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Mobile Marketing

Photo Series Captures Refugees In Diaspora Through Phone Cameras

3/31/2017

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Photo Series Captures Refugees In Diaspora Through Phone Cameras

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Photo Series Captures Refugees In Diaspora Through Phone Cameras

Photo Series Captures Refugees In Diaspora Through Phone Cameras

In what is now considered the world's worst refugee problem, smartphones carry much value in documenting daily life

Many have been utilizing their smartphones to provide live updates and footage of what is going on in Syria and other war torn areas of the world. Smartphones have also been utilized by refugees to keep tabs on their family members’ whereabouts. However, beyond a means of communications, smartphones also carry pictures and pieces of what was left behind. Photographer Alex John Beck decided to embark on a project, Syrian Refugees in Lebanon & Jordan, that documents refugees’ favorite photos on their smartphones as a way to share the stories of these individuals.


In each work, there is a portrait photograph of the refugee along with a photograph of their smartphone. The photographed phone screens contain images that are meaningful to the refugee. This includes pictures of family members now lost and childhood neighborhoods that were once untouched by war and conflict. Refugees also handwrite messages on their piece, describing their feelings or what they miss about their past, stable lives. One wrote, “I dream of returning to my country, living in it safely, and staying in home my family.” Many echo these wishes, showing the rest of the world that their long journey to other parts of the world are not to threaten the livelihoods of others, but because they really have no place to go. With nothing to go back to, these people have no choice but to move forward.

Although there are many photos of the refugee crisis, they are usually taken in the eyes of someone peering into the situation, not actually trying to survive this difficult situation. This project gives a more intimate and real perspective of these individuals who are drowned out by geopolitics and those who simply do not understand.

Alex John Beck

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Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 04:00AM
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Gannett Dodges Video Privacy Claims -- For Now

3/31/2017

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Gannett Dodges Video Privacy Claims -- For Now

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An Android user who brought a high-profile video privacy class-action lawsuit against Gannett has dropped his claims, court papers reveal.



Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 03:53AM
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Virtual Reality Is Ushering In A New Era Of Adult Entertainment

3/31/2017

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Virtual Reality Is Ushering In A New Era Of Adult Entertainment

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Virtual Reality Is Ushering In A New Era Of Adult Entertainment

Virtual Reality Is Ushering In A New Era Of Adult Entertainment

The Gold Club in San Francisco will launch a VR application so users can visit from the privacy of their home

Virtual reality has hit the ground running with the number of new devices and games released for it in the past year. Daniel Diallo, formerly a game designer, wants to take VR elsewhere: adult entertainment. He’s developing a new VR application for the strip club, Gold Club, in San Francisco.

Diallo wants to bring the immersive experience of being at a strip club into the privacy of a member’s home. Viewers with the VR application can watch taped footage of the dancers in a computer-generated replica of the Gold Club.

Diallo used 360-degree cameras for the computers to generate every corner of the club, allowing audience members to freely look around. Those watching a woman dance can purchase a variety of routines and tip them, similar to being in a real strip club.

The Gold Club VR application will have a soft launch in November 2017.

Gold Club

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Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 03:53AM
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All Ears: New Brain Research Shows How Audio Increases Marketing Effectiveness

3/31/2017

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All Ears: New Brain Research Shows How Audio Increases Marketing Effectiveness

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In the age of VR and digital visual advancement, audio often takes a back seat; an afterthought or a final dressing for the visual idea. Yet, new research into brain science shows that sound is a critical factor to building strong emotional connections. For healthcare advertisers, audio could be the key to more effective campaigns - campaigns that motivate people to take action.



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March 31, 2017 at 03:15AM
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[Opinion] How to solve the ageism problem in the tech industry

3/31/2017

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[Opinion] How to solve the ageism problem in the tech industry

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The tech sector is already fighting to narrow the talent gap and the gender gap, but what about the age gap?

There is a global gender gap problem in various industries, not just the tech sector. Many STEM industries are also suffering from a skills shortage. Several companies could do with overhauling their recruitment processes to ensure diversity when hiring.

However, one element of diversity that is often forgotten about is age. Every industry needs a varied pool of employees from different social backgrounds, of different ethnicity, from different countries and, of course, of different gender. But you’re not doing your company any favours if most of your ‘diverse’ staff are under the age of 30.

Considered to be one of the worst-kept secrets of Silicon Valley, ageism is still rife within the tech sector. You only need to look at films such as The Internship to see how easily older employees can be discounted as ‘out of date’ or ‘unable to keep up’.

