heading to and to make sure it offered gluten-free dishes for the colleague who was joining me:

What are bots and chatbots?

There is no difference. In the beginning bots were just pieces of software designed to automate specific tasks. Today, bots have evolved thanks to the accelerations of our capabilities in machine learning and natural language process to comprehend and engage in conversations. They are acting as an interface that can be plugged into APIs or various data sources to deliver information on demand and help drive conversational commerce. In many ways, they are a new paradigm to how we will consume the web information. We used to go to web pages, then to interact with apps… We are about to exchange with this new interface through natural language which will, in turn, retrieve the information we are after. We will stop browsing or tapping: we will start asking.

What’s the difference between bots and digital assistants?

A digital assistant like Cortana, Siri, Alexa or the Google Assistant is more advanced than a chatbot. Some call them “meta agents”. In addition to being able to parse conversational language like a chatbot they are also incorporate additional layers of artificial intelligence to help merge utility, productivity, entertainment and the ability to accomplish actions together to become an intelligent agent. It is both contextually and historically aware, which means that it can provide relevant information, proactive recommendations, tailored to your preferences and situation. As such, Cortana is a predictive and proactive agent that can, based on interactions, learn to interact with you, other people and bots.

What’s the difference between bots and skills?

What do you want to teach the digital assistant to do? A skill. A skill teaches the digital assistant how to do something or to take an action, based on a voice command. I might ask, “Hey Cortana, ask HUE to dim the kitchen lights” or “Hey Alexa, book a UBER in ten minutes!”, “Hey Cortana, let OPENTABLE book a table for two at John Howie Steakhouse at 7pm.”

Conversational Commerce – Connecting the dots

When it first launched, Domino’s Pizza Bot was super simple. Simple but effective. Customers typed the word Pizza and it would place for their connected account an “Easy Order.” The bot wasn’t really conversational in nature, but it started with an easy-to-use feature which allowed Domino’s to get their foot in the connected kitchen door in order to test and learn. Currently, Domino’s has both a true conversational commerce chatbot and Amazon Alexa skills with increased capabilities. Although retaining their ambition for a simple consumer benefit, ordering a pizza, they have upped the AI complexity to allow users to build their order from scratch, but also to track an order or reorder their most recent order.

Let’s take a high lever look at getting started with bots and what you need to keep top of mind as you get started.

Tips for getting started with bots:

Plan
1. Set goals and expectation for what it can do.
2. Focus on interactions that mean the most to your customers
Start Simple:
1. Focus on building a feature that works amazingly and will delight your customers.
2. Don’t reveal all the features at once. It can overwhelm your customers.
3. Integrate the features into the flow of the conversation where they make sense.
Develop your bot:
1. Choose a frame, like the Microsoft bot framework that can help you scale across channels.
2. Don’t try to launch across every channel at first. Take a test-and-learn approach and roll out features and channels.
Monitor bots closely:
1. Mistakes are inevitable – Learn from them and fix any identified errors/mistakes often and quickly.
  1. Examine it: What questions did people ask that the bot wasn’t able to answer?
  2. Teach it: What words does the bot not understand? Does it not get that veggie is another term for vegetarian?
  3. Humanize it: Does the tone of your brand shine through? Make the experiences more engaging?
2. Ask your customer for feedback, especially early on. Give your customers the option at the end of the session if they’d like to participate to help make the bot better!
3. Learn from customer interactions and feedback.
4. Generate smarter, more personalized interactions capitalizing on the growing number of cognitive services available
Iterate and Adapt. Rinse & Repeat.

Everyone loves a good conversation. Bots and skills are opening up ways to communicate directly and more conversationally with your customers – providing them a more natural experience. It also can give your business a deeper look into the customer experience – including their emotions and sense of urgency during the interactions. Bots and skills can help you provide more personalized experiences that create a more meaningful connection with your customers.

So, what if we’d stop chatting, and started coding?

Podcast: speaking with Movidiam on AI, Chatbots and Augmented Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Tue, 16 May 2017 12:59:00 +0000

I was recently invited to contribute to Movidiam's podcast and share my thoughts on the future of search, chat bots, Artificial Intelligence, the rise of Augmented Reality and their impact on marketing. If you regularly read this blog, you will be familiar with some of the concepts and principles that I am touching base on, but nonetheless you may be inclined to stop reading and start listening to my French accent:

Here is a link to that podcast.

The evolution of search through a modern consumer journey

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sat, 13 May 2017 17:09:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

The IAB UK has just released their digital advertising spend report for 2016 and announced that digital advertising grew at its fastest rate for nine years – up 17.3% to £10.3 billion. The last time annual growth was higher was in 2007 (+38%), when Apple released the iPhone leading to the accelerated adoption of smartphones, the emergence of the app paradigm, etc. The reason I call out that historical reference is because I genuinely believe we are at an equivalently critical inflexion point with the rise of AI: it grew out of search and is about to transform marketing as a whole.

As a matter of fact, the historical powerhouse of the digital landscape, Search, has continued to grow by +15% to £4.99 billion, which reflects two major trends:

First advertisers have (finally) realised that search plays a role throughout the customer decision journey and not just at the final conversion step
Second, search is, in itself, evolving drastically to offer new capabilities and surfaces of engagement for advertisers to capture new intents, new behaviours, new usages

Following a modern consumer journey and its query paths

As disruptive technologies reshape the digital marketing landscape, brands are investing time and effort to remain relevant and top-of-mind with consumers. For years, search marketers have obsessed over bottom of the funnel activity for its seemingly higher CTRs and conversion rates, in part fuelled by last click attribution models. But most marketers today agree that it is essential for a brand to appear across all stages of the funnel to drive brand affinity and recall.

Research at Bing Ads now allows us to quantify and better understand the customers behind the clicks and where they stand on the customer decision journey (CDJ). Consumers tend to go through five distinct stages, which vary depending on the type of purchase: initiation, research, comparison, transaction and experience. Consumers are subject to these same five CDJ stages, although each step will vary in length and importance depending on the cost of failure, frequency, cost and complexity of the task, and the shopper type.

As consumers go through a given decision journey, search plays a pivotal role and different types of queries will be used throughout:

Category searches: Include broad search terms that are not product or brand specific, such as shoes, running shoes, hiking shoes. These usually appear during the initiation, research and comparison stages but can also take part during transaction
Tangential searches include queries that are related to a given journey, but not in the exact same category. For instance, if I am searching for running shoes, a tangential search could be about preparing for a half marathon, running training program or running equipment. These are similar to category searches in that they usually get searched on before a transaction
Competitor brand searches: Include your competitors’ brands or products. This is an opportunity for your brand to appear through conquest advertising. For Nike, these terms could include Under Armour, Adidas, etc. As consumers get further along their decision journey they begin to hone in on their purchase and more specific searches occur
Brand searches: Include a specific brand or product name. Nike is the brand and product searches could include Nike Pegasus or Nike Running shoes. Brand terms are often the best performing keywords helping drive the most transactions

Search drives awareness

Traditionally search has placed a premium on brand keywords. The Bing Ads research team has found new insights on the role of non-brand search terms within today’s journeys. Brand Impact Study on usage data from a major US auto retailer determined that 72% of brand ad clicks (which includes category, competitor and tangential searches) had a non-brand keyword precede the brand click. In other words, retailers who do not run non-brand keywords throughout multiple stages of decision journeys are missing out on a majority of relevant searches and leaving gaps for their competitors.

Additionally, consumers who are exposed to a brand ad on a category or competitor query were 30% more likely to do a branded search. On average they had a 15% higher conversion rate compared to consumers who were not exposed to the brand ad. Having a branded ad appear in category and competitor brand queries improved brand affinity and recall, and increased the propensity for future brand searches.

Another Bing Ads research completed in Q3 2016 with a leader in the automotive insurance vertical measured brand awareness and perception based on exposure to ads within the search results pages. The key learning from this study was that searchers on Bing who saw a branded ad for non-branded search queries showed a statistically significant increase in brand awareness, perception and purchase intent. After being exposed to a branded ad, searchers indicated a 24% lift in unaided awareness, 28% lift in purchase intent and a 30% lift in viewing the retailer as a market leader. Brand awareness further improved when searchers clicked through on the ad and were taken to the brand’s landing page. In the study, consumers who were merely exposed to an ad without clicking on it, self-reported as more likely to take an action or next step

Although search marketers have long assumed some level of brand awareness in search, it is the amount of brand awareness shown here that proves impressive and indicates the importance of staying present throughout each stage of a journey

Search informs and educates

As consumers go through the initiation phase of the consumer journey and begin to do more research and consider purchasing, search can help with the decision-making process.

A Forrester Consumer Technographics study called out that 60% of consumers will use a search engine to find the product they want and 61% will read product reviews before making a purchase. And one of the most trustworthy sources in this research and comparison phase is none other than search engines. Furthermore, consumers consistently rely on search engines, more than any other source, as a reliable place to research about brands, products, or services that they are considering buying. According to Forrester, 49% of consumers reported that they rely on search to inform purchase decisions, and 19% of respondents identified search engines as the most influential source in driving their decisions.

New search experiences, new marketing expectations

The evolution of the consumer behaviours outlined above and the reaction from marketers by investing throughout the different stages of the consumer journeys are a sign of maturation for a discipline that is merely 15 years old. And yet, new search experiences powered by AI are coming to the fore, and are likely to further disrupt the model.

It has been well documented that search is no longer just a search box on a webpage with a list of links. It is literally breaking out of the box; it is changing in some dramatic and exciting ways. Once a function that used to be limited to a text box on a specific site has slowly been integrated into more and more of the technologies/devices, apps and sites we use every day, from phones to gaming consoles. As such, Search becomes more pervasive, but also more personal and predictive.

Conversations as a Platform is a great embodiment of how the Future of Search makes sense of these 3P (personal, predictive and pervasive). The rise of messaging apps where consumers now spend most of their time and technological advancements in NLP, AI and machine learning are creating rupture that is similar to what we have seen in decades past with the App paradigm. Conversations as a platform unlock a more human, personal way to discover, search for, access and interact with information. This new platform will enable us to interact with devices more intuitively, using natural language conversations, evolving us from mechanical keyboard and mouse to touch and beyond.

Search will never again be a constrained to writing in a search box. Instead, search will be a partner that can listen and communicate in dialogue with a consumer on any platform and any device. Thanks to new, more natural interfaces, voice search is becoming increasingly possible and accurate. We imagine a rich ecosystem of conversations, ones that include: people to people, people to your personal digital assistant, people to bots, and even personal digital assistants calling on bots on your behalf. That’s the world that you’re going to get to see in the years to come.

We have already covered the current rise of voice search as a result of mobile search adoption, but it is likely to further accelerate as search becomes more pervasive and turns your TV Set, you fridge or your car into a search box. ComScore predicts that by 2020, over 40% of the queries will be voiced rather than typed. It is worth noting that these experiences are often screenless which further disrupt the preconceptions that too many marketers have when they think they have nailed their search strategy.

How do you optimise your web presence for voice search? How do you market to chatbots? How will we see consumer intent evolve in these new experiences? We already seeing that 16% of searches every month had never searched for before. We also see that 25% of the clicks on the Bing Network are from searches not happening on Google… So, the versatility of the above-mentioned consumer journey is likely to continue to increase. And what an exhilarating evolution it is!

