060 - Does Digital Kill Advertising Creativity? Claire Winslow

Guest: Claire Winslow, CEO Best Practice Media joins Emily Binder to discuss the evolving definition of creativity in advertising, plus the problems with the ways that we recognize and award women in business.

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Claire and Emily discuss whether “advertising as we know it is dead” - prompted by Larry Light’s opinion piece in Forbes. The author writes:

The focus on short-term, disposable viewership is an unfortunate byproduct of the digital age. Sustainable advertising campaigns designed to create and reinforce brand loyalty will be a thing of the past.

The love affair with digital, data and devices has eclipsed the understanding that truly creative, memorable, persuasive and consistent advertising has an important role to play in brand building. Advertising is not a single use wet wipe. The primary role of marketing in general, and advertising in particular, is to create, reinforce and increase brand loyalty. -Larry Light

• Audience segmentation and funnels are the new form of creativity

• We should not limit the word “creativity” to a traditional definition of coming up with the ideas - it’s more than the ideas because it also involves the technical skill and strategizing of promoting the message, which can be done creatively even if it doesn't resemble Mad Men

• The evolution of language: it always changes. Look at Olde English. Old people always dog young people - it’s the pattern of humanity.

• Instead of taking slogans from traditional media and putting them on social ads, reverse it and let inexpensive social advertising inform the traditional ads which are more expensive to produce: 

• Case study from Claire's agency Best Practice Media: Buc-ee's Texas road stop, an amusement park/gas station - how Claire’s team is helping Buc-ee's choose effective copy for their road sign using digital (A/B testing 15 slogan options on Facebook to inform outdoor advertising). 

• More info: Buc-ee's, the convenience-store chain with a cult following and 'world-famous’ bathrooms

• Female Founders Are Changing the World. Please Stop Calling Them 'Mompreneurs' and 'She-E-Os': Enough with the cutesy nicknames - Inc piece by Leigh Buchanan

Get in touch with Claire Winslow:

bestpracticemedia.com

Social Media Week Austin: smwatx.com

Twitter: @bestpracticesmm

SPECIAL EVENT: SkillSetters Flash Networking at Project Voice on January 14, 2020

The official Tuesday night event at Project Voice:

Increase the discoverability of your Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing live at #SkillSetters premiere cocktail hour!

Come share your Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing, speed dating style! 50 Alexa Skill creators have the opportunity to give a short elevator pitch for your Skill in 1 minute to each person in the room. After each interaction, guests can scan each other’s QR code badge that opens their Skill on mobile.

You’ll leave with up to 50 new users, new friends, and great ideas! Come network with the #SkillSetters at Project Voice!

YOUR HOSTS: SkillSetters and Finalists for the Flash Briefing of the Year Award:

Emily Binder (Voice Marketing with Emily Binder)

Daniel Hill (The Instagram Stories)

Amy Summers (The Pitch with Amy Summers)

With featured guest Bradley Metrock, host of Project Voice along with Audiobrain and more great sponsors! Register now, spaces are limited.

056 - Kate O’Neill: Why Technology Must Be Human Centric

Author and keynote speaker Kate O'Neill is known around the world as The Tech Humanist. Hear her thoughtful approach to keeping technology human and what it will take for emerging technology to be successful from a business standpoint.

How do we design technology that is both smart for business and good for people?

Hear the human centered approach to voice and AI. Emily and Kate also discuss oncoming voice tech issues such as deep fakes and privacy issues such as data mining by Facebook and other tech companies.

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Topics and Timestamps:

03:15 How do we approach voice design from a human centric way that is also good for business?

04:30 Weather skill example - take context about what someone using the skill needs, like an umbrella

05:20 Business might build voice tech or other tech in order to check a box but it’s better to build for the person on the other end

06:00 Don’t ask, “What’s our AI strategy?”. Instead, step back and ask, “What are we trying to accomplish as a business? - Kate

07:00 Who are we building for and how can we serve their needs?”

06:20 Create alignment and relevance between the business and people outside it

07:10 Avoid unintended consequences of technology as it becomes capable of such scale

07:35 Google Translatotron and deep fakes: Translatotron translates spoken word into another language while retaining the VOICE of the original speaker.

Anatomy of a Babel fish as explained in the BBC TV series: “The Babel fish is a small, bright yellow fish, which can be placed in someone's ear in order for them to be able to hear any language translated into their first language.”

08:20 How we should approach technology that reminds us of the Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? The Translatotron’s simultaneous translation does not lose integrity originating from the sound of your voice. But one step further: there is sampling of your voice that is sufficient for ML (machine learning) and AI to synthesize your voice.

