Greek Complexity

Snippets from Techventure 2013

I was invited to participate in a panel at Techventure 2013 this week. Several interesting panels and speeches. I didn't manage to attend all of them but here are some of the more interesting comments I noted:

Arun Poojari of Amobee (now a unit of Singtel)

Very interesting to hear Arun say this given that he speaks as an insider of both the advertising and the telecom industry:

There is an oversupply of mobile inventory today versus demand. Compare this to television where there may be only ten minutes of ad inventory per hour of broadcasting, so you can more readily defend your pricing.

Mobile advertising market is a $4b market today and will be $50b in 5 years.

Tom Clayton, CEO of Bubbly

Minimum charge of 99c on Android is a big hurdle for penetration into prepaid subs in emerging markets. Emerging market subscribers often have a balance smaller than that on their prepaid phones and only top it up with minute quantities whenever they need it. Entrepreneurs in these regions need to be smart about how they monetize in this environment.

The entire digital advertising budget in India last year was $150m across web and mobile. Indonesia is 1/10th of that. You can't build a web or mobile business for markets like this if you're only going to focus on advertising revenue.

Kevin Hale, Partner at Y Combinator

Producing great entrepreneurs and companies needs tension and pressure. YC provides $14-20k to each company. Nothing more. We do not provide personal accommodation or office space. Entrepreneurs have to figure out how to survive 3 months on that and create a big company.

Important for Singapore to figure out how to ensure young people stop thinking "I need more money or need a better team or advisors..." Resourcefulness is more important than all the money, technology and other resources provided to young companies.

Chua Kee Lock, CEO of Vertex Ventures

Why would anyone become an angel investor or an entrepreneur in Singapore? If you have money to invest over a few years, it's much easier to work normal hours and invest money in real estate and make a nearly assured 30% return per year.

Jenny Lee of GGVC

Jenny was named the world's top female VC and 36th overall by Forbes this year. She is an alum of my current firm. She's originally from Singapore but has lived in China for several years now. She's one of the few people I've ever heard say that:

The Singapore government needs to get more involved with the entrepreneurship ecosystem and support it with more money.

The consensus view is that they're doing quite a bit already, mostly for the good, but need to leave the rest to other players.

Pieter Kemps of Amazon Web Services

I asked Pieter how many companies he sees from SE Asia that could potentially be billion-dollar businesses in coming years.

Can't speculate about valuations because that's not my domain. But our internal usage data shows companies all across Asia, not just SE Asia, that could achieve very large scale very quickly based on current growth rates. We see a few such companies in most major Asian countries.

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I haven't quoted each speaker word for word. Each speaker has been paraphrased based on notes I took at the time and to add some context. Errors, omissions and lack of sufficient context are all my own fault, not the original speakers'.

Taking enterprise social media to the next level

I am very pleased to announce that my firm has invested in Unmetric, a New York-headquartered company that is the leader in providing competitive intelligence on over 10,000 global brands that use social media. These three pieces contain further details.

We invested in Unmetric because of our answer to this question: how are large enterprises using social media within their broader marketing and customer service strategy?

In our view, the first stage of enterprises truly engaging with social media was when brands formally started listening to what customers were saying online, using such tools as, for example, Radian6 (bought by Salesforce for $326 million in 2011).

The second stage of brands rapidly coming to grips with social media was when enterprises began reaching out to customers to build relationships with them, Buddy Media being one of the tools used for this (also acquired by Salesforce for $689 million in 2012).

What Unmetric does is then the logical next step: benchmarking your brand against the competition and figuring out on a daily basis what, when and how to post online for your brand to achieve the best engagement. As far as a time-poor digital marketing manager or agency researcher is concerned, it's like having a super-human team of data scientists, market researchers and software engineers all working together to deliver key insights -- not just metrics -- in real time.

But let's not deal in abstractions. Here's a typical report prepared by Unmetric, this one analysing the US telecom industry. See slides 9 to 13 for examples of the kinds of insights Unmetric provides its customers.

The Telecom Industry on Social Media from Unmetric

 

Customers generally see insights like this not on static reports but on a personalised dynamically changing dashboard, on which they can click through for further details.

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Update: I forgot to mention that they're always on the lookout for smart and fun people to join the team. Please spread the word.

Whither Twitter, whither media agencies? (Bonus feature: a conspiracy theory!)

How scared are media and advertising agencies of this development (PDF; 384 KB)? I'd be petrified if I was them.

If you don't have time to look at that document, here's the two-sentence snapshot: Mondelez (the renamed Kraft snack food group) has done a deal with Twitter where Twitter staff will be seated in four Mondelez offices around the world, helping Mondelez with their real-time marketing by providing real-time insights, custom research and so on, in return for a minimum ad spending commitment. In effect, Twitter has turned itself into an agency.

