The number of American deaths at work from unintentional drug and alcohol overdoses jumped more than 30% in 2016, new government data shows, showing that the U.S. struggle with a deadly opioid epidemic is migrating to the workplace.
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Sequoia is raising a new fund that could top $6 billion, as pressure from SoftBank’s mega-fund increases on Silicon Valley VCs
Others in tech investing are also mulling how to counter the free-spending by the Japanese investment company
Call it the SoftBank Effect.
According to sources close to the situation, the high-profile venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is in the early of raising a third global growth fund that could range from $5 billion to $6 billion.
Sources said a numbers of other funds in Silicon Valley are also considering fundraises of this magnitude or even higher, prompted, in part, by the pressure to have larger pools of capital to deploy in the wake of SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund.
As Recode noted earlier this month, SoftBank Vision Fund is backed by tech giants including Apple, Qualcomm and Sharp, as well as by sovereign funds from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, making it the largest technology investment fund ever.
Leading rounds that include scratching out checks that start about $250 million (Slack) and head to $10 billion (Uber), its scale has reshaped Silicon Valley in 2017 — and, more to the point, irked the VC community.
“They have created a lot of tension between founders and their earlier investors, when they say take our giant wad of money or we will give it to your competition,” said one VC. “It’s made everyone else realize they need more capital, so that SoftBank is not the lead in every deal.”
That’s been one of the reasons for Sequoia’s giant raise, said sources, although the longer delay of a lot more startups in going public is another.
And Sequoia is definitely making an enormous leap from a previous $2 billion raise for its most recent global growth fund in 2015 that was disclosed in June
The Sequoia fundraising for the new global growth fund is in its exploratory discussions, said sources, so final numbers have not been determined. Its previous funds in this series have invested in companies like Airbnb, Stripe and Toutiao.
Lotame’s prep for GDPR highlights big changes in data management
As data management platform (DMP) Lotame gears up for compliance with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), some of the far-reaching changes are coming into focus.
First, there’s the matter of tracking consent by users across what General Counsel and VP of Global Privacy Tiffany Morris calls “the chain of custody.” This reaches from the time the user’s data is generated or collected at, say, a publisher’s website, through the various ways in which the data is use
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Podcast: For Salesforce CSO Jon Suarez-Davis, A Winding Career Path To The Cloud
AdExchanger |
Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jonathan Suarez-Davis will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18. In the wake of several big acquisitions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue. In this week’s episode we talk with its chief strategy officer, Jon Suarez-Davis, who joined the… Continue reading »
Equifax and beyond: How data breaches shaped 2017
With so much data being collected, stored and used, it was inevitable that breaches would be on the rise. The year 2017 saw more personally identifiable information (PII) exposed through malicious intent than ever than before.
Equifax and Yahoo led in the headlines, but there were many other notable breaches. As we look back, let’s see what we can learn from them.
Equifax makes all the headlines
Attackers hit more than 145 million Equifax customers this September. They stole names,
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Why Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir may be the biggest stars of the Winter Olympics
The skaters-turned-commentators say their sport is missing the sort of stars it had in the ’90s.
In the 1990s, U.S. Olympic figure skaters were household names. But today, you’d probably be more likely to know the names of the skating commentators, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir.
“We’re very proud to educate people in a different way than maybe they have over the last many moons,” Weir said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “Tara and I do things more conversationally. We’re very direct with our audience, and it’s a huge audience for us to be carrying figure skating.”
Figure skating is, in Weir’s words, “the diamond in the tiara of the Winter Olympics.” Talking with Kafka and Weir, Lipinski said part of their goal next year will be reminding viewers why that is — despite the shortage of household names.
“There really hasn’t been a name that is in the media on a daily basis and that’s what skating in the ’90s was,” Lipinski said. “Everyone knew, after the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan incident — Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan — everyone knew these names; they were household names because they were winning, they were on TV.”
“The perception of skating was different,” she added. “It had a little more glitz and glamor, it appealed to all ages. Whereas now, we haven’t really had that star. If we do, and that star starts popping up in pop culture moments, that would change the sport, in my opinion. You never know when that could happen.”
You can listen to Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On the new podcast, Weir said that when he competed in the Olympic Games in 2006 and 2010, he found himself having to compete with a completely different type of celebrity than his predecessors. And the older generation of people who coach and judge the skaters don’t always appreciate how interesting and different today’s personalities can be.
“I understood, in the twilight years of my skating, who I was and what I was going to be able to do at the Olympic Games,” Weir said. “… When I was going to my second Olympic Games, it was Gaga and it was Kardashians — it wasn’t as wholesome as maybe the ’90s would have been. You have to be, in some ways, competitive in an entertainment format with that sort of person.”
He and Lipinski also reflected on how the internet is changing the sport: Figure skating superfans can follow their favorite skaters year-round, thanks to the proliferation of livestreaming options online. But during their first turn in the booth, at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, the commentators took advantage of social media.
“Our main audience really isn’t that [superfans], and I think we established that in Sochi,” Lipinski said. “We brought in a lot of people that never watch figure skating at all. We really don’t know, [but] we go off of our Instagram and our Twitter.”
