Central Perk: 27 nov. 2015

vineri, 27 noiembrie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Thin Crowds, Subdued Shopping on Black and Blue Friday; Thanksgiving Shopping a Bust

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 09:45 AM PST

Retailers, especially big-box retailers will be blue if light shopping carries over for the rest of the season. The Wall Street Journal reports Thinner Crowds on Black Friday.

Millions of Americans left their Thanksgiving meals to hit stores across the country in an annual shopping ritual, but the crowds on early Black Friday morning were thinner than years past at some malls and shopping districts.

Thinner crowds could spell problems for retailers, some of whom entered the holidays warning of uneven consumer demand and elevated levels of inventory. But the smaller crowds could also reflect deeper changes in how Americans shop: Increasingly, they are spending more online and making fewer visits to stores.

Driving up to a nearly empty parking lot at a Wal-Mart in Houston on Friday morning, Dora Rodriguez, 39 years old, stopped her silver hatchback in surprise and called out her window to another shopper: "Excuse me, the Black Friday sale—it's ended already?"

Thirty-six percent of consumers said they planned to shop online only during this year's holiday season, up from 19% who said so last year, according to the investment bank Jefferies. By comparison, just 18% of consumers said they planned to shop only in physical stores this year, down from 35% who said so a year ago.

"The competition is led by Amazon and that factors into how other retailers set their prices," said Paul Trussell, a Deutsche Bank analyst.

Subdued Start to Shopping Season

Reuters reports Black Friday Crowds Thin in Subdued Start to U.S. Holiday Shopping.

Crowds were thin at U.S. stores and shopping malls in the early hours of Black Friday and on Thanksgiving evening as shoppers responded to early holiday discounts with caution and bad weather hurt turnout.

"We believe Thanksgiving shopping was a bust," analysts at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey said in a research note. "Members of our team who went to the malls first had no problem finding parking or navigating stores."

Scott Tuhy, vice-president at Moody's who tracks companies like Macy's Inc (M.N), said crowds on Thursday evening in New Jersey were steady but not busy. He said some stores saw a fair amount of activity around orders that were placed online and picked up in stores.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Unbelievable Lie of the Day: Turkey Says It Had Not Recognized the Aircraft as Russian When it Shot it Down

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 12:07 AM PST

In the wake of conflicting flight path information with Russian and Turkey differing on the flight path of the Russian aircraft that Turkey downed over Syria, comes the incredulous claim that Turkey did not recognize the aircraft as Russian when it shot the aircraft down.

This unbelievable statement comes as Hollande and Putin Seek Common Ground but Remain at Odds Over Syrian Targets.

The leaders of France and Russia held more than three hours of talks at the Kremlin focusing on the fate of the Syrian president and on which parts of the armed opposition should be protected from air strikes.

The summit was part of Mr Hollande's push for a broader coalition against Islamist radicals Isis after the attacks in Paris a week ago.

After the talks, Mr Hollande said he and Mr Putin had agreed on three basic points. "First, we will intensify the exchange of intelligence and any other information between our militaries. Second, the strikes on Isis will intensify and become part of a co-ordinated campaign in order to make them more efficient. Third — and Mr Putin also stressed this — we must focus our air strikes on Isis and other terrorist groups."

The gulf between the leaders on the future of Mr Assad remained as wide as ever. Mr Hollande reiterated his position that Mr Assad "cannot play a role in the future of this country" but Mr Putin rebuffed him, repeating his standard phrase that only the Syrian people could determine the future of their country.

The issue of widely diverging goals of the external actors in the Syrian war gained renewed urgency after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet on Tuesday which it said had violated its airspace. Ankara's move is believed to have been partly motivated by the fact that Russia's air force has been bombarding Turkmen villages in northern Syria, an ethnic group that Turkey views as an ally.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that Ankara had not recognised the aircraft as Russian when it shot it down. Following a slew of announcements of economic retaliation against Turkey, Mr Putin angrily dismissed this claim as "impossible" and said Russia had provided the US with information on the time and location of its sorties.

"Since Turkey is a member of Nato, they should have known. Did they think it was a US plane?" Mr Putin said. "All we hear is lame excuses. Well, that's their choice, it's not our choice."

Impossible

Putin's claim is correct. It is impossible to believe Turkey did not know who it was shooting at.

In fact, the claim is so absurd, and so much an obvious bald-faced lie, one has to question Turkey's claim that the Russian aircraft did indeed violate Turkey's air space.

Competing Claims

The above image from Turkish military releases recording of 'warnings' sent to downed warplane, Russia disputes flight path.

Turkey claims it issued warnings. I do not believe those warning claims are in dispute. What is in dispute are conflicting flight path claims.

If Russia violated Turkish air space, it was for at most a few seconds. But here's the real question at this point: After Turkey's unbelievable lie that it did not know what it was shooting at, how can anyone possibly believe Turkey, on anything, related to this matter?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Damn Cool Pics

Sylvester Stallone Shows Off His Beautiful Family At The Creed Premiere

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 07:23 PM PST

Sylvester Stallone recently showed off his beautiful family on the red carpet for the premiere of "Creed." Stallone is a lucky man. He's had a great career and now he's surrounded by beautiful women.

