Month: June 2019

Influencer Marketing has ballooned into a $25 billion industry, yet many marketing managers are left confused by this, because for them, it’s really not delivering the results to justify the hype.

Here’s the thing. Influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy such as Facebook or Adwords advertising. Each company needs to take a closer look at what influencer marketing can achieve, where it falls down, and how you can do a better job with this latest form of marketing that delivers, on average, $6.50 of value for every $1 spent.

The analysis below relies on clients and case studies from our experience at OpenSponsorship.com (my company) which is the largest marketplace connecting brands with over 5500 professional athletes for marketing campaigns.

With over 3500 deals to date across clients as big as Vitamin Shoppe and Anheuser Busch, established players like Jabra and Project Repat, and new startups like Brazyn and Gutzy, we have seen a lot go wrong (who knew you could disable comments on a post!) and a lot go right (an unknown skiier’s $100 Instagram, posted right before the Winter Olympics, going viral after he won the Silver)!!

Thanks to our in-house data experts, integrations with IBM Watson, robust ROI tracking tools and 10 years+ of experience combining the learnings of sports sponsorship with influencer marketing, we have gained extensive insights into campaign strategies.

We will share our learnings about what criteria to consider when choosing the best influencer to work with, figuring out how much to pay the influencer, what rights to ask for in the deal, what terms and conditions are reasonable and how to track ROI for the deal.

Table of Contents

• Who is the right influencer?
• What is the right price to pay?
• What rights to include in the deal?
• T&Cs: need-to-have vs. nice-to-have?
• ROI, the holy grail, what and how to track?
• In Conclusion…

Who is the right influencer? 

At OpenSponsorship, we match brands with athletes for marketing campaigns, with a view to further expand into other areas of media and entertainment such as music artists, comedians, actors. Even within the athlete world, there is the concept of micro-influencers such as yogis, triathletes, marathon runners, all the way to macro-influencers such as NFL Quarterbacks, starting NBA point guards and everything in between.

Our 3 recommendations for picking the right influencers are:

Miles away from the fancy parts of Gurgaon, where a cohort of Uber and Ola cars race all day to dot the surrounding, hundreds of people are working on a different solution to contribute to India’s push for improved mobility.

When Uber entered India six years ago, and its local rival Ola began to expand in the nation, many thought the two cab services will be able to meet the needs of most Indians. To be sure, the heavily discounted cab rides in the early days meant that the two companies were able to quickly scale their businesses to dozens of cities and were clocking about three million rides a day.

But in the years since, it has become clear that Ola and Uber alone can’t serve the masses — a significant portion of which lacks the means to book a cab ride — or magically circumvent through India’s alarmingly congested roads. This has resulted in the emergence of a growing number of electric bike makers such as Yulu — which partnered with Uber last month, Vogo — which is backed by Ola,  Bounce, and Ather Energy that are both showing promising growth and attracting big bucks from investors.

For four years, another startup has been quietly working on expanding its platform. But unlike the bike startups and cab aggressors, it is betting on buses. Shuttl operates over 1,300 buses in more than 300 routes in five cities of India. The platform serves more than 65,000 customers each day.

Shuttl, too, hasn’t had much difficulty in attracting capital. It has raised about $48.5 million to date. TechCrunch recently learned that the startup was in talks with investors to raise an additional $50 million. Amit Singh, cofounder and CEO of Shuttl, declined to comment on the upcoming funding round. But he sat with us to explain his business and the challenges it comes with.

The Tesla Model S vehicle fire that occurred in Shanghai this past April, prompting international media attention, was caused by a single battery module and is not a system defect, the company said Friday.

Tesla provided the update on the cause of the fire in a post Friday on its Weibo social media account. A team of investigators analyzed the battery, vehicle history, software and manufacturing data. The fire was caused by a single battery module at the front of the vehicle, Tesla said.

The company has issued a software update that will change battery charge and thermal management settings in Model S sedans and Model X SUVs.

This software update was first announced in May following the company’s investigation into another Model S fire in Hong Kong. In that incident, a Tesla Model S caught fire March 14 while parked near a Hong Kong shopping mall. The vehicle was sitting for about a half an hour before it burst into flames. Three explosions were seen on CCTV footage.

