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Real? Fake? Better offer from YT?

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THIS VIDEO TOOK ME 24 YEARS TO MAKE. Follow my journey live on Snapchat: "JEROMEJARRE" & Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeromejarre Directed by Jack Pearce https://www.youtube.com/user/jackfierce Produced by Casey Neistat https://www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistat

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America's doing cooler things than us...

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Google and Lionsgate have teamed up for an innovative marketing campaign to promote The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. Using YouTube Space LA and Google's Art, Copy & Code project-which aims to help brands reach the 18- to 34-year-old demographic-the District Voices campaign debuts today.

District Voices is a five-episode YouTube series presented as programming from Capitol TV, the fictional government-run station in The Hunger Games universe of Panem. Lionsgate plucked some of YouTube's top personalities for the series, matching channel content with the characteristics of various Panem districts. The movie opens in theaters Nov. 21.

"Our mission has always been to engage our Hunger Games fans in the most innovative and authentic ways possible," said Lionsgate's evp of digital marketing Danielle De Palma in a statement. "We cannot think of a better partner than these incredible YouTube stars, who truly bring new content to life in the world of Panem and extend our storytelling to online audiences in exciting new directions."

The Hunger Games franchise has already topped $1.5 billion at the box office. The YouTube collaborators involved in the campaign have a combined audience of more than 4.9 million subscribers, and they have racked up more than 550 million video views. Google noted that globally, people are watching in excess of 9 billion hours of video on YouTube monthly. Google's Art, Copy & Code program looks for innovative ways to connect with that audience and capitalize on the market.

"YouTube is the best place to build a fan base," said Ben Malbon, director of creative partnerships at Google. "This collaboration with Lionsgate showcases how brands can harness the power of Google and YouTube to reach their core audience when they are engaging with the content they are most passionate about and where they are spending the majority of their time."

The full list of videos, creators and release dates are:

District 8: Rob Czar and Corinne Leigh from the Threadbanger YouTube channel will show how to best make use of excess Peacekeeper armor. It debuts today.

District 2: Shane Fazen, of the 'fightTIPS' YouTube channel, will showcase the training and techniques required to be a Peacekeeper in Panem, beginning Tuesday.

District 5: Derek Muller, from the YouTube channel Veritasium, demonstrates new ways in which the Capitol may generate its electricity in the future, starting Wednesday.

District 9: Jimmy Wong and Ashley Adams, best known for their Feast of Fiction YouTube channel, demonstrate baking techniques from Panem's Grain District. It will go live on Thursday.

District 6: IJustine's Justine Ezarik will end the series with a glimpse at the driving force that proudly supports the transportation needs of Panem's vaunted Peacekeepers, debuting on Friday.

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YouTube Stars Plunge Into The Hunger Games' Fictional Universe to Market Latest Film

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Google and Lionsgate have teamed up for an innovative marketing campaign to promote The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. Using YouTube Space LA and Google's Art, Copy & Code project-which aims to help brands reach the 18- to 34-year-old demographic-the District Voices campaign debuts today.

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Brands are constantly seeking creative methods to make their pricey campaigns pay off in more ways than one. But computer giant HP hit the jackpot by turning its Vine campaign for the HP Pavilion x360 convertible laptop into a first-of-its-kind national TV commercial.

HP's vp of worldwide marketing Vikrant Batra said the company decided to aim its lower-priced computer, which can flip between being a tablet or a laptop, at high school and college students. Knowing that young millennials spend hours on Vine, HP, with help from agency 180LA, called for Vine creators on Niche-a platform that helps brands find social media content creators-to submit ideas that demonstrate the product's versatility, using the hashtag #BendTheRules as inspiration. "You can't force the culture into your brand, you have to get your brand to fit in with the culture," Batra explained. "You have to be comfortable with giving up control."

Creativity was key, but Batra added that having a large Vine following was a strong consideration because it meant greater reach. In total, HP hired about a dozen artists and commissioned around 30 clips. The campaign "definitely exceeded [HP's] expectations," resulting in 950,000 active engagements and 50 million organic views. Robby Ayala, a Vine creator with 2.9 million followers who made two clips for HP, got more than 241,400 revines and 13,900 comments for his content-up to four times better than his nonbranded work. "I told them a traditional commercial won't work. It needs to be in my own style of video and not an ad," he said.

"The clever thing about the HP ad is that the product is also the hero," said Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis. "You don't even have to know its Vine stars to be able to appreciate what they did."

Solis added that more marketers are repurposing social media or memes. Fiat's recent TV ads were made out of GIFs, while Samsung sourced the creative for its "What Matters Most" campaign from Instagram photographers. But he cautioned that using unknown online personalities or memes might not translate. "It's not going to work for brands who repurpose content across platforms because of laziness. They have to understand the medium and the message," he said.

HP is hoping lightning will strike twice, so it has launched another campaign on Niche. Batra said there's no concrete plan to turn these into a spot, but it's a possibility. "When you're working with content that is so immediate and dynamic, you have to leave room in your planning and react to every minute," he said.

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How HP Turned 6-Second Vines Into a 30-Second TV Ad

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Brands are constantly seeking creative methods to make their pricey campaigns pay off in more ways than one. But computer giant HP hit the jackpot by turning its Vine campaign for the HP Pavilion x360 convertible laptop into a first-of-its-kind national TV commercial.

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The great thing about video games is you can do all kinds of cool, crazy, dangerous and impossible things without actually having to do them.

Instead, you just sit on your couch with your buddy pretending that NBA star Kevin Durant is on your basketball team, or that you're a capable rock climber and base jumper, or you are racing an all-terrain-vehicle past some kind of very angry elephant, or you are on some distant desert planet having a Star Wars style laser fight with a bunch of robots.

So continues PlayStation's "Greatness Awaits" campaign, which has previously shown a man in a purple suit waxing philosophical before diving into a battle royal; other men trying to kill each other with medieval weapons while singing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day"; and an oil painter recreating "Washington Crossing the Delaware" with a relatively famous gamer and in-game heroes as the characters.

Sony created the new ad, "Friendly Competition," with the help of creative crowd-sourcing company MOFILM (also behind such charming commercials as Chevy's low-budget Oscar flick). Hollywood producer Jon Landau, whose credits include Titanic and Avatar, executive produced the new spot, which certainly delivers plenty of epic special effects (created with L.A.-and-Vancouver-based Zoic Studios).

And that's important. Without the flashy explosions, you might realize you won't actually find yourself riding a land speeder a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and that really would ruin all the fun.

CREDITS
Client: PlayStation
Agency: MOFILM
Executive Producer: Jon Landau
Executive Agency Producer: Kristen Roland
Executive Creative Director: Tim Roper
CEO: Jeffrey Merrihue
Senior Account Director: Gabriela Merrihue
Account Director: Carter Hahn
VFX Company: Zoic Studios
VFX CCO: Chris Jones
Head of Broadcast Production: Ian Unterreiner
Executive Producer: Matt Thunell
VFX Producer: Nate Occhipinti
Editor: Dmitri Gueer
Production Company: Don't Panic Productions
Producer: Melissa Panzer
Director: Jonathan Barenboim
Writer: Michael Zunic
Audio House: Eleven Studios
Sound Design: Henry Boy
Color: Dave Hussey @ CO3
Media Buying Agency: Carat

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Ad of the Day: Friends Rampage Through Games in PlayStation's Salute to Friendly Competition

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The great thing about video games is you can do all kinds of cool, crazy, dangerous and impossible things without actually having to do them.

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33% of users are already bored with their wearables

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33% of users are already bored with their wearables

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A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 33 percent of consumers who purchased a wearable item in the past year either do not use them any more or use them infrequently. The reason consumers are putting down their smartwatches is because the items failed to meet expectations and not becasue they have given up on a wearables future.

