070 - John Andrews: Retail Just Advanced Five Years - Marketing Post-COVID
John Andrews, CEO of Photofy, a community content creation platform, and Emily talk about all things Marketing Post-COVID in this week's episode. This episode has it all: social media advertising, the future of retail, and amazon to eCommerce. See what these two think the future holds for marketing and which tactics have been most successful in the last several months.
"What was a slow-burning retail apocalypse for many retailers just turned into a full-fledged firestorm. Shopping will be forever changed post-crisis, and while the dislocation of people and capital will be painful, both will be reallocated to more efficient models." - John Andrews
John and Emily talk about marketing and retail during and post-COVID-19. This episode has it all: social media advertising, the future of shopping, ecommerce, Amazon, and which brands will survive.
Video:
Guest: John Andrews, CEO of Photofy, a community content creation platform, is a media disruptor. Leveraging over twenty years of experience in consumer packaged goods marketing coupled with eight years of social media knowledge to build new media formats in the shopper marketing space. He helped build one of the first ‘people as media’ platforms at Walmart called Elevenmoms, founded Collective Bias (Acquired by Inmar in 2016), and teaches as an adjunct professor at NC State University.
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Topics:
02:30: Curbside is the winner of COVID: How retail has advanced during the pandemic.
04:40: Consumers are drawn to products and services that help them enjoy more “productive time” (e.g. riding in an Uber instead of driving).
06:00: Walmart was ahead of the game with their curbside shopping and pick-up process. They have been doing this for years.
07:00: HEB, a regional grocer in Texas, was beating out larger grocery chains during the peak of the pandemic because larger chains couldn’t keep up with demand and the need for new curbside services. HEB was stated to have begun preparations for curbside pick-up as early as 2005.
A pair of Nike shoes that John, a self-proclaimed sneakerhead, bought off Instagram.
11:25: Nike is one of the few companies that is managing a transition into digital retail very well, and it’s all about the difference between the use of push marketing and first-party data.
“Nike is using its direct understanding of its data to perfectly market to me what it knows I am interested in.” - John Andrews
16:30: Marketing advantage through data and the Nike app
19:35: Two recent global studies from Kantar and Edelman reveal that advertising and social media in particular are at new all-time lows for consumer trust. Just 17% of people trust news from social media.
“Public favorability towards advertising was 25% in December of 2018, but in 1992 that figure was 48%.” -Edelman Trust Barometer
21:00: Media companies are built on advertising, and they have had to be creative about their ad-driven tactics. Instagram does a good job of curating content for unique users but can bombard users with ads based on their interests.
24:40: What is an email address worth in five years? Will email marketing become a thing of the past?
30:00: What platforms are the best for targeted marketing? How do sound and voice play into this?
“There is an advertising opportunity in [the voice assistant’s recommendations] because everything is predictive.” - Emily Binder on the future of advertising
John’s recs: Podcasts, book, & WallStreetBooyah Twitch channel:
Podcast: Joe Rogan Experience: #1470 Elon Musk
Podcast: Social Geek Radio with Jack Monson, CRO at Social Joey
Twitch: WallStreetBooyah
Check out Episode 71 - VIDEO podcast with WallStreetBooyah and John!
Book: Ichigo Ichie, the Japanese philosophy of living in the moment and putting randomness into your life: (recommended by Scott Monty)
Ichi-go ichi-e (Japanese: 一期一会, lit. “one time, one meeting”) [it͡ɕi.ɡo it͡ɕi.e] is a Japanese four-character idiom (yojijukugo) that describes a cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment. Ichigo Ichie is the idea of living in the here and the now and embracing each day as it could be our last.
John Andrews is CEO of Photofy, a branded content creation platform
Connect with John:
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069 - Steve Pratt: Podcasts - Your Brand's Unfair Advantage (VIDEO)
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
Why do Facebook, Dell Technologies, Mozilla, Slack, Red Hat, NYT T Brand Studio, BMW, CBS, Charles Schwab, and more top brands come to Pacific Content when they want to create a branded podcast?
Steve Pratt is the Vice President and co-founder of Pacific Content, a company of 30 passionate podcast nerds that focuses exclusively on creating original podcasts with brands.
Play the video:
1-click play this podcast anywhere:
Pacific Content joined Rogers Media in May 2019 and is one of Entrepreneur's 100 Brilliant Companies. Their shows have won Webby Awards, Digiday Branded Content Awards, MarCom Awards, and Shorty Awards.
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
2:20: How Steve started working on branded content and more details on his background.
3:00: Sirius XM and the first podcast ever.
4:19: Getting bitten by the "podcast bug." Opportunities to generate exposure for new bands in Canada emerged through licensing agreements for podcasts.
