Healthcare is undergoing a transformation. Consumers want to make informed choices and take control of their lives, and pharma companies must be ready to meet their needs. This means building a new healthcare ecosystem that places the patient at its center, with the “person” fully engaged in his or her own healthcare. But with this move to person-centric healthcare, payers and providers are no longer the main decision makers.

So what does this mean for today’s marketers?

Last week, Ogilvy CommonHealth and OgilvyRED held the Worldwide Marketing Summit to address this question. Joined by some of the industry’s foremost thought leaders, the event explored the issues and challenges faced in modern marketing for the healthcare industry.

In this webinar, Ritesh Patel EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy CommonHealth, and Peter Fasano, Global Consulting Principal of Digital Strategy at OgilvyRED, will share key takeaways from the event as we discuss:

• Where marketing is failing to address healthcare concerns
• How “big data” is a change-driver for a new healthcare ecosystem
• New opportunities for predictive and preventative medical intervention
• Impact of digital healthcare on patient privacy

Join the discussion this week at these times:

• Thursday, 1st of October @ 1pm BST: http://bit.ly/EAME_PCHC
• Friday, 2nd of October @ 1pm EST: http://bit.ly/AMER_PCHC

Even if you can’t make it to the session, sign up anyway for a copy of the deck.

See you on the webinar!

Last week was a busy one! Stealing the headlines were the Papal visit and last night’s Blood Orange Moon, which we totally thought was a Halloween-inspired cocktail last week when the media started preparing us. (And that’s because it is. Thank you internet.) In other news:

• Ad revenue per user is how platforms are monetizing YOU
• Did the Christmas lights at Target this weekend freak you out? Blame Pinterest.
• Periscope is not a fad

Have a wonderful last few day’s of [OMG] September!

Twitter

Best Practices for Promoted Video

A new study by Twitter explores best practices for promoting a video on their platform. This includes humanizing your first impression, highlighting product value, aim to entertain, structure your storytelling and leverage the power of influencers. For the full report, click here.

Instagram

And the second runner up is…

Instagram has officially surpassed Twitter in users! Just this week, Instagram has announced that they have 400 million users. That’s plenty of selfies, food photos, and TBTs for all to see. If there’s a place for your client on Instagram and they aren’t already there, now’s the time.

Twitch

Since they claim YouTube Gaming ripped them off, spotlight please

When YouTube announced its new gaming-focused livestreaming program, YouTube Gaming, Twitch SVP of Marketing Matthew DiPietro released a statement reminding everyone that his company did it first. And, following YouTube Gaming’s robust, feature-laden launch, Twitch needed a serious update. Now, as announced at the first-ever TwitchCon keynote address, it’s getting exactly that. Source. [Key takeaway: TwitchCon is a thing.]

Facebook

Congratulations! You’re Going to Make More Money for Facebook!

Facebook, like other social networks, makes the bulk of its money from advertising, and last quarter, each U.S. Facebook user generated $9.30 for the company, $8.63 of which came from advertising. Research firm eMarketer predicts Facebook’s ad revenue per user will increase more than 37 percent over the next two years, and as much as 50 percent for U.S. users.

There are really two main ways for Facebook to increase your value. It can either increase its ad volume (i.e. show you more ads) or it can start charging marketers more money for the ads it already shows you. In Facebook’s case, there’s a good chance it’ll be a little bit of both. Facebook isn’t the only place where your stock is rising. Twitter’s ad revenue per user globally is expected to grow, too, by more than 62 percent in the next two years. Again, more ads and more expensive ads are likely on the way. – re/code

Pinterest 

Pin The Halls: 38 Million Pinterest Users Save 92 Million Holiday Pins

October is almost here and before we know it Christmas will be over. Just kidding. However, Pinterest hasn’t delayed pushing Holiday Pins. After a recent analysis of their 2013-2014 holiday season, pinners start pinning holiday themed content around September 1st.  Over 92 million holiday pins were saved and 43% of those pinners were millenials. Check out the rest of the infographic here.

Snapchat

Vertical Video Pays Off For Snapchat

According to Snapchat’s head of content, vertical videos have seen a 9 times higher engagement rate than horizontal video. Watching video is so popular that one Snapchat production company has even built a customized vertical kitchen. Snapchat continues to adapt to their audience’s behavior rather than try and change it.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, Denied Credentials For Pope Visit

The Archdiocese of D.C. have been denying BuzzFeed reporter, Lester Feder, to cover the Pope’s visit since January. BuzzFeed News believes it is because a spokesman of Cardinal Donald Wuerl doesn’t approve of BuzzFeed’s coverage of LGBT issues. However, Feder, has reported inside the Vatican, covered the White House and Congress, and reported in 25 Countries. Source.

LinkedIn

Did you notice that SlideShare is called LinkedIn SlideShare? 

If not, you’re not the only one.  The name change happened subtly a few weeks ago, coming about three years after its acquisition by LinkedIn.  Don’t expect huge changes to come with this rebranding, but one difference is that SlideShare users should be able to more easily access the profiles of people who post slide presentations and quickly get more background information. More from LinkedIn’s marketing blog here.

Periscope

Now You Can See If Someone Screenshots Your Periscope Broadcasts

Periscope released an update today for iOS users that lets you see if people are taking screenshots of your videos. Read More

The White House Joins Periscope and Broadcasts Pope’s Visit

The White House used Periscope to live broadcast Pope Francis stepping off his plane and greeting the Obama family. More than 11,000 viewers tuned into the White House’s inaugural stream. Read More

Web Profiles for Periscopers

Periscope web profiles are finally here! Read More

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

1. State the Purpose

First and foremost, a good policy will address the why, who, and what:

• WHY does this policy exist? Provide context around the brand’s social media activities and explain the importance of social media in supporting the broader communications and business objectives.

• WHO is the policy for? Outline teams and individual who may engage in social media on the brand’s behalf and that are required to know the policy.

• WHAT will those persons gain from reading the policy? State the key takeaways and how having this policy will help individuals in their day-to-day activities.

2. Define the Responsibility

• It is imperative to set the expectations for those engaging in social media on behalf of the brand.

• Persons who represent the brand, either individually or as the face of the brand, must know that they are taking responsibility for what they write and need to exercise good judgment and common sense.

• Make clear the expectations and potential outcomes should they not be met.

3. Set the Standards

• While at times there may be gray areas regarding what a brand can or cannot do in social media, it is always best to comply with the strictest standards. For example, healthcare brands who must comply with FDA marketing standards should outline this in their social media policy and instruct readers where to find a more information on FDA guidelines.

• Setting the rule for which standards must be met will reduce the risk of the appropriateness of actions being left to individual interpretation.

4. Establish Guidelines

• Providing guidelines around proper social media ethics will ensure that those engaging on behalf of the brand will always act in the brand’s best interest and in an way acceptable to those with whom they are engaging.

• Five key areas to be covered include:
  • Transparency about who is acting on behalf of the brand
  • How to correct mistakes openly, rather than trying to sneak edits past fans
  • Proper grounds and process for removing posts
  • Crediting work by others and avoiding illegal use of copyrighted material
  • Offering a value exchange to fans and influencers engaging with the brand

5. Plan Distribution

• However clear a social media policy may be, it is of no use unless employees are provided with the proper training and resources to become comfortable with the policy.

• Creating a distribution plan is important to providing ample opportunity for employees to learn and ask questions about the policy. As well, looking for ways to emphasize its importance will encourage employees to familiarize themselves with the policy.

• Brands may consider distribution through:
  • Internal communication channels (newsletters, regular email updates)
  • Online and/or in-person training sessions
  • Incorporating the social media policy into company guidelines manuals and/or onboarding materials
  • Communications from upper managing showing their support of the policy and emphasizing its importance

• Facebook is trying to make Google obsolete for journalists
• Learn what a Cashmoji is
• Snapchat makes it way easier to vomit rainbows – in an fun way
• Pinterest is HUGE

Facebook

Facebook Tries to Lure Journalists Away From Twitter

Facebook is hoping to make it easier for reporters to surface and follow news on Facebook and Instagram as well as track down users’ reactions, photos, and videos related to news, sports, and entertainment. And now it’s created a free news gathering tool called Signal to help journalists do just that. Signal offers a dashboard where journalists can follow trending and emerging topics, track chatter around public figures on a leaderboard, and search to find public conversations, photos, or videos. Reporters can seek out stories and sources via hashtag or location on both Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. – Wired

Twitter

The Rise of the Cashmoji

Before today, you may have seen custom emojis on Twitter created specifically for special events like the VMAs and the release of the new Star Wars film. But Twitter got smart and realized that pretty much everyone wants their own emoji (duh), and they’ve decided to monetize. Starting with Coca Cola and the #ShareACoke hashtag/custom emoji that started trending on Twitter the day it was released. How much does a custom emoji ad campaign cost? We’ll likely know soon, but for now check out this Tech Crunch interview about the future of the Cashmoji.  [here’s to hoping they rename that soon]

PLUS:

With the 2016 election heating up, Twitter users can now make donations to their favorite presidential candidates in a tweet via a partnership with Square.

AND:

Mobile devices represent 60% of browsing traffic for shopping sites, but only 15% of purchases. This week, Twitter launched a partnership with the new API, Relay, to allow stores to publish their products directly in your newsfeed for instant purchase. Check out the announcement article from Relay/Stripe here.

Snapchat

A Whole New Way To See Yourself(ie)

If your Snapchat Feed was filled with people puking rainbows and aging 70 years, you’ve heard about Snapchat’s latest update. When you’re using the camera to take a selfie, press and hold on your face to activate the different lenses.  The second new feature to the update includes the option to purchase extra Replays. Lastly, you will be rewarded a Trophy when completing Snapchat milestones, such as 50,000 Snaps. Blog. 

Here’s a great POV from Social@Ogilvy highlighting how brands can use these features.

LinkedIn

New Messaging Experience Comes to LinkedIn, Finally

You’ve probably realized that messaging is the cool new thing for social platforms (Facebook Messenger, longer DMs in Twitter). Now LinkedIn is joining the fun. They’ve been rolling out a new messaging experience that is supposed to feel more like a “chat-style” interface. They’ll also soon start letting you add stickers, emojis and GIFs — although, you may want to think twice before sending a winky-face emoji to a new business prospect. More details from the LinkedIn blog. 

Pinterest

Pinterest Hits 100 Million Users

Pinterest announced it crossed the threshold of 100 million monthly active users. In the last 18 months the number of searches on its service increased 81%. Buyable Pins are the site’s newest feature. Of Pinterest’s 50 billion pins, 30 million are buyable. Advertisers have found that Pinterest’s average customer coming from Pinterest spends 50% more than regular customers.Read more.

Periscope

Periscope Has Introduced Web Profiles

The social platform has recently hit the 10,000,000 users milestone. In order to keep the growth going, Periscope created web profiles.  The web profiles could help create a little more engagement for desktop users. Source.

BuzzFeed

How Google Glitch Propelled BuzzFeed Into a $1.5 Billion Company

In a recent Recode Interview, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti shared stories of the company’s early days. One of these stories included a scare that took away all of the company’s search traffic. Relying on Google to drive search traffic and social simultaneously turned out to be a huge mistake. There was a bug that Google thought BuzzFeed was promoting malware when it embedded videos. BuzzFeed forgot Google and turned all their focus to social media. They now dominate social media and are a $1.5 billion company. Source

Tumblr

Nescafé Declares the Brand Website ‘Dead’ As It Moves to Tumblr

Nestlé, one of the giants of the food industry, is trying hard to present a human face to its operations and products, and its latest move has been to convert its Nescafé.com website into a Tumblr blog. Read More

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

Snapchat Replay

What’s new?

• US Users can now buy snap replays, but still can’t replay any individual snap one more than once.
• Three snaps will cost US$0.99.
• Pay for Replay is an extension of a feature Snapchat introduced approximately two years ago. They said on their blog, “”We’ve provided one Replay per Snapchatter per day, sometimes frustrating the millions of Snapchatters who receive many daily Snaps deserving of a Replay. But then we realized — a Replay is like a compliment! So why stop at just one?”
• The feature may be a little pricey (as Snapchat said on their blog) but they feel users will want a more customized experience on their favorite app.

Why should a brand care about Pay for Replay?

Replays are Snapchat’s first foray into monetizing the app from users. They have been working with select brands for sponsored content and advertising but this is a new monetization avenue for the app which potentially decreases reliance on brand partnerships.

The feature has the potential to increase engagement with your content – if consumers feel it is worth paying for!

How should brands use Pay for Replay?

Create content that is so compelling people will want to pay to watch it a second time. However, note that brands aren’t technically supposed to have Snapchat accounts according to the Ts&Cs so create an account with caution.

Snapchat Lenses

What’s new?

• When taking a selfie, Lenses lets users choose one of several face filters (e.g. heart eyes, rainbow vomit, wrinkles) that can distort or add to the picture. New lenses will rotate in every day.
• The lenses show automatically when the app is in selfie mode, and a user presses and holds on the screen.
• The functionality feels similar to Photo Booth on Mac computers.

Why should a brand care about Lenses?

Lenses will likely increase Millennial ‘stickiness’ with Snapchat. If your brand is targeting young people ensure you have a compelling branded presence (via sponsored content, Stories, user account etc) on this platform if you don’t already.

How should brands use Lenses?

If your brand has a user account then consider how you could play with these filters to create more engaging content. For example, a fashion brand could engage an influencer to use the ‘heart eyes lens’ to create a ‘looks I love at NYFW’ Snapchat story by stitching the selfies together with other video/photo content; or skincare brands could have some fun with the aging filter.

Mountain Dew was the first brand to experiment – see example on the right – to appeal to young males.

Using these filters shows your brand knows the platform and creates a deeper, more trusted connection with your audience.

Note that brands aren’t technically supposed to have Snapchat accounts according to the Ts&Cs so create an account with caution.

Statistics Source: Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel at Re/code Conference in May 2015

For many brands, collecting likes and fostering engagement by any means necessary is a sign of a successful social media program. But if you dig deeper into these metrics, what do they actually mean? What is driving the actions? Are they taken by true brand advocates? Are the engagements contributing to the business’s bottom line?

A recent study conducted in partnership with SurveyMonkey has uncovered valuable insights into how to cultivate advocacy. With over 5,000 respondents from 11 countries, the results map how to build relevance and trust and drive forward a brand, business, and reputation around the globe.

In this webinar we welcome Bennett Porter, VP of Marketing Communications at SurveyMonkey, who will join us to dive into the survey’s findings as we answer:

• Who interacts most with brands online?
• Why do people engage with brands?
• What is the difference between a “sharer” and a “promoter”?
• Where is brand advocacy strongest?
• How do brands cultivate advocacy?

View the presentation from the webinar below. And if you’d like to sign up to receive notifications of future webinars register here.

But of course there was also news around the non-stop innovation at social platforms:

• Periscope had the best week ever
• Snapchat proved that tweens don’t need their MTV on TV
• Learn how a “Prepper” can help you build that bomb shelter you’ve been considering

Facebook

Facebook Adds a ‘Shop’ Section to Pages

In its quest to keep people within the site, Facebook introduced a new sections to pages, called Shop and Services. With the new sections of Shop and Services, small business pages can display what they have for sale, or what services the businesses offer. Wait, your client doesn’t count as a small business? Stayed tuned, Facebook plans to build out similar sections in the future, so other types of business pages can have new ways to connect with customers.

