Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

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!

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https://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/platforms-need-follow-triopolys-playbook-give-data-day-job/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjeFptUTFPRFV5TW1NeSIsInQiOiJyd1wvNUNHaTV1cEI5QmM1dVwveGE3NFpOcDhSV1ZcL1pJa0tYNGtLWkFBdVwvSE51M1ErNGFIYXlXaFBSZWZkZkhkemUwNlhHY2JJMmNTbW5vdWVGSU1yY1Q3Z3F1NmhnbkN1SUpBYlJRRGlIOW45b2NvZ0d3NEI2N0dQRHZJK1R3eSsifQ%3D%3D

As we enter the era of mass personalisation, tempered by strict data protection rules, we at iCrossing gaze into our crystal ball to reveal eight predictions for digital advertising in 2018. 

1. The Duopoly will finally be breached

Google and Facebook have ruled the digital advertising roost for years, hoovering up nearly all the growth this year. After numerous failed attempts by pure plays to breach the duopoly, Amazon will emerge in 2018 as the realistic challenger. When it comes to searching for products, Amazon has no equal – and over 70% of us search Amazon at some point during a purchase journey.

It’s the rich consumer behaviour data that powers advanced targeting through Amazon’s digital signal processing (DSP) onto unique ad placement that will attract share of spend – plus, of course, the invaluable sales and data reporting so craved by the advertisers.

Expect 2018 to be the first of several big years for Amazon, as the duopoly becomes an oligopoly for the next decade.

2. Watch out for a high profile bust after a short GDPR honeymoon

Friday 25 May 2018 will be a date etched in the history of digital advertising. When the day dawns, the General Data Protection Review (GDPR) legislation becomes law across Europe – and the UK has opted in. That means we have to gain specific, unambiguous consent to use personal data – including cookies, IP addresses, device IDs and so on. It all becomes personal data.

And while the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook are sitting quite pretty with tens of millions of registered users, the opposite is true for the swathes of ad tech businesses most people have never heard of. I expect a short regulatory honeymoon period from the Information Commissioner’s Office, before investigations begin in earnest. We could see a high profile bust in the autumn.

3. Could the Government finally announce legislation over harmful and illegal content?

This year has been an annus horribilis for brand safety exposures, from Jihadi websites, to fake news and even child abuse. So it’s no wonder marketers cite brand safety as their number one concern. This month the Prime Minister’s independent watchdog, The Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) recommended that social media sites be recast as publishers to stop them describing themselves as platforms with limited control over the millions of messages and videos that they host.

This would have huge implications, and any future legislation could lead to fines or prosecution for not complying with new rules surrounding control of content and take-down. Watch this space over the next two years.

4. Voice search reaches early majority

Voice search has already reached 20% of all queries. That’s critical mass in my business book, so we must be heading for the early majority on the old bell curve. With Google, Siri, Alexa and Cortana there’s a whole gang of virtual assistants taking our commands, and getting smarter in the process.

This will have a positive impact on our SEO strategies in 2018, as we optimise and generate content to respond to longer (and sometimes surprising) consumer voice queries. For those who do it well, this should become a seamless element of the modern brand experience 

5. Chatbots take over the sales and service front line

Businesses successfully implementing chatbots to help answer consumers’ questions in real time have realised great efficiencies in customer service and sales conversion. And it turns out customers love the convenience of chatting with a virtual assistant – just be sure yours is an intelligent one who knows when to hand over to a real human being if the questions get harder.

Your customers expect excellent, fast service and in 2018 we’re going to witness the emergence of some seriously talented virtual helpers.

6. AI rules ‘mass personalisation’ targeting revolution.

Once upon a time, demographic targeting was the height of sophistication. Now we’re entering the era of advanced audience insights. Not just time and place, but known consumer likes and dislikes, search, social and purchase history, even preferred formats.

It’s that ‘big data’ we kept talking about five years ago that can now be analysed in nanoseconds with artificial intelligence to customise messages in the moment. Welcome to the era of mass personalisation.

7. Wholesale shift of programmatic to private marketplace.

Programmatic ad trading is highly advanced in the UK, and in 2018 we expect a whopping 80% of display spend to pass through the trading desks. In the early days, nearly all the programmatic spend was on open exchanges, but as the market matured and the big publishers started to take part we saw growth in the Private Marketplace (PMP) offering premium inventory.

While the open exchanges gave us access to millions of consumers on thousands of sites at low CPMs, the brand safety and fraud risks were higher. Witness then the inexorable rise of the PMP which should cater for around 75% of programmatic spend in 2018, with growth formats in video, native and high impact display. Again – it’s all about the brand experience.

8. Static banners die off as video becomes all-pervasive.

The first ever online ad was a banner for AT&T on www.hotwired.com back in 1994, and for almost 20 years the majority of digital display spend went on banners, skyscrapers and things called ‘mid-page units’. These formats have not only been in decline for the last few years, but the far more dynamic and engaging video, social, native and paid content ads are due to account for three quarters of online display spend. All very much better for the consumer experience, and improved brand engagement for the marketer. Which also means…

A bonus prediction… CPMs will go back up (at last).