4:35: The new wave of podcasting hits and with it the need for podcasters to think and act like media companies
5:37: Companies begin realizing a new medium to generate content to increase exposure, without overtly tying it to their brand. It doesn't sound like an ad.
Choiceology with Katy Milkman is an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It explores irrational decision making. The show was created by Pacific Content.
"They all understand that you have to put the audience first, and you have to have a lot of empathy for the people that you're creating this for. Anytime anybody makes a piece of content that is about themselves, it's an infomercial." - Steve Pratt
"If we make something that's about us, maybe people will listen once, and then they'll never come back." - Steve Pratt
7:22: Traditional advertising is becoming less and less effective due to the economic and global impacts of coronavirus. Advertising isn't always about showing off your brand and product; sometimes it's about just about creating something that adds value to the user's experience.
"This is a time for brands to serve instead of sell" - Steve Pratt
Loyalty and ROI
9:00: How do you play to the unique strengths of audio, and how do you measure your success in harnessing it?
11:10: Podcasting can reach people when screens aren't available
Podcasting hit a watershed moment in 2019 when, for the first time ever, over 50% of the U.S. adult population had listened to a podcast.
13:39: Everyone has a podcast, and the market is increasingly growing. Discovery and promotion can be a podcaster's biggest hurdle.
14:48: The same tips for growing your podcast can be applied as you're building a voice experience on Alexa or Google Assistant.
"This is all part of the concert of the marketing instruments; they play together." - Emily Binder
17:58: Word of mouth can grow ambassadors for your podcast or voice experience.
"You can't buy listens in podcasts, you have to earn them." - Steve Pratt
18:30: Goodpods is a platform for users to discover new podcasts and can help podcasters capitalize on the "word of mouth" marketing in a digital form. Goodpods is founded by JJ Ramberg, see our conversation with her here.
19:56: Establish patterns and comfort with users, and it will make them more drawn to new mediums. This will reduce friction to new technology and drive adoption.
"When we first had smartphones, you had to teach someone how to download an app and close an app...now, it has become second nature, and we can't live without it." - Emily Binder
23:05: This is the time to experiment with technology
24:53: Smart speakers are the training wheels of voice, but voice assistant is on so many more devices than just a smart speaker
"We had a 70% YOY increase in global shipments of smart speakers in 2019 over 2018. And voice in the car is actually the fastest growing and number 1 use case of voice." - Emily Binder
27:17: What has Google been doing in the podcast space?
Books and Podcasts Steve recommends:
Connect with Steve and Pacific Content:
Steve Pratt is Vice President and Co-Founder of Pacific Content, an award winning podcast studio
Follow @beetlemoment on Instagram:
056 - Kate O’Neill: Why Technology Must Be Human Centric
Author and keynote speaker Kate O'Neill is known around the world as The Tech Humanist. Hear her thoughtful approach to keeping technology human and what it will take for emerging technology to be successful from a business standpoint.
How do we design technology that is both smart for business and good for people?
Hear the human centered approach to voice and AI. Emily and Kate also discuss oncoming voice tech issues such as deep fakes and privacy issues such as data mining by Facebook and other tech companies.
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Topics and Timestamps:
03:15 How do we approach voice design from a human centric way that is also good for business?
04:30 Weather skill example - take context about what someone using the skill needs, like an umbrella
05:20 Business might build voice tech or other tech in order to check a box but it’s better to build for the person on the other end
06:00 Don’t ask, “What’s our AI strategy?”. Instead, step back and ask, “What are we trying to accomplish as a business? - Kate
07:00 Who are we building for and how can we serve their needs?”
06:20 Create alignment and relevance between the business and people outside it
07:10 Avoid unintended consequences of technology as it becomes capable of such scale
07:35 Google Translatotron and deep fakes: Translatotron translates spoken word into another language while retaining the VOICE of the original speaker.
Anatomy of a Babel fish as explained in the BBC TV series: “The Babel fish is a small, bright yellow fish, which can be placed in someone's ear in order for them to be able to hear any language translated into their first language.”
08:20 How we should approach technology that reminds us of the Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? The Translatotron’s simultaneous translation does not lose integrity originating from the sound of your voice. But one step further: there is sampling of your voice that is sufficient for ML (machine learning) and AI to synthesize your voice.