A Nio-led team of experts that included the supplier of the battery pack module, investigated a reported fire involving an ES8 in Shanghai. The team concluded there was a vulnerability in the design of the battery pack that could cause a short circuit. In this case, battery packs in the vehicles involved were equipped with a module specification NEV-P50.

Vehicles with 70kWh battery packs produced after October 20, 2018 are equipped with the NEV-P102 modules and have different internal structural designs. These packs don’t have the same risk, Nio said.

The Tesla Model S vehicle fire that occurred in Shanghai this past April, prompting international media attention, was caused by a single battery module and is not a system defect, the company said Friday.

Tesla provided the update on the cause of the fire in a post Friday on its Weibo social media account. A team of investigators analyzed the battery, vehicle history, software and manufacturing data. The fire was caused by a single battery module at the front of the vehicle, Tesla said.

The company has issued a software update that will change battery charge and thermal management settings in Model S sedans and Model X SUVs.

This software update was first announced in May following the company’s investigation into another Model S fire in Hong Kong. In that incident, a Tesla Model S caught fire March 14 while parked near a Hong Kong shopping mall. The vehicle was sitting for about a half an hour before it burst into flames. Three explosions were seen on CCTV footage.

A Nio-led team of experts that included the supplier of the battery pack module, investigated a reported fire involving an ES8 in Shanghai. The team concluded there was a vulnerability in the design of the battery pack that could cause a short circuit. In this case, battery packs in the vehicles involved were equipped with a module specification NEV-P50.

Vehicles with 70kWh battery packs produced after October 20, 2018 are equipped with the NEV-P102 modules and have different internal structural designs. These packs don’t have the same risk, Nio said.

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1. Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a new firm

The man who won over decades of Apple fans with iconic product design and his pronunciation of “aluminum” is out at the company.

The executive will begin transitioning away from Apple at the end of 2019, launching a new project titled LoveFrom next year. In a press release, Apple noted that it will remain a client of his new design firm.

2. Amazon launches Counter in-store pick-up in the US, starting with 100 Rite Aid locations

The longer-term plan for Amazon is to expand the pick-up option to 1,500 stores (including non-Rite Aid partners) by the end of 2019 — a very quick ramp-up in the next six months.

3. Google Maps can now predict how crowded your bus or train will be

This is a new prediction technique Google has been perfecting for over half a year. Starting in October, the company began to ask Google Maps users who traveled between 6am to 10am for details about their journey.

4. Apple’s Sidecar just really gets me, you know?

Darrell has been trying out Sidecar, the feature that lets you use an iPad as an external display for your Mac — and he says it’s just about everything you could ask for.

5. Niantic is throwing a Harry Potter: Wizards Unite fan festival this summer

Niantic has been doing in-person “anomaly” events around the world for their first title, Ingress, for years, and the company has also held dozens of real-world events for Pokémon GO.

6. My six months with $30/month email service Superhuman

A $30-per-month email service capturing the adoration of investors and founders in Silicon Valley is perhaps an unsurprising story in a subscription-obsessed landscape, yet we’re only now hearing how stealth-y startup Superhuman has captured major funding.

7. The rise of the new crypto ‘mafias’

Drawing on the idea of the “PayPal mafia,” this article examines the formation and flow of talent within the crypto landscape today. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Amazon -owned game streaming site Twitch will be participating in Amazon Prime Day this year, with giveaways of free content from Apex Legends and EA Sports games, live-streamed events, and apparently, even a live-streamed shopping show. The latter was reported this morning by AdWeek, which detailed the streaming site’s plans for a 2-day live shopping show on its Twitch Presents channel.

Twitch had planned to release these details in a staggered fashion today, so the details of the live show aren’t yet on its blog alongside its other Prime Day announcements. But the broad strokes of Twitch’s plan is to loop in some of the gaming site’s favorite streamers to Amazon’s big shopping holiday.

It’s worth noting Amazon has tried to make QVC-style video shopping work several times in the past.

Years ago, it briefly ran a fashion-and-beauty focused show called “Style Code Live,” that was canceled in spring 2017. It also ran live video during past Prime Day events right on Amazon.com to show off some of its brand advertisers’ best deals.

And most recently, Amazon launched a dedicated section on its site, Amazon Live, which features a live-streamed video shows brands build using a new app, Amazon Live Creator.

