Mediaboss Marketing

Adjudged marketing innovator by Time magazine and business innovator by BusinessWeek, Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe, has written his first book, Restoring The Soul Of Business: Staying Human In The Age Of Data. Published by Harper Collins, it will be released in the US on 28 January. In New Delhi for its India launch, the Chicago-based advertising veteran spoke about the inspiration behind the book, the importance of balance between creativity and data, and the decline in advertising. Edited excerpts from an interview:

What inspired you to write this book?

There were two reasons. One was external demand, and the other was the internal belief that there was a right time to write it. As I went around the world either helping clients or speaking at various events, people were surprised that I had never written a book. I was told I had an interesting perspective on various topics. They wanted me to share it more broadly. Also, whether it was in the US, Europe, India or China, people were asking me the same 12 questions such as how do you extract meaning from data? How do you upgrade your mental operating system? Or, how do you manage change?

That was the external reason. The internal reason was, because of the rise of technology and data, a great amount of wealth was being created by companies like Facebook, Amazon and Apple, among others. But more companies were focusing on the left brain part of work, on math. The focus was on what I call the spreadsheet (profit, losses, productivity), and not enough on the story of the company which is the culture, emotion and its people. Because of this, the business was getting hurt. The society was getting hurt. Today, social media companies are highly profitable. From a consumer perspective they are giving great products for free. But for a citizen, there is a negative impact.

Their platforms are feeding polarization and hate. Also, when you start focusing on the numbers, you become very short-term oriented. A consulting firm got into trouble as people said they represented drug companies and were helping them sell addictive drugs. So people asked, where are the ethics and the values of a company? So I said that the soul of the business is the story and not just the spreadsheet. A successful company has to combine data, technology and emotion.

Would you say that data has helped build companies like Amazon and Facebook?

The success of many of these companies has been built on three big factors: First, they were innovators and pioneers. These were ideas-driven companies and not data-driven companies. The iPod was an idea. iPhone was an idea. Social network in Facebook was an idea. Second, their business models were built on a combination of data and networks. So they use data and, once they have a certain amount of scale, its very hard to beat them. If you go for search and you keep going to Google, Google has more information, and it can search better. If all your friends are on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, what are you going to do anywhere else? Thats called the network effect. Third, not Apple, but all the other companies are giving really amazing value for money. Google is free. Facebook is free. Amazon gives low prices and a lot of bundling. Consumers want things fast, good and cheap. These are innovative companies with ideas, that is, the right brain. Then they have data and networks, that is, the left. So they are not just data-driven companies. That is what I am trying to remind people.

Can you go wrong with data?

You can go very wrong. Although you cannot run a business without it, there are a lot of questions that data cannot answer about the culture of your company, what your talent feels about the company, or what your customers feel about the company.

So data can lead you to the wrong conclusions if it is outdated. Or, people sometimes dont behave the way data tells you that they behave. People choose with their heart and then use numbers to justify what they just did. If we did not choose with our hearts and we chose only with the numbers, then there would be no luxury brands, which are some of the most powerful companies. If only the numerics work, then there should be no Taj or Oberoi. No BMWs or Mercedes. When people tell me its all data, I say most decisions are made through the heart.

Are companies relying less on market visits for insights and more on online data?

They are doing both. The ability to listen to consumers has changed dramatically. In the past, you could carry out a few market visits, (analyse) a few focus groups. Now you have the ability to look at peoples social and search behaviour, and begin to get interesting information which you didnt have before. I have invested in an interesting company called QualSights. They do qualitative at scale. They basically tell people to put on the video on their phone while they shop. They collect thousands of videos all over the world, and then use AI and data to show patterns. Now you can do this globally, quickly, in peoples homes and other places because of technology.

How has the consumer changed in the age of social media?

On the positive side, they are connected with more people than they have ever been before. It might be a light form of connection. I remain connected to my class of 1974 because we have a Whats-App group. I can reach out to colleagues all over the world.