There are more than 45 million small businesses using Facebook pages. Pages are growing at a rate of roughly 1 million per month. – Source

Twitter

Twitter Opens Advertising in 167 More Countries

If geo-targeting for your Promoted Tweets campaign was too limited before, that might be changing now. Twitter now serves ads to more than 200 countries from 100,000 active advertisers. Check out the new advancements that could effect your next campaign. >>Read More

Plus: 16 Twitter Accounts That Will Make You Smarter

Snapchat

Snapchat proved a worthy second screen for MTV’s Video Music Awards:

12 million people watched the Snapchat Live Story from VMAs, technically exceeding the actual ratings of the broadcast and showing why brands are supporting alternative viewing options.

On TV, 9.8 million people tuned in, which represents the average viewership over the course of the broadcast, not necessarily the full tally of everyone who caught a portion of the show. On Snapchat, the average Live Story viewer watched for about three minutes, according to sources.

Source: digiday

Instagram 

These Are the Winners of the First Instagram Grants

Getty Images launched three $10,000 grants to support the work  of Instagram photographers. Each of the photographers’ styles were unique as they came from all over: Mexico, Russia, and Bangladesh. The three will also receive a mentorship from Getty Images Photography.

Because this some how feels important… Taylor Swift is officially the most followed person on Instagram with 45.5MM social media fans. Our condolences to Kim. [PS – IT IS IMPORTANT]

Tumblr

Tumblr Finally Makes “Reblogs” More Readable, Especially on Mobile Devices

One of blogging site Tumblr’s flagship features, the reblog – meaning the reposting of another person’s content onto your own site – is getting a significant makeover. Read More

Periscope

Periscope Headed to Apple TV – and Enables Landscape View [APPLAUSE]

It was a big week for Periscope. On Wednesday they were part of the Apple presentation teasing out their integration with the new Apple TV so basically you can watch Periscope broadcasts on your TV (we’ll never be bored again). And ahead of that existing in October, they released an update to the app yesterday which allowed for landscape view (just hold your camera sideways), Facebook connectivity, the sharing the link of the broadcast and to replay a video that’s complete. [What did you do this week?] Source.

Meerkat

Meerkat Now Lets You Download Saved Streams to Your Computer

Not as impressive as Periscope’s week, but still showing evolution, Meerkat announced that users who save video streams they record can now log in to the app on the Web and download those streams. From there, it’s possible to watch streams offline — or upload them to other websites. Read More

Pinterest

Inside the Fascinating, Bizarre World of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Pinterest has a new and quite different demographic, “Preppers.” They are considered avid DIY-ers, life hackers, and even give their tips for doomsday preparation. The total volume for prepper pins are up 87%. If you’re wondering what to do during a natural disaster, after job loss, or stock market crash, preppers have your answer! Check it out  

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

For some time now, brands and agencies have used “community management” as a catch all for any communication over a social media site. As a result reporting back performance to the rest of the business (let alone senior leadership) has been a murky affair with “likes”, “comments” or “engagement” being used to justify spend. In other words, in the absence of clarity, performance has been measured in terms of platform, not business result because the platform “Likes” were easy, they were right there on the front page of Facebook.

About 18 months ago we embarked on a program to make sense of this mess. We analysed the conversations happening in the 1,400 communities we managed globally on all the major platforms and what we realised was there was a plethora of different reasons people came to talk to brands, and most of them weren’t about campaigns brands were running or to “participate in the community”. People are quite practical and typically come to brands in social to ask about products, get help with products or complain. In fact, we found that with some variance by market and platform, about 50% of the conversations were customer service conversations. This finding has been corroborated by public data numerous times since then.

The other business significant conversations included: business leads, product feedback / development requests and of course campaign related discussion.

So underneath the conflation that is “community management” there were very real business needs that required addressing from some very different skill sets.

Furthermore, often, the community management team are not incentivised, trained or supplied with the systems to manage customers. So they do what they’re resourced to do which is answer the question in a way that minimises the likelihood of an escalation and then they move on. Understanding the customer profile, enriching a customer database and up/cross-selling is not the priority. So in many cases, people have approached brand pages in the early stages of purchase consideration for information but the opportunity isn’t capitalised.

Once the problem is properly defined it can be addressed. What we call “community management” today is actually four main activities:

1. Moderation
2. Customer Service
3. Content publishing
4. Campaign management

For the sake of a sensible word count, I’ll talk about the first two.

Moderation

When someone first posts to a brand page, we need to make sense of it, beyond simply flicking it to another department, it’s important to understand:

• Is it a question, request or complaint?
• Is this about an existing case? Perhaps from another channel or medium? E.g., Did they call first but then get stuck on hold and are now furiously tweeting?
• Are they a VIP?
• Are they a customer or prospect?
• Is the post within community guidelines?
• Is any private data available?

These are some of the key factors we’ll need to look at but we also code specifically for client and client department e.g., customer service, PR, marketing, product may all have different data needs. Once conversations are coded this way, we can pump the data into our client’s existing business intelligence tools (SAP, Business Objects, Microsoft Dynamics) or any number of dashboards for business reporting. But more importantly, when the case gets passed to the right department for handling, they have the information they need. Also note, that we look at these not as posts, but as cases, which is customer service lexicon that is a better description of what they are.

This whole process is the Moderation or “tagging and flagging” as we call it.

Customer Service

Once the case has been moderated, it gets moved over to one of our social care centres (call centres that are specialised around social / digital rather than phone calls) or our client’s contact centres for resolution. These guys and gals have access to the customer data including: profile, bank records or phone records and resolve the case with the customer. The agents have access all of the conversations we’ve had with the customer regardless of channel.

This is all well and good, but adoption wouldn’t be taken up so rapidly without tangible results so what’s the deal?

Well, the publicly available Twitter data quotes “Customer service at one-sixth” the cost of a call center interaction. We can verify that for most of our clients (telecommunications carriers, cable TV providers, banks and airlines) social care delivers a higher customer satisfaction score with a 75% lower delivery cost than traditional channels.

If you’d like to learn more about Social Care for your brand, reach out to jonathan.nguyen@ogilvy.com or evan.shumeyko@ogilvy.com.

No big mystery that Xerox CMO John Kennedy would embrace content as a way to achieve commercial and brand goals. After all, he was part of IBM’s golden years of Smarter Planet. That initiative famously created a bigger, purpose-driven platform that intersected so well with what IBM sold and injected ‘content’ into advertising.

Now Xerox has a new Web site that reeks of content. The landing experience starts with a clean, tile-based approach of content promotions that lead to articles, pdfs, videos.

Articles on Business Process

• Rethinking Customer Care  
• Three Flow Killers  

Articles on Transportation

• City Analytics 
• UCLA Scholar on Demand-Priced Parking  

Articles on High tech and Communications

• Improving Selfcare  
• A Learning Renaissance  

Content Demonstrates a Brand Position

Xerox is a brand that has gone through plenty of change over the past few years. Clearly they moved beyond copiers years ago but I couldn’t say what they stood for…until now.

A very clear lead article tells us “Work Can Be Better” and prompts us to “Read Our Point of View.” A very clear “About Us” section leads into a clear section including a pdf document on innovation under the banner of "who we are.' . They tell us that they are all about simplifying work and “provide the most diverse array of business process and IT outsourcing support and the industry’s broadest portfolio of document technology, services and software.”

Content can demonstrate what a brand is all about by delivering value in the form of insight, information, inspiration or instruction. Unlike traditional advertising, it doesn’t brashly ‘claim’ superiority. Content makes an impression and lets us come to our own conclusions. It can build belief that Xerox really is about simplifying work.

The brand positioning seems much stronger than in the past. Using content to bring the ‘simplifying work’ promise to life appears very smart.

“Distribution is Queen”

Now a cliché, the statement ‘content is king’ is often followed up by the adage that ‘distribution is queen.’ Xerox seems to be doing plenty to get their content out there.

First, they have made share functions a big part of every article. Even the pdf documents have a search-friendly abstract page which allows the content to be shared via social networks like this one for Flow Killers. 

They have over 560K followers on LinkedIn and are publishing organic posts that drive back into the content. I presume they have an extensive paid and highly targeted sponsored post program to drive the right audiences into the content they have on verticals/horizontals like transportation, healthcare, government, insurance and printing. The content is often delivered in pdf form. Originally, I thought this was a little old-school and not as Google-friendly as possible. But Xerox still maintains its roots as the ‘document company’ and business people (and Xerox sales people) still crave a digital nugget they can save on their desktop and read when the Amtrak Wi-Fi gets sketchy.

There are some interesting content off-shoots like Chief Optimist which is both a digital “magazine” of business insights – all with a positive tone – and a LinkedIn page with almost 5K followers. That offers a narrow platform to use some of the same content available on the core Xerox content site but in a contextually relevant collection.  Simple@work was a signature customer event in the UK this past year featuring Xerox Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns. I can imagine them re-using that event banner going forward.

Xerox has been experimenting with content for a few years. An earlier health-centered content site, Health Biz Decoded featured articles about the intersection of tech and healthcare. It remains live while any new content would be a part of the new Xerox site mentioned above.

This history of experimentation with content is key to where they are today.  I look forward to seeing what they do and where they go next.

Related articles

Inside Xerox's biggest-ever rebrand

Xerox Lobs New Ad Campaign at U.S. Open

The Marketing Technology Stack Dilemma

Is the 'Buyer Journey' a Bunch of Hooey?

About Those GIFs

GIFs really started infiltrating pop culture when netizens began slicing up iconic moments from TV shows and films, and sharing it with their friends. It quickly gained popularity as people can relate to that singular moment, and sharing it with their friends is like sharing an inside joke, over and over again. Just like emoticons, it has slowly evolved into a way to express yourself on the internet.

Tumblr was one of the first platforms to truly embrace GIFs, and have since been the ruler of GIF sharing. When you land on the explore page, you’ll see “GIF” show up as one of the top tags. Google launched a separate GIF filter in their search engine for you to search specific animated images related to their search tags. Facebook finally introduced GIFs into their posts in May this year, allowing users to leave GIFs in comments or a post without ever actually leaving Facebook. They also allow these GIFs to autoplay as you scroll past, just like a video post would.

Apps like PHHHOTO creates instant GIFs for you to share on all your social channels, and others like PopKey can be downloaded to function as a keyboard on your iPhones to seamlessly add GIFs when you text your friends.

The Dawn of Cinemagraphs

If you haven’t heard by now, cinemagraphs are all the rage. Its file format is still .gif, but it is conceptually different from actual GIFs.

The term “cinemagraph” was coined by photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck in 2011. They were the first photographers to really put cinemagraphs on the map through their stunningly beautiful fashion photography in conjunction with model, Coco Rocha.

Cinemagraph is the rendering of an image and a video together, where only part of the image is animated, and the rest remains static. It loops seamlessly, and its purpose is to create a surreal image, as though the image was a frozen moment in time.

GIFs vs. Cinemagraphs

First, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two:

So when should we use GIFs and when should we use cinemagraphs? And what’s the difference between them?

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, here are a few tips to help you out!

So start immersing yourselves in GIF-dom, because I reckon it’s here to stay for a while.

Share your favorite GIFs and cinemagraphs in the comments below!

We survived the longest August EVER – at least in terms of Mondays and Fridays – and good news, the Internet did too. Despite Donald Trump, Kanye West and the Chinese economy. Social platforms continue to evolve per usual. Some highlights:

• Instagram breaks out of it’s square – no matter how much you might like it
• YouTube is moving past Minecraft player videos into true gaming
• Google is so not antitrust-worthy

Have a great week and a better holiday weekend!

Instagram

NEW FILTERS AND LANDSCAPE?!

Instagram has FINALLY given us the ability to post landscape and portraits rather than just squares…but that’ll change you’re whole portfolio presentation, won’t it?! Not to fear, everybody’s doing it. And there are new filters to help uniformity.  No more tyranny of the square.

Implications: Creative freedom, more professional profiles/portfolios for photographers to display their expertise, and video quality will increase when importing full scale videos filmed on your phone.

YouTube

Gaming

Twitch is about to meet its match with YouTube gaming making interactive gaming more accessible. On top of video, music, and content, the digital giant has now presented a Netflix-style gaming solution. The first problem: organization. It’s hard to browse and discover new games without sifting through hundreds of games in categorical order. This is a clear problem that will likely be addressed quickly.

Side-learning: Don’t be a cofounder of a major digital site and violate an NDA with KimYe.

Tumblr

Yahoo Announces New Tumblr Sharing Tools And Native Video Ads For Developers

Tumblr In-App Sharing is basically a Tumblr share button, but for mobile apps rather than websites. Users can now share the photos and collages that they’ve created in PicsArt, directly from the app into Tumblr. Read More

Google

Google Finally Responds to Europe’s Antitrust Charges

This week, Google made it clear it would not back down against the anti-trust charges slapped on it by EU regulators earlier this year. The EU says Google uses its no. 1 status in online search to undermine competitors in related businesses. Example: if you Google something, it might not rank Amazon shopping ads very high in its results. Google officially responded for the first time, saying the “conclusions are wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics.” This is one of the biggest anti-trust cases in years. If Google loses, it could have to pay billions in fines and change how it does business. Don’t expect a resolution any time soon. This case will likely drag on for years.
More

BuzzFeed: OUR NEW PARTNER!

The Perks BuzzFeed and WPP Will Get Partnering With Each Other 

GroupM (WPP’s media buying arm) and BuzzFeed announced a one-year partnership. This union is a match made in heaven and no agency has had access to this much data before. BuzzFeed looks to gain insights on how branded content spreads through digital networks and messaging. BuzzFeed will also benefit from WPP’s extensive client list and continue to expand their audience. Read More.

Facebook

Facebook Periscope Competitor, Live, Should Be Widely Available Soon

Facebook’s version of the real-time video streaming app will no longer be exclusive to celebrities. However, only verified profiles will be able to utilize the app. Fans will be able to leave their real-time comments. [Sucks to be a commoner.]

Snapchat

Snapchat Is Adding Three New Publishers But Won’t Cut Old Ones

The newest publishers to Snapchat’s Discover section are: Mashable, IGN (A Gaming Publication) and Tastemade (A Food and Travel Network). Not cutting any previous publishers makes sense for one very simple reason: revenue. With a total of 15 publishers, Snapchat will continue to make profit selling ad space. Read on. Speaking of that ad space… According to DigiDay  Snapchat is charging brands for video ads viewed less than a second.

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, Pam Franklin, and Lauren Wesche.

Two of this year’s – and of all time – uber-franchises are of course Star Wars and James Bond. Slated for release at the end of the year (December and November, respectively), trailers for the films are already out in the wild; the Star Wars second trailer set a Guinness World Record. Incidentally, both franchises have made a home out of Pinewood studios in the UK, where a mix of highly-skilled labour and tax incentives are a potent attraction. Both franchises, with roots going back decades, will look to exploit a popular desire for nostalgia that is also playing out in television with the arrival of reboots like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. Recently, however, both franchises have faced existential questions; one over how to promote a film that for many already has high awareness, while managing equally high expectations; the second over ownership.

How to market Star Wars?

Last month’s Comic-Con, a densely-packed meeting place for mega-nerd and studio exec alike, would have been, one would think, a superb place for some exclusive footage, interviews or other filmic crumbs from the Star Wars reboot to be shared to the salivating masses. However, as The New York Times reported, the presence of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was “strangely invisible”, while films as far away as 2017 adorned many a banner or trolley cart. It was not until the end of the week that J. J. Abrams emerged, refusing to divulge any plot details. Much as with knowing the ideal time to start the promotional blitz so that a film remains in an Academy voter’s mind come Oscar voting time, Disney does not want to risk creating excitement in the marketplace too soon, only to have such buzz die down by the time the film is released. Eagle-eyed fans will also be on the lookout for the equivalent of a Jar-Jar Binks in this franchise, something that will immediately turn them off. These fans don’t want to be left out in the cold either, as they very much felt they were when George Lucas tinkered with the original trilogy to add new digital elements (i.e. “Why was I not consulted?”).

