Author Archives: Riku Vassinen

Apr 26 2016
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Digital Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Strategy

Real Omni-Channel Customer Experience

We consumers are living in truly omni-channel environment. We live in app economy. We don´t just want things fast, we want them now. This a real user journey from this new brave world:

  1. I realize that I don´t have any food in the fridge. This might pose a problem to my survival. I am too lazy to walk to smaller store so I decide to buy online.
  2. Because I am also a cheapskate, my online store of choice is Giant Online.
  3. The experience starts by not remembering your password. After resetting your password, you are finally into system.
  4. Giant Online has a great system called Shopping list. It enables you to put items you buy frequently to “shopping list” so it would be faster to buy your items. Expect when it is not.
  5. You cannot just import your shopping list to the cart, but you have to check every single item one-by-one.
  6. After you have put those products in the really innovative product feature kicks in. The products that are not currently available will disappear. So you have to start checking what items are actually missing from your shopping list.
  7. Because I buy lots of fruits and vegetables, Giant recognizes those as individual items. So if I put Avocado from US to shopping list and they do not have those exact fruits they will disappear from my shopping cart. The system is not smart enough to recommend avocadoes from New Zealand (or vice versa). The system does not also learn in any way of my purchase history. So then again I need to spend another 10 minutes by putting the missing items manually.
  8. Because I have used this store for long I have also realized certain quirks of it (like the one above). Sometimes you don´t find products with search and you have to go to specific category to go them through. Sometimes you can find certain products only through search. The time it has took me to master this online shopping platform could have been used to learn a new language.
  9. Finally you seem to have everything on your cart so it is time to check out.
  10. Expect the system tries to sell me something totally unnecessary. This time they offer me a funky green saucepan. Great deal, expect I don´t have any need for that product. Naturally these upselling offers are totally random and not connected to what I am normally purchasing.giantpromotion
  11. I select the option that if I miss any items they would be replaced automatically if there is a substitute item and they would not call me. Usually these calls are only about that the item is missing and there is no replacement. No idea to call if there are no solutions to missing items.
  12. I check out from the store. Great, it only took 20 minutes. My nearest store is five minutes walk so I probably would have already done this faster in there. But at least I didn´t need to stand up from my computer. Wait a minute; I did it on my stand-up desk at work. So at least I burned some calories.
  13. Ok of I go or so I think.
  14. Because I selected to pay with credit card, I have to do some extra security confirmation through SMS. So I have to check a code from my phone and type it into the system.
  15. Ok, not that hard, the card is valid. I will get e-mail confirmation of my order. By this point I have already utilized desktop, mobile and received e-mail during this shopping journey. And this for the quite mundane order of cabbage and yoghurt.
  16. My earliest time slot I could get the order was two days away. So eventually I had to go to nearby store to get some emergency stuff because otherwise I would have died of hunger meanwhile. So already this process has took an hour. Smooth…
  17. Day before the shipment, they call me (although I explicitly forbid them of calling). Well they call me anyway and say that certain items are missing and there are no replacements. Thank you for the information.
  18. The big day is here; I finally get my food delivery. Expect the delivery time frame is four hours from 9AM to 1PM, so I have to stay home and wait for that delivery. Luckily NBA playoffs are on so these four hours are not total waste of time. Way to go Boston!
  19. Little bit before 1PM the delivery is there. I check the order list and naturally some additional items are missing. I call Giant and they promise to reimburse (which they always do, just an additional phone call to do)
  20. I put the stuff into fridge taking around 10 minutes.
  21. Mission accomplished. I can´t wait to do this again in couple of days.

So to conclude, making things easier and digital meant the following:

  • Over 20 steps for a very simple process: select your food, buy your food, store your food
  • 5 hours total for making, managing and waiting the order
  • Using laptop for the order, doing two phone calls, receiving one SMS and one e-mail. So truly omni-channel experience!

So why do I still subject myself to this torture?

Answer: laziness.

I cannot be bothered to walk to the store because I am lazy bastard. I cannot be bothered to change to Redmart, because I am not convinced it would be any better. I have already registered to one service and cannot be bothered with my passwords. Laziness trumps loyalty.

