But we’re not the type to rest on our laurels.

Very soon we will announce changes to Sparksheet. It’s not going away. Rather, we are going to reorient it. How? We’re going to include more writing by colleagues at Spafax, in addition to writing from experts from around the world. We’re also going to start curating the best of the web – the interesting, forward-leaning stuff we find – to share with our growing audience. If anything, we will push more content, and more varied content, across more channels, and we will increase the frequency of that content. We will also increase the frequency of our newsletter (though not without your permission).

If you’re following us on any of our channels across social media, you will notice the eventual rebranding of those  channels, which will be relabelled Spafax Content Marketing. So if you’re following us on Twitter (or LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare and wherever else you might follow Sparksheet), and you’re wondering where Sparksheet went, it will not have gone anywhere. And you will always be able to find us at www.sparksheet.com.

Without an audience, a blog is nothing. You will be apprised of every change we undertake every step of the way. We believe that Sparksheet is a blog for transformation, and a beacon helping show the industry overall the path forward. We believe that content enhances marketing and we want Sparksheet to be at the heart of the new thinking about how brands communicate with the world.

This is an exciting time for the Sparksheet community and we look forward to sharing the plans of our evolution with you. So stay tuned. And though we don’t say it enough, thanks for reading, and for being a part of our community.

Moreover, the lack of brand trust and aversion to traditional advertising has led many top brands to start creating experiences instead of commercial shoots, and then filming real people interacting in real-time with the brand or product to make the actual commercial. The latest Chevrolet advertising – a series of dozens of 30-second commercials – all start out with the phrase: “Real people. Not paid actors.” Before the spot even begins, the viewer is led to believe that there’s a real-world experience that’s about to happen.

Experiential approaches in advertising will continue to grow. And in looking out at the global landscape of groundbreaking advertising and marketing ideas, four main trends are emerging that make experiential that much more indispensable.

From Tell to Involve

Confucius wrote: “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand.” This phrase paves the way for all future marketing and advertising to come. We are wholly over with the “tell” part of history: print and early radio that described a product or just slapped a name a name on it for differentiation. The past 50 years of television, print, out-of-home and promotions (to name a few) have all been about showing the product, or better yet, showing how the product will benefit our lives.

And now, with the concurrent rise of digital and experiential medias, brands are finally able to invite and involve their customers into the “brand experience.” We as marketers and advertisers are all craving for engagement with people. We can’t exist without them. And the more brands envelop their audiences in a warm embrace of brand-centric trust (what Kevin Roberts calls “lovemarks”), the more they will thrive. And experiential is at the heart of that.

Purpose and Meaning

The idea that brands are now verbs (and not nouns) is at the heart of experiential as well. And more and more of us expect the brands we buy and recommend to be socially conscious and provide a meaningful benefit to the world. One of the largest consumer-driven trends these days are brands standing for something – sustainability, gender equality, environmentalism, etc. Brands like Toms, Warby Parker, THINX and even Tesla have all been launched on the promise that commerce can be a force of good for culture.

But you can’t just talk about it, eh? As a brand, you can’t just put out a commercial and say you are doing great things for the world (even though oil and financial firms continue to do). You have to act. And action is what makes experiential so powerful. You have to be out in the real world to be effective. And people will judge for themselves, especially since 91% of global consumers would switch brands if a different brand of similar price and quality supported a good cause.

Innovation is Experiential

Think of some of the more salient innovations that have influenced advertising in the past five years — virtual and augmented reality, 3D projection mapping, social media or the rise of brand activation (ie. sponsorships, events, B2B). These innovations are wholly experience-based.

In the next few weeks, we in the industry will be hearing about the incredibly innovative ideas coming out of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We will all marvel at the crazy-cool ideas and executions that highly-creative people in ad agencies have invented using new technologies and innovative approaches to old ones. These ideas won’t be TV commercials. They will be experiential. And even though many of them live on a screen – digital and mobile – they will all be rooted in an interaction and engagement between a brand and a person. Just watch.

Brands must provide experiences – they must be activated in order to create that engagement and brand loyalty. In fact, a recent Association of National Advertisers study found that “brand activation is now 60% of marketers’ budgets.” Importantly to note, that spending eclipses what they spend on advertising. The study concludes that “spending on brand activation marketing in the U.S. is projected to top $595 billion in 2016. Such spending rose 5.5% in 2015 to more than $560 billion.”

Clearly, marketers need to take notice. And advertising professionals must follow the trends and remember that “the experience is the message.”

Learn more (or refresh your memory) here with The Age of Experience: Part 1, also by Max Lenderman. 

Since the advent of social media, businesses big and small have been asking the same question: is all of this effort really making a difference, and if so, what is the most productive and important way of going about it? According to the 2015 Social Media Industry Marketing Report, which surveyed over 3700 marketers to better understand the mysterious relationship between social media and marketing results, only 45% or marketers think that their Facebook activity is effective. Zukerberg’s giant channel is the most commonly used social media platform (used by 93% of marketers), followed closely by Twitter and LinkedIn, used by 79% and 71% of marketers, respectively. In other words, more than half of marketers using the most popular social media platform in the world don’t think it works for them (or their clients).

Is turning likes into cash flow any easier than spinning straw into gold?

Using Social Media for Customer Service

Gone are the days when your only option for complaining to a business was waiting on the phone for hours, serenaded by soul-numbing muzak. Social media is now one of the top tools for customer service. But it has its advantages and disadvantages. A frustrated customer who posts on a company’s Facebook page expects an immediate response. According to data from The Social Habit, a large-scale study of American media users, 42% of respondents who have ever contacted a brand, product, or company via social media for customer support expect an answer within 60 minutes. 32% of respondents expect an answer in no less than a mere half an hour. If you’re using social media for customer service, you had better be prepared to provide quick service. Of course, if you can reply to concerns with friendly immediacy, you humanize your brand while building trust, not only the customer who contacted you, but everyone who sees your public post. This can translate into increased likes and new customers.

Social Media Marketing and Branding

How can a business develop a successful brand when a consumer would much rather scroll through Twitter or watch a cat video than pay attention to its ad? According to a recent article in the Harvard Business review by cultural branding and strategy expert Douglas Holt, the answer to increasing your brand’s popularity on social media is to pay attention to “cultures.” Holt explains that social media has facilitated the growth of sub-cultures, which form around an array of ideologies and practices, into bigger crowd-cultures. When brands speak to these crowd-cultures, they increase their relevance. The Dove Real Beauty campaign used women’s personal stories to link soap products to the body positive and feminist crowd-cultures. And went viral. Oreo appealed to LGBTQ rights’ crowd-cultures with its rainbow pride cookie. And went viral on Facebook. Pumping out ad after ad simply telling customers about your awesome products and services doesn’t work anymore. But connecting your brand to a cultural movement and/or using a real person to tell a touching personal story that makes the link between this cultural movement and what you have to offer? That’s a recipe for likes, shares, and views.

Measuring Return on Investment for Social Media Marketing

Tying social media activity to marketing outcomes is complicated. In the past five years, industry research shows it’s been one of the top questions from marketing professionals. Eighty eight percent of marketers want to know how to measure the ROI from their social media activities, which could explain why over half of marketers don’t know if their Facebook activity is effective. And yet over half again plan on increasing their spending on social networks. Why? Because by looking at page likes and post views, companies see proof that social media increases their brand’s exposure. But does this exposure translate into dollars?

According to Dominique Hanssens, professor of marketing at UCLA, ROI is easiest to measure for one-time capital expenses, and social media marketing is more complicated than that. Hanssens argues that discovering whether your social media activities are impacting your conversion rates requires looking at your company’s overall marketing picture. In addition to social media data, sales’ expenditure, print and television advertising, and mobile app data (among others) must be analyzed in order to discover the true effects of your marketing efforts. Combining all of this data is, as Hanssens says, “incredibly tough.” To get around this, Buffer, a company that builds social media tools, has experimented with shifting its focus from ROI to content. Buffer argues that trying to figure out if social media activities are creating customers is difficult because the basic math isn’t as simple as: potential customer sees post -> potential customer likes post -> potential customer becomes a real customer and buys product.

Content-crafter Kevan Lee illustrated his ROI journey in becoming a Buffer customer to show how complex the journey really is:

“Kevan Lee’s path to conversion: Facebook > Blog > Guest Posts > Feedly > Bookmarks > Blog > IFTTT > Google > Buffer landing page > Conversion!”

To track ROI, there are companies you can hire to do it for you, as well as published formulas. But with almost 90% of marketing professionals reporting difficulties with tracking how social media translates to revenue, it might be a better idea to stick to what social media easily lends itself to measuring: engagement. And to successfully increase engagement, social media marketing isn’t that mysterious. It’s a lot easier to share branded content that speaks to a crowd-culture than it is to spin straw into gold. What effective social media marketing comes down to is common sense: make customers feel important whenever you engage with them on your platforms and link your product, be it a bar of soap, or a cookie, to issues of cultural relevance in the posts you share. Then, social media will do what it’s best at: spark engagement, start a conversation, and be relevant to your customers..

In fact, this kind of thinking has been around for a hundred years or so. The 1900 World’s Fair in Paris let everyday people see first-hand and hands-on demonstrations of some of the most profound inventions of this century. The Weiner Mobile – the truck shaped like a hot dog for Oscar Meyer – hit the road in 1936, perhaps being the first mobile marketing campaign ever and one that still exists today. The Pepsi Challenge – where street teams dared everyday people to compare Pepsi to Coke – is one of Pepsi’s greatest success stories. These were all avatars and progenitors of what we now call “experiential.”

The real shift in thinking came from a couple of Harvard guys. When Joe Pine and James Gilmore published “The Experience Economy” at the turn of the century, I knew that marketing and advertising would never be the same again. In their book, they posit that the developed world’s economies would shift from a service-based approach to an experience-based one.

“Future economic growth lies in the value of experiences and transformations–goods and services are no longer enough. We are on the threshold of the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. “

For a while, brands latched on to the “events” side of the statement. Experiential marketing was sequestered in that arena, defined as stuff that happens when brands throw concerts, sponsor sporting events or hand out samples out of the back of the truck. But experiential marketing was – and definitely is – so much more.

Since that year, the practice of experiential marketing has blossomed beyond events and sampling. It lies at the very heart of the best brands of the past 20 years. Apple has the Apple Store business – the fastest retail operation in history based solely on the experience you get inside the walls of a software and hardware company. Red Bull has redefined the way brands are introduced and appropriated by culture – all done without a single TV commercial or print ad in the first 15 years of its existence. And Tesla has redefined the way cars are sold strictly on the basis of a brand new test-drive experience.

There are plenty more massive brands that are predicated on experience. Uber. AirBnB. Zappos. I can go on. These brand juggernauts are proving Pine and Gilmore right: economic growth and value lies with experience. And the same applies to the marketing.

Just recently, Bud Light created it’s largest experience-based campaign ever with the “Whatever USA” campaign, which featured an entire town in Colorado being taken over for four days to create the ultimate immersive beer experience. This was repeated all over the country, driving one of the brand’s biggest marketing spends in history. And it was entirely experiential.

And do we need to be reminded about Stratos campaign Red Bull’s, an experiential stunt that broke YouTube due to tens of millions of streams being downloaded all over the world. That campaign alone grew Red Bull sales by 13% globally. And it proved that experiential marketing is one of the few disciplines that have very little media boundaries.

It’s important to note that at time when most people mistrust advertising, we are beginning to use real people to tell brand stories for us. The ability to be authentic and credible through real-world experiences is integral for brand trust. Great brands should be eager to create unfiltered engagements with their audiences, and experiential approaches to their marketing strategies do just that. Just look at all those TV adverts (like this one) that make sure to tell us that it’s real people in the commercials. This, my friends, is as experiential as it gets.

In Part 2, Max Lenderman looks at the future of experiential marketing and how it works overseas. Coming soon.

There are ever-increasing raft of studies, rankings and surveys that pelt the marketing community every day. In branding alone there are now 294 studies tracked on the website, Ranking the Brands. Most of these are celebratory lists pitting brands against each other on one dimension or another. And the tech industry is an expert at producing reports that skew towards ‘technology-as-savior’ conclusions. Add on consumer and market research studies and marketers are now buried in elephant-size data dumps.

I am a part of a team researching marketing studies for a prospective book. Our intent is to discover commonality and difference in content. One thing that we found immediately was the need to clearly understand the wants and needs of consumers. Everything else is blinding white noise. Marketers know this but get distracted by shiny new toys and theories promising better performance.

The practice and profession of marketing has never changed. It has always been predicated on human behavior. It exists to understand consumer’s motives and give them justification for making a purchase. Everything else either supports or erodes this fact.

The relationship between brand and consumer was pretty much a fair relationship until the Mad Men, mass communication era. That marked a point when brands took the appearance of control through the ubiquity of advertising. This went on for a few decades then the balance of power shifted back towards consumers…but was then interrupted by the advent of social media.

Social media promised dialogue but has regressed to a broadcast tool populated by intrusive advertisements. None of this has truly benefited the consumer yet brands believe they are doing better for their customers. In examining a significant sample of branding, marketing, advertising and consumer reports, it is fair to conclude that brands and marketers are not listening to consumers and struggle on the most important dimension: a personal and human one.

Trust Us Please

A recent Cohn & Wolfe report shows brands face an “authenticity deficit”. The company surveyed 12,000 consumers in 14 markets on more than 1,600 brands to determine consumer perception of authenticity. It found that just 22% of consumers agreed that brands and companies today are open and honest.

The study also discovered that fewer than 1 in 4 consumers agree that brands can be trusted. As well, only 1 in 4 feel that brands make the world a better place, and slightly fewer, 23% agree that they uphold high values. What makes this interesting is the uniformity of sentiment across the 14 markets.

Several other agencies and consultancies have uncovered similar findings. Havas Worldwide found that honesty and transparency was in the top three most important values consumers feel brands should embody. Harris Poll showed that dishonesty about products and services is the most damaging scenario for corporate reputations. Research from Initiative demonstrates that trustworthiness and authenticity are 2 of the top 5 brand attributes for consumers.

The Cohn & Wolfe study found 88% of consumers worldwide would reward a brand for authenticity. Most commonly, consumers would recommend the brand to others (52%), remain loyal to the brand (49%) and value the brand (48%), and a brand’s authenticity would also attract 1 in 5 to want to work for the company or to invest in it.

Too Beaten Down To Complain

The findings from an Accenture study seem to contradict a commonly held belief in marketing that unhappy consumers are more vocal than happy ones. The consultancy found that companies are performing so poorly that consumers have given up complaining because they feel nothing changes.

After receiving poor service from retailers, banks and cable providers, only 28% of consumers posted negative comments online; bad service goes unreported and unrecognized, so companies don’t react or improve. In short, everyone is settling for less.

Berkeley Warburton, Managing Director of Advanced Customer Strategy at Accenture, believes most consumers now suffer in silence before quietly switching brands and that this trend is growing. “While the squeaky wheel gets the grease and those vocal detractors are noisy, they don’t represent the bulk of customer sentiment. The bulk of your unhappy customers are not complaining to you, they are just silently switching.”

Apple Genius Bar in Shanghai’s Apple Store,” Wesley Fryer, Flickr

Know Thy Customer

Marketing has only one key tenet and it is ‘know thy customer’. An Experian Marketing Services report revealed that a marketers’ top priority in 2016 is enhancing their knowledge of their customers’ needs, attitudes and motivations. The analysts note that this is one of the crucial challenges faced by marketers regardless of industry or company size.

The voice of the customer is the most powerful force for making decisions and making things happen. The research shows that knowing the customer makes messages contextually relevant, analytics more actionable, and overcomes internal company silos that are often a barrier to customer service. There is evidence that deep customer knowledge drives companies to integrate their marketing efforts rather than organize by channel or discipline. It means they are focused on holistically pleasing the customer not satisfying their own internal machinations.

You Earn Trust, You Do Not Create It

Every relationship is based on trust. It requires that the parties involved are real. The word, “authenticity”, is used liberally in branding and marketing but woefully under-applied. If we circle back to the Cohn & Wolfe report, authenticity depends on how much consumers perceive a brand to be:

• Reliable: delivering on promises and being of high quality
• Respectful: treating customers well while protecting privacy
• Real: communicating honestly, being genuine, and acting with integrity

Being authentic gives a consumer something to believe in beyond a simple monetary transaction. Trust is earned when a brand backs up that belief consistently. Brands must give consumers something to believe in because marketing is predicated on a human behavior. Marketing exists to understand consumer motives and give them a justification for making a purchase and crafting a mutually beneficial relationship.

This is simple when deconstructed both logically and emotionally. All that consumers want, what they will pay more for, and what will keep them coming back is the idea that a company will treat them the way that they themselves would want to be treated.

Know thy customers and do unto them what you want done to yourselves. Thus endeth the lesson.

Tapping into the ongoing trend of GIFs and memes to engage with consumers, enter emojis, the cartoon-esque images that display sentiment such as a smile, kiss or wink. In the next step of infiltration, brands are using these easy-on-the-eye pictures to convey instant marketing messages.

Standardization of Emoji Marketing

First things first. Like smartphone plugs and wires, the lack of standardization of emojis between platforms has made something that should be simple (ie: using emojis) and easy to use and deploy annoyingly tricky. Standard Unicode, to make character encoding consistent, is the first in a long line of steps to correct this. How different are the emoji across platforms? Take a look:

“Image: Screenshot, Emoji Unicode Tables,” Who Controls Emojis Anyway, Mashable

There’s not much that can be done to combat these variations. Manufacturers could follow the Unicode standard more closely, making emoji icons more consistent. However, the responsibility lies with marketers and the user. One suggestion is to use the app Emojily, which allows users to look up how icons will look to the recipient before being published or sent. This may be bothersome, but it will save any marketing message miscommunication between brand and user.

Guide to Emoji Marketing

Additionally, as a majority of brands and companies have hopped on the emoji marketing bandwagon, the clout of emoji marketing could be called into question. Emojis are everywhere; in our texts, on our social channels and even in our emails – and there is the chance of becoming desensitised. Using emojis correctly is crucial to staying relevant and pushing through all the noise of a market that’s so easily saturated.

1. Use emojis in real-time engagement
2. Don’t create customised brand emojis without an end-goal or purpose
3. Use emojis when you want to deliver a message immediately with the end consumer

Examples of Emoji Marketing

With the ongoing trend to use emojis within marketing activities, many brands have hit the mark spot on, while others have fallen short.

To promote the most recent Star Wars film (as if any additional marketing was needed), Disney and Lucasfilm collaborated with Twitter to create hashtag generating emojis. When users published character related hashtags such as #C3PO, #Stormtrooper or #BB8, custom icons were automatically added to the end of the text, embedded within the Tweet. All Star Wars Twitter users took to the platform to tweet with their #StarWarsEmojis, encouraging mass amounts of social engagement, hype for the movie and making the icons trend for the run-up and duration of the movie.

On the flip side, Chevy’s recent press release may have taken emoji marketing a bit far. Writing a press release made entirely of emojis to announce, well…I’m not sure, the automaker challenged recipients to decode it. Although a unique way to update a marketing resource that has become overly common, the message can be shrouded by too much visual emphasis.

“Crack the Emoji Code,” Chevrolet

Emojis continue to evolve. From sCommerce, used by Domino’s and the app Bitmoji, which allows users to create their own avatar that can be used to display different situations, emoji marketing has been given the green light for full steam ahead.

The trend shows no signs of slowing and according to Freelancers Union, one in three Americans today is an independent worker and many predict that by 2020, freelancers will represent 50 per cent of the U.S. labor force.

Yet as powerful as this shift has been, new insights are emerging on the impact that independent, online work can have on the individual. (See our Q&A with the co-founder of The Solo Project for more on this idea.)

Working for a marketing agency whose entire business model is based on leveraging this growing population of freelancers, I’ve learned that without real human connection, a freelance professional never feels fully invested in their work.

It seems like an obvious conclusion, but technology has made it incredibly easy to feel isolated. Think about it — why pick up the phone or meet in person when an e-mail is more efficient? Yet the more freelancers we work with, the more requests we receive to improve social interactions.

Even experienced freelancers recognize the important place socialization plays in the ebb and flow of work. This might partly explain why so many freelancers choose to work in shared or co-op office spaces even though it is usually more economical to work from home.

The Digital High-Five

The need to feel connected is most prevalent when it comes to recognizing and celebrating success. However in a virtual world where team members may be literally spread across the globe, a pat on the back or raised glass simply isn’t possible.

To overcome geographical restrictions, we’ve tried all sorts of fun and goofy things in an effort to make our virtual team members feel they belong. Some work and others…not so much. In one case of best intentions gone wrong, we threw an office party and decided to invite our online team members. We had them join via Skype by propping laptops on tables while everyone partied around them. Not only was it impossible to hear anything they said, people eventually ignored the laptops or forgot them altogether. Thankfully, our online team gave us props for trying. (We’ve had much greater success through small personalized human gestures like birthday care packages, or inviting the team to share their Spotify playlists.)

It’s always better to go personal if you can. If you’re thinking about sending an email, get on the phone. If you’re thinking about making a phone call, see if a video chat is possible. But whenever possible, we make it a point to visit team members when we travel for business or pleasure. And we always try to capture our interactions on film because we find it has an amazing way of bringing people together. As much as digital collaboration has created incredible opportunities for businesses and freelancers to work independently, it doesn’t negate the very basic human need to feel connected.

Lack of awareness is no longer a challenge. According to PR Newswire, 31% of companies in China reduced traditional advertising budgets in 2015 and reallocated those funds to content marketing and new media. Content marketing is now THE industry buzzword in China as brands look for new ways to look to reach consumers both locally and globally.