OK – I’m sticking my neck out for the publishers here. After years of decline, following not just the recession, but a veritable tsunami of cheap content available on the exchanges – which led to ad blocking, ad fraud and brand safety issues – we took a long look at what actually worked and what the consumer might actually accept.

So, given the above predictions for the continuing growth of video, content and native, traded on private marketplaces; and the associated declines for static display formats and spend on open exchanges, the outlook for CPMs is…. pretty encouraging.

So there we are. As always, the New Year is full of exciting and innovative opportunities, but it’s also tinged with tough challenges as the digital ad industry continues to mature and take the lion’s share of media budgets. We at iCrossing are all over this stuff, but, like everyone else at this time of year, we’ll press pause for a few days before whacking the fast forward button in 2018.

Guy Phillipson is the chairman at iCrossing UK and the former chief executive officer at the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.

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2017 is the third-busiest year for companies reaching $1 billion valuation.

The unicorn club gets new members by the week. This year alone, 57 startups around the world attained unicorn status with a valuation of $1 billion or more, according to data from venture capital tracker PitchBook.

Seven companies that were once considered unicorns have seen their valuation dip below $1 billion so far this year, either through down rounds or down exits. Last year there were only three down rounds or exits. The Honest Company and Prosper both saw their valuation shrink below $1 billion in subsequent funding rounds, according to PitchBook. Down exits this year included Souq.com, which was acquired by Amazon for $650 million, and Shazam, which Apple purchased for $400 million.

Overall 2017 wasn’t the biggest year for unicorns — that award goes to 2015, which boasted 81 new unicorns — but it certainly has been busy.

Social platform Reddit, bitcoin marketplace Coinbase and ride-hail company Careem are among the notable entrants this year. Synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks is the latest inductee into the group, thanks to a $275 million funding round last week.

Altogether there are now a total of 227 active unicorns, according to PitchBook.

Here’s a look at the companies that have attained unicorn status this year, by their valuation and how much venture capital they’ve raised. Revenue data is available from the few private companies that made that information public. Click on a company to see its industry category.

A few notable stats from this year’s unicorns:

• Content recommendation platform Toutiao had the highest valuation, VC raised and revenue of all the unicorns this year.
• Four startups — Outcome Health, SenseTime, VIPKid and Mobike — had at least one female founder.
• About half of this year’s startups focus primarily on information technology and software.

The PitchBook data included goes through Dec. 14.

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Lotame Ignite APAC Conference 2017: The Current State of Data in Video Advertising Across Asia, brought to you by Lotame and SpotX.
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Amazon is gearing up to be the next big player in search for 2018, predict industry experts

“We are all kind of pretending to know what we’re doing with Amazon, but no one has really become an expert yet. I’ve tried Alexa. It’s interesting and it’s there in your house listening. That’s an amazing experience,” according to Greenlight Digital director of paid media, Hannah Kimuyu.

“Earlier this year, I was at the annual Independent agency summit in New York and Google stood up and said that they’re worried about Amazon. That’s the first time they’ve ever said they’re concerned about anyone.”

Many believe that voice search will be making leaps in the new year, MediaCom senior executive officer, Edward Cowel does not dispute this: “2018 isn’t going to be the year for voice search, that will be further down the line. The big trend for next year is the search industry understanding their audiences more and from an organic search perspective, that will feed into what Google does around artificial intelligence, personalisation and results.

“It also will affect us from a local search perspective with things becoming increasingly localised and personalised. And on the paid search side as well. From what I saw as a judge of The Drum Search Awards, was people really using audience data in very smart ways, not just to target key phrases but to really understand who they are targeting.”

The Drum Search Awards showcases data-driven work driving performance across screens from agencies, search engines, technology providers and all other outfits active in the space. The awards are open to entries for 2018, with the deadline fast approaching on Friday February 2.

Jessica Leader, client partner at Propellernet, the winner of the Grand Prix and best use of content awards, said: “Winning a Drum award has been an incredible accolade for us at Propellernet, and winning the Grand Prix even better! We’re incredibly proud. It’s helped to showcase our agency’s talent, insight-led creative approach and our impactful results.

“It has been a fantastic confirmation for existing clients, a great endorsement for new prospects, but most importantly, motivated and rewarded our incredible team.”

Founder of VCCP Media and chairman of the 2017 judging panel, Paul Mead,  believes that the full potential of search is yet to be realised. He said: “Search is a point of connection between all of a brands activities and one of the most effective ways to measure the health of a business. It is therefore vital that we provide a platform to promote this and to celebrate the amazing thinking and creativity of the talent in the UK search industry.”

The Search Awards return for 2018 to recognise and reward the very best in the industry across both SEO and PPC. These awards create collaboration across the whole industry bringing together search engines, agencies, technology providers and all other businesses and brands that contribute to the search industry.

What categories will you enter? There is a wide variety of search areas you can choose, including: performance agency of the year, most innovative search campaign, best use of connected devices, biddable team of the year, organic team of the year and many more. 

To enter, submit your application before Friday February 2.