In PwC's report, The Wearable Future, more than half of millennials and early adopters said they were excited about where the category will go in the future. To get there, however, manufacturers have to overcome complaints about price, privacy and security. Even so, PwC believes there will be more than 130 million units sold by 2018, with others estimating sales could be as high as 180 million units.

PwC anticipates huge returns for brands. Media companies, in particular, were identified as having a huge amount of potential. "[Wearable technologies are] blank canvases for highly targeted message placements, especially in the form of content with greater relevancy and context to the user," PwC said. "But wearable devices won't just create more ad inventory and unleash more publishing subscription revenue-they'll provide a meaningful opportunity to drive product sales and e-commerce."

PwC sees brands connecting with consumers through richer, more interactive entertainment experiences, tighter integration with social media and rewards for loyalty. Brands could work closely with stores to push content to consumers as they shop and eat at restaurants.

"The media company of the future must combine insights with curated experiences and find new ways of monetization-not merely through conventional advertising and paid content offerings," Deborah Bothun, PwC's U.S. advisory entertainment, media and communications leader, said in a statement. "Wearables offer media companies a huge new frontier of relevance and immersive experiences, helping to engage audiences by providing the most relevant content."

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33% of Users Discard Their Wearables in Disappointment

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A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 33 percent of consumers who purchased a wearable item in the past year either do not use them any more or use them infrequently. The reason consumers are putting down their smartwatches is because the items failed to meet expectations and not becasue they have given up on a wearables future.

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So you've probably heard about the American (a Texan at that) that got locked inside a Waterstone's bookstore after hours. His initial tweet sparked a hilarious trending conversation, one that was a perfect showcase of the narrative and creative power of the Twitter platform. Get the full lowdown at many different sites, like here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/everyones-going-to-be-tired-today-because-a-texan-got-locked. It's as entertaining as it gets.

But what's really amazing about the story is how the brand chose to respond. A couple days ago, Waterstones and Airbnb joined forces to turn the momentary buzz into a customer engagement opportunity, one that shows real creativity and wit. They are offering book lovers a chance to purposefully spend the night in the bookshop. Smart stuff. But most importantly was how fast the idea and the execution came together. The future of real time marketing is moving well beyond simply authoring a Tweet responding to 'news'.

Word of warning to all the creatives out there in agency land, the idea was generated by Airbnb and taken directly to the brand. The competition for creative ideas continues to come from anywhere and everywhere.

#waterstonestexan, Airbnb, newsjacking, Online Promotions, Real-Time Marketing, twitter, waterstones

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Waterstones & Airbnb Seize The #waterstonestexan Moment | Digital Buzz Blog

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So you've probably heard about the American (a Texan at that) that got locked inside a Waterstone's bookstore after hours. His initial tweet sparked a hilarious trending conversation, one that was a perfect showcase of the narrative and creative power of the Twitter platform. Get the full lowdown at many different sites, like here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/everyones-going-to-be-tired-today-because-a-texan-got-locked.

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If it fits, I'll ad it

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Every once in a while a campaign comes along that just puts a massive smile on this churlish blog team's face.
Virgin America is having an excellent year in the digital world. In June it managed to turn the process of booking a flight into a joyous process with its brand new website (as thoroughly documented in Ben Davis's 30 little things I love about the new Virgin America website).

It's also excelling itself in the world of social video. I'm a huge fan of its branded Instavids.

This week sees the launch of a gigantic multichannel, world-building content campaign that is as hilarious as it is inventive. It's also kind of boring and an expert lesson in what not to do on almost every digital channel in existence.

Welcome to BLAH Airlines. Here's why it's so brilliant.

This six-hour advert

Yep. That's right. SIX HOURS.

Oh sure you'll never sit through the whole thing, but the very concept of a six-hour advert is intriguing in of itself.

You can read it as a reaction against the execrably named 'snackable content' and social video's ushering in of sub-15-second-long entertainment.

If you want to be super intellectual you can draw parallels with this and the movement of 'slow cinema', where directors such as Bela Tarr and Theo Angelopoulos use achingly long takes to meditate on the smaller details of our lives, therefore saying much grander things about existence.

But mainly the advert is the perfect way to illustrate just how awful air travel can be. Six hours is a hell of a long time, why should you spend it staring at the back of another person's chair or shifting your weight listlessly around an uncomfortable seat?

It posits that BLAH Airlines is the antithesis of Virgin America, and that life is far too short to be wasting your time flying with any other airline.

That being said, if you pick a handful of random five-minute sections from the advert you'll find plenty of inspired, subtly hilarious moments.

1h25m

This trippy, meaningless dream sequence that has the same soundtrack as a spa's foyer. As far as dreams go, it's still pretty damn boring.

2h05m

The flight attendant explains how to play rock, paper, scissors in a completely nonsensical and likely very dangerous way.

3h56m

Spend more than 20 minutes watching the in-flight movie from seven rows back. It seems to be about a baby called 'Giggling Gary'. You won't be able to see any of it.

A radical departure

At the 3h39m mark our mannequin friend gazes longingly out of the window as a Virgin America airplane passes across a purple sky. A link appears taking you directly to the Virgin America site.

The ad will appear as a YouTube pre-roll

Yep. That's right. The six-hour advert will appear as a YouTube pre-roll. Mercifully it is skippable, but this is still one of the funniest components of the whole campaign and rightfully skewers this heinous practice.

YouTube comments

The comments are a joy to read, unlike the majority of most YouTube videos. Virgin America also keeps the community engaged with responses.

1-844-BLAH-AIR

Just to show that offline channels are just as important as online ones, BLAH Airlines has a dedicated hotline. Prepare for lengthy menu options and information regarding how long your flight has been delayed (you'll notice there was no 'if' in that sentence).

This awful website

Non-responsive, mobile unfriendly, difficult to read, grotesquely coloured and full of broken links. This is Blahairlines.com:

It also takes ages to load...

Testimonials

Testimonials include, "the windows can be opened or closed," by Gwen G and, "if the only point in air travel is to get to your destination eventually, then I guess you could say that BLAH gets the job done," by Malilk B.

FAQs

Helpful answers to all your most pressing questions. "How early do I need to arrive at the airport?" BLAH Airlines suggests arriving early. "My bags are lost, what can I do?" BLAH Airlines is sorry you lost your bags and hopes you find them.

Email

I emailed BLAH Airlines to see how it would respond.

In line with its word-building multichannel strategy (and utter lack of modern marketing skills) here is the response.

Fax

There's a fax number. It's here amongst the 'social' buttons.

If anyone would like to try this then please let me know the results. I would do it myself but... well... you know.

Live chat

Everyone loves live chat, it's a direct customer service channel that's becoming more and more preferable for its speedy resolution and personalised touch.

You won't feel that way after this...

Twitter

Featuring the strap line "our planes fly around," a steadfast refusal to respond to social customer queries and one of the most unappealingly beige profile pictures in existence, this Twitter feed is still a joy to follow.

@Junkyard_Bobbie Please allow 3-4 business months to receive a more personalized reply from us.
- BLAH Airlines (@BLAHAirlines) October 17, 2014

@DNHarris Sorry you are upset/glad you are pleased.
- BLAH Airlines (@BLAHAirlines) October 16, 2014

Of course what's truly brilliant about this is that, although the 'automated' and non-personalised responses are exactly how not to run a branded Twitter account, you need to know how to run a perfect Twitter to mock it so precisely.

In reality, this feed is being run far better than many other legitimate ones.

@kbosspotter beige. with accents of other shades of beige. #beigeisthebest
- BLAH Airlines (@BLAHAirlines) October 15, 2014

Instagram

BLAH Airlines has an Instagram account. Every single image makes you think that this will be the last ever flight you'll ever take.

And this just says it all...
Our Festival of Marketing event in November is a two-day celebration of the modern marketing industry, featuring speakers from brands including LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

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18 reasons to love Virgin's BLAH Airlines content marketing campaign

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Every once in a while a campaign comes along that just puts a massive smile on this churlish blog team's face. Virgin America is having an excellent year in the digital world.