Given its push for more live video, it only makes sense that Twitch would get involved with Prime Day in this way, too.

Beyond Twitch’s plans for live video, the streaming site is also offering a number of giveaways and hosting live events.

Twitch Prime, which comes with an Amazon Prime subscription, will offer members an exclusive character and weapon skins for Apex Legends, along with free content in multiple EA Sports titles. Members will have to link their Twitch Prime account to their EA Account to gain access to the in-game offers, Twitch says.

In addition, Twitch will host two events ahead of Prime Day. On July 13, Las Vegas and London will host Twitch Prime Crown Cup tournaments, featuring Apex Legends and EA Sports games. In London, Olympic gold medalist runner Sir Mo Farah, footballer Thierry Henry, and five-time X Games gold medalist street skateboarder Leticia Bufoni compete against each other in an unnamed EA Sports game.

Meanwhile, the Vegas event will feature music producer Murda Beatz, global platinum-selling DJ Dillon Francis, and others, the company says.

The 8-hour event will be live-streamed on Twitch Prime’s channel starting at 10 AM PDT.

Twitch Prime is a gaming perk with Amazon’s $119/year Prime membership. This year, it’s given away more than $2,000 in free games and content, the company says, including two dozen free games.

Unrelated to Prime Day, Twitch also announced this week the launch of subscriber-only streams for its top creators, Twitch Partners and Twitch Affiliates.

Bumble is giving users some new options to get to know each other inside its dating app, announcing today that they are adding voice and video calls to their app.

The feature is double opt-in, meaning you won’t get a video call from some rando the second that you match with them. Instead, users will see an icon inside their chat that they can tap on to enable the features that move beyond text. Once both users get onboard, you can get to chatting without worrying about exchanging your numbers or social media profiles.

You can only get to know someone so well between photos and chat messages though that’s more that enough for some interactions.

The goal of the new features was “giving users a more real life interaction, and saving them time by getting a deeper understanding of who they’ve matched with before they decide to meet in person or share valuable contact information,” MagicLab (the newly-announced parent company of Bumble, Badoo, Chappy and Lumen) CEO Andrey Andreev told TechCrunch in an email.

The ability to have a phone call or video call inside the app without exchanging numbers is a nice way to protect users from harassment. Bumble announced “Private Detector” a couple months ago which analyzes photos sent in chat and lets users know if there’s anything “explicit” in the photo so they know what they’re getting into when they open it. That feature is launching this summer.

MagicLab plans to bring voice and video calls to its other dating apps as well.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, which is coming up on July 20, NASA has restored and re-opened the original Apollo Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The restoration is a painstakingly detailed recreation, which involved years of research of archival footage and photography, and seven months of restoration work.

Everything used in the restoration, which was guided by a team that included members of the actual Apollo Mission Control team who supported the Apollo 11 astronauts, is either an original or a carefully crafted recreation. That means not only the large items like computer consoles and terminals, but also carpeting, articles of clothing, ashtrays and pens. They’ve all been put in place as close as possible to where they were during the actual mission, both in the control room proper, and in the visitor’s gallery and simulation support room adjacent to the room itself that make up the larger Control Center facility.

This restored marvel of modern history will be accessible to the public, via tours provided to visitors of Space Center Houston, and it’s safe to say it’ll be a pretty popular attraction come next month leading up to, and including the milestone anniversary of Apollo 11.

The facility was actively used to coordinate missions from Gemini, through Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle programs, from its initial test debut in 1965 to its last use in 1992 for Space Shuttle Discovery’s STS-53 mission.

Below, you can get a better look at some of the finer detail work done on the restoration – including a pipe, three-hole punch, and a variety of other once-mundane errata now embed with a weird historical awe-inspiring quality.

[gallery ids="1850126,1850127,1850128,1850129,1850130"]

In its most recent report, Synergy Research, a company that monitors cloud marketshare, found that enterprise SaaS revenue passed the $100 billion run rate this quarter. The market was led by Microsoft and Salesforce.

It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that these two enterprise powerhouses come in at the top. Microsoft reported $10.1 billion in Productivity and Business Processes revenue, which includes Office 365, the Dynamics line and LinkedIn, the company it bought in 2016 for $26.2 billion. That $10.1 billion accounted for top spot with 17 percent

Salesforce was next with around 12 percent. It announced $3.74 billion in revenue in its most recent earnings statement with Service Cloud alone accounting for $1.02 billion in revenue, crossing that billion dollar mark for the first time.

