Ann Axelsson

Trend update since last year's future report

Is the IoT a hit and what about smart devices and the sharing economy? The Schibsted Products and Technology team helped us sum up some of the issues that they covered in last year’s report to see what happened.

New wave of start-ups doing one thing really well

The ongoing price war between Amazon Web services, Google and Microsoft for the dominant position in the cloud space, continues to bring prices down with new advanced offerings from the big players. At the same time the number of open APIs is growing, and this will continue to inspire 3rd party contribution on top of platforms operated by large players. There is also a new intelligent layer with tools emerging to orchestrate the large distributed computing and storage power of the cloud more efficiently and flexibly. These trends will result in a new wave of “no-stack” start-ups, i.e. companies that focus on doing only one thing really well and use other services for everything else

Always connected with smart devices

The official release of Apple Watch in 2015 marked the start of wearable commercialization. The competition to become “the next operating system” is on between Apple, Google and Microsoft. Now major high-tech players are starting to invest heavily into wearable smart devices and the numerous smart device projects on KickStarter show that the proliferation is approaching, leading to exponential growth of applications. Smart devices will keep us always connected to the Internet – “always on” – and will therefore collect much more data from our daily lives.

Data science - now for everyone

Data science is becoming an integral part of product development. And more advanced algorithms are available via off-the-shelf products. This enables companies further down in the value chain to use data science without extensive knowledge of underlying algorithms and companies can better focus on delivering good user experience. At the same time, the increasing attention to privacy and user aversion to intrusive data collection and application features, fuel the usage of anti-data analytics. On the other hand, users will require better transparency about how their data are collected and applied.

IOT – Personalization in the physical world

The emerging smart home had Internet connectivity embedded in everyday objects such as light bulbs, thermostats and control systems to facilitate control and coordination among objects. Now the concept is getting mature with commercial product releases from GE, Philips, Sony and Xiaomi. IoT will see extensive usage in both enterprise and consumer products with smart cars being the next area after smart home to get into commercialization. IoT is going to vastly increase data available real time to business and consumers, and personalization will move into the physical world. Different people might see different ads on outdoor banners – everyone having a personalized environment around them wherever they go.

The sharing economy keep disrupting

The strong economic drivers from efficiency will help the sharing economy models disrupt even bigger parts of the “ownership economy”. Uber’s 40 billion USD valuation shows that the capital markets have strong faith in this model and more traditional B2C verticals will face competition from the sharing economy model. More tools and supports have become available for building these products, and differentiation is the key to success going forward to survive. Some peer-to-peer platforms must first resolve the regulatory pushback (e.g. transportation permits, lodging tax, financial transaction oversight), and provide more end-to-end tools and services to ease individual compliance requirements.

User curation and cross-screen shopping in e-commerce

Customer expectations for quick delivery and hassle-free returns, combined with economies of scale, favor established players such as Amazon and create high barriers to enter the e-commerce area. There are two long known ways to differentiate from competition, and both still work: Focus on service – Amazon is pushing service to a new level with Prime Local Stores and Home Services. Focus on price – Alibaba and the hype of shopping directly from China proves that the low-price driver still works too. But first mover advantage helps local leaders win over Amazon in their local markets. Etsy, as the sole star in niche e-commerce, hints that the key to success is a discovery model powered by user curation, not just a niche product collection. Cross-screen shopping will soon be the new standard consumer behavior pattern, with more and more buying intention starting on mobile. And the emergence of call-to-action ad formats for e-commerce with one-click buying can change the e-commerce dynamics and challenge Amazon.

Identified web more crucial than ever

Login and identity data are more crucial than ever. Behind lies the urge to deliver the best possible personalized services and offers, and the fact that cookies are dying as traffic moves to mobile (apps) and wearables. Identity data is applied in social network and media personalization and targeted advertising. Large players are increasingly conscious to fully own it, and new industries, like telecom players, are entering the game. Login also becomes more important to advertising, as adblocking goes mainstream. On long-term a distributed identity, i.e. an identity solution that does not require one single company or institution as the central operator, built on the Blockchain infrastructure (a technology originated from bitcoin), might gain large scale traction.

by Ann Axelsson

Serendipity - In search of the human algorithm

The very same Internet revolution that created the global village has made bumpkins of all of us. A system of organization, curation and recommendation of information makes each of our views of the Internet more and more insular. This lack of diversity makes us lose sight of the benefits of serendipity that often leads to creativity and new ideas, says Professor R. Ravi who is examining how to design for coincidence.

Imagine the pleasure of browsing in a large musty bookstore with racks of undiscovered treasures. Now imagine that all the books were of the category that you particularly liked. What if the bookstore itself was full of just your favorite authors and styles you enjoyed? This is the intrinsic promise of the Internet and its vast collection of curated and classified information. In fact, a precursor to the conception of the Internet by Vannevar Bush in his article “As we may think” particularly calls out the ability to navigate this maze of information using hyperlinks that lead to related topics.

