The Year of the Mouse is here! The mouse is the first animal in the Chinese zodiac, representing a new beginning. Chances are good that in this new decade, we will witness some of the most exciting technological and social progress in the last 100 years. The amazing developments particularly in the field of AI fuel these expectations. With our amazing and lovely clients who put a lot of trust into us, we feel well-prepared to enter the new era. We want to say our most heartfelt “Thank You” to all our clients and our teams in Beijing, Berlin, and Munich!

We have longstanding connections to China owing to our Beijing office and our latest product offering, China Beats (see https://chinabeats.io/). But we also have quite a few people of Chinese and Taiwanese background in our Berlin office.

The Chinese New Year marked a perfect opportunity for us to ask them some questions we – as non-Chinese Berliners – always wanted to ask. So we did. Here are their answers! Disclaimer: Not to be taken too seriously!

This article was originally published on The Drum on November 14, 2019.

Over and over again in its long history, China has turned into a global innovation leader. The compass, gunpowder, printing, papermaking and even pasta were first invented in Ancient China, hundreds or thousands of years before other parts of the world adopted these innovations.

Today, China wants to be – and in many ways, already is – the world’s innovation powerhouse once more. For instance, earlier this year the Nikkei Asian Review reported that China already surpassed the US in the number of AI patents filed. Just recently, the same business journal announced that China now tops the list of countries with the highest number of tech unicorns, overtaking the US once again.

For decades, Europeans have successfully peeked at Silicon Valley to track down approaches and technologies of the future. Today, it remains the most important place in the world for innovation. Yet we would be well-advised to simultaneously direct our gaze towards China in order to not overlook an increasingly important part of the picture.

Chinese platforms prevail for a reason

One of the key drivers of China’s digital economy is its indigenous digital platforms, which have turned into something like indispensable daily companions for the 829m Chinese netizens. In contrast to the Western world, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other U.S. tech giants play little role in China. Many will be tempted to point towards the “Great Firewall” to explain their lack of success on the Chinese market. But not all major US companies have been banned from operating in the country. Amazon, for instance, was left untouched. Still, it was not able to withstand Chinese competition. Due to Chinese realities, Amazon simply did not have much of a differentiating factor as an online marketplace as compared to Alibaba, JD, or Pinduoduo.

Today, Chinese e-commerce, search and social media platforms greatly outperform their Western counterparts in view of the audience reach and loyalty in China. But the global success of the TikTok short video app by ByteDance also reveals that Chinese tech giants are able to conquer foreign audiences too. Thanks to TikTok, “ByteDance became the first Chinese tech giant to break the West,” a recent Telegraph headline reads. Others will probably follow, as whether we like it or not, China’s tech companies are not only proliferating, but also bubbling with new ideas and an uncanny enthusiasm for innovation.

User-centric, AI-driven ecosystems lead the way

A fitting example are the sophisticated AI algorithms underlying TikTok and also Toutiao, ByteDance’s other wildly successful content platform. The latter has about 124m daily users, who spend a whopping 74 minutes a day on it. Impressive, considering that competition is more than plenty. What makes them stay is the AI-curated content, which is done exceptionally well. Citing a former ByteDance employee, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Toutiao’s recommendation algorithm builds up to 2,000 tags per user. Moreover, if a user scrolled back to read a paragraph a second time, “keywords from that paragraph would become tags associated with the user.” Needless to say, Toutiao shares many of its feats with TikTok – the AI-curated “For You” tab is what makes the app so addictive in the first place.

AI also plays a central role within Alibaba’s enormous business ecosystem. It is worthwhile to note that many Chinese tech giants including Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Huawei, and Tencent have established AI labs that have been delivering interesting results. Among those is Alibaba’s AI-driven copywriting tool, which can produce 20,000 lines of copy a second and has already been in use since 2018 on the Taobao and Tmall marketplaces to produce millions of product descriptions and ads. Much more important, however, is Alibaba’s use of AI to understand user behavior with the purpose of quickly adapting to changes and to become as user-centric as it gets. In fact, Alibaba’s business model consists of a user-centric ecosystem which is made possible through AI and data analytics.

