It's all BACK to the Future Now!

- It’s all BACK to the future now
- Bing makes money!!
- Transformation Perception Gap
- Instagram – the ‘it’ social network
- Prepared for Wearables?
- Snapchat sponsored filters
- Twitter stats
- Twitter polling
- Mondelez vous?
- Google Shopper Insights
- The BIg Box shrinks

Special Bonus: The preferred Social Networks of The Breakfast Club


We entered a new era last week in which all of Back to the Future now takes place in the past. I confess to a little ambivalence because it makes me a little sad, but it's also exciting because we're now in uncharted territory. The movie correctly predicted wearables, smart phones, video conferencing (though only on a wide screen, not a small one), googleglass and maybe hoverboards?. We're still waiting for coats that automatically resize and dry themselves, self-tying shoes and Mr. Fusion. But the Cubs definitely didn't win the World Series, thanks to the Amazin' Mets. #letsgomets

Interestingly, the flood of references to Back to the Future day last week benefitted the brands that were associated with it. Especially Pepsi and DeLorean, althought it's too late to do DeLorean any good.


Enough with the fun and games...

Bing makes money!

It's been a long wait, but Microsoft's Bing search business has finally become profitable, generating $1bn in revenues during the company's first quarter of this fiscal year. Here are some key stats related to the surprise announcement:

•Search revenue grew 29%, driven by higher revenue per search and search volume.

But here's the kicker!!

•Nearly 20% of search revenue in September was driven by Windows 10 devices.

Why is this interesting? Anybody? Anybody? Beuler... Because Windows 10 devices, their Tablets, their Phones and now almost every existing Windows 7 and 8 laptop and desktop, which are all eligible for free upgrades to Win 10, all have Bing as their default search and are notoriously difficult to change. So all these miriad devices are now functioning for Microsoft the way the Kindle works for Amazon. That is -- Amazon takes a loss on it's Kindles because it's essentially putting a really streamlined amazon store in every owner's hand. Microsoft has this growing media sales business, they're putting a Bing search engine in every owners hand, lap and office. But the Windows 10 upgrade offer has only just begun and there 1 and a quarter BILLION Windows 7 PCs out there in the world. So this is likely just the beginning of a rapidly expanding period of good news for Microsoft's and Bing. I predict it'll be worth the wait for the Big M.

Perception Gap

There's a perception gap in digital organizations. According to a recent study by L2, 9 in 10 organizations are undergoing a digital transformation, only 1 in 7 think they're doing it fast enough. 55% of CEOs think they're doing this very fast, fast or about right. 64% of Line Managers think the transformation is happening slow or very slow.

How is Philips doing? I'd love to know what you guys think. Can you respond either in this thread or on the SocialCast group at bit.ly/DigitalNAConnect? But I can show you some results of the Digital @ Scale Change adoption survey and other stats that Blake just reported to the Exco last week. The survey tracks what respondents think about the progress we've made in Digital since the inception of D@S:

The strongest improvements have been made in analytics
Half the respondent's now think Digital Strategy is extremely important
North America is above average in Digital Capabilities
North America is the leading market at collecting new marketing contacts
The Level 2 training onboarding level for Personal Health in August is leading the world at 89%


Instagram

If you're a regular reader, You know Instagram is the growingest presence in Social. We talk about it almost every
month. According to research by eMarketer, 32% of US companies with 100 or more employees currently use Instagram as a marketing tool. This figure is set to increase to 49% by next year, and will reach an incredible 71% by the following year. According to the research, the photo-sharing app could be more popular with marketers than Twitter within two years.

Twitter stats

And as much as we all love Twitter, it's hemmoraging users and over 44% of its Bn members have never sent a single tweet! 391 Mn of them have no followers. Interestingly, I couldn't find a stat about the % of Twitterers who only post but never read Twitter. I'm sure there are a lot of them. Anyway, Something needs to be done to jumpstart the venerable channel and there's increasing scepticism that Jack Dorsey will be able to do it as a part time CEO while he's also getting ready for an IPO at Square, the other company he's CEO of. But here's a bright spot...

