Moral Time

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Did you know that 80 percent of users churn within three months of downloading an app? That’s because most apps are marketed to the masses and not necessarily to the right customers.

Oftentimes, the goal of app marketing is to reach as many consumers as possible with the hopes of recruiting en masse and converting at better-than-average ratios. But part of the challenge for marketers is that many of today’s strategies are driven by metrics that don’t link to advanced user targeting and growth.

More specifically, app marketers aren’t using available data strategically to deliver productive user experiences that ultimately drive greater business profitability.

Now more than ever, marketers must shift from tracking traditional vanity metrics to measuring the very things that contribute to retention and growth. More and more, successful companies are investing in customer-centric metrics such as CLV (customer lifetime value) to gain intelligent, consumer-centered insights that not only identify the most valuable customers but also key behaviors and preferences to continually improve consumers’ experiences and journey.

Next-generation marketing and CX are about identifying and engaging valuable consumers

CLV is more important than apps in isolation. It helps apps and other touch points work together to deliver value-added, cohesive experiences.

CLV measures the value a consumer represents to the business across all interactions over their lifetime, not just a single transaction or touch point. That is ultimately the definition of customer experience. It is the sum of all moments a customer has with your brand throughout their life cycle. Marketing and customer engagement is now a cross-functional mandate.

Not all app users are the right users. If you use the Pareto Principle, you can assume that 80 percent of business value is attributed to 20 percent of your active consumers. While these percentages aren’t by any means a standard, they do emphasize the need to identify and cultivate the important customers who drive your business.

Instead of casting a wide net and attracting as many users as possible in the hopes of retaining a reasonably active base, CLV tied to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning focuses marketers and also developers on targeted engagement and growth. The idea is to drive profit by investing in more value-added user experiences and personalized offers. Doing so intentionally cultivates meaningful relationships with key customers.

Next-generation customer engagement is about cross-functional collaboration and data sharing

Unfortunately, customer experience today is largely siloed. Marketing, mobile, in-store, e-commerce, digital and so on are not collaborating nor operating against the same customer and market data. But that’s all about to change with the proliferation of AI and machine learning tied to smart CLV initiatives.

When the goal is to deliver targeted and integrated experiences, not just in-app, but across each touch point and the life cycle overall, companies create a truly customer-centric approach. AI then helps brands get a more complete, shared view and understanding of customer behaviors and expectations.

Additionally, AI-driven customer-centricity fosters cross-functional collaboration and data sharing that, by design, boosts customer experiences, along with CLV and business growth.

Identify highest-value customers and deliver targeted experiences

AI/machine learning platforms offer intelligent insights when pointed in the right direction. Successful brands study how much revenue highest-value customers drive over their lifetime and how much it costs to manage those relationships. And they examine CLV across all channels to get a holistic view of high-value behavior in all interactions. When the system can analyze important traits of high-value users, it can learn how to optimize CLV.

For example, to reach potential high-value customers, AI/machine learning uses data from existing high-value customers to optimize campaigns and touch points. In a study by Bain aimed at retail banking, it was found that it costs banks $4 every time a customer calls or visits. However, if consumers can complete the transaction via an app, it costs only 10 cents.

The key is to deliver capabilities in ways that consumers prefer and appreciate. Imagine how much AI and machine learning could additionally uncover when tasked with identifying friction points and new opportunities.

AI and CLV call for a new customer-centric playbook

You’ve probably heard time and time again that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. Brands that are winning prioritize CLV and AI and are drafting the playbook as they go. They:

• develop a customer-centric mindset.


• open doors between silos around in-store, digital and mobile so teams can focus on one clear business goal, rather than individual metrics (such as engagement or clicks).


• align customer-facing groups to a business outcome such as CLV and promote cross-functional collaboration and data sharing to assemble a holistic view of the customer across all touch points.


• understand who their highest-value customers are, how much revenue they drive over their lifetime and how much it costs to manage the relationship — across all channels.


• focus on measuring and communicating clear business goals rather than individual or vanity metrics.

AI and machine learning improve both by using existing data without cognitive bias. The more the system learns, the more it optimizes.

In the end, not all customers are created equal. By identifying those who drive value, how and why, you can learn how to design and deliver personalized value to them and enhance customer engagement and experiences to grow your business now and over time.

Public concern about Facebook’s power in society – and in politics – has skyrocketed in the wake of revelations that users’ data was analyzed by a U.K.-based marketing firm and used to construct highly targeted political propaganda in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Other technology giants have also sparked concern: Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all faced objections from users, the public and even government agencies.

Because all of these companies provide services relating to computers, there is a tendency to lump them together, calling them “Big Tech” or the “Frightful Five” or even “GAFA” – the acronym for the first four of them, leaving Microsoft out. Conceiving of “big tech” as a single industry makes the threat and influence overwhelming.