Disney have played this long game before. Five years ago we wrote about the careful marketing activity behind the sequel to Tron – another franchise with a long history and a rabid fan base that formed part of a nerd’s cultural pantheon. All in all, the marketing activity spanned three and a half years. Adding to the difficulty of the long lead time is the industry’s second biggest market, China, where Star Wars was never theatrically released. Different tactics for raising awareness might be needed here, but in full knowledge that any materials will quickly make their way online and around the world.

Until now, prominent activity has been otherwise limited to a Vanity Fair cover article and a Secret Cinema screening of Empire Strikes Back that has had most of London’s 20-30somethings raving all summer. It will be difficult to gauge how much or little the marketing activity has to do with the latest iteration of such a powerful icon of culture and film; Disney must do its best to ensure its fans are kept happy but craving until December.

Who will own the right to show Bond?

Skyfall, released in 2012, was Bond’s most successful offering to date. But this year’s outing, Spectre, will be the last before a deal ends between Sony Pictures and MGM / EON, the latter being the rights owners, who plan to shop distribution rights to a different studio. This would be a significant hit to the brand equity of a studio that has seen too few box office successes of late, arguably too many Spider-Man reboots, and the too-sorry tale of a cyberattack that exposed painfully frank emails, budgets, and salaries. Its stable of franchises is low compared to its peers; Universal finds itself with a newly-rejuvenated cash cow in the form of Jurassic World; Warner Brothers has its DC Comics franchise.

Outside of the brand though, the financial impact could be limited. While Sony had a 50% equity stake in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, according to the FT this was reduced to 20% for Skyfall and Spectre. “While it’s a good piece of business the financial upside or downside is not significant on either end”, a person close to the studio told the paper.

Likely suitors look to be 21st Century Fox – which has enjoyed a long relationship with MGM as its home entertainment distribution partner for a decade – or Warners, which distributed MGM’s Hobbit trilogy. Furthermore, the FT reports that “Kevin Tsujihara, the Warner Bros chairman, is a close friend of Gary Barber, his opposite number at MGM. The two have invested in several racehorses together, including Comma to the Top, which they bought for $22,000 and which had career earnings of more than $1.3m”. As with all things, timing will be everything as MGM ponders an IPO, which might see a higher valuation with a new studio deal in the offing.

En investissant les murs du Club 79 de Laurent de Gourcuff dès le 2 septembre, c’est plus une renaissance qu’un déménagement que nous promet son créateur Philippe Fatien et une équipe de designer (François Frossard) et directeur artistique (Marmott) très mobilisés. Une renaissance qui a commencé en dévoilant son nouveau logo il y a quelques semaines :

Visiter grâce à Laurent Guyot le lieu 6 jours avant son ouverture était un beau cadeau et donne très envie de croire en la résurrection d’un lieu mythique synonyme de fête et d’avant-garde. L’occasion de faire un point sur ce qui nous attend.

Un design exigeant intégrant rétro et technologie

La grande salle encore en travaux, longée par deux espaces VIP, prolongée par une rotonde privatisable est ponctuée de poteaux habillés dans un esprit boule à facette qui laisse imaginer une ambiance lumineuse assez unique.

Au-delà de la scène qui sera équipée d’une cabine en verre dans le vide « telle une proue de navire » pour accueillir le DJ, c’est sans doute le système de projecteurs lumineux au plafond qui imprime le sentiment de découvrir une salle de concert ou spectacle plus qu’un simple night club. L’ensemble occupe 1.200 m² agencés de façon à réserver de la place aussi bien aux danseurs qu’aux VIP attablés.

Le bar, placé au centre du club, est encadré par un immense miroir, reprenant le baroque des miroirs vénitiens.

La rotonde privatisable est « conçue comme une véritable suite d’hôtel, ornée de milliers de miroirs biseautés sur les murs et agrémentée de banquettes en arc de cercle en python beige, elle peut accueillir jusqu’à 50 privilégiés qui vivront un moment clubbing unique… »

Au final, le résultat devrait être à peu près aussi spectaculaire que la promesse :

 

Quelques cerises sur la gâteau qui comptent (pour moi)(et le DA visiblement) :

L’espace fumoir est grand, totalement intégré au Club avec la même qualité sonore et devrait s’habiller de jeux d’Arcade qui me semblent bienvenus

Les toilettes font l’objet d’une attention du DA qui mesure que la qualité d’un lieu se mesure aussi à l’inventivité de ce lieu que tout le monde visitera dans la soirée. Il faudra à ce stade se contenter d’un néon déjà en place.

Une programmation ambitieuse, des invités prestigieux pour mélanger les communautés

Inviter David Guetta à la soirée d’ouverture du 2 septembre est un signal fort de retour aux sources… qui ne dit pas tout.

Les rendez-vous mythiques et installés seront toujours là : Disco Queen le lundi, Ladies Night le mercredi, soirée Gay le dimanche soir mais de nombreuses autres surprises sont attendues avec les danseuses du Lido et du Crazy Horse, des DJ londoniens en vue, « des spectacles étonnants par une troupe freaky qui n’a aucune limite, une fois par mois ». Des croisements avec des soirées parisiennes hype telles que la très gay très friendly Club Sandwich sont également sur les rails.

L’enjeu est de séduire une clientèle plus variée, avec une montée en gamme parmi les plus select des clients, en s’affranchissant des castes de la nuit parisienne. Ce qui sera possible avec un plateau de VIP qui ne peuvent pas être tous anonymes. Ainsi, on attend déjà notamment Steve Aoki le 18 septembre, Kavinski le 23 octobre… et Madonna en after show en décembre ! On aprle également de Pharrell Williams et Kanye West très prochainement.

La direction en a bien conscience : tout est en place pour réussir le lancement, le challenge sera de tenir dans la durée et retrouver un nouvel âge d’or au croisement du retour aux sources et de l’innovation.

 

Le Queen Club s’installe au 79 avenue des Champs Elysées à compter du 2 septembre, son site web est attendu en fin de semaine, son actu est déjà déclinée sur les réseaux sociaux Facebook, Twitter et Instagram.

The post Virtual Reality is Reality: E3 2015 Recap appeared first on Tech PR Nibbles*.

In Austria last year, the winner of Eurovision’s popular song contest was a 26 year old drag queen with a beard named Conchita Wurst. Earlier this year, Sweden officially became the first country to add a gender neutral pronoun to its official dictionary. At the same time, Facebook expanded their already broad 58 gender options to now allow a custom unlimited field for users to designate their own gender identities. In May, Time magazine published a cover story about the “Transgender Tipping Point” featuring Orange Is The New Black star Laverne Cox. And just last week Target stopped labeling toys as being for boys or girls and instituted gender free labeling.

All of this flux is creating a paradox of interesting questions for anyone selling any product traditionally targeted at one gender or another. Are you ready to sell dolls to boys or footballs to girls?  How about bras to men or beer to women?  The traditional lines that were once drawn so definitively around broad product categories that entire marketing teams and experts even branded themselves as experts in marketing to women or men are now breaking down.

Earlier today while speaking at a gathering of the top digital marketers and brands in Mexico for IAB Conecta 2015, I shared some insights on trends and the art of predicting the future. The rise of women and examples of gender free labeling of toys or the rise of super heroines in entertainment are themes I have spoken and written about before in my trend report from last year.

Now nearly two years later the trend has broadened to a wider questioning and reinvention of the role of gender itself in they identity of individuals and consumers.  Pam Grossman from Getty Images, another speaker at IAB Conecta, added even more context to this idea speaking about trends in visual images being used and searched for by brands and agencies creating global marketing and advertising.

Inspired by the search and image usage data Getty collects from sales of stock imagery, one of the biggest visual trends she spotlighted was a trend named “GenderBlend”  – the gradual blurring of gender identity in images that were being requested and purchased from Getty’s vast catalog. This trend even led Getty to create their “Lean In Collection” depicting women in powerful situations and poses. So what does this mean for brands who still want to promote products to consumers who are rethinking these traditional gender descriptions?

Applying these insights to marketing, I believe there are three fundamental conclusions we can reach about how to market effectively in this post gender world:

1. Rethink gender roles in imagery – One theme that came through clearly from Pam’s presentation about Getty Images was that there is now a vast collection of images showing men and women in equal business situations and leaving behind traditional roles. The global searches for “Dads Changing Diapers,” for example, has increased 7x in the past three years. As this search for new types of imagery continues, it will be important to find and use evolved images illustrating new gender roles and relationships to influence consumers.
2. Expand your target market - A decade ago, Harley Davidson featured scantily clad women to sell motorcycles to men. Today they have a robust and successful division focused on marketing and selling bikes to women. What their example proves is that history and legacy don’t need to be forgotten in order to evolve and get smarter. What if you could double your target market overnight, simply by thinking more broadly about who your customers really are?
3. Make gender irrelevant - Part of the challenge when it comes to shifting our thinking on marketing is realizing just how baked in gender stereotypes are to the packaging and descriptions of the products we buy.  Do you unintentionally use “he” when describing your customer?  Do your two product options really need to be blue and pink?  Sometimes the best way to make your marketing more broadly appealing is to make the role of gender irrelevant within it.

Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator and the WSJ best selling author of Non-Obvious – a new book about business trends and how to predict the future. Previously trends he has written about include the rise of powerful women, optimistic aging, and anti-stereotyping. His trend research and an excerpt of his latest book are available at www.nonobviousbook.com.

Un puzzle mental qui finit par s’imbriquer d’un coup

Quand une problématique doit être résolue, hormis en situation de crise où la rapidité n’est pas une option, un processus itératif me fait passer dans un laps de temps que je ne maîtrise jamais assez  de la situation où « je n’ai aucune idée » à celle où « je déroule une note de recommandation en 10 minutes ». Entre les deux, je consulte de nombreuses sources, j’échange avec des spécialistes et des néophytes, je vais au cinéma ou me promène dans Paris, je me nourris des morceaux de vie de mes proches… Je constitue un puzzle mental constitué d’un ensemble désorganisé de convictions, d’idées et de mécaniques qui finissent par s’imbriquer le plus souvent un matin au réveil, sans que j’ai eu l’impression d’y réfléchir toute la nuit.

Une méthode professionnelle involontaire

Cette méthode involontaire s’est appliquée naturellement à la rédaction de billets pour le blog ou Le Plus avec un angle qui apparaît longtemps après que j’ai tourné autour d’un thème ou d’un sujet que je voulais traiter. Elle s’impose à tous mes projets professionnels qui nécessitent de structurer la pensée. Ce qui s’avère au final aussi incontrôlable que confortable pour moi et aussi peu gérable qu’agréable pour mon entourage qui me trouve souvent soudainement absent des conversations. « Tu es ailleurs ».

Ce fonctionnement me détourne de la fulgurance dont j’aurais tant aimé être doté et que j’admire tellement chez les autres. J’arrive parfois à compenser et gagner en rapidité grâce à une intuition nourrie d’années d’expérience qui peuvent faire illusion mais ne suffisent pas à me satisfaire pleinement.

Lorsque tout à coup « tout s’éclaire » dans ma vie personnelle

Depuis quelques années, j’ai développé dans ma vie personnelle, sans doute en partie par voie de conséquence à mon attention fluctuante, un processus similaire mais encore moins maîtrisé. Après que de nombreux signaux aient été émis par des voies diverses, sans que je n’y ai prêté une attention suffisante ou alors que ça m’arrangeait de ne pas les voir, un détail fait tout basculer. Un mot, une intonation, un regard fuyant peuvent tout déclencher. En un millième de secondes, ce qui n’était que des bribes éclatées d’informations s’alignent pour constituer une réalité évidente, pleine de sens mais souvent beaucoup plus désagréable que d’orchestrer une solution face à un enjeu de communication.

Ça m’est arrivé lorsque 2 mots de trop, anodins en apparence, m’ont fait réaliser que j’étais victime depuis des mois d’un énorme mensonge multi couches fabriqué par un cerveau occupé par plusieurs personnalités. Alors que des amis m’avaient mis en garde et que tellement d’éléments auraient pu me permettre de le déceler en quelques jours.

Une autre fois, de nombreux signaux de burn out s’étaient manifestés sans que je ne les repère. C’est dans le regard d’un inconnu dans le métro un lundi matin en allant au bureau que j’ai réalisé mon état pour m’amener à me débrancher immédiatement de toute pression professionnelle et sociale.

Pour tenter d’imager, je ressens dans ces moments là quelque chose de très proche de ce que « vit » Bruce Willis à la fin de Sixième Sens. Certes, en beaucoup moins dramatique. J’aimerais que ce phénomène s’efface avec le temps, ça n’en prend pas le chemin puisque je l’ai expérimenté plusieurs fois depuis juillet, en dînant avec des amis ou en échangeant avec ma famille. C’est sans doute le signe d’un éparpillement qui m’amène à me reconcentrer sur moins de projets et aborder la rentrer avec plus de focus et moins de puzzles.

J’ai regretté la mise en place un peu longue (1 épisode de trop) puis je me suis laissé embarquer. Je sais déjà que quelques scènes resteront parmi mes moments de série préférés pour la vie. Le concert figure aux côtés des dernières minutes du final de « Six feet under », de la mort de Joyce Summers dans « Buffy » et du face à face entre Walt et son beau frère dans « Breaking Bad ». C’est dire.

C’est aussi la série qui m’a fait craquer pour la plupart des membres du casting, filles, garçons… ou même trans.

La sublime et lumineuse Tena Desae est indienne mais aussi mannequin (tu penses), on a instantanément envie de la prendre dans ses bras quand elle déboule, ce que ne se prive pas de faire Max Riemelt, l’allemand de la série (qu’on aime aussi)

La bombe du mois s’intitule Miguel Angel Silvestre rien que pour nous faire penser à un gros minet, il est espagnol et sait donner très très envie de voyager du côté de Madrid (presque autant que son collègue Alfonso Herrera)

La surprise de l’année est une célèbre transsexuelle américaine, Jamie Clayton, qui a accessoirement la voix la plus craquante de l’univers et du coup tout le monde l’aime

Sympas, les scénaristes ont choisi de ne pas cacher grand chose de leur anatomie, en particulier dans la scène d’orgie de l’épisode 6 qui a fait son petit effet cet été (elle est sur YouTube mais je vais pas faire du racolage en vous l’insérant ici hein).

Mais je n’ai pas envie d’écrire sur #Sense8 : tout le monde l’a fait et tout le monde aime, du coup c’est lassant.

Ce qui me donne envie d’écrire, c’est plutôt la façon dont la chaîne a permis hier  à l’équipe de la série de partager avec ses fans la joie de revenir en saison 2.

