Fix/Friday — September 18
https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-media-a-new-framework-for-valuing-content
Adtech Perfect Storm
Arete shared their very thorough note on Apple and IDFAs in our Guild — a must read. Essentially they think Apple plans to go big on ads, that the walled gardens will be affected in varying ways and see a gloomy future for the various IDs being developed by the adtech industry. It’s called Apple Power Play and we are going to see enormous disruption.
Read the report and get involved in the discussion in our Guild — now getting close to 200 super smart members.
A video of my panel at the AppCommerce event is now available — I talked with Jay (CTO at POq) and Alex (CEO at Branch) and we covered both the new iOS14 and the likely impact of the IDFA changes
Unsurprising to see Instagram chief Adam Mosseri come out against the IDFA changes. And Eric Seufert reminds us that the Google / Android equivalent is likely to follow the Apple lead, but with some interesting wrinkles to preserve attribution by view throughs on Android.
One area the Arete report mentions is contextual targeting and this study shows it can be cost effective.
We mentioned that AT&T seem to be selling their media adtech business — Walmart and Singtel are amongst the possible buyers. Weirdly, as they exit a modern ad business their CEO thinks they may launch an ad supported mobile service — an old idea that gets trotted out every few years.
One of the most persistent voices in adtech is anti fraud activist Augustine Fou — here he looks at the issues with programmatic targeting. This new report shows how easy it is for bots to taint the adtech world — enabling some of that fraud. Reading this reminded me of two things. First, fraud has been around for years and progress in eliminating — or reducing it — seems slow. Second, it’s a few months since the ISBA report highlighted the lack of transparency and the lost 15%. Who is doing what differently, since that report came out?
TikTok
Still hard to tell what is going on with Tiktok — Oracle has reached an agreement but Trump seems unimpressed. Oracle seems to see this a great customer acquisition for their Cloud business and their share price is at an all time high. Still don’t think anything significant will happen. (but we do now know more about how the algorithm works — even if the Chinese will not sell it.)
But the competition are getting ready in case it does — with YouTube the latest to launch a me too product — YouTube Shorts
In other news they have reached 100m users in Europe. But these are Monthly Active Users and the useful stat is Daily Active Users. Of which Facebook have 300m in Europe and Snap have 71m. The BBC say TikTok has ‘given new artists a chance’
newTV
A long Quartz piece looks at the future of the TV ad — with this quote standing out;
Their predictions;
Future #1: Ads will actually be relevant
Future #2: Fewer ads
Future #3: Less annoying ads
WarnerMedia have some issues bringing HBOMax to market — promising a low ad load but having to navigate some content where ads are not allowed. A new PWC report predicts “there will be a number of high-profile streaming casualties by the end of the forecast period,” — will dig into all this on Wednesday when our midweek deep dive is all about newTV.
There are lots of interviews with Reed Hasting as he promotes his new book on how Netflix is run, but this Vanity Fair one is good. Talking of the competition and the way the young dont have the attention span he worries;
“The danger is someday Netflix becomes like the opera — a sort of super-high-end niche thing.”
In the old world Viacom say the Upfront Ad Market is ‘Very Far Along’ — but few details. More evidence that the math of streaming doesn’t add up — Viacom are to sell their CNET business for $500m as they concentrate on TV.
Merchant
On Wednesday we went deep on all things retail with our Merchant Fix — looking at Product, Shopper Marketing, Community, drones and Amazon — catch up here
Every Merchant knows that Christmas is coming and is getting ready for Black Friday, Prime Day and the run into Christmas. But it’s going to be different this year — especially for stores. Lulemon is bullish and plans 50 pop up stores in Q4 — mainly to manage overflow traffic from existing stores.
Amazon keep coming back to fashion — and the latest strategy is Amazon Luxury where Prime customers have to be invited to take part. This sounds interesting but as we saw with the Rhianna collaboration for Fenty, the user experience quickly reverts to Amazon style, after a rich landing page.
Great essay from Web Smith decrying the blandness of some much DTC. And a good article on how all the sites look the same — bland. In the week we lost an amazing Merchant, Terence Conran, we remember his stores and restaurants were never bland — walking down the staircase in Quaglinos or browsing the Conran Shop on Fulham Road were rich experiences. DTC needs a bit more of that attitude.
As well as the blandness, sites built on the most popular ecommerce platforms don’t do that well with Google. As they shift to Core Web Vitals this report shows almost a third of sites fail to meet the target for loading time. I spoke at a Google event on Mobile for their top advertisers a couple of years ago and we found then that most of the top 30 brands attending had slow mobile sites.
One of the businesses there that excelled was ecommerce pioneer The Hut — and a great flotation has values them at £5.4bn
Now you can buy Facebook Creative by the yard. Well almost. Common Thread have been really transparent and shared their creative packages — what’s included and full costs. And they have already sold out of some packages. This is how a modern agency works.
AR
The last time we were at Luxottica — the Milan firm that makes 90% of top end sunglasses — I asked about AR and their Google partnership, and they said everyone had been to see them. Now Facebook have a collaboration with them. And they announced a partnership with the New York Times for AR content — first for Instagram but likely to feature when glasses become a thing.
Monday Note write a good piece on AR glasses and Apple and make the point that fitting the AR tech onto glasses is hard. Which is what Luxottica said — they know what people will wear but the tech people always want more.
Plus
The Future of Media: A New Framework for Valuing Content This is a good report from Accenture and the World Economic Forum and the image above come from here.
The Apple event on Tuesday has been well covered but this is a good summary of the key points.
More magic from MSCHF — THOUSANDS OF CARDS, ONE BANK ACCOUNT: SPEND IT IF YOU’RE FAST ENOUGH
Iron Man and Stark Industries come to Fortnite -so smart from Marvel
Fortnite is launching a concert series it hopes will become a ‘tour stop’ for artists
The State of the Connected Home 2020 Report | Edition 4
Sony Music Bets Its Next Big Hit Will Be a Podcast
Forget TikTok. China’s Powerhouse App Is WeChat — NewYork Time
Westwood One’s Podcast Download — Fall 2020 Report
Finally — I am fascinated by gaming and this reminded me This Is The Time To (Re)Read ‘Snow Crash’ And ‘Understanding Media’ There is a well thumbed copy of Snow Crash on most Tech CEOs desk. And mine. For more on the Metaverse watch this interview with Matthew Ball.
