Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

10 Years of CES

Attending CES for ten years means traveling a total of 50,000 miles (from New York), navigating about 20 million square feet of exhibit space, mingling with some subset of more than 1.5 million attendees, and creating at least 1,000 slides for recap decks. I also know that one’s status as a rookie or veteran is determined by others; my familiarity with the Consumer Electronics Show is dwarfed by those who have been attending for decades.

But, 10 CES’s is something, and attending my tenth one in 2016 has made me nostalgic for the early days, back when I wrote more blog posts than columns and presentations, and back when the snacks a tech company served mattered as much to me as the impact of that tech on my clients’ businesses.

As I prepared for CES 2016, I looked back through all my files – blog posts (this blog was a treasure trove for reliving my earlier CES trips), Flickr photos, recap decks, columns – and gathered highlights from what I’ve shared publicly (as opposed to anything presented solely to clients). I was repeatedly surprised by early mentions of topics such as drones, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things. And yet, I had to wade through countless images of 3D TVs (which I sensed were a flop from the start) and 3D printers (which I was way too bullish on in terms of applications for mass market usage in the home).

I noted rather loftily in Advertising Age in 2015, “CES, at its core, isn't a show about electronics. It's a show about time.” What you’ll find here takes a broader view of time than what we’re normally afforded in a typical column or deck or tweet. It offers the perspective that a single year’s analysis can’t provide. If it interests or moves or inspires you in any way, please let me know.

Thanks for your time.

David

10 Years of CES: 2007-2016 from David Berkowitz

Catch the Only CES 2016 Preview You'll Ever Need

Want to know what the trends will be at CES 2016?

Sorry, I have no idea. It hasn't happened yet.

And once it happens, I'll just be making most of them up to fit preconceived notions about what they should be and what I hope my clients will care about.

Oh wait, are we not supposed to talk that honestly about how the whole trendwatching business works? 

In light of that, you might as well read this more candid take on what to expect at next month's Consumer Electronics Show. Let me know if you'll be out in Vegas. 

CES 2016 Preview - Consumer Electronics Show Trends from David Berkowitz

 

 

 

Is the Thrill of the Product Hunt Gone?

This was originally published Medium and LinkedIn - seems like it's worth sharing here too...

Product Hunt debuted in mid-2014 at the perfect time to give startups a way to promote themselves to a populace that seemingly can’t get enough of them. But maybe some of us can get enough after all. Below, data from Product Hunt itself implies as much.

The Google Trend chart below tracking the search term “product hunt” tells some of the story. It’s followed by the one-year history of unique users to producthunt.com courtesy of Compete, with a similar fall spike, a lull in Q1, and some inconsistency since. (I’m assuming May 2015 was a tracking error; if that point was adjusted to fit between April and June traffic numbers, it would resemble Google’s a little better.)

What made me really curious about Product Hunt is that it’s achieved what I like to think of as the “Mad Men” effect. At first, it was really fun, and I couldn’t get enough of it. But after awhile, I felt like I was going there more because I had to than because I wanted to. Product Hunt is still a good resource for me, especially when friends post products (Hunter Walk posted a New York Times podcast with Lin-Manuel Miranda and it ate up an hour of my day). But it’s more of a utility now, the vegetables rather than dessert.

So is Product Hunt ennui an actual phenomenon? Product Hunt has some data available on its site, which I manually compiled to look for trends. Lists can be sorted by what’s “popular” and also by the number of “upvotes” (the equivalent of “likes”). There are some changes in rankings when looking at Product Hunt’s measure of popularity versus the number of votes, so to keep things simple, I used upvotes as the sole measure.

One very useful feature on Product Hunt is the monthly roundup of top products. The latest one from September, for instance, showcases the 30 most upvoted products on the site. From searching the site, it seems like those monthly lists started with February’s recap, so the data here spans eight months, from February through September.

First, let’s look at the total votes by month. It’s been a gradual downward trend this summer, and beyond May looking like an outlier, the slope is typically flat or downward. Each series listed along the x-axis here denotes the ranking number, so Series1 on the bottom shows the most upvoted product each month.

Looking at this on a more granular level, we can see each month’s individual rankings more clearly, with a clear winner of a product for five months followed by tighter clustering. There isn’t some kind of power rule here, such as where the first is twice as popular as the second, and the second is twice as popular as the third. The amount of clustering is surprising. February’s 3541-vote standout, by the way, was Startup Stash, a curated directory of hundreds of resources for startups (how meta!). May was a tough month to crack the leaderboard; the most popular product in September would have ranked seventh if it appeared in May. March brought the most votes for the number 10 slot (1241, compared to 856 in September).