“I think back to my time when I was skating: I was 15 and there was no such thing as Instagram,” she added. “Nowadays, it can only be helpful that these athletes can engage with fans and become visible on a different platform. For Johnny and I, it was a huge blessing in Sochi … we made a joint Instagram account just because we thought it would be fun, and I remember one morning knocking on Johnny’s door and saying, ‘We had 11 followers last night, now we have 20,000 more followers!’”
If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:
- Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers in tech and media every Monday. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode, answers all of the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcastor wherever you listen to podcasts.
- And finally, Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, such as the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Peter. Tune in next Thursday for another episode of Recode Media!
NFL Ad Revenue Is Up, and Makegoods Are Down, During This Season’s First 3 Months
NFL ratings are down this season, but in-game ad revenue continues to grow year-over-year this season, according to new data from Standard Media Index. This season’s NFL revenue, from September to the end of November, is up 2 percent among all networks. There was one additional nationally aired linear TV game than in the same…
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Practical advice for planning a CRM marketing stack upgrade
The revolution in customer relationship marketing (CRM) continues with an exponential increase in the points of data available to leverage for marketing. Data is more robust, measurement tools are better, and channel capabilities are improving — not only on their own, but also in their ability to orchestrate marketing across channels. All of this is great for the industry, and it is driving investment in new marketing stacks.
When I talk about a marketing stack here, I don’t mean that
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Will Brands Be Ready For Monetization In 2018?
AdExchanger |
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Trey Stephens, director of audience monetization at Acxiom. As 2017 comes to a close, it’s a great time for brands to assess ways to improve marketing strategy and better capitalize… Continue reading »
How Instagram’s new features will impact organic reach
Last week, Instagram added two features that will alter the content in users’ feeds: The ability to follow hashtags will surface hashtag-focused posts, and a “Recommended for you” section will show posts friends have liked.
When it comes to organic reach on the platform, both changes have favorable and unfortunate implications for brands, publishers and influencers. Here’s a rundown of them:
Clutter will increase
Both changes will add increased clutter to Instagram feeds, resulting in more content users must scroll through to reach all organic content. Ever since 2016, when Instagram switched from a chronological algorithm to one that tailors posts for each specific user, brands have to pay to be seen. Instagram said the new changes will not impact where paid ads will appear within user feeds, so posts that are not backed by a robust paid Instagram strategy are likely to be further buried.
The new hashtag-related posts will follow the platform’s same algorithm. If a user follows a certain hashtag, say “#photography,” Instagram will determine which posts to show the user in their feed based on the recency and quality of the posts. There is no limit on how many hashtag-related posts appear in a user’s feed, said an Instagram spokesperson.
Meanwhile, the new “Recommended for you” section, which will include three to five posts, will appear after a user has viewed all of their new posts. Consequently, users who open and close the app more often will see the “Recommended for you” section more frequently than those that do not.
More discoverability
Both updates could improve discoverability on the platform in general, even as organic posts fall to the bottom of feeds. Take the “Recommended for you” feature.
“If Instagram follows Facebook,” said Samantha Skey, president and chief revenue officer at SheKnows Media, “I imagine we’ll see plenty of sponsored posts, which could make for strong advertising as it captures a trusted referral.” For the time being, Instagram said it has no plans to place sponsored posts in the “Recommended for you” section.
With the new ability to follow hashtags, marketers can capitalize on trending conversations. For instance, on Dec. 15, Target used #StarWars in a post to appear next to other posts that reference the opening of “The Last Jedi” movie. Now, if a user follows #StarWars, they might see Target’s post in his or her feed.
“For years, brands that had a right to be seen alongside certain hashtag-related content were buried by the algorithm,” said Matt Lang, senior digital strategist at digital agency Rain. “But now, they’ll have a chance to surface.”
Letting users follow hashtags could also boost influencers, said Kamiu Lee, vp of business and development strategy at influencer platform Activate by Bloglovin’.
Hashtags could encourage publishers to create communities related to their own brands and hashtags that audiences will want to follow, said Amy Ramirez, Instagram manager at travel publisher Culture Trip.
Hashtag abuse
Marketers don’t need big follower counts or social media budgets to do so, so it’s likely that they will add more trending hashtags to their posts as well as to their Instagram Stories, which could lead to hashtag abuse.
“The real challenge on all of us [is] determining which hashtags are actually relevant and can add value to conversations,” said Amanda Peters, group strategy director at Wunderman.
Allie Arends, social media engagement supervisor at Space150, said brands and influencers will have to start strategizing about their organic Instagram content almost like they would an SEO strategy. “The image, copy and especially hashtag usages should serve a specific strategic purpose to maximize organic reach,” she said.
Still, there’s no guarantee brands’ and influencers’ hashtagged posts will appear in users’ feeds. Lang said advertisers shouldn’t be surprised if Instagram decides to enact another algorithm that prioritizes which posts get featured for a specific hashtag that is being followed.
Either way, advertisers look forward to seeing which hashtags users end up following. Scott Lindenbaum, evp and director of digital strategy at Deutsch, said this kind of personal interest data could help make ads more relevant.