Which makes today’s challenge no longer about generating awareness of content. This rapid pace of change has generated a suite of new challenges that stem from the lack of understanding of what content marketing actually is. That means education. Or a different level of it. My colleagues at Forward describe content marketing as: “The formation of insight-driven content strategies and the creation, curation and commissioning of relevant, engaging content on behalf of brands that drives consumer interaction and action”.

Our focus now is to educate brands in China about how to be truly relevant and add value to their target customers lives, driving brand warmth and ultimately sales.

Here are some of our top tips about how to win with content in China. The good news? These tips work everywhere:

Listen to your consumers

Don’t create and plan content for the sake of creating content. Use data and insights to inform every piece of content you create. Content that tells a story and is context with your consumers’ lives will drive the most return.

Act global, think local

Ensure that global messages are relevant to the local market. Every word, phrase, photo, video, and gif should feel totally authentic or relevant. Consumers have to understand why brands are providing content to them – they have to have permission. Transcreate content rather simply translate.

Be relevant and in the places your consumers are

Or in other words, be effective and on WeChat.

Chinese consumers are becoming more sophisticated and expect personalized experiences. Use customer data and insights to inform the message. Ensure that the message is available on WeChat. This super brand is the go to location for consumers to engage with brands with over 650 million active users on the platform right now.

Think video and visual first

According to Statista 70% of all people in China engage with video online. Consumers have a deeper affinity with brands that offer richer experiences via video. Stories told through visuals also are proven to drive the most conversion according on Youku.

Optimise for SEO

Obvious, right? Well not so much if you are used to optimizing for Google. Ensure your team is fully aware of the nuances of Baidu.

Content Marketing will continue to grow and evolve in China, largely due to the continued development of Tier 3 and 4 cities. Much like the rest of the world, the youth market in these regions is likely to introduce a series of new content marketing trends. We can’t predict what they will want from us content marketers in the future but I think it’s safe to say that they will still be using WeChat – on the metro, in the shower, at a restaurant, on a scooter, anywhere basically. Well, for the next few years anyway….

As young people gain purchase power, brands from NASCAR to Comedy Central are hoping to reach them through Snapchat—the it’s-happening-right-now-next-big-thing that’s proving to be notoriously difficult for adults to comprehend. The visually driven app and its hotly anticipated update (which dropped March 29th), came up at dozens of sessions, with social media enthusiasts encouraging marketers to adjust to a new world of under-30 audiences, where the content is risky and unpolished, created live, built natively, and distributed instantaneously.

This time, it’s personal.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram taught brands how to get into the social spheres of new audiences. But in 2016, marketing is getting even more personal. One-on-one platforms are now the spaces that customers trust and that brands covet. Or want to covet. Snapchat is the obvious example (see above), but it’s just the beginning. Kik now delivers restaurant services, Snaps customizes emoji keyboards for Broad City fans, WhatsApp has rich content-sharing services, and Dasher allows users to exchange money via chat. Instant messaging is evolving into a new kind of browser—one that places brands’ bots in the most intimate of spaces, ready to converse with customers using on-point slang and prompt customer service.

The last gasp of the apps.

With the aforementioned rise of instant messaging and the continuing evolution of mobile devices, many SXSWers predicted that the age of apps is drawing to a close. Smartphone users are growing frustrated with hunting through a mosaic of icons to find particular services. A clean, brand-agnostic platform could solve this problem in the West the way it has in China, where users already use WeChat to shop, order food, interact with brands, and search for information. But what platform could be all things to all people? Facebook is certainly trying. It’s now a live broadcaster, an instant messenger, a workplace communication tool, a video phone, and a newsfeed. The social giant is even playing nice with publishers; rumours about it killing organic reach have ended, and Instant Articles makes content delivery more seamless than ever.

Authenticity Trumps pretty much everything.

The value of “authenticity” in content marketing has been touted for years, but at SXSW 2016, presenters found the perfect metaphor for how it worked. Donald J. Trump’s head made it into multiple PowerPoints this March. The leader for the Republican presidential nomination sells himself against conventional wisdom by making his message consistent with his brand, and by making his tone echo the voice of his audience. The path to success in politics, as in marketing, is not necessarily being authentic, but rather appearing to be authentic to the right audience: have a point of view, don’t be afraid of being unrefined, and always respond to your critics.

Facebook will win the live stream war.

SXSW2015 featured a throwdown between two live streaming apps: Meerkat and Periscope. The latter appeared to have won, but, as with everything in digital media, nothing lasts forever. Facebook Live launched last summer, and by the time SXSW rolled around again, it had expanded to full availability and quietly become the favorite live-streaming platform of many marketers and publishers. Mashable has reached legions of new fans through Facebook Live, says CMO Stacy Martinet, because the platform “brings the reach” of a built-in fan base, while being easier to use than Periscope. Plus, Facebook allows the videos to be saved to a brand’s timeline, whereas Periscope streams evaporate after 24 hours.

BONUS! That’s it, we’ve hit the attention ceiling.

If you’re reading this, then one thing is certain: you’re not doing something else. This may seem obvious, but it reflects a new attitude among the content creators gathered at SXSW Interactive 2016. There’s no more attention to be found among audiences, only the splintering of the attention that already exists. Marketers, brands, storytellers, and everyday users are responding to this with ever-shorter bits of content, trying to claim their slice of the attention supply through densely messaged and blaringly captivating 15-second Instagram videos, 10-second Snapchats, and eight-syllable bot messages.

As marketers, we know eliciting behavior change is tough, which is why we normally co-opt existing behaviors. So in this context let’s consider the theatre of video, our relationship with it and specifically the birth of 360 video –with a tip of the hat to the moving image and its use in advertising past, present and future.

It’s an area that perhaps hasn’t really encountered any particularly dramatic upheavals within the last 50 years, having been predominantly watched, close up, alone or with family and friends in the comfort of your own home. It’s a medium that has gone from what was initially not much more than radio with black and white pictures, to full color viewer interactive game shows, to digital, internet connected, 4K HD, curved screens – even if we look at mobile, the trend really hasn’t changed in a meaningful way despite the introduction of ‘engaging interactive’ formats.

In short, the screen, and our relationship with it, has remained constant – an extension of the theatrical proscenium arch and our own 140 degree field of vision. That is until Facebook launched its first Star Wars themed 360 animated video back in September last year.

Despite all this change, neither the hardware or the content has asked the end user to actually adjust their behavior all that much – and if anything has simply increased the ‘immersion’ of the experience, in the easiest possible way – surround sound, more pixels per inch, integration with other devices or channels to bring to the home an experience across a number of touch points. The consistency we really see, is the human head. It never moves, it has never been asked to move. Even looking over the last 2,500 years of recorded theatrical history humans have, almost without fail, been sat down, fed, watered, pointed in a particular direction and, the hope being, entertained. And yes you can say “but now we watch on the move on mobile”, but actually our relationship with the screen, and our field of view has remained constant.

Perhaps this is the very reason why AR has barely taken off, despite the fact it has been around on smartphones since 2008: too much friction, too much to ask of consumers, not enough value return. The problem becomes more accentuated when the behavior that needs changing is so embedded it’s almost surprising that our necks haven’t evolved out of the need to rotate. Thank god for real life!

Now I mention it, perhaps that’s it. Real-life. Watching TV, we are really asked to pause real-life, switch to lower brain function and open ourselves up into a more receptive emotional state, it’s more than a little like REM, and this is why TV advertising has always succeeded – we are captive, and we are open, ready and willing to be coerced into acceptance of a new reality.

But 360 video? VR, in a gaming sense, I understand. But 360 linear content? That, is a toughie. At Candyspace, where I work, the most forceful issue is that of its creative use in meaningful advertising. How can a story be effectively, and most importantly, intuitively played out in this medium? Look the wrong way at the wrong moment, miss a critical call to action or other important narrative hook; or alternatively you can awkwardly navigate the video with your mouse on a desktop.

In its current form there are numerous usability issues with 360 video and I suppose that a big part of the problem is really input, navigation and UX. These 3 key pillars are a way off even being close to good for your average mobile or desktop user, be they at home or out and about. To be meaningful or ubiquitous, it has to move beyond existing as a gimmick – which, with my hand on heart, is all it is at the moment. It has not been created to fulfill a need, it has been created because technology allows it – certainly in advertising its use cases currently don’t stretch any further than acting as branded content.

The bare minimum advertisers (and their work) needs is the ability to have deeper interactions within the video; and for Facebook and YouTube technologists to embrace the strange hinterland between the worlds of linear 360 video and Virtual Reality. At this point I’d settle for simple clickable areas, or delineating the videos with additional selectable narratives. This would begin to give a greater reason for advertisers to invest in the format and help it grow beyond its current bounds.

There are many problems to be overcome, but as Winston Churchill once alluded, within these problems, lie the opportunities. Opportunities for real experimentation, innovation and leadership. It’s down to people like us to develop new ways of engaging, not simply by co-opting a behavior; but by actually developing and evolving the reasons why these new immersive experiences of 360 ought to eventually appear on a channel plan near you. And that’s what excites me and my colleagues.

Carl Landau

I was fortunate to get a job in publishing at a young age with a B2B publisher called Miller Freeman Inc. They essentially specialized in niche titles, and there I worked on a magazine called World Mining, which was an international mining magazine. Later, I got a job working at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a computer magazine for hackers in the early 1980s. Back then, you used to have to build your own computer, and when I was there I was fortunate in the fact that Apple and IBM started producing PCs.

This is when I decided to start my own magazine called Computer Language for professional programmers. That was the whole idea: we would compete against general interest publications (like Byte). We went straight to the advertisers and readers to ask, “Wouldn’t you rather read a magazine that is specific to you and your interests?”

I realized the power of niche; the more you could segment that audience and the more interested they were with having all of the articles and ads geared to a specific taste, the more powerful it would become. Also, from an advertisers standpoint, they’re getting exactly the target audience they want. So there was a power on both sides. I’ve started five niche magazines and sold all of them over time, but I have always really enjoyed that whole idea of niche. Ultimately, that’s in the power of the Internet. You can find whatever specific information you want on anything you can think of. Niche magazines were basically the pioneers of the Internet.

Have you noticed any major shifts in niche marketing over the past 6 months to a year?

I talk to magazine publishers and many will have just one e-newsletter for their group regardless of size, but the more successful approach is to send multiple newsletters to refined groups of people. I always suggest that it be more interesting to the reader if you had one just about travel or health, and it seems people are finally grabbing on to this notion. You observe your market and then break it into even smaller groups.

Does this translate beyond traditional magazines?

It can be done with events too. Someone can hold a successful tradeshow for a target market but then whittle down their market even more. We hold a CEOs’-only version with 50 people that is very popular and garners a lot of sponsorship, especially considering the small group size. It’s all about getting your market smaller and smaller, and more segmented. The more segmented you can make it, the higher the open rate is. Niche is the way of the future.

Do you see a connection between the fall of the department store, general interest magazines, and your own interests in niche?

The bigger consumer magazines are really hurting because people want more niche. Newsstands, in particular, are inefficient; they have low sell rates, plus a high number of distributors and wholesalers who want their cut, so the costs end up being too high. Niche magazines are still doing well because they are curating their content for you as well as putting together advertisers that are interested in that specific target audience.

Do you think there will be a point where you won’t see bigger consumer magazines?

People have been saying that there won’t be printed magazines for a long time but ultimately, people still like magazines. However, the successful ones are making their content accessible across all platforms. There is also a lot of pressure on general interest magazines to provide audiences with everything they want (from print to digital to endless videos) and still make a profit.

It has also gone the same way for events. People always call for them to disappear, saying there is no interest. But the Internet hasn’t replaced events as a meeting place for people, as you can see with the success of things like Comic-Con. People love to meet with each other and share an experience in their fields of interest. They are the live repercussions of our social media world because otherwise you find everything out through Facebook, or a text or on LinkedIn and it’s just not satisfying.

Is there a difference between “local” and “niche”? If so, what would that (or those) difference (s) be?

We consider the city and regional magazine markets to be niche because once again you are pursuing a very specific group. One of the areas print is still especially successful is in local magazines. I get a local magazine and it’s getting fatter and fatter because it works better in terms of providing local neighborhood information. Print still works better than digital in these cases. There are magazines like The Austin Women that target 2 local niches at once, so these are the types of things that work as both local and niche.

Can you be too “niche” to make a profit? Or is there always a way to find a market? What are some future trends you see coming for Niche Marketing?

It depends on what that market is. Either you need to find sponsors that are interested in that, or find the right market. That way, no matter how many people are in the market, you will be able to support it. For instance, if your audience is wealthy or if it’s a business publication.

We just had the “Nichee Awards” and one of the entrants was a magazine for people that design high fashion clothes for dolls. That’s what is interesting about these, is that you would never know about them unless you are interested in that subject. There’s a guy that owns Parking Today specifically about parking lots and have their own trade show. The whole niche world is powerful, especially if you know what you’re doing.

Carl has founded and continues to run the popular, Niche Media Conference, now celebrating its 10 anniversary. This year, the conference runs from April 4th-6th and will be held in beautiful Austin, Texas.

I mean that in the best possible way. From a marketer’s (or publicist’s!) perspective, we’re in a weird world where anything goes, and I think that’s a very productive thing – it means that big ideas can truly be embraced. That’s what makes the job so difficult, but also so much fun.

The key is to think about the audience first: for the public, it’s not about a PR pitch or a marketing campaign, but instead about a moment or an experience that evolves their relationship with a brand.

Marketing and PR will each always have their own lingo, their own methodologies and their own die-hard advocates. But my prediction is that the business world of the future will care about results, not about labels or disciplines.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

After my business administration studies, I wanted to come up with a business idea that would serve a good cause. So I traveled the world to find inspiration, taught myself a little programming, and read a lot about environmental issues. In South America I learnt a lot about tropical reforestation and how trees can help mitigate climate change. This is how the idea for Ecosia was born and the search engine was launched back in Berlin in 2009.

Christian Kroll, Founder and CEO

And how did you come to link ad revenues with tree planting?

This is the main idea behind Ecosia: It’s a really useful tool that empowers users to do good by capitalizing on a daily habit without any additional cost or effort. If by using Ecosia you could search the web AND reforest the planet at the same time, why would you use any other search engine? Search engines make a lot of money from online advertising. At Ecosia we use our profits from that ad revenue to help both the environment and society. So far we’ve been able to donate more than $3 million with which we’ve planted more than 3 million trees. Our goal for the future is to grow our user base and come up with more clever tools that allow everyone to contribute on a daily basis.

You have a really simple but powerful argument for people to choose your search engine, but what is your content strategy for really getting that message out there?

We donated almost all of our total income until late 2014, which never really allowed us to scale or invest in complex new features or have a decent marketing budget. Luckily, our users love the idea behind Ecosia so much that they spread the word. We have a very highly engaged community, which has helped us to continuously grow . However, what really helped us move forward was going from donating 80% of our total income to donating 80% of our profits. This allowed us to invest in additional team members and has afforded us the ability to donate more money . This was a very important business decision and I am glad we made it. Anyone can browse our public business reports and donation receipts for a breakdown of our monthly costs and donations.

When you decided to go from donating income to donating profits, was that simply because profits became big enough to do so or was it more of an observation that it would be more beneficial to use the profits instead?

The decision was made because we decided we wanted to take Ecosia to the next level and really be able to improve our product and grow our user base. For that we had to invest in additional team members and overall development. Since we cover our running costs first and then use our profits to support tree planting, we’ve been able to scale. I really recommend watching Dan Palotta’s TED talk on social business and the problems they face when it comes to investing in their own growth.

You said that you learned about reforestation in South America, but how and which countries do you now choose to support tree planting projects?

Unfortunately there are countless regions around world that are in desperate need of reforestation. We want the trees we plant to help both the environment and local communities. By planting trees you can help mitigate climate change, but you can also create a world that is socially, economically and politically more sustainable. We want to maximize the positive impact of our trees so we try to support regions where people don’t necessarily have the means to engage in reforestation.

“Search Images fb-og-01”, Ecosia, Cloudfront

What message do you hope people take away from Ecosia?

To us, it’s important to show people that they have a choice and that just because something is installed as a default on their device or in their browser, it doesn’t mean they have to stick with it. Monopolists can exert a lot of power, which we think can be dangerous. Lately more and more people have become aware of the fact that there are alternatives. We want to encourage people to explore and look for tools that offer them additional value. We believe that the future belongs to tools that cater to a user’s needs and at the same time empowers them to do good simply by capitalizing on a daily habit.

SnapChat and WhatsApp and Slack are many things but they are not “social” in the mass sense of social media. Slack, especially, is for small groups (and some not so small) to exchange information and chat. Some people say it feels like “old Twitter.” That is, the noise to information ratio is non-existent. Facebook is getting older (admit it: how many of you now use it to stay in touch with your parents?) and older and the kids are leaving. This is a “worry” even though the site is the largest social media platform on the planet. By a lot (and let us also admit here that “worries” about any large social media channel, even Twitter, are generally driven by Wall Street and not by anyone else – if anything stuff like this is far more of a threat to Twitter than a lagging growth curve – and I have long argued that Twitter isn’t difficult, they just make it unnecessarily so, and an ecosystem of developers are tying to help Twitter help themselves).

What no one is really noticing is that the social part of social media is hurting. And it might be time to consider whether or not it’s in for a backlash. 

Instagram is the future one day and the next day it’s not. It’s “easy” in the sense that few words are exchanged (though that is changing and some interesting uses of the platform are starting to emerge). When’s the last time anyone said anything about LinkedIn? And Google seems intent on allowing G+ to die a slow and unremarked death.

What no one is really noticing is that the social part of social media is hurting. And it might be time to consider whether or not it’s in for a backlash. The same forces that doomed, say, newspapers, might hit social media as well. It’s hard to imagine now, but the future usually is. Kids, those crazy kids, are more into narrowcasting than broadcasting; they’ve grown up understanding that images and messages on digital are potentially forever and so a mindset of caution is baked in. Will media look more Chinese, that is, message based? Quartz thinks so and their instant messaging based newsapp seems to hint at a way media can appear to narrowcast without being…narrow.

No one is at fault here. Brands have to use social media because that’s where consumers are (for now). An ad on Facebook may not attract a smidgen of the eyeballs a TV buy might but it’s not going to cost all that much either. And it is highly highly targeted. Of course, ads or even brand presence is not really “social” in the truest sense of the word (which may be why Instagram is the space to watch for marketing efforts and not more verbal-based social spaces). But I suspect in the future there will be a kind of ad-blocking on social networks as well. And the social networks will see this for the enormous existential threat that it obviously will be and there will be a new fight. Meanwhile, newspapers will continue their downward spiral (alas) and lots of websites will lament this (unironically). And magazines will continue to get more and more niche and thrive (and attract ads). And TV will morph into an app-based subscription model and maybe even stop worrying about “screens” they can’t control.

I can foresee a day when everything is based on a subscription model. That is, we’ll pay for our media (again). Except for the channels and networks that feature fantastic content but in exchange promise only great creative ads. People will flock to those. Probably.

Brands attempting to use Internet culture in advertising can also backfire. Some examples include the Dub the Dew online contest or more recently Coca-Cola’s #GIFTheFeeling GIF creator or even #McDStories.

I would agree that it would be difficult to make money off an image macro meme. Companies typically try to use hashtags, viral videos and other types of online content to monetize “memes.”

The Wikipedia definition of “meme” is rather broad: “activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet.” So, if you are using that kind of broad definition, then companies clearly use memes in marketing all the time.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

There are few environments left on Earth that remain shut off from the march of consumer technology. Mêdog County in the Tibet Autonomous Region was one such place – untouched by the modern world, until 2013, it was the last region in China without a road leading into it. Here, the volatile landscape crushes attempts at progress beneath the chaos of mudslides and avalanches. Nature itself is the arbiter of change, not man.

Extreme environments are no strangers to our lives. Our stratosphere is clogged with flying objects – up to 10,000 commercial aircraft, 3,000 satellites and millions of drones. These gleaming hulks have their own lifespan, their guts and skin aging under the sun – and in service for as long as 25–30 years in the case of passenger aircraft.

The half-lives of aircraft and satellites decline in parallel. As occupants of an extreme environment, they are insanely expensive to launch, maintain and upgrade. So they eke out their existences until they reach minimum viability. Along the way the customer experience degrades and degrades until customer relations reaches breaking point and they are replaced or upgraded. But increasingly on aircraft, it’s not the overhead lockers, or the toilets that look out-of-date, it is the entertainment systems embedded in the back of the seats, and the Wi-Fi connectivity options on your mobile device.

Hardware Eats Itself

Since the dawn of the new millennium, the pace of change in consumer electronics and networked computing has expanded exponentially. Mobile devices are our default screens. If consumers are to care about another screen it has to offer significantly more – not just in size but also in utility, resolution and processing power. This is the battle fought daily by a niche hardware industry built around entertaining passengers’ inflight.

“Clouds (5)” Kurdistann, Wikimedia Commons

Marketers and promoters have been bringing video into the inflight environment ever since a projector was first lumped aboard an Aeromarine Airways flight in 1921. From projectors to overhead screens to video-on-demand systems, inflight entertainment (IFE) systems must have seemed cutting edge. Fast-forward to 2016 and the entire IFE industry continues to grow around the screwing in of screens, cables and servers to aircraft, and the provision of video and audio content to on-board hardware that is well out-of-date before the aircraft has left the factory, let alone after many years’ of service.

Inflight Entertainment Lives-On

The slow upgrade process of aircraft and inflight services protects the industry’s solution providers from the disruptive change that businesses on the ground have faced over the last 20 years. Thus, the long-term absence of fast and affordable inflight connectivity, for the meanwhile shields this world from major change.