Podcast - glancing at Advertising Week on Chatbots, AI and Machine Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 14:36:00 +0000

Back in March, as my team took part in Advertising Week, I was honoured to be invited by Jason Miller, from the Sophisticated Marketer podcast, to deep dive into the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots and what it means for marketers and how they can utilize the technology now and prepare for the future:

Live from #AWEurope: Chatbots, AI and Machine Learning

The story of an American dream

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:47:00 +0000

A few months back, I attended a story-telling class during one of my visits to Seattle. The team at Assembly Intiman provided us with precious advice and guidance on how to bring anecdotes to life, to insufflate in paragraphs sparks of emotion that will take your readers or your audience on a journey. The inspired us with vivid examples from The Moth. They explained how by bringing the story to life through with personal examples and necessary details, whilst never losing sight of the greater purpose, you could turn a story line into a richer experience. One of the exercises consisted in randomly selecting a topic and elaborating a plot on the back of that situational teaser... I picked up: "Your first crush". Here is how it ended up, after a few minutes of reflection:

"Close your eyes, and imagine. In a few months, my wife, two kids and I will move to Seattle, WA. The winter will be over and a truck filled with our boxes will be parked in front of the house we have just bought. The last reminiscences of snow will be still melting in the shade of the large evergreens. I have taken a big job at Microsoft, and I am about to embark on a career path that should be rewarding in many ways... A dream. Some would even call it the American dream.

But let me share a French dream. Her name was Nathalie. I was a young teenager attending the local high school in a small town back home, in the Alps. I was then relatively good academically, certainly good athletically and socially... well, I had friends. I did not drink. I did not smoke. And in that picture of perfection, the only thing missing was The Girl.

The year before, though, I got to know Nathalie during drama classes. As others performed the year-end play, we were exchanging connivent smiles in the promiscuity of the improvised backstage. No words. Just candid glances and smiles. As the summer broke, we parted ways for the holidays, but as our respective birthdays came, letters made their way to our mailboxes. Innocuous pieces of paper, peppered here and there of clumsy attempts to infer some sort of feelings. As many mountaineers, I am probably better at dealing with the grandeur of my surroundings than with the depths of my inner self.

Nonetheless, as school resumed, I rushed to the school gate to see in which class I was, and I could not avoid searching for her name, secretly hoping we would be able to continue that flirt between maths and geography. And she was there, her name just a few rows above mine on the pupil list of class 7D. I remember smiling at that discovery... Until she arrived and went straight in, without a look for me.

Nathalie the perfect girl. She was smart, and beautiful. Her eyes were green with hazelnut shards scattered around her iris as if a glass marble had been crushed into her eye. It is funny that thirty years later I still remember that detail because for months I was unable to look at her. I stared at her, timidly, but was unable to make eye-contact. I spent hours listening to lectures, half-present, with my gaze wandering her golden locks and my respiration slowly getting in tune with her own. I have looked at her back for hours, for days, for months in fact but without the courage to ever face her. But then came the warm, inspiring month of April. Encouraged by the bourgeoning nature (and the encouraging whispers of friends), I dared to call her out as she strolled across the schoolyard:

- Hi?
- Hi.
- Do you want to go out with me?
- No!

She had replied without the hint of an hesitation. So, as a good French, I turned around, shrugged and went back to my friends as if nothing had happened. Disappointed, deeply hurt, but utterly dismissive of the whole situation (as you rightly do when out of touch with your feelings). I was a teenage boy after all. What would you expect?

But she came running at me. Not Nathalie, her best friend. She confessed that, although Nathalie fancied me, she did not want to hurt one of her own friends who also had feelings for me. Yes, that made sense. Somewhat. Deceived by my own success... That was good enough for my ego, even if disappointing for my libido.

That same best friend called me back a few years later. She had found my number in the phone book and although we had respectively moved to different parts of town, she thought it was a good idea to let me know that Nathalie was still very much into me, but that she could not dare to reach out, after the schoolyard anti-climax. So, in a non-act of emotional courage, I grabbed my phone immediatl... a couple months later, and called her to invite her out. We went to the cinema, spent the afternoon together and as I walked her home our hands touched. An almost imperceptible brush of skin. We looked at each other. Eyes in eyes. I tilted my head. She titled hers. Got closer, and as our lips touched each other... Nothing.

Just like that, years of fantasy vanished in a brief exchange of saliva. So as I reopen my eyes, and look at these boxes that we have just finished to pack, I cannot avoid but think that my American dream may well just be another fantasy. But, you know what? I don't really care, as it is still very much worth living these dreams."

Connected cows and the greener pastures of big data

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 19:23:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

Remember the cringing router sound that accompanied your early internet connections? Being a 40-year old father of two, when I hear that screeeeeeeechhhhhhhhhh I can’t avoid feeling a smile pop on my face. That sound reminds me, with a touch of nostalgia, of the cry of a newborn. It makes me smile as fond memories have overshadowed the dirty nappies and sleepless nights.

To a certain extent, that sound was indeed the cry of a baby internet, when browsing was a commitment and a flaming logo the pinnacle of creativity. The worldwide web has since grown up. A lot.

Small steps towards big data

Looking back, that dial-up buzz was literally the first signal in our digital footprint. We signed on. And in that very moment big data spun to life.
What were we learning from those early signals? Not much. We knew how many people were online and roughly where they were. But as the web of documents developed, search engines arose and our ability to understand people increased. We started to know what you wanted. Think about it: you probably tell search engines things you wouldn’t tell your closest friends. We understood that your inputs into a search engine were, on a personal level, an expression of your desire, and on a global level, an expression of the world’s consciousness. The so-called Zeitgeist.

Although I have spent the last 10 years in the realm of online advertising, in today’s article I will focus less on search marketing, and more on the information infrastructure and machine learning that Bing is part of, looking at how this is influencing our future. What are we doing with our data footprint? Over the course of the last year I have asked many people across Europe how the idea of data collection made them feel. By large, the response was discomfort and hesitance. Until provided with more perspective.

The heights of data complexity

So let’s get back to our story. In order to understand the complexity and depth of the data infrastructure that we are part of, let’s contemplate what has changed since the emergence of the first search engines. With each of these four changes and associated amount of data surge that came with it, you need to visualize a growing mountain.
First is your search habit. From a few searches per day to multiple searches per hour, we are now searching constantly, and not just you but also the billions of people who got online in the recent decade.

Second is your search access. Most of us had access to a desktop computer 20 years ago. But just one. A grey, cold box, sealed to a desk. We certainly couldn’t put it in our pocket and take it with us to a party. It is not just computers, think about all the devices you own which are harnessing computing power: laptop, tablet, smartphones, TV, but also your car and now your fridge.

The third big change is your search expression. You have gone from using basic computer commands, with amp signs and inverted commas, to using more human a language. You’ve gone from asking “what” to asking “why…” and “how to…”. In fact we have seen the growth of queries starting by Why being three-fold the growth of What queries, which means we are no longer looking for information, we are looking for answers. You’ve layered sequential searches on top of these, in a complex web of intents.

Finally, the integration of search with other infrastructures has also changed. A search engine used to be an isolated service. Now it’s plugged into the social graph. This means that several points of contact are linked and with them a flurry of new signals, millions of them that only a few super-computers are able to capture, organize, model and render. Search engines are the database of intents, and social networks are the depository of sentiments. We have developed the ability to process, analyze and understand these two humongous, historical and real-time information sets together.

The search crystal ball

We can understand your sentiment for certain events or entities, estimate popularity trends, as well as predict outcomes of future events. Microsoft has developed a program called Bing Predicts which combines and models all the data signals we can find, and comes up with incredibly accurate predictions. We initially explored popularity-based contests like American Idol, for which the web and social signals are very strong and highly correlate with popularity voting patterns. Bing Predicts could accurately project who would be eliminated each week during American Idol and who the eventual winner would be. Just by using all of the signals that are out there.

Getting more complex, we turned to sporting events and even world political challenges. During the World Cup in Brazil, our team predicted accurately with 100% accuracy the winners of the final elimination round. During the last year Rugby World cup, we had 80% accuracy across the tournament. Surprised? In order to successfully predict a sporting event outcome, the number and type of signals we incorporated quadrupled from what we used to predict a basic popularity event like American Idol. This is because we recognize that popularity alone does not predict whether a team will win – Sorry for the fans. A fan base has however special insights into the abilities of their teams, and those fans are having constant discussions about their team. This is called the Insider Knowledge. We up-weighted their knowledge against player and team stats, tournament trends, game history, location and even weather conditions. This is how we were successful in our predictions.

We finally turned our attention to political events, and in particular the Scottish referendum two years ago. The process and results were presented at TEDxSuzhou.

We were and are predicting the future. Can you imagine a business need that this kind of prediction can answer? Of course you can! We’re experimenting right now with predicting the upcoming trends in fashion, in automobile, in technology – so we can help our advertisers make smarter business decisions.

So we saw how predictions can play a role in entertainment, sport or business, fine. Fine, until we find a way to make this kind of data infrastructure even more meaningful, at a society and mankind level. What can we do with this capability that goes beyond entertainment and the novelty factor? Can we use our big data to make a meaningful impact on society?

Up close

All of this is exciting on a global or country level. When we’re talking about millions of inputs, it’s no wonder you can make predictions and have an impact like this. It is just a massive sample size. What about bringing this big data infrastructure to a personal level? Is it possible for a machine to learn so much about you that it can accurately predict your next move? Or predict when you will need something, and provide it? That is the promise behind digital personal assistant like Cortana.
Cortana is not only on Windows Phone but also Android and iPhone. And since the release of Windows 10, she’s even on your desktop. As outlined in a previous article, you set up Cortana with some basic info about yourself, then use her to help you with things like scheduling and reminders and web searches. Before you know it, Cortana is spontaneously sending you an alert to inform you that you should leave the office now to be on time for your next appointment in Farringdon, because she found some congestion on your normal route. It doesn’t take Cortana long to learn so much about you that she can predict your next move and offer assistance.

A new layer of data in your coat

While our mobile phones aren’t exactly wearables, we sometimes behave as if they are, keeping them on our body no matter where we go. With wearables, two important things converge: big data infrastructure and your expectations.

When you hear “wearables”, you probably think of a smart watch or one of these fitness bands. But to go back to my introductory analogy, these are just the first baby steps towards the full potential of wearable and how that technology will be able to enhance our capabilities, as individuals or as professionals. Think about it: wearables can capture and communicate signals about your location, your manner of travel – whether you’re on foot or in a car – time of day, most recent queries, usual route home from work, the weather, your physiological state, etc.

So for instance, if your wearable identifies that your hydration is low, it could prompt a notification that factors in your location, whether you’re moving, what time of day it is and therefore whether the nearby branch of your favourite coffee shop is open. It could even cross-reference this with your earlier interest in gingerbread lattes, and the fact that it is raining, and direct you to the nearest open coffee shop with plenty of indoor seating and gingerbread lattes on the holiday menu. Your wearable might even send you an alert for a coupon the coffee shop is offering.

Greener pastures ahead

As the wearable technology grows, your expectations for your experience with technology in general will change. And that is for the better. After all what the point accumulating data points like hoarders unless you do something greater about it. And if I have learned something about the internet, is that it is a fertile ground for creative usage of untapped opportunities.

I am from the French Alps where I spent most of my summers walking the mountains with my grandmother. She used to herd cattle in these alpine pastures and she was telling me stories about how much each of her cows were almost like members of her family. They had names, and she could tell when something was wrong with any of them.
These days are gone. Nowadays a farm is no longer taking care of a small dozens of cows, but hundreds. The personal relationship of each animal is no longer an option. The story of the connected cows started with a farmer in Japan who was exhausted with the effort of figuring out the exact time his cows were fertile – because it is a very short window, only 12-18 hours every 21 days, and it happens usually between 10pm and 8am. Of course knowing this precise time of estrus would give farmers a chance to successfully inseminate the cows.

These are farms with hundreds of cows – you can image what a nightmare this would be to keep track. Could technology help? A farmer in Japan asked Fujitsu for help. Fujitsu consulted with some university researchers and they came up with this idea of putting wearables – pedometers – on the cows, and providing the data to Microsoft Azure, in the cloud, for analysis and alerts that go straight to the farmer’s smartphone.