Adobe came in third, good for around 10 percent market share, with $2.74 billion in revenue for its most recent report. Digital Media, which includes Creative Cloud and Document Cloud, accounted for the vast majority of the revenue with $1.8 billion. SAP and Oracle complete the top companies

A growing market

While that number may seem low, given we are 20 years into the development of the SaaS market, it is still a significant milestone, not to be dismissed lightly. As Synergy pointed out, while the market feels mature, if finds that SaaS revenue still accounts for just 20 percent of the overall enterprise software market. There’s still a long way to go, showing as with the infrastructure side of the market, things change much more slowly than we imagine, and the market is growing rapidly, as the impressive growth rates show.

“While SaaS growth rate isn’t as high as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), the SaaS market is substantially bigger and it will remain so until 2023. Synergy forecasts strong growth across all SaaS segments and all geographic regions,” the company wrote in its report.

Salesforce is the only one of the top five that was actually born in the cloud. Adobe, an early desktop software company, switched to cloud in 2013. Microsoft, of course, has been a desktop stalwart for many years before embracing the cloud over the last decade. SAP and Oracle are traditional enterprise software companies, born long before the cloud was even a concept, that began transitioning when the market began shifting.

Getting to a billion

Yet in spite of being late to the game, these numbers show that the market is still dominated by the old guard enterprise software companies and how difficult it is to achieve market dominance for companies born in the cloud. Salesforce emerged 20 years ago as an early cloud adherent, but of all of the enterprise SaaS companies that were started this century only ServiceNow and WorkDay show up in the Synergy list lumped in “the next 10.”

That’s not to say there aren’t SaaS companies making some serious money, just not quite as much as the top players to this point. Jason Lemkin, CEO and founder at SaaStr, a company that invests in and supports enterprise SaaS companies, says a lot of companies are close to that $1 billion goal than you might think, and he’s optimistic that we are going to see more.

“We will have at least 100 companies top $1 billion in ARR, probably many more. It is just math. Almost everyone IPO’ing [SaaS company] has 120-140% revenue retention. That will compound $100 million or $200 million to $1 billion. The only question is when,” he told TechCrunch.

Chart courtesy of SaasStr

He adds, that annualized numbers are very close behind ARR numbers and it won’t take long to catch up. Yet as we have seen with some of the companies on this list, it’s still not easy to get there.

It’s hard to develop a billion dollar SaaS company, and it takes time and patience, and perhaps some strategic acquisitions to get there, but the market trajectory continues to move upward. It will likely only grow stronger as more companies move to software in the cloud, and that bodes well for many of the players in this market, even those that didn’t show up on Synergy’s chart.

Streaming media startup Quibi, co-founded by entertainment industry heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman, is adding more star power to its launch slate. The short-form video content startup will have an action-thriller series starring Liam Hemsworth, one of the many Hemsworths (the one who was in The Hunger Games, specifically).

This series doesn’t yet have a name, but Hemsworth will start as ‘Dodge Maynard’ (Dodge is a very common name), who undertakes a very different kind of indecent proposal where apparently he ends up becoming human prey for villains who probably end up being very rich people who want nothing more than to hunt ‘the most dangerous game,’ to draw conclusions from a popular fictional trope.

There’s strong creative talent attached behind the scenes, too, including Sopranos writer Nick Santora and frequent Mad Men episodes director Phil Abraham.

Quibi, which is set for a launch in April next year, will have lots of content from a laundry list of top creators, likely owing to Katzenberg’s considerable tinsel town influence. Shows already greenling include a murder mystery comedy from SNL’s Lorne Michaels, a documentary series from Tyra Banks, a Steven Spielberg horror show, plus projects from Guillermo Del Toro, Chrissy Teigen, Idris Elba and more.

The company has already signed up $100 million in ad revenue commitments, and $1 billion in total funding. It’s unique proposition compared to the rest of the streaming originals market is to create short content specifically meant to be consumed on mobile devices on the go. Pricing at launch will range from $4.99 to $7.99 per month, depending on whether users want some ads, or a totally ad-free experience.