Inflight connectivity has evolved slowly because it is inextricably tied to the satellite networks high above the aircraft and ground-to-air networks far below. Using current technology, these networks cannot hope to deliver the Internet to 300 people aboard a moving target, at speeds that keep pace with our ever-increasing, unilateral hunger for data-heavy content.

“Airplane-takeoff-blue-sky-clouds-925837” by StockSnap, Pixabay

The latest systems bring the inflight environment closer to the reality on the ground – a world where everyone might one-day stream content from a global content delivery network. However, the costs of transmitting that much data to- and-from an aircraft are also, quite simply, out of this world. What’s more, by the time these connectivity systems are installed on a significant number of aircraft, they will be well on their way to obsolescence.

Locally stored content streamed over the Wi-Fi connection to passenger devices is one option being explored by a number of airlines. This approach relies upon a heavily configured local environment with hundreds of servers flying around on the airline’s fleet and content accessed through a customer’s pre-downloaded application. Sound complicated? It is.

So How Do Airlines Really Cut the Cord?

I work at a content and entertainment agency (Spafax, also the publishers of Sparksheet) that grapples with these problems. We have watched the VOD market on the ground evolve as Netflix and traditional broadcasters become increasingly indistinguishable as they have both borrowed from each other’s product, customer acquisition strategies and technology. Content owners and aggregators have unilaterally adopted cord-cutting technology and app-driven streaming TV. However, linear broadcast TV remains strong. If anything, we are just watching more TV in more ways, both in groups and individually, than ever before. But more and more of that content is consumed though apps and web services.

“Boeing 777-2DZ-LR, AN1940838” Alex Beltyukov, Wikipedia

If branded inflight entertainment is to survive long-term, it has to mimic consumer behaviour on the ground. It has to whole-heartedly adopt cord-cutter technology, leveraging the content delivery networks, services and applications built to power the likes of Netflix, Hulu and HBO Go. From a tech perspective, the future for branded entertainment is connected entertainment. But the inflight environment also creates a unique opportunity from a content perspective – where brands can cherry pick content from an unrestricted universe that the Netflixes of the world can only dream about. This is today’s IFE on steroids- a combination of traditional and new multi-format digital content that is curated and served to passengers in new ways. Here, the future is to deliver a dynamic, relevant, personalized experience for travellers still eager to optimize their highly prized me time.

This mix of technology and content opportunity is why my company works with Piksel, an Over-the-Top (OTT) TV provider, to deliver downloadable entertainment apps for airlines. Our Voyage applications deliver content pre-flight to passengers own devices direct from the cloud, not only extending engagement off the aircraft, but personalising the content to the individual and enabling live updates and a dynamic entertainment experience. These entertainment apps have more in common with iTunes than the VCR systems still inflight on some aircraft. They require no on-board hardware, come with no strings and enable you to launch an entertainment service to all passengers instantly— without grounding a single aircraft.

In the wilds of Mêdog County in Tibet, man eventually tamed the extreme environment. The same will become true for inflight video. Software-only video solutions are the future for the inflight world, as much as they are for the consumer world at large. Seatback screens will live on long-term in some scenarios, but just like a TV screen plugged into an Apple TV, the real computing power and content strategy will be driven by the cloud.

Jeff Lee, founding editor of TOWER TRIP, during a visit of a 8,2M$ property in Miami.

How to leverage Instagram? Not a numbers game…

In his insightful article Influencer Reach Doesn’t Matter Anymore, brand strategist Frank Danna states that it is not simply a numbers game, but rather a question of tapping the right niche.

To discover digitally active brokers in Miami for example, simply monitor #MiamiRealEstate and you’ll find yourself surrounded by a community of hundreds of professionals who share and collaborate information on newly listed properties. “Last year alone, several transactions were directly the result of sharing on Instagram,” tells Allen Davoudpour, broker at Douglas Elliman during a visit in Miami. “Buyers are not necessarily shopping for houses on the social network, but other brokers are certainly very alert of what’s new, and that often results in a collaboration transaction.”

Monique Assouline and Allen Davoudpour connected via #MiamiRealestate.

This is networking on steroids because it skims down your feed and interactions to a limited pool of like-minded individuals from within your field. Mix this with a strong and genuine personal brand; it can be a very effective tool.

Getting over the death of Facebook organic reach

Again, the number of Likes is irrelevant. Since organic reach is now out of the equation, owning and up keeping a Facebook page for your business is no longer a marketing tactic in itself, but rather a new toolbox for audience segmentation and retargeting.

Integrating a Facebook pixel on a listing page for example, will allow the listing broker to then retarget interested visitors with advertising about this specific listing inside their Facebook feed. Combine this with existing Facebook demographic audience segmentation and you obtain a very efficient and low cost way to market to the right audience. Just browse through Montreal broker Yury Shupilov’s listings or notorious Corcoran Group’s pages and then notice how many automated new touch points this manages to create afterwards.

Content amplification and native advertising

There is now more than ever an easy way to get featured on most websites and it’s called a media kit. If a website has all the right audience and credibility in a niche, investing in both pure advertising and advertorial can be an effective combo. According to Ross Fox, marketing director for The Real Deal, the most notorious real estate news website and magazine in the US: “We get more readers for the same stories as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, because as far as Real Estate news is concerned, people trust they can come to us first. A typical developer or development package includes both print and online for at least 6 consecutive months.” The Real Deal will also host its first Canadian Forum at the end of March in Toronto. This established formula in the US adds a third dimension to their media packages.

Of course, most brokers and boutique developers don’t have that kind of war chest to invest in advertising mixes. But as Mr. Fox also said: “No one is too small or too large to advertise.” I hence found similar stories on a smaller scale where local brokers partnered up with local influencers and blogs. As with this “dream loft” story featured on MTL Blog or the “condo of the month” column on Vancity Buzz. There is certainly room for improvement in terms of editorial transparency and integration of this promoted content inside these editorial grids, but it’s good to see an effort from both parties. I guess brokers cannot sell The Michael Jordan Estate every week…

Owned media and proprietary channels by developers

For years we’ve seen mega banners build up their own media. Think of Sotheby’s International Architecture and Design Magazine, Remax’s Above or The Luxury Edition by Christie’s. Now hotel chains and real estate developers also started to harness the power of (relevant) content to engage with the right audience.

Trusted developer Prével in Montréal recently launched it’s own webzine with in-house editorial team. “Our content strategy is to showcase the lifestyle and neighborhoods surrounding our four ongoing projects,” explains David Deschênes, Marketing Director at Prével. “Beyond brick, mortar and finishes, potential buyers need to know a particular project is a good fit for them. From featuring rock climbing facilities to temporary art exhibits, our articles are still relevant and resourceful for previous buyers in our projects.”

David Deschênes, Marketing Director for Prével photographed at Les Bassins du Havre in Montréal

This strategy also gives a lot of ammunition for dwellers to become ambassadors for their own condo projects, and sometimes refers directly to new buyers. “There is so much competition between developers for SEM that creating good content is a way for us to get more organic reach and preserve a healthy balance of SEO/SEM,” tells again Deschênes.

A pivoting referral system to include agents

Last summer, Canadian referral platform Zoocasa was sold by Rogers to Lauren Haw and a group of investors who are gradually pivoting the model to include real agents under the Keller Williams banner. “One of the first changes we made was to build a team of agents who work exclusively for Zoocasa, rather than referring leads out to agents who do not work for the company. This is an important change, and indicative of the direction we’ll take with marketing and our other services across the company” explains Lauren Haw. “We know our clients will begin their real estate hunt online at home, and our USP is being able to perfect that research experience with our new website. Once our clients are ready to meet with a real person, we will be able to match that same caliber, level of professionalism and expertise they experienced online.”

Another interesting venture is Justeduneuf.ca, an independent platform that lists exhaustively all available condo units and new constructions in an area (Montreal only for the beta). This can be very useful for buyers to shop and compare all projects with a bird’s eye view. The interesting twist now, is that developers can also get a premium access to an advertising dashboard, where they can bid for more visibility for their projects on the platform, like they would usually do on Adwords or Facebook. This way, they only pay for the right clicks from prospects.

Nicolas Lemay, Founder and web developer of Justeduneuf.ca when met for a coffee in Montréal.

Chasing International Buyers

In a world getting smaller every day thanks to social networks, referral systems and communications automation, broker Martin Rouleau at Sutton will still go the extra mile to obtain actual face time with potential foreign investors. He and his team just got back from China. “They like the face to face communication. Most of the Chinese people we have met don’t speak French or English. Having a Chinese member in our team, William Gong, who speaks fluent in Mandarin, and who was born and worked in China was a great asset. Building trust with the Chinese community takes time” recounts Martin Rouleau.

Alexandre Gauvin, William Gong and Martin Rouleau moments before leaving for China (photo by team Martin Rouleau)

“Being an international broker means travelling, understanding other people’s culture and build a referral network with real estate brokers from all over the world. We traveled to China to build a network of contacts more specifically with Chinese relocation companies, immigration companies, Canadian banks established in China and local banks.” Their commercial mission was also well documented to their more than 12K followers on Instagram.

What’s next?

I believe that no matter what type of technology is leveraged, the real estate business will always remain one of genuine human interactions. The brokers and marketers who will thrive in the new digital ecosystem will be those who understand that technology is there to work for them, and not the opposite.

If you have other ideas or cases to share, please feel free to submit them in the comments below!

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

What is The Solo Project?

Official logo. Credit: The Solo Project

The Solo Project is a media and research startup from the creators of Fast Company and Inc. magazines. We’re focused on the fastest-growing segment of the workforce. They’ve been called many things before — contractors, 1099s, freelancers, project workers — but we call them Soloists. And their numbers are HUGE. A recent Freelancers Union study claims that 53 million — 34% of the American workforce — are currently Soloists.

So this is an acknowledgement of the vast changes taking place in the economy. Does The Solo Project aim to give voice to this “new” demographic then?

“Notebooks-cafe-blog-mobile-569121” by Life-Of-Pix, Pixabay

It does. But we also aim to reflect how rich and varied this population is. For example, Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED conference, is, and for most of his life has been, a Soloist. Of course many Soloists become Soloists by necessity — it’s been a rough decade. But we have seen that this is more and more becoming the career path of choice for a growing group of people. It’s intentional.

Your first gathering of Soloists was quite the success. What were the demographics of the crowd? The other part of The Solo Project that is interesting is the research aspect. This isn’t just a gathering of a tribe, if you will, but research into that tribe. Can you talk about how this came together?

The event was a great success, despite a few factors working (very hard) against us: 1) nobody had ever heard of The Solo Project, 2) the event was free (event planners will tell you that free means nobody feels committed, and thus, it’s easier to decide to bail if something else comes up, 3) it was a short week because of Labor Day, and 4) it was an all day affair on a work day. Still, the tickets were gone within a few days of our announcement on Facebook and EventBrite. We even had to add more seats and eventually standing room.

The Solo City. Credit: The Solo Project

We were only a little surprised that the room was almost dominated by women (about 80 percent). There was also a good mix of industries represented — obviously, the creative class showed up big, but there were lawyers and accountants, too, as well as a good range of entrepreneurs of all kinds. Age-wise, the average attendee was about 42, but Boomers and Millennials were also well represented. And this was a rabid crowd. It was as if they had found their kindred spirits. Most Soloists will tell you that one of the most difficult aspects of solo work is the lack of co-workers. It can get lonely outside of the traditional office environment.

With regard to research, we realized early on that there just simply is not a lot of data about this population. As part of our launch strategy, we’re using research as a marketing tool for connecting us with potential clients and partners. We believe it’s a huge opportunity for us.

What will that research entail? Will it be about the work? More about The Soloist? About the economy overall?

Demographics, careers, services, buying habits, mindset, things you’d expect, but also, we’ll be studying the affect of this cohort on the economy, compensation issues, and the changing relationship between companies and the workforce. Our first research project (with the Knight Foundation) was focused on the Solo economy and how cities need to prepare themselves to serve and retain this population.

That’s interesting. What can cities, then, do to “serve and retain” Soloists? Can they create a set of conditions that even attracts them? And what do Soloists need from government policies that they perhaps aren’t getting now?

Well, you’ll have to wait for our report to see the answer to that!

Yes, cities can be proactive about this. Beside the obvious — affordable housing, convenient transportation, support services — they can ramp up the availability of co-working spaces, innovation districts, and affordable professional services like legal, accounting, and financial services. They can also designate a portion of the city’s work to go strictly to Soloists.

Ask any Soloist how easy it is to get a mortgage or health insurance, and how unfair their tax situation is. We may need something like the Small Business Administration for independent workers.

“Panorama of downtown Portland [Oregon] in the day. Hawthorne Bridge viewed from a dock on the Willamette River near the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry” by Cacophony, Creative Commons

Are there already examples of “Solo Cities” in the US? Cities that are attracting and retaining Soloists with the right mix of regs and resources?

It’s happening everywhere, and anecdotally, there are places we already identify as “Solo Cities” — Austin, Portland (Oregon & Maine), Boston, Brooklyn, Detroit, Boulder — where we’re seeing cool things happening, but it’s early. We hear about Montreal leading the way in Canada, too. But this phenomenon is really still on the cusp of a big breakout, at least in the media. Hopefully, we’ll remedy that. And we’re going to have to be the catalyst for changes in regulations and resources, too. The new world of work needs a voice.

What’s next for The Solo Project?

Credit: The Solo Project

We’ve begun talking to potential investors, but simultaneously, we’ve launched our “studio” business to begin to connect with partners who are interested in either talking to or learning more about the solo market. We’ll be publishing the Solo City report shortly and will share it with leaders from other cities who have a vested interest in making themselves more Soloist-friendly. The Knight Foundation (our Solo City partner) will also be pushing out the report to their constituency. And, we will begin working on v2.0 of our website and populating it with content as well as prepping for the print launch of the Solo Quarterly in the next 8-12 months.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

For the past 60 years, our society and economy have been predicated on mass production, mass communication, unfettered consumption, and disposable purchases. The following 9 trends are powerful as individual ideas and exponentially more so when taken as a whole. It will all start with the information consumers want to receive from brands and marketers.

1. True Evidence

The era of the tagline may be over. For too long, the majority of marketing has dumbed down content and tried too hard to simplify our complex world. The most effective branding and marketing credits people with intellect and reason. It facilitates choice. In order to make the best choice, consumers want more and better information. That is because they are more discerning when it comes to content and desire true evidence of one brand’s claim over another. Longer form marketing is already increasing in importance and will accelerate.

2. United Individuality

“Share a Coke Name Promotional Coca Cola Bottles” by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube, Creative Commons

For too long brands have lumped consumers into vague groups that serve corporate purposes more than reality. Studies show that individualism is growing more important and carries a subtle difference. Some of us will want to stand out while others will not. This trend is manifesting itself in interesting ways that challenge old school brand building. Even now Coach, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Michael Kors are ditching logos because Millennials do not like them. Individuality also means customization. 48% of Canadian consumers would buy more from a store that personalizes the shopping experience. Recognizing consumers as real people with different desires is paramount to brands. We have to use the tools at our disposal rather than segmenting like it is 1955.

3. Authentic Stories

The third trend has consumers reevaluating the notion of heroes and heroism. Now consumers identify with sincere, real and relatable types of heroes. We have seen this with Dove’s Real Beauty work. It has to be the most discussed campaign in marketing for some time. This everyday hero celebration has continued with Always’ campaign, “Like a Girl”. What they have done is shine a light on what is possible while educating us on the fact that 72% of girls feel held back by society. Consumers are looking for inspiration and brands know that presenting real people and their real stories can have deep impact in awareness and sales.

4. Positive Spin

A recent study found the most shared New York Times stories in the past two years were positive in content and tone. 73% of Facebook users believe the network exists to share positive posts. Clearly, consumers want to digest and share good news. Brands have responded with corporate social responsibility programs but these are developed in the same way as ad campaigns so lack a certain authenticity. Good deeds and the sharing of good deeds will become a normal course of events. This will be tough for brands and marketers who have been trained to think that all communications must be jarring, intrusive and deserving of recognition.

5. Growing Empathy

People check their phones every 6 minutes yet there is no evidence this is making us more intelligent, more efficient or more empathetic, for that matter. A study of college students found a 40% decrease in empathy in the past four decades, with the steepest declines showing up in the past 10 years. Is technology the culprit? Real-time, face-to-face conversations foster empathy, trust, discovery, democratic debate, patience, mentorship and self-knowledge. Clearly being plugged in does not equate to being properly tuned in. Over the next five years we will slowly return to real conversation and relationships by creating a balance with technology that winning brands will help facilitate.

6. Finding Time

Ariana Huffington has been a fervent believer in meditating before the workday. Photo credit: “Huffington at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival” by David Shankbone, Creative Commons

Does it not seem strange that with all of the tools and technologies that we have less time in our day? We are a mass Pavlovian experiment; we cannot help but react to a ping or chime from our device. These constant interruptions scatter our thoughts, burn our concentration, and allow us escape to something immediate. Our day now moves faster but feels like we’ve accomplished less. 48% of Americans feel that social media is like a full-time job and 79% believe life was much easier before the introduction of smart technologies. There are signs that this may change. Two-thirds of global consumers believe mindfulness is not a fad. Corporations (such as Google), prisons, the military, schools, yoga studios and churches offer mindfulness programs. It helps remove anxiety, improve health, and resets the context for how we live, view success and appreciate what we have.

7. Quality Rules

Product quality and utility has declined for decades. Large appliances once lasted decades but now we ditch them after a handful of years. Apple has trained us to rid ourselves of perfectly good devices at shorter intervals in favor of a few new features. Consumers are beginning to communicate new expectations and the pressure is on brands and businesses to deliver. We now expect cars to last at least ten years. Longer lasting will once again be a key determinant in where consumers put their dollars. Quality will once again be a differentiator. Consumers will expect more, not more often.

8. Smart Choices

Consumers are not going to cut back on spending. Brands that can offer solutions that provide consumers more time for the better things in life and deliver efficiencies that add to our wellbeing are brands that will win in the long run. Products that are anticipatory and self-sufficient will sell. NEST and Sonos are good examples because they have made themselves incredibly relevant as alternatives in how we manage and enjoy our homes. They both offer solutions that simplify lives and make things easier.

9. A Better Place

“Elon Musk, Tesla Factory, Fremont (CA, USA)” by Maurizio Pesce, Creative Commons

The last trend hits at the heart of the overall premise: that having a good life is not in conflict with making the world a better place. Consumers will increasingly patronize brands that deliver against this idea. Do not get caught up thinking this is only about sustainability and the environment. It includes good deeds and recognition of those making a difference. We are in early days of this shift. We are moving from sound bites and press releases to strong movements of change driven by larger numbers of consumers and not just vocal activist minorities. This will not be wholesale revolution but a sharp and radical evolution in our wants and needs.

These trends have begun in small ways, and will develop into a powerful, combined force that will be difficult to ignore. I am not a fan of outright predictions but I do believe that consumers will define themselves less by what they own and more by how they live. This does not mean they will stop spending. It means they will redirect their purchasing and reward brands that understand behavior. Such optimism is contagious. This is why I keep telling people it’s a great time to be in marketing. We’re crafting the future. Because the world demands it.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

Even though new tablet sales have flattened, growth is there and the tablet usage is up. The life cycle of a tablet is much longer a smartphone’s. For instance, the 5-year-old iPad 2 (2011) is still widely used and supported by Apple. Much research (eMarketer, Pew Research Center, CEFRIO, etc.) shows that tablet penetration and usage is growing within the population. In fact, net installed base is growing as more new tablets arrive and old ones are passed along to other users. Take La Presse+ for example which has doubled its Android tablet daily users in the last 12 months and increased its iPad daily users in the same period by 40%. To answer your question, tablets are very much alive and an important part of Canadians’ digital experience.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

The Art Basel crowd relaxing on artificial turf.

Predictably, this approach has also trickled into the mainstream space, with brands like Heineken, Perrier, Converse, and Target taking a more accessible approach to patronage via artist collaborations and special edition commissions.

As a result, Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) has become an event to watch for lifestyle marketers. As the American offshoot of the prestigious European festival, ABMB has exploded since its beginnings in 2002: attendance at the December 2015 edition reportedly increased by 6.5% compared to last year*, with more than 100,000 visitors and more than 20 pop-up shows. Featuring artworks from all disciplines and artists from around the globe, the five-day event is a celebration of creative energy and a spotlight for new ideas.

Compared to other big-ticket events in the cultural space (like film or music festivals), ABMB offers a different level of sophistication, spending-power and artistic legitimacy. The show-goers are not the hipsters of Coachella or the starlets of Cannes; while ABMB also attracts its share of glitzy Hollywood A-listers (this year included Leonardo DiCaprio, Katie Holmes, Sylvester Stallone, Adrian Brody and Hilary Swank), the Festival also draws elite individuals from other universes. One panel-talk, for example, hosted by the Creative Class Group, featured a medley of cultural icons including intellectual Richard Florida, architects Yabu Pushelburg, curator Jerome Sans, graffiti artist Kenny Scharf and musician Nelly Furtado, each offering their views on Miami as a creative incubator.

For show-goers, the appeal of ABMB is the sense of community, and like any elite sphere, the art world is a small world. For marketers, this translates into a chance to gain traction within a very targeted audience. For international brands and particularly those centered in the Americas, Miami also represents an ideal meeting point, where communities overlap and where a brand’s geocultural identity can be brought to life in a meaningful way. LATAM’s VIP lounge at Pinta Miami was a great example of this. This makes for an elevated and immersive experience, where brands benefit from a halo of creative energy.