It turns out that when a cow is in estrus, she paces. The number of steps she is taking increases tremendously, and this data alerts the farmer to the right moment for fertilization. The connected cow project has been 95% accurate – and that 5% where it misses the mark turns out to be when the cow actually skips the farm and goes missing.
Not only is this wearable incredibly accurate, it also helped the researches discover that there is an optimum window for fertilization if you’d like a female or if you’d like a male. With 70% probability, a farmer should fertilize in the first half of the estrus window if he needs more milk cows or if he needs more bulls. But it does not stop there… The Fujitsu researchers were able to also correlate pacing patterns with increased risks of genetic diseases and pathology.

It is amazing what data can tell you, if you know how to look at it. Sometimes creatively! This is the joy of data infrastructure. We can do wonderful things in the world when we collect, analyze and render the data that’s available to us. Microsoft is on the leading edge of this, with products like Power BI, Azure, our cloud platform but also Bing our search engine and its machine learning capabilities which can make sense of the millions other data points that come together to make big data smart, useful, creative and – yes – joyful. And you, what was the last time you found a creative inspiration in your data set?

The cycle of cliched cliches

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 07:40:00 +0000

The core essence of this blog has been, from its inception, the desire to speak to the cultural differences that would strike me in my daily encounters. It was also meant to bust, if not combat, cliches that so often minimise the enrichment inherent to cultural differences. Over time, the number of articles has reduced, because alterity became slowly normality, and it was getting harder to get surprised. That assimilation did not prevent me from being torn by a Franco-British Paradox, and from sometimes being reminded at my core where my roots were.

Back to the roots.

Every now and then you may be tempted to go back to your origins and to embrace the stereotypes associated to your homeland. Only to toy with them with tongue-in-cheek references, that turns cliches on their head. I have had my eyes for years, 7 years in fact, on talented Scottish rider Danny MacAskill. I have always found that this athlete was capable of bringing a touch of intellectual poesy in his performance. He is in control of the image that his films convey, and there is always more to the jumps and rail slides.

In his latest release, A wee day out, Danny gives us again that perfect twist... He dives into the cliches of a dated country life, with its lot of high tea, scones, hay bales, green pastures, steam trains, stone walls, small crowds and deserted stations. You could almost expect Postman Pat to pop by with his cat and his red van. But the heights of Britishness in this setting is also creating a perfect stage for taking mountain biking to new heights. But rather than dwelling too much on it, how about taking a ride in that delightful Great Britain:

More from Danny MacAskill:

Way Back Home, a tour of Scotland attractions
Inspired bicycle, the origins
Imaginate, an artist toying around
Epecuen, when a devasted city ruin becomes a playground
Cascadia, or how a colourful Spanish little village

Lifting the lid of the search box: Excel tips for search marketers

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 23:10:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

The motivational quote encourages us to “think outside the box”… But for once, I want you to think behind the box. Have you ever thought about the cogs, bots, artificial intelligence and other algorithms that are getting in motion every time someone hits the “search” button? The computing forces in motion are staggering and the amount of data that is crunched and produced is even more. Lines and lines of data, with in each of them a little piece of insight that could make all the difference in your marketing strategy. If only… If only you could overcome the spreadsheet blindness and see them.

Several of my posts in State of Digital are about visionary topics: the rise of AI, predictive modelling applied to individuals, digital transformation and the lessons that search engines could give to other businesses… This month, I was keen to be more tactical, and explore a little bit further the capabilities of the beloved Excel when it comes to making sense of large amount of data.

Picture that emotion

Advertising is all about creating an emotional bond between a brand and consumers. And since the infancy of our discipline, both marketers and agencies have been trying to visualize this connection. Focus groups, vox pop, surveys, research… They all had a go at it. But personally I never got fully satisfied by them. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that people give you access to their core beliefs when prompted over the phone or in the street.

Then Social Media arose. And you must admit that they are simply great for that corollary use. After all, what are these platforms but the depository of our intimate sentiment?

So obviously you can have a quick peek at Facebook and look up for the fan pages for your brands. That is straightforward as people are overtly expressing their sentiment towards the brand through these pages. They revive dormant products and re-energize old brands. They also virtually stone others to death.

But what if you are interested in emotions more deeply engrained in consumer minds? And looking at visualizing them? Personally I used to visit photo sites like Flickr or Instagram and run a query on a given brand. Type Bailey’s and you will get hundreds of pictures showing up. The resulting mosaic is fantastically enriching. You will of course see people sipping their favorite liquor but also loads of pictures of dogs and cats named after that brand. What a better proof of brand advocacy than to name your beloved pet after a trademark? Or to tattoo the swoosh on your hip or a Harley Davidson eagle on your shoulder?

Think outside the (search) box

This digression meant to make a point: we can find consumer insights everywhere. You just need to be a bit creative to see them. I remember discovering Bing Ads Intelligence tool, and having one of these ah-ah moments.

This tool is by essence a brilliant search marketing tool that enables search marketers to make more informed choices when creating a campaign: based on historical and forecasted data from Bing search queries, it provides you for any keyword with traffic volumes, demographical and geographical information about the searchers, even indicative CPC for the different positions in the auction… And it is free!

If you have not downloaded it yet, I would strongly recommend you do. Even if you are not working in search marketing. In fact, I should say “especially if you are not working in search”.

This little freeware can indeed help a lot of marketers out there. As a matter of fact, in the current economic climate, when costs are cut to their bare minimum, can you afford to research what your audience’s actual demographic profile is and where they live? Are your pockets deep enough to run a regular research to audit your brand awareness against this audience?

Search engines are for finding

Digital expert and author John Battelle once qualified search engines as the database of intents. With over than 28m unique users in the UK alone, Bing offers you a statistically relevant sample of these intentions. So why not use the Bing Ads Intelligence to run your own piece of research? It provides you access to actual logs, so you can use them as proxy for your consumer intents. How many consumer have searched for your brand in the last month, and how many have for your competitors? That will provide you with a good indication of your brand awareness. Did they search on a PC or from a mobile device? Have queries increased after your latest local TV campaign? Was your regional billboard campaign efficient? Where are visitors searching from? London, Liverpool, outside the UK?

A lot of these questions can be answered and visualized by pressing a button in Excel. Three actually.

Three Excel features to make your data click

The first click should be on Bing Ads Intelligence. As said, you just have to enter a word (a brand for instance) and choose what you want to know: demographics, device usage… And since you are in Excel you can rapidly turn the data into a compelling visualization like this:

Now knowing more about who searched, my second click would be on another Excel free tool, PowerMap. If you are running Office 365, this is a native feature in your ribbon. If you are using an earlier version, you can download that add-on for free. Power Map is a 3D visualization add-on for Excel for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical and temporal data, enabling people to discover and share new insights. It allows Excel to automatically chart the search data to see where the customers who are searching for you are located, where your revenue is generated, where prospects are congregating, etc. I particularly like that if you have your data points for several periods, you can turn your map into a little video which will illustrate the evolution of your chosen KPI over time. The brilliant thing in this feature? Excel does all the work for you. Leveraging Bing technology, it recognizes the geo-information present in your spreadsheet and plots the relevant data points on a map accordingly.

Of course, neither tool will ever replace a full professional research or extensive monitoring application, but these are valuable indicators and visualizations for a superior desk research. Personally I find these free tools simply brilliant for those who are always looking for innovative ways to increase cost-efficiently their agility, identify new opportunities and niches.

Who, where and now when?

My third click would be to dig into the question of time and create a day parting heat map using the conditional formatting of Excel to rapidly identify when is my marketing sweet spot. How do you do that? Conditional formatting is a brilliant function that allows you to automatically change the format of a cell, based on values and parameters that you dictate. So let’s say that you have a search account report that you downloaded from Bing Ads with Hour of Day as the unit of time. It would originally look something like this (painful to watch you would reckon):

Highlight each column individually and use conditional formatting. We then see a picture of account performance by time of day, and a heat map emerge. I’ve left the Clicks, Impressions, Cost, and Converted Clicks columns untouched right now, as I prefer to display those with a different formatting. The red vs. green distinction is a little too arbitrary for these numbers, so I go with a bar graph to show them instead.

Now this chart tells us a story. It portrays the ebb and flow of our daily traffic, and it clearly shows us both where we can pull back on our bids with day-parting modifiers – early morning from midnight to 4 AM – and where to be more aggressive. We have a real lost opportunity here starting at 4 PM to 8 PM to increase our bid modifier and gather even more traffic. Our Average Position and Average CPC metrics let us know exactly when our competitors are ramping up their spend, and the hours in which we should do the same… until about 10 PM, when our conversion rate drops again.

This report takes less than five minutes to pull, and no custom modifications were made to these rules aside from highlighting each column individually and selecting the right formatting. Day-parting is the easy and obvious use for this kind of analysis, but it can also assist in ad reviews, geographic performance… really, in any case that leaves you staring at a spreadsheet for hours on end, mining for insights.

To go further

So you’ve manipulated and made your data more digestible. It has worked and you have identified some interesting data points but now you want to tie this in with the rest of your company’s data sources and tell a story. That is when tools like Power BI become handy. It indeed allows you to connect your data with a wide variety of data sources, from local on-premises databases to Excel worksheets to cloud services. Currently, over 59 different cloud services such as Facebook and Marketo have specific connectors, and you can connect to generic sources through XML, CSV, text, and ODBC. Data.gov for instance is a great base of public domain data set that you can mash with your own.

So what can this mean? How about comparing the demographic profile of your audience with the latest census? Identify the correlation between your customer engagement and the weather variations? There is so much data out there, it is really just about letting your creativity unleash the power of insights. Or when data becomes clear, and actionable.

(Super)human nature

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 20:25:00 +0000

On your marks...

The 31st Olympiads have started, and I am ecstatic. I indeed have a personal relationship with this global event since I was born in an Olympian city, Grenoble, just like my kids who saw the light in London. I have particularly fond memories of London 2012, and wish to my Carioca friends to experience the same exhilarations we had back then.

The Olympics are a fantastic platform to see human nature at its best: physical exploits, determination, team work, perfection, apolitical statements and some more loaded, the highest degrees of emotions like happiness and despair, intertwined and simultaneous. You simply cannot remain unmoved by this competition. When tears blend with sweat. Why cries of joy cohabit with cries of distress. When pain is the path to pleasure.

However something which gives me even more goose bump is what Paralympians achieve. It is close to superhuman. At least that is what Channel 4, the Paralympic official broadcaster, claims:

Enabling abilities

It is incredible what these so-called "disabled" athletes are actually able to achieve. In many ways they are more capable than many of us. Actually, Oscar Pistorius did compete in the London 400m race against "able" athletes...

His participation raised some questions at the time, because observers wondered if his handicap was an unfair advantage over the other competitors. Actually, to be precise the debate was not exactly on the handicap itself, but rather on the technology used to address it: the blades. Would the blades provide extra spring and pace that human legs would not be able to provide?

More interestingly, it raised an ethical debate which tells a lot about human nature: it was less about diversity and inclusion of disable athletes amongst able competitors, but would Pistorius' participation set a precedent and open the door to technology-enhanced bodies? After all, if some are ready to inject some illegal chemical in their metabolism to enhance their performances, would some be ready to deliberately alter their body to integrate some technology that would multiply their capabilities? What is disability? Could some weirdoes mutilate themselves to compete? Scary, but plausible.

Technology opening doors.

Debate aside, I am amazed by how some technologies are enabling people to live up to the Olympic motto: faster, higher, stronger. More capable in other words. I find this exciting, don't you? And not just in sport... I already wrote about how technology helps with the virtualisation and dematerialisation of our lives. But technology is capable of such grand things, like allowing deaf people to hear or colour blind people to discover the chromatic gamut.

Let me introduce you to Neil Harbisson, a Catalan-raised but British-born artist and cyborg activist who has made the headlines for having an antenna implanted in his skull and for being officially recognised as a cyborg by a government. The antenna allows him to perceive visible and invisible colours such as infrareds and ultraviolets via sound waves. In other words, he does not see colours... He hears them. Each colour is associated to a sound, and with each sounds comes associated emotions.

