Short attention spans, publishers awakening, hipster armies and more in The Programmable Edition #48
We have been using Slack MFG Labs for 6 months now so we are pretty passionate with the current debate among the Slack community: does Slack fragment attention and reduce productivity, and if so, who is to blame: the user or the tool? Some say its design encourages noisy communication, some say the key is reasonable usage. Looks like it is the same story all over again.
We do not have specific opinion on the matter, partly because attention fragmentation is hard to mesure and must be balanced with benefits (integrations, helpful bots, super fast files transfer, custom emojis :) etc.), and that constant sollicitation is far from only being Slack’s privilege. However what we know for sure is that the main force shaping behaviors is company culture, and that keeping alive live announcements, team lunches, encouraging real-life discussions and empathy, drives right tools usage.
Have a productive, uninterrupted day,
Thomas
Can basic maths end the ‘digital ads don’t work’ debate?
Digital advertising sure has its flaws: ad bots, ad visibility, brand safety, ad blockers, and an overall bad reputation. However, it is immensely superior to other media on one point: end-to-end performance measurability. And this characteristic wipes out the majority of remarks about its ability to generate sales. If acquisition cost < revenue, you’re good, as simple as that ! (sort of…).
Publishers unite as they realize they have been cornered by tech giants
Google and Facebook command more than half of the digital ad revenue in 2015. Alone, no publisher can compete with those two on any ground, whether it is scale or data. The only way out is to join forces, something media groups were reluctant to do in the past.
The utopia of car-free cities
Not so long ago, all cities were car-free. What if stepping back was the only way forward? In fact, progressively removing car traffic from cities could lead to a significant improvement in quality of urban life, making it not only cheaper, but also safer, quieter and generally more pleasant.
The key to Snapchat understanding
For everyone born before 1990 except DJ Khaled, Snapchat is a land of deep mysteries. Even if the company does not earn money yet, it attracts lots of top media buying agencies: audiences numbers are huge, creative opportunities endless.
Facebook’s AI learns like a child
Facebook researchers trained a neural network on a list of children’s novels to evaluate how well an algorithm can make sense of what it is reading. The method, called the « Children’s Book Test », showed successful results: the more the AI was trained, the more it could understand and contextualize complex pieces of information.
Even marketing jobs won’t escape computerization
Intelligent systems are about to take over the marketing industry: half to two-thirds of marketing jobs are at risk. If executive and creative jobs are relatively safe in the near future, most types of sales or assisting jobs will surely go away. Get ready for the machine intelligence new deal.
50,000 hipsters help Spotify recommend you the next big hit
This week, Spotify expanded its Fresh Finds playlists: selections of brand new songs, identified as potential hits and only listened to by early adopters. Could this be the music streaming service first attempt to use trend detection in order to produce tracks for a music label of its own?
Would you entrust an algorithm with your life?
With the advent of self-driving cars, the idea of outsourcing a life or death decision to a machine can be horrifying. The engineers behind the intelligent systems are not only in charge of making them work properly, but more importantly, they have to make sure they won’t blow back.
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