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As TikTok’s popularity rises, buyers say the ad team needs to grow to keep up

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By Kristina Monllos.

TikTok is looking to grow as media buyers say the app needs to expand its U.S. team to keep up with demand. The company is currently seeking candidates for at least 17 positions for its ads business: two brand strategists, two influencer campaign managers, an ad products specialist, an ad operations manager, a trust and safety policy manager, among others, in its U.S. headquarters of Los Angeles, as well as offices in New York, San Francisco and Mountain View, California, according to jobs listings on LinkedIn.

The Bytedance-owned short-form video app launched in the U.S. in 2018 but its popularity has skyrocketed in recent months, drawing more big-name advertisers like Ralph Lauren and Chipotle, as well as a number of beauty companies like Eos, Too Faced and Elf to the app.

The allure of TikTok for advertisers isn’t just the potential to be among the first major advertising wave on the app, which has captured the attention of younger audiences, but the ability to run campaigns with sound as it is native to the way users watch content on the app, according to media buyers.

Buyers say the company is in a growth phase and that TikTok’s ad business now resembles early Snap Ads with low CPMs, a buggy self-serve platform (for those who have access to it), few metrics and unproven sustainability. Buyers have other complaints, like wait times of up to 24 hours for campaigns to appear on the platform and a junior ads team in need of help, too. For advertisers expecting the maturity of an ad platform like Google, TikTok will be a letdown. But for advertisers looking for a new platform to experiment on while it’s still growing, even with the current hiccups, buyers are bullish.

“They need to scale up a bit to meet the demand on the platform,” said one media buyer who has run multiple TikTok campaigns for clients. “We saw the same thing with Snap and Snap Ads a few years ago.”

“They don’t have the ad tools built out or measurement tools to really help us figure this out and justify it to compare it to some of the more established digital platforms,” said Matthew Rednor, founder and CEO of Decoded Advertising. “That’s a big complaint and one of the biggest reasons that big advertisers and agencies are not yet on the platform, even though everyone is there.”

It’s standard for new platforms to have immature ads businesses early on and TikTok is no different, according to buyers who say that while ad reps are kind and easy to work with, they aren’t as seasoned as reps at Google or Facebook. At the same time, the company’s main headquarters are in China and some decisions are still run through that team making the time difference a pain. That can, in turn, lead to a slower campaign implementation with some campaigns taking at least 24-hours to be live on the app, according to the first buyer.

It’s unclear how large the current U.S. ad team is or how it is organized, as a spokesperson for TikTok declined to share that figure or share current user numbers; buyers weren’t certain of the size. In February, Digiday obtained a deck that said TikTok had more than 27 million users opening the app eight times a day. The company offers video ads, brand takeovers, brand lenses, “top view” video and its signature hashtag challenge.

The difficulty advertisers and agencies face with TikTok currently makes sense to Shann Biglione, evp of Americas and global strategy at platformGSK, who said that clients’ expectations for platforms ads teams are often something like Google’s, which is “the gold standard” of ads teams. Dealing with that comparison, “it’d be surprising if TikTok didn’t struggle,” said Biglione.

Biglione has worked with TikTok’s ad team in China but hasn’t yet worked with the team in the U.S. “When you have up and coming platforms, especially one that doesn’t have [its main] headquarters in the U.S. [it can be hard],” said Biglione. “Operationalizing in China versus the U.S. is a bit different. China is much more fast-paced. Decisions can happen very, very quickly in China versus the U.S.”

Multiple buyers compared TikTok’s current ads offering to early Snap Ads as costs are low — CPMs are generally around $1.50, according to a buyer — but the tools and measurement capabilities aren’t built out yet, making it hard to prove the value of being on the platform. The company’s self-serve ad platform is still in beta as well as its interest-based targeting, according to a spokesperson, who said that “everything we’re doing is still in beta,” that the company is “in an experimental phase” and that it is “still figuring out what works for the brand and the community.”

The self-serve ad platform is bare-bones at the moment, with capabilities that allow buyers to get ads on the platform but there’s nothing flashy, no advanced capabilities and that it’s “a little bit buggy,” said the first buyer. “To be fair, they did let us know in advance that that was the case. It had been ported over from the Chinese version. We’ve also been helping them and flagging bugs we run into.”

The lack of results to showcase could keep buyers away for the moment; currently, the company’s ads site doesn’t offer any case studies for prospective advertisers to check out. Metric Digital CEO Kevin Simonson said that the shop hasn’t yet worked with TikTok but likely will in the first quarter of next year. “[The] reason being is that the people I’ve seen who have tested it, paid ads not influencer, haven’t seen good results,” wrote Simonson in an email. “I have a feeling it’ll only work like Snap only works, cheap AOV in beauty for the youngins’.”  

Still, even with that comparison and the lack of clarity into what the platform delivers for brands, there’s lots of interest from advertisers and agencies and that will likely continue to grow, according to buyers.