A key lesson to draw

As Alibaba’s former chief strategist Ming Zeng notes, five of the ten most valuable companies in the world are user-centric, AI-driven ecosystems. Two of them are Chinese – Alibaba and Tencent –, three American. This should give Europeans some food for thought. Both Chinese giants were founded by the end of the millennium and both obtained non-Chinese venture capital in the early years. But these were not gigantic investments. Naspers for instance, Tencent’s South African majority shareholder, invested a comparably meager $34m into Tencent in 2001. Today, its 31% stake is worth $130bn. By the way, ByteDance, only seven years old, is now worth 78bn.

If there is one lesson Europeans should draw from China, it is that: neither unfair advantage nor endless capital investment is what made China’s tech giants big. Rather, it is their understanding of their audience, their focus on user-centricity, and their enthusiasm for innovation that makes all the difference.

Advanced AI algorithms are also employed in China Beats, TD Reply’s new insights solution for China market intelligence. Head to the official China Beats website to learn more and download the “Technology in Action” thought starter, which dives deep into China’s ICT landscape.

On the occasion of this years‘ Singles‘ Day, TD Reply conducted an online buzz analysis focusing on automotive brands. All relevant Chinese internet platforms were taken into consideration. Among the five car brands most talked about over the course of Singles’ Day advertising campaigns in China, Volkswagen came second, with the remaining four top spots taken by Chinese automotive manufacturers. Among the sales platforms, Tmall, JD, and Suning played the most important role. In general, it became apparent that Singles’ Day has become significantly more important for advertising and sales activities in the automotive industry today.

In contrast to consumer electronics and fashion, little attention has been paid to the importance of cars on Singles’ Day in China. Yet on Singles’ Day in 2016, Chinese eCommerce market leader Alibaba announced that around 100,000 cars were sold within 24 hours on its sales platforms. Against that background, TD Reply decided to conduct an online buzz analysis to bring some light to this potential opportunity. With its Beijing office operating since 2010 and working with many of the world’s leading automotive brands, the marketing and innovation consultants have had their finger on the pulse of the Chinese market.

The online buzz is calculated on the basis of comments and mentions in social media posts, as well as relevant news articles. The main goal of the analysis was to find out which car brands were most discussed by Chinese consumers on Singles’ Day, which sales platforms were most important in this respect, and to what extent cars generally play a prominent role on Singles’ Day. All relevant Chinese e-commerce, social media, search and news platforms were considered. The analysis used China Beats, a data-driven market intelligence solution developed by TD Reply for the Chinese market.

Chinese brands dominate

Among the five brands that were most discussed in the context of Singles’ Day promotions, Volkswagen was the only non-Chinese brand creating high levels of buzz. BYD had a clear lead and secured first place with a share of 16% of total buzz volume, but Volkswagen held strong at second place with 10%. When the top ten brands are considered however, the picture is much more balanced. BMW, Audi and Mercedes take the total number to 4 German brands in the top 10, and the inclusion of Ford broadens the spectrum to include an American brand as well. BMW and Audi share the title of second strongest German car brand with 6% of total buzz volume, followed by Mercedes-Benz with 4%.

Tmall leaves competitors behind

In terms of e-commerce platforms, which are the most discussed topic in connection with car brands, Alibaba’s Tmall ranked first with a 45% share of buzz volume. This was to be expected as Alibaba is China’s undisputed e-commerce market leader and the company that originally launched Singles’ Day.

Competitor JD.com followed in second place with 14%, while consumer electronics retailer Suning.com surprisingly found itself at a strong third place with 12%. Taobao and Pinduoduo shared fourth place with 11%. Car dealers such as Autohome and Bitauto secured relatively weak shares of the total buzz volume with 6% and 1% respectively. Cars are sold on all the named platforms.

