Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Goodbye to the media buyers long lunch

    Goodbye to the media buyers long lunch

    Yesterday Decoding The New Economy posted an interview with Michael Rubenstein of AppNexus about the world of programmatic advertising and being part of a rapidly growing startup.

    The whole concept of programmatic advertising is a good example of a business, and a set of jobs, being disrupted.

    Media buying has been a cushy job for a generation of well fed advertising executives. David Sarnoff’s invention of the broadcast media model in the 1930s meant salespeople and brokers were needed to fill the constant supply of advertising spots.

    Today the rise of the internet has disrupted the once safe world of broadcast media where incumbents were protected by government licenses and now the long lunching media buyers are finding their own jobs are being displaced by algorithms like those of AppNexus.

    A thought worth dwelling on though is that media buyers are part of a wider group of white collar roles being disrupted by technology – the same Big Data algorithms driving AppNexus and other services is also being used to write and select news stories and increasingly we’ll see executive decisions being made by computers.

    It’s highly likely the biggest casualties of the current data analytics driven wave won’t be truck drivers, shelf pickers or baristas but managers. The promise of a flat organisation may be coming sooner than many middle managers – and salespeople – think.

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  • Programming the Internet’s advertising

    Programming the Internet’s advertising

    Michael Rubenstein, President of AppNexus is the first interview for a while on the Decoding the New Economy channel.

    Rubenstein joined AppNexus as employee number 18 in 2009 and has been part of the company’s growth from a small startup to a global technology company with a workforce of 1,000 professionals.

    AppNexus is one of the new wave of companies managing and programming online advertising, helping advertisers and publishers target their products better while giving ad tech companies deeper insights and data.

    In this interview, Rubenstein discusses some of the forces changing global advertising along with the challenges of dealing with a high growth business.

    Apologies for the bad hair on my part.

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  • The three S’s of employee engagement

    The three S’s of employee engagement

    We need to rethink how we measure performance in the workplace says Andrew Lafontaine, Senior Director Human Capital Managemet Strategy & Transformation at Oracle Australia.

    As business adapts to a changing society and mobile technologies, one of the questions facing managers is the mismatch between the Millennial generation and those GenX and Boomers who make up most of the executive suite, Lafontaine sees this as been in how the younger cohort approaches authority.

    “There certainly can be a disconnect between Millennials and boomers. Millennials don’t see hierarchy the way boomers see it as important,” says Lafontaine. “Boomers have ingrained view of the way they have come through the workforce.”

    Breaking the old rules

    Unfortunately for those older managers, their world was based on a formalised, ‘straight line’ hierarchy dating back to the days ships’ captains used flags and voice tubes to communicate.

    That rigid military style worked well for nearly two hundred years of business with mail and then the telephone only reinforcing that management model. Now newer collaboration tools mean different ways of working becoming possible.

    A problem with those different ways of working in teams is how performance is measured warns Lafontaine.  “What they are not measuring at the moment are what I call ‘network performance’. How workers they helping their colleagues, collaborating and working together.”

    Separating home and office

    With mobile technologies becoming ubiquitous it becomes harder to separate work from home life, “we working now from home and on the tram. You don’t need a nine to five workforce nad companies have to deal with and embrace the technology,” says Lafontaine.

    In the context of babyboomers and GenX workers, that technology meant longer hours in the office but Lafontaine suggests things are now changing. “There other areas to measure. How are they looking after themselves? The days of babyboomers working 12 or 14 hours a day and neglecting their health or outside life are over.”

    For the future company, the key to success lies in engaging their employees Lafontaine says. “A more highly engaged workforce delivers better outcomes. Engagement is the three S’s: Stay, Say and Strive”

    Those S’s come down to three questions for the worker; should I stay? What should I say? and How should I strive to do a better job?

    For managers the challenge is engage all workers regardless of age, the task of finding what engages and motivates workers of the computer generation is only just beginning.

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  • First steps in an online journey

    First steps in an online journey

    “The days of getting a PhD to get your businesses online are over” declared James Carroll, GoDaddy’s International Executive Vice President last week on a visit to Sydney.

    GoDaddy is the world’s biggest internet domain name registration service and Carroll was in Australia to promote the expansion of the company’s local operations.

    Australia’s a prime target for the company with nearly half the nation’s two million businesses not having a web presence. “I think there’s an awareness issue about the skill that are needed to get online,” says Carroll.

    GoDaddy’s Australia and New Zealand country manager Tara Commerford suggested two reasons why small businesses aren’t going online, “I think it’s lack of awareness and people don’t know how to do it”.

    Commerford suggests that simplified online tools are making it easier along with the easy access to other platforms like social media and location online services.

    The problem though is these tools are not new, this blog has been discussing how companies need to get online for years and yet the proportion of small businesses getting a web presence has remained fixed around the fifty percent mark.

    One of the barriers to getting online is confusion and the new top level domains haven’t helped this by muddying the message about which domains they should be registering under. This is only increasing the fear among small business owners that going online is complex, expensive and risky.

    It’s understandable that domain registrars like GoDaddy would push the new domains given the industry’s low margins and need for scale, but that’s not the problem for smaller operators.

    The problem for small businesses is getting the basics right with with a mobile friendly website, particularly for hospitality and tourism operators. Having the right domain name is an important first start of an important journey for most businesses.

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  • Dealing with the biggest of data

    Dealing with the biggest of data

    How do you deal with the biggest data sets of all? Bob Jones, a project leader for the European Organization for Nuclear Research – commonly known as CERN – described how the world’s largest particle physics laboratory manages 100 petabytes of data.

    The first step is not to collect everything, ““We can’t keep all the data, the key is knowing what to keep” says Jones. This is understandable given the cameras capturing the collisions have 150 million sensors delivering data at 40 million times per second.

    Jones was speaking at the ADMA Global Conference’s Advancing Analytics stream where he was describing how the project manages and analyses the vast amounts of data generated by the huge projects.

    Adding to Jones’ task and that facing CERN’s boffins is that data has to be preserved and verifiable so scientists can review the results of experiments.

    Discovering the Higgs Boson for instance required finding 400 positive results out of 600,000,000,000,000,000 events. This requires massive processing and storage power.

    Part of the solution is to have a chain of data centres across the world to carry out both the analytics and data storage supplemented by tape archiving, something that creates other issues..

    “Tape is a magnetic medium which means it deteriorates over time.” Jones says, “we have to repack this data every two years.”

    Another advantage with a two year refresh is this allows CERN to apply the latest advances in data storage to pack more data into the medium.

    CERN itself is funded by its 21 member states – Pakistan is its latest member – which contribute its $1.5 billion annual budget and the organisation provides data and processing power to other multinational projects like the European Space Agency and to private sector partners.

    For the private sector, CERNs computing power gives the opportunity to do in depth analytics of large data sets while the unique hardware and software requirements mean the project is a proving ground for high performance equipment.

    Despite the high tech, Jones says the real smarts behind CERN and the large Hadron Collider lie in the people. “All of the people analysing the data are trained physicists with detailed, multi year domain knowledge.”

    “The reason being is the experiment and the technology changes so quickly, it’s not written down. It’s in the heads of those people.”

    In some respects this is comforting for those of us worrying about the machines taking over.

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