The sheer volume and scale of information available on the Internet has made categorization, indexing and searching the most important task, as attested by the influence and market power of the leading search engine company. In an attempt to make the information presented to a searcher more and more relevant, an important new feature was introduced by Google in 2009: search personalization.

Different results for different people

What this means is that the search results for the same keyword will be different for different people. The search results for “whaling” will be different for an investment banker and for an environmental activist, and it will also be different between environmental activists in Norway and the US. Mostly, the difference makes the results more relevant and convenient to sift through. A similar kind of personalized recommendations exist in most large repositories such as YouTube, Amazon and news websites. One of the promises of Schibsted’s SPiD system is the development of a similar personalization for logged in customers.

The reason why this starts becoming problematic is articulated fully in the book titled “Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser. In short, personalization removes a standard frame of reference that is necessary for common dialogue among an informed populace. This is an important responsibility of journalism, media and information sites in a well-functioning democracy.

Removing the common frame of information reference puts each of us in our own filter-bubble creating echo chambers where we predominantly hear only from like-minded individuals. Even less noticed is the loss of the various opportunities to form serendipitous connections to new information which are important for cultivating a diversity of thought. Such a diverse frame of mind is an important precondition for creative invention which could be stifled by excessive personalization as well.

Myopic recommendation systems

If there are so many problems with personalization, why is it so prevalent? The answer comes from the design decisions made in the crafting of the clever software systems that allow us to navigate through information. A common metric of effectiveness in navigating systems (such as search engines, recommendation systems and relevance engines) is how much responsiveness (click-through) the automatic suggestions receive.

These automated machine learning systems optimize for presenting recommendations that have high responsiveness. While this is a very clear and actionable objective for the design of these systems, they are myopic in their scope. There is little understanding by the designers of these systems of the long-term benefits of serendipity and the eventual harms of filter bubbles. Business managers that look for data-driven ways of managing such systems all too often focus on such myopic objectives as well: just look at the metrics offered by the various online companies of their effectiveness and they are filled with number like click-through rates, unique users and engagement time (which translate to having more recommendations that users click on and stay on the site).

In this age of globalization and rapid cross-cultural mixing, it is even more imperative for a global citizen to be exposed to differing points of view. Not being exposed to diversity in opinions and opposing arguments leads to very insular societies; even purely as a business skill, this does not allow us to prepare for other reactions and counter arguments to one’s own thinking. Being in a unduly personalized information world would deny us of this important advantage.

There are additional reasons for encouraging and planning for serendipity: Letting one’s attention wander is an important precondition for free association and discovery via synthesis of ideas from various unrelated domains. Indeed, bright flashes of creativity are often preceded by such wanderings among seemingly unrelated concepts.

To counter these negative effects of personalization, you can take some action right away. You can make a personal choice to maximize the chance of serendipitous discovery in your information seeking habits: don’t use the same search engine every time; even though you may have a set of favorite bookmarked sites for information such as news, weather, entertainment, sports and fashion, develop a habit to visit alternates from time to time. Experiment consciously and look for information that is purposefully broader when using tools so that you automatically expand the scope of the filters they impose on you.

Designing for coincidence

Technologists can contribute in this endeavor too: it is possible to design recommendation systems that try not only to optimize for relevance but add in considerations of serendipity. As an example, the basic notion of popularity of a web page is its PageRank which can be approximated by the number of other pages that link to it. An information repository can be said to be maximally democratic if all pages have the same PageRank or number of pages recommending them. However, by sheer variability in quality as well as personal preferences, these recommendations tend to point over time to a few very popular pages. This winner-take-all syndrome is the result of the selffulling nature of their growing popularity as well as the human effects of wanting to have a set of common pages to share. My own research examines various ways in which such recommendation engines can be redesigned so as to maximize some combination of relevance and democratic equality: in addition to recommending relevant and personalized items, the system also pays attention to ensuring that most pages have roughly the same popularity (measured by the number of recommendations they receive).

More democratic systems

To design a system that also encourages equality, it is important to mathematically define the amount of inequality in an existing design. This is complicated by the fact that not all pages are equal in terms of the quality of their content: thus, we may want the resulting popularity of a page in a recommendation system to be proportional to its informative quality. A second complication is the interest on the topic of the page: a high-quality page on a fringe topic could still be deemed less popular or globally relevant than a medium quality page on a topic of wide interest. This can be modeled by looking at the distribution of interest in the topic of the pages. Putting these ingredients together, one can try to come up with an ideal measure of how popular a page or item must be in the most globally democratic recommendation system.