What I like about this last example is that it redefines entirely the notion of ability. Technically, Neil is not able to see colours, but he has invented a new way to perceive them and in fact this new ability is richer than the classical sight because it spans beyond the human visible spectrum. Just like these athletes are not just emulating able athletes, they are defining new performances in totally new categories. They are shifting the battle ground to places where they are not disable... To places where they thrive. For that and for everything they do, they have my unconditional respect and admiration.

Digital transformation, what the search evolution can teach marketers

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 09:21:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

If I were to deliver a sales pitch I would want to leave you with one figure; it would be 18%. But I am not a sales person and these pages are not meant to be commercially minded. I am the Head of Marketing in Europe for Microsoft search advertising, and that number made me realise how much transformation the search industry has undergone, and how rich a lesson it could teach marketers.
According to comScore, 18% is the number of searches performed monthly on Bing in the UK. This represents 756M queries per month, 3Bn across Europe and this is a fast growing number since Windows 10 users tend to search 30% more on Bing after their upgrade. Three billion, that is already a lot of queries, and a lot of words typed in a search box.

Keywords have been king in the search marketing business for years. But we do not advertise to numbers or words: we market to people.

The evolution of search: from searches to searchers

For years, search engines have proved themselves as the gateway to the web, an entry point to the content of web pages people wanted to read. However people don’t want to just read anymore, they want to publish, play, share, watch, exchange, etc. The way they search has evolved too: they have gone from asking “what” to asking “why…” and “how to…”. We have seen a three-fold growth of queries starting by “Why” compared to “What” queries. This means people are no longer looking for information, they are looking for answers. These expectations have increased with the rise of new search experiences like Cortana. This personal assistant makes sense of your search history, your personal preferences, your location, the instruction you give her vocally, to identify what is the most relevant information for you to action upon, right here, right now… And sometimes without having to even ask her explicitly.

To address these new expectations, it was critical to evolve the way we considered search. We needed to move away from simply indexing documents and comprehend that the internet had become a connective fabric between entities such as People, Places or Things. We also needed to develop machine learning capabilities to start making sense of the world in which we live. The final layer was artificial intelligence which stitched together the fabric to the model, and can start taking us to new possibilities like recognizing faces and even feeling, predicting the future…

The first stage on our evolution was understanding variant meaning in words. That when you type in “Chicago” you could look for the Musical, the Band or a trip to the City. Patterns were gathered but that was actually the extent of relevancy: what did they actually mean when they typed that word?

Then social networks came to the fore, and people starting to express their feelings, their personality. This new set of signals meant that a bunch of connections between people for a variety of reasons were in scope. Bing was one of the first to understand those connections with its Facebook partnership, and our combined graph search. Relevancy now integrated a notion of individualisation. We could factor who typed that word.

Devices took off, led by the iPhone and the smartphone democratisation that followed. This changed the game again because actually on top of “what” and “who”, there was now the context of “where”. The fact that it’s in your back pocket adds immense potential to what you could mean. The same me can search for “coffee” in the street to look for a cuppa, and use the same word at my desk to help my son with his expose on coffee harvesting. Same me, same word, but different geospatial context and therefore intent.

Nowadays more data goes through Bing every day than went through the entire internet pre-1997. And now we’re in a place where we don’t just use keywords, and text inputs but increasingly voice and Natural User Interfaces. That opens even more possibilities to refine the relevancy of the results. For instance, as signals from wearables get integrated, how about taking into consideration physiological state to provide always more relevant information. A high heart rate, sweaty hands, high-pitched voice could very much infer a high level of stress for someone searching for CPR. The searcher may well be in front of a case of cardiac arrest. A very different state than someone searching for a first aid class.

By taking into consideration this growing amount of signals, and with the computing power behind our machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are capable to not only understand but even anticipate what people truly want. It allowed us to create search experiences that are truly personal and relevant.

Marketing transformation. At last.

What happened to search as a service is currently transpiring across the entire digital industry. It is putting back the customer at the centre of everything.

Great marketing starts with the customer. The brand-centric approach of yesterday is quickly being replaced by customer-driven everything, where customers are dictating the style, quantity and mediums that marketers must use to reach them and win their business and loyalty. As modern marketers we need to recognize that every customer is unique. They are technologically savvier than ever and are connecting with brands across a number of channels. They expect brands to connect with them personally and understand their distinctive needs and desires.

For years, however, we have been negating that uniqueness, defaulting to segmentation, customer profiling and other persona-based strategies to compensate our limited computing and data processing capabilities. We needed proxies to make good enough decisions fast enough. As eluded, these days are long gone. Online and offline customer experiences may be producing even greater amounts of data for which, we now have the computing power required to stitch, but also to analyse and interpret. By bringing these data sets to the cloud, unaltered or pre-filtered, pooling them in a data lake for instance, we can then plug them to advanced machine learning capabilities we have sharpened in search to identify the true commonalities and uniqueness of the individuals without compromising on timing.

Marketers can now innovate more than ever and bringing marketing to its essence: people. Thanks to technology platforms we can understand customers changing needs and connect with customers across different devices, at home or on the go. Information is moving to the cloud to help marketers quickly access and take action on key customer initiatives. Ultimately, throughout analytics, operations and marketing outreach, one thing remains a priority: delivering consistent customer experiences. The customer experience is now at the centre of the business strategy and marketers are responsible for infusing a customer-centric culture into their organisation. To do this, marketers are connecting with customers along every step of the customer journey, collecting and responding to information to deliver campaigns that resonate. They are driving the innovative digital and physical campaigns that inspire customers and turn them into loyal brand advocates.

In conclusion, you will have understood that I wanted to go beyond the figures. I wanted to encourage you to re-evaluate whether your marketing strategy had evolved with your customers, and whether that strategy was using technology to fulfil the needs and expectations of the people behind the numbers. So, what have you learned from search?

What makes Paid Search so damn sexy?

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 10:17:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

In the world of marketing and advertising, Paid Search may sometimes lack the sizzle of social, the zing of video and the visual impact of display. But what happens when we look for beauty that’s more than skin-deep? When a French guy like me looks beyond the blue links of paid search, I see a marketing channel that’s sexy as hell for all the right reasons. Voila!

Search is powerful. This is because it’s at the heart of online activity. Everything starts with search. What is the first page you go to when opening a web session? Award-winning Super Bowl commercials get discovered through search. Social content is discovered by search. Your audience might see your brand in a social context, but they’ll find your site when they do a search for you. And getting your audience to your site is the gold – because you can control their experience there. They find you with search, whether they look for you at home or on the go, by typing or by speaking… Search is already ubiquitous but it is just the beginning: search continues to evolve to meet new needs, new usages, new form factors, new ways to consume the internet.

Search is the most popular kid in the room. About 766 million searches happen every day across all search platforms in the U.S. only. That’s 32 million per hour. That’s 9 thousand searches per second (comScore qSearch August 2015). And I preferred not to look at the worldwide figures as they are mind-blowing. No other marketing medium can put up reach numbers like this. Search has become such an innate, ingrained habit that sometimes we, as consumers, are not even aware of it as a separate step in our discovery process; it’s just what we do… even when we do something else. Multi-screening also creates a new layer of behavioural insight for search marketers. The 2014 IAB ‘Changing TV Experience’ study revealed 78 per cent of consumers use another device when watching TV – and for 69 per cent of those, mobile was the dominant device when second-screening.

Credit: photo by Thomas Bayer

It’s effing brilliant. Data collected from search behaviour is a window into intent on an individual level and on a societal level. The database of intent is getting richer every day as we add geo-location abilities, mode of transport (walking versus riding the tube, for example), deeper context (she searched for watches yesterday and party supplies today – connected?) and as we connect search data to other technology like fitness bands. You have heard of the Internet of Things? Search and its information architecture are foundational to the successful delivery and understanding of IoT. You have heard of the Future? Once put to the task to understand badly typed or poorly expressed intents, search and its machine learning capabilities are now capable to actually anticipate our intents, to predict our future even.

Search has integrity. Remember John Wanamaker’s old statement about half of his marketing budget being wasted but having no idea which half? Well, modern reporting tools don’t lie. You can measure search marketing results to the penny, the minute and the neighborhood. Not many channels can provide such a level of granularity and immediacy. Take a tool like Bing Ads Intelligence for instance: it plugs you directly into the search algorithm history revealing, for any keyword, the demographic profile of the searchers, the device they used, their location… It also informs you on the cost of a click for the different match cases and ad positions. And it’s free, accessible to all via Excel and works in a couple clicks. There’s a transparency with paid search that reassures and makes the guessing game of broadcast or display almost comical. Is there anything sexier than integrity?

It gets the job done. Paid search marketing drives buyers to sellers. It gives buyers what they want. Sellers get customers they would otherwise have no way of finding. Search does everybody a solid.

It’s getting prettier. Image extensions let advertisers add a photo to their paid search ad. Same with Shopping Campaigns, which are a retail advertiser’s dream come true. Bing’s much-discussed native ads rolled out this autumn with even prettier options to get in front of searchers in a context that makes a lot of sense.

So much control. A sense of control is a real turn on. One reason paid search marketing is perfect for smaller businesses is the absolute control over budget that search delivers. Control over targeting (men, women, time of day, day of week, seasonal, geographical, mobile, desktop), keywords and extensions makes things even more exciting and endlessly variable.

What paid search marketing lacks in sizzle, it more than makes up for with the meat. Paid search continues to innovate with new formats, targeting options and ad features. As search matures into its mid-20s, we have both a deeper database and broader search intelligence to mine. The data nerds have now morphed into marketing geeks, and paid search marketing is sexier than it’s ever been.

And so much more potential remains untapped. We commissioned a market research last summer in the UK, and the results revealed that although search marketing is reaching a maturing phase, it remains misunderstood, misused or even ignored by these very small businesses who could do so well in this channel. Some say small is beautiful, but it seems that SMB could be sexier and not even know it.

What do you love most about paid search? Tell us in the comments!

Waking the giant: The evolution of search marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 09:34:00 +0000

Tribune originally posted on The Drum.

Search is the single largest source of web traffic and the gateway today for digital information. It is little surprise that the role of search in the marketing mix is an ever evolving beast.

Today, search marketing is no longer confined to the technicality of SEO, linkages and keywords. More importantly, it drives increased brand share of voice and has the ability to provide better understanding of intent and context than any other marketing tool.

Search offers a unique wealth of insights to significantly impact brand marketing strategies. Last year over half of the brands surveyed by Bing Ads used search marketing to achieve branding goals. Research showed that advertisers who bid on their brand name as a key word received more clicks (27 per cent in travel sector and 32 per cent in retail sector), with fewer clicks going to their competitors (27 per cent less in travel sector and 30 per cent less in retail sector).

Of course, it isn’t news that search provides a wealth of data for advertisers. Understanding triggers to direct action, ROI per purchase, and demographic insights have always been of use to search marketers – avoiding wastage and proving value to each campaign. The difference today is in the intelligence and breath of information captured and the ability to drive insights into other marketing components across the ecosystem.

Mobile usage is playing a huge role in awakening the search giant. As consumers use mobiles to search and discover content more and more, the data captured becomes more intuitive, personal and contextualised than ever before. Research proves that the average internet user searches online 129 times each month.

Multi-screening also creates a new layer of behavioural insight for search marketers. The 2014 IAB ‘Changing TV Experience’ study revealed 78 per cent of consumers use another device when watching TV – and for 69 per cent of those, mobile was the dominant device when second-screening.

As consumer search experiences across devices become more varied, the data captured expands and its correlated learnings get enriched. Think for instance about voice-activated search – artificial intelligent assistant such as Cortana uses Bing to listen, learn and serve relevant experiences. This opens search marketers up to new opportunities and new behavioural data – longer, more local queries, different semantic, more conversational engagement. And as other platforms such as Windows 10, Amazon’s Kindle or Echo, with Bing integrated in the heart of the user experience, means the exposure to search-supported experiences are increasingly varied.