08:45 Sampling: Google would now have your voice - what will they do with it? Voice synthesis and deep fakes - the terrifying possibilities (overall: cool but scary)
09:30 Companies must govern themselves (e.g. Google)
09:50 Government has a responsibility to regulate privacy and data models
10:40 Kate doesn’t have smart speakers in her home because we don’t have a precedent for protecting user data, she says
11:20 Facebook Ten Year Challenge (Kate’s tweet went viral in January 2019 over the ten year old photo trend next to current photos of themselves) - she pointed out that this data could be training facial recognition algorithms on predicting aging
Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? : “Opinion: The 2009 vs. 2019 profile picture trend may or may not have been a data collection ruse to train its facial recognition algorithm. But we can't afford to blithely play along.”
13:20 We have seen memes and games that ask you to provide structured information turn out to be data mining (e.g. Cambridge Analytica): we have good reason to be cautious
14:40 "Everything we do online is a genuine representation of who we are as people, so that data really should be treated with the utmost respect and protection. Unfortunately, it isn't always." - Kate O’Neill
15:00 Do we need government to regulate tech? Can it?
16:10 “Ask forgiveness, not permission” is clearly the case with Facebook so why do users seem to be forgiving?
20:00 What might a future social network look like in which there are fewer privacy and data mining concerns?
Bonus info:
Deep fake (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") is a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.
Read more about deep fakes and voice emulation: the idea of voice skins and impersonation for fraud
052 - Brian Roemmele - Amazon’s Hardware Announcements: Keys to the Castle - Pt. 1
Echo Buds, Echo Frames, Echo Loop, and more new products take Alexa to new fields: what does it mean? Brian Roemmele is known as the Oracle of Voice for a reason. Over decades he has predicted so many things that came true. The brilliance of these new products like Echo Loop is about getting Amazon into the castle without fighting for spaces that are already occupied, like the wrist or the pocket.
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Skip to Part 2 with Brian Roemmele: The Key to Successful Branding - Voice and Beyond Alexa
About Our Guest:
Brian Roemmele is the recognized world authority on how voice AI will impact computing and commerce. Over arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects along the way. He has been published in Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Inc, Gizmodo, Medium, and is an exclusive Quora top writer. He hosts Around the Coin (earliest crypto currency podcast), Breaking Banks Radio and more, discussing everything from Bitcoin to Voice Commerce.
Brian created the Multiplex app and Multiplex Magazine, a way to stay on top of everything important in technology, payments and just about anything else. He has taken the stage at Money 20/20, ETA Transact and many private events as a speaker on the future of Voice Commerce.
Companies don’t patent things just because.
A big theme of this episode is getting out of the weeds of the technical features and instead looking at better ways to get work done. Think big picture. We are looking at the beginnings of new use cases in brand new paradigms.
When you paradigm shift, the canvas is blank, and that’s where we are with voice.
This is Part 1 - tune back in next week to hear more! We cover branding and marketing foundations based on personas and archetypes, which will determine success tomorrow. 1-click subscribe free in your favorite podcast app now so you don’t miss it.
The idea of the app is already gone.
From Brian’s Quora article about Amazon’s Fall 2019 release and preview of products (9/25/2019):
If Echo and Alexa devices from Amazon along with the Skills ecosystem were a stand-alone company in 2019, using typical startup multiples, Echo, Inc would be worth about $500 billion dollars. This is an astounding achievement and there shows no sign that the acceleration is slowing.
Amazon Owns The Far-Field Voice First Market, Now They Are Comping For The Near-Field
Today was a next generation Amazon Alexa-themed event with Echo devices for every possible use case but most specially the near-field. I have surfaced ~32 primary Voice First modalities. Amazon is now in three:
1. Near-field - on the body
2. Mid-field - small environment
3. Far-field - open room
Timestamps by topic:
04:00 Amazon’s patents telegraph the future
04:50 Amazon did not dominate in smartphone, obviously (Fire Phone failed - and at the time in 2014, people overlooked the first generation Amazon Echo)
05:50 Smartphone is an old modality
06:10 iPhone is the iconic smartphone
06:30 What is the strategy to get into the castle? Content and shopping, largest merchant on planet
07:10 “Amazon is a retailer, not a technology company” - this is why Amazon created the voice first experience first
Brian Roemmele - @BrianRoemmele
07:35 Amazon does not pretend to be a tech company, they’re a company that produces technology
07:50 Amazon doesn’t have mindshare yet, and that is key
07:55 What happens with content and mindshare? How does content creation play in?
08:30 Amazon is not going after the smartphone or smart watch (not after the wrist or the pocket
09:10 Products that define new categories must be loved and hated
09:30 “Talk to the hand” back in vernacular with Echo Loop
10:30 Tech companies don’t consider anthropological and sociological impact of products
11:10 We ask “Can we?” too often and don’t ask “Should we?” enough
11:45 Brian’s thesis: Hyper Local
11:55 Echo Loop (a ring) is not always on - it has a button to engage Alexa. It draws you into the Alexa ecosystem without taking away from Apple AirPods - and that is brilliant.