Quite often companies do not actually need to make things easier or cheaper, they just need to give you the illusion that they provide easier and cheaper solution.

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Apr 25 2016
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Advertising, Digital Strategy, Planning

Advertising At The Right Place but At The Wrong Time

The main rule in contextual advertising is simple:

Ensure that your contextual advertising is done on right context.

Sounds redundant but it isn´t. Let me show an example of advertising aimed at particular time-of-the-day:

McDonalds1
Hmm, it is 11AM on Monday morning. I have barely woken up. I don´t necessarily want to be up, but generally if you work at the office you don´t have choice. Or are you referring to my stand-up desk?

McDonalds2
I don´t even know what I will do tomorrow, not to mention knowing will I oversleep or not. I was planning to go sleep early, but do you know more about my Netflix addiction?

McDonalds3
I have already eaten breakfast and I am already dreaming about my lunch. Would you have any lunch deals? Or will you be targeting those ads at my dinner time?

McDonalds4
This ad was definitely at the right place because I noticed it. Probably in the media report it will also be really effective because I replayed it zillion times to get proper screenshots. So probably we will get more of this kind of lazy targeting in the future.

In many ways the opportunities in digital media are really interesting right now: ability to target people at the right place, right time and to retarget based on their behavior is fascinating. Unfortunately media and the media agencies are too often just too damn lazy to really utilize these opportunities, or just plain creepy.

This experience was not without silver lining, it reminded me to listen this awesome song by Dr. John to cheer up my Monday:

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Apr 21 2016
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Advertising, Business, Digital Strategy, Insight, Planning

Anatomy of An Insight: Letgo Commercializer

Sometimes your biggest challenge for growth is not that people are not using your platform, but they are just using it wrong:

Insight: The challenge is not that people don´t have stuff to sell, but they don´t know how to sell that. The pictures look bad, there is not that much story behind the stuff and everything lacks enthusiasm. If you are marketplace where people can sell their old stuff this is naturally a problem. You want to make people better sellers so their stuff moves faster and they can sell even more stuff. More stuff equals more money to everyone.

Would you notice a used product ad featuring Dolph Lundgren?

I know that I would.

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Apr 20 2016
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Digital Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Social Media, Strategy

Bots and The Rise of Conversational Commerce

Messaging is the new browser and bots are the websites.
– Mike Roberts, Kik Head of Messaging and Bot Experience

Bots have been all the rage last weeks. Whether it has been the NSFW Microsoft bot (not only racist, but also encouraging pot smoking in front of cops) or the ability to build chatbots on top of FB messengers.

Why sudden interest in bots?

They are not really a new phenomenon. Eliza was already created in 60s (test it here) and Siri has also been around for a while (test it in your phone). The main reason for the chatbots to gain importance especially now is because of the changed digital landscape. For majority of users, messenger is their digital starting point. Users don´t want to use messaging over Internet, they want to access their Internet to from their messenger. Therefore ability to help, serve and sell to users within messenger is paramount. Short text message (or emoji) is the default way of communicating, should it be also the way to communicate with the brands?

“Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.” 
– Chris Messina

We are still having long way for the bot economy and below are the core things to fix before chatbots will evolve from novelty to actual user behavior:

1. The bots need to understand normal talk
“They aren’t taking natural language; they are taking menu names,”
Bruce Wilcox,the author of Rose, the winner of the most recent Loebner annual chatbot competition.

Many of the recent Facebook bots are still quite clunky in terms of discussion. People are more casual when they are thinking that they are conversing with real person. The challenge is for the robot to be casual but at the same time providing the transactional value. Current examples have not been particularly promising as they are either pushing you products in unnatural way or trying to be funny but not providing any value:
poncho

2. The bots need to become more predictive and fast
Going back and forth with your bot to order a pizza is tedious process. Getting weather details in an hour is just ridiculous. They need to become way more intuitive to use to really rival Google for getting your fast answers. The novelty factor will wear off quickly. If bots are not able to give you solutions fast, they will not be used.