Blatant ageism

In November 2016, USA Today reported that 90 age-related complaints have been filed since 2012 against a dozen top tech companies in Silicon Valley.

The biggest problem with ageism in this sector is that it appears to be widely accepted as just that: acceptable.

In 2016, Dan Lyons, writer on the HBO series Silicon Valley, released a book about his time working at HubSpot, outlining the blatant ageism that takes place in the interview.

Lyons cited a particular interview that the (then) CEO of HubSpot gave to The New York Times, in which he stated that he had no desire to cure the age imbalance in the company because “in the tech world, grey hair and experience are really overrated”.

This is not a new phenomenon. Ten years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was at a start-up event and said: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” He was 23 at the time and I can’t help but wonder if he still he still feels the same way, having aged naturally with the rest of us.

Wanted: Young blood

The data seems to agree. PayScale showed that the median age of a Facebook employee in 2016 was 29. In Google, it was 30 and in Apple, it was 31.

It’s not all bad, as the same data shows that HP, Oracle and IBM all have median ages between 35 and 40. But there’s no denying the ageism problem in many companies and, unfortunately, the tech giants who continue to chase young blood don’t see it as a problem that needs solving in comparison to other elements of inclusivity.

However, a company can’t truly claim to be diverse if they have is a gender balance, but the majority of their employees are from the same socio-economic background. Nor can they claim it if they have employees from various cultures and countries, but very few of them are women.

So why is the same battle not being fought when it comes to diversity of age? Is it because older people simply can’t keep up with today’s technology?

The age-old myth

A 2016 survey from Dropbox of 4000 IT professionals painted a very different picture to that perception.

The report showed that only 13pc of respondents aged 55 and older reported having trouble working with multiple devices, compared to 37pc of those aged 18-34.

The survey also found that just a quarter of people over the age of 55 felt stressed out working with technology in the workplace, compared to more than a third of young adults.

Evidence aside, more tech companies are looking for passion, drive and soft skills, all of which are traits unlimited by age. If anything, it could be argued that older people have a natural inclination towards these soft skills, with more life experience under their belt.

Supporting this idea, Prof Brian MacCraith said that mature entrepreneurs are almost twice as likely to launch high-growth start-ups as 20-24 year olds.

Now that we’ve proven that abilities don’t go down as age goes up, how can the tech industry begin to solve its ageism problem?

Fixing the problem

For a start, they can update diversity training and recruitment methods to ensure that they include age and not just gender, race or ethnicity.

Unconscious bias isn’t just about hiring people who come from the same background, it also means solely hiring people that are roughly the same age as you.

Removing buzzwords from your job adverts is a good start when looking to recruit from a truly diverse pool. Of course, it’s illegal to discriminate based on age, but that doesn’t seem to stop recruiters searching for ‘recent graduates’ or ‘fresh talent’, which will most likely put off older applicants.

Finally, make age an essential part of your overall diversity plan. If a company strives to show off cultural differences and inclusion as well as a narrow or non-existent gender gap, that company should also look at the age of its staff.





Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 03:03AM
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Hispanicize Rolls Up Digital Influencers

3/31/2017

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Hispanicize Rolls Up Digital Influencers

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The Hispanicize Media Group announced a flurry of deals that will create a major new network of influencers targeting U.S. Hispanics.



Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 03:02AM
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Finding Brand Safety In An Unsafe World

3/31/2017

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Finding Brand Safety In An Unsafe World

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Marketers that assumed brand safety was assured for the digital advertising they purchased on Google were suddenly shocked when they found it published alongside content they deemed unsavory. If you are a brand or an agency and want to avoid being embarrassed or worse, fired, make sure you have adequate protections in place around programmatic.



Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 02:37AM
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[Insight] Inside the price war between Walmart and Amazon

3/31/2017

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[Insight] Inside the price war between Walmart and Amazon

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Last month, Walmart gathered some of America’s biggest household brands near its Arkansas headquarters for a tough talk. For years, Walmart had dominated the retail landscape on the back of its “Everyday Low Price” guarantee. But now, Walmart was too often getting beaten on price.

So company executives were there, in part, to reset expectations with Walmart’s suppliers — the consumer brands whose chips, sodas and diapers line the shelves of its Supercenters and its website.

Walmart wants to have the lowest price on 80 percent of its sales, according to a presentation the company made at the summit, which Recode reviewed.