Once we have established how to quantify equality after correcting for quality and interest, the task of designing a system that achieves these target popularities remains. Algorithms for suggesting recommendations can be calibrated for how close their results come to the ideal; new methods can be devised that deliberately take into account this final goal of increasing the calibrated equality of pages. More practical methods can combine existing notions of effectiveness of recommendations (such as the user responsiveness measured in clicks) with these new notions of equality in their objective and thus achieve a smooth transition to more democratic suggestions while maintaining a good portion of their current useful behavior.

By incorporating such aspects of equality and coincidental discovery in their objectives, technologists can help assuage the filter bubble problem. Business managers can also help by trying to quantify the value of planning for such serendipitous results in software systems they are responsible for. One possible source of this value already comes from reducing the “creepy” factor that is associated with many modern personalization systems that make the user feel that the software system knows too much about her private preferences. When Target sent a coupon book of pregnancy products to a teenager in Minneapolis, it spooked her father who realized that she was pregnant only well after seeing the book. One antidote employed by such campaigns is to mix in random coupons for non-pregnancy products that are still relevant. This solution reduces the creepiness of the personal targeting while making space to show a more diverse set of products that may result in interesting discoveries.

Establishing order for controlled chaos

There is an even broader role for social and political bodies to play in this correction: All societies that oversee information collection curation and presentation, as well as those that set technological standards must be mindful of this trade-off between the benefits and harms of personalization. Journalists, sociologists and media executives must weigh in on the debate to highlight the importance of diversity by exposing the tangible benefits from not moving towards excessive personalization and maintaining a broad and common point of reference. Let us carefully understand the implications of the bargain we are making for better organization and access to our information and ask ourselves the following question: is the convenience, speed and quick gratification offered by personalization worth the loss of a more deliberate trawl through the information that holds the possibility of seeing a golden nugget of coincidental and view-altering perspective along the way? Keep this in mind in your next session of web surfing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SIFe5689Dc

by Ann Axelsson

Facts & Figures: Mobile

Maybe the Millenials are right - in five years we might be doing everything on our mobiles. When looking at facts and figures of mobile usage and habits we seem to be heading in that direction.

by Ann Axelsson

The great mobile transformation

Mobile transformation is happening in all areas. At Leboncoin the mobile audience has overtaken the desktop usage. General Manager Antoine Jouteau gives an insight to how they’ve met the challenge.

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said and it is something I could imagine myself saying.

Over the last three years in France, as with most of online media in the world, users are becoming more and more addicted to browsing on their mobile, checking emails, interacting with friends and buying things. This usage has swiftly become the norm for everybody now.

While Leboncoin remains a strong leader with a well-loved brand, increasing revenue and a core cemented market share, nevertheless this phenomenon has an impact on audience and UX. As at Q1, 2015 our mobile audience had overtaken our desktop usage. This trend is here to stay and challenges our company in many ways:

• Mobile users have demanded new and adapted features (geo-localization, social functionalities etc.)
• KPIs on mobile have started to slightly encroach upon our revenue and audience
• Our internal organization (product, sales) has been overly focused on desktop approaches vs. mobile.

Rather than despair, I decided to look at this situation as a huge opportunity. In response, my management team and I launched a big transformation project to become multi device, we named it “Miami device” (a little French humor and wordplay). Our vision was that our UX would be seamless across all devices in six months. In detail, we aimed to:

• Transform our UX from desktop to multi-device
• Encourage a modular organization
• Evovle from a top-down decision process to a responsible and agile process with empowered middle management
• Go from 100 per cent business decisions to 50/50 business and technical decisions

To support this new organization, we selected seven key projects organized by small teams, with a maximum of resources and decision autonomy, agile methods, as well as ambitious and pragmatic KPIs.

And the results have been very encouraging! The number of releases on IOS and Android has multiplied, feedback from users is very good (with more than four stars on the Google Store for instance), we are testing responsive pages on desktop, geo-localization is about to be launched, native advertising formats are live, and the energy from product teams is higher and higher every day. Miami Device has been well received both internally and externally. Of course it’s not perfect, but now, the multi-device vision is central to the organization.

This transformation project marks an important turn for Leboncoin, changing our way of thinking, becoming more mobile, more agile, leaning on our strong and high level technical skills. A must-have to reach our ambitious goals and improve user and customer satisfaction.

by Ann Axelsson

Content provider or platform player

Content might be king. But a king needs a kingdom. Where is that kingdom for content in the age of digital media? Social media sure wants to build a kingdom and wants journalism to be part of it by providing new products and services for media houses on their platforms. This poses a very sharp question for publishers: Platform player or content provider? Jan Helin, publisher at Aftonbladet, shares his thoughts on how to play the game of news without losing the king.

Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat – in the last year we’ve seen how they all have extended their content offer to their users by luring publishers on board their platforms. Make no mistake about their endgame: They are trying to reach the position of a primary news source – a key position to any digital ecosystem. Digitally underdeveloped, but well established media houses are the perfect targets.