Tout a commencé le 8 août avec une journée spéciale anniversaire (tous les personnages sont nés le même jour)

Happy birthday to we #Sense8 pic.twitter.com/unlN4PHQsk

— Netflix US (@netflix) 9 Août 2015

We sens-ate all the cake and got a little surprise. #Sense8 https://t.co/QgyWseZqjD — Sense8 (@sense8) 8 Août 2015

Qui a basculé vers une grande annonce à 17h

Birthdays are just the beginning. #sense8 is reborn. https://t.co/tmMV66gKhm — Netflix US (@netflix) 8 Août 2015

Prolongé par quelques caméos des acteurs sur leurs comptes Instagram/Twitter/Facebook 

Season two! Segunda temporada! Love from Noemi and Lito! @MsJamieClayton @sense8 pic.twitter.com/UdCVEyIBvw

— MiguelAngelSilvestre (@ma_silvestre) 8 Août 2015

On est donc quelques-uns à être bien contents que la saison 2 arrive. Et on attend d’autres innovations vestimentaires que le combo boxer-une-chaussette-une-chaussure

No flip-flop? No pants? No problem. #NationalUnderwearDay pic.twitter.com/ITIN7ipcle

— Sense8 (@sense8) 5 Août 2015

Pour patienter, tous ceux qui ont vu Sense8 ne doivent pas rater le documentaire « La création du monde » qui donne envie de revoir immédiatement l’intégralité de la saison 1. J’y retourne.

The measurement of native content and advertising remains behind the times, though. Too many publishers venturing into this space have not cracked the code on measuring effectiveness. Too many rely on the metrics of display advertising (e.g. clickthroughs) or on “engagement” metrics with no context.

Two Types of Native

Think about two different expressions of native advertising. Working with an experienced publisher – Bloomberg, Forbes, NYTimes, etc... - brands can create co-produced content that appears on the publisher’s site. Advertising across the site drives publisher traffic into the content. Links within or adjacent to the content drive clickthroughs to the brand’s web site. For simplicity’s sake, I will call this approach ‘native content.’

A variant comes from the native ad networks like Taboola, Sharethrough or Outbrain that distribute content headlines into contextually relevant places within established content sites across the Web. My brand story on supply chain risks for small business might sit at the bottom of a Businessweek article on supply chain and drives interested readers directly to my site. Let’s call this a native network.

Need a Step Change Improvement on Native Metrics

Both are examples of native advertising. Both need a step-change improvement in measuring effectiveness.

With native content, brands want to drive engagement metrics (i.e. time spent, pages consumed, shares) with the content itself. They also want to improve brand metrics through some combination of delivering authentically valuable content and doing so alongside a trusted media brand. Are clickthroughs important? If I have an article on Businessweek on supply chain risks and one on my own brand Web site, my goal is similar. I want to connect with prospects/customers before the buying cycle. I want them to get value out of the content and associate that value with my brand. That happens when they consume the content or share it. They don’t need to clickthrough. Still, clickthroughs from native content to my Web site help connect readers with similar content and establish my brand as the source of the expertise. Clickthroughs are important, they just aren’t the only KPI nor the way to justify the expense of a native content program.

The WSJ blog covered the problem as reflected in a recent ANA survey:

“The lack of consensus on those questions (how to measure native) was highlighted by a recent Association of National Advertisers survey, in which marketers reported using a wide range of metrics to judge their native ad campaigns. When asked which measurement is “most important,” respondents said everything from brand lift and awareness to click-throughs, social media sharing rates, time spent, purchase intent, lead generation and more.”

Engagement Metrics, Attribution and Brand Lift

The get it right, to know what these native content programs do for our marketing mix and how to price and therefore pay for them, we need to focus on engagement numbers, crack the code on attribution – both short term and longer term – and value ‘brand lift.’

Time spent on a site or with an article is valuable. Number of pages read within a site of related content also matters. How many times a piece of content is shared is also a really good thing. These KPIs are at the heart of the value of a native program. But too often we lack any type of benchmarking or context. The publishers are just now accruing experience with brand programs. We don’t have a bank of benchmarks to compare performance of brand content specifically. Publishers routinely don’t want to share editorial performance metrics as a benchmark believing the advertiser-sparked content is a different species all together.

@BrianHonigman wrote an interesting piece on the Skyword blog about focusing on engagement or “attention.”

 “Take the social sharing your sponsored content receives and measure it against the attention minutes each piece of content drove while considering clicks, conversions, and referral traffic as a part of the equation. This will help you determine how much of an impact your content made on readers or viewers. By analyzing the social shares your sponsored content generates, you’ll likely be able to see the brand lift achieved by leveraging a publisher’s brand equity. In other words, you’ll get a better idea of the trust you’re developing with customers by sponsoring content on a trusted publisher’s website.” 

How does engagement sell? That’s always the next logical question. We need to adopt a view of the buyer journey that puts value on engaging someone over a longer buying cycle. That requires some POV on how content engagement plays an ‘assist’ role in a sale. Part of that might be reflected in brand lift metrics. These are usually done by the publisher and ask survey questions about preference or demand.  Of course, brand metrics require business leaders to believe that ‘brand sells,’ but that is a whole different argument and blog post. For the sake of this one, I believe strongly that brand sells.

One way to value how content contributes to sales is to understand the hand-off between native content or native networks and brand web sites where the latter have strong calls-to-action as readers move further into the journey (e.g. when business leaders wrestling with supply chain problems are ready to consider and evaluate commercial insurance to protect them from supply chain exposures.)

Peter Chen @ZPCeee, a marketing consultant, is thinking of ways brands can get at this value.  The Content Promotion Lifecycle is one way to better understand if the yield of native advertising networks (e.g. Taboola, ShareThrough, Outbrain) is valuable or too unqualified

“We can quantify the effectiveness of native advertising in two dimensions. One dimension is the advertising metrics measuring the efficacy of the ad itself – did the audience actually engage with this ad?

The other dimension is the engagement metrics assessing how people engaged with the “product” after viewing the ad. In theory, those who clicked on the ad were qualified, but how can we find the ads that generated the most amount of qualified traffic?”

DIY Content Metrics for Brands

Even as publishers refine their native content opportunities for brands, they will continue to lag in terms of the most relevant metrics. Their sales force sells against cpms, clickthourghs and the like. That ocean liner will take a while to navigate to a new course.

Brands will have to establish their own values for engagement with their content and begin to amass benchmarks from working with several publishers.

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Bien sûr, 10 ans plus tard, j’y écris moins mais c’est ici que je me suis tout permis, décrétant que j’étais chez moi, ce qui me donnait globalement le droit d’ignorer absolument le jugement de ceux qui venaient me lire.

Ce blog m’a surtout permis de passer de l’état de besogneux solitaire à celui de chanceux très entouré, il m’a offert de la visibilité, des opportunités incroyables, un statut de célébrité dans mon immeuble. Et un peu le dream job que j’ai depuis bientôt 9 ans.

J’y ai été sérieux en parlant de marketing (surtout au début), passionné en parlant de séries (avant de le faire ailleurs), grave en évoquant des sujets personnels (trop ?), régressif notamment avec quelques vidéos où je fais n’importe quoi.

Pour mes 10 ans de blog, j’ai donc envie de retenir un mélange des 4.

Le brief : une vidéo pour mes amis de Besançon avec lesquels je chantais il y a 25 ans (et que j’ai pas revu très souvent depuis). Pour une compil avant / après qui fêtait nos retrouvailles. Ils m’ont trouvé moyennement impliqué, pas sûr que le second degré soit bien passé. En revanche, ils m’ont trouvé plus jeune que jamais sauf les cheveux blancs. Ce sera encore mieux dans 10 ans.

Most of us do. We encounter them constantly – trying to promote their latest and greatest product. Their ads seek to interrupt us and every interaction is clearly only focused on either closing a deal or collecting our information for their database. They think in terms of short term revenue instead of long term value. They look at customers are only a necessity on their way to making a profit. And they make the world a worse place.

The good news is consumers have more ways than ever to filter these brands out and expose their selfishness as a warning to other consumers.  So whether you have your own business or work for someone else, there is more incentive to make sure you are not intentionally becoming one of those selfish brands. But how can you avoid it?  First you need to be able to spot the selfishness.  To help, this post shares real examples of five of the worst habits we often see from brands, and then offers some lessons for how to be better than that. Finally, I will also share some examples of brands doing the exact opposite and putting extremely valuable services and thinking back into the world in big and important ways.

1. Take any opportunity to cut corners.

Perhaps the worst brand succumbing to this habit is one that has plenty of money to be able to operate differently. Apple has a sad history of failing to take leadership in the issues that they clearly have the funds and industry clout to do if they wanted. They have consistently failed to lead on issues related to labor standards or using conflict free minerals. Their choices for using proprietary technology on things that could easily be standardized have been criticized (and legislated against) for being purely motivated by profit. Most recently, their use of cheap design for flimsy power charging cords has sparked others to launch products that should be unnecessary to correct the problems.

The Solution:  What if, instead, the world’s most profitable technology company chose to spend more of those profits on being a leader in those industry issues where it could?  What if they provided a truly premium experience to justify their high product costs on every level – even down to the quality of the charging cable provided with their products?  The point is, when consumers see a brand consistently choosing to maximize profits instead of doing what is right – that is a selfish choice. And consumers do notice.

2. Pretend to be something they aren’t.

When the “Got Milk?” campaign first came out, it was a brilliant example of focusing exactly on the thing that made their product unique. In those situations where they asked that question – there really was nothing as satisfying as milk.  Lately, though, the same group has extended its focus to a more unique positioning of a more questionably healthy product — chocolate milk.  This campaign positions chocolate milk as the ideal recovery drink for athletes – using convenient data comparing chocolate milk against water or sports drinks to reach this conclusion.  This positioning, as a healthy drink for athletes, translates into a more dangerous one for kids … that chocolate milk can help them be healthy.  It is easy to argue that kids are not the target for this significant advertising push – but they spokespeople behind the campaign are clearly kid friendly athletes.

The Solution: What if the brands that were promoting these products with high sugar content and questionable health benefits instead started speaking about them in more real terms?  Yoplait, for example, in a new campaign featuring their “25% less sugar version” of yogurt directly calls it a “snack.”  The successful advertising for Snickers candy bar promises the bar will satisfy your hunger, but never positions the bar as a healthy alternative for a meal.  Selfish brands make promises to be something they aren’t.  Instead of doing that, be candid about what you are actually selling.

3. Encourage cultural stereotypes.

Looking the Super Bowl is a great way to find the most visible recent examples of culturally tone deaf advertising.  This past year, one of the worst offenders was Chevrolet – using outdated stereotypes of men to position it’s latest pickup truck as a way to be more attractive to women.  We see this same type of stereotype often applied in the opposite direction through marketing that objectifies women as well.  Yet there are plenty of signs that the days of this type of marketing are numbered.  Backlashes against these mistakes are predictable and frequent.  And instead, campaigns that challenge stereotypes and paint a new picture are being celebrated.  A central theme among the award winners at the Cannes Ad Festival this year, for example, was the emergence of “girl power” as a theme in award winning ads.

The Solution: In this case, the solution is relatively simple in theory … but harder in practice.  Rather than retreating to the common and comfortable stereotypical descriptions of a target audience, why not expand and look broader?  If a traditionally masculine 112 year old brand like Harley-Davidson can make a big strategic shift to start appealing to women riders, your brand can rethink its approach as well.

4. Make people feel bad about themselves.

Fitness and beauty advertising has a bad habit of creating false images of perfection for both sexes that are impossible to recreate in real life.  The photoshopping of beauty images has brought more visibility to this, but the fact remains that there is plenty of marketing that is solely designed to help people feel worse about themselves so that they will actively go and spend money on perceived solutions to help them feel better. Fitness memberships are just one of those types of solutions that people try to spend money on with the promise of looking better.  The problem is, even with those the ideal seems too high often and therefore only feels reinforced with those who are already in great physical shape.

The Solution: Some smarter brands are finding that the best way to stand apart from this crowd of miracle cure vendors promising wonderful solutions to make you more fit is to be honest about what people hate in the first place and actually focus on fixing that.  What people hated about the gym, for example, was the social pressure associated with trying to “perform” while there instead of just working out at their own pace.  So popular fitness chain Planet Fitness created “Judgement Free Zones” and an entire marketing campaign focused on trying to entice anyone back to the gym as opposed to the regular “gym rats” who always go.  The strategy has been paying off for the brand too, with rapid growth and even a recent international expansion

5. Help promote stupidity by celebrating it.

Reality television is the world’s best method for celebrating stupidity. The biggest problem is that stupidity can be infuriatingly watchable. In fact, sometimes it is hard to turn away. No wonder reality television has had record growth within the last decade. Sadly, this has given rise to some very questionable programming, and one of the worst offenders of producing it is the cable network TLC.  Recently, two of their shows – Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and 19 and Counting were canceled amid controversy about the behaviour of the “stars” of the shows.  It is tempting to blame this on the consumer instead of the network. After all, they wouldn’t make the show if people didn’t want to watch it, right?  And the shows are getting smarter at fighting back with convenient data to illustrate that their shows may actually be having a positive effect, like this recent story of how MTV’s show 16 and Pregnant might actually have prevented teenage pregnancy.

The Solution:  So are reality shows really that bad?  Technically Shark Tank is also a reality show and many people are staying that it may actually be changing entrepreneurship in America today. So featuring reality can be effective and impactful, but not when that reality is solely focused on offering a voyeuristic journey into the bowels of stupidity.  Just because watching dumb people do dumb things is irresistible for many people doesn’t mean that your brand should be creating it – in your own programming or content marketing or in some other method.  You can be better than that.

The Rise of “Branded Benevolence”

In the stories and examples above, I have shared several stories of brands doing negative things in selfish ways. In most cases they are getting punished for them as well (ie – TLC canceling two of their formerly popular shows). The good news in this is that as consumers and the general public get smarter about seeing through this selfishness – they are inspiring more brands to change. In fact, this is happening with such frequency that it has become a trend – and those brands that act on it are getting a lot of attention. One of the trends I wrote about in Non-Obvious pointed to this evolution of brands making more positive contributions to society and how this “Branded Benevolence” as I called it may be one of the more hopeful trends for business to offer more value back to our society.

Among the examples I shared in this trend were CVS deciding to stop selling tobacco products, or Tesla offering to make some of its patents available to competitors, to brands like Coca-Cola driving to drive social change and even bring nations together through clever and viral advertising. Each are examples of brands doing more to rise above selfishness and do things differently. And they are being celebrated for it.  Being a selfish brand – or even a selfish individual is easy. All you have to do is focus on yourself and forget about anyone else. Choosing to be more than that is hard. But brands are making that choice every day and it is our challenge to continue to reward them for it. And to find the best way we can to stop supporting those don’t.

Rohit Bhargava is the WSJ best selling author of Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future.  He is the author of five business books, a frequent keynote speaker and a believer in building brands that act in unselfish ways, use their humanity and create more value in the world. 

Marketing automation and intelligence aims to make marketing and, potentially, sales more efficient. They can become the high performance engine that marketing never had. Investments in marketing technology continue to rise in many large companies making the CMO a primary technology buyer. Foundation Capital pegs the level of spend, “We expect technology spend by CMOs to increase 10x in 10 Years from $12 billion to $120 billion.”

Just what you are trying to automate or instrument depends on the nature of your business. Are you a B2C or a B2B company? Do you own your sales channel? Do you sell direct to end customers and do you do so online (ecommerce)? And so forth.

Depending on your answers, you may need a marketing stack of technologies that help you find and qualify leads, retarget the right prospects with advertising, cultivate customers to repurchase and more.

Operations vs. Innovation

But for many of us, marketing technology is not just about operational efficiency, it is about innovating in how you market, or how you connect marketing with sales, or in some way how you sell your product. It is possible that new technologies will allow a business without a practice of lead generation and nurturing to actually start to do that for the first time. That’s innovation. Yet marketing technologies require significant green dollar costs (actual purchase and licensing costs) and often greater grey dollar costs (time and opportunity). It is much easier for companies to invest in operational infrastructure meant to make a known process more efficient with a calculable return on that investment. Investing in innovation requires a different mindset. This presents a dilemma to marketers creating a tech strategy and selling it in. 

