Millenials are not a niche "youth"

I was thinking last week about one question the teacher raised in class. Since the youngest consumers seem less interested in Facebook and more in other social media like Snapchat, will Facebook suffer from it or is that a specifity of their age and they will grow as Facebook users as they grow older. I could not make my mind, seeing pros and cons for every side of the argument. But then, after some research I stumbled on a very interesting summary of who are millenials in term of numbers. http://www.millennialmarketing.com/who-are-millennials/
That is when I realized that actually millennials are not a niche “youth” segment but a generation of people who will ultimately give way to a newer generation. Therefore, millennial-focused brands will have to change their game to stay relevant. 

What if Virtual Reality was the next standard platform?

We know that Facebook growth mainly comes from mobile now. This shift in platform from the desktop to mobile is very interesting to me. The change happened so fast and it required digital marketers to adapt. What about the next shift? Maybe Virtual Reality. I found this article from TechnologyReview reinforcing this idea and giving it support by implying that Facebook acquired Oculus Rift because Mark Zuckerberg foresees virtual reality to be the next platform, the future standard platform that will replace the others in the long term. In my opinion, this would revolution the way to market products and services.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525881/what-zuckerberg-sees-in-oculus-rift/

From 66 billion dollars revenue in 2014 to 0?

After last session, I wanted to write about the future of Search. Google revenue last year reached 66 billion US dollars and its advertising revenue is still growing in double-digit (11% YoY change from Q2 2014 to Q2 2015).
However, what if the era of Google was coming to an end?
Indeed, we all know SIRI, as an intelligent virtual personal assistant and knowledge navigator. SIRI uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions. So far, what is the link with the end of Google current revenue model you would tell me? Well, what most people don't know, is how it works. SIRI delegates requests to a set of Web services. The software then adapts to the user's individual language usage and individual searches (preferences) with continuing use, and returns that are individualized.
What does it mean? It means that how Google would make advertisers pay if no human being has to make a search and would therefore click on an ad?
Well, you could also argue that SIRI is very basic, its limitations are more than apparent and does not work and that the future I envisage is Azimov's science fiction. Let's not be that sure. Many startups around the world actually work on the next version of SIRI. One of the most promising AI under the radar is called Viv. Developed by SIRI's inventors, Viv is THE new AI. It is able to learn from the world to improve upon its capabilities. A funny example is when you ask Viv "What's the status of JetBlue 133?". A second later, Viv returns with an answer: "Late again, what else is new?". To achieve this simple this result, Viv went to an airline database called FlightStats.com and got the estimated arrival time and records that show JetBlue 133 is on time just 62% of the time".
To learn more from Viv's CEO and its vision how Viv could impact advertising, see the sources.

Sources:
http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a34630/viv-artificial-intelligence-0515/
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/viv/
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/20/viv-built-by-siris-creators-scores-12-5-million-for-an-ai-technology-that-can-teach-itself/#.bvc2oi:37fs
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/06/the-future-of-voice-activated-ai-sounds-awesome/
https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings.html
http://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/

Mailjet Raises Another $11 Million To Scale Its Unified Marketing And Transactional Email Service

Posted Jul 15, 2015 by Romain Dillet (@romaindillet)

French startup Mailjet just raised $11 million (€10 million) from existing investor Alven Capital as well as Iris Capital and Seventure Partners. As a reminder, Mailjet is an email delivery service that works for both marketing campaigns and transactional emails.

“Mailjet’s distinctive feature is that we tackle both markets — marketing and transactional,” CEO Alexis Renard told me. “It’s different for MailChimp as they have two different products under two different names [MailChimp and Mandrill], Campaign Monitor only does marketing. But our market is evolving toward emails that are not entirely transactional nor marketing emails.”

Renard could be well-positioned to handle this new sort of emails by developing a single product under one brand. But first, a quick recap. What is a marketing campaign and transactional emails? What these companies call a marketing campaign is a newsletter or any kind of mass email list that you subscribed too. It’s not particularly tailored to you. A transactional email is an automatic email sent to you and only you. For example, it can be an email to confirm your email address after signing up to a web service or a purchase receipt.

These are two very different beasts. Transactional email services need to have a reliable API, send email as quickly as possible and never fail — Mailjet started with transactional emails. Marketing email services need to be able to send hundreds of thousands of emails even if it takes a few minutes, have a good reputation with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo so that your newsletter doesn’t end up in the spam folder, and provide tools to customize the design of your emails.

“Around 30 percent of ours clients only send marketing campaigns, 30 percent only send transactional emails and 40 percent send both,” Renard said. Mailjet now sends 600 million emails per month for 32,000 clients and monthly recurring revenue has jumped 70 percent year over year. Recently, the company has launched a new visual template designer to easily create responsive campaigns.

To read more

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/15/mailjet-raises-another-11-million-to-scale-its-unified-marketing-and-transactional-email-service/