Search is worth more than the clicks it measures. Today’s marketers need to leverage the insights captured from evolving consumer behaviour across the increasing numbers of touch points to help support broader brand strategies.

Beyond providing marketers with a wealth of information on what consumers are searching for, responding to, and engaging with, the future lies in platforms such as Bing learning intent and understanding context to the point it can predict future behaviour. This will not only allow marketers to anticipate, optimise and develop more efficient search marketing campaigns, but the understanding of intent can be leveraged to drive through-the-line marketing campaigns. As a first step in that direction, Bing Ads has recently released a new feature that enables brands to predict the impact of any change to their search campaigns in terms of reach and engagement.

Campaigns that truly utilise search as a strategic tool to inform decisions and enable personal, valuable, brand experiences to be created, will reap the rewards.Search is ubiquitous, its power expanding and its prominence in the marketing mix evolving. The latest IAB/ PwC AdSpend survey showed that search marketing is worth £3.77 billion – a rise of almost 9 per cent year on year, and expected to keep growing.

Marketers that understand the potential of search to shape and accelerate campaigns will win. Brands need to embrace the giant with open arms and stay close to the industry-changing opportunities search will continue to provide.

Is search data the new crystal ball?

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 09:10:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on State of Digital as part of a monthly column.

The more ubiquitous, pervasive and natural search is, the more intelligent it becomes. No longer is it a magnifying glass surfacing content from the depths of the web. Search is starting to look more and more like a crystal ball capable to predict the flight of flu epidemics, match winners and presidential election outcomes.

Not many technologies are capable of processing as much data, as frequently and actually make sense of it all. Search was fed on big data, grew with artificial intelligence and, if some say it is not rocket science, it is verging towards science fiction.

Brains in a box.

Historically search engines were indexing a web of documents to point searchers in the most relevant direction when they tapped a couple of keywords in a search box. Coping with the expansion and diversification of that universe was no small task, neither was the treatment of the ever increasingly more complex queries. So the technology had to gain in sophistication.

Algorithms started to extrapolate the strings of characters that were inputted. It became less about finding a specific phrase, and more about understanding its meaning. It was an evolution dictated by necessity. First, human beings are so prone to mistyping that machines could not rely on us ; second a same need can be expressed by different synonyms; and third, words have several meanings based on their context (e.g. from a PC, searching for “coffee” may relate to coffee harvesting whilst the same person using the same keyword on his smartphone may be after a caffeine shot).

This led to new functionality like query suggestions, auto-correction, auto-fill, semantic search… but also drastic evolutions of the algorithms with the integration of social, geographical or device signals. Search was no longer literal; it had become contextual.

From smart to intelligent
However, searchers still require to proactively engage with a user interface in order to trigger queries. These interactions remain contrived, even if you consider the conversational nature of voiced queries. Search will only truly become intelligent when the engine can anticipate what I need, even before I verbalise that intent. That is one of the promises of digital personal assistant like Cortana who relies on Bing information architecture and machine-learning to anticipate your needs. One of my favourites is her ability to urge me when to leave for my next appointment by making sense of my current location and the traffic conditions to my destination.

So could we take anticipation to the next level and predict the future.
Search engines are a database of intent where millions of people converge to look for information of what is top of mind for them. At the same time, social networks are the depository of sentiments. If you have developed the ability to process, analyse and understand these two humongous, historical and real-time information sets you have the opportunity to discover user sentiment for certain events or entities, estimate popularity trends, as well as predict outcomes of future events.

Bing Predict explored that concept with popularity-based contests like American Idol, for which web and social signals can highly correlate with popularity voting patterns and thus allows the engine to accurately project who will be eliminated each week and who the eventual winner will be. At the other end of the spectrum, predicting the outcome of the World Cup, Tour de France or the Premier League requires the incorporation of player/team stats, tournament trends and game history, location, and data from social channels.

The data from social channels provides the Bing model with the “wisdom of the crowd.” This approach is different from predictions for popularity-based contests. That model is able to interpret specific data as priority information such as team strengths, as popularity alone doesn’t dramatically help a team win or lose (some fans may object to this assertion but it’s largely true).

This machine-learned approach proved to be more reliable than traditional statistical methods on several occasions. Bing predicted accurately the Scottish Independence Referendum outcome from the very first day whilst the official statistic was oscillating between the Yes and the No. Our predictions for each of the men’s and women’s Wimbledon matches had an average accuracy of 71 percent, and got the winners from the first serve. We also predicted Froome’s victory in the Tour de France.

What can brands learn from these forward-looking experiments?

Machine learning models are already making their way to the advertiser toolset. Bing Ads for instance includes an opportunity tab which allows brands to evaluate the future impact of actions taken on their search marketing campaigns based on auction and competitive behaviours. That is just a first step.

I have already written about how brands should think outside the (search) box , and harness the full potential of the search data to inform their marketing strategy. Think for instance about the evolution of the geographic spectrum of your search queries to inform your stock strategy for the next holiday season.

Next, businesses can enrich their own data with real-world, publically available data sets to identify further correlations. It can be a small collection of manually curated convention centre calendars which infer future influx of visitors to a city, or richer data sets from Open Data sites around the world .

It might take some creative thinking on your part to reveal true insights, but ignoring this resource means missing out on a big opportunity to create value for your company and customers. This is about modelling the real world in advertising campaigns with extra rigor and an opportunistic mind set thanks to the accessibility and democratisation of Business Intelligence tools, like PowerMap or Cortana Analytics .

Finally, I am convinced that soon enough new advertising models will come to fruition. Trajectory marketing, for instance, would consist in geo-targeting consumers based on the location they will be at rather than the location they are, by modelling their current position, their celerity, external factors like traffic, weather conditions, etc. After all, marketing is about seeding the right message to the right audience, at the right time.

And that time is in the near future.

Olympic memories.

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 22:58:00 +0000

Mens sana in corpore sano

At a time when sports resonates in the media with bribery, scandals, big football transfers, and other big amounts of cash... It is critical to anchor ourselves in what sports are and should remain: a source of ecumenism, an ode to personal achievements and limits that are pushed always further by the human body and brain.

My older son is now almost six and as part of his school curriculum, he is exploring the origin of sports. What a better age and place to do so? He was only three when the Olympics hit London. Our town. Our sports. But he still has crystal clear images in his brain of that event, conscious that he took part in something unique, and that we expect to relive sooner rather than later, maybe in September with the Rugby World Cup.

London 2012 took place almost 3 years ago, and next summer the flame will ignite Brazil, and yet I cannot avoid watching these Olympic highlights without being moved to the tears. So here are my memories of a summer not so long ago...

Flashback on a backlash.

Flashback. I have a vivid memory of the exact moment. July 6, 2005. I am in a car and I cannot think of a better birthday present than hearing the IOC confirm that Paris would host the Games that it had been campaigning so hard for. The French capital, as much as the rest of the Hexagon, had dreamt of these 2012 Olympics which would put sports at the heart of the City Of Lights. Imagine that, athletes competing on the Champs de Mars with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop… The radio is crackling. Singapore is far away. And then, the verdict. Paris did not manage to fully convince the committee and it's Chiswick running hero, Sebastian Coe, who bags yet another victory. Paris is bitter, London exhilarated. The city will host its third Olympic games. Unfortunately the joy would not last as the following day a terror attack tears apart London with a series of bombing. What if Paris had won?

A few months later, a career opportunity leads me to cross the Channel. As Paul Feval once wrote it, « if the Games are not coming to me, I will be coming to the Games ». Fast forward seven years, and here we are. System failure after system failure, the District Line has been renovated. East London has found a new dynamism with the influx of investments made to the Olympic Park. The Londoners have volunteered en mass. And finally the streets started to be populated with new styles. Forget the buttoned-up suits from the City, the Shoreditch hipsters or Camden's goths. For a full fortnight the trendiest outfit was track suits… designed by Stella McCartney, but still.

At the heart of the games

Some had fled the city for the Cotswolds - no appetite for them to share the city with a million of plebeian visitors. Personally, this was purely unconceivable. My parents had told me so many stories about the 1968 winter games in my home town of Grenoble, stories about Jean-Claude Killy or Marielle Goitschel, stories of how they were moved to the tears when they heard on loudspeakers the heart beat of the last flame bearer walking up the stairs to light up the cauldron. Bam-bam, bam-bam, bam-bam. I wanted to live on that very same rhythm. Bam-bam, bam-bam, bam-bam. I wanted to embrace fully the promise of the games, and today I am sharing some of these heart beats with my sons (and you at the same time) with the ambition that one day we may have the joy to resonate in unison. Bam-bam, bam-bam, bam-bam. Here is my recollection of the games, an open-hearted memory if you wish.

Olympics are memorable. We all have in a corner of our mind a moment or an image from one of these competitions. For instance, I clearly remember being stunned by French Judo hero and flag bearer David Douillet's pragmatism when he declared to journalists before the Sydney games that his games would be over on day #1 and that he was hoping to carry another gold medal on that opening day. Funny enough my first real life encounter with Olympians was on the very first morning of the games where I was to grasp the depth of this declaration. Bright and early, I had gone to the ExCel Arena, only a few hours after Her Majesty the Queen jumped in a parachute over London with James Bond by her side. My agenda was to watch a few judokas fight for glory on tatamis… Or, as my son best describes it, two people in pyjamas pushing each other.

Judo: hard sport, hard facts.

Imagine that a second: you step into the arena, bow to the referee and to your opponent who in a jiffy grabs your kimono and throws you to the ground. 4 seconds, and the Games are over. Literally swept under your feet. You have not even have taken part in the opening ceremony the night before because you wanted to be fully fit for your big day. I let you reflect on the distress that the competitors face in such a moment. "What matters is to take part" may be hard to swallow at that very moment. I was touched by the abyss that the athletes were facing, and even today I remember word for word what Team GB Euan Burton uncompromisingly declared after being beaten: "I cannot think of anything positive right now. I have the feeling to have failed myself. I failed my coaches and everyone with whom I trained. I failed my mom, my dad, my brother. I worked very hard for a quarter of a century to reach that point, so no, I don't think of anything positive to take away." All is said.

Ipanema-on-Thames

Just like the Parisians dreamt their games, the London Olympic committee had managed to present the competitions in that jewel box that London can be. As a sneak peek to what the Brazilian games may be in 2016, the Horseguard Parade square got enhanced with a gigantic sandbox for the Beach volleyball tournament. In spite of occasional showers, St James Park had never looked more like a seaside resort where a colourful crowd could cheer and dance on the instructions of a passionate commentator. This is also that the Modern Games.

It's coming home.

England is home to football. But if beach volleyball carries along the scents of Copacabana and its coconut trees, the Beautiful Game still smells nowadays like outdated sexism and machismo. I was therefore delighted to see Wembley, the temple of this local religion, filled with 80.000 enthusiasts cheering the sporting performances of the women football teams. That was a victory in itself.

But it was topped by the privileged opportunity to stay in the stadium long after the last kick and to see the athletes walk around this mythic location with their medals around the neck. As the stewards were pulling down the nets and the spectators were exiting the arena, the US players walked the pitch one more time, to make the moment last just a little more. Tobin Heath, the pious, stood still, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed, as if she wanted to absorb every vibration.

La Marseillaise as a finale.

And since I speak about unforgettable moments, how could I skip the performance by the Experts? The French handball team, who had failed during the preceding European championships, were not ready to give up on their Olympic title. I had the honour to watch the final from the same stand as the players' family and other members of the French delegation. It was extremely moving to see their wives in tears as their husband were reaching the highest step of the podium… You could think that this is strange as if anyone should be used to victories and celebrations it would be them: this handball team has indeed been nick-named The Experts following their surgical double world champion titles, two European championships and two Olympic gold medals in just 6 years… This proves that one never really gets accustomed to glory. And to support my point even further, I witnessed this surreal scene when Renaud Lavillenie, himself Olympic champion of Pole Vaulting since the previous night, asking Jérôme Fernandez, the team skipper, for his autograph. Just like any other spectator... except that he received a little comment in return: « now it's your turn to get a second one! » (note: Renaud Lavillenie has since broken the world record a few times and is obviously tipped to fulfil that prophecy in Rio).

