Mary Meeker’s latest annual Internet trends report has been released, and it’s as insightful as always.
New sections for this year include:
A new section on the ethics of data usage and regulation
Interesting sections on healthcare (expenditure by country, and their focus on preventable deaths); and China (the move from manufacturing, and the totally different user experiences, such as live streaming for ecommerce)
New section on education – US university enrolments falling, with online increasing
Here are my highlights (aka abbreviated research notes):
Slide 25: [USA-based] advertising purchasing is moving to Amazon/ Twitter/ Pinterest (basically, moving from Facebook or Google at a quicker amount than they are growing)
Slide 28 & 29: Balancing Customer acquisition cost with Life Time Value!!
Slide 32: Drive conversion from freemium (Spotify & Zoom), rather than seeking new customers
#51: Echo devices doubled last year to 47M. There are now 90,000+ skills for Alexa. Why? How are they promoted?
Here’s a summary of interesting stories I’ve seen over the last week. I try to concentrate on the stories which aren’t necessarily mainstream.
Sport
The NFL is a good indicator of where the English Premier League is commercially heading
I’ve always said the Premier League is commercially 5 years behind the NFL. To anyone who thinks Premier League TV revenues or player salaries are too high, do not read this article on the latest NFL commercial numbers. Some examples:
The Raiders are building a new stadium in Las Vegas at a cost of $1.7bn. Tottenham Hotspur is building a stadium in London for £800m.
Roger Goodell is the commissioner of the NFL. He earns $30m per year, compared to Richard Scudamore, the head of the Premier League, who earns £2.5m including bonuses.
The Premier League does win on salaries though. The NFL has a team salary cap of $167m per team. Compare this to Manchester City’s wage bill (last year) of £225m. Put another way, the top 5 teams in the Premier League has a wage bill higher than the NFL’s cap.
In October I’m giving a keynote speech at an insurance event and I’ve been asked to speak about new technologies and trends. Separately, one of the readers of this site, Doug, recently emailed me asking whether I had “any insight into the insurance sector, and company’s use of Internet of Things technologies?”
Here are some thoughts which I’ve been thinking about for a while.
The Internet of Useless Things – well worth a quick read, even on the throne
Here are the best articles that I’ve read during the last week:
Warc – Measurement issues hit TV– regular readers will know my frustration with measuring TV audiences. Their time has come, just as they are reporting a sharp decline in audiences. But in an industry based on advertising revenue, the measurement companies are being urged to create ways of showing increasing audience sizes. Bizarre but inevitable.
This is the last post in the monetisation series. We’ve explored ten ways to monetise large digital audiences, from simple advertising to selling products. This post discusses ways of making money from data.
Data monetisation is one of the newest of all the models we’ve discussed in the series. And it’s probably the most misunderstood. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, it proved how valuable user data has become.
But customer data isn’t that new. The market for sales-leads data has been around for ages. The difference now is how that data is collected and ‘mined’. Data used to be scraped from public sources such as Companies House and Yellow Pages. Now companies are setup with the sole purpose of collecting information from users.
The first presentation I went to at adtech London today was Tim Abraham from Xaxis, a company specialising in Big Data.
The earliest example, the Doomsday book in 1086 with 13,418 records facilitating taxation! (My note: Did it take 1,000 years to forgive Big Data for this?!!@!)
Facebook now process over 500Tb of data daily
Organisations think more about optimising campaigns rather than just the media buying process
Big data provides granular information to enable estimation
Simple dashboards = big impact
Simple dashboards=big impact
Often, the insight from big data is difficult to action which creates a value vacuum and a question over Big Data projectas
In the future, Big Data will get bigger (more important), however scale alone won’t drive results. It’s all about enough data at the right time.
WPP expect digital revenues to increase at the expense of print
This was the first keynote speech of ad:tech London. Here are my brief notes:
A key focus for WPP at the moment is China and the Internet
WPP has more staff in China than in the UK
Digital ad spend will grow from 95bn today to 180bn in 2018, at which point digital will exceed traditional ad spending
Digital will take revenue from print and other channels, not from TV. In fact, TV ad revenue may still grow very slightly to 2018
WPP will be concentrating on this [shopping] list for the next 5 yearsKey trends from Mark:
Mobile. Its beyond advertising. Mobile is a CRM tool rather than another channel for banner ads. E.g. the British Airways app provides branding on a phone, alerts and transactions
E-commerce will become ever more important. The uk is already the second biggest market for ecommerce to South Korea. The question is how to handle Amazon
Data driven. Every website you visit will leave a digital footprint. The question is how to join these footprints and cookies together into one story, or a single customer view.
Social. Many WPP clients see Facebook equals mobile. Mobile usage = Facebook usage. The top mobile apps are Facebook and YouTube (each with over 1 billion installs), followed by WeChat (in China), Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn.
YouTube. 1 billion users consumer over 6 billion hours of content per month. That’s 6 hours per month per person. Video equipment on the high street at affordable prices, not just for professionals. Brands are joining in by supporting user generated content with product placement (e.g. Ford supplying vehicles for travellers).
The Gatekeepers of the internet. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft each have hundreds of millions, and some have billions of users. Working with them, or having a strategy of working alongside them, is key.
WPP said that technology is central to their clients’ digital strategy
In the next 5 years digital will account for around 45% of WPP revenue, it’s currently in the mid-30s.
WPP have bought ecommerce provider Salmon who produce the sites for Argos and DFS.
WPP doesn’t want to be a an ad agency. It wants to become a full marketing implementation agency in the next 5 years, competing with the likes of Accenture and Deloitte Digital.
Knowing customers well Credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI
Key points:
Big Data could be the digital equivalent of the friendly shopkeeper who has a good idea of what you want, as soon as you enter the shop
But probably isn’t.
My family is quite traditional. We shop at a greengrocer for vegetables, a local butcher for meat, a local baker for bread and a local wine merchant. We use supermarkets mainly just for tinned products.
The greengrocer, butcher and wine merchant know the products that my family want to buy as well as my wife or I do.
A few years ago, Big Data was the IT industry’s silver bullet to provide online stores with the same knowledge as my local greengrocer, butcher and wine merchant. Surely, Tesco thinks, if I buy nappies, I want to buy some baby food as well.
So Tesco began promoting baby food on all my receipts and offers in the post. However the only food we buy from Tesco is vegetarian. They can see that from all our shopping history. So there really isn’t any point promoting the latest chicken or beef baby food varieties.
And I think everyone who has bought Christmas presents for a young child through Amazon has been through the process of wondering why they receive endless children’s toys promotions afterwards.
My bank is another example. By definition my bank can see where I shop, how much my wife and I earn and how much we spend. My online banking website lists our current accounts, savings account and credit card all in one place.
I know through my work at Endava how much the bank spends on Big Data annually. So why does my bank promote the same savings account every time I log on? There are probably a gazillion more appropriate products they could be selling me than the same savings product every time. In the end I did take up the (poor) savings account just to stop the splash screen promotion.
I should note, one of my colleagues pointed out the first time I told this story “So the bank won. They promoted a product and you applied after a few placements.” He’s right of course, and I’d made it worse for all the other customers!
Big Data will help Internet websites get to a point where they mimic the traditional shopkeeper. However it’s in danger of becoming too scientific and will need to become much more customer focussed.
Please share this post with your contacts because it makes me feel better.
![WPP will be concentrating on this [shopping] list for the next 5 years](https://bradbox.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2013-09-11-09.42.05.jpg)