The semi-good part is, we start curating our lives. Sometimes we start thinking of what we do not because of what we want to do but because of how it will look on social media. For instance, in the US a lot of people are now renting clothes because they dont want to be seen in the same clothes on Instagram. So you have businesses like Rent the Runway (a subscription fashion service for women to rent designer clothes) come up.

The bad side is that you live in that world and forget the world you are currently living in. Often people around a table are all looking at their phones. The good part of social media is you get connected, the semi-good part is you curate your life, the bad part is you lose focus, connection and relationships.

How will things change for companies with data privacy becoming a big issue globally?

Privacy will be a huge issue and it will, at some stage, be settled by the government. Its very hard today to be anonymous. But different governments have different perspectives on this. The Chinese government doesnt care about privacy. They are using a lot of facial recognition and trying to track everybody. In Germany they are very privacy oriented. So the way data is controlled will differ from country to country.

You once mentioned that advertising will decline. What will replace it?

I was referring to the US market. Markets like India and others are still healthy for both print and TV. In the US, the opportunity to advertise to people will decline 20-25% in the next five years which is pretty significant. Many newspapers in America have gone out of business. Even for a big newspaper like New York Times, there are more online readers than there are for its print edition. In a newspaper format, everyone will see all your ads. In the digital format there are few opportunities to show people ads. You cant show too many ads digitally because people will get worked up. They dont click on them, they stop going to the site or use ad blockers. Also, now more and more people are spending time in an ad-free environment like Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime. So the opportunity to show ads has declined significantly.

Besides, who are you exposing your ad to? If you are relatively wealthy you can afford all these subscription services. If you are less wealthy and cant afford these services, then you are also not in the market for some products. If you are selling a car or a travel holiday, then these are not the people who can afford that. So the people I want to advertise for are not available. India may be different now, but it is moving in that direction.

The future is not just about advertising but connecting in new ways with people. So our focus is on marketing transformation and business transformation, which is why we bought companies like Epsilon (a first-party data company) and Sapient which is about digital and technology.

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The soul of a business is the story, not the spreadsheets: Rishad Tobaccowala - Livemint

In 2013, AHS Consulting founder Amna Shah started boosting her business'spresence on Facebook. She and her employees worked to build out a page with information about the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company, and posted new content multiple times a week. Toattract potential customers, staffers crafted ads and paid to boost exposure of posts.

Shah knew consumer-facing brands may be better suited for Facebook's advertising and paid marketing, but assumed hers, too, could find an audience. Some existing customers interacted with the brand, and likes piled up. But Shah says no one new from Chattanooga or the nearbyAtlanta regionseemed to be finding her consulting firmthrough the platform--only some individuals from India and China.

"Over time, we started to think these were fake profiles," she says."We got no new business out of Facebook, ever." Halfway through 2018, the company stopped putting effort into Facebook marketing.

Shah is far from alone. In a November survey, Inc. asked CEOs and other high-rankingexecutivesfrom fast-growing companies what they think about Facebook from a business perspective. Thirty-two percent said they are now getting less for their marketing dollars with Facebook than they used to, while 27 percent said they mistrust Facebook's use of their business data. In follow-up interviews, several of the survey takers said theyhave slowed their use of Facebook marketing and advertising. Afew, meanwhile, have pulled the plug altogether.

For years Facebook has pouredenergy into targeting and educating small businesses, growinga team of publicists and outreach employees.As of 2018, more than 140 million businesses globally used Facebook, at least 90 million of which were smalland midsized businesses, according to the company. Veronica Twombly, the head of communications for Facebook Small Business, says SMBsare a "top priority" for the platform.

"We are trying to elevate our free and paid solutions to make sure these small- and medium-sized businesses know all of the tools at their disposal to help grow their customers," Twombly tells Inc. The company offers digital training for businesses, and held more than 100 in-person training sessions in the United States in 2019.