“We know a ton of people are there, we know it’s a hot platform, so we should be experimenting and dabbling there versus waiting for them to have mature measurement systems because we know people are there, and this is the time to get on,” said Rednor. “To reject it because they don’t have a full team of reps yet or any of the things that the mature platforms do is kind of crazy at this point. You’re going to be somewhat left behind.”

 

By Kristina Monllos

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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The Claim That Facebook’s Libra Is A Cryptocurrency Is False Advertising

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By David B. Black

“Everyone” says that Facebook’s Libra is a cryptocurrency. Long before Libra had been imagined, Bitcoin pioneered and established the brand new world of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin created the category, and has always been its leading exemplar. The white paper by the still-unknown Bitcoin creator and inventor spelled out his design goals and the main aspects of Bitcoin that supported those goals. Once you read and understand what cryptocurrency is, it becomes very clear that, whatever Libra may be, it is NOT a cryptocurrency. To claim that it’s a cryptocurrency is like claiming that a locked desk drawer is a bank vault—yes, they both have keys and are supposed to keep things safe, but other than that…

Satoshi, the brilliant creator of Bitcoin, designed a currency that involves cryptography. If you want to be extremely loose, you could say that Libra is the same thing, because it’s also a currency that somehow involves cryptography. But that’s like saying that the thing you use to “buy” properties and hotels in the board game Monopoly is “money.” Try depositing some of it at an ATM and see how far you get.  Let’s explore the basics of what makes a cryptocurrency the way Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

First and foremost, there’s the concept that in Bitcoin, no one is in charge. How can you possibly make a computer system that works, does lots of computing, keeping lots of financial transactions and makes sure everyone’s account balance is correct … without anyone being in charge?? These things are hard to do when someone IS in charge! There’s quite a bit involved in making this happen, as I illustrate here, but here are some of the key points:

  • Anyone who wants to can sign up to be a “miner,” who are the folks that make Bitcoin work.
  • A miner has to put money into buying fast computers, running the mining software, and connecting with all the other miners to share work.
  • Miners get new transactions that Bitcoin users want to perform and “make them happen.”
  • This means that miners race each other to solve complex problems involving cryptography, the net result of which is a new page (block) of transactions that have been vetted, and “locked” by crypto-key.
  • Every piece of work a miner does is paid for by newly-minted Bitcoin – the miners are paid with Bitcoin!
  • Miners are highly incented to do the work and do it right, because they want to get lots of Bitcoin, and they want Bitcoin to continue to be viable.
  • Miners come and go as they see fit – no one “approves” them, literally no one’s in charge.
  • Miners can be anywhere, in any country.

Big corporations and regulators don’t like the unsupervised free-for-all of Bitcoin. They like to control things. And that’s exactly why Bitcoin was invented – to escape the control of a central authority but still have a system that works. It’s a brilliant concept, and Bitcoin’s success shows that it works.

Along comes Facebook and Libra. Facebook is ambitious. They keep trying to invent new things. They mostly fail when they build things themselves, so they buy companies instead. Facebook would LOVE to buy Bitcoin – but it’s not for sale, because no one owns it – darn! They’re forced to try to build it. But being a big corporation, they just can’t stop themselves from building their version of Bitcoin in a style that makes them comfortable – violating every single core principle of Bitcoin – the original cryptocurrency – along the way!

Here’s what Facebook is doing with Libra:

  • In Bitcoin, literally no one is in charge. With Libra, Facebook is designing and building it. Facebook is in charge and owns it.
  • Facebook has gone to considerable lengths to create the illusion that it’s not in charge with this fake Swiss-based consortium of prestigious companies that supposedly control things. Either way, some combination of big name-brand companies are in charge, which is pretty far from Bitcoin’s really-truly NO ONE is in charge.
  • Just like Facebook owns and controls all the computers that run Facebook, Libra will own and control all the computers that run Libra in a private data center. To all the corporate computer types, this is a good thing, but it totally and completely violates a core principle of Bitcoin, leaving it open to the same kind of insider corruption that all such places are rife with. It’s also a silly idea, as explained here. Microsoft and Intel explain the issues here.
  • One of the less pleasant side effects of Bitcoin’s miners and what they do with cryptography is the fact that “proof of work” takes time. It’s a cornerstone of getting all these strangers to play nice and do good things, but it takes a number of minutes to complete a transaction. To Facebook, this is unacceptable. So they’ve blithely discarded the key cryptographic cornerstone of Bitcoin, and replaced it with some light-weight encryption, so they can still say they’re a “cryptocurrency,” even though they’re not.

There’s more to be said, but that should be sufficient to make the basic point that Libra is a cryptocurrency the same way my cousin, who is sometimes allowed to sing in bars, is an opera singer. My cousin likes to think she is, and I’m nice to her. But she’s never so much as attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, much less appeared on stage in front of an audience. Similarly, Facebook’s Libra likes to think it’s a cryptocurrency even better than the original, Bitcoin, but it swore off the core principles of Bitcoin from the start, and doesn’t deserve to be called by the same terminology.