As a French in London, my emotions reached their paramount on that last night of the Olympic fortnight. As I wrote it already on this blog, you may question sometimes your attachment to your home country, especially if like me you consider yourself as a citizen of the world, a privileged migrant. On that night the answer was unequivocal and can be checked with this little test: can you listen to this Marseillaise, sung by a whole stadium, without having a shiver in your back? I can't! This epidermal reaction is worth any pledge of allegiance:

In the end, I would say that during these Games, London has never been as welcoming and smiling. I was proud of MY town, of MY countries... I was proud to have been one of the many heart beats.

The unbearable lightness of having

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 22:44:00 +0000

Ouch! I just walked yet on a lingering Lego bricks kindly left behind by one of my two boys as a token to their gratitude. Re-ouch! What did I trip over this time? Oh, just one of my wife's precious items from her impressive plastic bag collection (including this very special vintage edition by Tesco from 2007)...

Organised mess?

Many new parents will certainly sympathise, so yes I confess, I live in a flat that is cluttered... Books, toys, plastic and handbags, stilettos, pens and a few devices here and there (because the geek that I am does contribute to that mayhem, of course). No matter how creative you get with storage, they always seem to overflow. So the problem may not be the storage, but the content. Of course it is.

In fact, after having sold us alternatively the dreams that as the ultimate luxury was space or that some Swedish wizardry could help make more out of our jam-packed spaces, a more recent trend has emerged from the media. It is no longer about expanding or optimising micro-inches of cramped living space: it is now a matter of decluttering. If in the past, there was a relatively basic dichotomy between the have's and the have-not's, there is now amongst the upper-middle class a third category: the don't-want-to-have's. For them, it becomes a decision not to possess.

Inspired by Japanese Zen and Feng-Shui philosophies, this phenomenon is trending far and large in the press, as more and more books are released about how to tidy and clear out. You must admit this is in itself a bit schizophrenic... After all, avid fans may end up cluttering their house with books on decluttering!

Spring cleaning

Fad or trend? We are now in the very last days of Spring, and many of us have felt the almost therapeutic feeling of emptying cupboards and other hidden boxes from the junk we had been accumulating over the previous twelve months. Off with that candle holder in terracotta. To the bin the piles of Time Out magazines you have been promising your self to catch up on in order to be up to speed with what is hot... or, well, what was hot in June 2013 by the look of the cover of the edition you hold in your hand.

It feels good to reclaim some ground over the mess. It feels even better when you clear your conscious when you hand over your definitely too tight jeans to a charity on the high street. But it would be interesting to see how this trend evolves once the dust has settled. Nevertheless this phenomenon struck a cord with me (and not only because I have a profound admiration for Japan and obsessed by the necessity to bring order to chaos). It led me to another very contemporary divergence: possession versus materialism.

Is digitalisation cheating?

For years the concept of possession was necessarily associated to physical object. Wealth was measured by the ground you owned, the serfs ploughing your fields, the pile of gold you could put on the table... And then came the banks, and money got dematerialised. You had no more trinkets but access to money, an abstract concept. It was still your sweat and tears (or your servants), but it was no longer your very own treasure. There was no more attachment to the object itself, rather to its value.

Similarly, information which was once captured in pages, books and bookshelves was first digitised but still remained visible. It was on that floppy disk or in that server that was buzzing in the corner of the office. It was not looking like a good old book anymore, but it was still there. This changed with the rise of Cloud computing. With it, the virtualisation accelerates and objects further dematerialise. Like the golden nuggets an jewels which were replaced by bank statements, books, disks, CD, cassettes, external hard drives, servers... are disappearing from the local premises to see their quintessence hosted somewhere in the cloud.

Slowly the reticence of not being able to touch-to-own is fading. People are perceiving the value of virtualisation: easy and ubiquitous access; lower costs as you pay only for the storage you actually need; security of having your assets backed up in several locations... Of course there are hackers, like there were bank robbers, and there are still people who don't trust the cloud like many did not trust bankers and preferred to sleep with money under their matrass. But there are also genuine enthusiasts who are seeing in technology the opportunity to live the above-described trend to its fullest.

Technologically-enhanced lives

I indeed recently met that technophile whose job was to educate businesses about the latest evolutions and what they entail in terms of opportunity. As a technologist, he had decided to explore how far he could go in adopting technologies which could help him get rid of the unnecessary. He got a chip inserted under the skin, a bit of code here and there, and off he went to dematerialise his home. Sensors capture his presence and switches on and off the wifi, the lights, the heating system, etc. automatically based on agreed gestures, rules and orders passed through his phone. The keys to his flat were rapidly gone too, as his unique identifier emitted by his chip could open the door lock through NFC. Whilst many of us switch between different screens, he opted to retain only one, acknowledging that smartphones nowadays are sufficiently powerful to be a TV, a PC, a watch and even a phone. Why having a fridge if you could get his daily food intake delivered fresh to his door, prepared to meet his dietary requirements? One by one, he went through his inventory and tried to get rid of what was not really needed. He wanted to go back to the basics... Connected basics.

This leads to some interesting points of reflection: the digitalisation of the world implies the rise of a new paradigm where you can own without possessing. You still own information, tunes, photos... but they do not materially exist any more. This means that the renunciation to physical ownership does not necessarily jeopardise the codes of our Western societies. Pushed to the extreme, wealth could materialise in absence of physical possession whilst the poorest would be the ones anchored in a material world, unable to digitised... Internet behind a social walled garden, so to speak.

In that hypothetical, yet plausible world, Maslow's pyramid of needs may see "wifi access" being added to its lower, more basic needs. This is one of the scenarios that the Singularity University explores during their curriculum: "how to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges" with a democratised access to the internet as a prerequisite to avoid a new social rupture between the connected and the disconnected. This is also why companies like Google are exploring ways to give access to the internet in creative ways like the Loon project (and not to expand the reach of their advertising audience of course).

Tidying my thoughts

Personally, I am enthused by what new technologies can offer, and as a humanist, I believe in our ability to keep the potential demons at bay. Without going to the extreme of my technologist, I am slowly decluttering my flat, saving one foot nail at a time my physical integrity, my sanity, and hopefully a tiny bit of the planet by not consuming beyond what I really need. I am from the Generation X, that generation who has come to the world amidst the recession after years of prosperity. Because of that, I am more than ever convinced that we are therefore a transitional breed, and probably better suited than anyone to help facilitate and educate the change without being blinded by optimism or pessimism. We are an agent of change. For the better.

Marketers should think outside the (search) box

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 09:24:00 +0000

Blog post originally published on Bing Ads Blog.

Picture that emotion.

Advertising is all about creating an emotional bond between a brand and consumers. And since the infancy of this discipline, both marketers and agencies have been trying to visualise this connection. Focus groups, vox pop, surveys, research… They all had a go at it. But personally I never got fully satisfied by them. As a matter of fact, I am not convinced that people give you access to their intrinsic beliefs when prompted over the phone or in the street.
Then Social Media arose. And you must admit that they are simply great for that corollary use. After all, what are these platforms but the depository of our intimate emotions?

So obviously you can have a quick peek at Facebook and look up for the fan pages for your brands. That is straightforward as people are overtly expressing their sentiment towards the brand through these pages. They revive dormant products and reenergise old brands. They also virtually stone others to death.

But what if you are interested in emotions more deeply engrained in consumer minds? And looking at visualising them? Personally I used to visit photo sites like Flickr and run a query on a given brand. Type Bailey’s for instance and you will get hundreds of pictures showing up. The resulting mosaic is fantastically enriching. You may well have pictures of people sipping their favourite liquor but also loads of pictures of dogs and cats named after that brand. What a better proof of brand engagement than to name your beloved pet after a trademark? Or to tattoo the swoosh on your hip?

Think outside the (search) box.

The reason why I made this digression is because I am convinced that we can find consumer insights everywhere. You just need to be a bit creative. I remember discovering Bing Ads Intelligence tool, and having one of these ah-ah moments.
This tool is by essence a brilliant search marketing tool that enables search marketers to make more informed choices when creating a campaign: based on historical and forecasted data from Bing search queries, it provides you for any keyword with traffic volumes, demographical and geographical information about the searchers, even indicative CPC for the different positions in the auction… And it is free!

If you have not downloaded it yet, I would strongly recommend you do. Even if you are not working in search marketing. In fact, I should say “especially if you are not working in search”.
This little freeware can indeed help a lot of marketers out there, especially in smaller businesses. As a matter of fact, in the current economic climate, when costs are cut to their bare minimum, can you afford to research what your audience's actual demographic profile is and where they live? Are your pockets deep enough to run a regular research to audit your brand awareness against this audience?

Search engines are for finding.

Digital expert and author John Battelle once qualified search engines as the database of intents. With more than 24m unique users in the UK alone, Bing offers you a statistically relevant sample of these intentions. So why not use the Bing Ads Intelligence to run your own piece of research? It provides you access to actual logs, so you can use them as proxy for your consumer intents. How many consumer have searched for your brand in the last month, and how many have for your competitors? That will provide you with a good indication of your brand awareness. Did they search on a PC or from a mobile device? Have queries increased after your latest local TV campaign? Was your regional billboard campaign efficient? Where are visitors searching from? London, Liverpool, outside the UK?

A lot of these questions can be answered and visualised by pressing a button in Excel. Two actually.

Two tools to make your data click

The first click should be on Bing Ads Intelligence. As said, you just have to enter a word (a brand for instance) and choose what you want to know: demographics, device usage… And since you are in Excel you can rapidly turn the data into a compelling visualisation like this:

My second click would also be on another Excel free tool, PowerMap. Power Map is a 3D visualisation add-in for Excel for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical and temporal data, enabling people to discover and share new insights. You can therefore chart the search data to see where the customers who are searching for you are located, where your revenue is generated, where prospects are congregating, etc. I particularly like that if you have your data points for several periods, you can turn your map into a little video which will illustrate the evolution of your chosen KPI over time.

Of course, neither tool will ever replace a full professional research or extensive monitoring application, but these are valuable indicators and visualisations for a superior desk research. Personally I find these free tools simply brilliant for Small and Medium Businesses who are always looking for innovative ways to increase cost-efficiently their agility, identify new opportunities and niches.

Happy new world

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 08:00:00 +0000

Australia: tick. Austria: tick. China, Germany, Ireland: tick, tick, tick. Norway, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, USA and even this exotic country called France. Tick, tick and tick again...

2014 has definitely been a prolific year in terms of (re) discoveries. It indeed took me back on some fondly loved paths across the continents. And 2015 looks as much exciting, if not more. No wonder my little ones get thrilled to their next flight!

I wish you all a happy new year, full of encounters and explorations.

A mountain dweller in the Asian valleys

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 06:09:00 +0000

What a summer! A few months back I mentioned that I was taking some new responsibilities at work, and that despite that extended mission, I intended to write more often on that blog about my encounters, my surprises, etc. But fact is that in the last two months, I have been on the road, living these cultural differences without having the opportunity to jot down a few thoughts. 8 countries in two months… From public speaking at the National Library in Vienna to listening to a private concert of Lady Gaga in the Centennial Olympic Park of Atlanta during a business conference, from hugging koalas in Australia to surviving taxi rides in Taipei… I have experienced a few things worth capturing, especially in the Asia Pacific region most recently.

