2017 Begins!

What to look for in 2017
Advocates 
The year of Amazon...again!
Probably not happening
Customer experience vs Capability
Microsoft officemates
Insta engagement

What to look for in 2017 

As a service to our loyal community members, we've scanned a number of digital content sites to capture an overview of what they think the most important trends are for 2017. Here's what we found:

With live video platforms now available on all the major Social networks, live video is now TVs biggest competitor. But it's just beginning. While lots of brands experimented with it last year, it'll likely shift to mass market use in 2017. Live enables brands to break out of the traditional advertising mold, letting them create a more real connection with customers in real time. Also look for more vertical video.

74% of agencies are working with celebrities. But Micro-influencers are a thing now. Attention is currency and anyone who has the attention of a discrete, specialized group of people can be a valuable influencer for some brand. Moving away from expensive celebrities with millions of followers, some brands have realized that they can generate an impressive return partnering with people who have about 1000 followers. We're seeing success with this approach with our Male Grooming social presence. I think we'll see more tools popping up in 2017 to match these micro-influencers with brands who want to leverage their attention.

We'll see an explosion of messaging apps driven by Chatbots or 'Conversational Marketing'. In fact, our own Philips Customer Care group is launching a Chatbot pilot. I'm really interested in seeing how that goes. Facebook will be releasing Whatsapp for Business sometime this year. AI is increasingly playing in this space, whether on company sponsored text chats or in-home interfaces like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home which will really come into their own this year. Controlling your home and entertainment with just your voice is really seductive and I can tell you from experience with my new Google Home that it feels really natural really fast. So voice interfaces will start to creep up on text as more people become more comfortable talking to their devices. One other point about voice interfaces: Voice Responses from devices don't come with advertising -- yet. This could be a big game changer if the trend continues.

AI will also find its way to become more of a player in testing and analytics, sowing the seeds of automating some agency and marketing tasks.

Advocates

I was really pleased to see a number of my sources citing Employee Advocacy as a trend to watch this year. It feels great that Philips is leading rather than lagging on this. our PhilipsVoice initiative, which we started in March, now has over 200 North America employees who can share approved Philips content with their personal networks and we've received requests to train over 400 more. About half of these are Sales people who want approved content to share with their clients in their own Social networks. This is a runaway train -- in a good way! And I'm also happy to let you know that our little pilot will be picked up and scaled by the Global team this year. Yeah us!

The year of Amazon...again!

I wonder if you guys get tired of hearing about Amazon on these calls. I find it really interesting to talk about it though. This company is breaking new ground all the time and the implications are breathtaking. 2017 will be another Year of Amazon. With the Kindle Fire, they put happy little Amazon stores into the hands of millions of people. With Prime, they built a huge barrier to entry to other retailers online or off and created a level of loyalty that has never been seen before. (More than half of American households are prime members who default to Amazon for most of their non-food purchases.) Then pushbutton replenishment with the Dash button. A year ago Amazon Alexa made it possible to buy without a click. Just say the word. Amazon buy me batteries. (if you say it that way and you don't specify a brand, you'll get Amazon private label batteries.) It's the same with anything Amazon has a private label for: Amazon Basics, Amazon Elements, Happy Belly, Wickedly Good and others are all taking over their categories. They've just launched grocery stores without checkout lines. These are all steps to removing friction from the buying process. One click, free shipping, voice ordering, no checkout. But all these methods capture data. So what's the next step? No ordering. Amazon knows what you buy. With your permission, they can send you what you need when you need it. If you get something you don't need, you just send it back. But we know that'll almost never happen. Don't we? Yup, within just a few years. Amazon will ship us just about everything we need when we need it and we'll never have to order again. And they'll be the first Trillion Dollar company.

Probably not happening soon

So on the flip side, what's NOT likely to happen in 2017?

Drones, certainly not at scale, lot's of challenges still to be worked out. And they're not all about FAA restrictions. How would a drone deliver to an apartment? If there were tons of drones in the air all the time and they started to get annoying, would people start shooting them down? Aren't they at risk of being stolen and reprogrammed? I think drones will remain mostly a PR story for another couple of years.

My Hue lighting addiction notwithstanding, Connected devices aren't all that cool unless they really make something better or easier. Do you really need a cup that tracks your water intake? Probably not. I'm still suspicious of the fridge that knows when to order more milk.

VR for marketing is still a head fake, no one has figured out how to use it as anything other than a PR gimmick yet and it may not be worthwhile to do so unless the prices come down and the hardware shrinks significantly. Nobody is going to don a headset to watch an ad so the communications will have to evolve to something else.

Customer experience vs Capability

Marketers are failing on customer experience because they lack digital capabilities. 84% of companies studied say identifying users, personalization and measuring impact is 'very important to growth,' but only about 10% are able to deliver in these areas. I don't think we have a capability problem. Philips has done well training us in Digital and the importance of Customer Obsession. We're ahead of the game in North America on leveraging Search and Social insights. I do think we're still falling a little short in technology. But we're looking at fixing that problem from a number of angles. Customer behavior tracking and scoring, CRM development and hygiene, just to name two.

Microsoft officemates

We don't talk very much about Microsoft, because it's just not that interesting. But it's talent is. It's the number one place that other digital companies recruit from. Over 12,800 former microsoft emnployees now work for Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter.

Insta engagement
This week, Scott Galloway mused about Instagram. It's become the dominant platform for brand engagement when compared to Facebook and Twitter, commanding 92% of the social interactions for the 420 brands L2 tracks. But when you add YouTube to the mix, Insta only account for 42% of interactions while YouTube gets 55% and the others fight over the crumbs. But interestingly, the platform's organic reach has declined in the face of recent changes to it's algorithm. THe frequency of brand posts is up 6% but the interaction rate per 1000 followers has decreased 30%. I bet we'll be seeing more changes to the platform's algorithm to bring its attractiveness to advertisers back up.