Google and MasterCard partner in efforts to link online to offline spending data

After a four year negotiation, Google and Mastercard reached a deal that would pay the latter millions in exchange for coughing up data on its card holders, according to a Bloomberg report. Google then packaged the data into a new tool, called Store Sales Measurement, that allowed its customers to track whether online ads turned into real world retail sales.

Unfortunately for both parties - they didn't announce the partnership and so privacy watchdogs are none too happy.

Key Takeaway

The elusive story of marketing ROI isn't so elusive if you can connect the dots from Awareness down to Action. Regardless of the privacy faux pas - what Google and MasterCard are doing is the future of marketing analytics and Business Intelligence.

AI Startup, Clinic, is going after the quick-serve restaurant category

After years of making headlines in the fintech space for creating voice enabled AI in financial transactions (clients include S&P Global and Barclays) - Clinic is now selling its platform into the QSR space. You can watch it in action here: https://clinc.com/index.html#industries

Key Takeaway

While Clinic is on the leading edge of AI, they're proving that current technologies can account for long standing frustrations with voice support - ranging from the tech not knowing what you're trying to say, to handling complicated changes to commands. With companies like Clinic accounting for these issues - we truly are moving into an age where humans will not be needed for order taking and not just when it comes to food. This puts a large range of labor force at risk from bank tellers to front-line government employees to QSR workers.

This ultimately begs the question - do we need to start pushing governments to implement UBI (Universal Basic Income)?

Interview: Harvard's Sunil Gupta explains why most companies still haven't nailed down their digital strategy

In a recent podcast (from HBR's Ideacast - I strongly recommend it), Sunil Gupta, a Harvard professor of management and digital strategy explains why and how most companies have misunderstood digital. The issues range from building unnecessary websites to deploying apps that fail to build business results. The core issue, he says, is that businesses don't want to think about how digital can help, they just want to say they did something with digital.

I highly recommend listening to the full interview here (~25 minutes): https://hbr.org/2018/01/podcast-ideacast

Key Takeaway

Don't worry about how modern your digital is. As my father always says - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Instead - focus on your business goals, and then identify how digital might help you get there. This may result in modernizing a website, but for the sake of a specific business goal like improving brand equity, or making it easier for audiences to provide more information to a sales team.

This line of thinking is crucial as it becomes easier for companies to use "off the shelf" products to build websites, look at analytics or create content. It's all too easy to produce digital now - but it's just as difficult as ever to connect the right problems to the right solutions with a sound strategy.