Humans Invent finds out about the app that makes shopping a whole lot easier.
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@nfluencemedia
Humans Invent finds out about the app that makes shopping a whole lot easier.
A presentation and case study from Henry Lawson at DataIQ Retail 2013 Masterclass in London. Looking at how Westfiled is using nFluence autograph technology
With consumers walking into stores carrying more technology with them than was used to launch an Apollo space mission, and with them using it to shop online, retailers face huge challenges to use their channels to keep shoppers spending in their store.
In this session, retail marketers learned how consumer conversations are about more than running algorithms on huge databases and how Westfield is using technology to engage with shoppers before, during and after a visit, presenting shoppers with brilliant opportunities in their malls in a completely personal way that the shopper controls, and generating much higher quality metrics as a result.
This presentation was made at the 2013 Data IQ Retail Masterclass.
autograph™ technology goes no.1 in app store
We are absolutely thrilled to see the Westfield application powered by nFluence's autograph™ technology hit the no.1 spot in the App Store today.
Westfield is the first company to use autograph™ technology to deliver personalisation and it's clear that consumers have responded in a big way.
More importantly the average review score for the application which indicates consumer sentiment has gone from 3/5 stars to 4.5/5 stars since integrating our technology and updating their application.
We are incredibly excited at nFluence to see our technology performing so well for Westfield
The app homepage is set automatically between Westfield London and Westfield Stratford dependent on your location and the experience begins with a sample of 40 random brands available within the mall. This helps to build your ‘autograph’. You activate the system by scrolling along each brand and swoting. Yes, Swoting – pronounced “Swoe-ting”. Swoting is voting by a swipe action. You swipe up to indicate you like a brand and down to dislike. Once complete the system predicts, based on your choices, what shops, offers, food and drink you will be interested in and posts these on your own personal wall. It’s quite simply brilliant!
Westfield Partners With nFluence Media To Deliver a Relevant Experience to Shoppers
Westfield brings its shoppers and retailers closer using new personalised app
Westfield UK today announced that a brand new mobile app My Westfield is to be launched using nFluence Media Inc. proprietary autograph™ technology - a UK shopping centre first that allows personalised shopping content to be delivered on a smart phone directly to shoppers’ that are most likely to respond.
The new My Westfield app, which will be available initially on the iOS platform and available for free from the app store from the 28 June, allows Westfield shoppers to control a far richer and more accurate picture of their preferences through non-intrusive and relevant engagement using an autograph™, a platform developed by Seattle based tech company nFluence Media Inc.
Using the new My Westfield app and the nFluence autograph™technology platform, it allows users to have fun simply “Swoting™” brands – up for like, down for dislike – and within 30 seconds the new Westfield app is able to generate a customer profile containing over 600 interests, 2,000 brand affinities and 84 demographics of that user based upon their choices. Swoting is the new term for swiping and voting in one action.
After providing their preferences, the customer profile is presented back to the shopper, helping to build trust, users then willingly refine their interests. The customer profile contains no personal information, just brand affinities, interests and preferences, and remains completely transparent and under the control of the shopper at all times.
Content such as fashion events, cinema listings, offers, new product lines and new Westfield store openings are then collated according to the user’s customer profile. Customers can also express their like or dislike on any piece of content served, thereby allowing them to continually refine their customer profile.
Myf Ryan, General Manager Marketing, UK and Europe, said; “With the explosion of smartphone sales and our customer’s desire to utilise their mobile whilst shopping in our centres, this is an important launch to meet shoppers’ future needs and truly personalise the shopping experience. Westfield is firmly focussed on developing innovative multichannel technology solutions to drive sales and footfall for our retailors.”
Customers will be able to download the app for free at the iTunes store (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/westfield/id409824812) from 28th June. The current Westfield mobile app has proven popular with shoppers with over 340,000 downloads to date, 57,000 total users per month and 18 minutes average time per user.