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Interesting thoughts on why we've stopped owning things and prefer to share (e.g. AirBnB, ZipCar)

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Sharing and owning: The rise of the hybrid consumer | WARC

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This article discusses the rise of the 'hybrid' consumer and explores the underlying trends that are driving this development.

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Heineken Share the Sofa Tribal DDB Amsterdam

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Uploaded by Steve Griffiths on 2014-06-10.

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Cause trumps story in social media for brands

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Cause trumps story in social media for brands

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LONDON: Using cause-driven social campaigns can be more effective than using social-driven brand story campaigns, according to a new Warc report.

Seriously Social, an analysis of social-driven case studies by marketing consultant Peter Field, indicates that linking a brand with a broader purpose or cause can be a powerful approach and can lead to better long-term results than story-led strategies.

In the report, Field analyses case studies from the Warc Prize for Social Strategy, a global competition for examples of social ideas that drive business results. The competition defined social strategy as any activity designed to generate participation, conversation, sharing or advocacy.

Field was able to compare the impact of campaigns that associated a brand with a good cause, with the impact of those that built a story around a brand.

He found that media usage for cause-driven campaigns was more strongly focused on online, WOM/earned media and traditional advertising channels (excluding TV). Brand story campaigns, in contrast, made wider use of media channels and, as they were more likely to be short-term campaigns, included much more activation.

These patterns had an impact on subsequent effectiveness. "Cause-driven campaigns are more strongly associated with business effects," Field stated, a finding that became even clearer when stripping non-profit campaigns out of the calculation.

The business effectiveness of cause driven-campaigns was found to increase markedly over time, whereas that of brand story campaigns did not.

"Again, this is a reflection of the short-term outlook of the latter group," Field said, who suggested that conclusions about effectiveness drawn over a period of less than six months would underplay the true strength of cause-driven campaigns.

In fact, not only were cause-driven campaigns better at delivering business effects they also generated greater numbers of brand effects once the non-profits were removed from the equation.

Peter Field will be discussing his top five takeaways from this in-depth analysis of the world's most effective social media campaigns in a webinar on Wednesday 29th October at 3pm, GMT. More details and registration are available here.

Data sourced from Warc

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Good causes boost social media impact | WARC

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LONDON: Using cause-driven social campaigns can be more effective than using social-driven brand story campaigns, according to a new Warc report. Seriously Social, an analysis of social-driven case studies by marketing consultant Peter Field, indicates that linking a brand with a broader purpose or cause can be a powerful approach and can lead to better long-term results than story-led strategies.

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One bright spot in Apple's 'underwhelming' iPad reveals

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One bright spot in Apple's 'underwhelming' iPad reveals

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Is mobile revenue becoming a problem for Google?

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Is mobile revenue becoming a problem for Google?

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The ad that gives the industry a bad name

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The ad that gives the industry a bad name

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The ad that gives the industry a bad name

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If anyone in adland ever wonders why they are held in such low regard by the population, this is why, says Dominic Mills.

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Hello, my name is Stefano Hatfield, and I have a confession to make: I will turn 50 this year, and it feels bloody wonderful.

I'm no longer in denial about becoming 50. Instead, I have accepted and embraced it. In fact, I feel so liberated by this once terrifying personal landmark that I'm quitting corporate life to join High50, a start-up for the rapidly growing community that celebrates being 50+.

Until earlier this week I was the proud editorial director of London Live, the new 24/7 general entertainment channel for the capital, that launched last month. It's owned by the entrepreneurial Russian Evgeny Lebedev, also proprietor of the Evening Standard, the Independent and i, of which I was the launch editor.

Over the past decade I've become a launch junkie, having been the first editor of both Metro New York and News international's thelondonpaper too. However, each of those was part of a large corporation, and aimed at 16-34s. High50 is a bona fide start-up, the brainchild of the adman Robert Campbell, albeit one which he has nurtured in beta in an extended proof of concept, and one that has just secured significant first-round funding.

Robert had an epiphany the month he turned 50, in the company of Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Sure, our children will still view us as old, but beyond that perennial generational divide, 50 today really isn't like our parents' 50. The generation that was 50 when we were children came from a different place, one where their attitudes and habits were still very much forged in the context of post-war austerity. They were ignored at 50+ in the headlong rush to target 16-34 year-olds based on the twin belief that they had disposable income and that once loyal to a brand, they would never switch.

Well that, as Robert saw clearly, was then. The change began with shifting demographics that are impossible to ignore, evolved through a staggering, continuing improvement in health and life expectancy and found its fullest expression in a post-recession environment in which the young are saddled with huge post-education debts and terrifying accommodation costs. Meanwhile 35-49 year-olds have become the true sandwich generation, with children dependent upon them to a greater degree and for a longer period of time, as their mortgages suffocate them and ageing parents becoming a financial and emotional challenge that previous generations would not recognise.

Don't just take my word for it. First, the demographics: 106million of 314 million Americans, 340million of 1.3billion Chinese and 23million of 63million Britons are now aged 50+. By the year 2020 more than 50% of the UK's population will be over the age of 50.

And, the economics: people who are 50+ control 89% of all disposable wealth in the UK. The same group accounted for £320billion (48%) of UK household expenditure in 2012. They spend more than any other group on culture. Take a random category: 50+ women account for 68% of cosmetics purchases per year. Or more than 70% of the luxury travel market. The average age of a Porsche buyer? 51. It's not going to change any time soon: someone turns 50 every 40 seconds in the UK. The pensions crisis is only getting worse, and for many 50+ retirement is no longer an option. Oh, we all switch brands.

What do the the following have in common: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Elle McPherson? Yep, they are all 50. Courtney Cox, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves? They will be 50 sometime this year. 50+ are getting younger, not older.

And yet... Survey after survey finds that 50+ feel they are being ignored. Advertisers and the media industry obsess about the 16-34 year-old demographic, apparently oblivious to the shift in disposable spending power. Ageism abounds, particularly on television and in Hollywood, and especially for women. And 'they' are constantly being patronised. Do 'they' understand modern technology? Well, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners Lee and Eric Schmidt (all born in 1955) gave us modern technology. 50+ is the generation that shaped modern culture and attitudes.

It is also a generation that feels a little bit guilty. They have had it "pretty good, pretty, pretty good" compared to those before and after them? Once thoughtless, they are now mindful consumers who want to give back, even bankroll.

They also generally resist classification. Perhaps that's why they are so often ignored. They are hard work; a rare unifying characteristic of the contemporary 50+ being this resistance to being stereotyped. What's startlingly clear to me as I contemplate joining their ranks is that the time is ripe for a new celebratory conversation about being 50+, one based on attitude not age. And, if you don't agree, I don't really care. Because that renewed, liberating confidence that comes with rebooting my life is one of the many ways in which it is clear to me that age has its benefits.
Stefano Hatfield is editor-in-chief of High50

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Why I'm Launching High50 - The Online Community for the Over-50s

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Hello, my name is Stefano Hatfield, and I have a confession to make: I will turn 50 this year, and it feels bloody wonderful. I'm no longer in denial about becoming 50. Instead, I have accepted and embraced it.

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Twee advertising and the infernal urban village

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Twee advertising and the infernal urban village

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A London based commercial production company.

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Will.i-am and Zaha Hadid launch PULS smartwatch

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Will.i-am and Zaha Hadid launch PULS smartwatch

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Will.i.am is at Wired's annual conference in London today, where he was on hand to talk about all-things tech and, in particular, his newly launched 'smart cuffs' (or smartwatch to you and me).

However, a surprise guest made an appearance on stage with the American musician and entrepreneur - award-winning architect Zaha Hadid. Why? Well, it seems that Will.i.am has brought Hadid on board to design some of the new Puls cuffs, and she revealed some of the designs on stage, which you can see in the gallery here.