Feature Image Credit: INDIA – 2019/08/30: In this photo illustration a popular decentralised digital currency Bitcoin –Libra logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

By David B. Black

I started programming computers in high school. Before graduating with honors from Harvard College, I wrote code for oil refinery optimization and the ARPA-net. I then wrote code for compilers, composition systems, operating systems, DBMS internals and applications, large scale financial transaction processing, document processing, workflow and more. The card software I led now handles half a billion cards. I started in venture capital in the early 1990s, investing in the whole stack, from hardware to media. I now concentrate on health care and financial technology investments as tech partner at Oak HC/FT. I blog, and I’ve published five books on software-based innovation.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

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Scientists have found a way to create energy from the night sky

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By Marlene Cimons.

The concept of radiative cooling—where the temperature of objects outside at night drops below the temperature of the air—has been known for centuries. Now scientists are harnessing it as an energy source.

Scientist Aaswath Raman long has been keen on discovering new sources of clean energy by creating novel materials that can make use of heat and light.

And lately, he has focused on developing better cooling systems, perhaps inspired by childhood summer visits to his grandparents in Mumbai, where the temperature can hover at 100 degrees F with killer humidity—and where his family refused to add an air conditioner. “It’s not unusually different from Miami, I suppose—just a bit challenging without air-conditioning,” he says.

His interests in clean energy and cooling led him to learn about a phenomenon called “radiative cooling,” which is when objects facing up shed heat into the sky after dark, cooling the surrounding area. This aha moment also recently led to his developing a pollution-free source of electricity.

“I was blown away by how this natural, passive cooling mechanism was ubiquitous, but something I’d never heard of,” he says.

Even more surprising was learning that the concept was centuries old. Ancient Middle Eastern civilizations—especially the Persians—used radiative cooling to make ice, pouring water into a pool as the sun set, collecting the frozen chunks the next morning. Even though the ambient temperature stayed above freezing, the pool would grow colder than the surrounding air as the water radiated heat into the sky. During the day, heat from the sun would have kept the water warm, but at night, it grew colder and colder until it froze over.

A small LED powered by the Raman’s power generator. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

Raman, an assistant professor of materials science at engineering at UCLA, wanted to take advantage of this phenomenon to produce clean energy. So he and his colleagues designed a device that can harness nighttime cooling to generate a small amount of power.

For now, the device is too costly and generates too little electricity to compete with other forms of clean energy. To power a 3-watt LED lightbulb, the generator would need to be 1,300 square feet. Raman says he believes scientists could get that number down 60 square feet, and they could also lower costs enough to make it useful in remote areas disconnected from the power grid. A future iteration of the device could allow people without access to electricity to turn on a lightbulb, charge a cell phone, or power some other small device at night.

“There are also low-power sensors: think monitoring oil pipelines, or weather and climate monitoring in the Arctic,” he says. “The combination of remoteness and low power needs make them a great fit for this device, especially in polar, northern regions where you have limited or no sunlight for a large fraction of the year.”

His invention is deceptively simple. It looks like a small disc propped up on four legs. The side facing up radiates heat into the night sky, while the side facing down is warmed by the surrounding air. Sandwiched in between these two surfaces is a thermoelectric generator, which uses the difference in temperature to produce power.

The top side of the black aluminum disc radiates heat into the sky, while the bottom side is warmed by the surrounding air. A thermoelectric generator inside the disc takes advantage of the temperature difference to produce electricity. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

A description of the research, co-authored with frequent collaborator Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, was published in the journal Joule.

“This is an excellent demonstration of how the night sky can be used as a thermodynamic resource to do something useful,” says Jeremy N. Munday, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California Davis, who has proposed using radiative cooling to combat climate change. He says that more research is needed to know if the technology could someday provide a workable alternative to wind or solar power, for instance.

Raman has also looked for ways to take advantage of radiative cooling during the day. For a long time, most experts had dismissed this as improbable, insisting that the cooling effect only worked at night, but Raman was convinced he could create substances that could take the concept of radiative cooling and make it work during the day.

Ultimately, he and his colleagues created ultra-thin, hair-like materials—known as metamaterials—that successfully produced daytime cooling by acting as a mirror, reflecting the sun and heat back into the sky during the daytime hours, essentially removing the heat. It’s the same principle at work as natural nighttime radiative cooling, but with a little boost from materials created by the scientists.

Raman and his colleagues designed these cooling panels, which use a special material that radiates heat into the sky during the day. Water is cooled as it runs through the panels, and they are integrating such panels into air-conditioning systems to help them run more efficiently. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

The scientists have since incorporated this material into panels that use radiative cooling to improve the efficiency of existing air-conditioning and refrigeration systems, helping to save energy. This is an important development as climate change will fuel more stifling and unrelenting heat waves, so the need for cooling—especially during the day—is going to increase, upping demand for electricity.

Initially, Raman did not spend a lot of time thinking about how to use radiative cooling to reengineer existing air conditioners and refrigeration systems—and then, always up for a challenge, he changed his mind.

“It always seemed like such a mature and well-developed field,” he says. But, then, Raman asked himself: “Was there anything we could do to make it better? Turns out, yes!”

Feature Image Credit: [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

By Marlene Cimons

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art, and culture.