LATAM Airlines Group lounge at Art Basel.

The landscape at ABMB is of course competitive: this year, the show was host to marketing activations – some official, some not – from a variety of different brands, including tech-world stars (Samsung, KickStarter, Spotify, Airbnb, Muzik), mainstream lifestyle players (Target, VH1, Redbull), fashion icons (Jeremy Scott, Fendi, Sandro, Swarovski) and luxury/high-net-worth brands (Perrier-Jouët, UBS, NetJets, Douglas Elliman, Audi, BMW).

The apparent mood among marketing teams on-site was a que sera, sera acceptance of the unknown, in the face of ABMB’s many logistic challenges: when inquiring about program highlights or event itineraries, a common reply was “check back tomorrow”. This test-and-learn mentality is uncommon at events of this scale, and points to the collision of two worlds – creative and commercial – that are still learning to coexist.

Created as an open forum dedicated to moments of belonging, this space featured interactive workshops hosted by a variety of artists and performers.

Without question, the main challenge this year was the unpredictable weather, which threw a major curve in all outdoor activation plans. Kudos to the team at Airbnb’s open-air installation, who spent their days wrestling makeshift tents and oversized umbrellas; contrast this to BMW’s Art Journey, located in the botanical gardens beside the fairgrounds, which was left in a perpetual puddle.

Difficult mobility frustrated everyone, with Uber surcharges ranging between x4-x7, meaning that any events located outside the fairgrounds needed to have major appeal. Bacardi succeeded in luring guests across the bay to Wynwood with a free-admission concert series featuring big-name talent like Alicia Keys and DMX. Kit & Ace, similarly, overcame the transport challenge by activating in multiple locations, including the brand’s famous “Copper Studio” camper-van (also in Wynwood), as well as a pop-up shop at Soho Beach House.

Staff gather with umbrellas at the entry to ‘Belong. Here. Now’, Airbnb’s installation at Design Miami.

Additionally, party-hopper’s fatigue from around-the-clock festivities resulted in an extra level of flakiness from influencers and VIPs; I attended more than one cocktail reception where event staff outnumbered guests.

However, for brands that can embrace the agility required to survive this daunting context, the pay-off is potentially great. As an international celebration of creativity, ABMB requires that brands champion both the art and science of experiential marketing; they require boldness and ingenuity to stand out, as well as the rigor and precision required to survive. This is a useful exercise for any marketer, and one that results in an ideal testing ground for new products, concepts and experiences.

*http://www.skatepress.com/art-market-reports/skates-art-fairs-report-summer-2015/

#1 David’s Tea: The Brand and Business by Jeff Swystun

Coffee has often been the drink of choice while waiting at the terminal, but tea’s popularity is taking off, especially in North America (we’re sure the English are nodding politely and thinking “it’s about time.”). Companies like David’s Tea are countering coffee culture by creating a tea culture – and becoming the Starbucks of tea in the process.

#2 Omotenashi: The Secret of Japanese Service by Jeffrey Spivock

Shoppers receive the royal treatment upon walking into a Japanese store. Defined as the art of selfless hospitality, Omotenashi is ingrained in Japanese culture and is proving to be a competitive edge for brands. Because customer service trumps all.

#3 Sonos: The Speaker That Wants to Run Your House by Jeff Swystun

Sonos has long been the go to purveyor of wireless speakers, but now the company not only wants to disrupt the music business, it aims to be indispensable in how you run your home.

#4 Quiet is the New Luxury by Arjun Basu

Consumers are surrounded by massive amounts of marketing. And while businesses absolutely need to sell their message, more and more consumers are seeking out quiet spaces.

#5 What a Place Does for the Brand by Andrew Davis

Best-selling author Andrew Davis drove 25,000 miles over the last three years trying to answer one question: what happens when you market the place you do business just as much, if not more, than the actual business itself? Location-envy turns out to be a powerful marketing tool.

Bonus: Is there too much content? – The Sparksheet Question

In our new series, Sparksheet goes directly to industry leaders for quick answers to obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet or email me.

See you next year, happy Holidays!

Design is the way that people shape the places we live, the things we use, and the way we communicate.

So design matters because people matter.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

Camilla Vásquez, Ph. D.

My background as a linguist is in spoken discourse or spoken language. I made the transition to online language in a non-deliberate fashion. I started reading reviews and as I read them, I got more interested in the language features that they included. From there I searched the scholarly databases where I didn’t find a lot of work from the linguistic perspective being done on online reviews. Obviously Economics, Marketing and Business folks have been researching them – but not a lot of research from a linguistic perspective. So I stumbled into it and thought “Wow this stuff is really interesting!” My blog will keep you updated on my latest interests.

What can brands learn from comments?

Quite a lot. It depends on what they’re interested in finding out. Businesses have more customers than the ones who actually provide reviews. Reviewers represent a small but specialized sample. I’ve read estimates that they’re about 10% of a business’ total client base. It’s a self-selected population. It’s not going to tell you everything about everybody, but it’s 10% of the people who are motivated enough to want to write about their experiences online and share what’s important for them. And, as we know, they wield a lot of influence because people pay attention to not only the aggregate ratings but also to the comments from reviewers.

In my book, The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews, I looked at reviews from five different websites which were TripAdvisor, Yelp, Amazon, Epicurious and Netflix. Recipe and film reviews are different than reviews of products and services …so it really depends on what kind of business we’re talking about, and what they’re interested in finding out. But they can definitely mine reviews for whatever kinds of information they want. Many businesses are mining using big data approaches like sentiment analysis however my approach is a more complimentary, smaller data approach which provides a more nuanced view, one that can pinpoint or target specific features. So it would be up to the business to figure out what they are interested in looking for.

TripAdvisor booth at ITB Berlin 2014 by Travelarz, Creative Commons

Has a brand changed its course because of a user’s comment?

(Laughs) Yes, there are a couple of things I can tell you about that. I’ve been looking at restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp, comparing the two and comparing businesses’ responses. There have been a few case studies of restaurants in my area that have opened in the last few years, got negative reviews initially on opening and had a really active presence on social media (not only in responding to reviews but also on Twitter and other sites as well) and have actually kind of turned sentiment around. They have gone from being a business that wasn’t getting good reviews to now being really successful, thriving businesses. It seems to me that the initial investment of time, really paying attention to customers, following up and showing concern and maybe even addressing some of the problems that are being mentioned can actually turn popular opinion around. We’ve seen some cases like that.

3200+ is the number of comments on The Mountain’s Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee page on Amazon.com

I’ll give you another example, this is sort of a funny one. My research on legitimate reviews has led me to this side area of research about parody reviews. I don’t know if you’ve looked on Amazon, where certain products are the target of jokes that people write funny reviews of? Some of the better known ones are the Bic Pen for Her, Banana Slicer and the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt. Those products have something like 3000 reviews and and the most popular reviews have over 50 000 helpfulness votes, which are basically the same as “likes.” So the Bic Pen for Her became the target of thousands of these parody reviews, where some people would write funny reviews like: ‘Oh as a woman my tiny delicate female hands can’t open the package’ or ‘I’d use them for math but I can’t do math because I’m a girl’ and all this stuff. Sort of mocking marketers’ attempts to gender a gender-neutral product. Ellen DeGeneres even had a skit about it on her show. So it reached this massive audience, this social critique that started on Amazon reviews. I was searching for those funny Bic pen parody reviews yesterday to follow up on a paper that I’m giving, and the product is no longer on Amazon! I might be overlooking something, but I looked at a number of different search terms and I can’t find those reviews anymore. It is possible that when there’s enough of a response in online review forums, that these kinds of things can happen.

You said brands should not always answer negative comments. Why is that?

Figuring out how to reply to these reviews is a sensitive form of professional communication and I think it takes an expert communicator to figure out how to do this online where communication is somewhat decontextualized. Sometimes people end up really doing more harm than good. So before they fire off a response which may come across as sounding defensive I think it’s a good idea to have a strategy in place. Overall what’s the big picture? How many negative reviews to positive reviews are there? Are you only going to reply to negative reviews, or are you going to reply to all of them, or reply to a certain percentage? Are you going to reply privately to that customer, or are you going to make that public? And if you want to make it public, are you only speaking to that person or are you trying to address your comments to a larger reading audience of prospective consumers? There are a lot of factors at play and from the interviews I’ve done with local businesses on this project that I’m doing with local restaurants on TripAdvisor and Yelp, it seems that people make it up as they go along and they haven’t put a lot of thought into their larger strategy. I believe that’s an oversight, it needs to be given some thought. Some businesses farm it out and have another company address their online feedback. I’ve gathered some anecdotal evidence about really generic responses like ‘thanks for your feedback, we’re looking forward to having you back again and hope you’ll have a better experience’. For many people, responses like that don’t really convey that they care, or that they’re paying attention to the content of the message. Is that better than nothing? I don’t really know. I think that’s something that needs to be studied and I’m just starting to take my research in that direction.

Can brands benefit from user comments as users do?

Absolutely. There are studies that have been done with brands, like in the travel and tourism industry for example, which have found that several hotel chains regularly review the data from their online reviews. They check to see how they’re doing, if there’s anything that needs to be followed up on or improved, make changes based on the feedback that they get, or look to see if certain employees have been mentioned in a favourable light and reward them. Those kinds of practices are already taking place. Businesses are using reviews as a virtual focus group to gather information (not unlike a customer satisfaction survey) from at least from some segment of their customer base.

Do people “speak” differently when they leave comments?

Linguists and people who study language in social context like I do, follow the fundamental premise that we adjust our language according to who we’re communicating with, when, where and for what purposes. The way that you would tell a story to your grandmother would differ from the way you would tell that same story to your best friend who’s your age peer. You’d use different language, different expressions, you may use more or less slang, include more details or not. We call this audience design and yes absolutely, reviews are very much audience designed.

Although there are a number of factors at play with reviews. For some people it feels more like a stream of consciousness text that they compose, whereas others try to be very credible in how they portray their comments, maybe they’re more careful in composing grammatically correct sentences. They’re projecting a certain identity with varying degrees of awareness. Also, depending on the site there’s a different kind of sensibility that comes across. On Facebook reviews, for example, you’re authenticated through your profile so that connects you to your offline identity much more so than on other review sites where you can be a little more anonymous, where it’s not necessarily linked to your other online accounts. Some people may feel a little inhibited to be really honest if others know exactly who they are and how to find them. That’s another issue.

Yelp Review, 12 Yelp Reviews That are Way Too Enthusiastic About Taco Bell by Joel Stice, collegehumor.com

Of the sites that I’ve studied, Yelp asks readers to rate reviews not only according to how helpful or useful they are, but also asks readers to rate reviews on how funny and cool they are, which sets up a kind of ethos on the site. So there’s a lot more slang on Yelp than on TripAdvisor, for example. There are a lot more references to popular culture, people are more informal, and they try to be more clever and creative. You see different kinds of texts being composed there than you do on a site like TripAdvisor because of the way the site has been set up, and as a result, the audience’s expectations.

Cover photo credit: “scream and shout” by Mindaugas Danys, flickr.

Totally. Social media is certainly an important tool for marketers to consider but it has been over-represented in the marketing media. My research suggests that it occupies between 50% and 60% of all media articles on marketing, and yet accounts for less than 10% of total marketing investment. It’s also far too positively assessed by marketers when, in reality, it lacks reach and impact in many cases.

None of this means that a marketer should not consider social as part of their mix, of course they should. But if they start their planning with a pre-allocated budget for social media or for digital marketing in general they are making a massive error. Treat all the channels from social to search to TV to outdoor with equal critical objectivity. Right now social media is getting too much money and too much of an easy ride.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

Whether the consumer will buy into this model is still uncertain. Paying for one service with 500+ channels is one thing, downloading and paying separately for dozens of individual broadcaster apps is another. And getting users to pay for content they’re used to getting for free (such as YouTube and catch-up episodes on the large networks)… that’s another story.

Plus, one channel does not mean one app. Rather, each and every channel requires a multitude of apps. CBC TouTV currently offers its content via apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Windows 8, desktop browsers, Xbox 360, Samsung Smart TV and Mediaroom… and is faced with maintaining these and adding still more platforms such as Roku, Apple TV, PlayStation, and the list goes on. So development costs become an important business factor in evaluating the feasibility of this strategy.

Will apps replace television channels? If we consider that a channel is a big collection of curated video content, then no, I think they will coexist for a while.  These collections will continue to be delivered by pay TV operators (as channel numbers on our TVs), and yes there will be app versions for the cord-cutters who are willing to pay for just a few collections that interest them. Where the app versions may see growth is in the content owners who do not have traditional broadcast presence: the players associations, the specialty properties like The Onion and TED Talks, magazines and even branded content from companies like Red Bull and L’Oréal. These collections may only exist as apps and not channels. If operators abandon the pay TV business then that’s a different story. But let’s not discount their ability to bring apps right into their platform as TELUS is doing. The transformation is underway and it will be interesting to witness how this plays out.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

There is always room for amazing information that gets people thinking, feeling, acting differently.  Give me some more of that!

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

I wouldn’t go with a term like “blame” — makes it sound like 

The challenge is finding a way to make better ads. In this regard ad-blocking has the chance to be a disruptive, innovative force for online ads.

There are no stupid questions. And that includes The Sparksheet Question. What’s that, you ask? It’s Sparksheet going directly to industry leaders to answer our obviously naïve questions about today’s technology, marketing and content trends. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, and more importantly, would like answered, tweet our Community Manager.

A hole in the travel industry. And I think that hole is really around planning and booking either the most simple trips or the most complex itinerary quickly meaning under a few minutes. I think that there’s no problem with online travel today in the sense that if you want to book a flight or a hotel you can just go to said website and book it. However if you’re booking a flight or accommodation and your significant other is going to meet you for two nights and then fly back makes planning complicated. Booking multiple passengers to multiple cities with multiple segments online can become unpleasant. It’s very difficult and time consuming and after a while you just don’t want to deal with it. HelloGbye is a result of a hole in the industry in the sense that it hasn’t been addressed in the last 20 years but it’s also about making travel more efficient.

What was the aha moment that led to the creation of the business?

This is a story that Jonathan Miller, the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of HelloGbye, told me. Jonathan, his father and 3 other people were driving in a miserable rainstorm near Scranton, PA in 2009 circa iPhone 1. They couldn’t find flights, couldn’t find hotels, they just couldn’t get anything off their phones. And Jonathan said to his father, I wish I could just pick up my phone and say “find me a hotel tonight” or “show me the next available flight out to Toronto.” Jonathan thought what if we could create an application where you literally just speak your travel plans to your phone, have it understand your preferences and book your itinerary. That’s what lead to the inspiration and creation of HelloGbye.

Itinerary Grid. Credit: HelloGbye.

The app assumes a kind of communal and social aspect to travel. Is this for business travelers or leisure?

For both. It’s for anyone and everyone who wants to book the most simple itinerary to the most complex trip quickly. There’s a social component to the platform that is real-time and collaborative. If I’m a business traveler and I have a few colleagues who are planning a trip to New York but I also need to leave a day later and meet you in the morning and then fly to another city. If I create that itinerary as an organizer, yourself and the other person will get notification saying they’ve been invited to plan the trip. They will get the notification on their phone using the HelloGbye app and they’ll be able to see their portion of the itinerary which they can change. Once they make changes everyone else is notified. This applies to the business traveler as well as the leisure traveler. In terms of the content with which we’re initially launching, we’ll be offering flights and hotels. In the future we plan on expanding to car rentals as well as travel vacation packages. It’s really for anyone who wants the utility of booking travel very quickly and in a very bespoke manner.

To give you another analogy, when you go into a shopping mall you could easily spend hours upon hours going into every single store. That’s what the online travel industry is like. You’re given tons of options, you’re overwhelmed, you’re unsure of what you want. Our model is similar to a Best Buy mobile airport kiosk where there is a finite number of things that I may want as a business traveler like earphones, phones, iPods, etc. That’s what we display to consumers, we give them a very good screen choice of options to help them make a decision faster.

Who is the “typical” HelloGbye user?

HelloGbye is a B2C application, launching in 2016 that’s targeting initially the unmanaged business traveler. These are 14 million business travelers in the U.S. or 25% of the U.S. market but our goal is to attract the world’s 3.3 billion passengers. We’re really for anyone who knows what they want and what I mean by that is we’re not a discovery platform. You can’t say to HelloGbye “I want to go to New York” and just expect it to give you an answer. You have to say “I want to go to New York next week Thursday, I want to stay in a 3-star hotel near Central Park and then I want to come back to Toronto.” As long as you tell the app where you’re going, when you’re going and with who you’re going that’s all the information it needs. We have no issue with people going to Expedia and Trivago. The average traveler spends approximately 28 days researching their purchase and visiting 22 different websites. We have no problem with people who prefer continual searches but when they actually want to book, we want to be their digital travel assistant. With something you would typically give your travel agent to do and get results a day later, you can leave it to us and come back in 15 seconds.

Control Box – Voice. Credit: HelloGbye.

An app like this seems to invite the idea of partnerships with other travel brands. Is this something you’re going to pursue?

Absolutely. The travel industry is really predicated around volume and if we hit our volume target we already have potential partners with who we would like to work. We would like to offer beyond hotels, for example booking unique travel content like Airbnb or HomeAway. We would be open to expanding our content from beyond hotels and even working with other partners to provide in-destination content like tours or site-seeing.

Yes, the inspiration for the name HelloGbye is a Beatles’ song. The name of the app will change based on the country it’s in; In Italy users will log into CiaoCiao, and in Israel ShalomShalom. After its North American launch, the app will debut in Asia in Mandarin in the fall of 2016.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

The Category

The music industry continues to experience deep change. This has been driven by technology and distribution more than musical genres and artist trends. We have rapidly moved from LPs to CDs to digital. Devices and platforms now enable us to transport our favorite tunes, enjoy massive improvements in sound quality, and access extensive libraries of music through a variety of ways.

In this sense, Sonos was always prescient. The founders predicted that WiFi and music streaming would become ubiquitous. And they were right. The company gained a premium reputation and priced accordingly, creating enviable margins.

In many ways, Sonos both invented and defined a consumer category. It now unites digital music collections in one app allowing control from any device. It is an ecosystem of speakers, home theater, and seemingly magic componentry. But it is more than just an intelligent system that can control how you listen to your playlists. A lot more.

The Offer

Sonos is quickly displacing brands like Sony and Bose. Sonos is certainly interested in continuing with their current product offer but the long-term strategic play is to become irreplaceable as the central operating system of your home. This will allow the company to logically extend the brand into heating, security, lighting and more. Think of this as a “share-of-home” strategy. Or as the control system for all of your “internet of things.”

“Second Screen” by Hochgeladen von Atlasowa, Wikimedia Commons

In order to ensure this control, Sonos partners liberally. At present, all of its alliances center around music. If you have a Sonos speaker and an Amazon Prime account, the two will play very nicely together. Mood Mix is available via the Sonos App. With millions of consumers who use their products at home, Sonos teamed up with Mood Media to bring music to restaurants, retailers and other public spaces. Amazon’s streaming music service is now available in beta on Sonos speakers. Sonos already works with a number of other major streaming services, including Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, and Rdio.

At the core is the Sonos Wireless HiFi System. It allows streaming of all the music on earth wirelessly in every room of your home. This can be controlled by Android smartphone, iPhone, or iPad. The company allows access to millions of songs and thousands of radio stations by partnering with AUPEO, Deezer, iheartradio, JUKE, Last.fm, MOG, Napster, Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody, SiriusXM Internet Radio, Slacker Radio, Spotify, Stitcher SmartRadio, TuneIn, Wolfgang’s Vault, and more.

Given its unique nature, one could argue Sonos has no competitors. By bridging software and hardware and being a market leader, they have many brands chasing after them. Sony, Chromecast Audio, Soundbridge, Squeezebox, Apple, Samsung and LG have either entered the market or hold a certain piece of it.

The company made itself more relevant by appealing to technology and home systems installers. In other words, they have leveraged key influencers. I hired a home systems company and they immediately recommended Sonos as my central controller. It works with my Apple TV, a bunch of different speakers, and a mix match of amps and other componentry. It is intuitive and easy to use. When there is a problem, Sonos support connects you quickly with a real human who provides real assistance. All of this has helped build the brand and create more and more advocates.

The Business

The numbers are strong. Sonos is on track to hit $1 billion in sales this year. The growth is due to greater ubiquity and more reasonable pricing. “When we got into this business, an eight-room system cost $20,000,” said Sonos co-founder Tom Cullen. “Now it’s as little as $1,600, $200 a room. Cullen added, “Our mission is to hunt down every silent home and fill it with music.”

Sonos’ growth is attributed to the network effect. This takes place when services and technologies grow in value as more people use them. David Jones, former CEO of Havas and founder of You & Mr Jones, calls the mixing of branding and technology “brandtech.” A recent piece is Harvard Business Review states, “Brandtech companies use technology to create emotional product experiences that customers then want to share with others.”

Sonos has leveraged this effect to the point that one million homes in the United States are now Sonos homes. This penetration begs brand extensions into other aspects of home automation including the control of appliances.

David Jones, You & Mr Jones Photograph: PR

The Brand

Sonos’ growing recognition means bolder communications and increases in marketing spend. The brand ran its first Super Bowl ad in 2014 and supported the last Grammys with an art installation and lavish party. The Sonos Studio in London recently opened and is a public space where people can go and collaborate, listen to music, and attend workshops and masterclasses. The media budget has reached $20 million but Sonos does not use it to beat their chest or make broad claims. Chris Kyle, VP, Global Brand Experience has said, “Our job is to help tell the story, not be the story.”