Facebook in the past has acknowledged the growing cost of its advertising for business, even as user growth has slowed. Finance chief David Wehner said in an investor conference call that in the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, the average price per ad climbed 43 percent, while the number of ad impressions served increased just 4 percent. Still, Twombly says the company is continuing to see growth in monthly active advertisers.

Several of the executives that told Inc. theyhave stopped advertising on Facebook over the past year were from business-to-business companies, which often can findcustomers more reliably on LinkedIn or through other marketing channels. Butothers outside of the B2B realmhave followed suit.One example is Jack Wight, the founder ofan electronics reseller thatadvertisedaggressively to individuals on Facebook in 2018but pulled the plug on the effort the following year.

"We weren't making any money on those people by the time we paid for the advertising," says Wight, the chief executive of Buyback Boss, which is based in Tempe, Arizona. "The marketing cost was just higher than other channels."

Wight estimates his company spent about $20,000 on Facebook ads over the course of a year,before giving up on Facebook about seven months ago. For 2020, his company is using a strategy of SEO and Adwords to find people who type in, for example, "sell my iPhone 10" on Google.

A Buyback Bossemployee who had been handling the company's Facebook presence and advertising now focuseson search marketing. Wight says he's open to resuming adspending onFacebook--but only after he's scaled the other marketing channels he's found more effective.

"We put some money into it, we risked some money to experiment," he says, "and it just didn't work."

Published on: Jan 10, 2020

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Facebook Used to Be an Essential Marketing Tool. These CEOs Are Doing Just Fine Without It - Inc.

30-second summary:

Most marketers already know they can capitalize on artificial intelligence (AI) to make more informed decisions, better engage their target audiences, and drive revenue for their organizations.

Yet, according to a Demandbase survey released in 2019, only 18% of B2B marketers and sales professionals are currently using the tech.

The same study also found that 67% of marketers expect higher lead quality from AI, and 56% believe the technology can help yield better engagement with customers and prospects.

So, whats holding marketers back from using it?

While marketers recognize the value that the tech can deliver, they often lack the perfect combination of prioritized sweet-spot use cases, people/organizational capacity, and technology to effectively execute an AI strategy.

Unfortunately, by not mastering this trio, marketers are putting themselvesand their companiesat risk of becoming obsolete.

Experts from McKinsey & Company predict that AI technologies could lead to a substantial performance gap between front-runners (who fully absorb artificial intelligence tools across their enterprises) and non-adopters or partial adopters by 2030.

AI front-runners are projected to potentially double cash flow by 2020, with implied net cash-flow growth of roughly 6% for through 2030, while non-adopters might experience around a 20% decline in cash flow from todays levels.

To avoid falling behind and to begin reaping the benefits, every marketer must prioritize identifying the best-fit use cases, hiring and/or developing the right people, and implementing the right technology in the year ahead.

The AI landscape is littered with failed projects, so heres what to keep in mind to increase your likelihood of success:

While there may be hundreds of AI use cases that a marketer will eventually want to execute on, marketers should first map out their top candidates according to two dimensions: value and feasibility.

Its okay to first think big, but then you need to narrow the list.

Among the common use cases are the following: intelligent chatbots, smarter personalized digital advertising, content generation and curation, AI-powered account or lead scoring, AI-assisted email responses, multi-channel marketing attribution, next best action, customer lifetime value, and sentiment analysis.

Marketers should estimate the value delivered for each use case (potential upside revenue, time-to-market, reduced manual labor, customer satisfaction), as well as time and effort it will take to see actionable results.

If the use case isnt both highly valuable and highly feasible and if you dont know how youll act on the predictive results then it should be taken off the short-term wish list.

Marketers who are unsure of where to start should consider assessing the value of these common high-impact applications:

Once marketing teams have identified the processes they want to apply AI to, they can start to identify the individuals who will lead the implementations and the technologies they need to bring those use cases to life.

The skillsets of the modern-day marketer are fast-evolving.