Sourced from FastCompany

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7 essential Google Alerts you need to set up now

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By David Nield.

The best tool against the fear of missing out.

Among all the Google products, Google Alerts is perhaps one of the least known, but definitely one of the most powerful. It taps into Google’s endless crawling of the web—done to power its search engine—but flags up terms as they’re indexed, not when you get around to looking for them. Think of it as Google results coming to you.

Instead of running a search every day to see if your favorite band is touring, for instance, or to see if any new rumors have been reported about the new iPhone, you can sit back while those stories get straight into your inbox.

How to set up a Google Alert

Setting up Google Alerts is easy and straightforward. From your computer or mobile device, head to the Google Alerts page, and sign in with your Google account if you haven’t already.

Type the search phrase or words you want to keep tabs on into the Create an alert about… box at the top of the screen. Note that you can use the standard search operators here, the same you would use when searching on Google—quotation marks around a phrase will match that exact phrase; a plus symbol in front makes sure your search will always include that word, and a minus symbol in front of a word tells Google to return matches that don’t include it. So, entering “dolphins -miami” would get you results about the aquatic mammal but not the football team, for example.

As you type, sample results will appear so you know if you need to further refine your search. When you’ve got an alert you’re happy with, choose Show Options. Here you can choose how often your alerts appear, and whether you want to see all the results to your query, or only the most relevant. The latter option takes into account several factors, including the site it was published on, and how many times people click on it, among others. This option is much more helpful if you’re looking for something that returns a lot of hits.

When you’re happy, select Create Alert, and the results will start arriving in your inbox as frequently as you want (as they’re found, once a day, or once a week). Once you create your alerts, you can go to the Google Alerts page to modify or remove it.

Some trial and error might be required to find the right balance between getting overwhelmed with results and not getting any at all, but you should quickly get a feel for how specific you need to make your search terms and how often you need to receive your various Google Alerts.

Searching on Google is easy, but you know what’s easier? Having Google do the searching for you.David Nield

1. Important news topics

Google Alerts are ideal for keeping in touch with news stories, especially on topics that don’t often make the headlines. Maybe you’re interested in archaeological digs in one part of the world, or a specific type of art, or in a certain fashion trend—Google Alerts can bring articles on these topics straight to you.

2. Your favorite bands, shows, and authors

With so much music to listen to these days, it can be all too easy to miss a new album or a new tour from that band you were really into a couple of years back—but Google Alerts can keep you in the loop whenever something new happens.

But this extends beyond musical artists—you can check for new seasons of your favorite show on Netflix, or new books from your favorite authors, etc. Whatever type of cultural content you’re interested in, Google Alerts can serve it up.

3. Watch out for plagiarism

If you or the company you work for are in the writing business, then Google Alerts is a fantastic way of watching out for plagiarism. You can easily make sure no one else is passing off your work as their own, or borrowing your regular turns of phrase, or trying to impersonate you—create alerts using your name, or the titles of your articles, or some text from inside them to try and catch plagiarism (or discover who is quoting your content).

4. Check for company mentions

This one is work-related, but it’s still interesting—you can use Google Alerts to monitor what other people are saying about your company on the web, good or bad. Google Alerts is also useful for keeping up with industry news, and if your firm is a big name in your chosen industry, you should get plenty of news results too.

If you don’t want to get notifications about online mentions of your company, you can key in your name instead (this is one of the alerts recommended by Google itself). It might seem a somewhat egotistical move, but at least you’ll know if other people are talking about you (and maybe you’ll come across some other people with your name, too).

Wait, you did what? Oh, no… that’s just someone else with your exact same name.Omar Medina Films via Pixabay

5. Your personal details

Has your postal address or your email address leaked out on the web? A simple Google Alert can tell you. Remember no one else can see these alerts, so your privacy is not at risk here. If you do find your email address is out there for everyone to see, you might have been the victim of a hack, or have been listed in an online directory—whatever the context, Google Alerts helps you take action quickly.

6. Keep tabs on people

Who are you interested in? Whether it’s your long-lost brother, a particular politician, a celebrity, or a sports star, Google Alerts will deliver news on this person right to your inbox. For the most popular searches you might have to reduce the frequency of your notifications and stick to the Only the best results option, but this also works well for searches that don’t return many results at all—if someone suddenly comes back into the public eye, you’ll know about it first.

7. Local news

We’ll finish as we started, with news—the area where Google Alerts can perhaps be the most useful. In some parts of the world, finding news about your hometown isn’t always easy, but a quick Google Alert can help—if something significant happens in your area, you’ll know about it. If you live somewhere that does get plenty of news coverage, you might want to be more specific with your keywords (looking for stories on transport or crime, for example).

Feature Image Credit: Cytonn Photography via Unsplash

By David Nield

Sourced from Popular Science

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The Four-Part Formula For Marketing Success

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By Udi Ledergor.

I spend a couple of hours each week helping less experienced chief marketing officers (CMOs). They usually seek my advice looking for quick wins, tips and hacks.