International brands generate more interest

Although Chinese consumers talk more often about Chinese brands, they search on average twice as often for information about cars of international brands. “However, we have seen some extreme periodical increases in search volume among Chinese brands,” says Lars-Alexander Mayer, Partner at TD Reply. “These are related to advertising campaigns that Chinese brands carry out at regular intervals and are usually associated with very low purchase prices. During these campaigns, Chinese brands generated up to three times more interest on search engines than their international competitors in the last week. Yet, on average, the latter still generated more interest.“

Increasing relevance for the automotive industry

Following Singles‘ Day, the Alibaba Group announced that this year, over 100 million new buyers from rural areas and economically weaker cities in China were reached. Competitor Pinduoduo reported that rural buyers had bought 1000 cars on its platform within 16 minutes. Taobao even announced that 55 cars were sold in one second through one of its livestreams.

“Overall, we can see that Singles Day has gained in importance for the automotive industry as an advertising and sales platform,” says Lars-Alexander Mayer. “An increasing number of Chinese netizens are discussing the Singles Day’ promotions of various car brands. Particularly important were actions that took place on China’s major eCommerce platforms.”

With blood glucose levels often oscillating between high and low several times a day, the daily life of a diabetic can be quite the roller coaster. Inspired by a colleague living with Type I Diabetes, we want to use the skillsets and analytical knowledge at TD to create a tool that helps anyone trying to actively manage blood glucose and insulin levels do so in an informed manner. Our proposed open-source solution to blood glucose management aims to provide relevant and timely alerts and insights, aiming to make diabetes a smoother ride for those who live with it.

How do we do it?

We collected data on blood glucose, insulin and food intake and in combining these different sources, were able to develop a model that predicted future levels of blood glucose 30 minutes ahead of time. This type of prediction tool could help diabetics make more informed decisions in managing their diabetes on a daily basis.

Although the inputs for our model thus far included carbohydrate intake and previous data, our aim is to also include physical activity, heart rate, fat content of food, and other relevant inputs to improve our model. We believe that this will make the model more realistic and more usable for more people.

In order to take this next step, we need more data.

If you are interested in becoming a data donor to help us improve this open-source solution to managing diabetes, please get in touch with us via 6d-analytics.td@reply.de.

TD Reply teamed up with the Berlin-based customer experience (CX) specialists Experience One to hold a free workshop within the framework of our Pro Bono project, which took place October 19, 2019 at the Experience One head office.

The workshop, termed “Data Night Out,” served to educate people working in the non-profit sector about ways to employ open data to strengthen their cause and discover new ways of achieving their goals.

We received some great feedback from the participants and plan a sequel next year.

Below you will find some impressions from the first Data Night Out.

This article was originally published on The Drum on August 22, 2019.

“If you’re a marketer, you measure creativity,” writes columnist Helen Edwards in a recent piece. It’s not even a choice. Above any corporate investment into a marketing campaign looms the question whether it will yield any return worth speaking of at all.

Marketers will need to whip out some assessments to convince fellow execs that the next campaign will indeed be a good thing for the company. That is the easy part. Far more difficult is deciding how to measure the creative work, given the flaws inherent in the common options.

Common ways of measuring

Edwards lays out three options, all of which are far from perfect: pre-testing, post-activity assessments, or a combination of both. One of the key problems with pre-testing is that it often assesses only an early approximation of what will eventually materialize, not the actual thing.

The post-activity option, on the other hand, only assesses what has already been delivered, meaning that the insights gained will not help to improve the campaign during action. A combination approach may yield more data and some interesting insights, but it still leaves marketers with a “before” or “after” measurement only.

There’s a better way

In the end, marketers seemingly have to rely on their gut feeling to make big decisions, not on measurements stemming from imperfect ways of measuring. As Edwards puts it: “You hope the research will decide, only to realise the biggest decisions will be all yours.” But is that true? Are marketers left with what essentially are evolutions of approaches that in their basic structure have been around for a hundred years?

I argue that there is a better way, one that utilises a crucial element marketers still routinely neglect: digital data. And one that also allows improving a campaign even during its commercially active phase. Imagine a technology that can simply track and objectively evaluate a campaign in real time. This is precisely what the Data Creativity Score does.

