Why Software is Eating the World and What it Means for Digital Media

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In 2011, Marc Andreessen penned a wonderful Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, "Why Software is Eating the World."

Marc argues the following factors make the rise of software across industries an inevitability

  • 2 billion people on-line today with 5 billion expected to have access via mobile 
  • foundation laid by the CPU, broadband, mobile and PC industries
  • power of cloud computing to drive down operating costs (factor of 100 in ten years) and the global availability of Internet services and APIs
  • relative strengths of Amanzon vs Borders, Skype vs POTS telcos, Pixar vs old line studios, LinkedIn vs the recruiting industry, iTunes vs Tower Records...

He notes "companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming" and that "Schumpeter's creative destruction" will be felt across all sectors of the economy.

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Learning from Benioff and Salesforce

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The July 4th holiday is time for family, BBQs, and summer reading lists. I write to suggest Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.  The book details Benioff’s journey building Salesforce into a billion-dollar industry pioneer, lessons learned, and his philosophy.

Salesforce pioneered innovative technical and business models that dramatically changed the enterprise software market. Rather than pay license fees, implementation fees, etc, Salesforce customers were able to buy by the seat and benefit from Salesforce’s single instance, multi-tenant infrastructure. The “No Software” net effect was to dramatically reduce costs, while improving customer experience, enlarging the overall market, and creating recurring revenue streams.

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Coke: Moving from Creative Excellence to Content Excellence

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In the embedded videos below, the Coca Cola company brilliantly details its 2020 marketing strategy.  

The strategy calls for a move from creative excellence to content excellence.  The purpose of content excellence is to create liquid, contagious ideas that are linked to the brand's key goals. The conversational model depends on brand stories that provoke discussion and that allow the brand to react and promote conversations 365 days a year.

The shift is significant for many reasons; Coca Cola is one of the world's largest and most effective marketing organizations, Coca Cola is fundamentally rethinking what it means to market in today's world, and there is massive sea change underway in how effectiveness is defined.  Coca Cola recognizes that the iconic 30 second TV spot is not sufficient in a world of connected devices, on demand media, and user expectation for reciprocal relationships.  Coke no longer believes that creative alone will reach the target customers. With greater connectivity and an always on culture, consumers expect to converse and engage with brands rather than simply watch clever 30 second TV spots.

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Can Marketers Optimize Brand Campaigns in Real-time?

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eMarketer published a fascinating piece titled, Can Marketers Optimize Brand Campaigns in Real-time?

The article notes that only six percent of agencies are able to recognize consumers' interests in real-time. 

In a world of Twitter, Facebook, and the real-time web, brand marketing operates at a Paleolithic cadence. We've found that the average age of in-market media is three to six months.  When yesterday's paper is old news, the odds of months-old creative messages resonating are extremely low. Moreover, if creative is simply not working, or certain placements are driving little to no value, its imperative that brands operate a command center that allows for immediate action and response.  When we say immediate, we mean real-time.  

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Facebook Ad Platform Relaunch, Validation of Flite Platform 3

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Today, Facebook relaunched their ad platform with three announcements.

  1. Reach Generator product, a paid post model guaranteeing reach 
  2. New ad formats, in which the stream is the creative, or content = creative
  3. Brand pages moving to Timeline pages

Michael Lazerow, BuddyMedia's CEO, wrote a detailed post covering the announcements and their significance today in AdAge.

For Flite and its customers, the news is a positive affirmation of Flite Platform 3.  Platform 3 is predicated on delivering two key capabilities to brands operating in a real-time, app-driven world.

  1. Brands ability to update live campaigns in real-time with relevant, topical content
    1. No longer will ad creative be fixed and persist across campaign durations, but rather brands will push content in real-time to paid media in order to ensure that the message is relevant, topical, and impactful.  For example, brands will push both proactive (brand news and updates) and reactive (headline news, celebrity news, etc) to on line ads.
  2. Brands ability to integrate marketing applications directly in-unit.
    1. Online consumers will be able to share, chat, redeem, watch, read, register with the brand and its content directly in unit.

Facebook's ad units rely on very similar precepts - ad creative becomes the stream and ad units support rich functionality that Facebook's users have come to expect as given, like, share, comment.

Real-time, app-driven marketing is the future and requires new infrastructure and technology to deliver at scale. Facebook's product launch is a shot across the bow to all players in the display space and it will be fascinating to watch how the market responds.

 

 

Announcing New Funding for Flite!

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Flite is thrilled to announce the close of our $12m Series C. Neil Sequeira and General Catalyst led the round, with participation from our existing investors Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, and NCD Investors.

The investment provides three key benefits:
  1. The round cements our position as the leader in cloud-based advertising.
    • Cloud-based advertising represents the next chapter in brand marketing. Cloud-based ads allow brands to shift their spend from poorly performing standard display ads to ads that are programmed by the cloud and the best of today’s real-time web.
    • The net result of flighting cloud-based ads is a 10+x increase in brand recall, purchase intent, and marketing ROI.
    • General Catalyst’s investment reflects the strength of our partner and customer list. The world’s leading brands and publishers rely on Flite, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Toyota, L’Oreal, LinkedIn, and IDG. Flite’s ads reach over 120,000,000 unique users a month and each day we capture over 50,000,000 unique in-unit engagements.
  2. With $26m raised to date, Flite is well capitalized to invest in our future.
    • We plan to add to our world-class engineering team in order to invest in the Flite platform - web-based builders, real-time metrics, live updates, and cross-platform delivery.
    • Flite will continue to make our platform extensible, thereby allowing brands to leverage virtually any service or content in their brand advertising.
    • Flite’s customers will continue to receive world-class account management, service, and sales support. We will grow our Chicago and NYC presences, while adding coverage for other key markets.
  3. The additional capital will allow Flite to continue to eliminate the overly bespoke, manual, and cumbersome nature of today’s brand executions. Marketers today demand agile solutions to quickly and easily capture the promise of real-time branding. Our partners and customers will be able to do more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater impact and effect.
Finally, I’d like to thank our employees, investors, and customers for the continued support. Flite’s culture of excellence and collaboration allows us to out-innovate and out-compete far larger competitors. Our investors, backers of Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Omniture, and other leading companies, provide us with the counsel and resources to follow in the footsteps of giants. Finally, our customers provide us with the inspiration and incentive to continue to redefine brand marketing and to ensure that cloud-based advertising becomes the rule and not the exception.

Will Price is the CEO of Flite.