3. Bots are not a destination but a way to enhance the existing discussion
E.g. instead of going to separate weather bot, you should get the weather details when you are chatting with your friend and need that info. Mark Zuckerberg raved about bots as replacements for apps, but with the current experience, it is actually just easier to go to that weather app and get your answer. Ideal situation would be that your messenger would recognize opportunities for commercial interaction from your discussions, but how to build that experience so that it is not creepy?

We are living in the early days of conversational commerce. Using messenger for repeated purchases (like pizza delivery) seems like a no-brainer, but will people actually start browsing products within messenger and asking help from the chatbot?

That depends on the user experience. If AI behind the chatbot actually would know your taste and it would be effective and enjoyable to chat with, messenger economy could become true game changer. Opportunity and potential demand is there, but building a good recommendation engine alone is difficult not to mention that you have to add enjoyable interaction with a robot on top of that. And the core question is, will people want to interact with bots?

Time will tell.

One thing is for certain. Bots will not kill the web, but they will permanently alter it.

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Mar 22 2016
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Advertising, Insight

Anatomy of An Insight: GEICO Fast Forward

How did they get in the air playing a saxophone?
And we said, “Exactly”.

Pre-rolls are pain, but they should not be. Geico won “Campaing of the year” last year with their Unskippable-series. Now it is time for it sequel and again it does not fail to deliver. As we now sequels don´t usually work in advertising, expect when they are working.

First you are tempted with the pre-roll:

You can´t help yourself. You have to watch the whole thing:

(There are four of these ads for your viewing pleasure)

Insight: Quite often it is more arousing if you don´t reveal everything you got immediately.

This campaign is not only creatively top-notch; Geico has also ensured that all the nuts and bolts in YouTube definitely guide you to right direction.

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Mar 21 2016
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Advertising, Insight, Marketing Strategy

The Guide To Predicting The Future

“Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might be then have occurred. ..
Twenty years may also be close to typical duration remaining of a forecaster´s career, bounding the reputational risk of a bold prediction”
-Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies)
 
Not unlike other fields, advertising industry is full of bold predictions. Majority of them are completely off-the-mark. Predictions seldom come with accountability. The temptation to come with sexy soundbite lures you more than truly thinking about potential outcomes (or actually predicting the future). It is better to have a bold opinion than to be right:
 
“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. ”
– Evan Esar

I have read in multiple sources that this year will be the year of VR. This is a great example of Amara´s law, overestimating nascent but highly visible technology on short run:

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

VR is currently at the sweet spot of being obscure enough that making predictions about it can raise eyebrows (no one should not be shocked anymore that future is mobile for example). On the other hand, there are enough tangible examples of it so people can understand it. The innovations that will truly revolutionize advertising are harder to grasp at this moment or have not even been developed yet. When they will truly happen, they are too obvious then to catch the headlines.

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Mar 17 2016
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Business, Marketing Strategy, Strategy

Major Keys to Success from Snapchat (that probably only work for Snapchat)

majorkey

Snapchat has surprised me. I mislabeled the platform way back as just a method to share nude selfies (although there is definitely a market for that). They are more popular than ever, valuation is through the roof and they are totally altering the way how millennials communicate and consume content.

As a company they have been really refreshing and bold on their approach in their business. Take the following lessons with a grain of salt, as they might not be right for you:

1.Ask for (too) much
Google made advertising accessible for pretty much anyone and Facebook followed a suit. Snapchat has taken totally different angle. Its ads are expensive, so essentially available to only big advertisers (even though they have reduced their prices). For example branded custom lens costs 450,000 USD. Almost half a million of branded puking rainbow! We will talk about puking rainbows later. They also provide sparsely data about the ad performance and target audience (which might improve in the future). Essentially Snapchat is expensive because it can be expensive. What they offer is that you can be part of the party if you pay the premium. If you don´t, you will be left out. The choice is yours.

Major key to success: Set your price high, as it is easier to go down than to go up.

2. Don´t try to attract everyone
Snapchat is not for the old people; expect if you are Dj Khaled. We will talk about him later.