Let’s flip the key. Instead of looking at the clusters by month, let’s look at them by series. Below, there’s an even more pronounced downward curve, with a lot of convergence in the back half of the top ten list (slots six through ten), and an indication that the popularity of the top three products each month tends to determine the month’s overall total. This is shown as both a line and a bar graph.

Perhaps this is all much ado about nothing. Four reasons in particular stand out as to why this may not mean much. Add your own reasons in the comments.

1) Upvotes may not be the best measure of activity. Perhaps people aren’t liking products as much, or perhaps there’s more commenting and sharing going on. Or maybe people are visiting product pages and then heading in droves to the featured product’s own site, rather than spending any time on Product Hunt itself.

2) There could be a long tail effect. Maybe the rich aren’t getting richer, but lesser known products are doing better. I’m not convinced that’s the case, but it’s a possibility.

3) Perhaps Product Hunt is too slow in letting new people participate. The site notes, “A limited number of people have access to comment and post on Product Hunt to maintain a healthy volume of submissions each day and thoughtful dialogue.” If it’s too limiting, then there may not be enough new blood to replace some natural attrition. (PS: I have a few Product Hunt invites; just reach out to me if you want one.)

4) Product Hunt is expanding into new categories such as games, books, and podcasts. That may dilute some of the interest around products but increase overall activity on the site.

What’s your take on Product Hunt? Were you ever in love with it? Are you still? Have you been waiting for months for an invite so that you can participate? If you go there, are you an upvoter, or a commenter, or just a browser and clicker?

It’s a phenomenally well done site, to the extent that there are “Product Hunt for X” clones out there, and it provides value for my own work at MRY. I actually found out about the site when a colleague posted a client’s product there last summer, and I’ve been a regular ever since. Being needed can be more important than being loved. The overall trend, though, isn’t encouraging. After all, a lot of my favorite products are those I discover because people I know upvote them, and fewer upvotes leads to less discovery.

 

The Power of Ideas and Collaboration, and a Brief History of Social Media Marketing

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Bill Sobel for CMS Wire, where I shared some thoughts on ideas and collaboration, but also on how past experiences laid the groundwork for the present state of marketing. For instance, I shared a few thoughts on the evolution of search and social:

It was, at the time, a Herculean effort for marketers to shift from focusing on their reputation in Google to their actual reputation. Google was almost a distraction. It's as if marketers cared so much about sweeping the sidewalk in front of their store that they weren't paying attention to the people shopping there.

Another big change is that media companies didn't have any great ways for brands to reach people via social channels. Facebook in its fairly early days was tapping Microsoft to sell banner ads on its site. Meanwhile, MySpace let advertisers somehow make its site even uglier than it was before. It’s as if every ad was designed by Michael Bay. Marketers could also connect with bloggers, but even the word "blog" sounded like a noise people make once they realized they got food poisoning. Marketers weren’t in a rush to change tactics.

Read the full interview and let me know what you think. 

The Backlash to Real-Time Marketing is ON!

Image via Jon Thomas at Post Advertising

Is 2013 the year of real-time marketing (RTM)? Befitting such a buzzword, it had a few good months, but the backlash to it has been picking up steam.

Here's what MRY CEO Matt Britton had to say about it in Digiday:

“It’s herd mentality, and for a lot of brands, it’s really just embarrassing,” said Britton. “It’s actually hurting the field of social media marketing. You have brand marketers who have spent 50 years crafting their brand and now all of a sudden they are dumbing it down with clipart trying to replicate magic that happened once.”

In Ad Age, Mike Proulx of Hill Holliday compares RTM to a predatory weed:

Driven by the myopic goal of increasing engagement, many brands are unscrupulously on the hunt for likes, shares, followers and retweets without an overarching strategy based on core business objectives. This blind yearning for social currency is leading to incredibly irrelevant and unavailing branded content (a.k.a. advertising) that's preying on social media. Just because #Sharknado is trending, a royal baby is born, the "Breaking Bad" finale is on, or it's "Talk Like a Pirate Day," doesn't mean your brand has to flippantly post about it.

Even 360i exec Jared Belsky has been heard dismissing claims of Oreo's 'super' tweet being something that just magically appeared in seconds (via Ad Age):

Seem we can't talk about real-time without mentioning Oreo's Super Bowl tweet. But that was actually 3 yrs in the making- J Belsky 360i #awx

— Jade Mangahis (@jade_mangahis) September 24, 2013

And then at my OMMA Social panel about Vine and Instagram during Advertising Week, moderator Carree Syrek of Kinetic Social put a glass on the stage and said anyone who mentioned real-time marketing or Oreo had to put in a dollar fine. We somehow avoided the penalty.

Real-time marketing is not a bad word. Or a bad thing. Like any other kind of marketing, it needs to be used strategically. There's often value in it, and it's much, much bigger than community management. Real-time marketing is happening in search, display, online video, digital out of home, mobile marketing (in various guises), and even at times in traditional channels such as TV and radio. Harness it, not because it's a buzzword, but because it often is the best way to reach your target audience.