This spring, Facebook did a groundbreaking deal with nine of the most well respected publishing brands in the western hemisphere: BBC, New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, National Geographic, NBC, The Atlantic, Bild, Buzzfeed. They have now dedicated themselves to contribute with their news and stories to Facebook’s product Instant Article. This fall Washington Post joined and at the same time declared that they will go all in – all their content is to be found on Instant Article on Facebook.

What does this really mean? Forget the current deal and business model that Facebook is now offering and stretch your thought to the more longterm important question: Is it a good idea to seek a position as a content provider in the value chain? I believe this is the most important question for publishing since the breakthrough of Internet as news distributor.

Content providers or platform players? Who will be eating whom when old value chains break in the digital ecosystem? Or to to put it more bluntly by quoting the businessman and rap artist Jay Z when he broke up from his old deal on streaming to start his own platform: “What you eat don’t make me shit.”

One app to rule them all

Facebooks strategy is basically trying to give you no reason to leave their newsfeed ever. And jostled publishers are willingly helping out, hoping to get a throw of the ladle. It’s very much a “One app to rule them all”- strategy. (Or two if we count Messenger, which we definitely should.)

From this strategy they start buy- and sell groups, they’re building a payment solution on the Messenger platform inspired by the superior digital ecosystem created by Chinese Internet Giant Tencent on WeChat. They also gear their algorithms consistently towards video to take on Youtube. This summer Facebook passed Youtube with more than four billion video views per day and are now introducing live video.

And of course, there’s Instant Article – the collaboration with major news producers that might be the game changer for publishing. Facebook’s stand is this: It’s all about a better user experience so stop linking to your own destinations, just put your content up and we take care of the rest. There is one little catch they forget to mention in that business proposal: As a publisher you will lose your relation with your user to an algorithm that you don’t see, don’t understand and don’t control. This is in essence the problem with social media for publishers. And as a consequence, you lose possibility to in depth data and learning about the user.

New sources of information

If you ask teenagers in Sweden today, what their most important sources of information are they will answer Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube and Spotify, according to research by the Swedish institute Ungdomsbarometern.

You might just shake that off, thinking that this has nothing to do with real news consumption. But looking under the hoods of these players you’ll find another story, not only at Facebook.

• Youtube, with 300 hours of videos being uploaded every minute day and night, declared earlier this spring that they now have 27,000 news channels.
• Instagram, the platform that started out for sharing pictures from your family barbecue, have released numerous tools to create editorial content and have declared that some of their preferred partners soon will be able to link out from the platform and have access to all advertising technology from Facebook on Instagram.
• And then there is Snapchat, the youngest of all these platforms, that attracts teenagers in a massive scale, putting up hundreds of pictures of themselves every day that disappears in ten seconds. In January, Snapchat released Discover, an impressive mobile video experience. And impressive news outlets went on board – CNN, Daily Mail, Vice and Bleecher Report.
• Spotify, the Swedish hope among the big five, announced in June that they were going into video. They had another group of interesting news outlets on board – ABC, BBC, Vice news, NBC.

Different content fulfill different needs

So why are all these social media players all of a sudden so interested in becoming news media and collaborating with publishers to get it? Wasn’t journalism supposed to be almost dead? To find out the answer to that, we have to look at what human needs different content in general, and especially journalism, fulfills.

Facebook, Google and Instagram all started out to fulfill the user’s need for a break or distraction when you are bored. There are a few specifics that come with a position like that. The audience is huge – everyone needs a break now and then, but it’s hard to predict when. The user time spent can be low and their patience is rather low. If you don’t find anything you like right away you will most likely leave. That is the problem if you only cater for the need of distraction. Your relation with the audience is at risk of being volatile. The classic need of an update, a kind of content every newsroom is familiar with, has the same specifics to it as the need for a break. It’s a basic human need and thus a huge potential audience for those who do it good. But time spent is short and so is predictability.

More sustainable in the long run

Other parts of journalism are more interesting for a social media player. The parts that fulfill needs of looking things up and digging deep into a story that you feel passionate about. In these areas the audience is smaller, but time spent, prediction and patience is a lot higher. So a primary national news source, like Aftonbladet or VG is covering more user needs, which engage the audience at different levels than a social media outlet.

This is the reason why social media is so interested in publishing, they want to cover more needs for their users and strive for the positions of a primary news source – simply because it’s much more sustainable in the long run.

But what’s in it for the media houses? It’s quite easy to understand why Buzzfeed went on board Instant Article – their business model is all about branded content, so wherever their content is consumed is fine with them. And BBC is public service, so their content is payed for already. The question is why New York Times, The Guardian, Bild and the Atlantic chose to join. It seems a bit like a white-flag strategy.