How it works

While we now offer the Data Creativity Score commercially as part of our portfolio, the roots of the Data Creativity Score are purely academic. In the early 2000s, a group of researchers at the Technical University Berlin – myself among them – hypothesized that creativity could be measured based on two most important dimensions of creativity in the marketing context: creative concept (originality, newness) and consumer activation. The advent of the “digital first” paradigm and big data finally made it possible to create a working measurement tool.

The Data Creativity Score tracks and benchmarks campaigns in real time, calculating scores for their creative concept and activation, which in turn make up the final “creativity score.” This is done by complex crawling and Natural Language Processing algorithms, but what the Data Creativity Score is looking at are essentially two things: how consumers perceive the campaign emotionally, and in how far the campaign motivates them to lookup more information about the product.

The actual data is derived from both future-oriented sources, such as the tonality and emotional intensity of the comments (this is where Natural Language Processing comes into play) but also from more mundane ones, such as search volume and social media mentions.

What marketers can do with it

Digital data has a real-time advantage, and that is also one of the big pluses of a data-driven measurement approach. It allows marketers to cut media budgets for campaigns that fail to activate (and vice versa), saving costs, and to adapt claims during action. In contrast to the post-activity measurement, measuring real-time can also account for changes to the product or service that take place during action – providing clear indications for how exactly the campaign impacts sales. Even more important are all the learnings that can be derived from the plenty of insights generated in a full campaign cycle for the next planned creative endeavour.

Now, am I saying that the Data Creativity Score is an infallible measurement instrument for creativity? Of course not. Critics will point towards the fact that it can only measure what happens online (though I do not consider that to be a weak point at all, as we already live in an online-first world). Others will question our definition of creativity or even the validity of our data sources.

I am certain, however, that it is more perfect than the alternatives, particularly for one reason: it eliminates the element of gut feeling from the measurement stage, where it does not belong to at all. Gut feeling belongs to the world of creativity, the world of “chaos and serendipity,” as Edwards puts it. In the world of metrics, however, it is better to let algorithms do the math.

“Advanced Outlet Segmentation” – our joint project with Coca-Cola and CCEP Germany – was just awarded Coca-Cola’s prestigious Global Customer and Commercial Leadership Award (GCCL). Together with our partners, we developed a novel approach to leverage digital data for physical sales success.

For roughly a decade, our partner Coca-Cola / CCEP has consistently pushed us to take data-driven marketing and sales to the next level. Winning the Global Commercial Leadership Award is a great recognition of this partnership.

It underscores what is possible when both client and agency are willing to progress the boundaries of their industries, even if this means not knowing the final outcome. In most of these cases – as in the case of our Advanced Outlet Analytics approach – the result can positively challenge the status quo and create new business value in unexpected areas. The attributes that have underpinned this success are founded on a relationship that goes beyond standard definitions of client and service provider and instead is one built on the values of trust and honesty.

So proud of this project and partnership!

This article was originally published on The Drum on July 11, 2019.

Data is the new gold, but why are marketing departments still having trouble turning data into real business value? According to a 2018 Wunderman study, three out of four marketing decision-makers say that they employ data-driven marketing technologies – but 62 percent also say that they do not actually derive any actionable insights or concrete activities from them. In other words: they are wasting their money on tools and services that provide little to no return. This in turn means that in terms of business importance, despite all the media hype, data continues to play a little role. But why is that the case?

My experience of devising, pitching, and leading data-driven projects tells me that a prevailing misconception within marketing departments about the actual value of data for marketing are to blame.

A paradigm shift

There is a staunch belief across industries, even within agencies, that great ideas first and foremost come from the minds of great creatives and strategists – as pictured in “Mad Men.” Yet this belief runs contrary to the premise of customer-centricity that underlies data-driven marketing. In fact, data brings with itself a paradigm shift: the imperative to listen, rather than to survey.

For most of the world’s population, the web has already long become the primary medium for obtaining and exchanging information, entertainment, and shopping. And much as if they were treading on snow, they leave footprints, which can be used to analyze their behavior, motivations, preferences, and needs.

