Find our roundups collected in magazine form on Flipboard, the iOS and Android app; download the app to view this week’s edition here: http://flip.it/J6Fj
-Mexico is becoming an “immigrant destination” for both executives and laborers as its economy powers ahead, reports The New York Times.
-A special report on Brazil in The Economist includes a look at how domestic brands, from Natura to Havaianas, are prospering.
-Designer labels are on the rise in Latin America, reports TheFT.
-Nielsen has a look at how the Great Recession has changed shopping behavior for global consumers.
-The UN’s Broadband Commission outlines mobile broadband growth in a new report and says broadband use in developing countries will soon outstrip that in wealthier countries, via The New York Times.
-Ad Age reports that e-commerce is starting to negatively impact big packaged-goods brands.
This week we launched “Meet the BRIC Millennials,” a wide-ranging study of a generation that will shape the four major developing markets. The report spotlights findings from a survey of 1,640 Millennials aged 18-35 in Brazil, Russia, India and China that we conducted in July 2013 using SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online tool.
We found that like their counterparts around the world, BRIC Millennials are optimistic on most counts. So while they’ve felt the sting of economic uncertainty, they’re upbeat about their economic future. More than 8 in 10 believe their finances will improve in the next six months, although Russian Millennials are notably less bullish. Should their financial situation worsen, most Millennials who live on their own or at school would be loath to move back in with their parents, with the exception of respondents in India, where multigenerational households are the rule.
Notably, a majority of Brazilian Millennials are stressed about managing their finances, which speaks to the fact that they are the first generation in Brazil to embrace financial management. Years of inflation prevented a savings culture from taking hold; now, Millennials are beginning to embrace saving and striving to get a grasp on the ins and outs of financial planning.
Download the full report here or browse the abridged version on SlideShare.
“News Bites” was one of our 100 Things to Watch for 2013, the idea that as more people catch up with the news on smartphones, we’ll see an array of apps that help users stay current with a quick scan. The examples we pointed to—Summly and Wavii—have since been acquired, with Yahoo now incorporating Summly summaries into its own app (Google bought Wavii). The use of mobile news apps, meanwhile, is steadily rising, according to Adweek. More than ever, as Digiday recently noted, “readers want to consume content fast and often. The question every publisher is grappling with is how to do it.”
USA Today’s new sports news app, The Q, posts bites that are just 20 to 50 or so words in length. An exec told Digiday that the aim is to reach sports fans at bars, in line or watching TV. Wibbitz, a new text-to-video app, condenses news stories into mobile-friendly video clips. The company is pitching publishers on the idea of integrating its clips within longer features, per Springwise.
On the other side of the spectrum, publishers are experimenting with more immersive online stories that harness vivid imagery and videos. The New York Times garnered buzz (and a Pulitzer) for “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” published last December, which incorporates multimedia elements that appear as the reader scrolls down. The latest such effort from the Times is “The Jockey.” Rolling Stone has also ventured into this immersive territory, with HTML5-powered features like “The Geeks on the Frontlines” and “Greenland Melting.” But lean-back efforts like these, well-suited to tablets, may have too many bells and whistles for most readers, in the view of some critics.
Marketers will need to imagine new forms of ad placement that fit within this wide spectrum of news platforms and find ways to integrate seamlessly so as to complement rather than interfere with the experience.
A dozen years after the term BRIC was coined, we decided to zone in on the generation that will be defining the future of these markets, which together comprise around 40 percent of the global population. Millennials in Brazil, Russia, India and China have come of age during a unique time, with their countries experiencing both unprecedented growth and the repercussions of a worldwide slowdown; globalization; and the digital revolution. This generation will call on their distinct set of experiences and tools as they help to shape nations that, as one bullish forecast suggests, could together overtake the G7 economies in less than 15 years.
Our latest trend report spotlights findings from a July 2013 survey of 18- to 35-year-olds conducted in Brazil, Russia, India and China using SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online tool. It also includes input from JWT planners in the BRIC markets. “Meet the BRIC Millennials” explores themes we’ve examined in the context of Millennials globally—including personal finances, stress, changing gender roles, social good and social media—as well as issues especially relevant to BRIC nations. Among them: tradition vs. modernization, urbanization and national pride.
Millennials are regarded as the first global generation, with more overlapping values and shared experiences than any before them. As our wide-ranging study details, in some respects Millennials across BRIC markets are very closely aligned, while in others they diverge wildly in their outlook thanks to unique national conditions and traditions. We spotlight those commonalities and differences, along with some case studies that show how brands are responding to these increasingly influential young consumers.