In the U.S., when an industry gets so large it exerts political pressure on society, people often label the industry as a whole, like “Big Oil,” “Big Tobacco” or “Big Pharma.” The so-called big tech companies certainly are big: In 2017, they were the top five most valuable public companies in the U.S. But, as a scholar of the media marketplace that many of these firms are beginning to explore, I know that lumping them together hides the fact they’re very separate and distinct – not just as companies, but in terms of their business models and practices.

Understanding these companies in their proper business contexts makes it easier to understand their power in the marketplace and society at large. It also suggests ways to assess, regulate and manage that power to protect competition and even democracy itself.

Google: Advertising revenue from searches

Google and Facebook are most frequently discussed together, likely because of their domination of internet advertising. Together, the two companies collected 63 percent of U.S. digital advertising dollars in 2017. Both companies earn most of their revenue from advertising: 97 percent for Facebook and 88 percent for Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2016. But what they offer to advertisers and what users want from them are very different.

Google’s value proposition is helping users find things. Many – even most – of the 3.5 billion searches Google performs each day aren’t monetized at all. Google only gets paid if a searcher clicks on a paid link; the top three results are often labeled as “Ads,” in addition to several on the right side of a computer user’s search results screen.

Advertisers like Google because they only pay if their ads are clicked. That is a far better deal than what is offered in traditional media advertising, where payment is for how many people are shown an ad, rather than customers’ responses. In addition, Google’s position as a leading place where people look for information on products and services means an ad reaches a consumer exactly at the moment they’re looking for a product. This timing is more valuable than just showing ads to people in general – so much so that advertisers paid Google US$79.38 billion in 2016.

Facebook: Ad revenue from attention-grabbing content

Facebook operates more like a traditional ad-supported media company. It provides interesting content that attracts an audience, and sells their attention to advertisers – just as television, radio and print have done for decades. The key difference between Facebook and these legacy media businesses is where the content comes from: Rather than Facebook paying to create the material that draws users, the users add it themselves for free, posting personal messages and shared links.

Like traditional media, Facebook charges advertisers based on how many people see a message, not on how many take action by clicking. The value Facebook offers over traditional advertising is its ability to target very particular groups with a customized advertising message. This is precisely the type of targeting that happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which generated widespread public criticism.

Apple: Selling electronic hardware

In contrast to the advertising businesses of Google and Facebook, Apple remains a hardware technology company, deriving 84 percent of its 2016 revenue from the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers. The profits on those sales let Apple use very different strategies than the non-hardware companies with which it is often compared. The profit margins on each device are so substantial it doesn’t have to dominate the hardware market the way Google and Facebook control online advertising. Despite the seeming ubiquity of iPhones in some social circles, iPhones rarely top 20 percent of worldwide phone sales, and account for about 30 percent of U.S. sales.

Apple has other elements to its business, too – such as its iTunes music distribution business. But it’s important to keep the relative scale of those elements in mind. Mostly, they are complementary businesses that Apple uses strategically in support of its primary focus as a hardware company. Taken together, iTunes, its App Stores, iBooks Store, Apple Music, Apple Care, Apple Pay and other even more ancillary sales added up to just 11 percent of the company’s revenue in 2016. Even the company’s plan to spend $1 billion on original video is hard to understand, except as a support to branding and marketing efforts that boost its hardware sales.

Microsoft and Amazon: Mixed retail, computing and media

Much like Apple, Microsoft blends many revenue streams: It sells Surface computers, Azure cloud services, software (like the Microsoft Office Suite), gaming consoles and search engine advertising. The company once stood alone as a poster child for massive technology corporations. Lately, it may draw less attention because competitors like Google’s G Suite have challenged its market share. Also, Microsoft has not aggressively entered social media, a sector now under great scrutiny.

Finally, Amazon also operates in many different business sectors. Primarily, it is a goods retailer: That’s where 70 percent of its annual revenue came from in 2016. Its Amazon Web Services content hosting and cloud computing business contributed 9 percent, and Amazon’s media businesses provided roughly 18 percent of the company’s $136 billion of annual revenue. That $24 billion of media revenue is nearly three times that of Netflix, but still not Amazon’s core business.

Regulate markets and behavior, not ‘tech’

It’s not that these companies are so different as to be unrelated or incomparable to each other. They all involve – to varying degrees – computers and services built on internet connection that provide services to customers in ways that never existed before. All five gather data on their users and analyze behavior using algorithms to create personal experiences in ways that are new and have been challenging for companies with long histories in sectors such as media, transportation or retail to match.

But despite simple perception of them all as “tech” companies, their core revenue sources are clearly different. And those distinctions suggest ways people can understand and respond to anxieties about their growing economic and cultural influence.

In fact, what is most concerning is the extent to which these companies aren’t in the same businesses: They’re not competing with each other, or really anyone else.

In prior eras, Americans learned that major industries they first viewed as innovators and economic saviors were more complicated and less magnanimous than initially believed. So now today, big tech isn’t unlike everything that came before. In fact, big tech isn’t really a thing at all. Assessing these companies based on what they do, rather than mythologizing them, is the first step forward.