“We have to be both”

To understand how they reason at The Guardian I asked Tanya Cordrey, Guardians chief digital officer and also a member of the board of Schibsted, the key question: Should we be content provider or platform players? ”I would say that we have to be both. First and foremost we have to keep providing excellent journalism, because without amazing content, nobody wants to come to our site and nobody wants to read our content on another platform. At The Guardian we spend a lot of time ensuring that we have a fabulous experience on our own site, but we also think it is very important for our content to be where our users are.”

Tanya explains that they work very closely with the likes of Apple and Google and Facebook, to reach a worldwide audience. ”That strategy has been very successful for us. More than one in three Facebook users who sees our content now come to our website. So we see that people are coming back to our content more often than they have previously.”

That is a success in the matter of consumption of The Guardians content, which is of course important. And hands down – The Guardian is a great brand that produces fantastic journalism. But only 20 per cent of their traffic is direct traffic – users that come directly to The Guardian and not by any link from Facebook or elsewhere. The direct pull of The Guardians journalism is low.

”I’m not necessarily saying there’s one strategy for everybody. It is true that our percentage of direct traffic has declined, but at the same time we have seen our overall footprint increase dramatically, The Guardian now has 238 million browsers every month and that’s still growing at 20–30 per cent year on year”, says Tanya.

That is understandable, but the core of what she’s saying is: ”We need to be where the users are”. Is that really the role of a publisher? I would say that’s marketing. Publishing is about being interesting enough, or irresistible enough to be able to pull the audience in. But that is a debatable conclusion. Let’s look at this from another angle.

Vox creates communities

Vox is a tech start-up company moving into publishing. They started out as a sports community on SB Nation and on the same platform they’ve built the Verge, Eater, Vox, Polygon, Racked, Recode, and Curbed. These are all different verticals of content with different brands. Vox in itself is not an ordinary news brand. They don’t break news, they don’t report news, they have taken on the interesting task of explaining the news, all from the analysis that today’s news consumer no more live in a situation of information shortage, the problem for news consumers today is information overload.

Vox product manager Trei Brundrett has another perspective on platforms: “Starting out as a technology company, our approach from the very beginning was to build a platform and to build value and service on that platform for our audience and our users”, he explains.

”One part was around the content and the way we allowed our audience to be part of the media ecosystem. The other part was thinking of the value of community. Our writers can talk to the audience, but the really interesting thing is connecting people with each other around the topics that they are passionate about and that we are covering.”

And Trei Brundrett believes that direct traffic is extremely important. “ I think it’s the primary goal. What you hope to do is to build a platform that is valuable, where you can do reporting, do storytelling that is really meaningful. And over time your audience will understand that the richest and most exclusive experience, at the end of the day, is going to be on this platform where you’re building a very rich community.”

Two different conclusions from two of the world’s most interesting publishers right now. And two completely different companies, one with a proud legacy of publishing and quality journalism, one with a true passion for publishing and an impressive degree of innovation. In a perfect world they would be married…

In the pending of that world we can make the following observations in deciding who have the best strategy – Vox or The Guardian:

A whole new story

Guardian’s 138 million unique users per month are really impressive. A comparable number for Aftonbladet would be somewhere around 20 million. But looking at page views, which is a better way of measuring engagement, it’s another game. The Guardian produces 199 million page views a week, Aftonbladets on its small market produces 231 million page views a week, and 80 per cent of that is direct traffic. This is the difference between the power of direct traffic and viral traffic.

The high reach, high frequency character of a primary news source not depending on viral traffic creates a foundation of a digital ecosystem. This is why my answer is that we need to become a platform player – to enable the ecosystem that occurs in the relation between our different operations within Schibsted.

It could actually be the beginning of a whole new story for the future of independent journalism. But that is the next episode in the thrilling series of disruption of the media. It will take place in a new territory, on a new platform. It might be a game of thrones, but content will rule it, in one way or the other. If the king is dead – long live the king!*

*The phrase “The king is dead, long live the king” is first known from 1272 when Henry III died and his son Edward I took the throne. The declaration marks the ascension of a new monarch immediately after the death of the old.

by Ann Axelsson

Mobile rules in advertising

Location, location, location has been the mantra of the real estate business for years and years, describing the most important factors in determining the desirability of a property. Nowadays it is also an important factor in marketing, especially in mobile marketing. Frida Kvarnström, Product Manager at Schibsted Sales and Inventory, gives us an insight in the new technologies.

With new technology comes new opportunities, not only for companies and products, but also for marketeers and advertisers. Keeping in mind the vast amount of functionality encompassed in smartphones along with the widespread usage, it is no understatement that mobiles can be regarded as an extension of ourselves. No matter if we are checking email, finding a route on a map or keeping pace on a Sunday run, we would be quite lost without them.

An indicator of who you are

One of the reasons why marketeers and advertisers also are falling in love with smartphones is the geo-technology they enable. Geo-technology is an innovation that allows advertisers to better understand and communicate to the right people based on their physical location. It sheds light on their actual, real-life behavior.