Asia Pacific is a conglomerate of diverse countries, cultures, people, nations, etc. And there are many ways to go around. Long ago I lived in Singapore where I was working in a regional capacity which allowed me to grasps some of the complexity and nuances required to deal with the inhabitants of the region. I also toured a few countries from the South East Asian peninsula and around (Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Honk Kong or Macao and later Japan), which was a favourable ground to get ready for the cultural disparities to be encountered this time around. For this trip, I had decided to move North, which also meant moving from West to East from a cultural perspective. At least that was the assumption when embarking.

East meets far West?

Many tourists try to find commonalities between what they discover and what they experienced in the past. Between the known and the unknown. At a time when Scotland is discussing its independence from the United Kingdom, it was interesting to look at Australia with the eyes of a London-based person. As such, I could not refrain from wondering if this big English-speaking country would nowadays be more similar to the UK, or to let's say to the US. The history would lead us to think towards the earlier, but the economic neo-colonialism would most likely tilt the scale the other way. Originally, I was convinced that the famous Aussie bum would be sat between two chairs, as the French say, but I was to be proven wrong. Australia is not where East meets Far West.

Looking at a GPS, you could feel like driving across British counties... Most of the Australian cities are trademark infringements, tributes from the colons to their origins. As such you drive around many glorious (well rarely so) cities of good old England. Fulham, Ipswich, Chiswick... And you also drive through these towns on the left side of the road, which is right side for Brits and other folks who did not fall under Napoleon's influence back then. On the other hand, the scale of things are more American-like. Bigger than life some would say. For instance, as far as I recall, I had never seen a road sign pointing me in a direction with a 4-digit distance. And that was a "close-by" destination by the local standards! Cars too are disproportionately big, making any European SUV feels like a Fiat 500 on the local highways and that is understandable when you consider the size of the road kills they have to face: Wallabies or Wombats are "slightly" more sizable obstacle than the average field mouse.

Everything is bigger or greater here, but not in the same self-proclaiming way that their American cousins do. They may have a Great Barrier Reef, but no sign of superlatives here and let's face it this reef is totally Great. So it deserves its attribute. But otherwise no Biggest, Largest, Greatest, Awesomest... This country has inherited from its former dominion a sense of restraint. Australia may have Dollars, cowboys, ranches, great outdoors, surfers, skyscrapers, etc. but it retained a tuned down attitude. To its advantage. It also has tea, cricket and rugby but it retained its laidback attitude. To its advantage again. In essence Australia is a mix of many influences, stirred and blended in a melting pot that pays tribute to its relatively new modern history of immigrations. And frankly, when I saw the following sign in a supermarket, I could not avoid but thinking that it could be a good idea:

Obedience and influences

But I had to move North, going deeper in the Asian culture. Singapore, Taipei and then Shanghai were on the agenda.

To conclude on foreign influences, let me kill another myth. My knowledge about China is patchy - at best. To my excuse, this may be the Empire of the Middle, but it truly is peripheral to our western educational curriculum... Just look at a European or American world map: it is hard to say that China is front and centre. So when I arrived in Taipei, I assumed that the relatively recent Taiwanese secession under Chang Kai-Shek would imply a strong, reminiscent influence of Mainland China from a linguistic, cultural and economical stand points. But as I walked the streets of the capital, it felt strangely familiar. I had never been to Taiwan, let alone China, and I could not put my finger on it until I exchanged with my local colleagues. Taiwan is not looking to the East for inspiration. Its influences lays further west: Japan. Probably inherited from the former Japanese occupation, but also by the desire to cut bridges with their immediate cousins, Taipei shows many signs of Japanese influence. Anime, Manga, Sushi bars, shiatsu massage and other Mos Burgers... are just a few hints at my shared interest for Japan with this nation. Japan happens to also be the #1 travel destination for locals.

Alien appeal

I guess we all find in the unknown an exotic appeal and get drawn to it. Actually even the local vermin may look pretty exciting to the new comers. For example, I could not refrain myself from taking pictures of the Cockatoo who landed on my balcony, before realising there were dozens of them rampaging the resort we were staying at. In Australian cities, kiwis can be seen as the local pigeons and consequently do not catch the eye of anyone else but the tourists. I guess they are like the London squirrels, the Venice pigeons, the Parisian mimes or the Dutch on the French Riviera... An attractions that the visitors are happy to benefit from briefly, but that they also keen to rapidly forget.

But let's face it, every country has its specialities, good or bad. As a foodie I explored there culinary portfolios and was lucky to be truly treated by my friends with great local food experiences. From the Taiwanese bubble tea to the bush-style dampers, from the Singaporean Ice Kacang to the Chinese dumplings, from the more sophisticated Kumqwat crème brulee to the somewhat puzzling sweet dried meats, jelly fishes or Black Pepper Crabs... I have been indulging every bit of the way the delicacies of this region. A time I felt more like a Gulp Trotter:

Marche a l'Ombre

There are then these little adjustments that you need to make.

As a sun-deprived person from London, this tour between the equator and the tropics was a blessing. The opportunity to recharge my Vitamin D batteries which have been running low for... let's face it 8 good years. But I suppose that when you are living there, the sun is more a foe than a friend. The sun is there merciless. It is scorching hot, and for people who enjoy pale skins, you may need serious protection if you do not want to look like an Italian vanilla/strawberry gelato. As a matter of fact, French singer, Renaud, had a hit in the 80s with a slang-loaded song entitled Marche A L'Ombre whose lyrics seem after reflection pretty topical:

In French	...and in English (personal translation)
Et j' lui ai dit " Toi tu m' fous les glandes Pis t'as rien à foutre dans mon monde Arrache toi d' là t'es pas d' ma bande Casse toi tu pues Et marche à l'ombre	And I told him You, you piss me off You have nothing to do in my world Bugger off you don't belong Go away And walk in the shade

Well, as a Kwai Lo (white devil), as the Honk-Konguese call the Westerners, you need to adjust your walking patterns. You shouldn't stop at the very last inch of the pavement, ready to cross when the signal turns green... You need to stop at the very last inch of the last shadow, ready to cross when the signal turns green! That nuance allows you to look less awkward when you are left by yourself, with your co-workers sympathetically smiling at you, sweating in the heat, waiting for that a man icon as red as you to dress up in a fresh, green outfit.

And more...

And finally there are other local "experiences"... Some of which you may want to forget, or you may need to talk to someone to get over it. For instance taking a Taiwanese cab and grasping the full meaning of the "danger of multitasking". My taxi driver was indeed, in his obvious order of preference, but simultaneously: chewing a betle nut and rightfully spitting its brownish saliva in an over-used, stained paper cup; entertaining several conversations on WeChat, the local emoticon-based instant messaging phone application; watching a Chinese Opera on his embarked DVD player; and, oh yes, driving me to my hotel during the rush hour with hundreds of scooters zigging when we were zagging on the sound of the opera tunes... I have not been so frightened in a cab since a New Yorker of Italian lineage boasted his vague origins and considered the safety lane between Manhattan and Newark as the reproduction of private Monza circuit.

But what I will continue to value the most are these conversations, these insightful encounters with locals who give you the keys to a slightly better understanding their culture:

an Australia-based war veteran from Scotland returning home after 40 years to vote in the referendum;

two retired ladies sharing their Proust's Madeleine when pouring golden syrup on their grilled damper bread in the middle of a bush tour;

the Singaporean taxi driver who sung a country song before starting a yodelling demo;

these university friends we left in Singapore 15 years ago and find unchanged as if we left them the day before (except maybe the additional kids running around);

these colleagues and their upmost generosity who made me feel not only welcome but blessed... To all of you thank you.

I have taken many pictures of these trips, and you will be able to see some on my Flickr or Instagram streams. But these encounters are truly the highlight of my summer... Maybe because my capillary state did not allow me to fully appreciate this, sadly:

To read further:

A mountain dweller in the Washington Valleys

A mountain dweller on the Copacabana Beach

A mountain dweller in the Great Lake valley

A mountain dweller in the Washington Lake valley

A mountain dweller in the Þingvellir valley

A mountain dweller in the valley of Kerry

Chiling Chilean World Cup

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:56:00 +0000

Emotions

I have reported in these pages how sport can (and should be) a source of deep emotions for both practitioners and fans. Passion, thrill, deception, excitement... You name it. During the Olympics in London back in 2012, I had the chance to live some such a vibration first hand. Even today, listening to the French national Anthem, La Marseillaise, sung by a jam-packed Copper Box after the Olympic victory of the handball team still triggers a shiver up my spine. It is patriotism, pride, happiness and bucket loads of other emotions that are intertwined and anchored in my psyche. Proust had madeleines... I have a sport achievement.

A cup full of excitement

I will spend some time to discuss the profound connection that the Brit have to football, and how they differ so much from other nations with that respect. But today, I wanted to share another concentrate of emotion with this Chilean video. You may remember those miners who got trapped underground a few years back. Under the scrutiny of the entire country, they united and survived death. Today they unite again to epitomise the nation's hope with regards to their national team in the World Cup. The Chilean team is facing the world champions and the vice-champions, Spain and Netherlands, and inherited of what is nicknamed the Group of the Death... Something way to familiar for the miners. Watch and enjoy what a well written speech can do... A deep emotion!

The Franco-British paradox

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Edit: a few more additions on 9/06/14

The lists.

You have certainly come across some lists that define whether you are or not a Londoner, a Parisian, a Russian... I have even published one here a year ago. And yet, although these lists rely on facts and clichés I totally buy into, I have also realised that after two years in the UK, I had not completely blended in. Not yet. And in fact, I am still enjoying my differences and am even building upon it.

That led me to think about what we call in French "Les combles" of a non-English in the UK. This is hard to translate a concept, but it would be the "heights" if my faithful dictionary is accurate. A "comble" is something pushed to the absurd limit, something over the top... The following is a list, which will certainly expand thanks to your comments and suggestion, of the heights of being a non-assimilated alien in the UK. Some are a bit far-fetched, yet you will pardon your humble servant.

Statement or reality.

So as a matter of fact, you indeed know that you are not assimilated in the UK when:

You wear flip-flops in Wellington

You kick a football in Rugby

You take a shower in Bath

You spread mustard in Worchester

You look for ancient ruins in NewCastle

You get a speeding ticket in Slough

You finish a book in Reading

You shot a revolver in Winchester

You go bankrupt in Sale

You remain a virgin in Middlesex

You keep on eating chips in Dumfries

You play snooker in Poole

You sell Biafine in Blackburn

You breed pitbulls in Yorkshire

You grow potates in Leek

You get nailed in Hammersmith

You lay back in Hastings (courtesy of Mel Cason)

You get screwed in Cork (sorry, not in the UK, but could not skip that one)

You are constipated in Waterloo

You are seedless in Braintree

You dismount in Ryde

You refuse to march in Marlow

You are a headstone cutter in Livingston

You are immaculate in Staines

You never excel in Chartwell (special tribute to Microsoft-fans)

You are a veggan in Egham

You don't do a great job in Pipewell (bit kinky this one, and need to speak French to get it)

You are a clueless inspector in Leeds

You are trading bleech in Blackpool

You are running in Woking

You get stuck in Stape

You get a mute audience in Acklam

You own a dermatological firm in Hitchin

You fly the gay pride flag in Grays

You are hacker in IPswich (sorry for the geekery)

You forget your teddy in Sheringham
You are feeding the ducks in Swanage

The British cities are so interweaved in History that their name have inflitrated the vocabulary. And vice versa. So let's see if you can come up with more statements... Up to you twisted minds!

In the marsh-mellow

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Thu, 29 May 2014 10:41:00 +0000

Spot the difference

Ever since I moved from Paris to London, my friends back there kept on asking me the trivial question: "what is the real difference between the two capitals?". I say trivial, because two different cities are by definition... well, "different". But fair enough, both cities have a certain appeal, an history, a reputation... They are attractive destinations for tourists. If both nations may have entertained centuries ago some bellicose relationships, since then the Entente Cordiale has warmed up. Exchanges between the two countries have been as frequent as a French teenager exchanging saliva with a British girl during a linguistic trip.