Just read Roger Martin’s The Design of Business. He makes the most cogent case for the tension between innovation and operations within business. Making the case for how a well-planned marketing technology strategy can change how you market and sell is very different than the one you might make to improve what you are already doing.   

Strategy vs. Technology

The “marketing technology stack” is a catchy topic for the CMOrg (chief marketing organization – i.e. those that work at the marketing center of an enterprise). We all look at the insane landscapes from Chief Martec (Scott Brinker) and try to sort through the providers for various functions and services from email marketing systems to customer databases to retargeting partners and so much more. “I need one of these and one of these…”And so on.

But do you need a better email marketing platform or do you need a way to nurture sales channel relationships (or customer relationships)? If you are innovating (vs. simply operationalizing something that sort of already works), starting with confirming your strategy seems like the stronger suit. But we are talking tech investment here. Every choice is a commitment. I mean, even if the annual service fee for a SaS component isn’t that large, you will pay through the nose with the internal IT compliance and integration. The strategy ought to be a pretty solid one for the foreseeable future.

Strategy sounds more like:

• I need a way to engage my sales channel relationships and drive sales action with increasing effectiveness and efficiency

• I want to use data and content to generate ever more qualified prospects and refine those into actual leads with an ever-improving quality and conversion rate

• I need a way to nurture my customer relationships. This should include an increasing level of personalization such that this greater relevance drives retention and accelerates the growth of customer value

Any one of these ambitions or the ones that any marketer might have for their organization is loaded with implications for the right technology stack.  They speak more clearly about the problem to be solved vs. I need a better email marketing platform.   

Check out:

• These great efforts (“The Stackies”) to visualize various views of the marketing technology stack

• This article from Brian Hansford in Business2Community called, “Building A B2B Marketing Technology Stack”

Future vs. Now

Investments in innovation beg to be piloted or otherwise proven-out before a complete investment is made. That is hard when you are talking about technology infrastructure. But it can be done.

Use a new CRM approach and technology for one business unit and prove out the efficacy before rolling out to the others.

Only automate what must be automated to prove out efficacy. Don’t yet worry about efficiency. So, in a lead gen program, you may need tech to capture leads from Web activity and then to match against third party data but you can always ‘hand-deliver’ these leads to the salesforce to input into a sale tracking system. Later on you can integrate these two systems.

Get a partner to manage the ad retargeting program before investing in the necessary ad stack to manage in-house (if that is ever the most efficient way to go)

Choosing the right marketing technology stack is hard but essential. Making the business case internally requires a different approach if this is truly an operations enhancement vs. an innovation to how you market and sell today.

As any forum of CMOs and business leaders will tell you today, the imperative to apply technology is there. The promise of automating processes, combining data (big data and medium-sized data), and measuring effectiveness is terrific in marketing. Now we all have to choose wisely. 

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“In the 1950s… 80 per cent of the audience was lost. Studios tried many ways to win back this audience, including new technologies such as Cinerama, but none of these worked. What did work was to view the entire business as basically an intellectual properties business where they optimised on as many platforms as possible. That’s the business today.”

– Ed Epstein

Strategy is something that this blog has in the past accused the film industry of lacking, particularly when it comes to issues of development (over-leveraging risk with expensive tentpoles) and distribution (a lack of progressive thinking when it comes to day-and-date openings across platforms). This piece takes a look at how, in some areas, there are kernels of hope for the industry, as well as some specific areas that are ripe for improvement.

Given our initial contention, It was refreshing to discover this gem of an illustration (see top image) from none other than Walt Disney himself that was recently recovered from the archives, according to Harvard Business Review, showing “a central film asset that in very precise ways infuses value into and is in turn supported by an array of related entertainment assets”; all that’s missing is the strategic goal. Such forethought, of complementary assets combining to drive value, is arguably a symptom of the much-ballyhoed “synergy” and convergence the industry has undergone over the past ten to fifteen years; here was Walt writing about in 1957. The HBR article contends that it is not just synergy that is important, but in identifying those areas where you possess “unique synergy”. Disney’s current state, with Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm as content production houses, is an impressive pursuit of such a unique synergy, helped in no small part by having the impressive Bob Iger at the helm. The recent announcement of a Han Solo origin story, with the pair behind 21 Jump Street attached to direct, would have been to music to many a filmgoer’s ears. Unfortunately, the danger of undue risk from arranging a surfeit of tentpole releases remains, and is unlikely to be challenged while films such as Tomorrowland tank and Jurassic World soar. A brilliant piece on the evolution of the summer blockbuster, featured in the Financial Times recently, can be found here.

The film industry in China is a subject we last wrote about around a year ago. It’s a booming scene out there (last year China added as many screens as there are in all of France), which despite a quota on foreign film has proved enormously profitable to Hollywood. And while some films have had to seek opaque deals that ensure the inclusion of Chinese settings and talent in order to get the thumbs up for exhibition in China – e.g. the latest iteration of Transformers – others pay scant attention to such cultural pandering, and meet with similar success. In June, the Financial Times wrote that Furious 7 had no Chinese elements, but still managed to break “all-time box-office records since its release in China in April, taking in almost $390m”. Importantly, the figure beat the US’s taking of $348m. China is due to be the largest movie market in the world in less than three years. As we have written before, part of this is due to the cultural interest in moviegoing; people will see pretty much anything in China while the experience is still new and tantalising. While good for revenues, it does imply that content produced will be increasingly skewed – at least for a while – to lowest common denominator viewing that titillates rather than stimulates. The sheer volume of takings for such fare is ominous; of the fastest films ever to reach $1bn globally at the box office, three are from this year. China has played no small role in this development.

However, all is not as rosy as it could be. Traditional players in the industry are wary of new entrants. Domestic companies Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, YoukuTudou and Leshi have either partnered with studios for exclusive distribution deals over online platforms – irking the exhibitors – or simply investing in developing their own studios and content production. The FT writes, “[c]ollectively, these internet firms co-produced or directly invested in 15 films in 2014, which earned more than Rmb6bn ($965m) at the box office last year – a fifth of total receipts… Industry participants worry that these internet giants may soon seek to cut them out of the equation altogether“.

How to respond to such disruption? Well, they might for a start take a step up in their customer engagement management, from developing more complex segmentation to encouraging retention, whether it be to a particular studio or a particular cinema. At a simple level, this might mean things like not revealing the twists of films in the trailer. At a more complex level, it might involve working with social networks, perhaps even some of the very ones otherwise considered as competitors, listed above, to gain Big Data insights that can better inform messaging, targeting and identification of high-value users. Earlier this year, Deloitte worked with Facebook to produce a piece of thought leadership that looked to do just that, helping telcos with what was defined as “moment-based”, dynamic segmentation, with initial work and hypothesis from Deloitte and their Mobile Consumer Survey correlated against Facebook’s data trove. Using different messages over innovative channels, for example on WeChat, would also likely prove fruitful. Luxury brands, long the laggards in digital strategy, have recently been making headway in customer engagement via such methods. Looking further ahead, they might also consider how their “unique synergy” will be positioned for future consumer trends. The Internet of Things is set to fundamentally change the way we go about our lives, including the relationship businesses have with their customers. How will it impact movie-going and people’s relationship with the cinema? For all the global talk on the impact of such devices, the film industry has yet to develop any coherent thinking on it. One bright area is the subject we mentioned at the beginning of our article; collapsing release windows. Paramount announced earlier this month they have reached an agreement with two prominent US exhibitor chains, Cineplex and AMC, to “reduce the period of time that movies play exclusively in theaters” to just 17 days for two specific films, according to The Wrap. It’s not clear what financial (or otherwise) incentives the theater chains received for such a deal.

So while the threat of disruption is ever-present – as it is for so many industries around the world right now – there are ample opportunities for studios and exhibitors to up their game, through better targeting, better communication, better distribution deals, and, just maybe, better product.

Toi qui conseille avec tendresse,
Toi qui préfère rester témoin,
Toi qui pense qu’en âge on progresse,
Toi qui me trouve bien loin.

Toi qui reste sans que l’amour cesse,
Toi qui m’en veux de rire sans fin,
Toi qui me pense dans d’autres stress,
Toi qui me crois serein.

Toi qui voudrais tant que je reste,
Toi qui  me montre ce chemin,
Toi qui me dis que le temps presse,
Toi qui pense que je vais bien.

Je sais.

Je sais, j’en ai pas l’air
Mais sache que je te vois.

As an author of five books, I believe in the power of them and as a trend curator and University Professor I consume many of them. I buy several new non-fiction books a week and often invest my time and attention in reading them and learning from them.

What I don’t do is read most of them cover to cover.

Yet some of the most lasting ideas that I get from books come from reading them in bursts. I consume books and ideas the same way travelers consume frequent flier miles – as momentary rewards to be redeemed at a later date. Books can share powerful ideas that might change your life or career in an instant.

To some degree, creative thinking has always been like that. It can take a lifetime to build up enough experiences and insights to be able to solve the ultimate creative challenge in an instant. That is why compensation models for creative professionals are so flawed … because they reward time spent instead of insights delivered.

What if that same model of rewarding time instead of thought became a pervasive choice in our society? What if the politicians who received the most attention were the ones who were able to filibuster the longest? What if the scientists that recieved the most funding were the ones who wrote the longest papers?

What if TED talks had to be 70 minutes instead of 17?

It is hard to imagine such a world where we might start rewarding the people who waste the most time in sharing their ideas.

As strange as this may seem, it is exactly the world Amazon could accidentally thrust the world into with a recent announcement they made to only pay authors of self published Kindle books enlisted in the Kindle Select program based on how many pages readers actually consume.

On the surface, this seems like a pretty logical idea. After all, why should the author that writes 400 pages of complete crap that no one actually reads be rewarded simply because they were able to produce a great cover and have a few dozen positive fabricated reviews? Isn’t it better to only reward the best books?

As several writers have also pointed out, much of the indignation about this announcement comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually changing. What Amazon has done is tried to transform it’s Kindle Select borrowing program (and how authors get paid from it) into a fairer and more equitable model of rewards based on actual content consumed. It makes a lot of sense within that model.

Even outside of Kindle Select, a merit based system of rewarding authors isn’t necessarily a bad idea. As an author who does obsess over the words he uses and puts in years of effort to publish a book – I would personally LOVE a way to separate my books from the vanity published fluff that easily makes up the bulk of self published ebooks one can find in the Kindle store today.

Unfortunately, Amazon’s nuanced choice for the Kindle Select program where readers are borrowing books and authors are getting paid from a central pool may cause other groups to start thinking differently about how creativity is compensated in general.

What if Amazon’s move inspires others to begin devaluing creativity itself?

Creative agencies might start being challenged by clients who only want to pay for ideas that are turned into campaigns. Researchers might only be paid for insights that could be monetized. The point is that paying only for time spent is usually a flawed idea because it fundamentally reduces the value of experience and insights.

A great work of nonfiction can move your thinking from one place to another. It can dramatically change how you think about the world. There are dozens of books that have done that for me, despite the fact that I may not have entirely read every single page or every single chapter within them.

As an author of several nonfiction business books, I can honestly say that I really don’t expect every reader to consume every one of my books from cover to cover. In fact, in several of them I have started off by advising readers to avoid doing just that – and instead to consume only the pieces that seem most relevant for them right now.

I want to change how people think, and I want to be useful to help them get back to their lives and do something meaningful. If reading just one chapter of one of my books helped them do that, then the value of the book has been worth it.  I would gladly pay $20 for a powerful idea in the form of a book that changes how I work … even if I didn’t read that same book cover to cover.

Nearly 80 years ago, Australian farmers introduced the cane toad into their environment to kill the Grey Cane Beetle. Today there are 1.5 billion toads (and growing) spreading out across Australia. What seemed like an ideal solution to a problem rapidly escalated into a plague.

Amazon’s shift may be the intellectual equivalent of the cane toads in Australia.

The intention of creating a world where the most valuable ideas get rewarded and shared is a noble goal. The challenge is that the best ideas don’t always take the longest to share or require a cover to cover reading of a book in order to have impact.

Nor should they.

Rohit Bhargava is the Wall Street Journal best selling author of Non-Obvious and four other Amazon #1 marketing best sellers. He believes in the power of books, even if you don’t happen to read them from cover to cover.

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Was showrooming going to destroy the retail business?

This was one of the main questions speakers tackled at the National Retail Federation’s annual Expo event early that year. And the research didn’t look good. Around the same time of the show, the IBM Business Value Global Consumer Study studied over 30,000 global consumers and concluded that nearly 50% of all online purchases made by consumers followed some type of showrooming.

The numbers alone were enough to cause a ripple of panic for any retailer making big investments in maintaining a bricks and mortar location and losing significant revenue to online sales. How could they fight back?

The Rise of Omnichannel Retail

Several panels at the Expo offered some relatively predictable coping strategies and recommendations – from investing in a competing ecommerce store to somehow improving the retail customer experience. Retailers at the show left knowing they had to do something or risk facing obsolescence.

A year later when IBM came back to present the results from the 2014 edition of the same report – the data showed an unexpected shift. Even though consumers were increasingly shopping online, the data showed that only about 30 percent of all online purchases actually resulted from showrooming — a puzzlingly steep drop.

The study concluded that showrooming was no longer a top threat for retailers. The real question, though, was how could consumer behaviour change so dramatically within a year?

The truth was, it hadn’t.

Instead, retailers were increasingly becoming smarter about engaging what the industry had already started to call a “omnichannel” approach to retail … creating a seamless online and offline experience for customers. Some even started calling this fusion of physical retail with digital a “digical” experience.

How Experiences Matter More Than Shopping Bags

Buzzwords aside, 2014 was the year that many pioneering retailers started to evolve how their retail stores could create experiences that inspired more brand loyalty and affinity … increasingly without selling any products in the stores at all.

Today, electronics brands like Samsung are building out retail experiences like the Samsung Galaxy Studio in New York’s fashionable SoHo shopping district as a way to showcase products and innovations without actually selling them directly to customers (which still mainly happens through third party retailers).

Intel took a similar step last year by partnering with a retail space called STORY created by entrepreneur Rachel Shechtman as “a retail concept that takes the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store.” The store featured a showcase of wearable technology products using Intel’s technology as a component.

On a global level, retailers like Diesel, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus have all been experimenting with “smart mirrors” for many years to bring more interactivity to the process of trying on and buying clothes.  Outside fashion, grocery retailer Tesco has also been piloting tests for over four years now with virtual shopping experiences designed for urban areas to allow busy commuters to purchase items like laundry detergent and deodorant that no one really wants to carry home.

Even the world’s largest retailer is looking at the rise of this sort of branded showroom experience as an opportunity to grow sales. During a recent interview, Walmart President and CEO of Global eCommerce Neil Ashe promised that showrooming “is not a bad word at Walmart … if people want to showroom, then we are going to be the best darn showroom in town.”

As more brands consider using a retail space as a showroom to build brand affinity and educate customer rather than directly sell, they are also rethinking one of the most fundamental assumptions of traditional retail: that consumers want to walk out of a store carrying their purchase.

The $1 Million Dollar Lobby

When popular ecommerce fashion brand Bonobos founder Andy Dunn decided to sell shirts from his website, he also built several fitting rooms in the lobby of the brand’s headquarters to allow customers to try them on. Within months they were on track to do $1 million in sales directly from the lobby and he realized the potential of having a physical presence to augment their online sales.

By the end of 2014, the brand had opened ten shops across the United States with plans to add 30 more in the next three years. The vast majority of orders still come through the online system. Dunn’s major insight from that lobby experience was that most of their customers (almost entirely male) usually didn’t mind leaving a store without a purchase in hand.