Henry Lawson, CEO of nFluence commented: “Westfield shopping centres have such a wealth of opportunities for consumers that allowing them to find out what is going on, in a fun way using our autograph™ technology, helps to make life richer and simpler at the same time.” He continued “Marketing should be transparent and helpful, not invasive and lead by the internet’s black boxes. The Westfield team wanted to do the right thing for their shoppers and have driven this project hard to deliver results that we are all really proud of. It is about fun, safe and relevant experiences delivered in a way the consumer controls. Westfield breaks new ground in so many areas of retailing and we are very proud to help them do so in technology that helps shoppers so directly.“
For more information please contact:
Keef Sloan
07973 614302
"None of us need big data, we need clever data" Richard Eyre Chairman IAB @ Mobile Engage 2013
nFluence was at Mobile Engage 2013 last week in London with all the movers and shakers of the mobile industry.
Despite a full day of excellent insights, the highlight for us came in the opening introduction from Richard Eyre chairman of the IAB with his talk on how this is "The end of advertising as we know it"
You can view the full video here http://www.iabuk.net/video/richard-eyre-iab-uk-at-mobile-engage-2013 but some key points that piqued our interest.
Brands can be part of the conversation, joining in at appropriate moments and with relevant information.
We've been upgraded from shouting down at customers to serving them. In place of sliding messages under the door of strangers and not knowing if they got the message
All of this hinges on 'permission' something that is mandatory if you're going to be invited into someones personal space.
With all relationships the precondition of permission is 'Trust' Everything depends on trust.
Every brand now must be doing what it can to become the most trusted in its sector as this will be the passport to move across the border into relationship
None of us need big data we need clever data, data that tells us a story we can do something with..
The opportunity is there unless a brand breaks that trust, and then it's gone
The dividend of that clever data is Brand communications can move from whenever to the right time, from wherever to the right place, from mass to personal, from we to me, from whatever to the right material
The Mobile device will be an integral part of building and underpinning that trust by engaging people in the private space in appropriate ways
As usual some brilliant quotes from Richard. At nFluence we will continue to build solutions that help Brands earn that permission and build consumers trust, but most importantly generate that clever data with willing help from consumers, allowing brands to move from mass to personal, from we to me, from whatever to the right material.
We challenge the Brands at Mobile Engage 2013 to adopt the themes of Richard's excellent opening presentation.
nFluence: leaders in user generated interest graphs presents “autograph”
nFluence: giving power back to consumers
With click-through rates descending, marketers are faced with finding a smaller and smaller needle in their haystack of big data. They need help from consumers!
nFluence provides a cross platform UX, available for iOS, Android and HTML-5, that enables connected consumers to volunteer information about themselves through a fun, game-like UI – SWOTING™ (Swipe voting content they like and dislike) while having fun creating autographs™. In just 30 seconds they immediately get served relevant content and transparent feedback of their learned preferences.
The proprietary data system builds a 700+ dimension demographic and interest graph, the nFluence autograph™, as well as over 2,000 brand affiliations, generating an fascinatingly accurate picture of consumers interests, demographics, and brand preferences, whilst immediately rewarding them with personalized multi-channel content, offers and services.
About nFluence: start and roll out of autographTM
nFluence Media Inc. was established in Seattle in March 2011 by Brian Roundtree (following his sale of SnapIn to Nuance for $235M), Henry Lawson (ex-President of Donovan Data Systems, Adtech’s largest player processing $85BN in media spending annually) and Tom Huseby (renowned Seattle Entrepreneur).
The company was created when Tom Huseby (the now Chairman) introduced Henry Lawson to Seattle mobile start-up veteran Brian Roundtree, back in 2010. All three of them had been considering ways to make marketing work better from the consumer’s point of view. At the time Brian had been working on an app recommendation engine and, despite its ingenuity, Henry just couldn’t see how recommending mostly free apps could sustain a business – it was a brilliant zero billion dollar opportunity! That’s when they had their “Eureka!” moment – why don’t we build on the same principles and gamelike UX inherent in Brian’s app recommendation technology, but use it to recommend advertising, movies, music or any form of content, but matched to the declared interests of the user. And so nFluence was born…
nFluence has been building an ecosystem of autographs™ inside their own applications for over a year and today, right in time for The Festival of Media Global, signals the beginning of the technology roll out to third parties through industry standard API’s and an easily integrated SDK.
We were able to arrange an interview with Henry Lawson, CEO of nFluence, who talked us through the innovative technology they have developed and the trend towards mobile, consumer power and privacy. Click below and get excited!
The Personal Data Dilemma
When it comes to consumer data, we strongly believe that there is only one true owner - the consumer - and that's why we're actively building technology that allows consumers to control their data, in exchange for personalised and rewarding content.