Twitter polling

Twitter just launched a new polling feature. Tweeters can now create a 2-button poll that will remain live for 24 hours. Voting is anonymous and there's no limit to to how many polls you can create or participate in. Seems to me this is a great new way to engage on Twitter. Although it may get overused for a while before it settles down. Of course, you could always ask questions and get answers on twitter, but I think the anonymity and ease of just choosing a button rather than composing a tweet may get more response. Like any other tweet, the cleverness of the

question and choice of answers will likely be determinative. It's also rudimentary social listening. And it can even help you shape your approach to your twitter account...

What do you think of tweets without links? 1. They're useless. 2. Tweets can be fun and infomative without links.

How about this one...

Is two buttons enough to be useful? Yes No ?

Two choices is pretty rudimentary, but I think Twitter chose this simple version to test the waters. So we may see them roll out multiple choice pretty quickly as this catches on.

Prepared for Wearables?

With the popularity of Wearables growing so rapidly, you'd think that Health Organizations would be dedicating recources to being able to leverage this treasure trove of data. But eConsultancy and Ogilvy conducted an interesting survey in Sept on how ready the Healthcare industry is to jump on the opportunity presented by the consumer adoption of wearables. Only 5% of respondents said their organizations were very prepared, while 66% said their orgs were either unprepared or very unprepared. Only 25% of HealthCare organizations even use data from medical devices, and only 11% are collecting data from wearables. This validates the tremendous opportunity for Philips Healthcare Informatics, solutions and services to leverage our deep expertise in this type of integration, especially with our HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP) to help the industry take advantage of this rich trove of data and insight.

Snapchat

SnapChat just completed a new round of funding that pushed it's valuation over $16Bn. Does anyone use Snapchat’s Lenses? Apparently a LOT of people are. The social network launched Lenses a month ago. These are little decorative filters that you can pull over your selfies on The Snap to make your pictures more fun. And they're about to make these available as a media buy. Companies can create branded ones and pay to make them available for a limited time to Snappers. Snapchat expects its new sponsored selfie filters to reach a staggering 16m viewers a day, according to a report by Buzzfeed. The catch? Snapchat is asking advertisers to cough up $450,000 per day for sponsorship running Sunday through Thursday, $500,000 per day for Friday or Saturday, and up to a staggering $700,000 for holidays.

Mondelez vous?

Do you Mondelez? You may not have heard of Mondelez food, but you've definitely eaten them. Nobody could get through life without trying an Oreo, a Cadbury chocolate or a Ritz Cracker. As it turns out, Mondelez is the world's second largest packaged food company, just behind Nestle and just ahead of Pepsi. According to the Wall Street Journal, as part of a massive cost cutting program, this giant has reduced it's TV advertising more than 50% in the last 5 years and almost 20% since last year. Where has the spending gone? Why to digital of course which is less expensive and twice as effective! And to some cost cutting. BUt this company is overcoming challenges from learning new capabilities at a very fast pace, to executive education to tracking. Digital was 32% of their North America media spend last year and will be 45% this year. They've made big deals with Google and Facebook to create new communications paradigms for them beyond simple ads and promotions ad they're starting to get into impulse oriented e-commerce, which, though commonplace in a store setting is entirely new to the snack food market. How will this work? Don't know yet. We'll have to wait and see. But it sure sounds like these folks are finding new ways to market very traditional products.

Google Shopper Insights

Shoppers have used Google for a long time to help them find products and retailers. But this week Google announced Shopper Insights - a new tool that combines search and maps to help retailersfind shoppers. Or more specifically when and where shoppers search for stuff. For instance: In NYC, Gamers are shopping for Playstation 4 twice as often as XBoX One, but on the West Coast, shoppers were 10x more likely to be looking for the Microsoft console. Or on Black Friday, people tend to shop with their phones, while on Cyber Monday, they're more likely to use Desktops. For the first time, retailers can tap into insights yielded by search queries to understand shopping trends in individual markets.

The Big Box shrinks

Here's a surprise: WalMart is getting smaller! Most of their supercenters have around 2500 less products than they had last year and they're looking to further reduce to make inventory easier tomanage as they streamline their systems to boost online sales. Spending on these initiatives, along with it's determination to increase wages for the average worker have the company on track to lose about 12% in profit next year. That news caused the stock to drop 10% in a single day, allowing Amazon to surpass Walmart in value for the first time and wiping out about $11Bn of the Walton kids' fortune. But don't worry, they'll be OK.