I hope you're staying warm this week. Kind of makes my Scott of the Antarcticepisode last week seem prescient.
As always, I'm looking to provide more value than a bunch of curated links (even though that's pretty valuable itself), so here's a quote I'm thinking about:
"Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions."
– Nicolo Machiavelli
Hey, here's an immediate need: can you share this newsletter? It would help other people get just as smart as you.
Who can you trust these days? Is Alexa dangerous? What happens when new mobility meets the U.S. legal system? What concerns CEOs most in 2019? Why aren't DTC brands saying yes to Amazon? What 10 social media trends will matter most? What's the secret sauce of podcast advertising? How is streaming turning into cable's business model? Should you be able to monetize your own data? Is it time to regulate influencers? How are marketers changing their TV attribution strategies? Are digital detoxes solutions looking for problems? When can I come speak to your team? The answer to these questions and more await in the Believe Me edition of The Full Monty for the week of January 28, 2019.
The Full Monty makes you smarter faster, by curating the essential business intelligence every week. Links are below with commentary in italics. Please sign up for our email updates to make sure you don't miss a thing.
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Top Story
"Can I be honest with you?"
That question should spark immediate suspicion. Because it connotes that the person asking the question (a) isn't usually honest with you, and (b) is about to bring down a hammer of sorts.
Here's the thing: we have a problem right now with the truth and trust. The #3 issue keeping CMOs up at night is establishing trust.
It's apt then that the latest edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer came out last week. Also ironic that Mark Zuckerberg's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal ("The Facts About Facebook") was the same untrustworthy stuff we've heard from him — such as the old canard "We don't sell people's data." No, you sell access to people by using their data. Semantics.
And entirely transparent that Zuckerberg used the WSJ as the medium for his message. Facebook has systematically weakened the news industry, and its CEO can't publish this on his own page? Oh, right: regulators don't necessarily follow him on Facebook, but they do read the WSJ opinion pages.
Ever since getting caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has said that its #1 mission is to establish trust (I won't say "restore," because that implies they had it in the first place). But gaffe after gaffe has seemingly obliterated that platitude.
As you read though the links this week, take a good look at how many of them have to do with a lack or breach or trust, or an absence of honesty.
It's an epidemic. And the brand that figure out how to be authentic, believable, and trustworthy stand to win.
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About this week's image:
The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1760) illustrates a famous passage from Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2). After a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse—the horse being the emblem of Troy—and hid a select force of men inside including Ulysses (Odysseus). The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.
Artificial Intelligence / Autonomous
The latest in A.I., machine learning, and bots; mobility and autonomous everything. Aʀᴛɪꜰɪᴄɪᴀʟ Iɴᴛᴇʟʟɪɢᴇɴᴄᴇ / Mᴀᴄʜɪɴᴇ Lᴇᴀʀɴɪɴɢ
We're just at the beginning of voice assistants. Soon, they may be much more than humble servants. Which leads some to ask: is Alexa dangerous? Which really stems from a wider question of trust. (The Atlantic) Alexa, are you dangerous?
Alexa is now delivering headlines in a "newscaster" voice. When U.S. users ask "what's the latest?" the device will use direct waveform modeling to respond in the tone used by anchorpeople. (TechCrunch) I wonder if we'll be able to pick the newscaster voice that's the most trustworthy to us? Imagine if Walter Cronkite or Sean Hannity answered.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit is open-sourcing Neo-AI for machine learning. This will serve as a framework for optimizing A.I. models on other platforms, such as Google's TensorFlow, Nvidia, and others. (VentureBeat)
The technology behind Libratus, the A.I. bot that defeated human poker champions in 2017, has been contracted by the Pentagon for $10 million. The technology will be used for military strategy, planning, and simulations. (Outer Places) But not for shutdown negotiations, obvs.
Waymo will be assembling self-driving vehicles in Michigan. (Medium) Note: assembling, not building. Waymo relies on other auto manufacturers to integrate its own hardware and software.
Automakers may have overestimated how many people actually want electric cars. (Quartz) From the department of 'duh.' It's likely rooted in low gas prices and automakers' need to have a higher price point than consumers want.
Driver-assistance systems have too many different names. AAA found that there are 40 different brand names used to describe automatic emergency braking, 20 different names for adaptive cruise control and 19 terms of lane-keeping assistance. (Roadshow)
Communications / Marketing / Business Strategy
Industry developments and trends, including advertising & marketing, journalism, customer experience, content, and influencer relations.
Under a threat of potential jail time, a group of British online influencers have agreed to change how they post online after their social media profiles were investigated by the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority. (CNN Business)
Notably, people said they trust their own employer to do what's right.
But major gaps of trust exist between the informed and uninformed public.
There was a massive rise in news engagement — to the tune of 22 percent.
Journalism took a major hit last week with over 1,000 layoffs in media jobs in one day, including from BuzzFeed, Gannett, and Verizon Media. (Axios) This comes amidst a battle for supremacy from tech giants like Facebook and Google, an already eviscerated local news landscape, and the ubiquitous availability of free content everywhere.
Here's what concerns CEOs the most in 2019, including recession fears (external) and talent quality and leadership development (internal). (The Conference Board)
Personalization is needed more than ever. But how do you do it at scale? It's really all about knowing your audience and serving them up what matters to them, ideally based on what you know - such as their purchase history. IRI has the solution in their latest FREE webinar: How to Improve Audience Targeting for Your CPG Ad Campaigns. (IRI Worldwide)
Retail Apocalypse
Humans are a transactional species, and the practice — if not the very notion of what retail is — is undergoing a historical metamorphosis.