But for every company like us, that strives for good practice, there are a handful skipping straight to fourth base with their consumers by collecting highly sensitive information such as personal identification and demographic data, causing major upset and promoting a sense of intrusion and mistrust along the way.
This is the underlying anxiety that fuels the ongoing privacy debate, but why does the mobile industry need to be concerned about the issue of privacy? It turns out there are much less intrusive ways to get the information a company needs on its users.
A 2011 survey by the GSM Association found that a massive 81 per cent of mobile users regarded safeguarding their personal information as very important, while 76 per cent stated that they were selective about who they gave their personal information to. The Pew Research Centre also found that over half of mobile users decided against installing an app when they realised how much personal information was required to run it. Put simply, consumers care about who they give their personal information to and what it’s used for. Personalised service
Yet gathering personal information from consumers can be incredibly important for mobile companies, especially those hoping to create apps that provide a personalised service, or those looking to implement targeted adverts for marketers. It can also be beneficial for the consumer, with a recent study by Ctrl-Shift, an independent research agency, finding that consumers were actually excited by the idea of being able to get rid of noise and remove irrelevant marketing messages.
But companies can’t just go gathering this personal information without consent. If they want to earn the trust of their consumers, they need to let them know exactly what they’re going to do with their personal information and the reasons behind collecting it – many simply aren’t proactively doing this.
One of the biggest problems arises when companies pass on this information to third parties, usually without the consent of the consumer, and they subsequently get bombarded by unsolicited calls, texts or ads for products or services they have no interest in.
If consumers aren’t sure what a service or app is going to do with their personal information then they won’t be confident in using it, let alone spending money with it. In a 2011 global survey conducted by the trade body, MEF, 27 per cent of respondents cited security as the main reason they don’t transact more on their smartphones, while a survey conducted by TRUSTe found that one in three consumers rated privacy as their main concern when using smartphone apps. Companies clearly need to build trust with their consumers, and the key to this is transparency and control.
The best services ensure that their consumers know exactly how their information is being collected and used, and provide them with access and control over it. We believe our iOS app, dealBoard, is a good example of how this can be implemented well, having received exemplary Control and Transparency ratings in Ctrl-Shift’s research. In dealBoard we actually gather no personal information from the consumer, and with the data we do request, we are explicit and transparent about how it will be used. We also let our consumers see all the information that we hold on them in the form of a word cloud, and allow them to edit it whenever they want.
One of the best ways to gather information from consumers is to just ask them. What may be surprising to some people is that consumers are not actually averse to giving out personal information about themselves; they just need to know what it’s going to be used for and how it’s going to benefit them. Accurate information Ctrl Shift found that consumers are realistic about privacy, and will happily share a great deal of accurate information about themselves, especially if it’s non-personal information such as the brands they like or the things that interest them. What Ctrl-Shift found to be important is to provide consumers with some form of immediate gratification, be that through gamified mechanics and/or some sort of reward for their efforts.
Even better, if you can be completely transparent with the consumer and demonstrate that there is a clear benefit in providing you with the information, i.e. you provide us with ‘X’ information about yourself and we’ll help you save money on ‘X’ product, then they’ll be more than happy to help.
In dealBoard, for example, our consumers get to enjoy a gamified brand-sorting task, and for providing us with this information on the brands they like and dislike, we subsequently reward them by showing deals that are relevant to them. Companies from all industries are gradually beginning to catch sight of the benefits this more transparent approach has, with Tesco’s Clubcard Play being one of many. Tesco is hoping to make its Clubcard scheme more transparent and encourage higher levels of engagement from its consumers by developing a range of products and games that provide them with access to their own data and shopping habits.
We’ve moved into an age where more and more business is conducted in the digital domain, and technology is becoming increasingly advanced. The use of smartphones in our everyday lives will only continue to rise, whether it’s using an NFC-enabled handset to buy lunch, Barclays’ Pingit app to transfer funds, or completing micro-transactions in a game.
In a world that has become increasingly concerned with privacy and oversharing of personal data, ill-prepared mobile companies are bound to be left behind as users learn to guard their information.