Snapchat has ephemeral messages, and now Facebook has ephemeral friend requests. The big blue social network feeds off your social graph, and every time you expand it, it has more content to show you. But if you leave a questionable friend request in limbo for too long, you’ll probably never confirm or delete it. So Facebook is betting that by making those friend requests into exploding offers, you’ll be more likely to accept than lose the opportunity to connect. And if you didn’t want that friend request in the first place, it will self-destruct even if you don’t bother to manually reject it.

On Friday, TechCrunch reader Christine Hudler provided screenshots of a new expiring friend requests feature that gives you a 14-day countdown to make a decision. Now a Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the feature to TechCrunch, writing “I can confirm that this is a test to help surface the most recent requests.” Facebook tells me it’s a way to assist people with managing unwanted friend requests by eventually deleting those people saw but didn’t accept. It’s currently only appearing to a subset of users, not to everyone.

Those in the test group will see a “14 days to respond” countdown on their friend requests. A “Learn More” link leads to this Help Center article we’ve screenshotted here, as it only shows details about expirations to those in the test.

Keeping people’s friend request queue clean is critical to the company because if you can’t find the legitimate ones from people you know amongst all the randos and spam, you might stop growing your graph. Expiring friend requests could also solve a problem for social media stars and other public figures on Facebook. The app only lets you have up to 5,000 friends, and a limited number of pending requests that seems to be 5,000 minus your friend count (Facebook wouldn’t say). After that, you won’t receive inbound friend requests any more. The expiration date makes it much less likely that you’ll ever hit the pending friend request maximum.

The “limited time offer” trick has been around in shopping forever as way to boost your sense of urgency. Humans love optionality, but hate to miss out. People buy things they don’t actually want off of infomercials because if they “ACT NOW!” they’ll get a discount before it disappears. This same approach compels people to open Snapchat so they don’t miss their friends’ Stories that delete themselves after 24 hours.

The feature comes at a time when Facebook is especially sensitive about appearing respectful of your data, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Friend requests from total strangers can make users feel like they’re already sharing too much public information, and that one wrong click could expose their friends-only photos and posts. Keeping these requests from piling up could make users feel safer while ensuring they can keep adding real friends.

For more on what’s up with Facebook, read our feature pieces:

Tracking sea animals is a difficult task for many reasons, not least of which is the robustness necessary for any device to survive longer than a few weeks of water torture. The clunky solutions currently used to watch whales and other creatures might soon have a more lightweight competitor: this flexible, inexpensive “marine skin.”

Developed by researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the ultra-light sensor platform was developed out of the simple concern that existing tech simply isn’t pleasant for animals to wear. Muhammad Mustafa Hussain leads the project in collaboration with the Red Sea Research Institute.

The marine skin uses a flexible silicone substrate and a design that can survive being twisted, torqued and put under serious pressure at up to moderate depth. It tracks the salinity and temperature of the water and distance below the surface; this could be used to track either the creature’s own preferences or to monitor the waters in which it swims or crawls.

It uses a watch battery and the team suggests it could last for up to a year once it’s optimized, although the necessity of transmitting information over long distances could limit that. Currently it can only send information via Bluetooth, and a 30-foot range isn’t particularly useful in the vast ocean. But there are ways to account for that.

At a cost of less than $12 per unit, it’s also extremely cheap. At scale that could be even cheaper, and its low profile means it could be deployed en masse on small animals rather than on carefully chosen high-value targets like itinerant whales.

It’s still in the prototype phase, but the team is working with others to test the devices, and publishing its progress in a paper in Flexible Electronics. IEEE Spectrum has a few more details and pictures from Hussain’s group.

Google tried to make Android tablets a thing, and that seemed to work for a minute but ultimately ended up being a wasted effort. Now the search giant is trying to make Chrome OS tablets a thing, and we’ll see how this goes.

The first such device has been made official today. It’s the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, but despite being branded “Chromebook” there’s no physical keyboard anywhere – it is ‘just’ a tablet, not a convertible.

As the name implies, its screen size is close to 10″. It’s a 9.7″ 2,048×1,536 panel to be exact, and those just happen to be the specs for the cheapest iPad‘s display too. It’s powered by the OP1 chipset, seen before in the Samsung Chromebook Plus laptop. That has a CPU with two Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. This is paired with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (expandable via microSD).

The tablet supports Android apps and has a 5 MP camera on the rear and a 2 MP unit on the front, dual speakers, and claimed 9-hour battery life from its 34 Wh cell. It’s got Wi-Fi ac, a USB-C port, 3.5mm headset jack, Bluetooth 4.1, and even a Wacom EMR stylus with its own slot. The stylus doesn’t require charging.

While the Chromebook Tab 10 is aimed at the education market, you will be able to buy it even if you’re not in or a school. It arrives in April in the US for $329, which is exactly as much as the iPad 9.7 goes for. The Acer tablet will reach Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in May priced at €329.

Via