By now, I’m used to their sigh of disappointment when I share with them what I’ve found to be the four-part formula for marketing success. It includes no hacks, trickery or sorcery. Just four, time-tested elements I’ve found you absolutely must get right to build a successful marketing operation: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

Strategy

Here’s what it’s not: pulling together an odd mix of campaigns in hopes of them coming together. They won’t.

Strategy can be difficult to achieve but should always be simple to articulate. What’s “the big idea?” If you can’t easily explain it, you probably haven’t found it yet. I’ve found it useful to have a “big idea” for my overall strategy and for smaller components of it, like trade shows (why will people line up at our booth?) or content (what will make them download it?). There should be a simple way of describing what success will ultimately look like. Then reverse-engineer your tactics to get there.

Different is better than better. I explained one aspect of this in my recent article on the unwritten rules of business-to-business (B2B) branding and why you should break them. Now I propose being different in your overall strategy. Unless you want to be a “me too” company, you’re probably better off choosing a strategy others haven’t tried rather than attempting to be 10 times better than another player already using the same strategy.

Plan for galactic scale. You don’t need to understand all the details just yet, but you should be able to grasp the big picture of what your success will look like in one, two and three years. You’ll likely change a few things on the way — maybe even big things. But without a firm grasp of what future success looks like, you’re unlikely to put the right wheels in motion to get you there.

Execution

Open-water diving lessons often start with “Plan your dive; dive your plan.” The same truth holds for your marketing. Execution excellence starts with detailed planning and key performance indicators (KPIs).

How detailed should you be? Our events manager is measured on the number of event-driven opportunities we create and tickets sold to our annual event. Our weekly marketing team meetings start with reviewing every KPI we’re tracking this quarter. How well are we doing? How much have we advanced since last week? What bottlenecks do we need to solve for? We currently have 10 quarterly KPIs, each with an owner whose compensation is tied to this number. That’s how we create accountability.

I’m a big believer in the “fail quickly and learn from it” approach. Constant experimentation is the basis for fast empirical learning. We could argue until the cows come home on which subject line will perform better, but a simple A/B test gives us the answer and allows us to move on. Does someone have an ad creative idea? Great! What time can it go live? If it works, we scale it. If it doesn’t, we kill it. Rinse and repeat.

People

Hiring mistakes are painful to correct. We’re all human. So when things don’t work out for a new hire, we’ll give them another chance. And then a performance plan. And a final warning. By the time we’ve come to the conclusion things aren’t going to work out, we’ve wasted nearly 12 months we’ll never get back.

Don’t compromise. Hire the best people you can. You’ll need to reach out to the best candidates because they might not be actively job searching. This is hard work, but in my opinion, nothing else you do will yield higher returns. Candidates for junior positions are often surprised that I take the time to interview them. I respond that there’s no better use of my time. If we hire them and it works out, they’ll make our company millions. If we hire the wrong person, we could lose millions. Once you look at hiring through this lens, you’ll quickly realize the resources you need to invest in the process.

If your company is growing fast, hire overqualified people. Within a short time, you’ll promote them to fuel your growth. They’ll evolve from individual contributors to managers. It’s far easier to promote the people you have on your team than to parachute external managers.

Hire people better than you in at least one key skill the team needs to succeed. I struggled with this in the early stages of my career. I felt that I needed to be the best at every skill my team needed. I eventually realized how crippling that approach was and started hiring amazing people who were much better than me at their craft. That’s when things really took off.

To run an amazing marketing organization, you don’t have to be the best marketing operations person. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer. You only have to know how to hire, motivate and coordinate the efforts of amazing people who can do all those things.

Creativity

Don’t wait for your muse. Get systematic about your creativity. We hold regular creative brainstorming sessions on everything from our next event’s swag to our social media videos. Some of the best ideas have come from team members who don’t regularly get to flex their creativity muscles.

You never know where your next brilliant idea will come from. Get everyone involved. Make it fun. Follow up on the good ideas to motivate everyone to contribute more. There are no stupid ideas at these meetings and nothing gets knocked down. We list everything on the whiteboard, then prioritize by voting and taking into account production considerations. Some of our best work was created this way.

Marketing teams fail in many different ways, but the best ones I’ve seen or experienced firsthand always got these four elements right: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

By Udi Ledergor

CMO at Gong, the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales.

Sourced from Forbes

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8 Self-Development Activities Every Founder Should Make Time For

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Sourced from Inc.

Even the busiest entrepreneurs should devote time to personal and professional development.

As an entrepreneur, you invest a great deal of yourself into your business. That’s why it’s important to continually learn and grow, even when you’re off the clock.

Putting in the effort to grow yourself and your business can reap huge benefits for both, so it’s important to make time for these types of activities in your schedule. We asked eight successful entrepreneurs what they do in their down time for personal and professional development. Here’s what they recommend doing and why.

1. Physical activity

A healthy business starts with a healthy leader — and that means both mentally and physically. Jinny Hyojin Oh, founder of WANDR, recommends making time for physical activity as a regular part of your work week.

“I enjoy surfing when I can, not just for the great workout, but because it allows me to clear my mind,” Oh says. “Some of the best ideas that got implemented in my business have come to me while paddling out to the waters.”

