Thought Starters provides me with a chance to review and highlight some of the more important or interesting research and opinions that I’ve read over the last week or so. This edition looks at growth of mobile stickers, evolution of media and its implications for business and consumers and a look at the energy sector’s attempts to address climate change among other things:
Stickers have become a staple of the Asian mobile sector and are beginning to make their presence felt elsewhere. Connie Chan looks at how it’s shaping new forms of communication and how WeChat and Line are looking to capitalise on their use:
And sometimes stickers can convey what words cannot! This form of visual communication has become so popular in Asia — especially in China’s WeChat and Japan’s LINE [Line] — that it is not uncommon to see a deep thread of multiple messages without a single word. They’re not just for those crazy young kids. More notably, stickers are commonly used in professional, not just personal, chats as well. Not so frivolous after all. In fact, stickers are so core to the success of Line, that its CEO actually credited them as the “turning point” for that app. He shared that it took Line Messenger almost four months to find its first two million users … but after stickers were launched, it took only two days to find the next million. The company now makes over $270M a year just from selling stickers.
The inexorable rise of social media can be seen in its growing importance as consumers’ main source of news (and the inevitable demise of television news and newspapers):
GlobalWebIndex’s research points to markets where ecommerce is most popular among consumers with a mixture of developed and emerging markets holding sway:
Tal Shachar plots how the evolution of digital marketing has eroded FMCG companies’ hold on consumers purchasing and is beginning to open the way for new market entrants and expanding choice for consumers:
Since the dot com boom, the promise of the internet in fundamentally changing distribution, marketing, advertising and consumption has never fully lived up to the hype. While the major web services sucked the air out of classifieds and newspaper advertising, digital seemed unable to truly slay the beast that is TV advertising. And although consumer choice became more plentiful, the process of shopping for, purchasing and receiving products did not change as much as many had hoped. We still lived in an age determined and defined by the limitations and inefficiencies of the marketing funnel. But the rise of new distribution and marketing channels, on-demand infrastructure and consumer tracking stands to dramatically reshape this funnel, collapsing it in on itself, opening up new battlegrounds for brand competition and ushering in significantly more consumer choice. Time to get shopping.
Media spend on television advertising has shown robust health despite the growth in alternative digital advertising formats. Matthew Ball warns that this is not the time for complacency among the television networks as advertisers are offered a growing array of alternatives to the 30 second television spot:
This is certainly impressive, but it can’t go on forever. Not only is digital’s share of total consumer media time spent already at 50%, you have to believe TV will cede share if digital and mobile continue to grow. And they will.
The television business may say that’s fine – the loss/cannibalization of share doesn’t mean the nominal loss of spend as long as total ad spend increases. Yet this defense, too, is somewhat off the mark. Contrary to common belief, advertising has never been a growth business. For the past hundred years, national ad spend has been confined to a stable 1.1-1.5% of GDP (excluding WW2).
One advertiser that’s vying for a share of the television advertising pie is Snapchat. Christopher Heine profiles the company’s ambitious moves into online advertising as it looks to justify its $20bn valuation:
That growth is essential if it is to hit its goals. According to recently leaked documents from inside the company, Snapchat, a $59 million business as of last year, aims to haul in $250 million to $350 million this year and $500 million to $1 billion by the end of 2017. To accomplish that, the company will have to convince a greater slice of the population that they need another social network on their mobile devices; it must persuade consumers that an app that opens as a camera—often confusing to first-time users—is a vital addition to their digital lives. And it is no small feat to go from more than 150 million daily users to, say, 300 million. Just ask Twitter.
Ethereum is arguably the brightest light in the rapidly emerging blockchain sector and the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is one of the most interesting innovations to emerge from the platform. DAO offered an investment vehicle without the intermediaries traditionally associated with financial services taking advantage of the application of smart contracts. Unfortunately flaws in the DAOs code enabled hackers to siphon off funds. Whilst this doesn’t exactly make for a ringing endorsement of smart contracts and blockchain technology, it has made for an important learning exercise for the community and has raised some important questions as Matt Levine comments:
The most fascinating thing about the DAO hack may be the way it exposes these tensions. To true believers in smart contracts, there is no problem here. The system is fine; the failures — writing bad code and not anticipating this attack — were trivial, mere human error.Next time, write better smart contracts and you’ll be fine. To those true believers, changing the code after the fact — even to conform it to almost-everyone’s reasonable expectations about how the DAO would work — would be a betrayal of the smart-contract ideal.
On the other hand, to the humans who read the English descriptions of the DAO and invested their money based on their reasonable expectations, their losses probably do seem like a problem. You can’t really base the financial system of the future on computers rather than humans, on trusting to immutable code no matter what happens. Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong.
An interesting counterpoint to the earlier Tal Shachar article is research which points to a decline in the number of startups launching in the US and James Surowiecki points to the damage this may do to the long term health of its economy:
But there is a catch. While Stern and Guzman show that high-growth firms are being formed as actively as ever, they also find that these companies are not succeeding as often as such companies once did. As the researchers put it, “Even as the number of new ideas and potential for innovation is increasing, there seems to be a reduction in the ability of companies to scale in a meaningful and systematic way.” As many seeds as ever are being planted. But fewer trees are growing to the sky.
Climate change is one issue the world cannot simply wish away. We are beginning to see growth in renewable energy aided by the falling price of solar energy. Unfortunately the transport sector has been less successful in switching to low carbon technologies. Tom Randall profiles a valuable look at key trends in the energy sector, highlighting some of the successes and the hurdles faced in the move toward a greener future:
The tragic death of Jo Cox has brought the issue of Britain’s European Union referendum into sharp relief. John Oliver has some relevant and rather amusing words to say on the topic it and it should give you some idea of where I stand on the issue:
The featured image is an Ellen Rutt mural in Cleveland, Ohio and found on The Inspiration.
If you’ve got any thoughts or opinions on any of the above please let me know.