Will.i.am first revealed his smartwatch plans back in April, plans that finally came to fruition earlier this week when he formally launched the funky timepiece to the public.

Unlike many other smartwatches on the market, the Puls is a voice-controlled contraption that also lets you call and text - it sports GSM 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, a pedometer and accelerometer. Built by a team of 35 engineers, the Puls will be released under the i.am+ brand, though no dates or prices have been confirmed yet. That said, Will.i.am did strongly hint that it would be sometime in November.

Will.i.am explained his vision for the Puls - he says it's not a smartwatch. He's looking to mesh the worlds of fashion and technology to create something that people actually want to wear - something that Gucci himself might be proud of.

With Hadid, Will.i.am has a major design name on board, though granted it's someone more renowned for designing buildings. It will be interesting to see how her creations are received when they come to market and, judging by the photos, the devices won't look too out of place in a jewelry box full of bangles.

Read next: Improve social media shares by harnessing the power of positivity

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Will.i.am is Working With Zaha Hadid to Design Puls Cuffs

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Will.i.am is at Wired's annual conference in London today, where he was on hand to talk about all-things tech and, in particular, his newly launched 'smart cuffs' (or smartwatch to you and me). However, a surprise guest made an appearance on stage with the American musician and entrepreneur - award-winning architect Zaha Hadid.

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Buzzfeed to build new 'formats' team in the UK

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Buzzfeed to build new 'formats' team in the UK

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BuzzFeed is setting up a new development team based in London to look at new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences.

Tom Phillips, recently appointed UK editorial director at BuzzFeed, told Journalism.co.uk the team would be "explicitly focused on being experimental and trying out new formats".

"That's going to range from everything from games that are incredibly entertaining and go viral, to interactives... and new ways of laying out stories," he said.

"The remit is very wide but it's all focused around creating new formats that hopefully become something BuzzFeed is known for in the same way quizzes became a huge thing."

Phillips said the team would create new "reusable" tools that could be widely rolled out and integrated into the CMS (content management system), or one-off tools for big events like the forthcoming UK general election.

The new team will potentially work across all areas of BuzzFeed's editorial output, he said, such as its investigations unit which produces "longform investigative stories with real impact". The team will look at ways to make these stories "even more impactful".

Phillips, who worked at Trinity Mirror's "experimental project" Us Vs Th3m before joining BuzzFeed, said games were also on the radar.

"That's an area where I think there's a huge amount that we can do that we're not doing already," he said. "It's the kind of thing where the natural creativity of all of our staff could really shine through if we start to get that ball rolling."

However, many of the events the new formats team will be working on, like the elections, are going to be "serious news things".

While the team would be developing more entertaining games or new features for quizzes, it would also look at "ways we can work with data, ways we can bring visual elements to narrative stories," he said, adding that "these are all hugely important for news."

And some of the tools might also be "quite neutral", providing BuzzFeed reporters with a new way to present their ideas and offering an incentive to be creative.

Phillips said "the slidey thing" - a tool that juxtaposes two images and highlights differences between them through a vertical slider - was a "great example" of a simple but versatile format.

Screenshot from
9 Charts That Show How The UK Would Change Without Scotland

Since 'the slidey thing' has been added to the CMS, writers have been using it in different ways, from showcasing celebrity lookalikes to creating data presentations showing changes over time.

"You can use 'the slidey thing' for entertainment purposes but you can also use it to actually tell serious stories as well," he said.

"That's just a question of figuring out [how] you can take simple ideas and apply them in ways that might be unexpected and yet very compelling."

The team will consist of developers, designers, and writers, "people who are engaged and interested and enthusiastic about a wide range of different things, because that's when a project like this will work best," said Phillips.

Tom Phillips will be speaking about visual journalism at Journalism.co.uk's upcoming news:rewired conference in February

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BuzzFeed to build 'new formats' team in the UK

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BuzzFeed is setting up a new development team based in London to look at new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences. Tom Phillips, recently appointed UK editorial director at BuzzFeed, told Journalism.co.uk the team would be "explicitly focused on being experimental and trying out new formats".

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Pinterest ads are coming - and they're ambitious

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Pinterest ads are coming - and they're ambitious

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The Cannes Lions advertising festival has become as big among the Madison Avenue crowd as the Riviera town's iconic film event is for Hollywood. So as Steve Stoute nursed a drink with a friend at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the balmy June evening that opened this year's boozing and schmoozing, the Cannes Lions veteran braced himself for an onslaught of media and technology executives. Stoute's ad agency, Translation LLC, has clients like Anheuser-Busch, State Farm and McDonald's -- the kinds of whales that would have him fending off supplicants left and right.

But the roles of supplicant and master reversed when Stoute spotted Ben Silbermann walking into the bar. The soft-spoken Pinterest CEO was attending Cannes for the first time. Silbermann, 32, had just checked into his hotel and was planning to have a quick drink with his team before turning in to prep for his keynote speech the following morning. A few weeks earlier his social media service, especially popular with women and hobbyists, began experimenting with selling ads to show to its 70 million users. With more demand than it could satisfy, Pinterest had limited its test to a mere dozen sponsors, wringing commitments of more than $1 million from each.

Stoute was desperate to get his newest client, discount shoe store chain DSW, into the program (fashion is the third-most-popular type of content on Pinterest). "I didn't want this thing to go by without us getting in front of it," he says. Fortunately he had an in: Stoute's drinking buddy that night was Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, had just participated in the $200 million funding round that had propelled Pinterest's on-paper valuation to $5 billion. Horowitz called Silbermann over, and Stoute ordered rosé for everyone, raised his glass toward his new acquaintance and offered up a paean of praise and blessings: Rise above, be great, stay great.

After accepting Stoute's flattery, Silbermann agreed to take his money, too. An hour into his Riviera debut, the new prince of Cannes had already bagged his first deal, just by showing up.

That's pretty much how things have been going for Pinterest lately. A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn't yet five years old, but among women, who make up over 80% of its users, it's already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalization of more than $30 billion. Pinterest's U.S. user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically, and it's moving fast to catch up with them overseas, opening offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo over the past year. International users now make up nearly half of new sign-ups, according to the research firm Semiocast. Pinterest even doubled the number of active male users in the past year.

To date, Pinterest's users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to Web publishers.

All that activity sounds big, but it understates the moneymaking opportunity in front of Pinterest, which will ultimately be judged by how much revenue it can wrest from its users. While it's the earliest of days still, many analysts and observers believe that, on the basis of average revenue per user, it's only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. "They're going to bring in billions of dollars a year," says Dave Weinberg, founder of the social marketing company Loop88.

To marketers, Pinterest represents a unique proposition, a new medium of a sort that's never existed before. One difference is temporal. As Silbermann explains it, Facebook "is about your connections, your past events, your memories." Users on Facebook volunteer a staggering amount of retrospective information such as birthplace, alma mater and vacations, data the company can use to power its highly targeted ad offerings. Twitter can't offer that level of detail, which is why its revenue per user, at around $3.50, is only half that of Facebook's. Twitter's value remains stuck in the now, promising advertisers a presence in real-time conversations about the World Cup, a presidential election or Orange Is the New Black.

If Facebook is selling the past and Twitter the present, Pinterest is offering the future. "It's about what you aspire to do, what you want to do down the line," says Silbermann. And the future is where marketers want to live. When a user pins an image of a wedding dress or a coffee table to one of her boards, she's sending up a signal flare to the merchandiser who might want to sell her that wedding dress or coffee table. "There's intent around a pin," says Joanne Bradford, Pinterest's head of partnerships. "It says, 'I'm organizing this into a place in my life,' like when people tear out a page of a magazine."