2. Journaling

Many entrepreneurs recommend keeping a journal to reflect on daily thoughts and focus on the “big picture.” As Richard Fong, founder and CEO of Bliss Drive, puts it, founders tend to run all over the place, doing a million things at once, which can often create tunnel vision.

“One of the most powerful methods for keeping your eyes on the big picture is through journaling,” Fong says. “Revisit your weeks in a journal. Review your previous entries. Grow the masterplan and the ways to get there.”

3. Spending time with other entrepreneurs

Networking with others, especially fellow entrepreneurs, is the key to staying inspired in your business. Andy Karuza, CEO of FenSens, says he spends time with other founders socially, since they’re all interested in building and growing companies.

“It’s common to want to hang out with people that you share similar interests with,” Karuza adds. “It just so happens that entrepreneurs have a lot of great relevant insights, ideas and just plain fun stories to share.”

4. Solo travel

Many professionals find that breaking the routine and traveling to new places helps spark creativity and innovation. Daisy Jing, founder of Banish, recommends solo trips for this very reason.

“It’s nice to stay in your hotel room for an entire day while traveling because there is nowhere you need to be, no errands to run — just relax and recharge!” says Jing. “Just pause and rest, clear your head. I am most energized and recharged when I am alone in a hotel room, away from all the distractions. Then, creativity and ideas come in.”

5. Pursuing outside hobbies

Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, believes that being a well-rounded person with interests outside of your business makes you a better entrepreneur.

“I have found that having a hobby that has no relation to what I do professionally has helped me grow tremendously,” explains Gujral. “It gives me an outlet to be passionate about, to meet new people and give my brain a rest from the daily grind.”

6. Continual learning

A good entrepreneur knows they are never done learning, and Jared Weitz, CEO of United Capital Source Inc., recommends pursuing knowledge in any way you can.

“Make sure you are staying present in the industry and what your competition is doing,” Weitz says. “Listen to podcasts, read books and subscribe to blogs and articles that cover your area of expertise. The more you know, the more you can do.”

7. Connecting with friends and family

When you have a healthy mindset, you’re better at your job, says Chris Christoff, co-founder of MonsterInsights — and what better way to improve your mindset than by spending time with the people who care about you?

“Spending time with loved ones is a great way to recharge and refocus for the upcoming workweek so you don’t feel lethargic, overwhelmed or overworked,” Christoff adds.

8. Self-care activities

Chelsea Rivera, co-founder of Honest Paws, acknowledges that learning is essential to self-development. However, one thing that is also vital — and often not talked about — is rest and relaxation.

“It is important to practice good self-care so as to not burn out,” Rivera says. “You’ll be surprised at how simply spending some time with your own thoughts, without any ‘noise,’ can spark creativity and innovation.”

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc.

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Adobe and Amazon launch Alexa skill aimed at creatives, the Inspiration Engine

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By Jenny Brewer.

Adobe and Amazon have collaborated on a new Alexa skill aimed at creatives, titled the Inspiration Engine. Ask your Alexa-controlled device to “open the Inspiration Engine” and you can unlock a host of features intended to aid creative block and inspire work. This ranges from “quick sparks” – inspirational quotes and one-sentence “meditations” from creatives such as Jessica Walsh, Pascal Campion or Weitong Mai – to creative-thinking exercises that can, for example, guide the viewer through one’s senses or environment in order to explore a project from a new perspective.

With an Alexa-compatible screen device, users can ask for inspirational imagery, displayed on Behance, Adobe’s online portfolio site. Users can also take the Creative Types quiz, created for Adobe by Anyways, which asks a series of multiple choice questions to define an individual creative personality – for example an Adventurer (seen above), a Visionary or a Dreamer. Previously an in-browser experience, for the Inspiration Engine, Alexa will take users through the quiz and reveal their type.

The launch comes off the back of a recent study by Adobe, finding that 89% of respondents often struggle to find inspiration. This new Alexa skill targets those designers and artists “staring at an empty page, canvas or dartboard for too long,” says Adobe on its blog, and hopes, with the new tool, to be involved in the earliest stage of the creative process – whereas its other products are used once ideas have already sprouted.

The Inspiration Engine is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Feature Image Credit: Anyways: Adobe Creative Types, the Adventurer

By Jenny Brewer.

Sourced from It’s Nice That

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How To Effectively Build Traction For Your Startup Idea

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By Abdo Riani

Investment in marketing activities can start even if you have no clue what to build yet. Marketing channels and initiatives created to build and nurture an audience make it a lot easier for entrepreneurs to find ideas worth pursuing. Furthermore, startups that launch with an established audience can generate revenue quickly and build better products by engaging their subscribers.

Here are 3 effective marketing channels that will help you build traction for your startup idea before and after going to market.

1. Publish Frequently

Content marketing takes the form of text, audio and video. Pick any of these three, preferably based on how your audience prefers to consume content, and start publishing as soon as possible even if you are not ready to launch a startup or don’t have an idea yet.