“I’ll be honest, I had no idea what they were talking about half the time”
– David Gaines about Snapchat training sessions (Chief Planning Officer, Maxus Global)

If you are CMO, it is likely that you are not on Snapchat. Or if you are, you don´t understand anything that is happening there. However, your kids or younger colleagues probably are and that gives you signal that your brand should probably do something there. Snapchat is the ultimate access to one of the hardest target audiences in the world: teens.

If you are not teen, the interface of Snapchat looks messy, complicated and hard-to-use. Essentially they defy all the traditional belief of user design and the users love it. Rest of us don´t understand it but that does not matter. The enigma of Snapchat has probably added to its lure. You cannot compare it to any other app. That is also the reason why they can ask premium. There is no alternative for Snapchat.

Major key to success: If your competition is selling oranges, start selling apples.

3. Embrace the irrational
If you are snapchatting like boss, you have way too much time in your hands. What the success of Snapchat has showed, teens and millennials have lots of time in their hands. And although you are complaining how busy you are, in reality you have too much time in your hands.

The biggest star of Snapchat is Dj Khaled, who has six million followers. He is something like a Paulo Coelho for millennials and his stories are celebrated throughout the Internet. His days “walking on the journey to the path of more success” are filled with eating, drinking Ciroc, jet skiing and sharing his wisdom through major keys (for example key to success is to have lots of pillows).

Whereas Facebook is introducing utility (ordering Uber etc.) to Messenger, the hit function of Snapchat is filter that makes you puking rainbows. The success of Snapchat has prompted Facebook to acquire Masquerade. Its hit function is the ability to switch selfies. And yes, Facebook tried to buy Snapchat back in the day with three billion. Everyone thought Snapchat was crazy to decline the offer. Now they are valued for 16 billion.

pukingrainbows

Although Internet has transformed our life in many ways, you should never underestimate the irrational and random aspect of life. Our attention span is short and that short span is increasingly filled with puking rainbows and major keys to success.

Major key to success: People will favor mindless entertainment against thoughtful utility. Always.

Could you apply some of these lessons in your own business? Maybe, if you are attracting millennials. The challenge with certain successful businesses (that Snapchat is not yet even is, only with high valuation) is that their competitive advantage is hard to be duplicated. Truly phenomenal firms go against the grain and pretty much ignore what other competitors are doing.

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Mar 16 2016
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Business, Digital Strategy, Strategy

Machines Will Eventually Beat Humans in Everything

“I don´t think it will be a close match. I believe it will be 5–0, or maybe 4–1. So the critical point for me will be to not lose one match.”
– Lee Se-Dol (Korean Go champion before his matches against Alphago)

Lee-Se Dol was able to predict the future; it was just the opposite he was envisioning. Alphago (computer Go program done by Google subsidiary Deepmind) slaughtered him in six games.

alphago

Machines beating humans in a game is nothing new. In chess the gap between machines and human is already tremendous. Best chess machines are even able to win joint teams of human and computers. What makes AlphaGo´s victory intriguing is that Go is much more complicated game than chess. The first move of Go can involve 361 positions (chess has only 81) and Go game generally lasts more turns than chess.

“Simple heuristics get most of what you need. For example, in chess and checkers the value of material dominates other pieces of knowledge — if I have a rook more than you in chess, then I am almost always winning. 
Go has no dominant heuristics. From the human’s point of view, the knowledge is pattern-based, complex, and hard to program. Until Alphago, no one had been able to build an effective evaluation function.”
-Jonathan Schaeffer (Creator of Chinook, first program to beat humans in Checkers)

The machine victory in Go happened decade earlier than experts predicted.

AlphaGo is based on deep learning and neural networks. So while Deep Blue beat Kasparov with sheer computing strength, Alphago has more artificial intelligence behind it. Firstly neural networks were trained on 30 million moves from games played by human experts. That resulted to ability to predict human move 57 percent of the time. But that gets you to the same level as human players not necessarily able to beat them. So secondly, AlphaGo played thousands of games between its neural networks, and adjusting connections using trial-and-error process through reinforcement learning.

How many humans are even able to comprehend what above means (lest train themselves in even somewhat similar manner)?

