i [love] marketing.

How to make a content platform grow?

How to make a content platform grow? One way is to give legs to its content by adding new, adjacent content. Also known as economies of scope, it's an efficient growth strategy (just ask Netflix) and is exactly the one that Spotify is doing right now.  

It started with Spotify Landmark, a show featuring original content like interviews with surviving creators of Nirvana's "In Utero." The occasion was fitting: it was the album's 20th anniversary. 

But what's happening now is that Spotify's going beyond a dedicated original programming "channel" and starts to compete with publishers. All the better for the users: having a stream of songs, discovery mechanism, and related articles all in one place is a definitive experience win. It is a business win for Spotify, too, as it allows charging advertisers more for their ads, and charging more per subscription because of additional value it offers. 

The question is whether it makes sense for Spotify to stop there. Already a valuable and scalable distribution platform, it can easily venture in other types of content beyond songs and music-related articles. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what content it chooses to stream - as long as the content makes sense for its users.

Designing for sharing economy as the new creative frontier

The role of ad creatives may change quite a lot, and quite soon (and that's a good thing). With sharing economy churning out success stories like AirBnB, Uber, Rent My Ride, Barklay's Ring or Asos Marketplace, the creative challenge is going to revolve less around the needs and habits of individual consumer and more around creating something that facilitates creating new value out of existing resources in groups. The new creative tasks can be coming up with an infrastucture, motivation, and reward for sharing, collaborating or contributing. The interesting part? Designing for the social dynamics revolving around abundant supply, unmet demand and the possible links between the two.

The graph found here.

This store shelf is stalking you.

The rumor has it that shelves can now track age and gender of passing customers. That is, in the global supermarket Mondelez they can, thanks to Microsoft Kinect. Sensors placed on the shelves stacked with groceries will track who’s looking at the goods, how old they are, and what’s their gender. The data is intended for marketing purposes, like tailoring specific messages to the target demographic or offering real-time utility as Hellmann’s mayo did in Brazil. Hellman’s used data to assemble recipes on the fly for the customers who put Hellmann’s mayo in their cart. The utility of data doesn’t have to stop there, though: it can potentially be a really good source of research on human decision-making and the influence of the context on the way we choose, making marketing both more efficient for the brands and more useful to consumers.

Further reading: Future of Retail by FactCo Labs

Follow the Penguin

Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo is a lovely place. The problem is, not a lot of people know this. Distracted by their everyday lives, they all but forgotten about the aquarium.

This is where the Japanese ad & PR agency called Hakuhodo comes in. Hakuhodo's creative team took human distractibility as the starting point in coming up with their solution. The aquarium is only 1km (0.62miles) from the closes public transit station. To help people not get disinterested en route, they created the Penquin NAVI app: an augmented reality penguins that guide visitors right up to the aquarium's gates. This is where the second behavioral insight comes in: humans are enamored by cute animals and NAVI penguins move like the real things. Cuteness overload basically prevents people from looking anywhere else.

App downloads are encouraged at the public transport station, via QR codes. The results of this campaign are nothing short of impressive. Aquarium attendance increased 152% in a month the campaign was ran; and people who downloaded the app spent an average 9mins with it (which is way longer that it takes to walk 0.6 miles!).

Barklays Wants Your Bike Ready to Roam

It looks like tomorrow's going to be the last day of Barklays Bike Clinics, pop-up bike repair stores strategically placed around busy roads of London. Sponsored by Barklay's bank, these temporary repair shops offer free check-ups, tune-ups and safety info to bikers. Apparently, after running a survey and crunching some numbers, Barklays discovered that 57% of Londoners are riding bikes unfit to be on the road and that 18% cycle in dark without bike lights (um, guilty as charged). Behind the entire Bike Clinics initiative is the idea to get more people to cycle, and to do so safely.

Where you at, Citibank?

Complex Magazine goes Sky High with Danny Brown, displays one of the best uses of parallax so far

For its recent interview with Danny Brown, Complex magazine broke out of the article mold and crated something truly fun. In its Sky High feature, Complex invites us to scroll down the memory lane of Danny’s life, from his childhood, fall and consequent rise, his love for Adderall, and finally to his famous on-stage fellatio. (As for that, Danny says “People get their d%^&s sucked every day, B. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”).