It is the perfect example of a Reverse Retail experience: one that was designed by a brand to create affinity and inspire a purchase that could be completed online directly from the brand and fulfilled later.

This approach of merging the physical and digital experiences together is one that global head of shopper marketing at global ad agency JWT Ron Magliocco calls “living websites” – where an increasing number of shops flip the traditional retail model and simply become showrooms.

“Why would a store today stock 500 slightly different cameras?” Magliocco asked in an interview last year, “that’s what the Internet is for.”

Why The Reverse Retail Trend Matters:

For years when retailers talked about the promise of creating “multichannel experiences” for customers, it basically meant having an online site as a way to avoid losing sales to competitors while mainly focusing on sales through retail locations … and the numbers supported that choice.

In 2015 and beyond, the connection between physical retail experiences and online buying is starting to reverse itself. The real life experiences are tailored to deepen brand engagement, and offer something memorable and valuable. The purchase itself, and how it gets fulfilled, is increasingly moving to the online environment where the “endless shelf” allows retailers to provide exactly what consumers want customized to how they want it.

Thanks to increasing speed and capabilities for home delivery, this entire process becomes more and more seamless for customers so they can have goods delivered almost immediately, enjoy them soon, and leave a retail store with a memorable and shareable experience rather than a shopping bag.

This blog post was excerpted from a chapter on “Reverse Retail” from the Wall Street Journal best selling book Non-Obvious.

What do you do when you’re angry about something no one else cares about? Share it on social media. So as we started to each find our own voices on a platform that could reach micro-audiences, the easy thing to do was to use it as a place for venting. Flight delays, rude waiters, critiquing the latest episode of our favorite TV show were all common topics.

No one really cared, but that was ok because hardly anyone was really paying attention anyway. After all, the point of venting is usually inherently selfish to make yourself feel better, right?

Of course, our fascination with the insignificant didn’t end there. It then (d)evolved quickly into an ongoing dance to portray ourselves as sufficiently happy, balanced, and successful individuals. Posts about new cars, new babies, and new vacations filled each of our feeds and offered an endless parade of good times for the world to see.

This sea of positivity created a sort of FOMO-driven social media paranoia captured perfectly in actress Mindy Kaling’s only partially satirical title for her first book: “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”

And then came selfies.

Mercilessly mocked for their ability to showcase narcissism in the form of duck face photos – the selfie has changed how we think about social media. Rather than just sharing thoughts about the moment in real time, selfies started us thinking about how to share that moment while still injecting ourselves into it.

The hottest new social media apps are promising to help us do the same thing, through live streaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope. So social media has completed that evolution from sharing thoughts to sharing experiences. Yet as this shift slowly gained traction, something unexpected happened.

People decided to become vulnerable.

Today my Facebook feed is not only filled with congratulations messages for graduates or holiday plans, but also with friends sharing amazingly personal stories of dealing with the passing of a loved one, or getting a diagnosis of cancer, or the painful experience of losing a baby.

These are no longer overfiltered and meaningless depictions of the world. Social media is getting real. And as it does, the value we each find in it is starting to shift. It is no longer only a place for diversion, but is also becoming a place for belonging. A place for emotions other than anger or pride. A place for legacy.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how to use social media for marketing. Then I started spending time trying to break out of the hype and keep marketing from ruining it for everyone. Today I see it for what it is.

Social media is not a marketing platform.

It’s not a customer engagement tool. It also isn’t a soap box to declare your own greatness to the world. Instead, it has become an essential way of sharing the reality of what we each experience in our daily lives – whether life alteringly good or life shatteringly bad.

We can all finally share a bonding moment over this hard earned truth. Especially if it allows us to delight in our friend’s lives while also giving us the chance to be indignant or happy or sad about something that actually matters.

Like each other.

Wayward Pines

Cette série marque le retour de Matt Dillon, Juliette Lewis et irradie la signature de M. Night Shyamalan (Monsieur Sixième Sens). C’est la seule nouveauté que j’ai déjà attaqué et je suis accro après 4 épisodes. Pas une originalité folle mais un petit goût du Prisonnier modernisé qui me plaît. Avec une petite touche supplémentaire que je ne peux pas révéler sans spoiler. Seule l’issue de cette mini série de 10 épisodes nous dira si ça valait vraiment la peine…

Dans la catégorie pas encore vu :

Grace and Frankie

Daredevil

Empire

Mr Robot

Unreal

Supergirl

Et les 2 retours que j’attends avec impatience :

Orange is the new black (Saison 3 le 12 juin)

True Detective (Saison 2 le 21 juin)

Je manquerai sans doute de temps pour tout voir. S’il faut resserrer la sélection, j’attends vos conseils !

Avec la nomination de Laetitia Rossille à la tête de l’expertise crise de l’agence, Ogilvy Public Relations lance un nouveau service de communication de crise : SOS@Ogilvy

Avec l’accompagnement de ses grands clients dans leur communication de crise, Ogilvy PR s’est forgé en 20 ans une expertise constamment renouvelée avec en particulier l’intégration stratégique des médias sociaux et du développement de contenu réactifs au cœur de la discipline. L’accélération de la demande et des besoins de réactivité conduit aujourd’hui l’agence à se doter d’un responsable de la gestion de crise. C’est à ce titre que Laetitia Rossille a rejoint Ogilvy PR et lance un nouveau service, SOS@Ogilvy, destiné à supporter sans délai une entreprise en situation de crise.
Avec une expérience de plus de dix ans sur les enjeux de crise au niveau national et international, cette diplômée du MBA d’HEC possède également une expertise en communication corporate.
« En renforçant l’équipe corporate d’une experte des enjeux sociétaux et énergétiques nous accélérons le déploiement d’offres telles que SOS@Ogilvy afin d’anticiper et d’accompagner les marques, les entreprises et les dirigeants sur un terrain complexifié par le web et les réseaux sociaux. » précise Eric Maillard, Directeur général d’Ogilvy Public Relations.
« En situation de crise, les entreprises doivent pouvoir accéder rapidement aux meilleurs experts pour acter sans délai des décisions qui peuvent laisser des traces pour longtemps.» commente-t-il. « L’approche SOS@Ogilvy se nourrit d’expériences concluantes menées au sein de notre réseau international, notamment en Afrique du sud, » poursuit Audrey Rousseau, Directrice générale adjointe de l’agence. « Dans ce cadre, Laetitia nous est apparue comme la meilleure pour porter une expertise qu’elle a pu exercer pour des organisations exposées et exigeantes. »

Un nouvel atout chez Ogilvy Public Relations
Aujourd’hui en charge de l’offre crise à l’agence, Laetitia Rossille continue d’intervenir dans le Certificat Leadership d’HEC sur la thématique du « Crisis management. » Elle anime également, au sein de l’Ecole Militaire, des modules de sensibilisation aux enjeux de communication et de marketing.
Avant d’intégrer Ogilvy Public Relations, elle intervenait en tant que consultante sur les enjeux de communication aussi bien interne qu’externe pour des clients comme AXA, EDF, L’Oréal, Bel…
De 2009 à 2011, Laetitia était responsable des relations presse au service presse de GrDF/GDF Suez où elle a renforcé son expertise en gérant des crises sociales et industrielles. Elle a également animé le réseau de communicants locaux dans leurs actions de relations presse et publiques.
Elle était auparavant, et depuis 2004, chez Publicis Consultants et où elle conseillait sur leur stratégies éditoriales print et online des clients tels que Altadis (aujourd’hui Imperial Tobacco), Essilor, Nestlé (Guigoz) et Suez.
De formation littéraire classique, sa passion pour l’économie et le secteur industriel la conduit à intégrer le MBA d’HEC. Elle terminera son cursus par un semestre à Washington DC (Georgetown University) où elle prendra en charge une mission d’audit pour le compte de la direction stratégie et innovation de Duke Energy.

SOS@Ogilvy, expertise et réactivité
Ogilvy Public Relations a conçu sa nouvelle offre, SOS@Ogilvy; pour répondre au double enjeu auquel une entreprise en situation de crise se trouve confrontée : réagir vite et bien.
Pilotée par Laetitia Rossille, SOS@Ogilvy s’articule autour de trois actions immédiates :

• une heure de conseil offerte ainsi que des outils simples d’aide à l’évaluation de la crise
• une note de recommandation envoyée dans la foulée avec un axe stratégique, une méthodologie et une proposition de mise en place opérationnelle ;
• la garantie, sitôt le périmètre d’intervention défini, d’une activation dans les 24h des actions décidées. Veille social media, média training, production de contenus écrits, réalisation de reportages photo ou vidéo…
Tout est mis en œuvre de manière « express » grâce à un réseau d’experts mobilisables partout dans le monde et des outils pré-modélisés.

Ogilvy Public Relations
Créée en 1994, l’agence Ogilvy Public Relations France fait partie du plus grand réseau de RP au monde reconnu comme l’agence la plus créative et le meilleur réseau EAME en 2014 par Paul Holmes. En France, l’agence Ogilvy Public Relations est totalement intégrée au sein du groupe Ogilvy & Mather, la 6ème agence la plus primée au monde à Cannes en 2013 avec 19 Lions dont un Lion d’or pour Ogilvy Public Relations dans la catégorie RP.

Dirigée par Eric Maillard, Ogilvy PR France réunit une équipe pluriculturelle de 30 spécialistes RP répartis en 3 pôles d’expertise : Corporate, Social Brand PR et News Content. Parmi les clients d’Ogilvy PR en France en 2015 : ALCATEL ONETOUCH, American Express, BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions, Boohoo.com, Caisse d’Epargne, Embratur (Office du Tourisme du Brésil), Electrolux, FM Global, les Fonds Européens, Galler, Genius, Google, Jones Day, La Poste, le Parlement Européen, Macif, Ministère de l’Emploi, Nestlé, Prince, Reed Smith, Smappee, Smile Makers, Sony et Zebra Technologies.

Contact Presse : Diane Gériment – 01 53 67 12 72 – diane.geriment@ogilvy.com

 As usual, the best parts were the conversations outside the sessions.  Like the dinner chat that started with “All this talk of the buyer journey is crap.”

What’s right with the buyer journey

The funnel no longer adequately describes the progression of a buyer from “unaware” to actually purchasing, but finding a neat, simple funnel-alternative that does describe how we come to purchase is just plain hard.

We are all influenced in new ways and new sources - No big mystery that what leads to a purchase decision for a business buyer(s) or consumer is more complex today than the golden age of advertising. Andrew Davis in his BMA12 keynote painted the most plausible and laughable “path to purchase(s)” for a consumer inspired to eat (or listen to) meatloaf. The path can be long, circuitous, include many influences. It really is a journey. Google’s view of the consumer journey to buy insurance reveals that it can start six months out. 

The journey describes many touchpoints and contributions to a purchase decision - B2B buyers consider 8.9 sources of information today – twice as many as a few years ago. We are all doing more research before and after engaging a sales person. We talk to colleagues. We inspect products at trade shows. We read expert posts on LinkedIn. And so forth. Gone are the days when a handful or less of communications intercept a potential buyer and drive that purchase.

Everyone’s path to purchase can be different with different influences - IBM, Salesforce, Oracle – all of the marketing technology firms – are promoting this notion of the connected customer and that we ought to be addressing millions of individuals…individually versus as “target audiences” or segments or even personas. Conceptually  this makes sense. What drives someone to purchase, repurchase, advocate, behave loyally is different

 Attributing a sale to a single event is incorrect - Rarely is there a single driver for a purchase decision. A journey view acknowledges that and aims to reveal the important touchpoints that a marketer can affect along the way. Understanding what has more influence in a sales-related action (my euphemism for all the actions we hope people will do – buy, buy again, tell others about the product, behave loyally) is the marketer’s job today. Believing only in the last-click, is irresponsibly naïve.

The buyer journey is inherently more customer-centered - We all need to become increasingly customer-centered. And we need to be wary of just giving this aspiration lip service. Thinking and learning about your customer’s concerns and experiences as they try to solve problems via purchasing products and services, demands curiosity and compassion.  It is the buyer’s journey after all and not the path we aim to force people down.

What’s wrong with the buyer journey

Like any broad concept, the “buyer journey” can be stretched too far. A conceptual framework can become the answer to too many problems.

Direct marketers may destroy the idea - It’s in a direct marketers dna to try and “stimulate” people with offers and other action-inducing communications. They focus on efficiency – engineering emails and ads to drive people to take the bait at the lowest cost.  Now with the customer journey, the promise of mapping all these wonderful touchpoints and building a technology platform to coordinate them is too good to pass up. But mapping and instrumenting individual buyer journeys may not be worth the extraordinary effort. In the time it takes to do this, habits will change.

Focuses too much on touchpoints vs. the psychology of buying - A buyer follows an email to a Web page. Days later they read a post in their LinkedIn feed and follow a link to a blog post. Weeks later they Google a business problem and browse four sites with credible expertise. And so on. The temptation of a buyer journey-model is to just think of these as a collection of media touchpoints where your brand ought to be to intercept this buyer. It may be more productive to think about what the so-called “buyer” is trying to get done at various points in their journey. They actually don’t likely start out as a “buyer” but as a business person with a problem.

Without believable attribution, complex marketing against the journey will die under it’s own weight - If we cannot measure and understand the contribution to a sale for the dozen or so touchpoints along a journey, we will lose our will to spend our marketing dollars against them. This is just the way the world turns. Now matter how good the model seems, if it cannot be measured, eventually we will give up on it.

B2B buying decisions involve a lot of people and that’s a lot of journeys - How many people inside an organization influence a buying decision? Four? Six? Ten? We know that the bigger the price tag the more bodies there are around that conference table. How do you manage to understand all those journeys and affect them?

It's the right idea

The buyer journey is the right idea. We just have to decide how we are going to change our marketing practices to align ourselves. We could easily go full force in mapping out dozens of personas and complex journeys. Or we could aspire to an increasing understanding of the path people take from the glimmer of a business need to an actual purchase and then try our hardest to be genuinely useful to our prospects and customers.

Attending BMA15 was a good reminder to me that there are a lot of smart people out there trying to figure this all out. My best strategy is to spend more time with these marketers and hope some of their smarts rub off. In my estimation, this is a worthwhile organization and I plan to participate more in the future.

Useful Reads

The Buyer Journey: Content Marketing Versus Sales Enablement – Business2Community

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey – Salesforce/Pardot

The Role Of Influence In The New Buyer's Journey – Forbes

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Content as a bridge between B2B sales and marketing

An astounding twenty years ago, my father bought Bill Gates’ book, “The Road Ahead”. A business book barely interested me at that age, but it came with a CD-ROM (contents above) that showed an exciting future, much of which will sound familiar today. It seemed only natural that Gates’ company, Microsoft, would play an integral part in this future. Who would have guessed that Microsoft would fail to be the leader of so many of today’s dominant technologies? In smartphones, they are reduced to competing for the “middle ground” with Sony, as Apple and Google innovate. In television, again, Apple and Google, as well as the likes of Amazon, Netflix. In gaming, it has lost the console crown to Sony’s Playstation 4. And its famous OS, Windows, went through significant problems in its most recent iteration when myriad complaints about the absence of a Start button and a generally perplexing UX caused a volte-face that served as an embarrassing period for the company.

Since Satya Nadella took over as chief executive last year, there has been much talk of change in the way Microsoft does business, and indeed, in which businesses it will continue to operate in. But how much should Microsoft change before it loses touch with its roots? When does Microsoft stop being Microsoft?