Traditionally advertisers have been trying to understand consumers based on their online behavior. How we behave online can tell a lot about people; what articles they like to read, websites they prefer to visit and products they like to buy offers insights about their affinities and intents. Geographic data provides information on your physical location. Looking at where you are, have been, or where you are going, is also a good indicator of who you are.

Today Schibsted offers its customers three different types of geographic targeting. Traditional geo-targeting is “real-time” and offers ads based on where people are located when consuming our services. Geo-fencing and beacon, are based on where you have been, to create customized segments for future retargeting.

Examples of geo-targeting might be special deals in a store nearby or realestate properties for sale in your area. Schibsted has successfully collaborated with a number of real-estate agents, where available property listings near you automatically were displayed in a fixed advertising space on Aftonbladet. This feature is seeing significant usage and can be next to addictive, both for house-hunters and the curious.

Virtual fences

Geo-fencing technology enable us to target users based on previous whereabouts. By mapping out places of interest, it is possible to create virtual fences that collect information about those who enter that area and build a specific target group. An airline customer wanted to reach frequent flyers – we drew a fence around Arlanda airport and segmented recurring visitors. This enabled the customer to communicate through traditional mobile banners at Aftonbladet to their audience of interest.

Beacon technology enables us to create even more niched segments than geofencing. By placing a beacon transmitter in a customer’s brick-and-mortar store, visitors can be collected when passing by the transmitter. The beacon technology is suitable for smaller areas, is based on Bluetooth technology and requires opt-in action from the user in a mobile app.

In collaboration with Aftonbladet, a food truck used a beacon to track visitors while handing out samples. This very niche segment of visitors was later targeted with a coupon banner at Aftonbladet that encouraged them to try the food sample again.

Combined behaviors

Looking ahead, the potential of additional uses of geo-technology have yet to be explored. The next step is to identify the users across devices and combine offline and online behavioral data, to create even better targeting opportunities. This technology will also improve the quality of Schibsted’s products, as we will learn more about where our visitors are and what they are doing, while consuming our services.

by Ann Axelsson

The art of Simplicity

Today, digital technology enables us to deliver a huge amount of functionalities to all users. However, we are proven time after time that the basic principle of simplicity is very relevant, probably more than ever. Borja de Muller emphasizes the need to find the “just enough” point when exploring what we should offer the users.

As the celebrated American graphic designer Milton Glaser put it a long time ago: “Less isn’t more; just enough is more”. This is what differentiates experiences. This is what differentiates effective communication and marketing. This is what differentiates resource planning. And so it goes in many other dimensions.

Often we hear the importance of “seamless experiences”, “personalization”, “user-centricity”, “new features or functionalities providing a competitive edge”. This is all very relevant, but it is pointless if it is not assessed in the context of simplicity.

Clear of clutter

Typically, adding functionality adds complexity. A careful cost-benefit assessment should be carried out in the form of user tests before getting carried away by the novelty of such functionality. An example of how this is performed (and one that we probably encounter daily) is Google’s homepage. Despite of the complexity behind its search algorithm, and despite the many functionalities that Google provides through its ever-growing product portfolio, its main insignia and gate-away (its homepage) is still clear of any clutter: it is simple. It has “just enough”, and of course, it is very relevant for users. Achieving such simplicity in the delivery of a service is not simple.

There are many examples of the importance of simplicity in design. When looking at its impact vis-à-vis data you always need to have the end user in mind.

At the end of the day, data must be a core enabler to find the balance of the “just enough” in every single touch point we have with the user. Showing a person everything he or she may need or want is not easy to do (specially in a limited space and limited time), and for sure impossible for the user to assimilate.

Knowledge is key

However, if we know more about that user, we know about why he or she is currently using our systems, we have much better chances to be effective on that communication. We have to get that “just enough” point. And companies have to understand that data is the great enabler for that. Achieving such effective engagement with our user will in turn open up many other possibilities.

Data is often regarded as an enabler to add more and better functionality to our products, or display ever more information. However, I believe that the exact opposite view is much more effective.

Data should be leverage to enhance simplicity. Each one of us is best placed to think through how that applies to their business or occupation. Let me give you a couple examples in classifieds:

• Why should I select a category for an item I am trying to sell? Data and depp learning architectures allow for accurate picture recognition.
• Why should I search for the relevant content in the platform? Data allows ever-improving accuracy in recommendation algorithms.

Of course, these are only two examples that allow huge simplifications in the way we deliver our service. These technologies, enabled by large processing of data, allow for many other use cases from computer vision to medical diagnosis. And, at the end of the day, it allows to make the delivery of many services simpler. The ones who understand this best and are able to implement it effectively into their areas will be the ones who will succeed and gain the user. In a digital world, this is the final game.

by Ann Axelsson

Designing the UX way

Hiding complexity or at the very least making what is complex more understandable is a cornerstone of good User Experience (UX). Lidia Oshlyansky, Head of User Experience, Schibsted Products and Technology, shares the striving for achieving simplicity.

