Author: rssmasher

Given all the constant late-night POTUS tweet storms and the unstoppable #metoo movement, this hasn’t been the easiest year for a company to try to break through the noise and try to get noticed in a big way.

There have, however, been a few incredible exceptions. Obviously, everybody knows about the unorthodox launch of Apple’s iPhone X (including the insane semi-accidental animoje karaoke videos gone viral). State Street’s awesome traffic-stopping Fearless Girl statue was clearly huge, creating returns for the bank worth $7.4m (despite the fact that the brand ended up with egg on its face some months later). And everybody loved Tesla’s surprise launch of the record-breaking Roadster after the grand finale of the Tesla Semi launch.

“The ingredients of a good stunt are that it fits with what is happening in the culture today,” Richard Laermer of RLM PR explained. “It has to fit the times. It can’t be something so obscure that no one will get it. It has to really hit people where they live. And most important, a good stunt is something people will tell others about without rolling their eyes.”

Here are a few other bold PR stunts in 2017 that you might have missed but that drew millions of eyeballs and captured our collective imagination.

The Jumping Robot video (Boston Dynamics)

Who doesn’t love a jumping, backflipping robot that’s gone viral on YouTube? We love Boston Dynamic’s jumping robot, posted on November 16, 2017. It’s already racked up a whopping 12m views. The robot is positioning the ex-Google brand as the go-to B2B brand for delivering humanoids that can walk (and scare the living hell out of you).

What are 12m views on YouTube worth to your investors and to your brand?

The Gyroscopic Transportation of the Future video

Semendov Dahir Kurmanbievich launched the Futuristic Gyroscopic Transportation and captured our imagination on social media for at least 48 hours. This company racked up 5.4m views on YouTube in just a few days to show the futurist’s concept for a transportation vehicle that can pass above traffic.

“The key to standing out is showing what your impact can be in context – whether that context be your competitors, your industry or other relevant companies,” said Nitzan Tamara, vice president, marketing at market intelligence company SimilarWeb. “The lack of context limits your ability to show what your growth and impact really means. If you want to get noticed and make an impact, show the full picture you operate within.”

Gusto – “The Cross Country Roadtrip”

While it’s way too easy in Silicon Valley to live in your own Northern California hot tub bubble, you’re never going to connect with the rest of the world unless you get on the road and shake hands with the heartland on a ‘listening tour.’ While other tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have made promotional tours or roadshows to middle America, in April Gusto chief executive and co-founder Josh Reeves drove a Winnebago from San Francisco to Jacksonville, stopping at 11 cities along the way (more than 3,000 miles).

The trip received local coverage in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Alabama and increased its web traffic by 30%. The business raised $161.1m in funding, backed by investors including Instagram, Stripe, Yelp, Dropbox, and Eventbrite, and is now valued at over $1bn.

Cancun.com – “Seeking a Cancun Experience Officer”

The company set out to find the right candidate to spread the Cancun love and drive traffic to the newly-relaunched Cancun.com. The company behind the stunt (though they tell me it’s more than just a stunt) is TravelPass Group, a travel technology company based in Lehi, Utah that is part owner of Cancun.com.

The posted chief experience officer, or CEO, position pays $10,000 a month for the candidate to live and experience Cancun for 6-months expense free. The CEO will be expected to create content based on their experiences that will be used on Cancun.com. TravelPass and BestDay launched the job search in early November, resulting in more than 350 articles and over 100 broadcast segments, plus 4,000 applications and counting. To apply you have to make a one-minute video.

The best part is the job requirements:

• Sleeping in luxurious beds overlooking the most pristine beaches
• Scaling 3,000-year-old pyramids followed by a swim with a 40,000-pound whale shark
• Sipping an ice-cold beverage before teeing off 200 yards down an ocean fairway
• Mingling with locals and tourists at your VIP table in the hottest clubs
• Coordinating charitable projects with local organizations to support education, health and well-being
• Having the most enviable job on the planet

Interested? There’s still time to apply. Join the more than 4,500 applicants (and counting) from more than 100 countries who have already done so.

Winners will be announced in January.

Screenshop

I love how @screenshopit lets you find the exact designer looks you see people wearing online, plus suggests similar items at all price points! #ScreenShop_Ambassador https://t.co/TXZ23agVoT pic.twitter.com/nA8JBDVbU5

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) November 7, 2017

Perhaps the best stunt of all is getting one of the biggest brand influencers of all time, Kim Kardashian, to become an early adopter and advisor of your new mobile app. The New York-based app is known as the Shazam for clothing.