In an article published in The Economist last month, the newspaper detailed how any business project that seemed to operate in an adjacent or transformative area for Microsoft – and thus by implication weakened the focus on Windows – was given short shrift during the days of Gates, who was known to utter in disbelief: “WHAT are you on? The ‘fuck Windows’ strategy?”. The Economist goes on to write that many of the companies best innovations were killed at the hands of this “strategy tax”. This phrase reportedly makes Mr Nadella shudder now, and he encourages innovations in areas that interest people. This has had noticeable effects; Microsoft wares are no longer confined to a walled garden. Office programs are available on smartphones, and the company is working more closely with Linux, an open-source platform that erstwhile chief exec Steve Ballmer once referred to as a “cancer”.

This previous reluctance to embrace open-source drove initial (and hugely profitable) success. But today, as computing moves to the cloud, The Economist writes, “this model is breaking down. Software is becoming a service delivered over the internet and mostly based on open standards”. Although it innovated in the right areas – specifically cloud computing and smartphones – its reluctance to allow people to run anything on these platforms but Windows OS not only narrowed their offering but allowed for competitors, the likes of Amazon and Apple, respectively, to move in. It is thus interesting to note that Nadella’s motto for Microsoft is “mobile first, cloud first”.

It is interesting to note that Mr Nadella rose to the top via Microsoft’s cloud business (Azur), rebuilding revenues by “letting customers use their own choice of software”. Office is available as a freemium model, and he has reached across the aisle in making it available on Android and iOS devices. The company allows Office 365 users to save their files “on the servers of Box, an enterprise-software firm. ‘They used to treat us like arch-enemies’, says Aaron Levie, Box’s boss.” Importantly, the ways of working have changed there; agile work practices are now in place, with products being tested and released iteratively under the umbrella “Garage”.

These changes are evidently not merely cosmetic. It does seem to be part of a renewed focus (that may even involve the spinning off of Xbox). It is key changes like this that IBM – a behemoth once surpassed by Microsoft, which is in its own throes of evolution as it looks to consulting and a partnership with Apple – is also engaging in. There are challenges though. On the subject of clawing back the hearts and minds of mobile developers, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen told The New York Times recently, “It’s very challenging to carve back market share”. It speaks to a larger problem around talent. Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School commented recently “Microsoft has lost a lot of great people”. Furthermore, its cloud and mobile focus could be dangerous; while its cloud services revenue is growing, it will not be enough to be make up for losses elsewhere. In mobile, the purchase of Nokia is increasingly seen as a misguided decision. Such challenges are compounded by the fact that, as Allen says, Microsoft has “more competitors than any major C.E.O. in the world” has to deal with. Faced with such fundamental change to the business on its own Road Ahead, it should be of small comfort that Boston Consulting Group published a report in April entitled “There’s no such thing as corporate DNA”, with the subheading “Why You Have to Be Prepared to Change Everything to Endure“.

Je me souviens d’une vieille conversation avec mes parents qui me racontaient la succession de surprises que leurs avaient réservés les échanges avec le corps professoral tout au long de ma scolarité. Elève plutôt bon sans être notablement brillant,  je passais de l’ « enfant dangereusement isolé » -qui avait probablement fait craindre un risque d’autisme à ma maitresse en maternelle- au « leader du groupe » dans le spectacle de fin d’année au collège, de la « discrétion attentive » qui faisait de moi le chouchou en CM2 au « petit rigolo » qui faisait marrer (et dissipait) les filles au lycée. Même si chaque commentaire sur mon caractère se révélait surprenant, mes parents ont sans doute pensé que j’avais tout simplement évolué en grandissant, bien que ce ne soit pas forcément très visible dans mon comportement en famille où j’ai toujours démontré un caractère fort mais plutôt discret.

Je ne pense pourtant pas avoir changé et me reconnais aussi bien dans l’enfant isolé que dans le petit rigolo chef de bande (Et là je me bats très fort pour ne pas citer du Céline Dion hein). Il m’a fallu du temps pour comprendre qu’une personnalité aussi multiple n’était pas la norme. Et pouvait déstabiliser autour de moi.

Je ne peux qu’imaginer la diversité et la contradiction des adjectifs qui me décriraient le mieux en fonction de mon environnement. Ca donnerait sans doute à peu près :

Au travail en France : distant et respecté. Austère et exigent. Plutôt grande gueule. Lunatique et sous contrôle.

Au travail à l’étranger : réservé mais sympa. Fiable et contradicteur. Intrigant.

Avec mes relations pro et contacts ponctuels : sympa et accessible. Drôle et attentif. Superficiel et léger. Trop secret.

Avec mes amis, selon les amis et les groupes :

• Joueur, leader, indépendant, égocentré, lunatique
• Suiveur, à l’écoute, discret, peu investi, dans le groupe mais à l’écart
• Bon public et réservé, de bon conseil
• Bavard et déconneur, bon confident, sociable, fêtard mais parfois absent
• Effacé pour mieux mettre en avant les autres, peu partageur mais connecteur, casanier

Cette diversité catégorisée transparait sur les réseaux sociaux où je suis tour à tour pro et déconneur (sur Twitter), dépressif et égocentré (sur mon blog), éparpillé (sur Facebook), exposé (sur Instagram)…

Ceux qui me connaissent dans une catégorie m’imaginent en général avec difficulté dans une autre, J’ai longtemps eu du mal à réunir et mélanger mes amis, sans doute incapable de trouver le meilleur dénominateur commun. Et n’ai réalisé que très récemment la complexité pour les autres, plus que pour moi, de cette diversité de traits de caractère.

Great content and content design drives repeat usage and greater engagement. It’s not rocket science although it should be data-driven.

PWC, The World is in Beta, is Better Design

The PWC site, The World in Beta, is a great example of a thought leadership content site that follows new, best practices in content design and delivers a remarkable and refreshing approach.

Here’s how they state the purpose of the offering:

“Through this website we’ll seek to explain what companies must do to adapt and prosper in this age defined by digital opportunities. We’ll show how these opportunities are changing industries and markets and affecting every part of the organisations wishing to compete in them and we’ll share strategies designed to help companies move with speed, empower ideas from untapped sources, and develop resilient and trusted networks.”

There is so much right going on here, I will simply highlight 4 great content experience and design qualities:

1. The introduction and purpose is carried by a short video. This shares their POV succinctly and in a truly engaging way. Once I understand the site purpose, I will simply engage with their most recent content and do not need to refer to this video again.

2. Articles are elegant, attractive and easy to read. Articles have great headlines and an easy to read/scan display format. the one caveat is that they do not consistently use bold headers that break down long articles. Enforcing best practices with a consultancy can be difficult. While only a few articles are complemented with imagery, the editorial still feels open and visually inviting.

3. The site is optimized for sharing. The fact that they have share buttons adjacent to promos (we all share before we read) aligns to behavior.

4. There is personality here that I and Google appreciate. Most articles and stories are bylined by staff who are identified with photos and contact information including their LinkedIn profile. As my Content Marketing lead, Brian Carlson, will often point out, the byline helps in establishing authority in Google. I like it because I want to get to know people in organizations.

5. Short, provocative videos amidst the articles. They are pondering the future here and are not shy about crafting a few videos that depect that future. Like this :33 video on drone bees which just happens to be a great length for pre-roll advertising, not just content on the site. 

The Washington Post RWeb Version is Refreshingly Simple

The Post has a new tablet-inspired interface that makes reading stories fun again. The big-picture approach that stacks two stories next to each other with a simple arrow-left and arrow-right actually encourages me to read deeper into their stories and not simple headline-hop.

Three things worth noting here:

1. Never underestimate the power of a picture and a headline. When I scan my NYTimes app, I am grazing headlines looking for a relevant story. When I am in the Post RWeb version, I am attracted to the photography that hints at the story as much or more than the actual headline itself.

2. Stories designed to be read, shared and crawled by Google. The stories are well constructed – bylines, headlines, share functions, ability to go full width, increase the text size. They are really paying attention to what the reader may want to do. The only caveat is that stories are written like traditional newspaper stories so no bold paragraph headlines to make pages more scannable. I am certain that quality makes  good journalist cringe. I just appreciate it when several pages of text are broken up by bold headers.

3. User-controlled photos enhance the mobile experience. Some stories have a lot of photographs – like the one on the President’s visit to Watertown, South Dakota. Rather than force all of these images down the pipe, regardless of what type of connection you have, the page loads a couple, tells you how may more are in the stack server-side and that asks you if you want to load two more. Another good example of user-centered design.

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3 Lessons on Becoming More Data-driven in Digital Marketing

He is not a household business name like Steve Jobs or Jack Welch. He didn’t lead an organization into making products to change the world. In fact, many of the employees that now work at the company he once led have probably never even heard his name.

Yet he was responsible for one of the boldest and most enduring marketing campaigns and business strategies of the 21st Century. In a world where brands seem to change marketing taglines and missions every 24 months, Townsend was a trailblazer. In 1970, well before people were talking about responsible corporations or empowering employees, he even wrote a book about his unique business philosophy called Up The Organization: How To Stop The Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits.

So what was the campaign tagline and corporation that Townsend was responsible for building?

Avis. We’re Number Two, So We Try Harder

For more than 50 years and until very recently, Avis still used a variation of that same tagline. It is a unique example of marketing that people respect and believe because it shares a level of truth and honesty that is widely missing from the lazy marketing we see today.

The sad fact is, honesty in marketing has become shocking because it is so rare.

What if we could reconnect our marketing with that type of bold and believable honesty? There are signs that this exact mission may be a growing trend among the business and marketing strategy of brands in a variety of industries. To illustrate, here are five of the most shocking examples of honest marketing strategies in recent years, as well as a simple actionable lesson you can take away from each one.

1. Listen To Your Experts (Avis)

While you may know the iconic tagline, the story of how Avis came to run with their “We Try Harder” positioning is an even more interesting tale of trust and commitment. In 1962 then CEO Robert Townsend was running a struggling brand. To help, he brought in the hottest advertising agency of the time – DDB. The agency took the job on one condition: Townsend agreed to run whatever campaign they suggested no questions asked. With this creative freedom, copywriter Paula Green created the new tagline, the brand ran it and it helped turn the brand around. In the process, Townsend learned a valuable lesson which he later wrote about in his book: “Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency. Then go get the best new agency you can. And concentrate your efforts on making it fun for them to create candid, effective advertising for you.” It worked for Avis because they sought out great advice from experts, created an environment where that expertise could translate into a great message and then used it effectively. You can do the same thing.

2. Pick An Enemy (Lane Bryant)

Walking down the street in New York last week, the wrapped buses and billboards featuring full figured ladies in underwear were hard to miss. Their hashtagline boldly proclaimed #ImNoAngel and offered not only a rallying cry for women to “redefine sexy,” but also clearly painted a picture of who the brand was against: Victoria’s Secret. Sometimes great honesty can come from knowing what you are not and offering that point of view through advertising. For Lane Bryant, picking an enemy has created a big conversation and awareness of their Cacique line of underwear. Mission accomplished.

3. Admit You Have Competitors (Dos Equis)

It is tempting to see your brand or product as the only thing anyone would ever consume. The reality, of course, is that people frequently mix and match. “The Most Interesting Man In The World” campaign for Dos Equis has a lot of fans. Most love the guy depicted – and want to be like him. Yet consider the opening of his beautifully honest tagline “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis.” So a beer spokesperson doesn’t always drink beer? Of course not, because real people don’t always drink beer either. Admitting that simple and obvious fact gains attention, and having an entertaining character at the center of the ad drives the point home.

4. Fix Your Problems Publicly (Domino’s)

Perhaps the most openly honest advertising campaign in history was Domino’s “Pizza Turnaround” where they publicly aired focus groups of customers saying their sauce tasted like ketchup and pizza crust tasted like cardboard. Then they made a commitment to fix it and offered a transparent look at exactly how they were doing it. The entire campaign is already a case study in business transformation and marketing transparency and deserves a place on any list of surprisingly honest marketing campaigns.

5. Focus On The Story (Hans Brinker Budget Hotel)

While you might not be familiar with this hostel located in the middle of Amsterdam, for more than a decade they have been using one of the most interesting and unexpected marketing strategies you will ever see from a hotel chain. I speak about the example often in keynote presentations, because it offers such entertaining visuals – but the tagline the hotel has used for years is some version of this: “It can’t get any worse. But we’ll try our best.” The story they tell is that their “budget hotel” (ie – hostel) will be the worst you can imagine. Of course, their typical backpacking customer is intrigued and stays there purely for the story alone. And then they talk about it to everyone.

Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator and the author of five best selling books on business trends and how to build a brand with personality and humanity. He has previously written about the business trends of “Brutal Transparency” and “” in his annual trend report which has been viewed and shared more than half a million times. To see previous editions of this report and download a free 82 page excerpt of his latest book, visit www.nonobviousbook.com.

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If true, it should follow then that China are huge fans of most consumer electronics brands. We’ve written before about threats to intellectual property. The impact of such imitators is most keenly felt by the end user, and can be mixed. In India, back in 2011, counterfeit DVDs of The Dark Knight sold for over $600 a pop. In China, where a limited embargo on foreign films exists, scarcity has spurred innovation, leading to grey-market DVDs with more special features for viewers to enjoy.

Such innovation still flouts the law, however, and is nothing new. In his book A History of Future Cities, Daniel Brook writes in detail of the Westernisation of Shanghai at the end of the 19th century:

“As early as 1863, the British food company, Lea & Perrins, was taking out ads in the North China Herald to warn Shanghai consumers of ‘spurious imitations of their celebrated Worcestershire sauce [with] labels closely resembling those of the genuine Sauce’ and threatening lawsuits against anyone who dared to manufacture or sell the knockoff product”

Today, China still struggles to build powerful brands that work outside the country as well as they perform domestically. An editorial earlier this week in the Financial Times confirmed this status, with a focus on handset manufacturer Xiaomi. The editorial rightly points out Xiaomi have made good attempts at brand cultivation, including a strong social media following that cultivates a sense of belonging that results in people attending new product releases in the same uniform and plush toys (see header photo). More could be done though. Ultimately the brand can be as glitzy as you want, but without an exciting business beneath, generating excitement will be hard: “It is a sound business, but not an innovative one”. Its product specs borrow from Samsung, its product design and launch motif from Apple, albeit with some mildly diverting software additions of there own, such as a way to navigate automated phone systems.

The risk of failure in markets outside of China has potentially been heightened by the centrally planned market environment present there, which rewards and protects national incumbents while doing its best to hinder new, foreign entrants. A domestic market with over a billion people is not a bad starting place, but as the FT concludes, “If Chinese brands are going to take on their rivals around the world, they need to dazzle us with something we have never seen before, much like Sony did with its life-altering Walkman“. Sony though will feel keenly that such dazzlers do not a sustainable competitive advantage make.

Marketing and sales should be closer disciplines. Too many organizations manage them separately and end up engaging prospects in very different ways.  There is a lot of wisdom in using very similar content in integrated marketing programs as in your sales engagement. Each connects with prospects and customers at different phases of the journey.

By listening to prospects and customers through conversations, social, search, formal research – we can get a clear sense of what business problems they wrestle with long before they need our products. That's what we create content to address. 

We deliver useful, compelling content that helps them understand and even solve business problems before they buy or before they are even in shopping mode. We use digital marketing techniques – increasingly targeted delivery, native contextual placement and more to reach more of the right people. We don’t know they will all become customers of ours but we know they fit a profile and share an affinity for the topics that intersect our business and theirs.  

We use much of the same content in the sales engagements between the field force that interacts with independent agents and the customers they both serve. Historically, these engagements include a lot of face-to-face meetings. Increasingly email and, now, LinkedIn extend that relationship between those moments. Sales people (field + agents) learn a new cadence to connect with prospects and customers more often. Relevant content makes that outreach a welcome one.

