planet andrew

Some interesting insights... all reinforce that the channels are adding to and broadening traditional distribution and reach.

Nielsen, OzTAM and Regional TAM reported that 95% of households have at least one digital TV set, up from 90% in the first quarter of 2011. Some 70% receive digital stations on all of the sets they used.

• During a typical month, the typical person watched 113 hours and 38 minutes of television, rising by six hours 31 minutes on an annual basis.
• 44% of Australian households possessed PVRs or other time-shifting technology, and the average amount of time dedicated to playing back content has grown by four hours and 31 minutes, to 12 hours, since Q4 2010.
• 77% of homes are connected to the internet, and Australians normally spend 43 hours 54 minutes using this medium on a PC per month.
• Watching any form of online video, from broadcast content to user-generated clips, contributed three hours and 27 minutes to this total.
• 49% of Australians aged over 14 years old now own a smartphone. This total has grown from 35% at the start of 2011.
• Smartphone subscribers spent 1 hour 20 minutes watching all forms of video through this route by the end of last year, measured against 35 minutes in the first quarter.
• 10% of metropolitan households now own one or more tablets, with 5% of the online population viewing video content in this way by the close of last year, up from 2% at the end of 2010.

Interesting read on Bloomberg about retailers shuttering their Facebook stores. What's surprising is that they didn't try new concepts all together. Why would you shop the same experience in Facebook that you could have on the web? If the alternate store is one bookmarked click away, then there is hardly stickiness.

We've had an alternate experience at CBA - the Facebook community is vibrant and its an exciting channel. We don't want another branch in Facebook, we want Facebook to be an extension of our branches. For the two together, to create a better and differentiated experience. Ok, it's early days. And that's why shuttering stores seems remarkably shortsighted. 

It also seems to miss one of the killer elements that Facebook offers us all - a compelling and low-cost platform on which to experience and play. Play is the key factor. It is what people do when they get there. I wonder how many of these retailers tried to reinvent retailing as a game in facebook? 

We'd give Facebook an "F" for fun, and and "A" for marketing impact.

Enjoyed this read and thought this bit was spot on:

We have finally understood and came to terms with the fact that we could no longer sustain that method of working in an environment where we now know there are much much better collaborative and knowledge sharing tools out there with social software. We are finally embracing that notion that we need to smarten up in our very own use of email, even if that implies playing games, and start considering how email is no longer the king and master of the corporate world, but just another useful tool for certain types of interactions where it is rather suited for the job.

I'm not sure what is going on in the UK but here in Australia online banking is the norm. I'd argue banks big and small are passionately pursuing digital innovation - something that keeps us all on our toes.

There are several drivers.

First, IT and particularly smartphone penetration is amongst the highest in the world. Banking has increasingly become a companion activity. We see this every night in our data. People sit down to watch TV and start paying bills and checking balances.

Second, banks here invested ahead of demand - especially CBA. Take contactless terminals - they are everywhere. In the US you will struggle to find them. What that means is ideas like tap-and-go payments made possible by Kaching suddenly have very broad appeal. We've also invested many hundreds of millions of dollars creating one of the most modern core banking platforms in the world. What this means is instant visibility into account status and real-time payments. This not only puts people in control of their money, but makes the digital world more secure and meaningful.

We are past the digital tipping point. A new world of banking is upon us - a world that will start on small screens everywhere. The key to unlocking this innovation isn't dollars. They are important and they must flow at some point, but in reality they are realitvely small in the context of any Banks overal P&L.

The crux of the issue is culture. To fully capture the online opportunity any business needs to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship - one that harnesses their natural strengths in things like Risk and Security -- and applies them to new challenges. THe culture needs to be based on "yes" principles rather than "no". Most importantly, it has to be maniacly passionate about customer - about surprising and delighting them.

Once the right culture is in place and tested, innovations like Kaching and the CBA property app flow. Interestingly, culture is hard to replicate and hard to compete against.

It also makes for a pretty fun place to be.