With the number of digital customer touchpoints that marketers need to managewhich includes everything from desktops and mobile devices, to social media and beyondmarketers need to consume, analyze, and leverage endless amounts of data to inform decisions.

That data is especially crucial for fueling valuable AI applications; without it, the systems wont have the necessary information they need to generate mission-critical insightssuch as predicting consumer behavior or creating truly personalized content.

Its no surprise then that Marketing Lands January 2019 Digital Agency Survey found 72% of agency marketers said data science and analysis will be the most in-demand technical skills in the coming years, followed by conversion rate optimization (59%), and computer science/AI and technical SEO (52% each).

Unfortunately, those skills are hard to come by; according to Indeed, the number of individuals searching for AI-related jobs decreased by 14.5% from May 2018 to May 2019. They also found that demand for data scientists increased by 344% from 2013 to 2019, yet the talent pool grew by just 14% in 2018.

Although the talent shortage certainly presents challenges for marketers, there are ways around it. Marketers can identify internal citizen data scientists.

These are individuals who possess deep domain knowledge and have a strong analytics background, but not formal data science training.

With the right tools and training, citizen data scientists can get up to speed on the organizations AI strategy quickly.

Additionally, marketers should consider hiring an AI consultant to support their initiatives or looking to their platform provider for guidance on AI strategies in the near-term while they work on adding AI to their marketing DNA and building it as a competency over the longer-term.

Regardless of the use case, there are different approaches marketers can take to leverage AI in marketing processes.

Marketers know well that there are some 7,000+ different vendor tools that could be leveraged in a martech stack, and an exponentially increasing number of those incorporate some AI, or at least claim to do so.

The most common approach taken by marketers today is to leverage AI that comes built-into a martech tool and that is optimized for just that one-point solution or capability.

That means marketers might have 10 different AI tools for ten different capabilities, but thats the most frequent approach today that gets fast time-to-market without having to hire or develop the AI competency in-house on day one.

While having those point solutions may work today for certain problems, the reality is that some of the highest value problems in marketing or customer loyalty cant be solved by a point tool.

Use cases such as next best offer, cross-sell/up-sell, churn prediction and reduction, customer experience optimization, price elasticity modeling, customer satisfaction, and others require a broader enterprise solution.

To that end, finding the right AI technology or platform backed by some business transformation help is absolutely critical to marketers AI success.

Here are three considerations for success when selecting AI technologies:

The impact of AI is being felt across all industries, and the savviest marketers are prioritizing getting their AI strategies in motion to maintain their organizations competitive advantage.

But in the AI-driven era, its not enough for marketers to be interested in AI; to be truly successful, theyll need to think critically about the processes, people, and technology that will be core to their AI missions.

Those that master that combination will be easy to identify, as their organizations will dominate for years to come.

Bill Hobbib is responsible for global marketing at DataRobot with over 25 years of experience marketing disruptive technologies to organizations of all sizes, including more than a decade in the data management, analytics, and SaaS space.

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AI in marketing: How to find the right use cases, people and technology - ClickZ

Rush drummer Neil Peart during a performance at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas in 2002. (Ethan Miller/Reuters)

Neil Peart, the Canadian drummer and leader of the Seventies hard-rock band Rush, has died. Peart had battled brain cancer for three years.

I saw Peart and his band perform at the now-demolished New Haven Coliseum during Rushs Power Windows tour in 1985 (I think), and he was even more phenomenal in person than he was on the records. Fan polls routinely agreed he was the greatest rock drummer of his time (or indeed of all time, I would argue, though some would go with Keith Moon). Im not sure any rock track boasts drumming that can match Pearts breathtaking work on the 1981 song Tom Sawyer

Unusually for a drummer, Peart also wrote the big majority of his bands lyrics, which were among the most ambitious ever attempted in the hard-rock space. Like many other rock lyricists (Roger Waters, Pete Townshend), Peart was a genius at tapping into the restless alienation of late-teen boys who think theyre smarter than everyone around them. It occurred to me many years later that its an odd kind of gift, to keep your mind stuck in that mode of detachment, anger and frustration as you advance into middle age and accumulate mansions and supermodel girlfriends. Peart told Rolling Stone four years ago, I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept. Well, no one wants to hear rock lyrics about property taxes and the failings of the kitchen staff.