 

The Truck Stops Here

Here's today's Social Media Insider, originally published in MediaPost. Photo credit: Me.

In the future, will all of our restaurants turn into roving trucks? You may not ask yourself that question every day, but answering it will reveal a few things about the evolution of social media.

This megatrend of trucks serving gourmet food is one of those cataclysmic events that can only be brought on by a slew of events that were never supposed to happen at the same time (think "The Day After Tomorrow"):

·  A recession that caused consumers to be thrifty when eating out while also giving the jobless and underemployed more time than they're used to.

·  GPS technology accurate enough to locate restaurants on wheels.

·  The advent of Twitter, which allowed truck-food proprietors to economically broadcast where they are, along with empowering consumers narcissistic enough to tell people they are on line waiting for a truck chef to serve them.

·  Finally, the emergence of Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts so comfortable that truck chefs can be gellin' without having their feet resemble snapshots from the podiatric-themed issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

New York City has a multiplying fleet of truck chefs. Battles for the streets have become so intense that one truck food purveyor told The New York Times a few weeks ago, "I should not have to carry a baseball bat on my truck in order to sell cupcakes." I've visited two trucks for food this month alone: Van Leeuwen artisan ice cream by the High Line park (after trying the vanilla, "artisan" must be a synonym for "bland"), and the CupcakeStop.com truck that I found via a colleague's tweet, which served the best red velvet I've had east of the Mississippi (either side of it, you can't top Sprinkes).

The most famous, uber-hip food truck isn't driving near my office anytime soon. It's Kogi, the Los Angeles-based Korean barbecue truck fleet with over 35,000 followers on Twitter. Proprietor Mark Manguera seems to have an Oprah-like command of his followers, with hundreds of them lining up for Asian-Mexican food whenever his trucks tweet.

How much further will this trend go? Here are a few ideas:

·  The locations of these trucks will be crowdsourced. It's the converse of the drive-thru: instead of the truck saying where it is and people tweeting about it, people will tweet and the truck drives to where the most buzz is.

·  Mobile applications will instantly show which food trucks are in your area. Trucks will be sorted by cuisine type, location, and the length of the line.

·  A market of line-savers will emerge. Someone spending $10 on dinner from a truck may well pay another $20 not to wait on line for an hour or two (I couldn't find anyone offering or requesting this on the Los Angeles Craigslist boards). A secure arrangement between the parties using SMS and PayPal could ensure timeliness and accuracy. A more sophisticated system could have the person on line periodically checking in via GPS to confirm their location.

·  Trucks will eliminate all of their selection and will tweet the day's option along with the location. One day, it might only be steak fajitas, while another it's shrimp tamales. And the same people who waited two hours to get what they wanted from the truck would wait four to have no options to choose from.

·  Trucks will tweet the wrong locations intentionally. This will weed out the fans from the superfans. Anyone can follow a truck on Twitter and find it and wait on line for food while telling all their friends about it. But imagine if people had no clue where the truck was, and even their friends tweeted the wrong locations to throw them off? The same people who waited four hours to eat food from a truck with only one menu item would spend another four hours trying to find out where the truck really is before waiting another four hours for food.

Thanks to social media and the mobile technologies facilitating it, these trucks may in time lead to a super-race of Twitter users. Consumers already too thrifty to gorge themselves will spend four hours running around after a truck and four hours longer standing in line, all to consume undersized portions designed to easily fit in their hand for on-street consumption. While engaging in these tweets and spending ample time with their fellow line-waiters, they're bound to comingle and eventually reproduce. These offspring will in turn exhibit the genes for fitness and tech savvy that will give them disproportionate advantages in the centuries ahead.

I'm not sure I'll be one of them. Sunday night, while walking home, I discovered a Vietnamese restaurant in my neighborhood and ate my first banh mi sandwich. I had read no reviews, whether by professionals or consumers. I saw nary a tweet about it, and didn't tweet it either. Monday night, I went back for another banh mi. It won't be my last. The whole time, the restaurant stayed in the same location, there was no line, and I sat down while waiting. I'm clearly not cut out for the future of truck-based food consumption, though if it's carrying red velvets, I may make an occasional exception.

360i Uses Google to Predict American Idol's Winner

If you haven't checked out 360i's blog Digital Connections, now's a pretty good time to start. I'll dispel two possible myths before you do:

1. I'm not the 360i blogger. I'm one of them. You can read bios of the ten contributors and see for yourself.
2. It's not all about 360i. There are a lot of industry perspectives shared there that have nothing to do with 360i, even if all of the insight draws from the agency's experience.