08:45 Sampling: Google would now have your voice - what will they do with it? Voice synthesis and deep fakes - the terrifying possibilities (overall: cool but scary)

09:30 Companies must govern themselves (e.g. Google)

09:50 Government has a responsibility to regulate privacy and data models

10:40 Kate doesn’t have smart speakers in her home because we don’t have a precedent for protecting user data, she says

11:20 Facebook Ten Year Challenge (Kate’s tweet went viral in January 2019 over the ten year old photo trend next to current photos of themselves) - she pointed out that this data could be training facial recognition algorithms on predicting aging

Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? : “Opinion: The 2009 vs. 2019 profile picture trend may or may not have been a data collection ruse to train its facial recognition algorithm. But we can't afford to blithely play along.”

13:20 We have seen memes and games that ask you to provide structured information turn out to be data mining (e.g. Cambridge Analytica): we have good reason to be cautious

14:40 "Everything we do online is a genuine representation of who we are as people, so that data really should be treated with the utmost respect and protection. Unfortunately, it isn't always." - Kate O’Neill

15:00 Do we need government to regulate tech? Can it?

16:10 “Ask forgiveness, not permission” is clearly the case with Facebook so why do users seem to be forgiving?

20:00 What might a future social network look like in which there are fewer privacy and data mining concerns?

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Connect with Kate O’Neill:

Twitter @kateo

koinsights.com

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Bonus info:

Deep fake (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") is a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.

Read more about deep fakes and voice emulation: the idea of voice skins and impersonation for fraud

036 - Monopolies: AT&T Yesterday, Facebook and Google Today - Robert Binder

Robert Binder is a Senior Engineer member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He has 43 years of experiencing working in technology on everything from mainframe computers to embedded cyber physical systems, including work in institutions in financial markets in Chicago including the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange).

We talked about how the drivers of economics and business are sending Facebook in the same direction AT&T was sent. Topics include:

• Classical Economics

• The Network Effect

• The Monopolist's Demand Curve

When it came to AT&T's breakup in the 1980s, it was not just the new technology that mattered, it was the business opportunities created at that moment. Capital investment and risk taking and entrepreneurial activity that resulted happened at a very large scale.

Customers used to lease landline phones from AT&T.

Timestamps:

3:15 How Robert got involved with software in 1976

4:00 2 GTE software project the theory of the firm monopolist's demand curve

2.40 Robert's project with GTE Automatic Electric, which operated specialized telephone networks. At the time AT&T operated all the wires and owned all the phones. People leased their home phones from AT&T.

The deregulation in 1985 of ATT opened the door for cellular networks and led to what we have today; this is a hugely complex topic. But we discussed a few aspects. 

6:00 The Theory of the Firm

6:15 In a competitive market, no individual company can control price; they price based on supply and demand

6:43 The Monopolist's Demand Curve

7:09 Martin Shkreli and high cost drug monopoly- ‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli sentenced to 7 years in prison — says, ‘This is my fault’

9:20 AT&T was a monopoly but they made more money by charging less - not gouging customers even though they could

10:00 Facebook is the greatest deal in advertising but is quickly increasing in cost

11:02 The power of monopoly is a street that cuts both ways for Facebook (privacy issues, scrutiny)

11:20 Most users don't realize Facebook owns Instagram or that user data is the product - the model is much more complex than AT&T's monopoly

12:20 In the 1930s people realized that if the telephone system was to grow, they would need to employ an inordinate amount of humans to man the switches - not scalable

13:20 Was there skepticism about technology like the telephone like there has been for the PC, the smart phone, email, and now voice technology?

13:50 Long distance calls were expensive

14:15 New technology, when scalable and affordable, can be adopted readily and becomes quotidian

14:30 The Network Effect (the value of a network increases to a power of two with the number of connections) - exponential growth

Connect with Robert Binder:

• LinkedIn

• Twitter @rvbinder

026 - Marketing in 2019 & Beyond: Social Media and Voice

Year-end episode. Predictions - keeping it simple, two areas of focus:

1. Social media - tech companies and their manipulation-based business models will change. They’ll evolve in two ways: First, greater transparency that frustrated users will seek. Second, more cohesion with government (as Steve Case posits in The Third Wave).

   Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, and LinkedIn: the revenue models are based on manipulation through constant feedback loops that surveil users (the product). This is the new fast food. Users will begin to see it as unhealthy like they do cigarettes and Big Macs.

2. Voice marketing - why smart speakers and voice assistants are like the automobile in 1903 (famous Ford/Horace Rackham quote). Voice is not a fad.

1-minute clip:

Also mentioned:

• 06:40 - Brian Roemmele, The Oracle of Voice re: “computerese” - Brian is spot on. 06:40

• 08:16 - Mitch Joel (I quote Mitch re: the 1.0 state of smart speakers and how it’s like the internet before the hyperlink - hard to navigate). Spot on again.

• Join me at The Alexa Conference on January 15-17, 2019. Get 20% off tickets with promo code: ALEXASPRK203

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