The idea of being able to locate consumers at that delicate moment when browsing becomes shopping has marketers intrigued. "One of the things we're trying to figure out strategically is how to tap into consumers earlier in the inspiration or planning phase," says David Doctorow, senior vice president of global marketing at Expedia, one of Pinterest's charter advertisers. "We don't have great ways to identify consumers in that part of the journey."

For now advertising is Pinterest's only revenue line. But it requires only the tiniest leap to conjure a scenario in which the company acts as middleman for the hundreds of thousands of retailers already showcasing their wares on its platform. "The next step will be how do we make it really easy for you to go out and buy that ring or take that trip," says Silbermann. This is Amazon's turf, but Facebook and Twitter have been making incursions, with both companies conducting tests of "Buy" buttons for frictionless shopping. Pinterest, though, has natural advantages in e-commerce, with independent research showing its users are more likely to share product links and make big purchases than users of other social platforms.

If Pinterest is going to lay claim to the future, it will have to knock off a pretty formidable incumbent, Google, which is also in the business of harvesting signals of intent and selling them to marketers. That's the basis of its search advertising, the engine that drives roughly two-thirds of the company's $55 billion in annual revenue.

Silbermann, who spent two years as a product specialist in Google's advertising operation, knows what he's up against. For all his midwestern diffidence (he was raised in Des Moines), he's not shying away from the confrontation. In his Cannes keynote Silbermann dismissed Google as "the ultimate card catalog," an outdated technology useful only if you already know what you're looking for. Evan Sharp, Silbermann's cofounder, puts a finer point on it. Pinterest, he says, "exposes people to possibilities they never would have known existed."

Pinterest people talk of this open-ended form of search as discovery, and figuring out how to do it right "is the biggest business opportunity in the last 10 to 20 years for an online business," says Tim Kendall, Pinterest's product head. The choice of time frame is not accidental: As Facebook's director of monetization from 2006 through 2010, he shaped the strategy that turned that company into the $200 billion force it has become. He says Pinterest will be bigger--bigger than Facebook and, yes, bigger than Google. "That's why I joined."

Silbermann didn't always know what he was looking for. It's tempting to assume otherwise: As a child in Iowa he had multiple collections, including one of dried insects pinned to cardboard; as an adult he started a pinning site for virtual collectors whose most avid early users were in the Midwest.

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Inside Pinterest: The Coming Ad Colossus That Could Dwarf Twitter And Facebook

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Facebook monetizes the past. Twitter the present. Pinterest, by organizing your wishes and dreams, can identify what you might do or buy in the future. That's a model worth $5 billion for the social network with almighty Google in its sights.

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One powerful question for brands to answer in 2015: what are you prepared to SACRIFICE?

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Apple revamps iAd with re-targeting capability

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Apple revamps iAd with re-targeting capability

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Apple's release of its new mobile operating system last month came with an overlooked gift for marketers: the ability to retarget ads based on users' in-app browsing behaviors.

According to ad agencies, Apple is actively pitching the new capability as a way to effectively solve the mobile cookie problem.

Say, for example, a visitor to a retailer's iPhone app adds a pair of shoes to his cart but ultimately decide not to buy it. In this scenario, the retailer will now be able to retarget that user with an ad for that exact pair - even in another app on his iPad. When tapped, the ad would direct him back to his abandoned checkout page and automatically add the shoes to his online shopping cart.

"One of the big limitations of not just iAd, but the entire iOS ecosystem, is that cookies don't work," said Eric Franchi, co-founder of cross-device ad network Undertone. IOS is the operating system on which Apple devices run. "If Apple can bring very advanced targeting combined with e-commerce, it will be incredibly powerful."

E-commerce companies are a particular focus for the new feature as it enables them to retarget users across Apple devices based on items they have previously expressed interest in. E-commerce apps can also track the items shoppers add to their digital wishlists and send ads for those items when they go on sale, and target ads based upon a person's shopping history.

Cross-device retargeting should help iAd. With just a 2.6 percent share of the U.S. mobile ad market, Apple lags behind Google (37.7 percent), Facebook (17.9 percent), Twitter (3.5 percent), Pandora (2.9 percent) and YP (2.7 percent), according to research firm eMarketer. The iAd business, rolled out in 2010, has not exactly set the ad world ablaze. Mobile ads remain a sidelight for the company.

Apple's primary motivation for maintaining iAd is to entice app publishers into developing apps for its devices, as advertising is tangential to Apple's business. Apple shares a majority (70 percent) of iAd revenue with app publishers using the network, and its projected mobile ad revenue for all of 2014 - $487.1 million, per eMarketer - is just 1.3 percent of the revenue Apple earned in the third quarter alone.

Still, with retargeting capability, Apple is wading into one of the hottest areas of digital advertising. Standalone retargeters like Criteo have done well, and much of Facebook's programmatic ad business is premised on retargeting. In its early stumbles with iAd, Apple based most of its pitch on iAd being a premium brand advertising product - with a matching price point. The addition of retargeting will allow it to cater to performance advertising goals.

Apple declined a request to comment for this piece.

The iAd development is alluring for marketers looking to retarget users on mobile devices where cookies are functionally irrelevant. Plenty of companies - most notably Facebook, Google and Twitter - are looking to solve this problem by turning their users' profiles into universal advertising identifiers for targeting and attribution purposes.

Jeremy Lockhorn, mobile lead at digital agency Razorfish, said iAd retargeting is also useful for mobile game developers. Games will be able to serve ads to users who haven't played in a given period of time, or to entice active users to make in-app purchases for special features.

"This is huge for any app developer that's monetizing off of iAd," Lockhorn said.

Retargeting became available when Apple rolled out iOS 8, the latest version of its mobile operating system, in early September, but the iAd sales team has more proactively pitched it only recently, presumably to cash in on the deluge of e-commerce marketing spend that comes with each holiday season.

While ad agency execs are excited about the new possibilities, Apple has shown little desire to make advertising a core part of its business. What's more, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote the following in September in an open letter to customers: "Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don't build a profile based on your email content or Web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don't "monetize" the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud."

Apple does let iPhone users reset the advertising identifier used to serve them targeted ads via iAd, thus erasing all previously held information. Users interested in doing so can find the option by selecting "Settings," then "Privacy" and then "Advertising" on their phones.
Image via Shutterstock

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Apple revamps mobile ads with retargeting options - Digiday

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Apple's release of its new mobile operating system last month came with an overlooked gift for marketers: the ability to retarget ads based on users' in-app browsing behaviors. According to ad agencies, Apple is actively pitching the new capability as a way to effectively solve the mobile cookie problem.

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Xaiomi, not Apple, is changing the smartphone industry

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Xaiomi, not Apple, is changing the smartphone industry

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Determining which customer to target first is one of the most critical decisions in the entrepreneurial process. Customers that are relatively less risky and more predictable can make it easier for new to firms gain a market foothold. One such set of customers is the nascent middle class in emerging economies.

Why? First, as their financial situation improves they are anxious to buy new things. Not quite able to afford the top brands, they're nevertheless willing to pay a little more for something they perceive might be close. Second, because they can't yet afford the high-margin top brands, they're not all that attractive to incumbents worried about generating enough cash to cover their high fixed and variable costs. So they exist in a sweet spot from an entrepreneur's point of view: rich and numerous enough to fuel a start-up's growth and also poor enough not to spur incumbents to respond.

Xiaomi, the four-year-old Chinese smartphone manufacturer, has found just such a sweet spot, and as a result is taking the smartphone industry by a storm. Pundits claim that Xiaomi is just a Chinese copycat of Apple, and not without some reason. Some point to Xiaomi's product introductions, which are eerily just like Apple's. Others point out the strong similarities between Xiaomi's operating system (named MIUI) and Apple's iOS. What's more, Xiaomi's products rank among the best in the industry in terms of performance. All these cues might lead us to believe that it is competing head to head with the leading smartphone manufacturers.

