Data-Labor-Technology

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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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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AdExchanger |

The May deadline to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is swiftly approaching, and ad tech and security startups are forming a new industry: privacy tech. Companies like PageFair, Evidon, Prifender, Tealium and Segment hope to capitalize with GDPR compliance solutions for brands, publishers and even other ad tech vendors. The International Association… Continue reading »

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Harford and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi worked closely together at Expedia.

Uber is filling another key role in its executive ranks just as the year turns. The ride-hail company has hired former Orbitz CEO Barney Harford to be its first-ever chief operating officer.

Harford, who has been learning the ropes at Uber as an adviser since October, worked closely with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at Expedia. Before becoming CEO of Orbitz — which Expedia later acquired — Harford led Expedia’s push into Asia while Khosrowshahi was CEO. He begin his official work as COO on Jan. 2.

His appointment comes as Uber embarks on an important year. Coming off a year wracked with public scandal, Khosrowshahi is under a great deal of pressure to turn the company around in 2018. Adding to that, the long-time travel executive has his sights set on taking the company public in 2019.

Harford joins a growing C-suite. In October, Khosrowshahi appointed former Pepsi executive Tony West to be Uber’s chief legal officer. The next priority for the company is to fill the CFO role.

“I have never met a stronger operator or a more thoughtful strategist than Barney,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “He is able to go deep on key aspects of a business while never losing sight of the big strategic picture. He loves engaging with operations, marketing, product, and engineering teams around hard problems, and is passionate about using technology to transform the world.”

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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.

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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 »

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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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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 »

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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.

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Between making its 10th agency acquisition of the year and winning the Maserati account, Accenture Interactive’s December reflects a 2017 that saw it get closer to senior marketers. Joydeep Bhattacharya, Accenture Interactive’s managing director for the U.K. and Ireland, said it’s only a matter of time before consulting firms oust traditional agencies in advertisers’ minds and revealed how the crumbling digital advertising ecosystem could benefit the consulting firm in 2018.

Our recent conversation has been edited and condensed.

Big brands have said there’s no role for consulting firms in cleaning up the supply chain. Why is there a bigger role for Accenture Interactive in helping marketers spend their money?
Now more than ever, it’s apparent that marketers need to be more focused on growing their businesses. If they don’t own that agenda, then someone else will. As more industries get disrupted and more new players emerge, then those marketers who are able to influence the trajectory of their own company’s growth will be the ones that thrive. It’s only a matter of time, and we want to be the ones that set the pace for that [change].

Was that focus part of the reason why Maserati recently picked Accenture Interactive without a pitch?
Maserati’s CMO [Jacob Nyborg] talks about the importance of horizontality [within businesses], but there aren’t many agencies that can not only join creative, data and technology end to end but also say that they’re ready to be a true partner. By that, I mean really understanding a client’s growth KPIs, which could mean putting our own fees at risk because of that. We have the talent and the culture at Accenture Interactive, but it’s also about how we take complete accountability to get results.

[In 2018], agencies will be asked to dial up their commitment as partners and have a commercial relationship linked directly to growth. Creativity in the traditional sense will be even more important as the arena for winning hearts and minds of consumers becomes even more competitive and crowded.

How have you found winning new business?
The direct channels for our agencies like Karmarama, for example, are continuing to flourish because the agency has a broader story to say. For Accenture Interactive, it [new business] works well when we’re able to pull the client onto the global stage like we did with Maserati. Being part of Accenture gives us access to places where the business is already present at the boardroom. We don’t just see this is as a scale play; we’re going to grow on reputation. We’re going to be selective about the clients we go after. It pays dividends in the long run.

Do potential conflicts of interest between clients or between parts of Accenture Interactive’s business like media and auditing worry you?
We have a clear approach; we don’t want to make acquisitions that could upset those agencies already in our existing family. With Karmarama, for example, once we knew we could work with them and vice versa, the second part was to collectively decide together [as Karmarama, Fjord and Accenture Interactive] who is best suited to win what business, as there are enough clients to go after for us. It’s a simple and easy conversation that takes place between the three CEOs that I have within my family.

Do potential conflicts become more apparent as your programmatic business grows? Would you spin off the auditing side of the business?
We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it. Right now, we’re focused on how we can invigorate creative, data and technology together, and then have a clear role in the programmatic space. Depending on how things go and what clients see value, then we’ll decide how best to operate in the market.

Part of Accenture Interactive’s programmatic push centers on offering a managed service to run clients’ in-house trading desks, which many media agencies can do. How will the business be able to sufficiently grow in 2018?
Now that we have critical mass [on the programmatic side of Accenture Interactive], I’m seeing more interest in it. More clients are coming to us asking us to do discovery pieces of work that helps them to understand where their money is going and what they can be doing to drive better effectiveness. That’s not just down to us. The market and the view of media within it has started to shift with the transparency and brand-safety issues that have made the mainstream news.

Why did Accenture Interactive acquire digital agency Rothco?
Firstly, we look at acquisitions as talent magnets rather than [profits and losses]. We don’t just acquire agencies for financial maximization. The other part of our strategy is to be a leader in each of our markets. In the U.K., we have Karmarama. We want to be a dominant player in Ireland, which is part of my [management] patch, and so we got Rothco to help us do that. They’re an agency that’s very strategy-orientated, which made it a good fit for the rest of the business. Ireland is a big market for us. It’s where our worldwide innovation center is. There are also a lot of international brands that are either headquartered there or have sizable options, so it’s a great place to immerse all the international clients that visit in creativity and innovation.

Image courtesy of Accenture Interactive

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