Examples of relevant content

Supply Chain Pressure Test – this is a simple diagnostic, light-interactive, that helps mid-sized manufacturers think through their exposure for supply chain risk. It drives them towards a conversation with their independent agent or with their carrier (us)

Plastics Manufacturing Trends – we recently attended the NPE2015 trade event. This brought together some of the most innovative next technologies for plastics manufacturers. By highlighting what we saw there, we can help manufacturers who attended or who did not start to recognize some of the trends that may have an impact on business risk.

The top 5 manufacturing workplace injuries – simple, practical articles like this one that include a visual, can help manufacturers better understand safety issues and take steps to reduce their incidence in their shop.   

Designing around the buyer journey

We want to build preference and even drive demand beyond the typical insurance renewal cycle. That means looking at a complete ‘buyer journey’ and finding ways to be of-use even when a person isn't in an active shopping or buying phase.

The digital content marketing efforts – delivering content via a web site and promoting via email, social channels and content-oriented advertising serves a purpose all along the journey but is particularly useful in the front third and back third. Sales engagements happen adjacent to and including the conversion phase. Using similar, expert content in both efforts will earn relevant awareness, achieve necessary efficiency and connect sales and marketing at a time when they are stronger together than they are apart.  It also "sells"

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3 Lessons on Becoming More Data-driven in Digital Marketing

The Supply Chain Meets Social Business

Once you make it through security, you walk to the end and encounter a sign inviting you to take something called a “JFK Jitney” to your gate. At the bottom of the escalator, you discover that this “jitney” is actually a shuttle bus designed to take passengers from one terminal to the next.

It is safe to say I travel often enough to describe myself as a professional traveler, so confusing signs like this rarely slow me down. Navigating security lines has become routine for me. I rarely check a bag, and I have probably encountered just about every travel related mode of transportation at an airport possible.

Yesterday when I waited for the jitney in the airport lounge, I saw a very confused looking young European couple trying to figure out where to go or what they were about to do. They spoke English but were in a foreign environment. For them, the jitney was an unneeded confusion.

I watched them wait a few seats away from me, and saw the signs of relief on their faces when they realized that a jitney was basically a bus.  To tell the truth, I was kind of relieved about that myself.  I’m not stupid, and neither were they.  Yet that small piece of our travel experience was needlessly confusing.

The travel experience is full of “jitneys” like this. From now on when I encounter a sign or process that is not as simple as it could be, I’m going to remember this jitney.  You should too.

Too many consumer experiences are built with jitneys as well. The problem is, we are tempted to look at brands that have done it well and think we can do the same thing.  Starbucks makes consumers order a Tall, Venti or Grande instead of Small, Medium or Large. Those cup sizes are now iconic because Starbucks is everywhere.

Popular regional restaurants like Waffle House have time honored ways of ordering menu items – like getting hash browns scattered (grilled), smothered (with onions), and covered (with cheese).  For those few examples, it works because it is part of their brand personality.

Unfortunately, the world is far more filled with brands trying to be a little too clever with how they describe their experiences, and frustrated consumers are just struggling to keep up. What if your experience is a little less like a Venti coffee and a little more like that confusing shuttle bus?

Improving your customer experience sometimes means choosing simplicity over cuteness. This happens to particularly be true when your target audience is mostly made up of half awake travelers just trying to make it to their gates on time.

At 5am, no one wants a jitney.

We’ve written several times over the years about the deployment of Big Data. One of the key challenges with such tools is the seductive risk of treating the data as a catch-all answer to a question not asked. Zeitgeist in the past worked with a large client in the public sector that understood this pitfall and studiously avoided it by knowing beforehand what Big Data meant to them, and how it could be used to improve its strategy and operations.

Without such forethought, applications of Big Data can be ineffectual, if not outright harmful, as the president of eBay Marketplaces said last year in an interview with McKinsey. Governments around the world – particularly in the West – have been using Big Data for some time now to help identify extremists. The jury is still out for some as to how harmful government digital surveillance can be. The deliberate weakening of virtual systems has its root in the fact that the US government originally classified once-arcane cryptography as a munition, which when licensed abroad was watered down. “The idea of deliberately weakening cryptography in the name of national security has not gone away”, writes The Economist. An article published in The New Yorker earlier this year investigated the NSA’s uses of Big Data – specifically mass surveillance of individuals in the US and beyond over cellphone metadata, social media, etc. – and found it wanting. This appears to be partly because there is no pre-determined strategy for what they want the data to do, other than to figuratively chuck it onto the pile with the rest of the data they have, which at some point might be used. The efficacy of such a practice, according to the article, has been minimal. In all of its surveillance, the article claims there was but a single case “where the NSA’s phone-records program was decisive”. It is perhaps telling that most of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks that have occurred on Western soil since 9/11 have been known to the intelligence community. In other words, the data needed was presented, but there was no strategic oversight for how it should be deployed. It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of too little direction and too much volume. The New Yorker elaborates, below:

“Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. case officer who works with the Soufan Group, a security company, told me… ‘We knew about these networks,’ he said, speaking of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Mass surveillance, he continued, ‘gives a false sense of security. It sounds great when you say you’re monitoring every phone call in the United States. You can put that in a PowerPoint. But, actually, you have no idea what’s going on.’

By flooding the system with false positives, big-data approaches to counterterrorism might actually make it harder to identify real terrorists before they act. Two years before the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers alleged to have committed the attack, was assessed by the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. They determined that he was not a threat. This was one of about a thousand assessments that the Boston J.T.T.F. conducted that year, a number that had nearly doubled in the previous two years, according to the Boston F.B.I. As of 2013, the Justice Department has trained nearly three hundred thousand law-enforcement officers in how to file ‘suspicious-activity reports.’ In 2010, a central database held about three thousand of these reports; by 2012 it had grown to almost twenty-eight thousand. ‘The bigger haystack makes it harder to find the needle,’ Sensenbrenner told me. Thomas Drake, a former N.S.A. executive and whistle-blower who has become one of the agency’s most vocal critics, told me, ‘If you target everything, there’s no target.’“

This last quotation applies to strategy in general. Without anything specific to focus on as a strategic achievement or direction, one shouldn’t expect any improvement in that area.

Like any brand marketer, I went through the 3 phases of Facebook algorithm grief in 2014: outrage, sadness, and finally, sanguinity. The changes to the Facebook algorithm that may ultimately limit the organic exposure to 1-2% of your fan base at first seemed like a betrayal to advertisers thinly veiled in “what’s-good-for-the-users” logic.

The potential situation is that with a follower base of 50K only about 125 or so of those fans will be exposed to the post.  Had we all not experienced strong 20-30% exposures in the early days, we might not care. Still, it seemed to suggest that the fan base of a brand didn't matter all that much. If you were a brand that spent a chunk of money acquiring fans in the previous period, you might be a bit miffed. 

But it's really not that big a deal. 

Efficiency and organic followers 

Efficiency of Facebook is what matters. Is it the right medium to engage prospects, customers and in a sales-channel business like ours, agents in a way that will lead to a sales-related result (some type of “assist” earlier in the customer journey)? You could ask the same question about Twitter and LinkedIn. Even while those platforms don’t have the same algorithm-limiting exposures, no brand gets in front of as many of its followers as it would hope.  The Twitter feed keeps on streaming by. LinkedIn users are just beginning to look for content on the platform (although that behavior gets stronger every day).

Efficiency requires us all to be precise about what actions we value and what it costs to drive those actions via other means. In some cases, social media is highly unique and cannot be really compared. The best example is sharing content. Our best content gets shared a lot. That extends the reach of our content by one of the most trusted channels – word of mouth marketing. It’s not really comparable to other channels that deliver straight from the brand. Reaching 2% of a follower base at no cost can be a valuable. Alternatively, you might value click-throughs to a Web site where you can either re-target people or capture their information for a highly instrumented email marketing program.  

Social network organic reach can be a useful piece of the puzzle.

Here’s how Liz Gross puts it:

“I already have a realistic perspective of Facebook reach, which allows me to act calmly and rationally in response to the recent news. Here’s what I expect from our Facebook page, which has over 60,000 likes:

About 60% of the time, I’ll reach less than 2% of my audience with any particular post. There are a handful of highly engaged followers that see every single post we publish in their Newsfeed—I know this because they like and/or share them all. They’ve demonstrated to Facebook that every post matters.

Another 30-35% of the time, I’ll reach 3-5% of our followers with a single piece of content.

About 5% of the time, a post will reach 15-20% of our users organically, and we’ll consider that a “greatest hit.”

But over the course of a month, more than half of our fans will see at least one piece of content that’s relevant to them. They probably don’t want to hear from us any more than that.

We augment this strategy with promoted posts…and I’m continually collecting data so when I promote a post I know exactly how many people I can reach, how fast, and at what cost. I can quantify what Facebook reach costs my organization, and make an educated decision on whether or not I want to pay for it.”

Here’s how Jon Loomer summarizes:

“Ultimately, quality is what’s most important. Let’s assume that your highest quality fans are the top 2%. The most important thing is that you reach as many of those 2% (understanding many won’t be online when you post) as possible.

If 70% of your fans are casual and rarely take action, how important is it that you reach all of those 70% with each post? It’s a question you should ask yourself.”

Bigger is not better

Organic fans are a part of the puzzle. But bigger is not better. If you are a mass market brand like most consumer product goods (think Nestle, Unilever, Coke), having millions of fans may make sense. Although all of these brands chased fans when the exposure rates were much, much higher. Now they pay to reach more of them.

Most brands don’t need big fan or follower bases. The targeted paid content solutions in each platform is very good and getting better every day. If you want to reach a particular segment, you will do it with a thoughtful 3-step dance:

1. Grow a relevant follower base interested in your content and brand in a way that does not dilute engagement. Usually, when marketers aim to attract new followers, they employ tactics that bring in many people, some are the wrong sort. Engagement numbers drop. Only attract followers to the point that your engagement stays positive. Post organically to reach the few. Target paid posts to reach a few more.
2. Build custom audiences and use paid media to reach the right people. Not only can you increasingly microtarget the right people, some will convert to become followers on the strength of your content (this presumes that you are mainly using content in your sponsored posts/updates/tweets.)
3. Strategically promote posts based upon data and goals. One could put a little bit of money behind every post to gain additional reach. If you looked at every post as the equivalent of an ad, you might do that. A better approach might be to select the posts that are performing strongest or are more central to your business and carefully promote them.

Now if only industry indices that try to compare how competitors are doing in social media would drop ‘fans, followers, connections’ as the one magic KPI, we could all get on with marketing that matters.

For the last five years ago, our social media team has created infographics explaining the social media landscape of various Asian countries. The image for China has been in constant evolution, from this first version in 2010.

Now Jeremy Webb and Ying Chen have created the latest Social@Ogilvy take on China’s social media landscape, along with a couple parody infographics:

– The continued rise of WeChat: The Tencent-owned platform now takes on the role of multiple Western platforms in China.

– The addition of mobile video sharing: Vine has inspired a number of equivalents in China – the major players are Sina owned Meipai and Tencent’s 微视… not to mention WeChat’s “Sight” functionality.

– The addition of social travel: With so many Chinese now traveling at home and abroad, these platforms are much less “niche”. Breadtrip and Mafengwo are a first stop for many. Tripadvisor serves both Chinese and non-Chinese.

– LinkedIn crossing the China/Western divide – The professional SNS, one of the few western platforms not blocked, set up an office here in China. Questions remain as to the cultural need for a professional SNS in a market where networking is done face-to-face, but as the platform develops the China product there’s certain to be opportunities here for brands in China.

And, for fun, we’ve done some spoofs that highlight the difficulty in doing an info graphic like this.

In the first one, the “spinner”, lines are so blurred now between the platforms and Chinese platforms today are much less “equivalents” of similar Western platforms than they used to be. Definitions of Western platforms no longer apply when thinking about Chinese ones.

The second bulls eye emphasizes how WeChat seems to have swallowed all other platforms.

Finally, the idea behind the bottom image is the question whether such an emphasis on separate platforms is even relevant today? Good social media work thinks first about the consumer – what ideas and content would get them excited? If this question can be answered then the platform becomes less relevant – the consumer will be sharing on the platform relevant to them. They will decide the platforms for us.

Ce n’est pourtant pas l’envie qui me manque (régulièrement) de te plaquer là comme ça, d’un coup, sans dire un mot, après 8 ans de vie commune. Tu sais déjà pourquoi, mais puisqu’il faut être explicite, allons-y. Ce ne sera plus à faire le jour où je me serai affranchi de ces quelques détails qui me retiennent.

D’abord, tu me fais croire toute la journée, à coup de likes et signaux de fumée, que plein de gens m’aiment, s’intéressent à tout ce qui se passe dans ma vie. Une vie dont je ne montre évidemment que le plus réjouissant. Comme tous mes petits camarades le font. Au point d’ailleurs de finir par penser, ensemble, qu’un bon moment de vie ne vaut vraiment que s’il a été partagé sur Facebook.

Je crois prendre de vraies nouvelles en parcourant les statuts de mes « contacts », je sors d’ailleurs du petit tour du lundi matin qui me fait penser qu’ils se sont tous sacrément éclatés ce week-end. Moi aussi j’ai passé un super week-end mais je ne l’ai pas dit sur Facebook, ça doit cacher quelque chose. Mais comment honnêtement cacher le plaisir que je prends à parcourir vos instants de vie ?

Pire, tu me laisses imaginer artificiellement que je donne des nouvelles aux gens que j’aime en commentant leurs statuts. Ca m’éviterait quasiment de décrocher mon téléphone. La facilité dans ce qu’elle a de pire en somme. Moi qui essaie chaque jour un peu plus de dire aux gens que j’aime que je les aime, comment un coeur sous un statut ou un « bon anniversaire » en public pourrait y suffire ?

Facebook, tu n’es évidemment pas la cause des maux, seulement le cristallisateur de l’exercice permanent de nos propres dérives. Il en faut une force de caractère pour ne pas nourrir ce pic d’intérêt en likes et commentaires que mes amis m’octroient au premier selfie venu. Je ne comprends pas moi-même cette tendance que j’ai à liker  les selfies de mes amis. On s’entraîne mutuellement à nous exposer, jusqu’à l’overdose. De quoi transformer nos images numériques en représentation « sublimée » de soi-même. Être vu n’était pas un moteur quotidien, ça le devient, malgré nous (ok, ton copain Instagram a un peu accéléré le processus mais tu l’as racheté, c’est dire).

Dans les moments moins joyeux, le nombre de notifications que tu fais clignoter sur mon téléphone devient un masque à oxygène toxique, un fil barbelé qui retient mal à la vie sociale. En m’indiquant bien à quel point, si je disparais un peu, je suis oublié à une vitesse record.

Alors Facebook, je veux que tu saches que si je ne te quitte pas, c’est parce que mon travail m’oblige à être là. Ce qui fait tout de même un gros détail.

Je n’oublie pas les bénéfices collatéraux. Les quelques amis éloignés que j’aurais perdu de vue sans toi. Les petits miracles de vrais échanges ponctuels que nous n’aurions jamais eu sans toi. La facilité que tu offres pour rentrer en contacts avec un auteur que j’ai aimé lire ou un anthropologue que je rêve de rencontrer (Et Madonna aussi hein même si je suis pas sûr à 100% que ce soit elle qui me réponde ahah).

Je n’oublie pas non plus que je déteste ce que tu fais de moi, ce que tu fais de nous.