Mom Discovers Something Very Awkward On Her Son’s Bathroom Wall

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 04:42 PM PST

This is not the type of thing you want your mom to talk about on social media.

Beware Of The Zombies On Black Friday

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 04:38 PM PST

If you're going shopping on Black Friday, just try not to get bit. You don't want to turn into one of them.

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MeasureFest 2015: what did we learn?

MeasureFest 2015: what did we learn?

Posted: 26 Nov 2015 06:36 AM PST

Yesterday was MeasureFest’s inaugural edition from Brighton. Hosted in the city’s Corn Exchange, MeasureFest this time provided three distinct sessions; Attribution, Testing, and Measurement (which could also have been called ‘How to wrangle Google Analytics data into a better, prettier, and more comparative format’).

All in all, there was something there for everyone, but not everyone was likely to enjoy all of the sessions. Let’s take a look at the agenda for the day…

	Attribution
	Russell McAthy – Attribution You Don't Know What You Don't Know
	Harriet Checkley – Attribution 2.0
	Lewis Lenssen – Measuring The Marmite Media

	Testing
	Martijn Scheijbeler – Scaling Your Testing Program for Maximum Impact

	Connor Wilkinson – Creating a testing culture in Asda
	Tim Stewart – Roadmaps & Experiment Design – Just because you can, doesn't mean you should


	Measurement
	Neil Barnes – Turbo Charging Your Google Analytics Data
	Adam Englebright – Google Analytics Minus Google Analytics
	Elayne Phillips – Measuring Communications in Downing Street
	Nikki Rae – Segment or Die! – The underused Cliché

Given the breath of different marketing disciplines covered by the three sessions, it would be silly to try to cover each talk in the detail they require and deserve, so instead I’ve chosen some of the key discussion points of the day on which to ruminate.

#1 – Testing strategy

On of the points that stood out most from the talks at MeasureFest yesterday was in the strategy behind A/B and MV testing. There were widely different approaches mentioned across a number of talks and it certainly got me thinking….

The main discrepancy in the approaches seemed to be in whether a value judgement needs to be placed on any test before it happens, in order to determine what value the result of a test might possibly have.

On the other side of the coin was the approach of Dutch speaker Martijn Scheijbeler from The Next Web, whose approach seemed a lot more free and objective than those of his corporate red tape restrained fellow speakers. His approach, do everything fast and without any pre-judgement of its result or budgetary impact, was certainly a lot more exciting and the very definition of an agile testing environment.

Screen Shot 2015-11-26 at 11.33.26

That’s not to say his team aren’t aware of overall KPIs or goals, just that they don’t let red tape restrict them from the potential to find something unexpected.

The pace and breadth at which Martijn’s team in Amsterdam worked at testing impressed a lot of people in the Measurefest audience…

Screen Shot 2015-11-26 at 11.28.55

You can find Martijn’s slide deck from his talk (Scaling Your Testing Program for Maximum Impact) below. (Warning: contains coarse language!)

#2 – The (potential) impact of Adblocking

Lewis Lenssen, Rakuten’s Attribution’s Marketing Director was asked about the impact of Adblocking by a member of the audience after his talk. His main points were that many people use ad blockers because the ads they encounter slow down page loading.

Lewis highlighted that it was up to the advertising networks to find solutions to these issues. He also said the industry needs to be more transparent about the data it collects and how it is used in order to combat the increasing use of ad blockers.

Interestingly, just this week, news hit that Yahoo had banned US users from accessing their webmail if they had Adblockers installed. Yahoo confirmed the changes, which includes a pop-up box asking users to pause their ad-block software before they could access their inbox.

Some think this action is rather rich, coming from a company who admitted that adverts on its homepage had been infected with malware for four days last year. For more information on the arguments for and against, check out the video above from Mashable.

#3 – Simple GA solutions

Both Neil Barnes from Friday Media Group and Adam Englebright from Measurelab extolled the virtues of Google Sheets and its facilities to hook it up to GA to produce easy, digestible dashboards from standard GA data.

The emphasis was definitely on making the most of the free data we get from Google Analytics, and creating ways of viewing data from multiple domains side-by-side. There was also an acknowledgement that employing familiar Microsoft graphical elements, such as pie charts, line graphs and colour formatting makes dashboards easier for non-analysts and non-technical stakeholders to view and digest.

Key point: the power of hooking up Google Sheets and GA should not be overlooked. Scheduling capabilities provide a useful and simple way to get daily/weekly overviews. These are both free, and can be easily shared and accessed.

Adam Englebright’s slides can be seen here and Neil Barnes slides and templates can be found at online – we’ll share the link shortly.

So there are the points of discussion which stood out most for me at this year’s MeasureFest. As always, there were some great quality talks from some super experienced and savvy marketers. Let me know what stood out for you from this year’s event. What one thing that you heard would you take away and action this week?

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