Writing - Robert McGovern

Feb

2016

Mobile messaging, and what it means for brands

For the last 6 or 7 years, the growth of social media has been a phenomenon that’s affected everything from the way we communicate with one another to the way we consume media and entertainment. But as Social Networks make the move to being de-facto media distribution channels, users have overwhelmingly started migrating to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, LINE etc. to engage in more meaningful communication with friends and family.

It may come as a surprise, but in 2015, the Big Four mobile messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Viber) overtook the Big Four Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn) in monthly active user numbers. So it’s official; mobile messaging is where it’s at.

From a publisher’s point of view, some media outlets are already using messaging apps to connect with their audience in interesting ways. The Huffington Post are using Viber’s Public Chats to publicly share real-time conversations between their journalists. BBC News are using WhatsApp for user-generated content, gathering reader photos, videos, and first-hand accounts that it later repurposes on its live news blog, and The Washington Post are using Kik’s Promoted Chats to attract readers through quizzes and game-like experiences.

Either way, it’s clear that where users go, ultimately, brands want to go too, thus providing the incentive to technology platforms to facilitate this connection.

Much has been made of Facebook’s desire to turn it’s Messenger app into a much broader platform, enabling users to do more than just communicate with each other. Plans include everything from facilitating customer service, to ordering an Uber directly within a conversation, and even allowing P2P micro payments, all within the context of messaging. This is much like the most popular Asian apps such as WeChat and LINE already offer. In a way, the messaging aspect is a commodity service used to build a broad user base to offer a wider range of add-ons to.

WhatsApp is looking to get in on the action too. At last month’s DLD conference in Munich, founder Jan Koum spoke about the plan to remove the annual subscription fee to use the service and eventually cater to businesses (he gave American Airlines and Bank of America as examples), offering them ways to deal with customer servicing directly through the messaging app.

How might brands utilise messaging apps?

But all of this just poses the question of how exactly brands might use messaging apps to connect with consumers. Perhaps it’s not too crazy to think of WhatsApp customer call centres springing up in the developing world in the not-too-distant future, but surely there are possibilities far more interesting than this. AI responses to customer queries have been touted, but aside from a responding to customer complaints, how else might brands utilize messaging platforms to enhance customer relationships?

Perhaps ‘conversations’ with brands can be used to maintain customer loyalty and rewards programs, a friction free way of opting-in and continuing to use them. Mobile loyalty apps have been sold as the answer to the problem of having to constantly carry around rewards cards and the like, but in reality, downloading a standalone app and registering your details to keep track of this seems to be as much of a turn-off as carrying around a physical card in the first place. Brands could also use messaging channels to offer personalised deals or suggest new products that their users might like. Something akin to the “If you like this, you’ll love these” style prompts that work so well on Amazon etc. Either way, it sounds like a smoother way to interact with customers and prompt them into action.

But at what point might this become a nuisance, and are most consumers really open to engaging with brands on channels that they also communicate with their friends and family on? Well it would appear that they are. Recent consumer research in the area is encouraging. According to a 2015 MEC survey, 79% are not opposed to engaging with brands on chat apps. That sounds like enough of a mandate to me. Even if actual user behaviour turns out to be a little less enthusiastic about this once it becomes the norm.

I’m sure we’ll slowly start seeing some examples of these concepts over the next 6 months or so as Facebook and friends turn on the tap and unleash some of the functionality that third-party developers have been working away on since F8 last March. In the meantime, we’ll just have to put our thinking caps on and come up with some interesting ways to utilise messaging channels to connect with customers.

Jan

2016

Netflix In The UAE: The Verdict

This article was originally written for Lovin Dubai. Click here to read the full article.

So, as many of you might already know, Netflix finally became available seemingly without warning in the UAE last week. It’s been a long time coming, but at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last Wednesday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that the streaming service was rolling out simultaneously in more than 130 countries around the world and the UAE is thankfully one of those countries.

While many expats in the UAE use the service already through a VPN, an official launch gives viewers more options for using the service and finally lets us sign-up using UAE payment methods. After having the weekend to binge watch a host of shows we finally have a good idea about what the UAE version of the service offers content-wise.

Is it censored?

In short; no. One of the concerns that seemed to come up quite a lot on social media channels when the announcement was made was whether or not the content would face the same scrutiny from the censors as we tend to see with films that reach the cinema. We’re quite used to seeing chunks of movies being removed and many social commentators assumed that this would be the case with services like Netflix too.