Most companies' CRM, loyalty and other systems are a 'corporate data asset' that, in most cases, combine the data that consumers are happy for the company to hold, with potentially 'toxic' data, that has often been inferred over many years from multiple sources, with some sniffed from the consumer's ‘data exhaust’. Profiles are inferred, often incorrectly, from that data trail. This 'soup' of data carries a huge risk and, like trying to ‘unmix’ an omelette, cannot be easily segregated. The end result is potentially explosive, and can even become potentially illegal under EU privacy laws, as seen recently with the furore over Google’s change in privacy policy, and the unification of 60 services and their user data under one agreement. Corporate data assets can be de-risked by developing mobile solutions that give consumers control of their data, and providing a framework in which they feel a sense of ownership.
Ctrl-Shift predicts that the market for volunteered personal information will be worth £20bn (in the UK alone) by 2020. Now is the time for companies to form honest, open relationships with their consumers and earn their trust and business at the same time. The mobile industry needs to embrace volunteered personal information, and steer away from generalised inference and intrusion on privacy, just as the other digital industries have been doing so, and pave the way for mutually beneficial business practices in the future. Henry Lawson is the CEO of nFluence
Seattle startup nFluence Media has named Eric Benazech to the position of chief revenue officer.
“With a proven technology, and first clients already signed up to the Autograph platform, it was an easy decision for me to join nFluence,”
said Benazech, who previously worked at Aimia Inc.
We are at the Festival of Media today. Eileen Schuch from Coolbrandz caught up with our CEO Henry Lawson to discover what autographs™ mean for Marketers, and why it's is such a "Cool Idea"
http://www.coolbrandz.ch/coolideas/nfluence-presents-autograph-at-festival-of-media-global/
nFluence Media Launches autograph™
An alternative to social log-in through user generated interest graphs
SEATTLE and LONDON –18th April 2013 - nFluence Media Inc., leaders in user generated interest graphs, today announce the launch of autograph™ , an alternative to social log-in that enables consumers to have fun providing opt-in data about their preferences without giving away their social graph. nFluence Media will unveil the autograph™ platform to businesses during the Festival of Media, taking place in Montreux , Switzerland on 29th April 2013.
With click-through rates descending, marketers have been faced with finding a smaller and smaller needle in their haystack of big data. They need help from consumers. Using nFluence’s cross platform UX consumers create autographs™ indicating their like or dislike of brand logos and visual content by swiping them up or down on a mobile or web screen. In just 30 seconds they immediately get served relevant content and transparent feedback of their learned preferences.
autographs™ contain 84 demographics, 600+ interests and 2,000 brand affinities that consumers can continually refine and add more valuable opinion data too. Marketers now have opt-in data that is privacy-safe and, more importantly, straight from consumers, without the need to rely on social log-in data. This results in a response rate to content, offers and advertising that can be up to 52 times greater than if they had relied on inferred data alone.
Henry Lawson, nFluence CEO, commented “autographs™ are an industry first thanks to direct consumer involvement and the proprietary technology that enables this process to take place in under 30 seconds." He continued "The magic of autographs™, and the fun consumers have in creating them, is in direct contrast to the traditional "Big Data" algorithmic guesses that companies currently use to build consumer insights. Response rates to Big Data driven behaviorally targeted advertising are only marginally more effective, but big data is potentially explosive, with consumers spied upon, and the data gathered potentially illegal. autographs™ give marketers the opportunity to exchange content, and personalize offers for this data. This is a genuine game changer for both consumers and businesses alike which, in our client trials and live applications field use, has resulted in between a 10 and 52 times increased response rate.”
Brian Roundtree, nFluence CTO, added “So many consumers have become aware that when they use Facebook Connect, they are selling their friends to new sites. Until now they, and the publishers, have had little choice. autographs™ are as simple to use as Facebook Connect, yet deeply more personal. They are about your unique interests and not your friends, and therefore consumers create a profile they trust, and want to use broadly to experience a digital life on their terms. For our clients, they can use autographs™ to gain deep customer insights and deliver relevant, personalized and rewarding customer experiences without having to rely on socially inferred, and possibly inaccurate, data."
nFluence has been building an ecosystem of autographs™ inside their own applications for over a year, and today signals the beginning of the technology roll out to third parties through industry standard API’s and an easily integrated SDK. This can be rolled out live, via white-labeled software applications or plug-ins into existing mobile or desktop applications, in under 8 weeks. nFluence is already working with a number of clients to integrate autograph™ technology, the first of which will be announced June.