This may appear a little schizophrenic because it is. Sonos would prefer to let customers be their marketers but the company’s influence has forced them to talk about themselves. For the next few years, the company will experiment with the right balance and that will produce wins and more than a few head scratching marketing investments.

The Last Track

Sonos co-founder and CEO, John MacFarlane sees nothing but sunny days ahead, “I think this is a once in a lifetime moment in music. Streaming music will become a global phenomena just like the Internet was in 1995/96.” And that is what the company is currently banking on. Streaming revenue is set to be the largest part of Sonos’ growth in the next three years.

Yet, I see the bolder play that will influence the brand and the business. Given the company’s interest in partnering to gain more control, market share and “homeshare”, it is reasonable to assume that Sonos and companies like Nest will seek each other out. The goal is to own not just music in a house but anything than can be automated. Whether you call it an ecosystem or a central nervous system, the company’s plan is to hardwire itself into our homes and consciousness.

There are two pens in front of you. They look the same: a $5 pen made in China and a $10 pen made in the USA. Which one would you buy?

If you are like most consumers, you’ll purchase the Chinese-made pen.

So, how could I inspire you to buy an American-made pen for three times the price of its Chinese-made look-a-like?

One self-made billionaire, Tom Kartsotis, has figured this out, and the answer is elegantly simple: imbue your product with a powerful sense of place.

The Paradox of Place

‘Storefront’ by Foundry Co, Pixabay

Sense of place is a way of describing the emotional relationship that an individual has with a particular area. It is a value-laden concept that encapsulates a person’s feelings, perceptions, attitudes and behavior towards a specific location.

Ironically, the more global our economy, the less we leverage the marketing value found in the sense of place. In a digitally-driven world, the products and services we buy aren’t from anywhere. They are from the web.

Over the last three years, I’ve driven 25,000 miles across the United States trying to answer one simple question: what happens when you market the place you do business just as much, if not more, than the business you do?

What I found was astonishing: directly promoting the place one does business, even in a global economy, has profound effects on one’s business.

The Law of the Origin Story

We love a good origin story.

An origin story is the back-story of a person, place or thing. It is the legend behind a comic book character, a corporation, a product or even a sport.

When it comes to corporate origin stories, it would seem that a garage or a dorm room is one of the best places to build a successful business. Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Google, Amazon, Disney, Yankee Candle, Harley Davidson, Mattel, Maglite, and Lotus all tell origin stories that start in someone’s garage and end with success. Facebook, Dell, and Microsoft are all purported to have started in dorm rooms. Read enough of these origin stories and you might think your business would be more successful if you move into a garage or find yourself a dorm room.

These kinds of stories are powerful. They are told and re-told. Great origin stories become legends. They become a piece of pop (or even corporate) folklore.

Unfortunately, the more global our economy has become, the less we believe our origin story – and the place we’ve built our business – matters.

The Power of Location-Envy

Location-envy is the emotional belief that one’s success is defined by the location of one’s work.

We’ve been taught that envy is bad (it is one of the seven deadly sins.) But location-envy is benign. The envy we’ve been encouraged to avoid is destructive. Location-envy is constructive. It’s a unifying force, an amazing source of pride, a tremendous motivator, and — most importantly —a powerful emotion.

Location-envy only occurs when one believes that their own community cannot deliver the success that they can achieve elsewhere. Or when one believes their success is defined by the place in which they do business.

Location-envy creates a connection between the place we’ve built our businesses and the success we’ve seen. It creates a connotation, a feeling about our town, that connects our desire for success with a specific place in the world. These kinds of emotional connections and connotations are sticky. Not only do they appeal to those in the industry, they’re easy to remember.

Location-envy is so powerful it can help you attract more dreamers and innovators. It’s so effective it can reduce your operational costs. It’s so sticky it can increase tourism. Location-envy is such an immutable force it can even increase your profit margins.

Attracting New, Qualified, Talent

‘Downtown Warsaw, Indiana, in October 2005’ by Derek Jensen, Wikimedia Commons

In 2013, Nextremity Solutions moved their executive offices and the fifteen full-time employees on staff from Red Bank, New Jersey to a little town an hour west of Fort Wayne, Indiana on rural route 30 in northern Indiana called Warsaw.

Why?

According to CFO Frank Patton, the move was “not only because it has the right address for the orthopedic industry, but because it also has the orthopedic talent pool needed to grow the company.”¹

The right address for the orthopedic industry? The talent pool needed to grow the company? What could Warsaw, Indiana possibly have to offer that Red Bank couldn’t? What resources and talent could convince a $10 million dollar start-up to pack up, rent new office space, buy new houses, and move their staff 720 miles to a town of 13,000 people?

Simple: three of the five largest orthopedic manufacturing companies in the world are based in Warsaw, Indiana. The Nextremity Solutions team believes that their chances of success in Warsaw are better than in Red Bank, or New York, or San Francisco, or anywhere else in the world.

Warsaw, Indiana is the Orthopedic Capital of the World(TM) and Orthoworx, a nonprofit founded in 2009, spends every workday ensuring that it stays that way. Aspiring medical device designers, engineers, even executives know that if you are going to make it in the orthopedic industry you have to be in Warsaw.

Reduce Operational Costs

Elkhart, Indiana is the RV capital of the world!

Elkhart generates $7.2 billion a year manufacturing 80% of the recreational vehicles (RVs) sold in the US and accounts for a quarter of all employment in the city. Sixty-one separate companies manufacture everything from recreational vehicles to mobile homes.

Everyone from Georgia Pacific to Magic Chef has decided to open distribution centers and warehouses in Elkhart to be closer to the sixty-one companies building mobile homes in town. The result: lower operational costs and an entire economy of just-in-time manufacturers.

Building an RV in Elkhart costs less than anywhere else in the country.

Increased Tourism

Hamilton, Missouri is the home of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. A few years ago, Jenny Doan and her son Al started uploading a new quick quilting tutorial to YouTube every week. Today, 240,000 subscribers watch Jenny’s video uploads each Thursday.

See how Jenny promotes Hamilton, Missouri?

Today, Jenny and her team of 124 employees, fulfill 3,000 orders a day. 50,000 tourists from around the world flock to town to meet Jenny and learn from the master. Making Hamilton Missouri is the Quick Quilting Capital of the World!

Better Margins

So, who is the billionaire venture capitalist who’s figured out how to inspire consumers to spend $15 on a pen just by marketing the place it is made?

In 2011, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Kartsotis (the founder of Fossil) set out to launch a new luxury watch brand. Rumor has it that before Mr. Kartsotis decided to set up shop in Detroit, he commissioned a study to find out if the Detroit brand alone added value to the products he planned to produce.

The study asked participants “if they preferred pens made in China, the USA, or Detroit at price points of $5, $10 and $15 respectively.” The result? Given a choice between a pen made in China or the USA, participants consistently chose the Chinese pen. As soon as they added the option to buy the $15, Detroit-made pen to the mix, subjects immediately decided they would gladly pay the higher price point. Why pay more for a Detroit-made pen? It has been imbued with a sense of place. Detroit’s reputation for manufacturing high-quality products adds intrinsic value to the pen ².

So, Shinola set up shop in the former General Motors Argonaut research building, also home to an arts college. In 2013, the first 2500 Shinola watches hit the market, and they sold out in a week at $550 each. Eighteen months later, Shinola grossed $80 million, selling watches to clients as American as President Bill Clinton, a proud owner of twelve watches. In 2015, Shinola plans to sell 250,000 watches, and a whole host of other Detroit-made luxury-goods.

‘Shinola Store Detroit’, by Kanwar Sandhu, flickr

Shinola‘s product-line has already expanded from wristwatches to leather bags, bikes, iPhone cases, pocketknives, footballs even pet supplies. Like Fossil, before it, Shinola is a lifestyle brand. The Detroit team is also venturing into retail with plans to open 16 domestic and European stores by the end of 2015.

Shinola’s marketing, not to mention the entire ethos of the brand, is about Detroit. The city’s name is on every single one of their products. Shinola markets the place they do business just as much, if not more, than the business they do.

This is exactly the kind of corporate marketing that builds a sense of place. It is the kind of marketing that creates location-envy. It is the kind of powerful storytelling that opens the door to the reinvention of Detroit as the Luxury-Goods Capital of America.

These stories lead to a big what if.

What if you marketed the place you do business just as much, if not more, than the business you do?

What if you leveraged the power of location-envy?

Town Inc. by Andrew Davis

Bonus

Take a listen to chapter 13 ‘Saving Detroit’ of Andrew Davis’ latest bestselling book Town Inc.

1. Press Release, September 4, 2013, “Ortho Company Moving Headquarters to Warsaw,” Ink-Free News.
2. Fossil founder digs the D, Daniel Duggan, Crain’s Detroit Business, May 27, 2012.

The brainchild of former Atlantic Media entrepreneur-in-residence Andrew Golis, This. is a social network for those who want to cut through the increasing clamour of the internet.

Andrew Golis. Image from medium.com

Sparksheet chatted with Golis about This. going public and how he hopes it can provide users with pure signal in a world made noisy by the proliferation of superficial, commoditized content. Here’s our conversation:

What is This. and how did it come to be?

Andrew Golis: This. is a sharing network where members can share one link a day, and the basic idea is to create a community that’s about a deep passion for art and entertainment and journalism on the web.

We have all these incredible networks like Facebook and Twitter that connect us with all of the media that’s out there, but they’re really tuned for different things. Facebook is beautiful for connecting with your friends and family and Twitter is extraordinary for connecting you to live conversations, but neither of those are fundamentally about the quality of the media that’s floating through them.

By limiting every member to sharing one thing a day we give them the opportunity to mark something that’s special and say, “This thing is really worth your attention.” And people can follow people whose taste they respect and see that one thing. It gives them the ability to get this incredible list of things to watch, listen to or read and they end up with almost all signal and no noise.

What was the initial inspiration for This. and what’s it taken to get it to where it is?

AG: My background is in media as someone who lives at the intersection of editorial and strategy. I ran digital at an investigative documentary show called Frontline and when I was there I spent a lot of time thinking about prime-time digital and the things that did and didn’t get distributed over the kind of networks that were rising to take over the media business.

About two years ago now I joined The Atlantic, which has had an extraordinary decade of turning what was an old kind of fussy intellectual magazine into a powerhouse digital media company and launching things like Quartz. They gave me the freedom to really take that curiosity around networks, and quality and prime-time and play with it, and I was able to get the initial prototype of This. up with support from The Atlantic and its owner David Bradley. From there we were able to grow it enough and get enough traction to take it out of the company and set it up as its own startup.

Tell me more about the idea of only sharing one thing a day and how that shapes how people use This.

AG: When you create that limit it prompts a little more intentionality on behalf of the sharer.

Everyone in the system understands that when you have one thing to share everyday, if you are going to put something up you’re giving it your fullest endorsement.

I don’t think that leads people necessarily to longform or investigative journalism, but I do think it leads people to things that have required more work to create. We live in an era of commoditized content, where because of the low bar for sharing we end up with a kind of mass of mediocre stuff as opposed to stuff that reaches a little deeper into your interest and pushes you to think. I mean, just look at the stuff trending on Facebook on any given day.

Is what This. does curation?

AG: I think that curation is a buzzword that’s lost some of its meaning through overuse. But if you actually think about its history there is an incredible role for people who have this passion in helping people discover the new and the great, be it an art gallery curator or a movie critic.

Every tool on the web gives us the ability to be a curator in someway or another. Twitter is primarily a live communication platform and Facebook is giving you tools to create an identity around the people you went to high school or college with and your friends and family. But a curator actually wants to be able to create an identity around their home bookshelf. Displaying their taste is giving them the ability to say, “This is the stuff I’m passionate about and want to show.”

What we’re going for is to give our members who want to be curating, and are doing it on other platforms that aren’t really built for it, a place where they are rewarded for the quality of the stuff that they share, and producing an identity and network around that.

This. dashboard on November 2, 2015

I got on This. because someone at The New York Times tweeted me an invite. Are users mostly journalists? Is it diversifying?

AG: One of our huge advantages at the beginning was that because this is the kind of community I’m a part of and my wife [Jessica Valenti] is a part of we had an overrepresentation of professional digital media people. That was a massive advantage because if you want to see people who have a really good sense of what’s good and what’s not on a daily basis, connect yourself to the people who are reading the internet for a living.

But at this point, journalists are definitely not anywhere near the majority. We’ll probably cross 20,000 members by the end of October.

One of the things I saw shared most widely on This. was a couple months ago when The Atlantic published an
excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. Is there a certain type of content that does well on This.?

AG: The biggest communities right now are around tech, feminism, civil rights and media. Those are the four topics with the highest membership density, but we’re also starting to see stuff in art and design, in sports, there’s a lot of stuff that’s emergent. We’ve got an international community that’s starting to bubble up, with a big chunk of German and French users.

It’s only been a week since we [publicly] launched and we went from 12- to 20-thousand members so everything is a little fresh.

In one of your newsletters, you wrote about an MIT professor’s theory of the threat of digital devices distracting us from our real lives. Is it paradoxical to try to combat distraction by building another social network?

AG: The way it’s often framed is that distraction only works in one direction: that we are distracted by devices and digital services away from real-life conversations, or relationships or whatever. But my point is that, that’s not the only direction that distraction goes. Sometimes in real life my five-year-old throwing a temper tantrum can distract me from reading a great book on my kindle. Or the auto-play video of a bear falling out of a tree can distract me from what my friend wrote on Facebook.

One of the nuances we’re going to start to push ourselves towards as we get used to what this new digital world is like, is that it’s not just a matter of being distracted from things in our non-digital lives. It’s also about being distracted from really important quality things on our digital devices by other things that we’d rather not be giving our time to but sort of can’t help but look at.

What is it that you think we need to be focused on and what are the real threats in terms of distraction?

AG: A huge amount of what we’re seeing is products and services that we love, expanding beyond what we want them to do. When I go to Facebook I get very frustrated that I can’t just see pictures of my friends and read about their lives, which is what I love Facebook for. Because that company has reached maturity with that core service, it’s expanding beyond that and trying to look for more ways to suck up our attention. It’s because of the scale it’s reached and the nature of what it means to be a public company.

The problem is not that we only need to be paying attention to these kinds of things and not to these other kinds of things. We all want to be able to enjoy some fun, light, goofy entertainment sometimes and go really deep into media that we really love at others, but when those contexts crash together in these services one of them becomes more challenging.

This. is just focused on the quality of the media that we connect you to and creating tools for people who want to curate and consume that media. In the same way you’d see at an art gallery or a bookstore, there’s a particular type of context you want to create that gives people the ability to focus on consuming media that they’ll really love

So is the internet and web culture headed towards these totally separate, siloed tools or is it going it be dominated by these big overarching platforms?

AG: I think it’s bad for consumers if you see Facebook or Apple eat the web. And the thing that we’ve seen over and over again is that the diversity and small-d democratic nature of the web, over time, makes these niches more useful than the sort of business-development driven, everything-in-one-place portals.

If we’re hopeful about the web and its ability to continually reinvent itself than I think there’s an opportunity for people who want to do something very specific.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

So marketers speak of engagement and immersion. Marketers try to move beyond cherished but outmoded metrics while desperately clinging to other equally outmoded metrics. And as touchpoints increase, and technology evolves, and consumer behavior changes and shifts and morphs, marketers must come up with more and more sophisticated means with which to engage with the marketplace. That results in a lot of messaging. And it’s pushing a lot of stuff.

But now marketers are starting to hear more and more about noise and, in apposition, quiet. Consumers are starting to crave quiet spaces. And when they say that, they mean “free from marketing.” There is no other way to say it.

Quiet is the new luxury. Of course, we know that everything can have a marketing angle. Even quiet.

What would help, maybe, is if marketers thought up their campaigns outside of their own content bubbles. Forgo the focus group and just take a walk outside. All too often, marketers create campaigns by ignoring the real world – and all the marketing in it – to concentrate on their own content ecosystems. In a race for eyeballs, marketers forget everything else those eyeballs see. Put it this way: did your high school teacher or university professor ever consider the amount of work their colleagues were saddling you with while they themselves were piling work on you? Not really. Did you resent them? Yes. Each bit of homework was necessary. But all of it at the same time was a recipe for late nights, no sleep and a lifelong addiction to caffeine (best case scenario). Or burnout.

In marketing terms, we tend to forget the context of our messaging. Smart content is context smart. And bad content is, in the simplest terms, bad service.

Because service is the height of marketing. And here, an old-fashioned notion, that of “added value,” should remain top of mind. Why? Well, we all know, deep down, that consumers don’t care about any of the world’s brands. Consumers only care about a particular brand if it improves their lives. If that brand adds value. To them. And once a brand stops adding value, the consumer moves on. Cuts through the noise. To find something else they value. And a brand that values them.

What in your background allows you to create an airline company?

I come from a traditional brand design background and one of the problems, if I can use that word, is its focus on communications and not on actions. I tend to be story-centric, I’m very interested in the story we are telling with the products, services, and experiences we’re creating and developing because stories need to be at the heart of what it means to be human. When we talk about creating better experiences for customers, so much of that comes down to how well told are our stories.

Devin Liddell. Credit photo: TEAGUE.

You’ve created a new airline but it feels like it’s really a new idea about customer service. Were you scarred by a certain customer service breakdown or did you learn something about customer service in your past jobs that you thought you could apply to air travel?

[Laughs] It wasn’t the negative experiences that intrigued us, though we’re certainly aware of them; we were actually more attracted to the purity of how we could make this better versus fixing what seemed to be problematic. We approached Poppi with a lot more love really. Air travel is amazing and it probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves. There are, to your point, some major annoyances within air travel which don’t have to be there. There are some problems but they need some design love, they need some design attention. And if we can do that, we can make air travel awesome again.

Bags are a big problem. But what if there were no cabin luggage at all? The Poppi 777 aircraft features ”fedora bins” that only hold personal items, such as computer bags and jackets. All luggage is checked with RFID-enabled tags to assure passengers that their bags are where they’re supposed to be. Credit photo: TEAGUE.

What’s the correlation between good design and good travel?

That’s a really good question. For us, it’s hard to separate design from the travel experience itself. In design, when you think about the experience a passenger has, our point of view is that every single touch point should be designed. The word we’ve used to describe those in between moments is seams. We really like to design for the seams. So what are the seams between when you get off an aircraft and the ground transportation, or that seam between check-in and the experience at the gate, or that seam between parking and when you arrive at the security check point. There are all those in between moments and unfortunately they haven’t been designed as well as they could be. If you do design them, then you have opportunities to create awesome experiences.

How do you expect the Poppi customer to differ from the customer of a legacy carrier?

I’m so glad you asked that. What we want is for the customer to feel a sense of belonging to Poppi in the same way they feel a sense of belonging to the other businesses they support. And there are precedents to Poppi in this regard. When you talk to customers of Southwest Airlines, they feel very tribally affiliated with Southwest. They feel like Southwest is there for them and we want the same for Poppi. I think the Poppi customer will feel very invested in the business and also I feel there are plenty of passengers out there who should not be on Poppi and that is OK too. We actually want that. The worst thing that can happen to a brand is to feel like it’s for everyone. We want Poppi to feel like it’s precisely for me, whoever that me is, and in doing so we understand that it might not be right for others. That’s one of the problems with modern air travel. Modern carriers are so fixated on losing their customers to their rivals. The reason they’re worried about losing their customers is because they’re not different enough.

Ticket Exchange System. Credit photo: TEAGUE.

Could you speak more to the type of customer Poppi isn’t chasing?

A super price conscious customer who religiously checks Priceline or Expedia to find the lowest fare is not who we’re after. I don’t blame that customer at all because airlines have not added enough value to the passenger experience to make it worth paying more. We pay premium pricing for other brands because those premiums are worth it for some reason. The ideal passenger is someone who feels a sense of belonging to the Poppi brand and is willing to pay a premium because we’re capable of delivering value that they’re not getting elsewhere and delivering a value that’s important to them. Whether we handle bags in a way that they love, or that we provide them with branded artifacts. Every year when they update their yearly membership to Poppi, they get an awesome mailer in the mail, a package with the latest and greatest cool Poppi stuff. In an ideal future, there will be highly differentiated airlines that serve the need, functionally and emotionally, for all kinds of passengers. That’s not the case right now, airlines are a bit homogenized if I can use that term. Airlines should be highly differentiated from one another and offer different ways of doing business different passengers can fall in love with.

How will Poppi react if established airlines start stealing your ideas?

To be totally clear, that’s exactly what we want. In all likelihood Poppi will never fly, it will never operate as an airline and that’s what we’re after. We created Poppi specifically as a provocation, and as a gift to existing airlines.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

“Ambulance Victoria Mercedes paramedic at St Kilda Junction, 2013” by LiamDavies

An hour or more wait in the reception area. A rushed 15 minutes with the doctor or physician assistant. Exorbitant bills tied to minor care in the emergency room.

Whether by TV tropes or first-hand experience, these are the flaws many westerners associate with their country’s healthcare infrastructure. Despite the efforts of entire industries, the complexity of healthcare makes its inefficiencies particularly difficult to solve.

These are the same types of inefficiencies that sparked a dramatic change in the taxi and hotel industries, giving rise to Uber, Airbnb, and an entirely new type of commerce known as the sharing economy.

Can the same combination of technology and on-demand services be applied to the healthcare industry? Does such an ethos even have a place where the commerce of healing is concerned?

A growing number of physicians and consumers are saying yes.