From our experience over the weekend though, this certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. We’ve come across quite a few scenes that definitely wouldn’t see the light of day at the cinema if you know what we mean!

While it doesn’t appear that content has been specifically censored in the UAE, there is still the issue of regional licensing agreements that have resulted in certain content not appearing on the service in general outside of the USA. For example, as OSN have the rights to show House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black in the UAE, even though Netflix actually commissioned and produced these shows themselves, they can’t stream them on their own service in the UAE. Other shows like The Office, Suits, Dexter, Lost and Modern Family also don’t make the cut for the same reasons.

To read the full article, click here.

Jan

2016

Virtual Reality and the future of Media & Entertainment

A version of this piece was originally written for Shane O’Leary’s Tracking ’16 Trends Report which was launched this week. You can download the full report here.

Virtual Reality, despite being an actual reality for quite a while, is still somewhat the stuff of science fiction for the average person on the street. All that might change over the next 12 months though.

In 2016, there will be some serious movement in the Virtual Reality (and Augmented Reality) space in terms of mainstream availability. The consumer versions of the Oculus Rift, HTC’s Vive, and PlayStation VR, among others, are all scheduled for release in the New Year. But more importantly, away from these pricey headsets, more affordable and thus more mainstream-friendly options are becoming available to let anyone with a smartphone experience the potential of what VR technology has to offer.

This past November, a collaboration between Google and The New York Times put cheap Google Cardboard VR headsets into the hands of over 1 Million people to facilitate a 360 degree documentary that The New York Times produced on the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Never before has basic VR technology been so widely distributed and so easily accessible to the general public.

From a publisher point of view, this is an area where large incumbents (like the New York Times mentioned above) can flex their muscles and use their resources to produce more powerful content via VR that smaller pretenders might find harder to create.

But with this technology more accessible than ever before, and content producers now starting to actually cater for it, what is really exciting is how different industries might take advantage of Virtual Reality to offer more immersive experiences to their audiences. Just think of the potential that cheap, mainstream VR availability could have on the actual media and entertainment that can be produced across everything from news, TV and movies, video games, and even areas like live music and sport.

Imagine being able to watch your favourite band play a festival half way around the world from the fan pit. Or experience the Champions League Final as if you were sitting in the front row right on the halfway line. All this from the comfort of your own sitting room (and without having to queue up for half the event to get a pint!).

In addition to large media and content publishers starting to cater for VR content, the barriers to this type of content creation itself are beginning to come crashing down, at least in terms of 360 degree video. Devices like the GoPro and Google camera rig collaboration will enable smaller publishers and agencies etc. to get in on the action too. And that’s even without taking into account user-generated content, something that is bound to grab people’s imaginations. With live streaming increasingly accessible and growing in popularity all the time through apps like Periscope, users’ appetite for this type of content, from both a consumption and creation point of view, should help propel the concept forward. Take the 360 degree video of the annual Grafton Street Christmas Eve charity concert from Bono and the lads below as an example of the possibilities (view it on a mobile device to get the gist of it or drag your cursor around the screen to manipulate the view if you’re on a laptop / desktop).

With VR slowly graduating from being a techy niche to scratching the surface of the mainstream, and with content producers finally starting to jump onboard, expect to see some really interesting examples of this over the next 12 months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFejk_J9ifQ

Dec

2015

Rooftop solar panels could be mandatory in Dubai by 2030

This article was originally written for Lovin Dubai. Click here to read the full article.

Question: what springs to mind when you think of Dubai? Massive skyscrapers and luxurious hotels? Sprawling malls and fast cars? Either way, chances are it isn’t sustainability and green credentials. All that is about to change though if Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has anything to say about it. In accordance with the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, the Emirate is aiming to become a global centre of green energy innovation, over the next 35 years. It seems that there’s now a concerted effort to do more than just pay lip service to sustainability.

The 2050 plan, which was launched by Sheikh Mohammed last week, also aims to lay the groundwork needed to make the city almost completely sustainable through clean energy, with the goal to become the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050. Under the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy, the city aims to provide 7% of its energy from clean energy resources by 2020, 25% by 2030 and 75% by 2050.

You might think that this is somewhat of an oxymoron, but despite having such a hot climate and a reliance on fossil fuels to cool our buildings and power our appliances, there is one thing that puts Dubai in a unique position to take advantage of renewable energy – our lovely year-round sunshine.

To read the full article, click here.

Netflix In The UAE: The Verdict

Is it censored?

Virtual Reality and the future of Media & Entertainment

Rooftop solar panels could be mandatory in Dubai by 2030

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