13:20 Future of the voice assistant that you talk to like a significant other
13:30 Done thumb clawing at screen - that is the future
13:50 Echo Frames and Echo Loop are early versions of the ubiquitous voice future
14:20 Near field computing, mid-field, and far-field (open room) - Amazon’s secret weapon over the castle wall was to get in the home (with Echo in 2014) - which became the fastest adopted consumer technology in history
15:10 The tech leap happened organically with consumers from kitchen to living room - Amazon is doing the same strategy again to get people to adopt this in the near field
15:50 People mocked the iPad (menstrual pad?) and look what happened - these products have to be hated or mocked
16:30 iPhone was laughed at because it didn’t have a keyboard. What is past is prologue. We always see the future through the glasses of right now and the past - always view the future through the rearview mirror:
16:40 We defined the new in the words of the old, e.g.: the horseless carriage, flameless candle, talking pictures.
17:50 Most voice first experts have nothing to do with the technology world, which irritates folks in tech
18:45 Computing is not what it was for the last sixty years, and it will not continue to be what is has been the last twenty - think about this for typing and interacting
18:55 Technology gets bigger and bigger until it disappears (e.g. you don’t talk about your carburetor, you just buy a car that works or Jobs saying RAM doesn’t matter, you will only care what the computer does or accomplishes)
21:35 There are no killer applications for voice. “Apps?” That’s 2D. (Check out our interview with Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist of Alexa, where we concluded the same thing)
21:55 So what are people really looking for with voice?
22:30 "The idea of the app is already gone.” - Brian
23:40 The intimate relationship that technology can and will spawn is the killer app. We can’t see that world clearly yet
24:50 We’re not battling on the grounds defined by prior technologies
25:10 We’ve only seen 4 of the 175 modalities that voice first works in
25:50 Amazon’s brilliance is great utility to an existing ecosystem (Alexa)
Echo Buds (pre-order Echo Buds for $129.99 <— this link helps support the show!)
25:00 Amazon doesn’t expect Echo Buds to replace Apple AirPods
27:20 Echo Buds isolate noise and incorporate multiple VAs like Google and Siri
27:30 AirPods are a cultural phenomenon about fashion as much as sound- that is why they won’t be easily replaced by Echo Buds
28:05 Brand signaling with AirPods, or whatever product comes next- that is human
28:30 Loop and Frames are wise moves
29:10 AOL move to open AOL Mail to internet mail is similar to Buds move to open to other VAs
29:40 Amazon subsidies for Buds and Amazon Music. Music is a commodity - supplier does not matter.
30:10 When you stream music, that streaming service makes almost nothing (e.g. Apple, Google, Spotify) - loss leader. The strategy is about attention, narrative, communication with the customer.
30:50 See: Prime. Brilliant. Long term relationship.
OUR SPONSOR
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027 - How to Make the Voice Assistant Like Your Brand
Hear how the future ubiquitous voice assistant will decide whether to promote your brand.
We spend major ad dollars on the duopoly (Google and Facebook) with Amazon a distant third. Those ad dollars will shift.
Telenav announced that it is integrating Amazon Alexa into its automotive navigation system offering.
1.0:
The voice assistant we know today will be so much smarter tomorrow.
Your shadow, your assistant:
The voice assistant will be every person’s personal assistant, their shadow, their life historian and documentarian. It will mitigate our drudge work for life admin tasks like errands and comparison shopping. It will save us all kinds of time. I hope we use that time well.
What won't change:
We are at the mercy of an algorithm today: many ecommerce retailers live and die by SEO on Google and on Amazon. Tomorrow our brands will be at the AI's mercy. The data will be richer, the algorithm more complex.
Amazon, which is nearing $800 billion in value, is making a noticeable push in advertising products, hoping to grab a piece of Google and Facebook’s duopoly of digital advertising. Voice commerce is estimated to be a $18.3 billion opportunity by 2023.
This idea of the future is not radically different from the game we play with search engines today. You bid to be at the top based on a user’s query, or you work on your content to rank high organically.
The same process will happen but with less screen, and more anticipation of the user’s needs or next purchase.
When the assistant recommends a product, it will try to match to the user’s needs, history, and preferences. Google does this today with search results. Your website gets rewarded for relevancy. Everyone tries to game the SEO algorithm but ultimately if you have great content that solves the searcher’s problems google knows it and ranks you higher. There is no silver bullet.
Up Next:
Tune in next week for episode 28: my upcoming interview with Jon Chu, an expert in voice first ecommerce and retail.
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