I Read Meeker’s 355 slide Internet Trends Report So You Don’t Have To
Once a year, Mary Meeker, a partner with venture capital firm KPCB, mic-drops her much-anticipated mega-sized Internet Trends report online like a Silicon Valley rockstar. Now in its fourth year (in current format), this monster slide deck is super intimidating if you don’t know how to read it.
And, every year, the geekosphere descends upon it in an up-all-night blog race to post their cliff’s notes of the 355 slides of data, acronyms, and new tech buzzwords. Unlike those summaries which rank and define each trend — you can find a dozen of those — I’m going to share my picks of the most impactful trends for the enterprise and why executives should care about them.
As a bit of background, I spend a fair amount of my time on site with enterprise CEOs, CTOs and CIOs helping them make sense of emerging tech, decipher the hype and noise from the truly disruptive, and decide what’s right for their business. As such, the opinions below are a mashup of my own report analysis and conversations with executives who are already thinking deeply about these trends.
1. Pick Any Channel — Just Make Sure It’s Mobile
Growth of the Internet and smartphone base is slowing year over year meaning that most people who can be online easily already are and closing the remaining gap is going to be much more difficult. So our focus should turn from user to usage growth. Internet usage on desktops, laptops and tablets is holding steady, while usage on mobile phones is growing by roughly 10% YoY. That said, smartphone shipments are slowing and even with 44% global penetration we’re seeing indications that consumers aren’t upgrading their hardware as much as Apple (and others) would like them to.
Why should you care…?
It’s obvious that capital investment dollars should go into capturing eyeballs on mobile, but these numbers would indicate you should probably over-invest in mobile experiences, including at the cost of investments in other channels. Make sure any online interaction point you have with your customer is crisp on a mobile device, or they’ll just move on.
Have you tested your mobile experiences on last year’s iPhone? What about two upgrade cycles ago? Consumers are holding out on upgrades longer, so make sure your experiences are fast, smooth, and stable on previous-gen devices.
Start thinking about your mobile investment as a platform and not an app. The future of human computer interaction will be less about staring at a rectangle screen and more about multi-modal experiences. Given almost half of the world has a smartphone in their pocket, you can bet those experiences will be driven by the compute and connectivity on that platform.
Don’t fight mobile usage in your brick and mortar locations; at the very least offer fast, free WiFi. Better yet: create mobile experiences that link on-site service, events, products, promotions, wayfinding and adjacent content.
Read this…
Myer connects with Chinese consumers in Australia via WeChat
SnapStyle enables customers to match up online photos with in-store merchandise
2. Digital advertising is it — but not without context
Digital advertising impressions are up and about to surpass TV, but advertising spend hasn’t followed suit. While many traditional organizations are investing in digital brand, they’re also still investing in traditional advertising mechanisms. It’s obvious that Google and Facebook are the frontrunners with 85% of ad market share, but conversion isn’t great. Why? Digital Ads are boring — do you convert? Not only are users ignoring online ads, but they’re actively employing ad blocking tech (mostly in their browsers) so that they don’t even have to put the effort to ignore them
Why should you care:
In the ad world conversion is what matters and context (not content) is king! Double down on investments in mobile digital advertising (and kill any investments in print), but ensure that you have the right ad at the right place and right time. This requires complex multi-variable context. Think user location + route + time of day + personal preferences.
Partnerships with social networks and other lifestyle service providers can unearth that needed context. Knowing that Jack likes Cherry Limeades is not super helpful, BUT knowing that Jack likes Cherry Limeades and it’s a hot day outside and he’s about to pass by a Sonic on his evening commute home can help us target promotions effectively. Sounds creepy, until we all get used to it and the first movers win the ads wars.
Ensure that your content is optimized for a mobile experience; fast loading, pithy, and instantly engaging — you have less than a second to grab someone’s attention as they scroll through the feed of whatever app they spend an hour a day on.
Read this:
Advertise Less, Innovate More
3. See n’ Say: Search Is A/V
The use of visual imagery as a key part of branding is on the rise and user generated content on social networks is driving increased engagement. Imagery is being utilized on the front-end to provide context for improved search and on the back-end to provide context for advertising. Oh yeah, and platforms are being built in the front, back, and all around.
In addition to images, voice is slowly replacing typing; 20% of mobile queries are made through voice and almost 70% of Google Assistant requests are conversational interactions. We can expect this interaction mechanism to increase as NLP tech gets more sophisticated and voice recognition accuracy improves.
Why should you care:
Conversational requests are on the rise and as voice recognition algorithms become more accurate everything from commerce to customer service will be done through a conversation. Don’t waste time hand rolling your own NLP algos, when you can buy them as a service. Use it and build a phenomenal customer experience through conversation. Start small, with something as simple as a single item reorder and add complexity as you go.
But don’t forget that progressive brands are leveraging user generated content and social network influencers to drive increased engagement. Consumers want authenticity from a source they trust (their network or their roles models). Start thinking about how to drive UGC through social networks and how to influence your customers’ influencers. It starts with knowing who they are.
Read This:
Why conversational UI? Why now?
4. Customers Are Staying Home — or are they?
Retail sales are up while retail store closings are about to break a 20 year record. Parcel volume is way up, apartment building lobbies are becoming warehouses, package unwrapping has become entertainment, and eating out has becoming eating in. Delivery revenue of services like Door Dash and Instacart are rising and these aggregators are finding successes in data-driven upsells through simple recommendation engines.
Traditional retailers like Lowes and Wal-mart are launching defense strategies grounded in technology innovation and digital property acquisition. Large upfront investment costs are providing short term returns, however staying power remains to be seen. Meanwhile, digital natives like Warby Parker and Bonobos are going offline in an attempt to provide a multi-modal experience.
Why you should care:
It still remains to be seen, whether all of these omni-channel investments will pan out. They have been all the rage in retail for the past number of years and have produced mixed results. Consumers today expect three things; convenience, simplicity, and a solid experience. Brands that are focused on providing all three seamlessly are winning. Bonobos is a great example where customers can go to a brick and mortar ‘guideshop’ for the experience of trying on a pair of pants for fit and rinse, repeat, reorder online in the future for convenience. Wal-mart acquired Bonobos to add to its digital/physical portfolio, while Amazon did the same with its Whole Foods acquisition, just in the other direction — both are racing to the same outcome of omni-channel nirvana.
Read This:
Why Walmart-Bonobos Is A Bigger Deal Than Amazon-Whole Foods
5. The New Normal in Enterprise Tech
There is a massive movement towards cloud, with spend on both private and public clouds totalling over $36B USD and approaching traditional data center spend. It’s no surprise that AWS is winning based on overall product performance and developer mindshare, while Microsoft is a not too distant second due to strong enterprise relationships across their product suite.
Concerns are shifting away from security and cost to vendor lock-in and governance, which would signal that decision makers are thinking deeply about removing constraints and the friction that comes along with them. Additionally, the cloud tooling ecosystem is raging out of control, there is very little need to roll your own tooling unless it is a core differentiator for your business (probably not).
Why should you care:
If you’re not building a platform to take advantage of the elasticity and performance of the cloud, the flexibility of new software delivery models and architectural patterns, and a vast ecosystem of business services you are very, very far behind. Organizations should be taking advantage of this paradigm shift in enterprise technology to get the most value from their unique assets. A strong focus on platform building to remove the friction within your engineering teams, expose your business assets for innovation, and efficient experimentation will create the innovation engine you need to create competitive advantage. Don’t know what to build on your platform? See above.