However, looking at the full extent of Xiaomi's business model reveals just how different - and how disruptive - it is. For starters, unlike Apple, Xiaomi is not targeting premium customers; it's mostly teens buying those high-quality phones, and hardly at a premium, since Xiaomi's prices are at least 60% lower. A neat trick. How does Xiaomi pull that off?

To sell high-quality cell phones at so low a price, Xiaomi keeps each model on the market far longer than Apple does. On average, a new version of a phone is launched every 265 days in the industry - down from 345 days in 2009. But Xiaomi doesn't renew its product for two years. Then, rather than charge high prices to cover the high cost of state-of-the-art components, Xiaomi prices the phone just a little higher than the total cost of all its components. As component costs drop over the two-year period by more than 90%, Xiaomi maintains its original price, and pockets the difference. Apple, on the other hand, collects its highest profits with the introduction of each model and needs to come up with new model after new model to keep those margins up.

When you consider how much easier it might be to profit from plummeting component prices than from continual new feature development (which sooner or later will likely overshoot the needs of most cell phone customers in any event), the disruptive potential of the model becomes clear.

One might worry that other low-end competitors could easily copy this clever model, and to forestall that, Xiaomi has devised a creative way to create some of the mystique Apple is so justly noted for. Essentially it markets its phones to its price-constrained but status-conscious teen base in much the same way that rock band promoters sell concert tickets. Through an online retailer called Flipkart, potential buyers preregister for a short sales window. They're required to stay online for at least two hours before the sale starts, and then only the first 20,000 lucky buyers get the opportunity to purchase. Human nature being what it is, after this awful experience, buyers end up wanting the phone even more.

Xiaomi is close to meeting its target of selling 60 million phones in 2014 with a business model well suited to expansion into other developing economies. In a classical reaction to disruptive innovation, the largest smartphone manufacturers were at first not motivated to seriously challenge Xiaomi, since they could not be profitable at the price these customers are able to pay. Now that Xiaomi is becoming a significant competitor, the incumbents are still barely reacting, launching simplified versions of their mature flagship products, as Apple did with the iPhone 5c. But these are perceived as outdated, as newer models, like the iPhone 6, are introduced amid great fanfare in wealthier markets, and often end up being discontinued.

So far from being a copycat, Xiaomi presents a knotty disruptive challenge to the largest smartphone manufacturers. As it continues to expand in developing economies by marketing to the emerging middle class, it remains sheltered from the competition by its margins and the way it makes products profitable. Sooner rather than later, as it continues to propagate its new business model, this disruptive competitor is going to change how this industry works.
More on Xiaomi: How Xiaomi Beats Apple at Product Launches Can Chinese Smartphone Darling Xiaomi Compete in Western Markets?

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Xiaomi, Not Apple, Is Changing the Smartphone Industry

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Determining which customer to target first is one of the most critical decisions in the entrepreneurial process. Customers that are relatively less risky and more predictable can make it easier for new to firms gain a market foothold. One such set of customers is the nascent middle class in emerging economies.

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With Apple Pay slated to go live later this month, one can soon expect to see an avalanche of fear mongering from pundits who, like PayPal, will question the wisdom of trusting Apple with user credit card information.

The reality, though, is that Apple Pay is an exceedingly secure mobile payment platform. In fact, it may very well be the safest way to make any type of credit card payment. To understand why, below is a general overview of how the system works behinds the scenes. Note that this article is meant to paint the Apple Pay process in broad strokes, as a good portion of the nitty-gritty technical details aren't yet publicly known and, due to security considerations, may never be fully disclosed.

In putting this post together, I was able to talk to a few individuals involved with the development of Apple Pay who were able to shed a tiny bit of light on Apple's foray into the world of mobile payments. Additionally, a number of the technical aspects of the financial and logistical processes that govern Apple Pay can be gleaned from the EMV Payment Tokenisation Specification Technical Framework which can be downloaded here.

That said, here's how Apple Pay operates and why it's so secure.

Credit Card information isn't part of the equation

With Apple Pay, no credit card data -- even in encrypted form -- is ever stored on the iPhone or on Apple's servers. Similarly, no credit card data is ever transmitted to or stored on a merchant's servers.

When a user first signs up for Apple Pay, either via an existing iTunes credit card or by loading a new one onto the iPhone, the card information is immediately encrypted and securely sent to the appropriate credit card network. Upon determining that the credit card account is valid, a token is sent back down to the device whereupon it's safely stored within the iPhone's Secure Element.

The token is used in place of an actual credit card number and is what Apple, in its marketing materials, refers to as a unique Device Account Number.

What the heck is a token?

The token itself, as implemented in Apple Pay, is a randomly generated and unique 16-digit number that ostensibly resembles a valid credit card number but is, in fact, fundamentally useless. Think of the token as nothing more than a placeholder or reference ticket for your actual credit card information. The only thing a token has in common with its corresponding credit card number are the last 4 digits on the card.

A 2012 white paper from First Data on the benefits of tokenization reads:

The token can be used just like the original card number for business functions such as returns, sales reports, marketing analysis, recurring payments, and so on, but cannot be used to conduct a fraudulent transaction outside the merchant environment. The aim of tokenization is to remove the card information from the merchant environment as completely and quickly as possible (thus addressing the root cause of data security issues) while maintaining existing business processes.

Tokens by themselves are worthless and cannot be decrypted

The key thing to remember about tokens is that they hold no intrinsic value and cannot be used, by themselves, to perform any type of monetary transaction. Over and above that, it's likely that Apple Pay tokens are not mathematically generated, which is to say that they can't be decrypted back into a credit card number because encryption isn't even part of the equation. Put differently, there exists no master key to reverse engineer them. Instead, there's what is effectively a master index. When a credit card is loaded into Apple Pay, the credit card data is replaced with a randomly generated string that only the token issuer (in this case the credit card networks) can map back to the credit card account.

You could hand the most talented hackers or cryptographers a list of millions of token numbers and it would be of no value to them.

As an additional layer of security, there are mechanisms in place to ensure that the token itself is bound to the phone on which it's stored and can never be used from another device.

The mechanics of an Apple Pay transaction

Once a transaction is underway, the iPhone sends the token (which again, acts as a stand-in for the real credit card information) to the merchant which, in turn, sends it to the credit card network where it is mapped back to the corresponding credit card account that created it. The card network ultimately contacts the issuing bank for authorization. If the card is approved, the issuing bank sends a message all the way back down the line to the merchant indicating that all systems are go and the transaction can proceed.

This process is leaps and bounds safer than traditional credit card terminals because merchants transact exclusively in tokens and are never in possession of user credit card information.

With a service like Apple Pay in use, large credit card breaches at companies like Target and Home Depot become ancient history because there are no credit card numbers to steal in the first place. What's more, Apple Pay's use of tokens eliminates common threats such as man in the middle attacks and good ole' fashioned credit card skimming because, again, actual credit card information never touches the merchant.

The use of a token, though, is just one part of the puzzle that makes Apple Pay so secure.

Additional layers of security - Touch ID and cryptograms

Per the aforementioned EMV Payment Tokenisation Specification, completing a token-based transaction from a mobile device requires a form of personal authentication, which is where the simplicity of Touch ID rears its beautiful head. Instead of having to clumsily enter in a one-time password (static authentication data such as a PIN cannot be used), the payment process is finalized when a user authorizes it with Touch ID.

But there's a whole lot more to Apple Pay than Touch ID and the simple handing off of tokens. Providing an additional layer of security, an Apple Pay-equipped iPhone at the time of each transaction also sends a dynamically generated CVV up the chain along with a cryptogram. The CVV is the three-digit string located on the back of your credit card and, in the case of Apple Pay, is a algorithmically-generated dynamic string that's tied directly to the token. The cryptogram itself " uniquely identifies the device" that created the token and, according to the EMV Payment Spec, is likely comprised of encrypted data sourced from the token, the device itself, and transaction data. Note, though, that the precise components of the Apple Pay cryptogram aren't publicly known.