The links between perceived usability, beauty and simplicity have been made by researchers for many years now. Before user experience became a profession and human-computer interaction became a field of study, other areas, such as psychology, were already looking at how object placement, object relationships and similarity could affect our perceptions. For example, Gestalt principles speak of how we try to simplify complexity by using cues such as proximity, continuity, similarity, closure, figure and ground.

Beyond psychology we have learned and borrowed from many other disciplines, as well as growing a field of study and practice, to help us create user experiences that are simple, beautiful, engaging, usable, useful and maybe even a little fun.

Researching and testing

That’s all well and good you say, but how do you actually do it? It’s not magic; by researching and testing our ideas early and often and from there iterating our designs we aim to hit the sweet spot of user experience for our audience.

To give a concrete example, we’ve been developing a reporting tool for our Ad Operations teams. They have current tools in place. These tools are fairly difficult to master, often don’t work as well as we’d like (it can take hours to produce a single report) and are often more complex than they need to be for their most common use.

We set out to try to address this issue for our end users. We first went to see how their existing tools worked and what types of reports were most often produced. From this research we developed some ideas for a minimum viable product – one that would address the most common use of the reporting tool.

We quickly prototyped this tool and took it back to the users to test. We listened to their feedback and requests. We quickly fixed anything we could. Requested features that would take longer to develop were added to our to do lists for future releases or iterations of the tool.

We gave the tool to users so that they could use it in their day to day work while we continued to add features and changes from our to do list.

Once we had made enough changes to make the tool even better we went back to the users again to test and see how the newest additions to the reporting tool were working for them. We again gathered their feedback and requests so we could make any quick changes or needed fixes and again create a new to do list for anything that would require more time to address.

A product suited for purpose

In this way we’re able to create a product that is simple and right for the users. They provide us the much needed input on their needs, goals and the problems they would like to have us solve. They also help us understand how they will use our products in their day to day work. We in turn can design and engineer for those needs. What happens as an end result is a product that is suited for purpose, simple to use and even increases productivity (no more waiting an hour for a report).

External users

The process described is used whether you design for an internal or external users. With external users things like our branding become more paramount and the styling, visual design and of course communication style must be closely aligned across the product. Of course, internal tools should be wonderful to use, but external tools may depend on their user experience being truly wonderful to be commercially successful. In the case of designing for external users things like engagement and the user’s emotional response to the product become even more critical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI5DLtk520w

by Ann Axelsson

Data as the foundation of ecosystems

The mission is clear – Schibsted is creating a digital ecosystem to connect data from different platforms and companies. But how does it really work? Adam Kinney, Head of Schibsted Data Science, guides us through four steps you need to take to fully realize the potential of data in an ecosystem.

There’s no doubt that data is hot. More and more businesses are asking their users to log in to share their information. With knowledge of your user and their behaviors, you can create personalized products and experiences that will be more relevant and create greater engagement and user growth. And in the end increase revenues.

In an ecosystem with several companies tied together you are able to get facts from different kinds of sites and platforms. Of course that means a bigger amount of data from more users, but it also means a larger variety of data that can provide an even bigger picture. If, for example, a user visits both a news site and a classified site, that will tell different things about him or her.

There are some basic sources of data you can work with in data analytics and in an ecosystem.

• Logged in user profiles.
• Events – whatever a user does within a site.
• Content – by analyzing what kind of content the user is consuming you can learn even more. For this the data science team uses language processing techniques, automatic tagging, and topic extractions.
• Global data views – how users are flowing around in the ecosystem and how growth is going across the entire system.

The data science team then uses the data to build data products. These are tools to create personalized products and services. One example is targeted ads – showing different ads to different persons based on their profiles. It could also mean giving readers content we know they are interested in, or offering services connected to a purchase we know the user intend to make. Better personalization, in turn, can increase the reach, frequency, and variety of an ecosystem. It is in this way that an ecosystem becomes a self-reinforcing growth engine.

To get to a fully realized data ecosystem there are a few steps, or stages of evolution, that you have to take. This is how Adam Kinney explains it:

Stage 1: Silos of user data

This is where a lot of current ecosystems are now. Each of these orange blocks is one fact that we know about a user. We might know that a particular logged in user is 35 years old. Another user, visiting the classified site Finn, has used the car vertical five times last week. The boxes represent different companies and that each company builds its own understanding of users, independent of what is known about the same user of another Schibsted company.

At this stage the data exists, but a lot of the potential for using it comes by combining it.

Stage 2: Sums of user data

At this stage we have a common identification of both logged in and logged out users, which allows us to combine data. All significant actions that users take on any of the products in the ecosystem are collected in a central data store. If we visualize this as a matrix where you have users as rows, and features (facts about users) as columns, in this stage you get blanks, simply because we only have some facts.