He also labeled himself a libertarian and in youth dabbled in Ayn Randism, naming Rushs 1975 song Anthem for her1937 novel Anthem, which was among George Orwells influences for 1984, and crediting Rand in the liner notes for her influence on the 1976 Rush album 2112.What teen boy didnt also flirt with Rand? To persist with a Rand fixation is not the mark of a healthy mind, though. When asked in 2012 (again in Rolling Stone) if Rands words still spoke to him, he said, Oh, no. That was 40 years ago.Peart did retain his libertarianism, after a fashion. He explained:

In that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal because Im an idealist. Paul Therouxs definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, Ive brought my view and also Ive just realized this Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and were all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And thats when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. Thatll do.

Peart died in Santa Monica on January 7. R.I.P.

Link:
Farewell to Rocks Greatest Drummer (and Randian) - National Review

Libertarians have been among the most vocal critics of President Trump's decision to order the killing of Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani. But there was actually a time when there were prominent libertarians who advocated assassination as an alternative to war.

It's worth noting that the libertarian objections to the Soleimani killing fall into two broad categories. One has to do with the question of whether Trump had the legal authority to order the attack without Congress. But the other is the substantive criticism of whether it's a good idea to take out a prominent foreign leader.

In the past, however, there has been a strand of libertarian thought that actually saw targeted killings of America's enemies as a way to eliminate threats without the need for major military engagements that killed civilians. To be clear, this doesn't mean it was a universally accepted position among libertarians (as if such a thing exists), but it was a prominent one.

Harry Browne, who was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, explicitly argued that the United States should offer a bounty on the heads of our enemies. In Why Government Doesn't Work, the manifesto for his 1996 campaign, he made the case against the first Iraq War for its toll on innocent victims. "Assume Saddam Hussein really was a threat," he posited. "Is that a reason to kill innocent people and expose thousands of Americans to danger? Isnt there a better way for a President to deal with a potential enemy?"

As an alternative, he argued that the president could publicly deliver a message to Hussein, explaining the U.S. meant no harm to the Iraqi people and proposing $20 million be given as a reward to the person who assassinates him. "Everyone in the world is eligible for the reward: American citizens, citizens of other countries, Iraqi citizens, members of your Palace Guard, your cabinet even your wives."

Browne went on to explain: "There are brave, daring, ingenious, ambitious people in the world who would love to try for such a reward. At least one of them would probably be successful. But, what is more important, the potential for such success should dissuade anyone from threatening us."

He wrote: "Would the President be condoning cold-blooded killing? Yes but of just one guilty person, rather than of the thousands of innocents who die in bombing raids."

In the wake of Sept. 11 and as a presidential candidate, Ron Paul advocated that the U.S. enlist the help of private individuals to capture terrorists by issuing "letters of marque and reprisal." He proposed a bill that would have allowed "Congress to authorize the President to specifically target Bin Laden and his associates using non-government armed forces. Since it is nearly impossible for U.S. intelligence teams to get close to Bin Laden, the marque and reprisal approach creates an incentive for people in Afghanistan or elsewhere to turn him over to the [United States].

But he later criticized the raid that killed bin Laden, arguing that the U.S. should have worked with Pakistan.

There are specific circumstances surrounding the Soleimani killing that may make it particularly objectionable to libertarians. But the idea of targeting bad actors as an alternative to large-scale bombing raids is not incompatible with noninterventionist foreign policy sentiments.

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Prominent libertarians once advocated assassination as an alternative to war - Washington Examiner