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Plus, Facebook is expanding facial recognition across its products, Stitch Fix releases its first earnings report since going public, and the best seats on Broadway.

Republicans in the House and Senate approved a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax plan. Trump is expected to sign it within days. Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The tax bill soaks some … rich Americans — but it does not soak the richest.” [The New York Times]

Facebook knows when someone uploads your picture to Facebook — now it will alert you about the photo, even if you aren’t tagged in it.The company is improving privacy settings and expanding its use of facial-recognition technology “to prevent people from impersonating other people” on the service. Users will now be asked to grant Facebook permission to use facial recognition broadly across its products. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Stitch Fix released its first-ever earnings report, and its shares fell by 12 percent. The online personal styling service is spending more on advertising and attracting new customers that want more less-expensive clothing, so CEO Katrina Lake said the company will increase lower-price-point sales this year. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

Bitcoin prices are moving around a lot. Because bitcoin. Something called Bitcoin Cash is way up. Plain old bitcoin fell dramatically and is climbing back up again.

Ziff Davis executives addressed their new employees at Mashable, who promptly leaked the comments to the press. Reasonable advice from Ziff Davis COO Steve Horowitz to the company, which he bought at a fire sale price: “You guys are a Coke brand. Never forget that. Let’s make sure that we’re doing everything we can to stay at that level and not get down into Tab village.” [David Uberti / Splinter]

Top stories from Recode

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just getting started, says Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn. An investor in the crypto trading platform Coinbase, Quinn says “the toothpaste is out of the tube,” on the latest episode of Recode Decode.

This is cool

The best seats on Broadway.

The Procter & Gamble toilet paper brand Charmin has opened a pop-up space near Times Square in New York City to offer 14 clean and free public bathrooms through Christmas Eve. Of course, this is a marketing stunt called an “out-of-home (OOH) activation,” a way to create a more personal touch with audiences as digital channels are dominating marketing strategies.

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Identity is at the heart of knowing your customer. If you don’t get identity right, everything else will be wrong. How are organizations able to manage their CRM databases with consumer data that is constantly changing? This changing data impacts your company’s ability to efficiently manage both inbound and outbound communications and the struggle between customer experience and costs. Current and accurate identity data can help you increase IVR containment and reduce costs for inbound calls, while also reducing the risk of lawsuits and penalties from TCPA violations for outbound dials. Listen to this informative webinar to learn how to: • Ensure that your customer profiles are up to date • Clean, verify and extend your customer records for the most current, accurate, and actionable identity data • Ensure outbound communications are efficient and compliant with current TCPA regulations • Improve IVR containment rates by automatically identifying more inbound callers • Implement best practices by reviewing industry case studies of organizations that are successful in managing proactive and up-to-date identity data across the enterprise.

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Corporate Website: https://www.home.neustar

Risk Solutions Website: https://www.risk.neustar
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The Liverpool-based creators of national mental health database The Hub of Hope  have launched a poster campaign to raise awareness of the vital resource in the lead-up to Christmas 2017, six months on from its launch.

Mashbo, creative designers and trustees of Chasing the Stigma (CTS) – the charity behind the web-based app – have funded the fly poster campaign, which will promote the Hub of Hope in Liverpool city centre using funds ordinarily reserved for client Christmas cards and gifts.

The 50 posters carry details on how to access support via the resource, alongside the striking yet simple message that ‘the doors are open’ to thousands of grassroots and national organisations 24/7 throughout the Christmas period.

The decision to launch the campaign was made based on research from multiple sources including Rethink Mental Health, which revealed that the pressure to be cheerful and splash out on presents can cause mental strain, exacerbating symptoms such as panic attacks, depression, low moods, sleeping problems and cause thoughts of self-harm and suicide.

Since its launch in July 2017 the web-based app, which brings help and support together for all mental health issues in one place, has received almost 10,000 unique visits from 751 different cities and towns across 59 countries.

The digital platform has been designed to revolutionise the way people seek help for their mental health difficulties by using the device’s location to discover the nearest services to its user, as well as national organisations. The campaign reiterates the message from CTS Founder and Liverpool comedian, Jake Mills that “there is always hope”.

Jake said: “Christmas can be an extremely difficult time, especially for those who are affected by mental health issues.

“Since its launch in July we have seen an amazing response to the Hub of Hope and the Christmas we want to ensure that people know there is a place they can go to easily find access to free and immediate help available.”

The launch of the poster campaign also comes in the same week of the first anniversary of CTS becoming a limited charity.

Gavin Sherratt, managing director of Mashbo, said: “The initial response to the Hub of Hope has been incredible and we are proud to be lending even further support to this fantastic resource. As a business we are focused on using technology for good and the Hub of Hope has been a fantastic way for our team to use its skills to really help people, especially at this difficult time of year.”

The Hub of Hope database, which the first of its kind in the UK, has been publicly commended by mental health charities such as the Samaritans and public figures including Jeremy Corbyn and Davina McCall.

The web app is free to use and also free for organisations to register.

 

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Germany’s top antitrust enforcer opened a new front against big tech firms when it said the way Facebook harvests user data constitutes an abuse of dominance.
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