If you have an audience of active readers, you can reach out to them for insights, feedback, sales and referrals. Research conducted by ProfitWell shows that companies with an active blog gets around 70% more leads. Furthermore, close to 50% of buyers consume 3 to 5 pieces of content before expressing interest in the product or service, and the close rates of active readers is up to 10 times higher.

Content marketing takes time but pays off big time in the future. One way to leverage the power of content marketing without necessarily producing original content is by curating the best posts and stories in your industry through a weekly or daily newsletter. This will allow you to build an audience and relationships with the readers and content creators, and finally, it’s a good exercise to learn more about the market, discover trends and carefully monitor readers’ interests and comments.

To start writing, you can use platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, or preferably through your own site that you can create in just a couple of hours. Many no-code tools can help you create a blog quickly. To launch a newsletter, you need a landing page to collect email addresses and an email marketing platform to broadcast the newsletter.

2. Organize Events

Networking and educational events are a different form of content marketing. Events are powerful because they allow you to gather different stakeholders around a topic of interest and give you an opportunity to build relationships, gain insights, introduce and sell your product.

Furthermore, events can help you create a network effect by leveraging the audience and followers of your attendees, experts and partners. A small event can grow quickly just by seeking the promotion of influencers such as expert guest speakers. If you’re seeking quality feedback or if you want to presell an idea, use in-person or online events to attract key stakeholders.

3. Build A Community

Anyone can attract website visitors. If not through the first two channels, it can be done with paid ads. The challenge is in turning visitors into followers and fans. Building a community will play the biggest role in your ability to continuously drive traffic and referrals.

It starts by creating a home for the members. This could be an email newsletter, private groups on social media or slack, and/or social events. A small community with dedicated members is much more effective in terms of collaboration and referrals than a big community with most members having no interest to contribute to it. As such, size is not a reference, start small.

A simple marketing funnel shows how potential buyers go through several stages before making a purchase starting by becoming aware of the product followed by building interest in it, wanting to try it, and finally, convert into paying customers. When you make marketing a priority since the beginning, you are accelerating acquisition by proactively building awareness and interest in the product you’re creating. By the time the app is ready to go to market, people will be lined up to use it.

Feature Image Credit:  Startups that launch with an established audience can generate revenue quickly and build better products by engaging their subscribers. Here are 3 effective channels for building traction for your startup idea. Getty

 

By Abdo Riani

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I help tech entrepreneurs build startup products (apps) that generate revenue quickly with a higher probability of success to serve either as a side business venture or a stand-alone startup with growth potential. I am also the founder of StartupCircle.co, a mentorship platform for passionate startup founders.

Sourced from Forbes

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How food companies use packaging to fool you into thinking an item is healthful

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By Ellie Krieger 

Next time you grab a package off the grocery store shelf thinking it looks like a healthful choice, take a beat before you toss it into your cart. The better-for-you allure of it could be as superficial as the wrapper itself. From print colour to bottle shape, specific package design elements can have a real influence on the perceived health benefits of the food inside.

But unlike explicit written nutrition claims such as “low sodium,” which are subject to strict governmental regulation, the implied health messages of package design are entirely up to the manufacturer. While design techniques are often used fairly to communicate the presence of a more healthful product, they are also sometimes employed in misleading ways. Keep an eye out for these tricks of the trade to avoid being duped by a product with a deceptively healthful veneer.

Thin, shapely containers: It’s no accident that many packaged lower-calorie drinks such as skinny margaritas and flavoured sparkling waters come in thin bottles. That silhouette propels the message that the product is slimming, since research demonstrates that people perceive food and drinks in elongated packages as less caloric than those in wide packages. And when a thin container also has a curviness to it, with an indented “waist” (a concave shape), the product inside is perceived as healthier, particularly by women who have a high body mass index, according to a recent study published in the journal Food Quality and Preference. Such a container may actually hold a better-for-you, lower-calorie option, but it could also serve as an unwarranted health halo on a drink you’d be better off avoiding.

Images of fields, farms, grains and produce: The images printed on many packages can reveal more about what the manufacturer wants you to associate with the food than the quality of the food itself. As I browsed the grocery store recently, I saw pictures of whole wheat still in its husk on boxes of crackers made only with refined flour; sketches of garden leaves on bags of coconut sugar, and prominent images of ripe whole fruit and vegetables on snack bars and puffs that contain more sugar than produce on the ingredient list, and the produce was in powdered form at that. Pictures on packages can be powerful unconscious cues, connoting unprocessed, farm-fresh, natural foods that are flush with healthful properties. Very often the ingredient list tells a different story.

Muted colors: When food manufacturers want to give you the impression that their food is more healthful and natural (read: free of artificial ingredients, less processed) they tend to steer clear of bold colours on their packaging in favor of lighter, more muted tones. That’s because research shows people associate paler hues with a better-for-you products and bright colors with more intense, possibly artificially boosted, flavors. Healthier products in the United States tend to have pale white, green, brown and yellow coloration, so plucking a product off the shelf based on package colour might actually lead you to a better choice. But then again it might not. Colour impacts our perception more powerfully than we might realize — even to the point of defying logic. One study, for example, found that a candy bar with a green calorie label was perceived as healthier than the exact same bar with the same calorie information on a red label.