The important thing to remember, though, is that the cryptogram is effectively a one-time use digital signature that verifies that the token in transit originated from the device being used. Additionally, the cryptogram includes pertinent transaction data such as the identity of the merchant and how much is being charged.

There are two important facts here to remember:

1. Tokens cannot be used without an accompanying cryptogram

2. The cryptogram ensures that a token can only be used from the device on which it was initially loaded

Fleshing this out a bit more, I spoke to Steve Mott of BetterBuyDesign -- a former MasterCard executive who now writes for Digital Transactions -- who added the following details:

The network 'unravels' the cryptogram, then ships the transaction information to the issuer for authorization. The key is the merchant sees NO account information but has the final four digits of the PAN [CC number] as an account identifier to use as a mechanism for tracking volume/activity per account. The only dynamic part of the token is the cryptogram, generated per transaction; the rest is static token data, but largely worthless without the cryptogram.

Apple Pay will help usher in a new standard for mobile payment security

Highlighting the improved safety that Apple Pay provides, Tom Noyes -- a former credit card executive who has an excellent series of in-depth posts about the world of mobile payments -- said the following in the wake of Apple's Apple Pay announcement.

Apple is the first implementation of the new EMVCo tokenization specification. In my view this is a giant LEAP beyond EMV chip and PIN, and is now (by far) the most secure PAYMENTS scheme on the planet.

Mott was similarly excited about the prospect of Apple Pay, noting that while it remains to be seen how well the service scales, Apple "raised the bar and made transacting without a token no longer an option."

Noyes' statement brings up an interesting point, namely that the fundamental aspects of Apple Pay weren't concocted in Cupertino. Rather, Apple Pay was designed in accordance with an emerging token-based mobile payments standard which aims to increase security and reduce the incidence of fraud. To that end, Apple is getting into the mobile payments space at just the right time. So while Apple isn't necessarily inventing the wheel here, Apple Pay again represents the first real implementation, on a massive scale no less, of the relatively fresh tokenization specification.

That said, it's not as if Apple took the easy way out and simply developed Apple Pay to conform to the most general requirements for token-based transactions. On the contrary, sources at two top credit card companies who helped work on the implementation of Apple Pay told me that large technical teams from Apple, credit card companies, and banking institutions worked tirelessly over the past few months to implement additional layers of security into the Apple Pay platform. This jibes with recent reports detailing the immense effort put into the platform from the likes of Visa and JP Morgan Chase.

A credit card executive involved with development of Apple Pay told me:

Token transactions as they have been implemented for Apple are a new and much higher standard of security for electronic payments. The amount of security built into provisioning tokens and supporting transactions is a new standard that I think will definitely shift fraud patterns going forward.

What this means for consumers

While it remains to be seen if Apple Pay catches on with consumers, there should be no doubt that Apple Pay is an extremely safe way to make a credit card payment. In fact, it's likely much safer than how most users are currently making credit card payments today.

Remember that merchants in an Apple Pay transaction never have access to user credit card information and, as a result, users never have to worry about their information being compromised in a security breach. Further, security at the device level is effectively impenetrable as tokens, along with the encrypted keys responsible for the cryptogram, are all securely stored in the Secure Element.

And as an extra security precaution, iPhone owners will have the ability to unlink or temporarily suspend a token connected to a stolen device, thereby rendering Apple Pay inoperable until the device is retrieved.

So while the Apple Pay user experience has been set up to be impressively simple, there are a myriad of complex safety measures at work behind the scenes to help ensure that sensitive user data remains free from prying eyes. The use of token-based payments is something the banks have been pushing for and something the credit card networks are similarly excited for.

The only variable, really, is how consumers take to it. Safety, though, shouldn't be a concern.

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Apple Pay: An in-depth look at what's behind the secure payment system

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With Apple Pay slated to go live later this month, one can soon expect to see an avalanche of fear mongering from pundits who, like PayPal, will question the wisdom of trusting Apple with user credit card information. The reality, though, is that Apple Pay is an exceedingly secure mobile payment platform.

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Prepare for ads on Snapchat, bruh!

The company announced on Friday that users will start receiving ads from brands under the Recent Updates section of the app. This is the same portion of the Snapchat inbox where you find Stories, a product that threads together multiple snaps (both video or photo) into one, long snap.

The ads are opt-in, in that you don't actually have to watch them if you don't want to. (Brands will love it!) After viewing, or within 24 hours, they disappear from your inbox. However, users have no control over whether or not they actually receive the ads. They're coming, whether you like it or not.

Either, it's a pretty chill way to approach advertising, and it focuses predominantly on the happiness of the user, not the brand. It's hard to say the same for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which all force users to look at ads that are interstitially woven into the main social experience.

Still, an ad is an ad is an ad. And ads are never actually cool.

Snapchat first started experimenting with this idea with the launch of Our Stories, a collaborative Snapchat timeline centered around specific events. The first Our Stories event was Electronic Daisy Carnival.

Though Stories is a growing product, Our Stories have limited visibility because they are so targeted around a certain date, location, and group of people.

Advertising within regular Stories, as opposed to location-based advertising, makes far more sense in terms of reach.

But how powerful can these ads be? If users have complete control over whether or not they view these ads, brands run the risk of spending money on a platform where the majority of users aren't even seeing their content.

On the other hand, users are getting a pretty good deal. Of all the social networks in the past decade, this may be one of the only ones to employ advertising that isn't forced onto the eyes of users.

It's unclear how Snapchat will actually monetize these ads - they could charge for every user that receives a snapvertisement, with a bonus for every time a snapad is opened, or they could simply charge for every viewed ad on the platform.

Within the announcement, Snapchat mentioned (Clueless-style) that it would be "totally rude" to put ads in your personal communication, like IMs or Snaps, and they are exactly right. They also explained why they're introducing ads.

"We need to make money. Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters. We promise that we'll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products - that's what we love to do!"

(I love the bit about promising to use the money to power Snapchat, considering founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy each skimmed $10 million off of the top of their $80 million Series B for themselves. We promise we'll use the money on the product this time, guys.)

You can read the full blog post here:

This weekend we're placing an advertisement in "Recent Updates" for Snapchatters in the United States. It's the first time we've done anything like this because it's the first time we've been paid to put content in that space. It's going to feel a little weird at first, but we're taking the plunge.

The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you. Some companies spend a lot of time and collect a lot of data about you to figure that out. The product we're releasing today is a lot simpler. An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories.

We won't put advertisements in your personal communication - things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that's fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted. It's nice when all of the brilliant creative minds out there get our attention with terrific content.

Understandably, a lot of folks want to know why we're introducing advertisements to our service. The answer is probably unsurprising - we need to make money. Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters. We promise that we'll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products - that's what we love to do!

If you're into it, TechCrunch's Josh Constine and I got into a bit of a debate when we first heard the news, and our co-editor Alexia Tsotsis decided to record it.

You can view it here:

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Snapchat Ads Are Probably Cooler Than Facebook's, But Still Not Cool

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Prepare for ads on Snapchat, bruh! The company announced on Friday that users will start receiving ads from brands under the Recent Updates section of the app. This is the same portion of the Snapchat inbox where you find Stories, a product that threads together multiple snaps (both video or photo) into one, long snap.

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Not one artist has gone platinum in 2014

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Not one artist has gone platinum in 2014

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According to Billboard...
So far this year, 60 digital songs have sold over 1 million units as compared to 83 last year.

And after nine months, not one artist-album has yet to hit the million-unit mark.

Frozen soundtrack is the year's best-seller so far with a robust 3.12 million units.In the prior year, five albums each had scanned over a million units, led by Justin Timberlake's 20/20 Experience, which at the end of 2013's third quarter had scans of 2.3 million units.
Image, 'Doobie Brothers Gold & Platinum Records at B.R. Cohn Winery', by Sarah Stierch. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC by 2.0).