Click here to download the full report or here to browse it on SlideShare.
Find our roundups collected in magazine form on Flipboard, the iOS and Android app; download the app to view this week’s edition here: http://flip.it/J6Fj
-New Yorkmagazine mulls “What Does Manhood Mean in 2013?” citing from our own recent “State of Men” report.
-The FT ponders how marketers will reach Millennials, given that they prefer on-demand media and “pay little attention to big broadcasters or traditional culture tastemakers.”
-Ad Age spotlights “Cord Nevers,” the growing cohort that has never subscribed to pay TV and has no plans to do so.
-Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising report finds that consumers around the globe have become more trusting of messaging.
-Chinese travelers, now the world’s biggest tourism spenders, are generating a slew of grievances about their behavior, reports The New York Times.
-As China’s government pushes greater urbanization, millions of citizens feel excluded from the equation, according to the FT.
-The FT takes a look at the growth of technology and innovation in Central and Eastern Europe.
-Pew research spotlights the growing number of governments that are regulating the wearing of religious symbols or attire.
-The Economistreviews the new book Average Is Over, which forecasts the end of the American Dream as few manage to enter the ranks of America’s elite.
-The Wall Street Journal reports on “the lost generation” of young Americans who are still struggling to find work as the recession’s effects linger.
The beer category has been suffering as Americans cut down on drinking or switch to spirits and wine, as Ad Age reports in its cover story this week. According to the magazine’s infographic, beer represented less than half of total U.S. alcohol consumption in 2012, down from 56 percent in 1999. USA Today recently reported that 36 percent of American alcohol drinkers say beer is their beverage of choice, vs. 35 percent who pick wine—a big shift from 1992, when 47 percent backed beer and just 27 percent preferred wine. (And among adults under 30, the preference for both wine and spirits is much higher than it was back in the ’90s.) Meanwhile, the big beer brands are also losing share to local and craft beers.
Bigger marketing budgets and smarter campaigns, along with the launch of quirky new flavors like Smirnoff Cinna-Sugar Twist, have helped drive demand for spirits. The spirits segment now accounts for 34 percent of consumption, up from 28 percent in 1999. Wine’s market share has increased only slightly.
Ad Age spotlights the new tactics that beer marketers are testing, with brands embracing craft beer—last year, for instance, Budweiser launched a limited-edition sampler pack—and seeing opportunities in targeting women, who account for only 20 percent of the beer market.
Who needs 15 minutes? The next generation of celebrities needs only six seconds (running in a continuous loop) to make their mark. Eight-month-old Vine, Twitter’s social video platform, has become the latest go-to for finding influencers and otherwise marketable personalities, as CNET reports.
Trident gum recently launched a six-second spot on the Fuse network that’s basically a Vine featuring Brooklyn musicians Nicholas Megalis (who has some 2.7 million followers on Vine) and Rudy Mancuso (1.9 million followers), singing a jingle. Virgin Mobile hired Viners including Magalis and Mancuso, Ry Doon and Qpark to spread awareness of a contest to feature the micro-videos as campaign fodder. Meanwhile, Relativity Media recruited Vine bigwigs to stalk the premiere of its movie The Family, to catch videos of the film’s stars; MTV took a similar approach for the recent Video Music Awards.
Vine stars are becoming so big, brand consultant Gary Vaynerchuck has launched a talent agency, Grape Story, to represent them and other social video up-and-comers. Some marketers are hiring these Vine talents to create videos for the platform. Lowe’s, for instance, enlisted photographer and director Meagan Cignoli, as Ad Age reports. And for New York’s fashion week earlier this month, Kenneth Cole hired Cignoli, Jason Mante and others to capture moments before and during the runway show; plasma screens at the event then featured a live-streamed Vine mosaic.
Vine has racked up some 40 million users, while Instagram has also successfully dived into video this year, making social video the breakout platform for 2013.
weeSpring aims to help new and expecting parents collect opinions on baby products from friends and the weeSpring community. The company participated in TechStars NYC’s most recent startup accelerator program, for which JWT serves as a partner. Co-founder and CEO Allyson Downey previously had roles with Random House, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Credit Suisse, and holds both an MBA from Columbia Business School and an MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts. She talked to us about the deep user engagement of parents, attracting fathers in a mother-dominated space, and the startup’s plans to dive into big data and mobile.
What led you to create weeSpring?
When I was pregnant with my son, I walked into a Babies ‘R’ Us for the first time and promptly burst into tears. I looked at this sea of products I knew nothing about and saw a metaphor for how unprepared I was to be a parent.