Brown paper packaging: In the same vein, packaging material considered to be eco-friendly, such as glass or brown cardboard or paper, can lead us to believe the food inside is better too — higher quality, more sustainably produced and healthier. Since environmentally conscious consumers are often willing to pay more for those attributes, it’s a ripe opportunity for marketers to rebrand the same old product, often at a price premium.

Transparency: Another design that has become increasingly popular is transparent material for all or part of a food package. A window into what is inside a container not only provides the obvious benefit of allowing you to see what you’re getting before you make a purchase, it also informs, correctly or not, our overall impression of the food inside. Research shows that foods in transparent packages are perceived to be higher quality, more attractive, fresher, and healthier than those in opaque packages.

Taken together, these design techniques are not necessarily a bad thing — they will often lead you to products that are genuinely better for you and the planet. But to be a smart consumer, don’t judge a food by its container. At the very least, make a habit of turning a package over to read its ingredient list and nutrition facts before adding it to your cart.

Feature Image Credit: Packaging material that is considered eco-friendly, such as brown paper, can lead us to believe the food inside is better, too. (iStock)

By Ellie Krieger 

Sourced from The Washington Post

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‘Ad tech companies have stopped innovating’: Why BuySellAds is buying up media brands

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By Kayleigh Barber

BuySellAds is a small ad tech company that has found a way to stand out on the Lumascape — by buying publishers.

The advertising marketplace for publishers and marketers last week scooped up Pando, a tech news site formerly known for its strong opinions and a membership model that had fallen by the wayside, following its purchase 18 months ago of digital news aggregator Digg. The bet, according to Todd Garland, CEO of BuySellAds: Use these sites to prove out BSA’s model of being a one-stop monetization shop for media publishers.

This is something of uncharted territory for ad tech, which normally plays a middleman role. It’s not unheard of, as the biggest player in ad tech, Google, owns and operates media. The Washington Post and Vox Media are both publishers who license monetization platforms.

Garland said that BSA is still very much in the vision-and-mission phase and hasn’t yet released the products to its clients; however, Pando’s acquisition is the next step in the testing process. The newly acquired brand will be moved onto the publishing platform that was created for Digg and will be used as a test case before opening the platform up to clients.

“Part of our general premise is that the big ad tech companies have stopped innovating, and we’ve seen our customers looking for new revenue sources,” said Garland. Therefore, his goal is to transform BuySellAds into a revenue tech company in order to figure out how to create monetization tools for its publishing clients beyond programmatic ad sales and direct ad buys.

While Digg is profitable now, Garland said that the goal of buying the site was never to earn revenue off of it. Instead, it’s a testbed for creating a publishing platform that he can be licensed to other publishers. It’s a model that carries echoes of Say Media, which started as a video ad tech company before scooping up publishing brands.

When Pando launched its membership product in 2015, former co-founder of Pando Paul Carr said that the small, in-house team had to invest a lot of time and money into building the current CMS. Garland’s goal is to remove the financial and time burdens that go into producing the system, so that journalists and publishers of any size can create profitable platforms for their content.

Similar to what the Washington Post created with its Arc Publishing and Zeus platforms, which give publishers ad optimization and other publishing tools, BuySellAds is focused more on journalists and smaller publishers that want to build profitable platforms for their journalism without having to sink tons of money into multiple vendors or web developers.

“Not everyone has figured out how to successfully monetize digital media,” said Garland, which is why he sees “an opportunity for small to midsize folks to get the tools they need to have successful businesses and operate successful platforms.”

With Digg, Garland said that BuySellAds was also able to learn about the struggles that its partners are dealing with firsthand and he noted that operating Digg has been a challenging experience on par with the general struggles of the industry.

A former employee of Digg said that immediately after the acquisition, half of the roughly 30-person staff — the technology team — was let go, and the sales and business-side staffers were absorbed into BuySellAds. From there, the staff’s video editor, general manager and two original content editors were laid off over the course of the following 11 months. In addition to the layoffs, other editorial members departed and currently the brand’s entire staff consists of five full-time employees and one part-time staffer.

Pando’s former owners, Carr and editor-in-chief and CEO Sarah Lacy, both departed the staff and not including the two recent posts announcing the sale of the publication, only eight articles had been published on the site this year. Garland said that the company will be relying on freelancers and outside contributors to provide content for the site.

“I’m not trying to enrich myself directly with these properties but trying to figure out how to enrich others,” said Garland.

“We know [Pando had] been stale for a while, but we didn’t want to start from scratch,” said Garland. “We wanted something workable that we could experiment with as well as learn to build better tools for publishing clients.” And similarly with Digg, the media brand had been in desperate need of money, according to former employees’ accounts, who said that when the brand was acquired in April 2018, it wasn’t profitable.

Garland and BuySellAds have been aiming to learn more about the media business for some time, but it doesn’t appear that the editorial staff at Digg was aware that this was the driving reason for the brand’s acquisition in the first place.

By Kayleigh Barber

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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