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Not One Artist Album Has Gone Platinum In 2014... - Digital Music News

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According to Billboard... So far this year, 60 digital songs have sold over 1 million units as compared to 83 last year. And after nine months, not one artist-album has yet to hit the million-unit mark. Frozen soundtrack is the year's best-seller so far with a robust 3.12 million units.In the prior year, five albums each had ...

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What the numbers tell us about streaming in 2014

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What the numbers tell us about streaming in 2014

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What the Numbers Tell Us About Streaming in 2014

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By the end of 2014 streaming revenues will account for $3.3 billion, up 37% from 2013. However headline market value numbers only ever tell part of the story. Just as important are the numbers on the ground that give us some sense of where the money is flowing and of the sustainability of the business...

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Editor's note: Philip Inghelbrecht is a co-founder of Shazam, investor in 8tracks, and a paying Spotify subscriber.

Of all industry roller coasters, the music industry must be the wildest.

The last 30 years reshaped the business in a way we never could have imagined. Music as a product changed dramatically (e.g. from LPs to MP3s) and the ups and downs in worldwide sales would make the most hardened theme park visitor queasy. Nonetheless, we have yet to experience the biggest switchback on this rollercoaster ride.

The clues for what's around the next turn lie in a sister industry - movies.

Let's start by taking a look at the music industry. According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) revenue peaked at $38bn worldwide in 1999, collapsed down to $16 billion (2011), edged up somewhat the year after, only to fall back down again to $15 billion last year (2013). The transition from analogue to digital played an important role in all of this: it made music piracy easy for the casual music fan. Piracy is real and doesn't need further explanation. The industry, however, makes it the scapegoat, conveniently forgetting some other (often self-inflicted) wounds.

For starters, the $38 billion peak was artificial, and not a reflection of "steady or ongoing" music purchases. In the run-up to 1999, a lot of people replaced their LPs with CDs, often buying the same album twice. What goes up (higher) must come down (faster/further). Secondly, packaging changed.

We used to buy albums, or a bundle of songs. That means that the casual fan typically ended up paying 3x to 4x more to get the few songs they really wanted. Today, we can buy tracks piecemeal, spending minimal dollars. And thirdly, record labels (still) get it wrong on pricing. Recording executives have the tendency to target diehard fans with steep prices; they misjudge the pricing elasticity of music (as David Pakman explained in a recent blog post).

It's not inconceivable that Spotify would land 5x more paying subscribers if the price-point were $3/mo (currently set at $10/mo). A lower price point beats the inconvenience of piracy, makes it more appealing to casual fans, and potentially opens up developing countries.

I'm probably missing a few causes - and some that I mentioned could be argued. That's not the point here. The fact is that the music industry has been suffering for 15 years, and remains fragile as it is today.

Meanwhile, the movie market blossomed from $80bn to $88bn in 2013 (source: PWC). The industry is projecting this figure to reach $100bn in the next few years to come, with growth across countries worldwide. What's going on? Movies have gone (mostly) digital, too. And piracy is no less of an option through services like XBMC (Xbox Media Center), Popcorn Time and the plethora of Torrent services.

The key difference lies in what's called "windowing", i.e. the creation of exclusivities (for the exact same movie or TV show) around format, time, geography, etc., with each sold to the highest paying customer.

For example, when a movie is first released, it's typically only available in theaters. Avid movie buffs will pay $10-$15, just to see it once. After that it becomes available on DVD (again $10, this time to own and view multiple times), then Video-On-Demand (think $4 to view over 48-hours), then pay-TV (e.g. HBO at $10/mo, with limited scheduling) and streaming (e.g. Neftlix at $8/mo, easy scheduling), eventually ending up for free (e.g. TNT, assuming you forget about the ads). I skipped and rounded a few release windows here, but it gives you the gist.

The same piece of content is sold over and over again, each time maximizing the end-user's willingness to pay. Windows of exclusivity can last for decades and be cut across anything that allows for differentiation: format, geography, quality, etc.

Movie and TV content owners are masters at this game. In many ways, it's a superior form of packaging and pricing, the very two things the music industry fumbled on.

But this is about to change, because on-demand music subscription services (such as Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc.) will unlock the opportunity for windowing in music.

Today, when a music track or album is released, it's pretty much available anywhere, at the same time. There have been the occasional exceptions - for the longest time, Kid Rock would not sell on iTunes; instead he (smartly) sold bundled CDs only. In general, however, record labels fail to charge a little (or a lot) more for the artists that fans really care about.

Windowing is where they will start taking a page out of the movie/TV book. Windowing in music has become easy through the inherent streaming nature of subscription services. This means that on-demand services can buy (temporary) exclusive access to a certain artists, tracks or albums.

For example, Beyonce's next album might be available on Spotify exclusively for the first month (Spotify would pay millions of dollars for this exclusivity). The same first-month exclusivity right can be further sliced and diced by market (for instance, Spotify in the US, Rdio in Europe and Google Play everywhere else), by format (if Deezer has the worldwide exclusive on uncompressed tracks), and so on. As content gets "older," it becomes more widely available, possibly at a lower cost or completely free.

Continuing with the same example, after the first month, Beyonce's album could be streamed pretty much anywhere for paying subscribers (only); free on-demand users, however, may have to wait another year or so before they get to stream it, too.

In a world where music is distributed through release windows, casual music fans will find all the music they want in a single on-demand service. They are happy to wait until the music becomes available. Avid music fans, however, may find themselves paying for two (or more) on-demand providers.

For example, while Beyonce might be available on Spotify, Jay-Z could only available on Beats. They have no choice but to pay for Spotify and Beats in order to get immediate access to both.

Ironically enough, windowing in music also plays in the hands of the subscription services, especially as it comes to acquiring customers. For one, they can't compete on price because labels won't let them (if you ever want to read a hysterical, albeit exaggerated, story on this, then read this blog post by Michael Robertson). Second, competing around (unique) technical features is pretty short-lived; they are either insufficiently differentiating to the consumer and/or get copied in your competitor's next release.

Exclusive access to music, however, is the most compelling consumer argument to onboarding a new subscriber. Beats (or Apple) is rumored to have paid a whopping $100 million to be the exclusive first-month distributor of U2's new Songs of Innocence. It's Apple's marketing cost for drumming up more Beats subscribers (or stealing them away from Spotify). Jimmy Iovine, a top recording executive who recently joined the Apple ranks, taught them well.

So windowing seems to be the answer to many. Paying for multiple streaming services at the same time is no more absurd than people paying for both Netflix and HBO (and a few VODs every month, on top of that). It re-establishes something that the Silicon Valley has always found hard to acknowledge: content is king.

That's great news for the recording industry, potentially good news for the streaming services (i.e. multiple can survive and thrive at the same time), but questionable for the avid music fan. Their number one hobby is possibly getting a whole lot more expensive. However, since people are willing to part from $100+ to attend a concert, it's probably the least of all issues.

The user experience, however, is more problematic. I simply can't see myself switching around multiple apps and services to access my entire catalogue or music library. In the same way that Sonos let's me "mix" multiple music services in a unified playlist, I expect new companies to address this particular issue. Bop.fm is one of those seemingly on the right track.

The only unknown in this for me are the artists themselves. Under the system of windowing, it's most likely that only the bigger bands will get to partake, and even then, it's not clear if record labels will share the surplus dollars. Let's hope for the people who create all these beautiful sounds it's less gloom and more bloom or boom.

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The Music Industry Is About To Change, And Apple And U2 Are Just The Beginning

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Editor's note: Philip Inghelbrecht is a co-founder of Shazam, investor in 8tracks, and a paying Spotify subscriber. Of all industry roller coasters, the music industry must be the wildest. The last 30 years reshaped the business in a way we never could have imagined. Music as a product changed dramatically (e.g.