So I started sending emails to my friends and asking, “Which car seat do I buy?” and “What’s the difference between all these baby bottles?”
What I got back were these really intense Excel spreadsheets—it turned out that all my friends, when they were expecting, had had a pretty similar experience, and they started using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents and these long email files to keep track of everything. After they had their baby, they updated and annotated that list with all their comments and recommendations, and then sent it out to their friends who were expecting.
Find our roundups collected in magazine form on Flipboard, the iOS and Android app; download the app to view this week’s edition here: http://flip.it/J6FjO
-The New York Timesexplores the emergence of “micropopularity” and what it means to achieve pop culture success in 2013.
-In the new advertising landscape, taglines are dying out, Adweek reports.
-Some employers are embracing parental involvement as a means of retaining Millennial talent, reports The Wall Street Journal.
-A new study examines Millennial managers, finding that they’re perceived as enthusiastic but also entitled, USA Today reports.
-A new report says “American families are becoming increasingly polarized along race, class and educational lines,” reports The Washington Post.
-The gap between America’s richest 1 percent and everyone else reached its widest level in history last year, per USA Today.
-With long hours and high stress the norm in China, The Wall Street Journal reports that some workers are rethinking their priorities.
-An FTspecial report examines Brazil’s infrastructure and the country’s drive to make improvements before hosting the World Cup and the Olympics.
Almost three-quarters of South American respondents reported feeling nervous or anxious in JWT’s global AnxietyIndex study. Our most extensive study of consumer anxiety to date surveyed 6,075 adults aged 18-plus in 27 markets—including Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico—using SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online research tool.
Anxiety drivers vary greatly by country. In Brazil, where protests have been rocking the country since June, the cost of health care remains a key concern, as does the quality of care. In an attempt to improve the system, the government recently started implementing Mais Médicos (“More Doctors”), a program that aims to reduce Brazil’s shortage of medical professionals by importing them. Argentinians are most concerned about the rate of crime in their communities and the cost of living. Inflation has been a longstanding issue, running at around 25 percent—more than double the official rate—according to many private accounts. Colombia, by contrast, is comparatively less anxious, though it over-indexes when it comes to anxiety surrounding the threat of terrorism.
To read more about the levels, intensity and drivers of anxiety in South America and beyond, browse the AnxietyIndex 2013 Global Report on SlideShare or download it here. Click here to check out Co.Exist’s coverage of our report this week.
Coca-Cola’s recent “Social Robots” initiative allowed some teens who couldn’t attend the brand’s annual Summer Love Festival in Israel to participate via robots (see today’s post on our sister blog, AnxietyIndex). And San Pellegrino recently let people take virtual tours of Taormina in Sicily using five remotely controlled robots, part of its “Three Minutes in Italy” promotion. But beyond novel marketing initiatives, robot avatars have the potential to generate big business in the enterprise market, as CNBC recently reported.
“Telepresence” enables people to be in two places at once via remote-controlled devices that generally feature screens elevated to human height, microphones and webcams. Suitable Technologies’ Beam is one contender in this market; others include VGo; iRobot (the Roomba company), with its Ava concept; and Anybots, which calls its avatars “Virtual Presence Systems.”
In keeping with our ongoing fascination with all things nostalgic, here comes Postmodern Jukebox, who are refashioning today’s hits into ragtime-style ditties. Last week the group uploaded their take on Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” and quickly racked up 4 million views on YouTube. Their versions of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” and Ke$ha’s “Die Young” showcase the songs’ surprising musicality and have also tallied several million views. Perhaps the biggest treat of these remakes is vocalist Robyn Adele Anderson, whose supple voice carries just the right measure of knowing winks. —Aaron Baar
Click-and-Collect Shopping, one of our 100 Things to Watch in 2013, is proliferating in Asia, with retailers enlisting convenience stores as places where customers can both pay for and pick up goods ordered online. Online boutique Zalora now lets shoppers in Singapore complete their transactions at select 7-Eleven outlets; customers receive a text message when the package is ready. Tech in Asia offers additional examples in China, Taiwan and Thailand.