Alright, now that all of that's cleared up, you should check out 360i's American Idol's predictions and historical review based on Google data. There's a very detailed piece in Mashable showing how Google data has played out for Idol over the past few years, and the charts are embedded via SlideShare below.

American Idol Search Trends

View more presentations from 360i.

Doing More With Less: You Can’t Run But You Can Hide

Today, I’m following fewer people on Twitter than I was a month ago, even after major events like SXSW and iMedia Breakthrough.

I’m friends with fewer people on Facebook, even though I’ve made many more connections.

My blog, cluttered as it may be, has far fewer links along the right-hand side than it did earlier this year, and the links that are there are far more likely to be current.

It’s all with the goal of trying to do more with less and focus on the objectives and ties that matter.

Facebook is perhaps my favorite case in point, as I’ve come around on the redesign in a big way. I couldn’t stand what they did at first, and I still in many ways would prefer to have the old layout back, where its algorithm picked which stories to highlight in my News Feed (the central update list on the homepage for registered users). It was far easier to make sense of what’s happening on the site, especially with over 1,000 “friends” there, when Facebook prioritized the updates that were mutually of interest to a number of my connections. Now, it’s a fire hose, spewing out everything.

Yet Facebook has one feature I absolutely love, and I wish Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and others would copy: the “hide” button. There are many people I want to be friends with on Facebook to stay in touch, see what events they’re going to, send birthday wishes, and that sort of thing. I’m fine giving these people access to my full profile, and once in awhile when I’m curious what they’re up to, I might want to view theirs. Yet I don’t need to hear from them on a daily basis. And if they post a few updates a day to the site, if not more, I really don’t need to be that close.

Enter the Hide button. In one click, they disappear from the News Feed, and their updates are gone for good. I can still see all the hidden posts, but now the hidden posts almost always outnumber the posts in my News Feed (especially because hidden posts are often from people who post excessively). I can alternatively hide updates from applications if I love the person but hate the app. That led to my recent Facebook update:

just took the Which Facebook Quiz Are You? quiz and found that he's the quiz that just LOOOOOOVES seeing his news feed overrun with Which ___ Are You quiz updates.

On Facebook, I’m feeling a greater sense of control. Hopefully that will get even easier on Twitter and other services too. On Twitter, there are people who I follow because I’m friends with them, or I want to be able to direct message them, but I don’t need all their updates. Increasingly, I’m choosing to break my ties with them, which creates other problems.

The Hide button, though, is elegant, efficient, and solves that information overload problem in the most user-friendly way I’ve seen – one that won’t harm any relationships in the process.

Update:

For further reading, see Jeremy Epstein's take, calling the hide button the "Facebook's line item veto."

Don't Google Google.com on Google Trends

I'm checking out the new Google Trends feature where you can compare sites. I heard this was supposed to launch Tuesday so they jumped the gun. There's great coverage in Search Engine Land and Mashable.

With the new feature, you can supposedly compare unique visitor estimates over time for various sites, making Google trends compete with Quantcast and Compete. Despite various screenshots posted, I can't see the unique traffic numbers for any site I try.

A bigger surprise is that you can't see any traffic estimates - even estimates! - for Google.com.

Click the image to enlarge further.

The Links You Need to Click

I love how Matt Dickman and others do their link roundups, and there are always quite a few I want to share, though it's so much easier to just post them to del.icio.us than actually get them on the blog (Andrew Raff used to have great link roundups on his blog before resorting to del.icio.us as well).

Here are a few notable links from the past several days:

* Babelgum: Here's another TV streaming service similar to Joost. At first it's easy to feel bad for it given how much PR Joost got and how little attention Babelgum received. Yet Babelgum has all the negatives of Joost (slow, requires a download, limited content selection) without the positives that Joost offers (many social features, fairly intuitive interface, and at least some content worth viewing). It's still early in the game for any of these sites, though I'm not convinced there'll be a need for either. All the TV networks are already offering some increasingly better experiences for streaming TV shows, and I (like everyone else) am eager to see how the NBC-Fox joint venture holds up. If you still want to try Babelgum after that rave review, download it here.

* Webware 100: Vote for your favorite web applications. For a good roundup of what's new on the web, read about the finalists in every category. You could easily kill a day here.

* I Google Myself. It's a play - about a gay porn star. Best title ever. Thanks, Manhattan Users Guide, one of the few newsletters I've subscribed to almost as long as eMarketer's. For a lighter take on Googling yourself, check out what happens when Marge Simpson does it.

* Ask.com: It's new. It's improved. It's not good enough to matter, but it gets a golf clap. And it probably gets the next column.

* Wikigroaning: Compare character counts of various topics and you'll find that there's major nerd bias at Wikipedia. Internet Dating beats Dating, and Lightsaber Combat beats Modern Warfare. I checked further and Lightsaber Combat even beats the article on War.