We were at a sunny Earls Court London today for Internet World and the Big Data show. Lots of talk of personalisation using Big Data. The talk from 'my things' on how they use big data to personalise display advertising was interesting. They can personalise based on all kinds of inferred data. Social, mobile, 3rd party, context, what point on the sales funnel you are etc. etc. and then predict exactly what display ad and product to show you before you even knew you wanted it - all within 120 milliseconds! Clever stuff, but the keywords here are 'predict' and 'inferred'. I prefer the word 'guessing' and these guesses provide only a marginally increased response rate. While we agree in principle in personalising advertising to the user, it's seem crazy we are still are not giving users the ability to control what is served and then see the data that is held on them. Giving consumers control and transparency of their data, not only is good for business but its prevents consumers feeling spied open as they navigate the Internet, and actually means they might get served content that interests them. We left Internet World 2013 and the Big data show, with a feeling that the fight for consumer control continues!
A brilliant article from our friends at CTRL-SHIFT on a recent documentary from the BBC around Big Data.
They provide excellent contrasting view points to the programme that fuelled the Big Data hype one step further.
When hype cycles reach their peak, the connection between the thing at the heart of the hype (which may or may not be important) and what people say about this thing frays to the point of breaking. Unjustified extrapolations, logical leaps, ignoring contrary evidence, omitting consideration of other factors – these all become fair game once the hype takes over.
I liked Wicked the musical, has Facebook just outed me?
It was revealed from a study from Cambridge University recently that a Facebook users' online behavior reveals intimate details about personality. “Shock! Horror!” has been the (expected) response from the privacy advocates. Marketers, on the other hand, are rejoicing and claiming another big win for Big Data. But is that really the case?
Read the full article from our CMO Rowan Corben at http://www.dmnews.com next month
A great article from Ernan Roman highlighting how Big Data is just a more sophisticated form of —“spray and pray” marketing and how consumer preference data is the next big deal
We have been supporting this argument at nFluence for a while and it's pleasing to see research that supports that consumers are willing to share their preferences in exchange for a more personalized experience.
Some interesting findings from his research from over 10,000 hours of in depth interviews with consumers
The wisdom of the customer has provided us with a few critical truths: Customers, both B2B and B2C, are sophisticated enough to recognize that to receive increasingly relevant offers, they must share detailed preference information.
Customers want to share detailed information about themselves, but only if they trust the brand. This reframes data privacy concerns into the following: a beneficial exchange of information that improves the customer experience. This information will constantly change, grow, and be enriched through two-way interactions with consumers.
For consumers, personalization is the true value of providing personal preference data The payoff to the consumer for sharing their personal information is exponentially greater personalization; and the most effective way to demonstrate personalization is to provide consumers with increasingly relevant experiences, communications, and offers.
Per our VoC research findings, we've learned five important takeaways for marketers:
1. Consumers view personalization as the next step in a company's commitment to service excellence.
2. Personalization must be viewed as a service and a benefit, not just a sales tool.
3. Consumers look to personalized follow-up messages as value-added triggers to go online and evaluate relevant products.
4. Online shoppers view personalization as a necessary requirement for engagement.
5. Consumers are clear in defining personalization as being about more than simplistic transaction-based communications. In our research, people frequently state, “I want more than just buying history–based emails,” and, “With today's technology, I expect the experiences and emails to reflect my preferences.”
An interesting read into the problems of using Big Data for Marketing and why its impossible to predict human behaviour. That's why at nFluence we believe Marketers need to start asking the consumer for help as apposed to using Big Data algorithmic guesses at what they might like.
Some of the world's finest mathematical minds – including those at NASA – are swimming in big data and yet something as seemingly simple as predicting catastrophic weather events is still way beyond our reach. The earth and its weather patterns occur within a closed system with hundreds of years of data points and yet we still get it badly wrong. Those analysing raw data within the marketing sphere can't possibly believe that they have an advantage over scientists and statisticians struggling with future predictability across frontiers such as global finance, medicine and government. So why are we fuelling the belief that we can now predict future human behaviour? My point is not to denigrate such work, far from it. Rather, I think it's time someone pointed out the audacity and sheer conceit of marketers who are trying to claim that they can use big data better than anyone has done in the past.