Floor 9

In this week’s special episode, Scott sits down with Adam and Christina from our Strategy team to talk about the trends we laid out in our annual Outlook report this year. Starting with the overarching trend of the unintended consequences of technology and the souring consumer sentiment, we discussed how social and search is being unbundled into smaller communities and platforms, how the rise of subscription services is driving a media consumption divide, how brands are increasingly leveraging content and services to build a lifestyle branding, and how regulatory concerns may interfere with the application of automation technologies.

What We Covered:

• The unintended consequences of technological disruption and the impact on consumer sentiment towards big tech
• Why people are leaving social media like Facebook and Twitter for smaller, more interest-based online communities
• How the rise of voice and visual search will change the SEO game
• The widening media consumption gap divided by the paywall and the consequences of such an asymmetrical divide
• Why brands need to become lifestyle brands to gain consumer trust and access, and how they can achieve that
• The nuances of applying automation technologies that brands have to be mindful of, and the regulatory forces that may interfere with the rollout.

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It was “Show Time” indeed in sunny California at the March Apple event on Monday. Oprah, J.J. Abrams, a sleepy Chris Evans, and other A-list Hollywood talent were all in attendance to help roll out Apple's new Apple TV+ service, which will house all of Apple's original programming that is in development. Additionally, Apple announced some other new service offerings including Apple News+, Apple Card, Apple Arcade and Apple TV Channels. On this episode of Floor 9, we breakdown everything brands and marketers need to know about the latest Apple event and what it means for brands.

What We Covered:

• What Apple News+ means for magazine publishers, news readers, and journalism.
• How Apple Arcade works and how it is an early move for Apple to get ahead of the trends in the gaming market.
• What Apple TV Channels and Apple TV+ say about Apple’s video content strategy, and whether Apple’s OTT offerings will be competitive against Netflix
• How Apple Card will reset the consumer expectations around the credit card experience.

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Welcome back to Floor 9. This week, we are delighted to chat with Damian Bradfield, President and CMO of WeTransfer, about how WeTransfer aligns their services with the creative community, how their unique ad products differ from the display ads commonly seen on the likes of Facebook and Google, and what today’s companies must do to navigate the online and offline world simultaneously. Plus, we also talk about how the tech industry is reacting to the increasing backlash and regulatory scrutiny, and how convenience will always win at the end of the day.

What We Covered:

• Damian’s personal background and experience with WeTransfer
• WeTransfer’s mission to serve the creative community across the world
• WeTransfer’s unique ad products, and why they work so well
• We shared thoughts on potential regulations on the tech industry
• Why consumer inertia and the need for convenience may complicate the process
• Brand implications, aka, what brands can learn from WeTransfer

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In this episode recorded on Valentine’s Day, we talk about Spotify’s intensifying love affair with podcasts. Joined by Adam and Christina from the strategy team, we talked through what Spotify’s recent acquisitions of Gimlet Media and Anchor means for the company, for the other podcast players (mainly Apple), and for the future of the entire podcast industry. Adam also reveals his long-winded personal history with podcasts. Take a listen and feel the love (for podcast).

What We Covered:

• Why Spotify bought Gimlet Media and Anchor
• The different economics between music streaming and podcasting
• What Apple could do in podcasting in response to Spotify’s big moves
• How Spotify’s aggregation strategy could change the podcast ecosystem
• How this whole thing calls back to two of our Outlook 2019 trends: “Unbundling of Social and Search” and “Media Have & Have-nots”
• We laugh about how our editor Richard hates Valentine’s Day.

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In this week’s special episode, we are proud to present a live recording of a Retail Innovation Week panel discussion that we recently put together in collaboration with PSFK. Our Strategist, Christina Adranly, led an esteemed panel with executives from social platforms Reddit and Snapchat and brands Johnson & Johnson and Floyd to talk in depth about the role of social media in brand building, community engagement, and next-gen commerce. Together, the panel explored the secret sauce behind how direct-to-consumer brands have successfully leveraged social media to reach consumers, and the lessons that brands, agencies, and platforms can apply to future-proof consumer relationships.

Special thanks to all the panelists who contributed to this episode:

• Will Cady, Reddit, Head of Brand Strategy
• Lauren Kase, Floyd, Head of Brand Marketing & Communications
• Marni Schapiro, Snapchat, Director of Sales
• Tony Crecca, Johnson & Johnson, Director Ecommerce Sales & Digital Experience

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Welcome back to Floor 9! Once again, the Lab team is starting the new year strong to bring you our insider take on the 2019 CES. As the biggest consumer tech convention on earth, CES showcases the latest trends in innovation and sets the tone for the rest of the year. The Lab team (Scott, Angel, Adam, and Christina) recap what we saw from the show floor and summarize the trends, which includes:

• 5G and 8K are “getting ahead of ourselves”
• Smart home turns into a full-on platform war
• A recap on Eureka Park, the section showcasing international startups
• Emerging corporate innovation models at this CES
• Apple’s looming non-presence at CES
• We laugh about Scott’s delayed realization of Apple’s wordplay on its billboard

In the second half of the episode, we are joined by our brilliant team of LatAm Lab Ambassadors to talk about CES trends through the lens of the LatAm markets. Together, Florencia Crosta (Regional Director of Investments, Intelligence and Innovation for Latinoamerica), Felipe Kopaitic (Regional Digital Director for UL at IPG Mediabrands), and Santiago Garcés (Regional Account Director at IPG Mediabrands) shared their thoughts on attending CES for the first time, contextualizing 5G and voice assistants for the LatAm region, the democratization of healthcare, and how Google may have a strong advantage in the region compared to Apple and Amazon.

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As we wind down 2018 Scott, Adam and Christina reflect on the past year and discuss the predictions that were made in our 2018 Outlook.

What We Covered:

• Will world governments regulate any of the major tech platforms?
• What verticals will Amazon tackle next?
• Does Facebook enter the home? Will Apple turn Siri into a true platform?
• How will the use cases and business models for AR develop?
• How much market share will voice and visual search capture?
• How will content distribution windows change?

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This week, we had a tri-coastal conversation with special guest Tom Donaldson, VP Creative Play Lab at Lego Group, and Adam Simon, our head of strategy, about how technology is changing the future of play. The tri-coastal trio tackles a range of topics including AR & VR, voice-enabled devices, the role of education and end with a conversation about the growing concerns around screen time.

What We Covered:

• How digital technology is changing play today
• Opportunities and limitations of AR & VR
• We discuss the definition of play as it pertains to esports and gaming
• Voice-enabled devices and their potential impact on play
• The role of education in play
• We end with a conversation on screen time

Related Links:

• Lego Bugatti Chiron [YouTube]
• Floor 9 listener survey [Link]

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This week, we sit down with two special guests — Nick Johnston, Editor-in-chief from Axios, and Joshua Lowcock, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer / Global Brand Safety Officer of UM Worldwide — to talk about the current landscape of news consumption and where the future of news may be going. Social media has no doubt forever changed the way we keep up with the news, for better and, perhaps more so, for worse, yet social media platforms keep insisting on being just technology platforms and not media publishers. This leads to a sludge of inappropriate, problematic content proliferating online platforms, and that creates unsafe environment for brands to buy against. Therefore, how we navigate the future of news is a big part of building a healthy digital ad ecosystem for tomorrow.

What We Covered:

• The major challenges facing the news industry today
• The differences between fake news, disinformation, and misinformation
• Human-curated news vs. algorithm-driven news feed
• New content formats and ways to consume news
• The promise of new business models that could help fix the issues
• We laugh about how terrible social media has become

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