Mondelez announced a similar deal, though more limited in scope, with Google back in May.

Now, before anyone starts jumping up and down with objections, I know that this isn't really a replacement for agencies. But it is a significant development that agencies and advertisers will be watching, and for Twitter itself as it positions itself for an IPO. If large digital platforms like Twitter and Google are able to directly provide custom services to large brands, where does that leave agencies?

On the other hand, the agency business model has historically changed so much in response to market developments that I have no doubt the smartest ones out there will continue to reinvent themselves and thrive. For example, when online advertising first started to get going, a lot of agency unbelievers thought that the Internet would disaggregate agencies entirely. Exactly the opposite happened as agencies started online trading desks to buy ad impressions on clients' behalf, started doing creative and copy for digital ads, designed online campaigns and so on.

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For whatever reason, I couldn't find mentions of this news online when I checked a few hours ago, not on FT.com or on any other website. Gentlemen, start your conspiracy theories now.

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Update: Right, here's the FT article now. Mondelez strikes deal to chew into Twitter’s social media knowhow

"Social operating platforms" for online ads

The evolution of online advertising continues apace. See this pitch by Unified Social:

Interesting that they chose so early in the game to take money from a strategic (as we say in the trade) in the form of publishing group Conde Nast.

via: Forbes: Unified Raises $14 Million to Expand Social Operating Platform

TV remains King

But for how long?

Click to see original

There are many more households in the US with four TV sets than those with one, two or three? Wow. That certainly puts paid to the notion of TV time being family time.

Some of the stats here aren't explained in sufficient detail, but there's still lots to ponder.

The frequent fliers who flew too much

Excerpt: "There are frequent fliers, and then there are people like Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom. Both men bought tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines. It was almost like owning a fleet of private jets."

More here: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-golden-ticket-20120506

This is an auto-generated post from my reading list courtesy IFTTT. See http://ifttt.com

Infographic of stats on mobile apps in India

Quite a lot of interesting stats here. Would be interesting to see how some of these data points have evolved over recent years. I also wonder how many Indian app users are on 3G vs 2G vs WiFi. Conversations I have had with industry players suggest that cellular data is still not the primary medium.

Much more here.

(via TechInAsia)

Hacked PCs falsify billions of ad clicks

Excerpt: "Online investigators have exposed a network of hijacked computers that defrauded advertisers by generating billions of fake ad views. The so-called botnet scheme, which hijacked 120,000 residential PCs in the US and cost advertisers millions of dollars a month, highlights the increasing complexity and opacity of online advertising."

More here: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ab60c728-908f-11e2-a456-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2O5hy5q8j

This is an auto-generated post from my reading list courtesy IFTTT. See http://ifttt.com

Japan’s smartphone advertising platform FreakOut raises US$5.3M in series B funding

Excerpt: "Founded and launched back in 2010 by Yuzuru Honda, FreakOut has been delivering its white label platform to more than 3,000 advertisers through 90 agencies in Japan and the US."

More here: http://e27.co/2013/03/07/japans-smartphone-advertising-platform-freakout-raises-us5-3m-in-series-b-funding/

This is an auto-generated post from my reading list courtesy IFTTT. See http://ifttt.com

Best mobile banking app?

I just saw a video demo of Krungsri aka Bank of Ayudhya's mobile banking app. It's the best mobile banking app I've ever seen by far. Not just about bank balances and branch locations like the typical banking app, but also transfers, shopping, stock brokerage services, rewards redemption, bill payments, reminders, social features, and so on and so forth. Some of this is even available to non-Krungsri customers. The only thing that detracts from their effort is that they only support smartphones (maybe only iPhones).

This may all sound obvious, possibly even a little "so what?" depending on how cynical you are -- but my experience with other mobile banking apps (if an app even exists for your bank) has been complete c**p, even in supposedly advanced Singapore. Other banks' apps I've seen may:

• provide pretty basic bank balance type info
• use the mobile phone purely as a channel for poorly thought through "promotions"
• pretend that they're a fun social networking app that people will enjoy using, not realizing that consumers look to banks for functionality not fun
• have such poor user flow that frustrated consumers uninstall them immediately

Both regional and global banks are guilty of the above.

Youtube should have a video of Krungsri's app that shows you what I found so admirable about it in comparison to the above all-too-common faults in other banks' approaches.

The presenter of the demo pointed out that their approach was to take a marketing approach from the beginning, rather than IT. The focus was on user experience, which doesn't mean pretty graphics but imagining what a customer, whether a young student, a high net worth individual or anyone else might need and delivering that simply. Technology considerations (and the inevitable arguments with the IT department) came later.

Clearly they know what they're doing.

Update: This is the demo I saw.