“If you don’t have Kim Kardashian’s digits at your fingertips, thanks to the rise of user friendly platforms like FameBit and Tribe, influencer marketing strategy is more easily implementable than ever before,” said Nate Masteron, a marketing expert at Maple Holistics.

Bitcoin (Unnamed)

It wouldn’t be a 2017 tech story unless there was a mention of Bitcoin. Sources tell me there is a Bitcoin stunt in the works as we speak. A crypto-credit-card company is branding a physical token with its logo on it and going down to Wall Street with an army of Task Rabbits to hand them out to Wall Street executives at lunchtime.

According to the PR agency I spoke to, “Wall Street will hate this so much because they have a strong distaste for ICOs.”

The agency will be filming their reaction for a video that is expected to get a huge amount of media pickup. I guess we’ll see, and no, this isn’t part of a PR stunt.

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Americans increasingly relied on credit cards to make payments in 2016, and made more of those payments remotely, according to new data the Federal Reserve.
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Americans increasingly relied on credit cards to make payments in 2016, and made more of those payments remotely, according to new data the Federal Reserve.
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Schmidt will stay on the board as an adviser.

Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt is stepping down from his role as executive chairman of the company, according to a press release published Thursday.

Schmidt was Google’s CEO for a decade, stepping away in 2011, and has been chairman of Google, now Alphabet, since 2001. He helped oversee Google’s transition into Alphabet and will remain on the company’s board, but in a “technical advisor” role focused on science and tech projects. The key change is he’ll be stepping away from his day-to-day work leading Alphabet’s board.

The company says it expects to “appoint a non-executive chairman,” presumably sometime next year.

Schmidt had a long career as a software executive before becoming Google’s CEO in 2001. He helped turn the company from what was effectively a side project by two grad students into a dominant online ad business. He was recently the subject of an article that detailed a personal relationship he had with a publicist hired by Google some years ago.

The 62-year-old executive is currently worth over $13 billion, and he has lately spent more time on his foundation, which is focused on environmental causes and energy technology.

“Since 2001, Eric has provided us with business and engineering expertise and a clear vision about the future of technology,” said Larry Page, Alphabet’s CEO and Google’s co-founder. “Continuing his 17 years of service to the company, he’ll now be helping us as a technical advisor on science and technology issues. I’m incredibly excited about the progress our companies are making, and about the strong leaders who are driving that innovation.”

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VP Stephenie Landry has been running Prime Now since its 2014 launch.

Stephenie Landry, an Amazon vice president who launched and runs the company’s Prime Now express delivery service, has taken on the oversight of two additional Amazon delivery businesses, Recode has learned.

Landry recently became the business leader for Amazon Fresh, the company’s oldest grocery delivery offering, as well as Amazon Restaurants, its restaurant-delivery service.

“If you look around this facility, you’re going to see a lot of everyday items — food and consumables,” Landry told Recode in a short interview at Amazon’s Prime Now delivery hub in New York City on Thursday morning. “Amazon Fresh sells the same types of products but a much greater variety. And so both of them have a lot of synergies and it makes sense to think about them jointly.”

At the same time, Landry appeared to throw cold water on the idea that this consolidation in leadership might signal Amazon’s plans to fold the Fresh business into Prime Now or vice versa — an idea that floated around grocery industry circles after Amazon recently scaled back its Amazon Fresh business in some markets.

“If you think about the physical world, there are lots of different ways that consumers shop for products,” she said, providing reasoning for running multiple, separate delivery businesses that include selections of groceries and food.

“And so I actually think that we’re going to have lots of different ways to get food to customers,” she added. “But behind the scenes it makes sense to develop as many efficiencies as possible.”

Landry joined Amazon in 2004 and was a founding team member of Amazon Fresh, which first launched in 2007. That service costs $14.99 a month on top of Prime’s $99 annual fee and offers a large selection of perishable and packaged foods for delivery within a day of ordering.

Landry later served as technical adviser — or “shadow” — to Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business.

Since overseeing its launch three years ago, Landry has led the expansion of the Prime Now service to more than 30 U.S. cities and more than 50 markets in total globally. Prime Now lets Prime members buy from a limited selection of goods from Amazon and local retailers and get orders delivered for free within two hours, or for $7.99 for one-hour delivery.

Ian Freed, the vice president previously responsible for the Amazon Restaurants business, left the company earlier this year. It’s not clear what Ben Hartman, the Amazon vice president who previously oversaw Amazon Fresh, is up to now.

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VP Stephenie Landry has been running Prime Now since its 2014 launch.