Amazon knows that direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands own the relationships with their customers (and the rich data that results from it). And Amazon wants a piece of it. But the DTC brands aren't falling for it. (Digiday)
Amazon will begin testing its robot Scout, for delivery of one- and two-day shipping. (Wired) We'll see how long it takes for thieves go from grabbing packages off porches to simply loading Scout into the back of a van.
Millennials have been credited with upending entire industries, and retail is no exception. Here's what retailers need to know about attracting and retaining consumers from a maturing generation of digital shoppers. (eMarketer) And technically, it's not just Millennials; it's anyone from any generation who is doing more online.
News to know about relevant social media and technology platforms that may affect your business.
How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities. (The Verge) The bad news for large players like Facebook is that it takes human curation, approvals, and interaction, and that it seems to work well in manageable numbers (Vermont's is about 160,000 members). The good news is that it serves as a model for brand- or interest-based communities.
Related: the 10 social media trends that will matter most this year. (Search Engine Journal)
Fᴀᴄᴇʙᴏᴏᴋ / Iɴsᴛᴀɢʀᴀᴍ / WʜᴀᴛsAᴘᴘ
The biggest news about Facebook dropped on Friday, with the announcement that the back ends of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger would be integrated, allowing users of any of those Facebook-owned platforms to be able to message each other across platforms. (The New York Times) This is widely seen as an effort to leapfrog regulators, to make it more difficult to break Facebook up.
Twitter is beginning to roll out a redesigned interface for web users, including the addition of an emoji button and an update to its trending section. (The Verge) I've been using it for the last couple of weeks; it's very similar to the mobile app.
The latest in the world of streaming video, audio, and the advertising, pricing and bundling models related to them. Vɪᴅᴇᴏ
How the success of Netflix's Bird Box, which was watched by 58% of its user base in its first month, drives Netflix's virtuous cycle as an aggregator. (Stratechery)
Hulu is lowering the price for its least expensive subscription plan while raising the cost of its live TV offering, a move that aims to bolster its subscriber numbers while increasing the margins on its most expensive plan. (The Wall Street Journal)
Internet video stream cord-cutting services started as cheap alternatives to cable television, but now they are duplicating cable's business models with similar costs. (ZDNet) What's past is prologue. The media industry has little imagination or variation on its models.
Program of the Week: Mo Rocca hosts Mobituaries, an irreverent but deeply researched appreciation of the people (and things) of the past who have long intrigued him.
Please subscribe to The Full Monty podcast, our own 5-minute weekly business commentary. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
Do try this at home: "Alexa, play the latest episode of The Full Monty."
Business disruptions in the legal, regulatory, and computer security fields, from hacking to the on-demand economy and more.Pʀɪᴠᴀᴄʏ / Sᴇᴄᴜʀɪᴛʏ / Hᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ
How to protect yourself from getting your Nest device hacked. (Tom's Guide) It's a simple matter of self-education that's necessary when you buy with connected devices.
Facebook may be facing a record fine from the FTC over its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. (Recode)
Rᴇɢᴜʟᴀᴛᴏʀʏ / Oɴ-Dᴇᴍᴀɴᴅ Eᴄᴏɴᴏᴍʏ
With so much money flooding into a largely unregulated, still-developing market, all sorts of ethical lapses are bound to ensue, and indeed they have. Is It Time to Regulate Influencers? (NY Mag)
A look inside Uber's Special Investigations Unit, a 60+ team handling severe reported incidents, nearly 1,200/week, often leading to stress and emotional trauma. (CNN Business)
Instacart admits that it uses tips to calculate how it pays workers. In other words, if a customer leaves a large tip, Instacart figures it doesn't have to add much in, so the tip becomes the wage. (Working Washington) Possibly illegal? Certainly unconscionable.
Measurement / Analytics / Data
The future is not in plastics, but in data. Those who know how to measure and analyze it will rule the world.
How can you energize your team and give them actionable ideas for boosting customer engagement? It's all about applying Timeless Wisdom to your process — practical and relatable lessons drawn from historical and literary contexts.
Combine this with Fortune 10 executive experience and some great stories, and you'll be happy that you spent a fraction of what it costs to send your team to a major conference. I'll spend anywhere from an hour to a whole day with your team and give them the power to develop trusted, lasting relationships with your customers.
Let's chat and see if I can customize a session for you.
Mental Nourishment
Other links to help you reflect, improve, or simply learn something new.
The company that bought Necco, Round Hill Investments LLC, shut down the plant that produced Sweethearts last year. As a result, this will be the first year since 1866 that you won't be able to buy those candy hearts imprinted with messages. (The Guardian) Do they make one that says "TOO BAD"?
Digital detoxes: are these well-meaning practices just solutions looking for problems? Technology isn't inherently bad, so detoxing isn't inherently good either. (Quartz) "Why, then, 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison." —Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.
If you've been to New York, you've undoubtedly gone past the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue. Perhaps you've even gone inside for a bit. But have you really seen it? This video tour has the hidden details of the New York Public Library. (Architectural Digest)
Top image credit: (public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
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