Your attention is limiting business growth
Your attention is starting to limit business growth. So, the common thread today is: How do you spend your time?
Netflix competes for your eyes in the attention economy
Netflix pointed out, for the first time, that it doesn't consider traditional TV companies like HBO as competitors. Instead, competitors are things like Fortnite, that people would rather spend time with.
Netflix says in their investor release: "We earn consumer screen time, both mobile and television, away from a very broad set of competitors. We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO. When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and sign-ups spiked for that time."
The paragraph is fascinating for a few reasons:
- Netflix is competing in a crowded market where attention is a scarce resource, fragmented across content from games to social networks.
- The company admits (perhaps not intentionally?) that attention is now a commodity.
- Netflix is now trying to move consumers from one digital activity into another, rather than convert subscribers.
A peek into the future of marketing
Voice interfaces, AI, privacy, and bite-sized video – there are many disruptive forces impacting marketers today. Within three to four years, a Gartner report predicts the following changes to the marketing landscape.
- CMO’s top priority will no longer be customer experience but profitability.
- AI will boost content creation — including video — by more than a third. Autonomous marketing systems will issue about half of the multichannel marketing messages, leading to a 25 per cent increase in response rates due to greater targeting precision. The bottleneck to personalisation at scale is content, not data.
- Compared to now, consumers will watch nearly 20% fewer video ad minutes each day, leading to more short-form video ads.
- Brands that let users control their marketing data will experience lower customer churn.
- Almost two-thirds of marketing analytics departments will be cut in half since they are not delivering business results. Instead, their time is spent on foundational tasks like data integration and formatting.
(Gartner points out that it has been wrong, as well as correct, in past predictions).
Facebook tries to bring back teen users with a meme-app called LOL
The hunt for a younger demographic has kept Facebook busy for a while now. Their latest idea to attract teenage smartphone owners is an app called LOL - a simple software featuring a feed of memes and GIFs categorised by topics like “animals” and “pranks”.
Facebook is currently testing LOL with 100 high school users, and the design appears similar to Snapchat’s “Discover” tab. It will offer algorithmically curated bundles of videos that users can scroll through and interact with. Some aspects of the user experience are similar to Instagram Stories, with share and reaction buttons at the bottom.
Some recommended reads from around the web:
- Facebook’s "10-year challenge” is just a harmless meme – right? (Wired)
- The Future of AI Will Be About Less Data, Not More (Harvard Business Review)
- The rise and demise of RSS (Vice)
Tool of the week: Airtable
Airtable is part spreadsheet, part database – a bit like Google Docs on drugs. It's super simple to link different spreadsheets together or to have multiple views instead of duplicating content – like a calendar view, a list view, and a "Trello" view. The best thing is: it's up to you!
Airtable comes with a variety of templates that you can start from, or you can create your own from scratch. And people use it for everything from creating organisation charts to content management platforms.
It is, of course, easy to collaborate with your colleagues in Airtable, as well as create input forms for your customers or colleagues to fill in. And, after you’ve designed and configured your Airtable base from the user-friendly graphical interface, Airtable provides an API that can create, read, update, and destroy records.
Airtable is almost too complex to describe in a couple of paragraphs. The best way is to take a look at their different demos and try them out yourself.