The Uber for Healthcare is a House Call

Emergency room care is expensive, and in a significant portion of the time, unnecessary. According to a 2010 study published in Health Affairs, between 13.7 and 27.1 percent of all emergency room visits in the US could be treated at alternative locations, like urgent care clinics, which would save over 4 billion dollars.

However, if the patient has children, the logistics of a drive to the urgent care clinic — or to receive help at all — become more complex. Urgent care clinics don’t answer the question of convenience, and could still be a huge drain on the consumer’s most important resource: time.

Here, like in other industries, the appeal of the on-demand aspect of the sharing economy is obvious, which is why a handful of startups are cautiously vying to do for urgent care what Uber has done for car rides.

And consumers’ appetite for on-demand healthcare services isn’t limited to North America. In the UK, consulting firm 365 Response has received some 500,000 in funding from the Department of Health to develop Healthcab.

Unlike many on-demand platforms, Healthcab reaches beyond elective visits — like for a high fever or sprained ankle — and looks to better support patients with serious renal conditions who need transportation to and from their appointments. From their mobile phone, users could book transportation provided by England’s National Health System, vet possible drivers based on their credentials, and track the vehicle’s movements.

360Response.org

Notice the similarities with ride-sharing services?

Pager, a New York City company, actually uses Uber to transport the healthcare professionals at a cost of $200 per urgent care visit. Heal, a similar service provider operating in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Orange County, charges a flat fee of $99 per visit — regardless of how long the doctor spends with the patient.

The fees associated with these visits aren’t covered by insurance companies, but that doesn’t seem to be a deterrent for consumers.

So far, both parties seem to benefit: consumers get medical attention without having to leave their home and providers keep patients out of the emergency room.

All of the startups in this space employ licensed care providers (usually a combination of doctors, physician assistants, and nurses) who want to make more money during their off hours — much in line with the way many on-demand employees make their services available through these mediums to supplement their income.

Marketing, Data, and Risk in On-Demand

The value proposition for on-demand services — whether in healthcare, ride sharing, food delivery or what have you — is essentially the same. Users get to outsource a task from the convenience of their phone, thus saving a great deal of time.

This same brand positioning has become ubiquitous, with “the Uber for [insert industry here]” becoming an all too common elevator pitch for on-demand startups. But despite the repetition (or just lack of creativity) in marketing, the value to consumers is quite real.

Everything from around the house tasks (Handy) to food delivery (GrubHub and tons of others) can now be outsourced through a phone, or at the very least through a web application.

For healthcare, there’s a bit of an interesting twist both in marketing as well as in risk. Instead of simply claiming to be the Uber for healthcare, house call apps can play on a more nostalgic appeal: the return of the house call and a re-emphasis on the doctor-patient relationship.

That promise has a much stronger appeal on an emotional level, but the risks associated with an on-demand healthcare platform are much more substantial as well.

For example, many healthcare systems now seek to centralize patient data in a particular medical software, which is great in theory, but hazy when contractors who may or may not work on the same platform as the patient’s usual provider enter the care process at random.

Doctor taking notes on an iPad by NEC Corporation of America, Flickr

This can result in significant confusion as well as data breaches arising from poorly constructed applications or data transfer policies.

Additionally, where low-quality contractors in other industries may result in cold carry-out or poorly painted trim, in healthcare, these on-demand workers have a significant role to play in the health of their patients.

So is “Uber for healthcare” really happening? Yes, though at a slower pace than other industries. There’s a great deal to be figured out, but that’s not so uncommon in an on-demand world.

Jaguar Feel Wimbledon, From Jaguar UK

In 2015, “empathic media,” automated technologies used to understand people’s emotions, took two steps forward. Both were in the UK.

The first was at Wimbledon. In partnership with the storied tennis tournament, three tech and media companies—Maido, Mindshare and Lightwave—launched a campaign called “Feel Wimbledon.” Using sensor-equipped wristbands, they tracked the moods and emotions of the Wimbledon crowd by monitoring the heart rate, localized volume, motion and skin temperature of 20 fans. This data was used to create ‘living ads’ for Jaguar by visualizing the audience’s fluctuating emotions.

The second took place along London’s Oxford Street, where M&C Saatchi (along with Clear Channel and Posterscope) tested advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers’ emotions and reacted according to whether a person’s facial expression was happy, sad or neutral. Wisely, the test adverts featured a fictitious coffee brand named Bahio. The really innovative part was that the ad improved itself until it received positive reactions from its audience.

There is nothing ethically troubling about the particulars of Jaguar and fictional Bahio campaign, but what they portend raises questions about marketing and ambient intelligence. The campaigns are early users of soft biometrics and artificial intelligence, technologies that are sure to see an upswing in advertising use and raise thorny ethical questions.

Soft biometrics differs from hard versions—which confirm identity by iris texture analysis, fingerprinting, facial scanning, and voice and signature testing—because the they are not used to identify people, but rather to enhance interaction between people and machines. For advertising, this involves tracing the body’s behaviour, inferring moods and emotional states, and using this information to target advertising. The artificial intelligence part comes in as soft biometric feedback from viewers is used to improve ads by tailoring them to the viewer.

M&C Saatchi London came up with an algorithm that recognizes the attention generated by an ad. Video via M&C Saatchi London.

The opportunity for wider use of soft biometric data will rise in tandem with both personal sensors, like mobiles and wearables, and commercial ambient sensors, like those in the Bahio billboards. If and when wearables become embedded in everyday life, emotionally sensitive empathic media will grant advertisers greater insight into our emotions through how we speak to our mobile devices, more granular facial recognition and emotional insights derived from our heart rates, respiration patterns and how our skin responds to stimuli.

In the earlier cases, consent is unproblematic. Wimbledon’s tennis fans knew what they were signing up for and the M&C Saatchi campaign was cautious in its ambitions with no data being retained. However, outdoor media owners such as Clear Channel are both obviously interested in collecting data about how campaigns are performing on their ad spaces, and working out ways to monetize data from tomorrow’s smart cities. The virtual and the real will soon meet through two-way interaction between mobile and wearable devices and urban environments, raising the necessity to better understand how emotion, behaviour and consumer histories are used. We might also be mindful that this data is of interest to surveillance agencies.

Related: The Public Money and Private Tech Behind Connected Cities

Interviewed at Cannes this year for BBC’s Click, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP¹ , was asked whether WPP would want to reach people with a marketing message knowing their emotive state.

“Yes,” he responded “one would like to do that but within the grounds of people knowing exactly what they’re getting into so

Sir Martin Sorrell,CEO, WPP Plc, United Kingdom by Sebastian Derungs

demystifying the process, simplifying the process, making people understand what they’re letting themselves in for… that’s really important.”

This is a laudable position, but how will it work in practice and how can it be ensured that advertisers stick to this moral highground? As it stands, this is a call for a consent mechanism of sorts. Although opt-in is not mentioned, the comments imply that without informed agreement WPP would not pursue this line of advertising. We’ll see.

The twist with all of this is that empathic media does not require personal information. Online, consent is typically required for the processing of personal data. What is at stake today is not personal data, but aggregated data about bodily reactions to ads and nearby events (a tennis match for example). In years to come this will surely become a hot regulatory issue, but as it stands, data protection and privacy concerns are based on the principle of identification, not intimacy.

Related: Ask Permission!: Navigating the Labyrinth of Data and Marketing

Let us take at face value for now the claims that data will be aggregated, and that any personally identifiable information derived from mobiles and wearables will not be sold or passed on from the point of initial data collection. Let us also temporarily assume that aggregated emotional data cannot be merged with other data sets so to re-identify people. If all of this is possible: what precisely is the ethical problem with the use of soft biometrics in advertising, if there is one?

After all, the creepy line isn’t a fixed thing. Social media is a prime example, as we willingly share, in public, insights into our lives that were inconceivable 20 years ago. Further, as informational privacy and personally identifiable information aren’t the problem, what possible concerns does this leave us with?

“First 4SQ mayor Perk,” Louis Oliveira, flicker

At this stage, the ethics are unclear, but this is the future of empathy-based advertising:

• Public spaces will be used to mine aggregated data about citizens’ emotions;
• The relationship between our bodies and environment will be altered;
• Our publically mediated emotions will in part fuel our media systems;
• And emotional insights will generate a more fluid, dynamic and reactive and emotionally aware public environment.

The problem as I see it is temptation and history. The opportunity to link biometric information from opt-in or check-in apps such as Facebook and Foursquare—and thereafter devices, histories, locational data, friend lists and contacts—with other ads and retail environments is going to be enormously tempting. The history of behavioral advertising and online programmatic approaches tells us that the capacity to use emotional data in tandem with behavioral histories will be irresistible.

As Sir Martin Sorrell suggests, more discussion is required so that people and regulators understand what they’re getting themselves into. Somewhat ironically, we might take our cue for ethical standards from one of Adland’s favorites, Bill Bernbach of DDB. Famously he says “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”

My question for today’s marketing luminaries is this: Can and will the use of empathic media in advertising take us towards a higher level?

1. Spafax is wholly owned by WPP.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan talk with sushi master Jiro Ono during a dinner in Tokyo, Japan, April 23, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In describing customer service in Japan to foreigners, I usually tell them to imagine Julia Roberts and the bevvy of shop assistants fussing over her in that classic “Pretty Woman” montage right before she utters “Big mistake. Big. Huge!”

Now imagine that same service everywhere you go in Japan, whether it’s Chanel or a corner 7-Eleven.

Omotenashi, loosely defined as the art of selfless hospitality, is a cornerstone of Japanese culture. To welcome someone into your home or establishment and be able to anticipate their every need is seen as a privilege for the host, and working in a service industry is regarded with the utmost seriousness and respect. There are no menial tasks if the result ensures a great experience for a guest.  

Most Westerners are unfamiliar with it, but some of the island nation’s retailers are using Omotenashi to try to gain an edge on European and North American companies on the global market. As booming brands like Uniqlo bring Omotenashi to a store near you, marketers and retailers would do well to buff up on the Japanese philosophy of service.

Omotenashi is such an integral part of Japanese culture that it served as the centerpiece of Tokyo’s winning 2020 Olympic bid. Spokesperson Christel Takigawa promised that Tokyo would offer athletes and tourists alike a “unique welcome … One that dates back to our ancestors, yet is ingrained in Japan’s ultra-modern culture. ‘Omotenashi’ explains why Japanese people take care of each other and our guests so well.”

In North America or Europe, the simplest place to witness this ingrained ethos of meticulous customer service is in the same retail interactions that are anonymous at best and surely at worst. One might assume that the closest thing North America has to Omotenashi is Nordstrom’s mythical one-rule employee handbook that states using “best judgment in all situations.” It is close, but it is far too simplistic. Overall, Japan is a society based on rules and retailers do not encourage staff to “go above and beyond,” but instead deliver the same extraordinary level of service to anyone who enters the store.

In Japan, every shop employee, no matter who they are, greets customers by bellowing “irasshaimase,” which is a strong and polite welcome. But while North American Wal-Marts and Gap also employ “greeters,” in Japan this notion of welcoming someone is everyone’s responsibility as opposed to novelty and passed off to a jolly octogenarian in a yellow vest.  Moreover, many acknowledge that primary motivation of US brands to greet people is in fact to deter theft, not for the benefit of the consumer. It is not uncommon hear the irasshaimase, a dozen times when visiting a store, which can flummox or even frustrate foreigners, given that absolutely no response is required.

Most shop assistants in Japan bow to the sales floor each and every time they enter or leave to go to the back room—as an overall sign of respect. Ditto the train conductors on a subway or Shinkansen high-speed train. At the Louis Vuitton store in Roppongi, sales staff unobtrusively radio each other on headsets to let colleagues know that you are moving to their their areas.  In over a year in Tokyo, I have never once seen a sales attendant look bored, let alone fiddle with a mobile device while on the sales floor.

“Uniqlo,” by Rog01 via flickr

Shop assistants rarely work on commission and there is no tipping in Japanese restaurants or anywhere for that matter – doing so could even be seen as insulting. Japanese service industry professionals are taught to believe that a happy customer, who brings referrals and repeat business, is the true reward.  It certainly helps that Japanese service workers are paid a living wage, in addition to costs of commuting and overtime. Tipping is so far from the typical Japanese mindset that, in Hawaii, where 1.5 million annual tourists hail from Japan, a restaurant caused a stir by threatening to add a mandatory 15% surcharge to non-English speaking patrons in the same way it does for large parties.  While the idea never did catch on, boldface recommendations for “American tipping etiquette” are now common on Waikiki restaurant receipts, typed in both English and Japanese.  

Many of the subtle nuances of Japanese retail excellence can often be lost on those not raised in Japan. However, the flipside of Omotenashi is that local consumers have been trained to expect exceptional quality and service at every possible occasion. While Westerners might brush off local rudeness as someone “having a bad day” or simply tolerate the poor service, Japanese customers are far less forgiving if they believe an experience has not been up to snuff. However, their displeasure is manifested in a very local way: it is highly unlikely they will complain on the spot. Locals will instead make their opinions widely known to friends, to those who recommended the service (travel agents, concierges) and, more recently, in online reviews.  

While staff training certainly occurs, local Japanese retailers have the advantage of starting from a very elevated base since exceptional service is omnipresent.  However, as Japanese retailers like Uniqlo and Muji expand globally, they are trying to expand these basic tenets of Omotenashi to global markets via extensive training for foreign workers.  Many of Muji’s overseas management track staff are sent to the Tokyo HQ for a one year training program. At every Uniqlo store around the world, ‘advisors’ (shop assistants) gather one hour prior to store opening to recite ”The Behaviours”, a series of well-honed phrases that define customer service.

We often hear, in Western countries, the idea that the ‘customer is king’. It therefore should come as no surprise that in the corresponding Japanese aphorism, customers are elevated to the status of a god.  To serve them here is considered a divine act, even when the question is simply, “Do you want fries with that?”  

“The New York Times newsroom,” by Marjory Collins, Wikimedia Commons

The number of employed journalists in the United Kingdom declined by 6,000 or 9% since 2013 as falling ad revenue has squeezed publishers to cut costs, and newsrooms on the other side of the pond have seen similar losses. This means media outlets are cutting content creators at a time when they are demanding more content creation. Some experienced writers have been replaced by younger, cheaper ‘digital-natives’ but publishers will increasingly use fast-acting, data-hungry robo-journalists instead.

If you think that’s far-fetched, they’re already here and learning fast.

The Career Path of the Robo-Reporter

Several publishers including The New York Times, LA Times and Forbes employ robots: clever computer programs that use algorithms to gather information and natural language generators to churn out reader-ready copy.

They’ve shown a natural aptitude for data, but “careers” that started on sport and business desks are now moving into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Like all junior reporters, the robots are learning from their copy editors. Although in this case, the ‘subs’ are there to actually, not metaphorically, re-program them.

Like junior reporters, they can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing—but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.

A few big publishers will understand their potential and let them shine, while others will only ever give them mundane jobs.

They’ll open doors for the sort of nimble new companies that arrive during disruption, able to use technology for what it is suited.

Silicon Valley is already immersed in the technology behind robo-reporting but will use it first in fields like healthcare. They’ll enter robo-journalism later, buying or eliminating the newcomers.

How Good is Robo-Journalism?

“Spaceman Robot,” by D J Shin, Wikimedia Commons

It has taken ages to reach a point where people in tests can’t tell the difference between machine written articles and similar articles by humans. But a key feature of the ‘new machine age’ is that slow development quickly turns to accelerated gains.

A hard exercise has been getting journalists to verbalize what they’ve learnt to do instinctively. Once verbalized, those lessons are turned into algorithms. Machines can then trawl through wire stories, the Internet, press releases and data sets, finding and writing stories.

They don’t, of course, knock on doors, burn shoe leather or make contacts and phone calls. However, they can do the same tasks as the increasing proportion of journalists set to aggregating and repackaging news or making sense of the increasingly digitized data that informs the news.

After algorithm creation there’s slow fine-tuning. This is human labor-intensive process of reprogramming but it is coming on apace.

The Associated Press once checked everything machines produced but now they put the majority of it on the wire directly.

Other companies will check everything, but decoupling machines from over-zealous human chaperoning will be essential to take full advantage of what robo-reporters can offer. It is what will make new entrant companies nimble; it is what will hold back established publishers. Machines produce more if checking doesn’t slow output.

Machine Learning

Machines can learn language from large banks of expensively produced, comparable texts.

They translate between languages by comparing decades of EU and UN reports, expensively translated into multiple languages by humans. When asked to translate a sentence, they scan these translations to find a close match or a few fragments they can add together.

Similarly, that news media publishes to the open web means machines can compare how publishers cover the same story. They learn alternative phrases, different approaches, narratives, tones and house styles.

It means they can be set to write with a particular skew: in support of a sports team or against a political party.

They can learn in an unsupervised way. They can absorb captions under hundreds of pictures and so describe what is in a new picture. They can test their understanding of stories against summaries like those CNN and MailOnline use in articles. They can learn in dynamic environments, reacting to events around them. They don’t always need a human to slowly feed them knowledge.

This rich back-catalogue of digitized articles is also a source of facts to draw on. Machines have powerful memories. Fact checking is fast.

Paul Pierotti, Managing Director of Accenture Digital says, “This technology is being used in healthcare firstly because of its ability to digest vast amounts of textbook knowledge and new research; secondly because it can diagnose what it sees in pictures or in patient data; thirdly, it can use language to report the diagnosis along with supporting evidence and recommendations. The reasoning and language will evolve to feel human. If the healthcare industry can harness that potential so too can news companies.”

Data Analysis

“Big Data,” by DARPA, Wikimedia Commons

Machines are adept at investigating data sets. Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more—looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyze geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.

Robo-journalists are arriving at a time when the lack of data skills amongst journalists is starting to show. Peter Bale, Managing Director of CNN observed at a Reuters Institute Big Data event that traditional journalists who aired opinions based on very little proof were being embarrassed by people, often outside the industry, who could draw more solid conclusions from data. Machines will help publishers catch up.

Personalization

Machines can produce multiple versions of an article to make it more ‘personal’—to give it local flavor, for example.

Again, speed is important. Re-writes are produced in a fraction of the time it would take a human so stories are both current and personal.

As well as location, personalization might be based on the demographics or behaviors of groups of readers, as determined by their online activity. Publishers already target advertising like this.

Articles can be re-written based on what an individual might show they know about a topic in an interactive element in an article. The machine then describes the difference between your perception and reality.

We’ve always read between the lines to understand how we are personally affected or to see how reality differs from what we assume. In the future we will only need to read the lines themselves to understand those things.

Language translation is another form of personalization. Publishers from De Correspondent to The Economist have ambitions to find new customers amongst different language speakers. Machines offer opportunity.

Related: The News Social Network: Q&A With De Correspondent’s Rob Wijnberg

Finally, machines can write tirelessly. By covering more topics they’re more likely to write about your football team, your industry and etc. News feels more personal.

Interest to Advertisers

by kaboompics, Pixabay

Robo-journalism will be of interest to the advertising department. They’ve built native advertising units to write copy for advertisers—and charge a premium. Personalization means bigger premiums.

On the flip side, what if robo-journalism technology got into advertiser hands? They already plan to buy native at scale across many sites. What’s missing is the ability to speedily and cost-effectively re-write content to suit different publishers’ environments. If technology enables it, they can force prices down.

In Conclusion

The slow part is over. The rate of development will accelerate. Costs of entry will drop, as expensive lessons learnt by machines will be cheaply replicated in others.

Publishers will battle nimble robo-publishers and advertisers seeking to drive down cost. They’ll need to fully embrace the twin opportunities of data interpretation and personalization—and avoid chaperoning machines too closely.

Before you know it, these challenges will be upon us.

This post originally appeared in TheMediaBriefing and has been adapted for Sparksheet’s audience. Read the original here.

“Warby Parker – Percey Sunglasses” by Scott Ackerman, flickr

Brands can become verb-worthy. In my father’s day it was the Cadillac, a car synonymous with luxury and status. If you had a Caddy you’d arrived.

Today, brand-verbs have taken on extended meaning. Start-ups and businesses seek to emulate certain brands: companies aim start the UBERization of their industry. We also hear that whole industries are being “Warby Parkered.” This is funny given Warby Parker was once called “the Netflix of Eyewear” in GQ.

The affordable, hipster-chic eyewear company has risen fast but is yet to make much money. In an April 30th article in The Wall Street Journal, Warby Parker admitted it was not profitable. Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-chief executive, did not share revenue performance but claimed annual sales were picking up.

The Category

Warby Parker founders set their sights on an industry with bloated costs and one dominated by just a few sleepy players. The business model cut out the middleman to work directly with manufacturing. The designer eyewear was then sold online to cut retail costs.

All of this was wrapped in a strong brand predicated on being hip and fresh that delivered superior quality and customer service. Warby Parker felt that by greatly improving the buying experience they would make traditional competitors irrelevant. This approach has rocked the complacent category.

The Offer

“Spectacles,” by urbanlatinfemale, flickr

Warby Parker built the popular brand by first marketing designer frames for under $100. The startup saved costs by cutting out licensing fees, working directly with suppliers and shipping products to consumers. Now the frames start at $130 indicating either the company can price for improved margin or that operating costs are higher than expected.

The eyewear is still competitively priced and is made attractive with free shipping and returns. For the socially conscious, Warby Parker distributes a pair of glasses to those in need for every pair sold. This is an incredible commitment in an age when corporate social responsibility programs are largely vacuous press releases.

Related: In Corporate Social Responsibility, Commitment is Key

Having begun strictly online, the business is now experimenting with retail. Their website claims, “Our retail spaces combine the snappy ease of online ordering with the fun and serendipity of real-life shopping (with a photo booth or two).”  These now number fourteen across America.