More recently many French people have started crossing the Channel, and no longer to discover a new mother tongue. If British retirees keep on investing in houses in France, it is more active a population that transit in the other direction. Some say it is for tax evasion, to embrace liberalism, to be offered more exciting job opportunities, to live in a multicultural environment... Many reasons are brought forward, some positive, some more dubious. But in light of that context it is understandable that people want to understand that exotic proximity. In fact, my personal appeal for that French-British relationship got me on TV a few years back, when Sky News invited me to comment on the French news that was that week abundant in the press outlet. An interesting experience...

But back to my initial question, what are the differences between both cities? After 8 years in the UK, I have now lived longer as a Londoner than a Parisian, and the disparities are becoming less and less obvious to me. I guess that is what one calls assimilation. When the difference becomes the new norm... That said, I remain French at core, and there is still every now and then a little event in my daily life that will make me smile. This happened last weekend for instance.

Wetland...

When you are the father of a couple kids, you are always on the look for new activities that will help you keep your sanity. Outdoor activities are great for that, because as Sigourney Weather pointed out in one of her films, "no one can hear you scream in space". Sympathetic friends directed us to the London Wetland centre, a marshland within walking distance to Central London which has been adapted for educational purposes for kids and other bird watching fans. You can walk around discover migrating species in a protect habitat, when 10 minutes before you were still in the middle of the traffic jam.

I realised then that this greenery was one of the key differences between London and Paris. In the latter you can walk in parks and squares, but they are nowhere near the size of Hyde Park or Richmond Park. Paris does also have a marshland... but the colourful birds there are of very different species...

Le Marais (The Marsh in French) is one of the oldest part of the city. It is tucked on right bank of the city, just off Ile de la Cite and the Hotel de Ville. It is the medieval part of town and was built upon what was then a wetland. Nowadays it is the gay-tho after having been the real pletzl. There are still some reminiscences of the Jewish past around Rue des Rosiers, where kosher restaurants and museum are available. The only surrounding humidity in that part of the city comes from sweating clubbers who are enjoying the Parisian night life to its full. Throughout the day (although not so much in the late morning) it is a vibrant part of town, with bars, restaurants, galleries, small boutique shops, hotels... And even if you are not a proud member of the gay community, the walk through these ancients cobbled streets with not-so-straight (pun not intended) buildings is a delight.

You will agree that although sharing the same terminology, both are very, very different experiences... The extra focus on the nature in London could also be the source of some misunderstandings for keen party animals. When a Parisian plans a Stag-Do he is probably not thinking of something as literal as his Richmond counterpart...

A new chapter

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sat, 17 May 2014 23:14:00 +0000

Back to the <blank> page

I have been quiet on this blog lately. I confess. But I also have some valid excuses such as the arrival of my second son in February, the acceptance of the older one to his preferred school, some family holidays here and there... And more recently a change of job. I certainly feel like I am currently turning a page, and moving to a next chapter.

Strangely, in the past, I took that expression quite literally, and started to write. This blog when I arrived in London. A short story when I became a dad. So now that I am about to enter a new stage in my adult life, I was wondering where this idiom would take me. For now, I am not quite sure of the answer, but at least the reflection brought me back to this blog, and I hope that in spite of the professional activities and other side effects, I will find the time to regularly come back to this vessel and to fill it with some goodness: cultural differences, random and puzzling experiences, insights from London or other valleys, photos of this, of that...

On my bedside table

Whilst I may not have found the inspiration to write yet, I have certainly resurrected the taste to read. Here is a sample of the books that are currently laid on my bedside table, and I thought they were a great summary of where I was today:

Inspiration.

I have always been a fan of Jules Verne and have always been amazed by how this story teller was in fact a fortune teller. Some of the anticipation books he wrote were not only great narratives, but also a sneak peek at what would soon be a reality. "Around the World in Eighty Days" has had a special place in my childhood, and it is not totally alien to my thirst for discovering new cultures. I had never actually read the book, but been immersed in its universe through a Japanese anime dated 1972 which I am discovering today was pretty accurate an adaptation despite its anthropomorphisms of various animals. The reason I was seduced by this book when I saw it on its shelf was of course heavily connected to this childhood memory, but also by the judicious reference to my new job. I have been indeed promoted to Head of International Marketing and have therefore a new expanded geographical remit to LATAM and APAC. With a team now spanning from Sao Paulo to Taipei, from Sydney to Munich or London, I will certainly have to endorse both Phileas Fogg and Passepartout's roles. The phlegmatic and time-controlling freak on the one hand, the curious and adventurous on the other hand. My personal ambition being to work with my head, my hands and more importantly my heart, to constantly learn new ways to fulfil my and others’ full potential, I am truly excited by this new opportunity.

Expiration.

This leads me to my next book Chris Anderson's The Longer Tail. Today again, like very often, I am asked what my job is. At times, I feel I am like Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, or more likely Chandler Bing in Friends... The one whom nobody knows what he does for a living. So lets clarify that for good: my role consists in explaining to small and large businesses the benefits of promoting their offering in the search results provided by Microsoft search engine, Bing.

I personally find the whole world of search engines fascinating. They are at the forefront of the technology with Artificial Intelligence, connected devices, Virtual learning machines, big data... But more importantly, search engines are a data base of intents, as John Battelle once coined it, and this is the reason why the Curator of the TED conference's book is on next to my pillow. It indeed democratised the concept of the long tail and its application to commerce, whereby there is an uneven distribution of intents with a high volume of asks for a small number of topics, and then a high number of topics where the asks are small to marginal. So when some businesses fight for the most demanded and therefore disputed products from the head of the diplodocus, some like Amazon built their success by focusing on the dispersed yet unmet needs of the tail. The same dynamics apply to search... and it is fascinating to consider what the majority thinks (or search for), but also to explore the depth of thoughts that human beings are capable of. This is a passion that I try to share and expose in my public speaking or classes.

Expiation.

I have indeed been giving some lectures in different universities in the past few years, teaching aspiring marketers on the opportunities, challenges and best practices of online advertising. It is always an honour to be able to share some of your learnings and maybe to inspire a few. The next book, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a direct consequence of my return to the school benches. Inspired by all this academic brain juice I once opened one of these numerous boxes in which you store your manuals and other class notes in a vain hope that one day you will need them. Under the heavy layer of dust was a few books that the Teenager Cedric planned to read to be better informed, cooler, smarter, hairier...

Marx and Engels' foundational essay was amongst them, and I decided to save their beards from the moths. I have since dived into this classic only to realise how modern it was. Bar a few obsolete or outdated terms, the concepts and associated utopia remain so current that it is inspiring. I am personally disheartened with politics as the content of programmes have lost their elevations. There is no more philosophical stance in the choices you make, you now elect the less worst within a single school of thought which has imposed itself as the norm: liberalism and individualism. Nowadays, politicians do not debate, they denigrate. Parties are just variances of the same flavour. I find this pauperisation of the public thinking damageable. After all, politics and search engines have that in common, it is not good for anyone to have a single view as it is necessarily partial, in all the sense of the terms.

Recognition.

The last book is a gift from a dear friend of mine... And I am not sure what to find in this dairy book. But as a French who is about to be even more immersed in different cultures, figuring out where to put my hand on some cheese, literally or rhetorically, is certainly an asset. I look forward to devouring these pages...

And I want to seize this opportunity to thank my friends and my cherished ones for their past, current and future support. I love them. I love you. And I do not say it enough, so let me write it down. That may be the introduction of my above-mentioned new chapter...

"You are a man of heart!"
"Sometimes", replied Phileas Fogg quietly, "when I have the time."
Jules Verne (1828-1905)

Olympic tears before the sweat.

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 14:39:00 +0000

The emotional tap.

The London 2012 Olympics are still a vivid memory. I totally embraced the spirit of the Games at that time, enjoyed every second of this international event and the drama that came along with it. Sports are a marvellous catalyst of emotions: joy, despair, achievement, anger, rage, sadness...

This myriad of shared feelings, concentrated in a short period of time, sublimes the actual sport performance to make it something bigger, larger, more universal. It triggers a response of communion between nations.

A marketing plea?

I am personally a cerebral machine that works on emotional fuel. This is why I have been working in advertising. I like to tell stories, engage people emotions. Too often though, and especially in the context of economical pressure, story telling is discarded to focus on transactional messages. "Don't charm, sell" seems to be the motto as if you could not use your charm and connivance to actually drive business relationship.

Of course you do have the big brands that are the trees hiding the forest. For the Nike, Apple and other Microsoft, how many other advertisers are forgetting to instil some emotions in their engagement with their customers? Some claim that brand building is not required for all brands, and that some brands do not require to create an emotional connection with their market. Commodity products spring to mind...

Who cares about toothpicks? I hear you say.
Can buying a USB stick ever give me butterflies in my tommy? Someone adds.

Well, I do think so... It just requires a little more efforts. In fact marketing commodities, like good B2B marketing, is about applying the same level of intransigence as for marketing high-involving products despite more limited resources and an easy path towards complacency.

Paris-based creative hot shop Buzzman did an amazing job with their Hunter Shoots a Bear interactive video to encourage people to make use of Tippex. And look at what Procter & Gamble has done with the following commercial. It does not sell diapers, wipes, detergent... It sells emotions! And smartly announces their corporate tie-in with the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics that surely will be heavily used in shops to drive product usage and adoption. Smart. And efficient.

Enjoy!

Puzzling Chinese

noreply@blogger.com (Cedric) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 12:57:00 +0000

Last journey?

I have written a few times on this blog about one of my favourite French director, Cedric Klapisch. This affinity is not only related to our homonymy, but more importantly to the fact that his films capture a reality that speaks to me. Many of them struck a cord in the past, but I must say that L'Auberge Espanole (Pot Luck) an its sequel The Russian Dolls really hit the bull's eye for me. They are simply generational movies... They brought me back to my own referential scheme, at the right moments of my life. They come with an exquisite sense of short-lived nostalgia, and a reality check on our society values...

The first instalment shares the life of a French student who arrives in Barcelona as part of an Erasmus exchange programme, a few months before entering the exhilarating life of an administrative clerk in the finance ministry. In Spain, he will discover life, its difficulties, its tensions, its passions... In the flat share that accept to host him, he will live with Spanish, Danish, Belgian, English, German... folks who will all help him make sense of that intrinsic mess. He will discover himself and ultimately unleash his contrived passion for writing. A year that will change his life.

The second opus takes us a few years later, when our students have started their adult life and seen some their dreams shelved for a while. Xavier, our hero, is struggling through his Parisian life. He may be writing but not with passion. Until a TV channel ask him to write the sequel of a cheap love story, a dull assignment that ends up getting him back in touch with Wendy, his Barcelona roommate who may reveal being the love of his life.

A mess, a life.

Last week in France, I have heard that my wait for the next episode is now over. Early December, we will hear back from Xavier, in a third (and possibly final) instalment of our hero: Cassel-Tete Chinos (Chinese Puzzle). The plot is a delight....

10 years after his last adventures, we are finding Xavier in NYC. "Cool!" you may say, except that his life, like many of us, is nothing but linear. He lives in NY to be close to his two children who stay at his former wife's, Wendy. He has another child in Europe but is only the surrogate father as he helped another Barcelona friend, Isabelle, who is a lesbian finance analyst and wanted a family. To be able to stay in the US and get a green card, he married a US citizen from the Chinese community, and therefore made China Town his home in the Big Apple. Xavier will discover who he is as a father, a husband, a foreigner... in a word a Man.

Call me a masochist, but that mess is triggering much anticipation for me, to the point that I have reached out to the director himself to hear his plans for the distribution of the film in the UK. And here is his answer:

YES, the film will be released in the UK, but timing to be confirmed... Well, I cannot wait. So let me leave you with a quote from this inspired director:

Optimism it is also to say that there is sadness and desolation in life. Pretending that everything is happiness, that everything will be fine, that is not optimism, that is stupidity.
Cédric Klapisch (1961-)