Stage 3: Enriched user data

Stage two is where we systematically start to fill in all the blank spots. We have enough data on different kinds of users to be able to predict the true values in the gaps to provide complete profiles on nearly all users. We use machine learning techniques and build what we call classifiers to predict these values. And we get what we call enriched data. As an example we’ve built a model for gender prediction. By identifying which categories logged in users at Finn, who have given us their gender, click on – we can now predict gender for 85 per cent of all users.

When we have filled this in sufficiently it enables the next generation of personalization.

Stage 4: Reinforcing user data

This gets us to an ideal state, a selfreinforcing user data stage, where we’ve collected a sufficient critical mass of data that makes the process start taking on a life on its own.

New user patterns can be mined from the existing data, which then enable the accumulation of more user data, which can in turn be mined for more new patterns, and so on. At this point, new product innovations become possible in which we anticipate user needs and provide services to fulfill those needs.

And we can grow really, really big. This is the vision and Adam knows its power.

“I’ve seen, first hand, the power that enriched user data has to drive additional user growth – on top of what you’re going to get without it. That’s really impressive and powerful”, says Adam Kinney.

by Ann Axelsson

Wanted: More women in tech

Tech is in desperate need of women. With today’s under-representation we miss out on great innovations and profits. Camilla Bjørn, Isabelle Ringnes and Louise Fuchs challenge women everywhere to take part in the ongoing revolution and pose the question – am I a user of digital products or will I define the future of products?

Technology is fueling the world and has become ingrained into every facet of our life. It is the integral backbone driving virtually every industry, with media being among the flagship industries to both tackle the challenges and embrace its opportunities head on. But it is no secret that the ones defining this revolution, to a large extent, are men. Women account for less than 20 per cent of leading tech positions at the majority of tech companies worldwide. In the world at large there is a high demand of new engineering talent. At today’s rate we are not producing nearly enough engineers to meet future demands. By 2020, the US will require one million more computer scientists than is being trained today.

Hurts the ability to grow

Everywhere, companies are struggling to hire software engineers. This hurts the ability to grow, innovate and disrupt at the pace we have become accustomed to. It denies us from the privilege of empowering people in their daily life with cutting-edge products.

If women were recruited to STEM education at the same level as men are, numbers would increase dramatically. But this is not only a matter of numbers – the industries miss out on female perspectives. There are several examples of cutting-edge technologies whose first releases fell flat due to their lack of female involvement. The first voice recognition technology could not recognize female voices. The first airbags tragically killed several women and children because they had only been tested on men. Apple’s first release of Healthkit enabled users to measure virtually every bodily function ranging from caloric intake, exercise and blood pressure, yet it failed to measure one of the most important and natural aspects of female health, namely the menstrual cycle. Needless to say; a female perspective can be the make-it or break-it component of any product release.

Without it, companies are losing out on golden opportunities to innovate in female-oriented product categories. Not only do women account for 80 per cent of consumer purchases; yet still they report to be the least satisfied customers. Women are also the dominant drivers in industries such as fashion, baby or family related products and weddings. Companies are not only lacking the potential to envision the business opportunities in these promising verticals due to the lack of female employee representation, but are also failing to predict and optimize to meet the needs of about 50 per cent of their current consumers, readers and users.

Caught in a reactive loop

If we as women can’t define the future we will be caught in a reactive loop. Technology has revolutionized the media industry for the past decade and will continue to do so exponentially moving forward. Content is still king, but technology has become the dictator and the backbone that distinguishes leaders from followers and winners from losers. It is up to each company to make the bold decisions on how to integrate new technologies into their products, always focusing on the end-user. Therefore, to be tech-savvy will be vital for women in order to attain leadership positions with real impact going forward.

Willingness to change

A career in technology does not require advanced coding skills. Technology is already an integral part of our personal and professional lives. You don’t need to spend hours crunching code to sufficiently comprehend the opportunities and limitations of technology. In fact, among the most successful female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley only 16 per cent have technical degrees. Although technical skills are highly valued, they are not required to emerge in the field.

However, relentless curiosity, openness and willingness to change, are. This is our challenge to women. Don’t let the opportunities overwhelm you with apathy. Dare to be bold and take chances. Try to learn as much as you can along the way, and feel confident in knowing that no one knows everything. You know a lot more than you think. Fuel your passion everyday for the exciting development of new technologies, and challenge your mind to imagine how new innovations can benefit us all.

Technology brought us the Internet and all the wonderful free resources it is providing us today. Dare to exploit your network and your surroundings, and feed your brain with new perspectives, ideas and talent. Future leaders will need to understand technology in order to create change with a real impact. Leaning in essentially means learning more.

We are all new to this. The world is new to this. We are embracing these challenges together, globally, as companies and individuals. Passion for tech is your key to success.

by Ann Axelsson