Category Archives: Commerce

Media, Thy Name Is “Acquisition”

Need The Talent? Buy The Company!

As heads swirl over the growing number of media acquisitions in 2015, last year’s predictions for these trends have proven true and then some. Although federal regulators rejected Comcast’s recent bid to acquire Time-Warner, now Charter wants Time-Warner, — and will likely get it.

I’ve found VentureBeat’s acquisition page with clearly marked abstracts topped with headline links pretty well sums up a media buying trend that has not happened since the last months of the Clinton administration. We all hope innovation drives this trend, and not “buy this week and sell the next” approach among those who stand to make solid dough, especially paper dough.

Not Just Tech Is Buying Up Tech
Not only have tech companies come after boutique media companies in droves not seen since 2000, traditional companies are continuing to beef up media talent they don’t have internally, and simply buying companies that do have the talent. Call this latter trend of “tiny tech acquisition” ongoing preparation for The Internet of Things.

According to Jacob Mullins of Exitround, today we continually have big, strong companies clamoring for relatively small buys (under $100 million):

Do You Take Your Yogurt With New Media?
“UnderArmour acquired MapMyFitness. Hearst acquired BranchOut. Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. Walmart acquired over 15 tech companies in the past four years. There are more corporate buyers in the market than ever, and as detailed by The Economist, “25 of the 30 firms that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average” which include everything from The Coca Cola Co. to Caterpiller Inc. have a corporate-venture unit. Even Chobani, the Greek yogurt company, has a tech incubator. These are all attempts to assimilate technology into the businesses of large companies whose core business or focus is not technology.”

But we still have large tech and media companies going hard after smaller tech companies, again according to Mullins of Exitround:

“This year we’ve seen an inordinate number of billion dollar venture-backed exits such as Nest (acquired for $3.2B by Google), Beats (acquired for $3B by Apple), Minecraft (acquired for $2.5B by Microsoft), Oculus VR (acquired for $2B by Facebook), Twitch (acquired for $970M by Amazon) and of course the largest venture-backed exit of all time with Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp.”

Four Additional Top Headlines During This Age Of Tech Media Acquisitions & Mergers

“Amazon Trumps Apple’s Beats Acquisition With Music Streaming”

“Three Strong Reasons Why Regulators Will Let Charter Buy Time Warner Cable”

“2015 Will Be The Year Of The Tiny Tech Acquisition”

“AT&T still throttles unlimited data, and FCC isn’t promising to stop it”

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Amazon’s Dash Button: Easiest & Wildest Way Yet To Buy Family Products

Amazon might convince all of us how easy this “Internet of Things” might get — and potentially, how ubiquitous.

Never mind, if possible, concerns and promises over Amazon’s controversial delivery drones, otherwise unmanned, small, whirling, low-altitude flying machines (with live-feed cameras) delivering products to our homes. Also never mind, if you can, concerns over all those potential additional connectivity needs foreseen to be required inside our homes. (More on that in a minute.)

It’s just too darn easy to use Amazon’s new Wi-Fi Dash Button (introduced the day before April Fools Day, 2015). All Amazon requires to buy products is pre-enabling your phone, and pushing a separate “dash button” that you can place almost anywhere in your home. Welcome to Amazon on your fridge, on your coffee maker, on your kitchen sink, on your washer and drier, in your bathroom medicine chest.

Or stuck, of course, to your tissue and toilet paper holders.

And stuck on your hallway walls. In your cabinets. On your stairwell. In your closets. And stuck on your home office desk. Anywhere and everywhere in your home are good by Amazon.

Running out of Tide? Push Amazon’s “Tide” Dash Button. Low on Gillette disposable razors? Push Amazon’s Gillette Dash Button. Jonesing for some good, old-fashioned Maxwell House? Push Amazon’s Maxwell House Dash Button.

In fact, avoid shopping altogether and push your Cottonelle, Bounty and Smart Water Amazon Dash buttons, along with your Olay, Glad, Gerber Amazon Dash buttons, and increasingly those of other international brands.

While most of us can still marvel at the sheer technology of easily pushing a button — while Amazon of course repeatedly dings our credit cards along the way — and have products delivered to our doors, what are the possible societal effects if Amazon and other in-home Wi-Fi ordering systems become widely adopted?

Delivery logistics technology and low-skill manual labor to ship products will surely rise, but getting out of our homes might become less necessary. Grocery stores and large box stores as we know them will surely lose customers, but cheaper prices for packaged goods might benefit customers, at least in the beginning. To be sure: Amazon and their partners will undoubtedly learn a lot more about us, while we sate ourselves with oodles of Cottonelle, Tide and Bounty.

In fact, these dash buttons are just the beginning, says the Wall Street Journal: The truer order of the Internet of Things is that our home, personal and business devices will do our ordering FOR us. Won’t we all be happier if systems charge our credit cards or online accounts, and simply order things and deliver them to us? Surely, we are told, we will.

Here is a piece on Amazon’s most recent home-ordering product from The Wall Street Journal’s Nathan Olivarez-Giles: “Amazon’s Dash Button Is Not a Hoax, It’s Phase One”

Finally, here is Ian Crouch’s take from the April 2, 2015, edition of The New Yorker: “The Horror of Amazon’s New Dash Buttons”

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.