Most marketers in tech - and most inudstries -- obsess over the funnel. At what point and what rate are we converting people from awareness to consideration to buying and loyalty. There are as many funnel taxonomies as there are views on how to move someone through the funnel.

But does the funnel matter for all purchases? Arguably not. Think of a good burger - lots of awareness, lots of loyalty, not much of a funnel. The argument has long been that the funnel matters most for any capital purchase. But as Aaker points out, as industries mature and we accept basic quality and performance benchmarks exist, funnels start to collapse. Relating his experience of replacing his computer, he says "there was no funnel experience, I passed by awareness, comprehension, and preference and skipped directly to purchase. Makes me wonder about the logic of many marketing programs as well as accompanying analytical efforts to measure results."

Knowing where a funnel matters most, and where it matters less, is critical. Aaker makes a key point that for many, brand awareness up front might not even matter and can be replaced by recommendation. I've long argued that most marketers would do well to focus on replacing awareness with recommendation.

How do you drive recommendation?

For those of you looking for a Flat White in NYC, look no further than Toby's Estate. You'll also be able to experience Pro Barristas pouring hot water into a ceramic double dripper from a Hario kettle, or pulling a carefully calibrated shot of espresso from one of only two La Marzocco Strada machines found stateside.

Work-life balance is something I'll write about more soon. In the meantime, I just stumbled across this quote that is thought-provoking:

“Every one of us can send emails on Sunday night, but how many of us know how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon? If you don’t know how to go to the movies from 2 to 4, you’re in trouble because you’ve just taken on something that unbalances life, but you haven’t rebalanced it with something else.”

Ricardo Semler

Espresso, Intelligentsia from The D4D on Vimeo.

Love what they are up to at Atos. While banning email might seem extreme, it might be the only way to drive change quickly.

“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

Thought you might enjoy this.

I'm a big fan of Evernote. If you are too, try out Clearly in the Chrome store. Great way to reduce the clutter and read.

In one of those must read posts over at HBR the case is well made for a few more Angry Nerds. 

Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse…..

…in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they’d done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn’t. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed.

The original sin behind the Microsoft case was made much worse. The issue wasn’t whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone without Apple’s Safari browser. It was that no other browser would be permitted…

….Developers can’t duplicate functionality already on offer in the Store. They can’t license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple’s.

The content restrictions are unexplored territory. At the height of Windows’s market dominance, Microsoft had no role in determining what software would and wouldn’t run on its machines, much less whether the content inside that software was to be allowed to see the light of screen…

…tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely having competing tech companies—each of which is empowered to censor—solves the problem?

This is especially troubling as governments have come to realize that this framework makes their own censorship vastly easier…

…A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and their generative characteristics. Software was installed one machine at a time, a relationship among myriad software makers and users. Sites could appear anywhere on the Web, a relationship among myriad webmasters and surfers. Now activity is clumping around a handful of portals: two or three OS makers that are in a position to manage all apps (and content within them) in an ongoing way….

….If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.

Great post from Tony over at The MIX. Key points for taking back your attention include:

1. Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors
   What do you truly stand for? How do you want to behave, no matter what? Keep those commitments front and center through your days, both as a source of energy and direction for your behaviors.
2. Build deliberate practices
   Set up ritualized behaviors you do at specific times until they become automatic. For example, begin by doing the most important thing first in the morning, uninterrupted, for 60 to 90 minutes. Make the start time and the stop time inviolable, so you know exactly how long you're going to have to stay the course.
3. Create "precommitments" to minimize temptation
   Our capacity for self-control gets depleted every time we exercise it. Turn off your email entirely at certain times during the day. Consider working at times on a laptop that isn't hooked up to the Internet. Do this for the same reason you should remove alluring foods from your shelves (or avoid all-you-can-eat buffets) when you're on a diet.
4. Start small
   Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress--but not too much stress--and over time your attention will get stronger. What's your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don't go past 90 minutes without a break.