The Competition

Warby Parker is up against a great range of competitors. Chief among them is Luxottica Group, which owns brands such as Oakley and Ray-Ban, and retail chains LensCrafters, Pearle Vision and Sunglass Hut. Luxottica would have seemed formidable given their dominance in both production and distribution but Warby Parker saw that this as an opportunity.

The competition extends from opticians right down to drugstores and convenience stores. There are also several other online innovative eyewear providers. I recently purchased two pairs of prescription sunglasses from Eyebuydirect.com. They arrived within eight days, cost $78, and could be returned for free. I admit one frame was rather cheap and was intended for outdoor sports while the other was in a faux wood grain that prompts compliments wherever I go. I am not shilling for the company, I am making the point that options for eyewear abound.

The Business

Warby Parker has raised $115.5 million USD in six rounds of financing from twenty-two investors. The most recent round values five-year-old Warby Parker at $1.2 billion. This makes it one of only a handful of online retail startups to grow beyond a $1 billion valuation before going public or getting acquired. Still, the company is not yet profitable. They do not share revenue numbers but Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-chief executive, has said sales are accelerating.

The capital is largely going to the retail shops. A growing portion of sales are coming from these storefronts which now employ nearly half of the company’s five hundred employees. The physical locations help drive awareness for the Warby Parker brand overall. Henry Ellenbogen, who manages T. Rowe Price’s $16 billion New Horizons fund and an investor in the company told The Wall Street Journal, “We think about Warby as a blend of offline and online commerce. The more successful Warby is offline in a market, the more successful they are online.”

The Brand

This comes from the company’s website: “Warby Parker was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to offer designer eyewear at a

“Dharma Bums,” by Chris Drumm, flickr

revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.” But I would say the brand is less about rebellion and more about whimsy.

The company name comes from Jack Kerouac’s book Dharma Bums. Every employee gets a copy, “as part of our standard secret initiation rites.” The brand’s language is fun and approachable, “Sometimes people say to us: ‘If you love your job so much, why don’t you marry it?’ (Answer: we would if we could.)” Frame names are definitely upscale and preppy ranging from Halford to Winston to Madison.

The brand continues to flirt with different distribution models and has recently partnered with Nordstrom on a pop-up shop. The installation is curated by Olivia Kim, Nordstrom’s director of creative products, and will live in select Nordstrom locations as well as online. The shop will sell existing Warby Parker frames, four exclusive new sunglasses, and a curated selection of non-eyewear items, including McSweeney’s books, Pike St. Press notecards and Clare V foldover clutches. This suggests that Warby Parker is looking to be a more holistic lifestyle brand.

A 20/20 Conclusion

Warby Parker itself is a disruptive retailer and cool brand with aspirations to a larger role in the lifestyle market. As they embark on this journey they are creating a universe of affiliations that will help make it happen, whether by intention or happenstance.

Warby Parker co-founder Andy Hunt is raising $125  million USD for a new venture capital firm called Elephant Partners, which would aim at monetizing startups willing to leapfrog Series A investments. Warby Parker alumni, Stephanie Korey and Jen Rubio, have started Away with Warby Parker co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa on the board.

Disruption is the thread that runs through all of these ventures. All that remains to be seen is if disruption actually pays. To be “Warby Parkered” needs to be synonymous with making money, not just raising it.

Brazilians are tuning into domestically-produced content. Image of “O Fim do Filme” via Flickr by Universo Produção.

Brazil is known for its creativity, its color, its flair. Telenovelas (Brazilian soap operas) are distributed around the world, and now, thanks in part to recent laws that require Brazilian networks to air a certain amount of locally produced content each day, the country’s domestic film and television industry is booming too.

Adopted it 2011, Brazil’s pay-TV regulation (Law 12.485) has helped stimulate a surge of content by requiring that TV stations show at least three-and-a-half hours of homespun material each day. The demand on networks to air nearly 1,300 hours of Brazilian television and film a year has prompted an upswing in the output of large and small production companies and, in turn, created a wealth of new opportunities for marketers.

Image via Flickr by Mike Vondran.

Since well before the law, however, Brazilian movie audiences had been swelling. Over the past seven years, ticket sales have grown more than 60 percent, from 89.1 million tickets sold in 2008 to 147.9 million in 2012 and even more in subsequent years, according to statistics from Brazil’s national movie agency, ANCINE.

This boom in viewership represents a boon to the Brazilian economy. A 2014 report from the Motion Picture Association of America found that in 2013 the audiovisual sector contributed 19.8 billion reais (roughly $5.5 billion USD) to the economy and employed more than 100,000 Brazilians. Based on these numbers, film is contributing to the Brazilian GDP on the same scale as tourism; in at least one sense, Brazil’s movies and TV shows are on par with the Rio de Janeiro beaches and Iguaçu Falls.

The growth in both the demand for and production of AV content in Brazil has outstripped the country’s existing theatre infrastructure—a trend which is well illustrated by the Brazilian film phenomenon “Dois Filhos de Francisco” (Two Sons of Francisco).

Directed by Breno Silveira,“Dois Filhos” tells the story of how a passion for music transforms the lives of a simple farmer and his family. Released in 2005, the film sold 5.2 million tickets—surpassing Star Wars Episode III and Batman Begins at the Brazilian box office.

The film was produced by Conspiração Filmes. According to Leonardo Barros—who heads advertising, television and film production for the company—the natural growth of Brazilian content on the big and small screens has been given a shot in the arm by the 2011 requirement to air more local content.

“The law [12.485/11] represented a sea of change for independent production in Brazil,” said Barros. “This has given a huge boost to production … Brazilian producers now talk about two different eras of independent production in Brazil: B.L. [Before the Law] and A.L. [After the Law].”

Conspiração Filmes is an independent production company that began in 1991.

Brazil is by no means the first country to introduce quotas for domestic content. Australia, Canada, South Korea, and many countries in the European Union all have similar legislation.

In Canada, regulation passed in 1968, generally referred to as the CanCon laws, requires that 55 percent of the material aired by private Canadian broadcasters is at least partially produced in Canada or by Canadians. Although the CanCon regime has fostered recent cult hits like “Trailer Park Boys” and “Orphan Black,” much of the TV and film consumed in Canada is still made in the United States or produced with the broader American audience in mind.

But according to a content consultant for Brazil’s Rede Globo, the largest TV network by revenue in the world after ABC Television, even as the internet has opened the floodgates on international content, Brazilian viewers have shown a strong preference for Brazilian content.

“The expansion of pay-TV in Brazil has opened many more options for international content,” said Flávio Rocha, formerly the TV networks artistic content director. “But, as is the case in many regions and nations around the world, people tend to prefer to watch programs that reflect their own culture and tastes.”

The growth of its domestic film industry, along with the increased purchasing power of the swelling middle class and the draw of major international events like the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, has made Brazil a ripe investment prospect for international producers and advertisers.

Image of Marcus Fernandes from Cologne Conference, in Cologne, Germany.

Marcus Fernandes, a showrunner for Irmãos de Criação, which handles many international coproductions, cites his company’s children’s cartoon “Clara in Foodland,” as an example of the potential for foreign and domestic collaboration in the Brazilian TV market. Created in partnership with Unilever, Discovery Kids and O2 Filmes, the cartoon promotes a healthy diet through interactive online entertainment. “Clara” has become a hit in Brazil and across much of Latin America.

“This was made possible in large part by the law, but also because of private investment and investment mechanisms, especially the Audiovisual Sector Fund,” said Fernandes.

But the same law that helped create this environment complicates the investment process with a tangle of regulation governing foreign film production.

Fernandes refers foreign film and TV producers interested in working in Brazil to the ANCINE guide to filming regulations and emphasis the importance negotiating agreements directly with domestic partners.

Despite the complexities, there is great potential for collaboration between Brazilian and foreign filmmakers and for marketers to tap into the booming Brazilian economy. Since 2010 Conspiração Filmes has worked with German, Spanish and French filmmakers to produce “Bach in Brazil,” “Lope,” and the TV mini-series “Rouge Brésil.”

The total value of these projects is over 75 million reais, $25,000,000—a string of zeros long enough to capture the attention of filmmakers and advertisers in Brazil and around the world.

Move over phone booths. These tech pylons offer urbanites free Wi-Fi and more. Image via Link NYC.

A few weeks after moving to New York City, I watched a friend pick up her buzzing cell phone, screen the caller, and put the phone back down. “I’ll just tell him I was on the subway,” she told me.

The moment stuck with me as one of those New York rules: the idiosyncratic behaviors that manifest from the unique, complicated infrastructure New Yorkers navigate every day. I too have used the subway-excuse.

But now, some of those rules are changing. With the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) celebrating the connection of its 100th Wi-Fi enabled station earlier this year, more commuters are enjoying wireless in the New York underground and the subway-excuse is becoming less and less plausible.

There are changes going on above-ground too. Google recently announced a partnership with city-run innovation group LinkNYC that will blanket the streets of New York with free public wifi. And the trend extends beyond New York. From Tel Aviv to Perth, Manila to Cape Town, the world’s cities are building out public connectivity programs with help from companies like Motorola and iiNet.

The major opportunity for private/public technology partnerships is to create order from chaos: to accelerate and simplify the day-to-day bustle of navigating a big city.” Tweet

“I was underground,”  is no longer an excuse for not picking up your phone. Image via MTA.

The public/private partnership between for-profit companies and the cities they’re connecting is mutually beneficial. Private companies provide proven technology that accelerates the development of connected cities—without Motorola, for example, Tel Aviv may have taken much longer to roll out a Wi-Fi initiative.

For private companies, partner cities are a new market for lucrative connectivity products that can be used to enhance brand recognition amongst large urban audiences. The cities win as well by being able to offer free public Wi-Fi without bearing the entire cost of infrastructure development, especially considering the installation, maintenance, and elaborate device architecture (including ethernet switches, access points, and wireless controllers) needed to support public connectivity.

Google’s planned partnership with LinkNYC will ultimately increase connectivity for New York residents and tourists, but it will also be an advertising product. The high-speed Wi-Fi pylons that Google and LinkNYC plan to install will feature fibre-optic speed, Google Maps, and charging stations, but will also display targeted digital advertisements on the side of the pylon. Furthermore, Google will be able to serve digital display ads on connected users devices. As the first major outdoor Wi-Fi partner in New York, Google will be first to claim the valuable physical and digital advertising inventory driven by—if the product is successful—a high volume audience.

In London, outdoor advertising company Exterion Media is building an even more direct public advertising experience. The company is working with the London Transit Agency to equip 500 London buses with beacon technology that will allow advertisers to send messages to riders’ smartphones that are tailored to the apps the rider has downloaded to her phone or to the advertisements she sees on the bus around her. Passengers will be able to respond, interact, and redeem special offers, breaking up what may otherwise be a dull commute.

These buses of the future include Wi-Fi and beacon technology. Image via Flickr by David Holt.

For customers with expensive data plans, increased public connectivity in the world’s cities may be a welcome way to stay online without incurring the costs, but the benefits of these public/private technology partnerships can extend far beyond Wi-Fi and special offers from advertising.

In Tokyo, smartphone users get help navigating the city’s labyrinthine Shibuya Station— visited by 3-million commuters every day—from bluetooth beacons that provide turn-by-turn directions to the right platform for the user’s trip.

Following a £24 million grant from the UK Technology Strategy Board, Glasgow meticulously mapped the city’s walking tours, cycling paths, and points of interest, and made the data available to residents and visitors on the web and in smartphone apps. The city’s streets are laid with sensors that determine the volume of cars on the road and adjust traffic lights accordingly to reduce congestion for drivers.

New York’s CitiBike bicycle-sharing program, which enables almost 100,000 people a season to navigate the city on two wheels, recently updated its technology so that riders can get real-time updates on bike availability and receive email receipts immediately after completing a ride.  Like the city’s planned partnership with Google, CitiBike provides residents and visitors a valuable service—in this case, the ability to travel by bike without owning one—while Citibank itself gains outdoor advertising space and an expected uptick in brand recognition and affinity. And Citibank is certainly incentivized to keep improving the service; each incremental enhancement to CitiBike’s technology should improve the customer experience and, in doing so, attract more customers and increase the value of the brand footprint.

Even those outside of NYC have heard of CitiBike. Image via Flickr by Oran Viriyincy.

With great connectivity comes great responsibility, and to ensure success, connected cities should follow the north star of creating value for residents and visitors in the same way their private partners seek to provide value to consumers. The major opportunity for private/public technology partnerships is to create order from chaos: to use connectivity, technology, and data to categorize, accelerate, and simplify the day-to-day bustle of navigating a big city—without losing the quirks and character that attract so many to cities in the first place.

By providing value for residents and visitors, technology partners will ultimately attract the customers to the services that drive impressions for advertising products and resultantly, each company’s bottom line. City-specific services also allow technology partners to sell highly-targeted, more valuable ad units based on demographics as granular as specific neighborhoods or intersections.

As public/private technology partnerships mature, appropriate data use will have to be considered closely and restrictions set to respect customer data privacy will likely evolve.” Tweet

But in order to reap the benefits of public/private technology partnerships, companies must be vigilant to avoid potential pitfalls.

Regardless of ads, connectivity is a powerful incentive for commuters. Image via http://www.exterionmedia.com/.

Programs dependent on advertising revenue must be careful to balance ads with the connected content users have come to enjoy. Advertisements served as users log in to public Wi-Fi should not stall internet access.  When possible, these advertisements should take advantage of customer location data to serve ads that are relevant to where the user is and what she may be doing. For example, an ad served to a rider on Exterion Media’s London buses for a clothing retailer with a location along the bus route is relatively actionable and potentially more valuable for the rider than a an ad for a less immediate retailer.

Finally, these partnerships need to be cognizant of user sensitivity to data privacy and clearly communicate the terms of service to customers. Public Wi-Fi programs will give both cities and their technology partners access to troves of new customer data, but these programs will need to draw a line on appropriate and inappropriate use of that data.

Related: Ask Permission!: Navigating the Labyrinth of Data and Marketing

Image by Kurtis Garbutt via Flickr.

Leveraging the data for targeted advertising is a concept customers may be more familiar with, but what about some further potential applications of this data analysis? Should public browsing history be searched in a high crime area to identify potential infractions, even if it means the browsing history of non-criminal citizens is combed through as well? As public/private technology partnerships mature, appropriate data use will have to be considered closely and restrictions set to respect customer data privacy will likely evolve.

Today’s public/private technology partnerships are laying the foundation for a connected future to become reality, and the most effective initiatives will be those that push beyond free public Wi-Fi to build innovative experiences that empower users to interact with their cities like never before.

As long as cities and their private technology partners prioritize the creation of valuable user experiences and respect sensitive issues like data privacy, we have the opportunity to fuse our physical and digital worlds, to proactively deliver data, history, and recommendations based on hyperlocal context.

“Turn left here and you’ll avoid waiting 2 minutes at the crosswalk … That restaurant you’re walking by? Here are three dishes we know you’ll love.”

The bold sign, in cheerful teal and green, draws your attention. Curious, you peak inside and are greeted by a clean, bright environment and pleasing aromas. The aisles and displays resemble a cosmetic store. The goods are presented as precious keepsakes; the packaging suggests there is an item among them uniquely for you. A fresh-faced staffer attentively waits to answer any questions.

Welcome to the new world of tea.

David’s Tea was founded in 2008. A newcomer to the centuries old tea business, but one confident that it could make the product relevant to the modern consumer. The opportunity is great, but the company also faces significant challenges. It must convert coffee drinkers, have smart distribution, and battle a competitor with deep pockets while keeping investors happy.

The Category

Tea has been a beverage of choice for centuries, since its origins as a medicinal elixir in Shang Dynasty China. The British famously popularized tea production for the western drinker and through trade took it global. The East Indian Tea Company was so successful it became a synonym for “monopoly”.

Tom Standage, author of The World in a Glass: Six Drinks That Changed History, writes, “Englishmen around the world could drink tea, whether they were a colonial administrator in India or a London businessman. The sun never set on the British Empire—which meant that it was always teatime somewhere.”

Fast forward to the 21st century and the casual beverage market is crowded and confusing. Soft drinks, energy drinks, and variations on bottled water crowd shelves. Then, of course, there is coffee. The apparent dominance of coffee has been underway for hundreds of years. It began when coffee fueled commerce and created strong links to the rituals of business that remain in place today. Lloyds of London and the London Stock Exchange were both originally coffeehouses.

However, after water, tea is the most popular drink on earth. It is a $45-billion market worldwide. Yet, it has only recently gained a foothold in North America, where it is set to explode, especially in the United States. According to The Tea Association of The USA, the market has grown from less than $2 billion in 1990 to an estimated $10 billion in 2014. Eighty-five percent of US tea consumption is iced tea, but hot tea sales have increased 17% over the last 5 years. According to the The Tea Association, this growth is forecasted to continue.

The Offer

Montreal-based David’s Tea offers a wide range of loose-leaf teas, pre-packaged teas, tea sachets, and a host of tea accessories. Their website currently offers organic, fair trade, kosher, detox, energizing, chai, chocolate, and cold fighting teas. They run the gamut from white, green, oolong, black, pu’erh, mate, rooibos to herbal. The tea does not come cheap. For example, Yogi Berry is priced at near $50 for 250 grams.

Tea has never been this bold. Photo via Flickr by nora/sskizo.

The accessories provide great margins and invite consumers to dive deeper into tea culture. Stores are stocked with mugs, teapots and tea makers, teacup sets, infusers and filters, kettles and frothers, tins and spoons, along with important replacement parts. A Crystal Clear kettle will set you back $100.

Located primarily in Canada and the United States, David’s Tea operates 161 retail locations as well as online sales. Even with aggressive expansion they have maintained an artisan’s approach. Since founding, they have introduced over 400 different teas and pride themselves on creative blends. Some of these concoctions from David’s Tea profess the same medicinal benefits claimed centuries ago.

The Competition

Beyond the crowded beverage category, David’s Tea’s most visible competitor is now part of the Starbucks’ empire. The coffee giant intends to use its network to build up Teavana. Starbucks bought the chain in late 2012 for $616 million and, according to Fortune Magazine, plans to expand to 500 stores in 2015. Although, there are presently only 360 Teavana locations.

The goal is to make Teavana a $3-billion-a-year brand within five years. Starbucks will give Teavana more space in its thousands of stores overseas following the same strategy in US and Canadian Starbucks locations. They have indicated that they will shy away from investing in more Teavana standalone stores relying instead on the existing Starbucks’ footprint. It will be interesting to see if Teavana sales cannibalize those of Starbucks or result in net gains.

Starbucks will be using their own stores to expand Teavana’s brand recognition.  Photo by Inhabitat Blog via Flickr

Where Starbucks intends to apply some attention is in a fresh brand-awareness campaign and an overhaul of Teavana packaging. This a direct response to the success of David’s Tea whose fresh brand is creating loyalty. Starbucks has had an eye on tea for some time. It bought Tazo tea for $8.1 million in 1999. That business now brings in more than $1 billion in annual sales of products such as tea bags and bottled tea. Starbucks is hedging against coffee saturation and will use its playbook and network to dominate the tea business.

The Business

David’s Tea went public, debuting on the NASDAQ on June 5, 2015. The share price started at $19 and closed at $27 per share. That success was quickly tempered when the company announced it lost $93.2 million in the first quarter. Leadership was quick to point out the cost of becoming a public company was a prime contributor to those results.

The good news is sales grew 29 percent to $35.8 million as comparable sales for stores open at least a year grew 6.3 percent, according to The Canadian Press (CP). David’s Tea opened 7 new stores in the first quarter. The chain now has 161 in North America. The company’s CEO, Sylvain Toutant told CP that his priority is further differentiating the offer. This means more interesting products, a greater focus on customer service, broader awareness of the brand and a plan to grow the chain to over 550 stores in North America. That is the number that David’s Tea believes will grant ubiquity but not saturation.

The Brand

David’s Tea has joined the noisy bunch on the Stock Exchange. Photo by bfishadow via Flickr.

The in-store experience at David’s Tea is pleasing. Samples abound and, unlike Starbucks’ baristas who are hunkered down behind counters, David’s Tea employees circulate throughout the store. Further contrasting the coffee giant, David’s Tea does not provide seating. On the one hand, buying a tea is an an in-and-out shopping event. On the other, the experience is not tainted by loud people at the next table or by the clatter of keyboards from wannabe Hemingways.

David’s Tea has an ethos of knowledgeability but not arrogance, akin to yoga stores like Lululemon and Lole. These lifestyle brands resemble private clubs. They give the impression of exclusivity but invite everyone to join. David’s Tea attempts to communicate this with every interaction, evidenced by their large teal coloured shopping bags that emulate the finery of Tiffany & Co.

One area that the brand has focused on from the outset is loyalty. Many brands gear their marketing budgets to the one-time acquisition of a customer. Smart brands look to provide lifetime value. David’s Tea in-store experience and loyalty program are working in concert to keep people coming back.

Sipping to a Conclusion

The rising consumption of tea in the USA bodes well for David’s Tea. Even capturing a small part of the market will amount to enviable performance. That is why expansion and distribution will determine success.

Keep calm and expand? Photo via atastefortea.wordpress.com

Claims by retailers that they will grow by X-hundred stores are meant for the business press and investment community,but the David’s Tea brand seems niche enough that it may benefit most in the longterm by growing margin rather than square footage.

David’s Tea is coming online during a time when people are very comfortable with online purchasing and major brands are closing retail outlets. This year, according to the American Retail Federation, McDonalds has closed 700 stores globally and Starbucks is shutting down all 23 of its La Boulange locations. By all means, David’s Tea should dot the map with stores in smart markets but leave saturation to the digital world.

