Marketing leaders allocate more to analytics as demand for data-driven insights increases
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Data Can Be a Marketer’s Dream—or a Persistent Nightmare [Infographic]
Too many B2B marketers are sleeping on the job when it comes to maintaining the consistency and quality of their data.
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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 »
It’s moving slowly, but Pinterest and other tech companies are becoming less white and less male
Pinterest released its latest diversity report on Tuesday.
Slowly but surely, Pinterest is getting more diverse.
The company released its annual workforce diversity report on Tuesday, and claims that underrepresented minorities now make up 9 percent of its workforce, up from just 7 percent in 2016. Pinterest is also hiring more female employees: Women account for 45 percent of Pinterest’s workforce, up from 44 percent last year, according to this latest report.
The data represents advances compared to 2016 government data published earlier this year. And while the changes from year to year may seem small, the company is chipping away at those diversity proportions.
Here’s how Pinterest’s workforce has changed since 2014:
Women make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s workforce than they did three years ago, and they also claim more technical jobs inside the company, roles that have traditionally been dominated by men. Women still account for 19 percent of Pinterest’s leadership positions, the same percentage the company had in 2014, but up slightly over the past two years.
Underrepresented minorities — people who are black, LatinX or Native American — also make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s overall workforce. Minority employees make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s technical and leadership groups than they did three years ago.
Here’s how Pinterest’s diversity report compares to similar reports from other tech companies. Silicon Valley has been making a push over the past few years to diversify the tech industry for a number of reasons, one of which is to bring in employees with a more diverse range of experiences and ideas. As you can see, Pinterest has a higher percentage of female employees than most other Silicon Valley giants.
Candice Morgan, Pinterest’s head of Inclusion & Diversity, says the company has instituted a number of programs in order to increase diversity, including Pinterest’s own version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for top jobs like head coach. Pinterest’s version of the rule requires the company to interview at least one qualified female and underrepresented minority for each senior-level opening.
Pinterest also has an apprenticeship program to encourage candidates from nontraditional tech backgrounds to apply, and requires employees to complete an unconscious-bias training course in their first week on the job.
The MarTech Minute: Digimind’s Social Wall, Heap’s customer insight platform and more
This week we are seeing some innovative product launches, powerful collaborations and lots of career moves.
MarTech in Motion
Digimind announces its Social Wall
The social listening analytics company adds a data visualization presentation tool. Its first-to-market offering will allow brands and agencies to display simple, up-to-the-minute social listening analytics metrics and more.
CliqStudios.com selects Visual IQ’s marketing intelligence platform
The seller of custom kitchen candid
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Walmart is developing a personal-shopper service for rich moms — and a store with no cashiers
This ain’t your grandpa’s Walmart.
When Walmart paid $3 billion for Jet.com and its founder Marc Lore, the promise was that the entrepreneur would help the retailer appeal to new types of customers.
Here’s the next step in that evolution.
A new Walmart subsidiary, called Code Eight, has recently started testing a personal shopping service for “busy NYC moms,” according to multiple sources, with the goal of letting them get product recommendations and make purchases simply through text messaging.
The target customer of Code Eight is described in an online job listing as a “high net worth urban consumer” — translation: A rich city dweller — certainly not the historical sweet spot for Walmart’s main business.
Household items are delivered for free within 24 hours; other purchases are delivered within two business days. Returns are picked up for free at a customer’s apartment building or house.
Walmart’s startup incubator, Store No. 8, is also working on another under-the-radar project, dubbed Project Kepler. This effort aims to reimagine the in-store shopping experience with the help of technologies like computer vision.
Multiple people familiar with the project tell Recode that one goal of the initiative is the creation of physical stores that would operate without checkout lines or cashiers — in a similar fashion to Amazon’s futuristic Amazon Go store, which was announced a year ago but has yet to open to the public.
A Walmart spokesperson declined to comment.
Taken together, these Walmart initiatives mark a major leap in the vision for the type of businesses Walmart will operate, and customers it will serve, five or 10 years down the line. But since both business strategies are in early stages, there is no guarantee that either will develop into a long-term business or launch widely.
Walmart had previously announced that Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Fleiss is heading up Code Eight, but has revealed little to no details about the startup.
Recode has learned that Code Eight plans to eventually charge a membership fee, but current testers are using it for free. The personal-shopping service is currently focused on items in “health & beauty, household essentials and apparel/accessories” categories, according to a job listing. It’s not clear if the startup is sourcing this inventory from Walmart and its subsidiaries, or from outside retailers.
Code Eight has told early users that they can order products simply by texting a photo of it. They can also message with a general request for a type of product they need, and leave it up to the service to pick the specific item for them; customers fill out a survey upon joining that is supposed to help personalize their experience.
One source says that the Code Eight product has the appearance of an automated bot, but seems like a human is actually the one communicating on the other end of the message. That may change over time.
“[W]e set our sights on taking the lead in conversational commerce by leveraging machine learning, NLP, and personalization algorithms,” a Code Eight job listing reads. NLP refers to natural language processing — essentially, how a computer turns a human’s spoken or written request into instructions it can process.
The Project Kepler project focused on the future of in-store shopping is being led by Mike Hanrahan, the co-founder and former chief technology officer for Jet.com, multiple sources tell Recode. It is located in Hoboken, N.J., where Jet is based.
A Project Kepler job listing for a “computer vision engineer” says that the role will involve creating a “best-in-class consumer experience in the physical retail space.”
Amazon’s Go concept uses a combination of sensors and cameras to track what each store shopper takes off of shelves so it can automatically bill them for their purchase without their having to stop to pay on the way out. The store’s launch has been severely delayed, however, with reports that the technology did not work well when the store was crowded.
Walmart is envisioning a similar system that would potentially eliminate the need for cashiers in stores outfitted with the technology. Walmart has more than two million employees worldwide, many of whom work at checkout.
But it’s possible that the Project Kepler technology would be used in new types of store formats, rather than be retrofitted for existing stores. This project is just one of several across Walmart focused on what the retail store of the future should look like, according to a source.
Drug and Alcohol Deaths at U.S. Workplaces Soar
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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Ad consortium based around LiveRamp’s IdentityLink boosts membership
In May, data onboarder LiveRamp announced the launch of an open digital ad consortium that would utilize a single cookie linked back to its IdentityLink ID.
This week, the Advertising ID Consortium announced the addition of 16 other demand- and supply-side members, including Videology, Kargo, Adform, AerServ, Amobee, DataXu, IgnitionOne, Sizmek and Thunder.
Additionally, demand side platform (DSP) The Trade Desk said it will make its ID compatible with the Consortium’s. In May, the t
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These Tech Firms Are Vying to Shake Up TV Advertising in 2018
CMO Today looks at a few independent tech firms poised to shake up the antiquated TV ad business, while still trying to be mindful of your privacy.
Digital advertising in 2018: 5 trends to watch
Digital advertising in 2017 saw several major changes that will continue to influence and affect the work of digital marketers in the coming year. As we go speeding into 2018, here are five predictions about how the digital advertising landscape will evolve in the coming year.
US and EU (de)regulations put marketers on divergent paths
Brands that market online in the US and the EU will have to navigate those markets quite differently in 2018.
In 2017, the US and EU regulatory stances di