To accomplish that, the brands that sell their goods through Walmart would have to cut their wholesale prices or make other cost adjustments to shave at least 15 percent off. In some cases, vendors say they would lose money on each sale if they met Walmart’s demands.

Brands that agree to play ball with Walmart could expect better distribution and more strategic help from the giant retailer. And to those that didn’t? Walmart said it would limit their distribution and create its own branded products to directly challenge its own suppliers.

“Once every three or four years, Walmart tells you to take the money you’re spending on [marketing] initiatives and invest it in lower prices,” said Jason Goldberg, the head of the commerce practice at SapientRazorfish, a digital agency that works with large brands and retailers. “They sweep all the chips off the table and drill you down on price.”

But this time around, Walmart’s renewed focus on its “Everyday Low Price” promise coincides with Amazon’s increased aggressiveness in its own pricing of the packaged goods that are found on supermarket shelves and are core to Walmart’s success, industry executives and consultants say.

The result in recent months has been a high-stakes race to the bottom between Walmart and Amazon that seems great for shoppers, but has consumer packaged goods brands feeling the pressure.

The pricing crackdown also comes in the wake of Walmart’s $3 billion acquisition of Jet.com and its CEO Marc Lore. Lore now runs Walmart.com and has said one of his mandates is to create new ways for the retailer to beat everyone else on price, including Amazon.

The pricing pressure has ignited intense wargaming inside the largest CPG companies, according to people familiar with discussions at Procter & Gamble, Unilever, PepsiCo, Mondelez and Kimberly-Clark. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

“It’s dominating the conversation every week,” said an executive at one of these companies.

Representatives for these companies either declined to comment or failed to respond to requests for comment. Executives inside these companies would only speak on a condition of anonymity because negotiations with retailers are confidential.

An Amazon spokesperson said in an email: “At Amazon we protect low prices for our customers, every single day — nothing has changed in terms of our focus or how we operate.”

Walmart did not provide a comment.

Amazon algorithm

One piece of the battle, executives say, is an Amazon algorithm that works to match or beat prices from other websites and stores. Former Amazon employees say it finds the lowest price per unit or per ounce for a given product — even if it’s in a huge bulk-size pack at Costco — and applies it across the same type of good on Amazon, even when the pack size is much smaller.

So let’s imagine Costco is selling a pack of 10 bags of Doritos for $10 — or $1 per bag. Amazon’s algorithm notes that one bag is $1 at Costco and, in turn, lowers the price on Amazon of a single bag of Doritos to $1.

That is a great deal for customers — something that is likely driving the decision at Amazon, where an obsession with customer value dominates its strategy.

But now, Amazon is selling individual items at Costco prices while not getting the same wholesale price that Costco enjoys. In short, it’s going to be really hard for Amazon to turn a profit on those goods.

When Walmart sees this, it freaks out on the supplier, industry executives say. And it doesn’t matter to Walmart that Amazon may not be getting the same wholesale price that retailers like Costco or other membership clubs receive. In other words, even if Amazon isn’t profiting from its extremely low prices, Walmart is still demanding the same bulk-rate discount applied to individual items.

“Walmart has had it explained to them by myself and others,” said one industry insider who asked for anonymity talking about private discussions. “My conclusion has been that they beat all suppliers up regardless because they need it to be a problem at the senior levels of these companies.”

In some instances, Amazon is willing to lose money for some period of time on a product it feels it has to have. Jeff Bezos’s company knows, after all, that it has to continue to increase its selection in non-perishable grocery goods if it is going to really challenge Walmart in the $800 billion category.

But, more so than in the past, Amazon is ratcheting up the pressure on manufacturers of goods that the online retailer is unable to sell for a profit, executives say. Separate from the algorithm, brands are also facing the realization that their products that are sold profitably in stores may become unprofitable online when shipping costs are factored in.

Unprofitable items are known inside Amazon as CRaP products — the acronym stands for “Can’t Realize a Profit.” And Amazon is not afraid to kick off big and small brands alike.

Case in point: On a Friday afternoon last month, all Pampers diapers sold by Amazon were unavailable on the site. Industry speculation was that Amazon may have kicked Pampers off the site as part of a negotiation over prices.

Neither Amazon nor Pampers parent company Procter & Gamble would comment on whether this was the case. But the bigger point may be that senior industry executives thought such a move was even a legitimate possibility.