2C2P is developing an alternative model: The company works with online retailers, enabling customers to pay at local stores and then delivering the goods to shoppers’ homes. The service kicked off in Thailand and has expanded to Myanmar, where a majority of consumers are unbanked. —Geri Kan
Our March report, “Embracing Analog: Why Physical Is Hot,” examined today’s urge to seek out physical objects and experiences as a countertrend to our digital lives. Two manifestations: the continuing vinyl revival and the somewhat unlikely return of cassettes. This week comes the first Cassette Store Day, a promotional event with participation in the U.S., the U.K. and several other countries. The Flaming Lips and Haim are among the bands releasing albums on cassette for the event. Others already offering cassette tapes include She & Him and MGMT, while several cassette labels have sprung up. Meanwhile, Whole Foods recently started selling vinyl records in five Southern California locations. —Marian Berelowitz
As we note in our recent report “Retail Rebooted,” speedier delivery is coming to online ordering, and the pressure is on to deliver goods within hours. This means a new demand for couriers, some of whom will do both the shopping and the delivering. “Valets” for eBay Now track down and drop off items in the markets where the service is available; Fast Company recently tagged along with a Manhattan deliveryman. And last year a TechCrunch writer spent a few hours as a courier for Postmates, which delivers lunch, groceries or office supplies. PocketShop is a similar, London-based startup focused on groceries; its Pocket Shoppers “go through rigorous tests to discover who knows their Galas from their Golden Delicious, their Minstrels from Maltesers.” And in Chicago, the startup WeDeliver trains “delivery specialists” to work with local merchants. —Marian Berelowitz
Our 100 Things to Watch in 2013 included NFC tags—tags that users can program to initiate an array of functions on mobile devices—and noted that they have interesting potential for brands, which can use them to simplify processes like downloading information. Now McDonald’s Singapore is using NFC tags for something a little more playful: Placed under tables, the tags turn dining surfaces into interactive McDonaldland racetracks and Android phones into “cars.” Diners download the McParty Run app, then simply hold their phone over the “Happy Table” to play, collecting virtual burgers and apple pies while helping Ronald McDonald organize a party. New games, including Battleship, are on the way. —Geri Kan
Are rings the next wave in wearable devices? A highly successful Kickstarter campaign out of the U.K. proposes a steel or titanium ring equipped with near field communication technology that enables wearers to unlock a smartphone or door, and share public information like a Twitter handle. The ring is designed to balance data protection and sharing, as a video explains. (But as the ring pairs with the user’s mobile device, iOS users are excluded, since Apple has yet to integrate NFC.)
Wearable technology, as we’ve noted, has spurred the creation of items that help people go Private in Public using tech-infused Intelligent Objects—two trends featured in our 10 Trends for 2013. The ring promises an innovative convergence of these themes, offering a potential alternative for those who fear biometric authentication (one of our 100 Things to Watch in 2013). —Bobby Esnard
Print catalogs are still alive and well, proving to be an enduring way of connecting with consumers, as we note in our recent report on “The Future of Correspondence.” But increasingly catalogs will also bridge the physical/digital divide, thanks to augmented reality. Last year Ikea added an “X-Ray” feature to its catalog—one of the most widely distributed texts in the world—that allows readers to peer inside products and see, for instance, what a cabinet interior looks like. For the 2014 catalog, customers can place virtual furniture pieces into real-life rooms simply by scanning products with a smartphone or tablet and laying the catalog on the relevant spot on the floor. It’s an ingenious way to add functionality to analog media. —Bobby Esnard
At the ripe old age of 16, Lorde (Ella Yelich-O’Conner) has several hit songs in her native New Zealand, a single (“Royals”) that’s getting global exposure and an upbeat profile in The Wall Street Journal. What sets this young talent apart from the typical pop starlet is her “elusive approach to publicity,” as the Journal put it, and her edge, reminiscent of the grungy, rebellious ’90s.
“Royals,” which reached 100,000 hits on YouTube within 24 hours, comes across as a counter to poppy perfection, eschewing typical aspirational and glamour themes for a more authentic depiction of teen life. “I thought it was time someone in popular music was saying what everyone my age was thinking: we don’t even have licenses, let alone Maybachs,” she told Bullett. Lorde’s debut album is set for release Sept. 30. —Maxine Gurevich
The rise of tracking technology and Intelligent Objects is helping pet owners better understand their animals. Whistle is an on-collar device that monitors activity and health, relaying data to owners via a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. Whistle takes details such as breed, age and size into account to provide feedback on everything from activity level and quality of sleep to sociability and play time. It can also identify unusual behaviors, potentially enabling early detection of illness. Owners can track the data over time, establish goals for their pets, and easily share the data.
There’s also Tagg, a GPS tracking system that lets pet owners track location and activity, and Wandant, a dog pedometer available in Japan that also monitors health. Meanwhile, Project FIDO out of the Georgia Institute of Technology proposes a wearable computer that would enable assistance dogs to send messages to handlers. —Alexandra Stieber
weeSpring