Stephenie Landry, an Amazon vice president who launched and runs the company’s Prime Now express delivery service, has taken on the oversight of two additional Amazon delivery businesses, Recode has learned.

Landry recently became the business leader for Amazon Fresh, the company’s oldest grocery delivery offering, as well as Amazon Restaurants, its restaurant-delivery service.

“If you look around this facility, you’re going to see a lot of everyday items — food and consumables,” Landry told Recode in a short interview at Amazon’s Prime Now delivery hub in New York City on Thursday morning. “Amazon Fresh sells the same types of products but a much greater variety. And so both of them have a lot of synergies and it makes sense to think about them jointly.”

At the same time, Landry appeared to throw cold water on the idea that this consolidation in leadership might signal Amazon’s plans to fold the Fresh business into Prime Now or vice versa — an idea that floated around grocery industry circles after Amazon recently scaled back its Amazon Fresh business in some markets.

“If you think about the physical world, there are lots of different ways that consumers shop for products,” she said, providing reasoning for running multiple, separate delivery businesses that include selections of groceries and food.

“And so I actually think that we’re going to have lots of different ways to get food to customers,” she added. “But behind the scenes it makes sense to develop as many efficiencies as possible.”

Landry joined Amazon in 2004 and was a founding team member of Amazon Fresh, which first launched in 2007. That service costs $14.99 a month on top of Prime’s $99 annual fee and offers a large selection of perishable and packaged foods for delivery within a day of ordering.

Landry later served as technical adviser — or “shadow” — to Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business.

Since overseeing its launch three years ago, Landry has led the expansion of the Prime Now service to more than 30 U.S. cities and more than 50 markets in total globally. Prime Now lets Prime members buy from a limited selection of goods from Amazon and local retailers and get orders delivered for free within two hours, or for $7.99 for one-hour delivery.

Ian Freed, the vice president previously responsible for the Amazon Restaurants business, left the company earlier this year. It’s not clear what Ben Hartman, the Amazon vice president who previously oversaw Amazon Fresh, is up to now.

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This article appears in the latest issue of Digiday magazine, a quarterly publication that is part of Digiday+. Members of Digiday+ get access to exclusive content, original research and member events throughout the year. Learn more here. 

David Pemsel, CEO of Guardian Media Group, is concerned about Facebook but bullish on the ability of philanthropic contributions to fund publishing. Below is our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed.

Your move to a more reader revenue-focused model has resulted in reader revenue overtaking advertising. What’s the future for that?
When we started this three-year plan, we recognized that advertising alone would not secure a sustainable business model. We looked at the binary decision of either putting up a paywall, which will inevitably impact reach, or going the advertising-only road and saw a third way in which we can still have reach but at the same time optimize reader loyalty globally and domestically.

Why not a paywall?
Well-intentioned people often tell me, “Just keep cutting costs, put up a paywall and the Guardian will be profitable.” But we have to remind people of the role the Guardian plays in the world. People are anxious about what the world is right now, and our unique ownership structure, which is totally independent and free of shareholders, means people trust our independence and want to support us to keep us as openly accessible as possible.

What are the cultural challenges in moving to more of a reader-revenue model?
We haven’t always legitimized genuine collaboration. There’s tension. When you’re trying to get to a sustainable outcome, a dynamic news agenda, with finite resources, you’re pivoting from an advertising-only to a reader-contributor strategy, there’s a lot of heat in the organization. You must deploy your most precious people in a strategic way, but give them autonomy to collaborate, debate and argue their way to an outcome.

What’s the opportunity in philanthropy?
There are some conventions derived from The New York Times that X percent of your regular readers are likely to become paying subscribers, and that’s your future business model. Over time, that will cap out. You’re then stuck with a finite number of paying subscribers. There are different groups of people who will subscribe digitally and others that contribute at an article level because they feel passionate about a subject. There is no ceiling on how far contributions can go.

What’s next for publishers’ relationship with Facebook and Google?
We have a close relationship with Google from [CEO] Sundar [Pichai] down. They recognize the role of quality news within their ecosystem. So we’ve collaborated a lot around video, VR funding, data analytics and engineering resources. It’s a valuable strategic relationship.

What about Facebook?
Facebook is a different picture. Our relationship with them is difficult because we’ve not found the strategic meeting point on which to collaborate. Eighteen months ago, they changed their algorithm, which showed their business model was derived on virality, not on the distribution of quality. We argue that quality, for societal reasons, as well as to derive ad revenue, should be part of their ecosystem. It’s not. We came out of Instant Articles because we didn’t want to provide our journalism in return for nothing. When you have algorithms that are fueling fake news and virality with no definition around what’s good or bad, how can the Guardian play a role within that ecosystem? The idea of what the Guardian does being starved of oxygen in those environments is not only damaging to our business model but damaging to everyone.