“I’m very concerned,” one of them said. “Do all CPG goods get commoditized to 40 percent below where they’re used to being? The long-term implication is you just don’t know where the bottom is at.”

Get the CRaP out

When Amazon warns suppliers that a product is pre-CRaP, meaning it’s in jeopardy of being kicked off the site for profitability issues, it makes demands. Oftentimes, to lower wholesale prices. But that doesn’t always work, especially if a brand has the leverage of also selling into Walmart, which is still the biggest retail customer for many manufacturers.

In these instances, Amazon may transfer the product to Amazon Pantry, a smaller catalogue of goods restricted to Prime Members. All Pantry orders come with a $5.99 shipping fee per box, which helps cover Amazon’s costs, if fewer than five items are ordered at one time.

Another Amazon tactic is to prohibit some brands from buying ads within the site for a product that Amazon can’t make profitable on a standalone basis. Like paying for prominent placement in a store, a brand can buy ads within Amazon to promote their products. Blocking these ads is another way of burying a product.

“They are playing Jekyll and Hyde,” said an executive at a large grocery goods manufacturer. “At times, it’s all about growth; at times, it’s all about profitability. They keep switching back and forth.”

“They are playing Jekyll and Hyde.”

Another factor: As Amazon Prime becomes a bigger part of Amazon’s business, Amazon ships more orders that consist of just one item. These orders can typically be tougher to make profitable than multi-item orders — a trend that could explain the renewed focus on profitability.

“Amazon realizes Walmart is serious,” the executive said, “and is basically asking manufacturers to subsidize their unprofitable shipping costs for them.”

No easy solution

What is a brand to do? There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some do give in and offer Amazon a better price if they can afford it.

Some push Amazon to keep the unprofitable product, but give them a better deal on a more profitable item.

Another strategy is to stop selling to Amazon as a wholesaler and instead sell directly, or through resellers, on Amazon’s marketplace. Amazon cannot control the price of an item sold by marketplace sellers, though it can make it harder to find items that aren’t priced aggressively.

The longest-term solution, however, is perhaps the most difficult: Reimagining how a product should be designed and packaged from the ground up, specifically for e-commerce sales. That often means cutting the weight of low-price goods since shipping costs tend to eat into a product’s profitability. (Amazon, in fact, is trying to capitalize on this potential shift by asking brands to reformulate their packaging to make it easier to ship — all done via Amazon, of course.)

Big brands, however, have been doing more talk than action when it comes to pursuing this solution — a fact that you can be sure Amazon has noticed.

But Andrea Leigh, an ex-Amazon general manager who now runs her own brand consultancy, has come across a few examples of brands redesigning goods for e-commerce. One of them, from the brand Celsius, is an energy drink that has been transformed into powdered packets that the customer mixes with water at home.

Then there’s the brand Green Works, which has sold household cleaners in concentrate form, along with an empty spray container.

“If competitors go away and you can live it out, it presents you with an opportunity where you can steal share in a relatively easy way,” she said. “Figuring out how to do online better and not getting CRaP-ed out, that’s a huge opportunity.”

The rise of direct to consumer?

Perhaps the toughest part of being a traditional consumer packaged goods brand today is that you don’t know who your customer is because you sell to them via a middleman: Retailers like Amazon and Walmart. And if you try to sell direct through your own website — which requires a different set of skills — retailers often raise hell. Yes, the same retail partners that are putting the squeeze on wholesale prices.

So some of these multinational companies are dabbling with diversifying their sales channels through acquisition. Unilever, the owner of brands like Dove and Hellmann's, last year purchased the subscription razor startup Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion. The vast majority of Dollar Shave Club’s sales come through its own website.

Venture capitalists are betting that that deal will be the first of many acquisitions of digital-first brands that would traditionally sell their goods on supermarket shelves — though no major ones have yet followed. If they’re right long-term, however, this pricing pressure from Amazon and Walmart may be partly to blame — or thank.






Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 02:06AM
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Real-Time Daily's Personnel News: Week Of March 27

3/31/2017

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Real-Time Daily's Personnel News: Week Of March 27

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Real-Time Daily's weekly roundup of hires, promotions, and shifts within ad tech.



Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 01:32AM
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Ad Blocking Is An Opportunity Not An Obstacle

3/31/2017

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Ad Blocking Is An Opportunity, Not An Obstacle

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A technology arms race is not the answer; we need to be thinking smarter, not harder.



Mobile Marketing

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March 31, 2017 at 01:32AM
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