Take online comments and search terms. Their wording, tonality, length, and syntax offer invaluable insights into what the customers really think about a brand and want from it. These insights can be extracted utilising modern AI-powered technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), tracked and analyzed in real-time. Technology finally makes it possible for companies to listen to the customers’ thoughts and wishes, the prerequisite for a customer-centric marketing strategy. But how can this be converted into real business value?

The beauty of real-time tracking

One of the ways to achieve this is by establishing detailed casual relations between specific marketing actions and sales success – which is something that has been virtually impossible to accomplish using popular campaign measurement methods. Even with the help of the most sophisticated marketing mix models, their results will only be available weeks or months after a campaign has ended, leaving marketers without levers to correct the course during action.

Only data can enable real-time campaign success tracking, predictive live ROI calculation, and brand steering. With remarkable effects: L’Oréal, one of our clients, was able to quadruple the sales impact of its video content with this approach. This example also points to one of the most important values data-driven marketing offers to businesses, namely the integration of marketing and sales.

Neglected strategic potential

But given all these opportunities, why are they rarely used in comparison to common brand management tools, such as surveys? In my experience, this has to do with the fact that the evolution of data-driven technologies strongly outpaces the growth of the corresponding expertise within companies. Currently, many companies have just reached the level of being able to integrate social media likes, shares and other engagements into their marketing strategy via social listening tools. Insights based on things such as tonality and wording reflect the future-oriented, explorative, and strategic potential of data that new technologies have only recently been able to unearth. Of course, using these technologies requires a whole other level of expertise and resources.

Yet in the long-term, neglecting that potential means risking falling far behind companies that are already investing a lot of resources in it – companies such as L’Oréal. With the goal of providing “personalized content” and “the right message at the right time” to its customers, the group already decided two years ago to move towards a “digital-first paradigm.” By building up multiple in-house data expert teams, the cosmetics giant is now capitalizing on the possibilities provided by new technologies and accumulating new knowledge that will help to secure its number one position in personal care for years to come. Notably, L’Oréal’s brand value according to the BrandZ ranking increased by nine percent from 2017-2018, and again by nine percent from 2018-2019. In 2018, the makers of the report attributed this explicitly to “successful strategies to build loyalty and become more customer-centric.”

Data-driven marketing has enabled that success, but it is also important to note that it was based on more than just the introduction of modern tools. L’Oréal adopted a whole new “digital-first” grand strategy, and it strongly increased its internal data expertise. These two things make all the difference in determining who will be able to derive business value from data and who won’t.

Ever heard of Matthew Fontaine Maury? This 19th century U.S. naval office virtually singlehandedly invented what we today call Big Data analytics and data-driven problem-solving.

In doing so, he changed the world for the better. Even today, we still reap the benefits of this data pioneer’s amazing work.

Is your interest awakened? Then learn more about Maury below!

Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Story in Pictures

This years’ Reply Xchange in Munich truly stood out. It all came together nicely: a beautiful, modern venue with the BMW Welt, a cheerful atmosphere with thousands of visitors, gripping speeches, and lots of amazing showcases.

TD Reply was also well-represented with three plenary sessions, two stands, and dozens of our team members on site. We were able to garner a lot of interest not only with China Beats, our newest business intelligence solution, but also with our other products and approaches.

In a plenary session, TD Reply data scientists Aaron Pickering and Juan Orduz spoke about the amazing opportunities provided by new Retail Analytics approaches for both consumer goods brands and brick-and-mortar retail. Moreover, Pickering and Orduz explained why the value of machine learning and artificial intelligence can only be realized by asking the right business questions and taking a consumer point of view.

TD Reply’s China Beats received a lot of attention at this year’s Munich Xchange. Here at one of the introductory sessions by Julia Saswito of Triplesense Reply.

Anja Kielmann and Martin Schmoll of TD Reply introduced China Beats in more detail in their plenary session, which focused on the question of how China Beats can help to understand the forces and actors in the Chinese market.

At their stand, Matt Hoban and Lucy Travaglia of TD Reply also presented the alpha version of a new product linking music taste with emotions: “Like This Like That.” As easy to use as any search engine, Like This Like That intelligently provides fitting movie suggestions for each song or band name that is typed in, based on the emotions the music is associated with.