This last week has seen a flurry of acquisitions and new product announcements. Facebook acquired Oculus Rift, adding to its growing collection of tech businesses. Disney acquired Maker Studios, recognising the growing value of YouTube celebrity and new breed content producers. BT is gearing up to get back into mobile telephony in a bid to protect its fixed line business, with the potential to offer ‘quad-play’ household packages across broadband, telephony and TV. And in ad tech, Microsoft announced the roll out of a programmatic video network, while AOL launched its ‘One Platform’ to try to make sense and simplify digital ad technology.
Unless you’ve been living under some kind of marketing rock, you’ll know that it’s Advertising Week London. In a bid to pack the rooms of BAFTA, many sessions this week are featuring celebrity guests. If you’re still deciding what to see, and aren’t fussed about celeb-spotting, here’s The Drum’s round up of sessions to attend. We can’t help but notice how the agenda is dominated by media organisations, agencies and topics. Where are our creative agency brethren, and why isn’t commercial creativity a bigger part of the agenda?
IBM is the latest of the global business services to launch a division dedicated to interactive product and experience design, helping brands to join the dots between new digital services, data collection, IT logistics and user experience design. This is another indication that what might have been marketing-driven activities (eg user experience) are increasingly becoming strategic business priorities.
Here’s a typically provocative interview from Seth Godin on what the marketing community has been getting wrong in the internet age: that assuming the linear relationship between advertising (buying attention) and sales works in the world of internet marketing. The new world of marketing is about making products and services that become brand stories in their own right – not trying to pay for attention.
What can Tinder teach us about the future of interactive design? Cards could shape the future of design: here’s a point-of-view on why this might be the case. Though we are sceptical about any one thing being ‘the future’, it does make an important point about how we shape the design of brand experiences for a world increasingly driven by gesture.
One of Pixar’s key management tools is the Braintrust, a working group that shapes the direction of and solves any problems with their key projects. This is a fascinating look at how they use this system to take their projects from okay to outstanding.
Here’s a great example of ‘social proof’ in action: San Francisco’s TWIT projects uses live billboards to name and shame drivers who are texting as they drive.
How do you bring branded glassware together with musical talent? This is how: Stella Artois recently collaborated with New York designer Andy Cavatorta and indie band Cold War Kids to create an entirely new set of musical instruments as a tribute to the Belgian brand’s signature goblets – The Chalice Symphony.
The weather, particularly in the UK, shapes more buying decisions than we may realise. The Weather Channel has launched a smart platform, Weather FX, that can use changes in weather to predict consumer demand for products – and shape when to advertise to capitalise on brand demand.
Some 80% of Twitter users want to see Twitter get better at sorting and improving how it filters its increasingly busy news feeds. This is at the heart of Twitter’s problems as it tries to regain its momentum in user growth following its high profile IPO. This is a great look at the issues it is facing, and how it is evolving to tackle them.
In the UK, 4G might still feel like a relatively new technology, but it seems we should already be turning our attention to 5G. Bell Labs predicts that by 2025 we’ll see a widespread roll out and adoption of 5G – for a new generation this may mean a world where we’re constantly connected at high speed on every device.
While we’re looking into the future, MTV has launched a new global project aimed at getting under the skin of the issues faced by youth audiences over the next decade. MTV Knowing Youth: 2020 Vision explores young people’s outlook on the world and their vision for the future – more competitive, less secure, but nonetheless full of opportunity.
An ever-increasing number of global marketing organisations are developing incubators for start-ups. Unilever has unveiled the seven start-ups that will take part in its ‘Go Global’ incubator initiative. Some of the winning start-ups include: Africori, NewAer, Songza, LifeSum, and Thoughtful Media Group.
Lending Works is the latest UK-based start-up to join the peer-to-peer lending sector, going up against the likes of Zopa, RateSetter and Funding Circle. It has just raised £3.5 million pre-launch as it gears up to enter the market, and will try to differentiate its offering through the provision of greater levels of protection offered to lenders.
King, and its flagship, Candy Crush, are among the UK’s best start-up successes, having IPOed for more than $7 billion. This post tells the story of the business and why we should all hope that King goes from strength-to-strength.
See you next week.