Machines can already replace humans in more fields than we are willing to admit. And more importantly, they are playing better job as well. Machines can crunch data to obtain experience, which is impossible for humans during their lifetime. We have to start embracing machine learning and collaborating with machines more if we want to survive. Advertising industry has been especially almost hostile to any technological improvement. That will be a road to sure destruction. Beating a Go champion is much harder task than to do a subpar brand campaign. If we don´t take more proactive and positive approach to data and artificial intelligence, we will make ourselves redundant.

Machines can either be our allies our friends. I would opt for the latter choice.

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Mar 09 2016
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Business, Insight, Strategy

Being Busy Does Not Mean That You Are Working

Busyness as Proxy for productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
-Cal Newport (Deep Work)

Being in a meeting is not our job.
Having a conf-call is not our job.
Sending e-mail is not our job.
Being in front of computer late to suck up your bosses is not our job.

“Being busy” should never be an indicator of how well you are doing our job.

Our job is to think or sell: sometimes both and sometimes in reverse order.

If you are busy because you are thinking really hard and selling even harder, that is great.
If you are busy because you want to look like you are busy, I just feel sorry for you.

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Mar 08 2016
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Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Strategy

What Deadpool Teaches You About Branding?

deadpoolemoji

I finally saw Deadpool last week and it is definitely a contender for the best movie of this year. Where I actively avoid mainstream movie theatres (especially in Singapore, where the selection is even narrower. Luckily we have Projector), it was like a breath of fresh air to watch something totally politically incorrect on big screen. And I am not the only one enjoying it, Deadpool is becoming the third biggest superhero movie of all-time.

1.Don´t listen to focus groups
There is a lie, damn lie and then your target audience analyzing your ads in focus groups. Deadpool is the kind of movie that would not ever get a green light in focus group. There is senseless violence, infantile humor and jabs and insults to everything that is sacred. The hero is flawed and does not even want to be hero. Not surprisingly, despite the strong hype movie was not exactly going anywhere:

We developed the script six years ago, wrote this fantastic script, it leaked online, Deadpool fans went nuts for it, so the studio granted us a small amount of money to make test footage. This test footage that we shot then sat on the shelf for four years, as it does, they didn’t do anything with it, then just a little under two years ago it leaked, accidentally, onto the internet.
Ryan Reynolds (in Jimmy Fallon)

Deadpool would not have happened if there had not been groundswell to get the film released. Ryan Reynolds continues:

“Here’s the thing, the fans freaked out and overwhelmed Fox, and Fox basically had to greenlight the movie. The problem is the footage was owned by Fox so it was kind of illegal … I know that one of us did it.”

If you truly believe in your product, sometimes you have to bend the rules (or even ignore them) a little bit.

2.Embrace the constraints
Fox tried to do pretty much everything to not get the movie released, e.g. cutting the budget on the last minute:

“We had to carve something like $7-8 million out of the budget in a 48-hour window. And we, as a group, just put our heads together, got creative, and said ‘How do we cut what is essentially nine pages out of a 110 page script?’”
–Rhett Reese (writer)

But when there is a will, there is a way. Deadpool is not about the special effects. It is about the attitude. If you have the attitude, that can shine through but if you are only about who is having the biggest explosions, that kind of cut would be fatal.

3.Ride the trend…but in opposite direction
People start to get bored of superhero movies. They still are going to see them, because essentially you don´t have a choice, as they are everywhere. Everyone knows the formula and every superhero comes from the same mold. When someone breaks the pattern, it will definitely get noticed. That is why it is important to know your competition, so you can do exactly the opposite than them.

4.Be top-of-mind
The marketing campaign for Deadpool is a perfect example of a great integrated campaign. Top-of-mind is ensured with heavy use of traditional channels.

deadpooloooh

In digital you are really starting to have fun. Like with Deadpool emojis or a Tinder profile:

deadpooltinder

5.Keep it real
Traditionally having a R-rated film is a deathblow to a film. Deadpool has gone against all the conventional Hollywood wisdom, mainly because the makers had a strong belief to the film.

So that´s all. If you have not seen Deadpool, go see it now.

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