Should Google and Facebook be regulated?
Regulation ensures there isn’t negative impact from market dominance, which there is with those organizations, especially in advertising. But you can’t sound anti-platform or anti-digital or anti-Google or Facebook because it’s the future. News organizations have had this narrative of “it’s unfair, look what they’re doing.” But regulation needs to be used appropriately to ensure there is fairness.

You’ve described the digital ad model as broken. How would you describe it now?
The commoditization that’s come with everything being more machine-led has meant some clients have lost sense of how to build brand equity over time. There is nothing wrong with programmatic; it’s just the safeguards in that ecosystem need to be about total transparency. Some of those data points in media planning are completely opaque, and that still needs to be solved.

Who is responsible for addressing ad fraud?
There is a client at the top of this food chain. It’s their money. They can’t allow their money to be disseminated in places they don’t understand, so it’s beholden on clients being much clearer on where their money is deployed and for agencies to be more clear and transparent about where that money is going.

What’s a big trend you see in 2018?
Voice is increasingly on our radar. The translation of the written word into devices like Google Home or Alexa is starting to take off. What is the role of news organizations in a voice-activated search world with no interface? What’s the user experience? How do you get brand recognition? If you say, “Good morning, Alexa or Home,” how can you be reassured that the Guardian is the first thing that comes up in the news category? I love that challenge.

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It’s an “investment,” not a sale, for an important reason.

Fifty years after founding Rolling Stone, the iconic music and pop culture magazine, Jann Wenner is handing it over to new owners.

Penske Media, the publisher that owns trade publications like Variety and WWD, is buying a majority stake in Wenner’s Wenner Media, which in turn gives it control of Wenner’s 51 percent stake of Rolling Stone.

The deal puts Rolling Stone’s enterprise value — which includes the cash on Rolling Stone’s books — at more than $100 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction — which means that Penske put in something in the $50 million range to buy the magazine. That price surprised some people who had looked at the deal earlier in the year, and valued the stake in the $30 million to $40 million range.

That convoluted structure of the deal — Wenner’s team describes it as an “investment,” not a sale — is important for two reasons:

• BandLabs Technologies, the Singapore-based company that bought 49 percent of Rolling Stone last year, had a right of first refusal for any offer for the rest of the magazine, according to people familiar with the sale process. By structuring the transaction as an investment, this prevents BandLabs from buying the whole magazine.
• The deal also allows Jann Wenner and his son Gus, who has been steering the business of Rolling Stone for a few years, to call themselves equity owners in the family business. Jann Wenner will become editorial director of the property, and Gus will stay on as president.

As Recode reported last month, Penske Media owner Jay Penkse was one of three bidders circling the property: Irving Azoff, a longtime Wenner friend/frenemy, was also looking at it, backed with money from New York Knicks owner Charles Dolan. So was Bryan Goldberg, the CEO of Bustle, a digital publication aimed at millennial women, who also co-founded Bleacher Report, a site acquired by Time Warner’s Turner in 2012.

But it was never clear that Azoff and Dolan, who have no publishing experience, wanted to actually own and operate Rolling Stone magazine. And while Goldberg has now founded two digital startups, he doesn’t have any experience with print, which accounts for the majority of Rolling Stone’s business today.

But Penske’s portfolio, which is primarily tilted toward trade publications, does include print titles, like Variety. The stretch for him will be running an iconic brand: While Penske owns some consumer-facing properties, like Robb Report and BGR, this is by far the best-known title he will have owned.

Penske’s main task will be helping Rolling Stone create a business on the internet, which Jann Wenner proudly ignored for years. Today, digital is a tiny fraction of Rolling Stone’s revenue, though Gus Wenner says he has a plan to fix that.

Note that in Rolling Stone’s absence, no one has really created a dominant digital destination for music-related content. Perhaps that’s because the internet allows music fans to seek out whatever niche they like instead of coming to a general-interest destination. Perhaps that’s also because in a YouTube + Spotify age, there’s no reason to read about a band when you can hear and see them with a single push of a button.

In any case, it’s no longer Jann Wenner’s problem. But he’ll still be able to keep a piece — presumably a small one — of the property that allowed him to become a media star himself.

You can read about Wenner’s amazing life story via “Sticky Fingers,” a new semi-authorized biography by Joe Hagan. I talked to Hagan earlier this fall for the Recode Media podcast: You can read a transcript of that conversation here or listen on Apple Podcasts or below.