Co-branded locations can be helpful too. Starbucks benefited from the combination with bookstores. David’s Tea could find clever homes in yoga studios and stores.

Underlying the brand is an aversion to complacency. If you are a frequent visitor to the chain you will notice David’s Tea is constantly tinkering but in a way invisible to the occasional consumer. A marketer or brander will pick up on it though: Frontline training is improving, merchandising sees subtle tweaks, and they constantly experiment with new elixirs that keep tea fresh as an alternative to competing beverages.

David’s Tea might have been best as a niche business in scale but a lifestyle brand for loyalists that live, breathe and, of course, drink tea. However, going public has created pressure to grow the business, perhaps beyond the frontiers of its specialty brand.

The moment the bell was rung and David’s Tea appeared on the NASDAQ, it became a different game, a different race. The company openly declared it meant to be the biggest, and just I hope the brand is not sacrificed along the way.

A DavidsTea store in Greenwhich village via Everplaces.

Packed with colored plastic and the promise of lifetime rewards, the second wallet, no doubt a Kenneth Cole brown leather billfold from the late 90s stuffed at the back of a desk drawer, contains loyalty cards. We have them; we use them; we forget to use them; we don’t even remember when we signed up for them. Possibly to receive a discount on seductive Egyptian cotton sheets, or perhaps to experience, but once, World Traveller Plus on a London-bound British Airways 787 from Toronto. We ask therefore: Were the plush seats and extra inches of legroom worth the sign-up hassle for the measly Avios (currency for British Airways’ loyalty rewards program, Executive Club)?

Absolutely, we assure ourselves.

But now, as Executive Club members (fancy!), will we ever experience the thrill of a late-night transatlantic upgrade again? Survey says: no. And why? Because according to the oft-quoted, unwritten rule of marketing, we (and most people) do not make up the 20% of the market who bring in 80% of a company’s profit. The looming reality of “cattle class” comes to a head, as cheap mimosas and salt-stained red boarding carpets become but a distant memory.

The issue at hand, however, is that even frequent-flyers are now being packed sardine-tight into economy class seats, somewhere back by me in row 34. Often characterized as on-the-go suits who would never be caught dead in (gasp!) Y class, AKA Economy, many frequent flyers in fact fall outside of this stereotype. However, with airline loyalty programs imposing new, often unattainable mileage and spending requirements, even more have been stripped of any of the tangible benefits that once came from their supposedly elite position in the commercial air travel loyalty game.

Elite status may give you priority boarding but is the red (or blue) carpet really worth it? Photo by Larry Johnson via Flickr.

What they are left with is a top tier title without the top tier rewards, and a complex marketing structure which revolves around ego and status, perpetuated by an ever-expanding choicelist of classed “premium” options. In this system, it is where you fall on the eliteness spectrum that matters.

The question of eliteness was recently identified in Josh Barro’s New York Times piece “Facing Elite Bloat, Airlines Move the Goal Posts,” in which he defines the concept of ‘elite bloating’ with the simple proposition that, “If everyone’s an elite flier, no one is.” And like many graduated class systems, frequent-flyers is decidedly and deliberately complex.

The hierarchy of passenger status dictates that the top and bottom tiers will most likely always be so. Big spenders—people just one tax bracket below the private-jet crowd—receive big treatment and, although airlines appreciate their business, the occasional flyer does not participate in the status game. The most tiered status group, therefore, is our business travellers. And, like aristocracy, titular nuance plays a role in how one self-identifies in the flyer status game, as frequent flying for business is no longer for the privileged few.

The world has become a very small place. Hopping a 22-hour flight to Hong Kong is as routine for today’s business traveler as it would have been for my parents (both “Super Elite” in their day) to grab the Rapidair from Montreal to Toronto’s Pearson several times a week. It is also known that most business travellers don’t in fact pay for their own airline tickets; they go where they are needed and climb the status rungs, absorbing the benefits of frequent flying on the company credit card. And travel rewards programs have capitalized mightily on the dog-eat-dog concept of status structures as a marketing device.

The ‘everyone’s a player,’ small-world reality of frequent-flyer bloating has been addressed by making the thresholds one needs to cross to receive tangible rewards largely unattainable; not only must one fly more frequently, one must spend more on travel to achieve whatever adjective for elite tiered status happens to be en vogue.

Bronze is gone. Delta Airways splits their SkyMiles into four categories starting with Silver. Image via Delta.com. MQM = Medallion Qualifications Miles, Medallion Qualification Dollars (MQDs) = Annual spending on Delta flights.

On Delta for example, to go from Silver (lowest) to Gold (second lowest) membership, a flyer must accrue an additional 25,000 “qualifying miles.” Based on the complex system that determines frequent-flyer status, only miles from certain flights and certain routes will be counted towards this threshold, but with the upgrade and extra flying comes priority airport services, fee waivers, and lounge access. Wonderful. To jump from Platinum to Diamond (the highest level), however, the spend difference is 50,000 of the right sort of miles. And the benefits? Almost identical.

It’s time to cut the class. Companies are aware that the era of White Star Line travel is over – airline travel is horribly unglamorous. The introduction of graduated “premium” travel has aided in redistributing the hoards, but has simultaneously become very confusing, in that it has attempted to resolve the classist reality of air travel by introducing more classes.

What exactly is the difference between “Plus” and “Premium”? Is “Executive” the same as “Business”? The higher airlines raise the exclusivity stakes, and nuance what it means to fly as an X- vs Y-level flyer, the more this redistribution comes to be meaningless. The business traveller next to you in coach may in fact have an elite status; they just don’t get anything for it anymore.

How can we dismantle the classism, and offer something real, without upsetting those who do in fact care what mileage number is printed next to the “Elite” on their luggage tag? Our chart toppers are a constant – as long as they are guaranteed a J cabin (Business Class) seat and the hoopla that goes with it, they’ll most likely travel happily. Rebranding lesser titles by simultaneously stripping mileage of its previous tangible value is the current system, and although it makes perfect marketing sense (engendering a promise that the next tier is in reach), it’s, you know, kind of deceptive.

Barro’s statement (by way of Delta Air Lines), that it is impossible for everyone to be a frequent-flyer, holds true. That doesn’t mean, however, that frequent-flyers fly any less frequently, and telling them otherwise really grinds their gears. Airlines are attempting to navigate the turbulent skies of a saturated frequent-flyer market, a decidedly difficult task. Yet they are doing so by making the majority of their “middle” (previously elite!) members feel unappreciated.

We live in a world of one-to-one marketing. The ultimate goal is to be able to throw away our second wallet, or at least blow the dust off the top of it slightly less often. Individuals never enjoy being told that they are special, only to then be shown that they are not. If we are to maintain a system of graduated flyer statuses, there must be a certain level of consistency, and accountability. Airlines must get creative, award tangible benefits, and attempt to make status-conscious flyers (and the companies who pay their airfare!) feel appreciated in other ways when they pull the red boarding carpet from underneath their feet.

Header illustration by Godwin Dakey.

JetBlue’s on-board Wi-Fi has modernized to give travelers more. Image by Ryan McGuire via Imcreator.

In-flight entertainment has come a long way since its early days with a projector screen and pneumatic headphones. While the last twenty years have seen many airlines invest in expensive in-seat video systems with hundreds if not thousands of entertainment options, some are starting to rethink those investments.  For many carriers, Wi-Fi can serve as an inexpensive and effective entertainment system that travelers love. In some cases, it can even pay for itself.

The initial model for Wi-Fi was straightforward. Either the airline paid to install the system or the provider subsidized it. Passengers paid for the service and either the airline or the provider could try to recoup their costs. This was challenging in the early days when personal devices weren’t as widespread, but as soon as usage began to increase a new problem presented itself: speed suffered.

For ground-based systems like that offered by Gogo in the US, capacity was effectively fixed. There were some enhancements to technology that helped improve speed, but ultimately, the only thing Gogo could do was increase prices to hold down demand.  Today, it’s not uncommon to see Gogo charge $40 for Wi-Fi access on a single flight across the United States.

When Wi-Fi went mainstream, airlines started to realize that they could switch their role in onboard entertainment from being a systems and content provider to being a content provider alone—all while being able to charge passengers. Anything that could replace the enormous cost of buying, installing, and maintaining those in-seat units was a very attractive proposition to airlines feeling the pinch of rising fuel costs and falling ticket prices.

But access to the internet alone wouldn’t be enough. While more and more people brought their own devices onboard and logged on to the Wi-Fi, the system slowed to a crawl. So airlines began installing servers on aircraft that could hold a library of movies, TV shows, and more. This allowed everyone on the airplane to access speedy entertainment via a wireless connection since it never actually touched the internet.

This model showed promise and many airlines rushed to it, particularly on shorter-haul flights. Even though this provided vast entertainment options, the true holy grail was being able to provide fast internet access to everyone on the airplane. The future clearly demands faster satellite options.

JetBlue’s new WiFi model is all about partnerships. So far partners include Vice, Wall Street Journal and Amazon. Image via JetBlue.com

The first truly fast Wi-Fi experience for everyone on an airplane came from LiveTV, the former JetBlue subsidiary. JetBlue is now close to having this installed on all its Airbus aircraft, and the results have been stellar.

The system is fast, and that has enabled JetBlue to enter into some productive partnership deals with big name brands. First, it made an agreement with The Wall Street Journal to provide subscriber-level access to those on JetBlue flights. That was just the beginning.

In May, JetBlue announced that Amazon Prime Instant Video would be made available for all Prime members aboard on of its flights.  Normally this would require paying for the higher tier of bandwidth, but Amazon is covering the costs. And just recently, JetBlue struck a deal with Major League Baseball to allow free streaming of MLB.TV on flights, even for those who aren’t paid subscribers.

Amazon Prime members get access to their favourite content in the air.

So why are companies flocking to this opportunity? Airlines provide a captive audience with time to kill. This is the perfect opportunity for Amazon to pick up some new Prime members. It’s also a great way to sign-up more subscribers for MLB.TV and The Wall Street Journal As you can imagine, there is no shortage of companies that would be interested in this kind of arrangement.

While today, JetBlue is the only airline that has enough bandwidth on most of its fleet to allow deals like this to work, other providers will surely follow and Wi-Fi speeds will increase across the board over time. You can expect to see more and more deals like these in the future.

JetBlue originally planned to keep Wi-Fi free for travelers only during the roll-out period.  But these partnerships have been so successful that it will now be free for the foreseeable future. With the right Wi-Fi system, airlines can save installation and maintenance costs on expensive in-flight entertainment libraries, they can earn money on partnerships, and they can provide a fantastic (and free) experience for the customer. This isn’t the right model for every airline on every route, but there’s no question it is extremely attractive. Going forward more and more travelers are likely to leave Wi-Fi on when they switch their phones into airplane mode.

Native Advertising is the new black, and increasingly it’s harder to differentiate ads from articles. This native advertising for Orange Is The New Black was featured in The New York Times.

According to this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 28% of American and United Kingdom news audiences who could recall seeing native advertising online said it made them feel less positive about the news organization carrying it.

What does that tell us about the effect of native advertising on trust in the host media? Some would say that, if over a quarter of those recalling it don’t like it, kill it.

Some say it pretty vehemently.

The Wall Street Journal editor in chief, Gerry Baker, likens native advertising to a Faustian pact: “If [advertisers] manipulate the digital or print operations of those news organizations, it makes the reader confused as to what is news and what is advertising, and the reader’s trust, the very reason that those advertisers want to advertise in those news organizations, goes away.”

Journalist Andrew Sullivan, founder of The Dish website, addressed Harvard Law School last year with a talk called “How Advertising Defeated Journalism.”  He was particularly critical of native advertising, which, he believes, endangers “the entire enterprise of writing.”

“Does it matter whether any of this stuff is actually related to the truth? Of course not. The truth is a peripheral matter,” Sullivan said. “After a while, in this circus of desperate attempts to get attention… there will be a moment in which the average reader will look at The New York Times and be so disgusted by what it’s become.”

However, before we close the case and deny publishers a source of revenue that is forecast to double in the next three years, even as other revenue streams decline, let’s consider the nature of trust in the media.

It isn’t just advertising that undermines trust in news media. Journalism is very good at undermining trust too. Journalism is like butchery; people devour the finished product but are squeamish about the process.

Unsettling them are practices like undercover journalism, stings and receiving stolen documents.  “Reporters should just report the facts,” is a phrase I often hear in focus groups – but those saying it give scant consideration to how facts become available, especially those that people in authority don’t want journalists to see.

People also become queasy when journalists rock the boat.  According to YouGov, 12 percent of Britons think investigative journalism has a negative effect on democracy.  Further, 22 percent thought it was bad for society that The Guardian and Washington Post reported on materials given to them by Edward Snowden. Polls from the Pew Research Center show even greater skepticism of the leak’s value among Americans.

If nearly a quarter of people feel uncomfortable with newspapers carrying Pulitzer Prize winning journalism like that (a similar figure to the percentage uncomfortable with native advertising in news media), and one in eight are queasy about all investigative journalism—is it reason enough to kill that too?

If trust in news brands is already delicate, it might be argued that it shouldn’t be stressed further by the sudden introduction of commercial content.  However, commercial content has existed, sanctioned by (and convenient to) editorial teams, since long before advertising went native.

This advertorial brought to you by Ford. Image from relevance.com.

I’m not exclusively talking about Advertorials, though they’ve been around for a while. (I remember, going back more than ten years, an advertising exec being sent to the news-floor of The News of the World to ask a journalist to help write an advertorial for a travel company. “I’ll help you if you can spell encyclopedia,” the exec was told. He couldn’t and the journalist didn’t write the copy.) I’m also talking about public relations.

For his 2009 book, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies commissioned research from the journalism department of Cardiff University to analyze every single domestic news story (2,207 pieces) in The Mail, Telegraph, Times, Guardian and Independent over two randomly chosen weeks. They found that “41% of them were initiated by PR and/or contained material supplied by PR, and a further 13% of stories carried clear signs of PR activity.” They pointed to misleading bylines where rewrites of PR copy were attributed to “staff reporter” or a named writer. Davies writes, “PR professionals generally aim specifically to make their own role in a story invisible, and journalists are happy to go along with that.”

PR derived copy isn’t a new thing. It increased through the eighties and nineties as newspapers shed journalists who then moved to PR agencies with their newspaper know-how and contacts.  The stories they succeed in getting into print aren’t advertorials or native advertising – because they aren’t even paid for.  In fact, much of PR is an annoyance to newspaper’s advertising sales teams, which are trying to get the same companies to pay to advertise.

What if editorial based on PR from commercial organizations were replaced by native advertising that was clearly flagged as advertising and was paid for by the company that commissioned it?  Publishers might lose a source of “clickbait,” but they would gain revenue and the readers would be more aware of the provenance of the content. What would that do to trust?

In his 2004 book My Trade, the broadcaster and ex-newspaper editor Andrew Marr offers advice on “how to read a newspaper.”  He advises that readers should be wary of a different kind of PR:  “Suspect research.  Hundreds of dodgy academic departments put out bogus or trivial pieces of research purely designed to impress busy newspaper people and win themselves some cheap publicity.”

He also advises readers to “Know what you’re buying—no reader can hope to get a picture of what is happening without first knowing who owns the paper.”  Another warning is to “register bias.  Be aware that reporters are now less embarrassed to let bias show,” and that awareness of such bias “may point to the source of the story.”

What this paints is a picture of quite complicated news pages that take some decoding before the reader has a clear understanding of what is going on.

If, as Baker suggested, native advertising can confuse audiences about the provenance of content, so can PR derived clickbait, columnist bias and proprietorial influence. Of these, native advertising is the easiest to clearly label in order to alert readers to the type of content it is (I can’t imagine the other three ever being labelled when they occur).  Similarly, of these, native advertising is the easiest to situate away from serious news pages (appearing instead on the fashion, wheels, travel and other lifestyle pages where audiences are used to reading about brands).

The Guardian Labs aim to maintain reader trust while rolling out native advertisements.

Theoretically it is also easy for a discerning media owner concerned about trust to turn some native advertising down.  In February, Anna Watkins, managing director of The Guardian’s native ad unit, told Marketing Magazine that her team has turned down prospective advertisers who pushed for further mentions of their brand in editorial content in addition to the normal sponsored content.

“Native advertising in its worst instances can imply hoodwinking the reader [into thinking] that a commercial message is independent editorial. That’s a short-term win, and our approach is about maintaining trust of the readers,” Marketing Magazine reported Watkins saying.

Some people will always be uncomfortable with news media carrying native advertising but so too will some people always be uncomfortable when news media holds the establishment to account. In both cases discomfort should be minimized via appropriate execution not absolute exclusion—but publishers should know they won’t please all the people all the time.

What the… This native ad featured on the Atlantic’s website clashed heavily with the news site’s non-sponsored content. Image from econsultancy.com

Publishers should also be honest with themselves about the amount of PR content in their pages that originates from commercial sources.  Taking it out or migrating it to paid-for native advertising that is clearly labelled would be good for both trust and revenues.

Meanwhile the majority of Reuters Institute respondents who could recall native advertising thought it neither increased nor decreased their trust in the news organization (around two thirds in both the US and UK). The figure is higher amongst certain demographics; according to Quartz, 86 percent of their target audience of executives don’t mind it.

It can even be liked. The UK’s Association of Online Publishers found that 59 percent of people who can recall native advertising find it interesting and informative.  There are plenty of ‘gold standard’ examples of native content that audiences found to be as engaging and shareable as editorial pieces on similar lifestyle subjects.

If it is appropriately executed, why shouldn’t it be?

What will Apple conquer next? ‘David Sandoz/flickr’, CC BY-SA

After much anticipation Apple has launched its new music streaming service, Apple Music. It’s the latest addition to Apple’s burgeoning product ecosystem which includes devices, software, online digital payment systems and digital media stores. The launch of Apple Music also poses a substantial threat for existing companies that deliver on-demand music streaming services – most notably Spotify, the subscription-based music streaming provider that has achieved an impressive customer base of 75m (with 20m paying for the service) since 2008.

Competition between innovative companies is nothing new, but in today’s hyper-connected digital world everything happens faster. The competitive advantage that a single product or service can give is much shorter-lived. The launch of a product or service on the market is immediately observed by millions of companies, globally. And the companies that have the right resources and technology to build on a good idea and possibly make more out of it are the ones that thrive. Enter Apple to the music streaming business.

Making more out of an idea

Having a good idea that creates value for customers is only the very beginning of a business’ journey – this is something colleagues and I reflected on recently in a paper published in the Academy of Management Review. Coming up with one way to make money out of it is a good start, but stopping there does not lead to success, certainly not in the longer term.

An idea is really a seed. A seed that can grow in many directions and generate other successful new ideas. Developing follow-up ideas can be the key to long-term success. Apple is an example of a company that does this extremely well.

In 2001 Apple developed the core idea of combining design, portability and connectivity. The first way it conceived to make money from this was the launch of a product for the music industry. The result was the iPod, a smoothly designed, ultra-portable device that enabled connection with other devices and access to content. The iPod was a huge success, but Apple did not stop there.

Building on the same basic concept and combining new telecommunication and computing functions it introduced the iPhone and the iPad. Today, continuing along the same trajectory the company is expanding into wearable technology with the recently-launched Apple Watch, and now into music streaming with Apple Music. Electric car systems are the next objective. Each of these products is – in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s own words – “a very key branch of the tree,” originating from the same seed that led to the iPod in 2001.

Tim Cook waves to the audience after his keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2014 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, USA, 02 June 2014. EPA/JOHN G. MABANGLO

Generating more

In our article we call this a “generative” strategy. Successful companies think about what else could be done with the same basic concept. They apply it to other contexts, develop complementary products to enhance their success and target new customer bases.

Uber is another example of this. It is building on the core idea at the basis of its car sharing service and is entering logistics with Ubercargo (a moving service) and Uberrush (a package delivery service).

Being generative makes sense for a variety of reasons. First, not all early applications of a given idea are successful. In its path to success Apple launched products that did not work, such as the tablet Newton and iTunes Ping.

Developing a portfolio of variations on the same idea makes a company less dependent on the success of each one of them. For instance, maximizing the profitability of its music streaming service is less crucial for Apple than it is for Spotify because Apple Music is only one of many services the company provides.

Developing a system of interconnected products and services also has the benefit of locking customers into them, which competitors that focus on one idea will struggle to replicate. So developing a customer base for its new music service is going to be much easier for Apple than it has been for Spotify because Apple benefits from the millions of users (and registered credit cards) already tied to its iTunes accounts.

Exploiting potential

Being generative does not necessarily mean pushing multiple ideas. Rather, it means exploiting the full potential of each idea. Coming up with a large number of varying inventions is more likely to be detrimental for a firm, spreading its attention too thinly. Xerox Parc in the 1970s, for example, generated an incredible number of new ideas but didn’t succeed in exploiting their full potential. Some similar ideas did find commercial success though—such as the first Macintosh computer.

In our research, we emphasize that organizational choices that foster creativity but also create pressure to deliver outcomes are an important means for exploiting existing ideas in new, profitable ways. These can include things like companies having challenging goals on invention and time sensitive creative processes that create a sense of urgency and provide rhythm to the inventive process – think Apple’s annual developer conference as a key deadline for the launch of new products. Developing a knowledge base that draws on a diverse range of experiences can also contribute to this goal.

Even after a successful invention, failing to recognize a product or service’s full potential might lead someone else to do it. If a company does not consciously try to further develop its ideas in all the feasible directions, it might end up leaving a lot of money on the table. And Apple is a company that is well-endowed to swoop in and clean it up.

A version of this article previously appeared on theconversation.com.