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It’s game over for the traditional customer journey.

Today’s consumer has fragmented the ancestral sales funnel by wandering freely across channels and devices in search of the best product or deal. The average consumer owns more than seven devices, using more than three each day, of which marketers typically only see one, according to the Data & Marketing Association’s 2017 Statistical Fact Book.

To put it a different way: The path to purchase has evolved from a two-dimensiona
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The discussion of net neutrality in the US telco landscape has become highly polemicized in recent years.

So much so that it’s now almost impossible to discuss the technical implications and limitations of net neutrality without touching on fundamentally thorny issues of political debate.

While it is easy to bring in wider discussions of basic rights or censorship it should be noted that the concept of net neutrality is primarily concerned with limiting or controlling how internet service providers (ISPs) can manage, monetize and develop their networks. Understandably, many operators in the media industry have been watching the debate in the US very closely.

One internet, many uses

As a society, we’re putting the internet, and the data we carry over it, to a huge variety of different uses. Countless articles online will tell you of the ‘proliferation of data’ due to the Internet of Things, 4K video, machine learning and many other bleeding-edge innovations. Internet traffic is rising at an annual rate of 26%.

As a result of this growth, ISPs around the world should be investing heavily in improving the infrastructure responsible for meeting this demand and delivering the next wave of technological innovation. Video content alone is forecast to be 82% of Internet traffic by 2021.

The requirements of a network capable of delivering an early bulletin board or email service is fundamentally different to one dedicated to delivering live video streams. The fact we can currently even consider doing this over the same internet is a testament to the highly effective architecture of the net and the collaborative, open work that continues to be done by organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

This is the result of incredibly innovative engineering and service delivery operating at global scale. But there’s no reason to believe that these requirements won’t continue to evolve in the future. The internet’s reliance on overcapacity to ensure a consistent quality of service, is likely to be unsustainable and expensive in the long run.

The opponents of net neutrality claim innovation is being stifled by the requirement that all service providers to deliver a “lowest common denominator” internet. They argue that ISPs need an incentive, and investment, to upgrade their network infrastructure and provide valuable differentiated services catered specifically for the needs of different providers

The myth of a neutral net

The truth is that net neutrality is something of a myth from a technical perspective. The internet is already a two-tier race for those who have the money.

Lots of industries move data around private networks without resorting to the public internet. They are willing to pay for quality, consistency or specialty because they use it to secure a competitive advantage. This is especially true for sectors such as financial services and digital media. Broadcasters historically avoided carrying anything over a somewhat unreliable public internet, instead investing in private networks to deliver their service. Telcos even created a triple play business out of exploiting their own networks to deliver that same experience to the consumer.

Today, their contemporary competitors, OTT providers such as Netflix, similarly concerned about offering a consistent, quality service to their customers are investing hugely in their internet infrastructure. Cloud computing to make their operations more efficient and both globally and locally scalable, paired with content distribution networks and ‘edge’ computing – placing computing resources closer to the end user – helps to improve bitrate, reduce latency and reduce buffering on streamed video content.

These internet ‘users’ have chosen to spend money on more powerful and scalable network capabilities. This allows media operators to work across geographically diverse platforms, get closer to their consumers worldwide and use network redundancy to overcome inevitable failures. These ‘improvements’ can be conveniently categorized as network management and don’t fall foul of net neutrality because they are theoretically available to anyone, if they can pay. That net neutrality then guarantees their hard won advantage through the last mile to the consumer has more than a whiff of hypocrisy about it! The position becomes more forgivable when it is considered that that last mile is often controlled by dominant competitors.

Nevertheless, these improvements provide a clear example of market forces at work to deliver an improved value proposition and that also make the Internet work better.

An unbundled internet

When considering the rationale for investment in the internet, it’s important to note a key distinction between the internet and other public utilities. Water and electricity are essential elements of public life, but they do not operate as engines of commerce and business in the same way as the internet. Whole swathes of the global economy, not least the media and entertainment industry, have been built on or completely disrupted by the internet.

The truth of the matter is that net neutrality is a sticking plaster over an incredibly and increasingly complex value chain. A differentiated internet, underpinned by an unbundled, transparent payment/supply structure would allow the right services to be offered to the right customers at the right prices.

This is what needs to be considered when deciding on a regulatory framework for the internet. Governments and regulators should focus on ensuring the internet remains foremost a competitive platform for the economy, protecting consumers and promoting innovation.

The risks are high. Get it wrong and innovation could be snuffed out, setting the internet back by decades. Get it right and the internet could go on to become mankind’s greatest achievement.

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