By David Farrell
Terry DiMonte signing off at month's end
Veteran CHOM 97.7 radio host Terry DiMonte is retiring after 43 years. The popular Montreal radio host is set for his final live broadcast at the end of his shift on May 28. He joined CHOM as the Morning Man in 1984, and moved to MIX 96 in the '90s. He then took over for George Balcan at CJAD 800 and returned to CHOM after a four-year stint at Q107 Calgary.
Media and telecom consumer trust at an all-time low, Canadian study finds
Consumer trust for big brands dropped during the pandemic amid concerns about how ethically companies behaved, a 2021, U of Victoria Gustavson Brand Trust Index study has found.
Among the findings:
Trust in media is at an all-time low. In the spring of 2020, the media category saw a spike in trust as people tuned in at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, the trust bubble has burst, with all traditional and new media brands (except for Maclean’s magazine) giving up most (if not all) of the gains they saw early on. Social media brands such as Facebook remained among the least trusted in the index.
And trust in Canadian telecom companies is on the rise, but sadly it is viewed as the second least trusted category. Past year-on-year results had telecom companies showing signs of trouble, with nearly all of the companies seeing a decline in their brand trust scores. Three of the big four telecom companies, however, saw significant improvement after Covid struck as they provided critical infrastructure for both work and social interaction. – Source
Bites
– Isabelle Mondou, currently Associate Deputy Minister of Canadian Heritage, and Deputy Minister for the Covid-19 Response (Communications), Privy Council Office (on assignment), becomes Deputy Minister of Canadian Heritage, effective May 3.
– Bell has agreed to acquire the operations of Montréal's Octane Racing Group Inc., promoter of the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix, the largest annual sports and tourism event in the country. The agreement extends through 2031. Bell is ensuring tickets for the 2020 race are valid for the 2022 event.
– The Banff World Media Festival has announced that Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault will give a virtual keynote conversation at the annual on Thursday, June 17.
– Bell has launched a cyber security service awkwardly called Bell Security Unified Response Environment (BSURE). The new service is available to Bell Business Markets customers
Why Verizon sold AOL and Yahoo for about 1% of their peak valuation
Verizon acquired Yahoo for $4.48 billion in 2017 and AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion. The deals were meant to give the telecom giant lots of data so that it could sell targeted advertising against its media assets. But it quickly became clear that the data-based ad play wouldn't work, as it was too difficult to compete with the marketing prowess of Google and Facebook.
Tim Armstrong, who was hired in 2015 to run Verizon's media operation, left abruptly in 2018, about a year after the Yahoo deal.
CEO Hans Vestberg, who became CEO of Verizon in 2018, quickly abandoned plans to invest in the media arm. Verizon took a $4.6 billion write-down for its media unit in late 2018, and failed to invest meaningfully after that.
The big picture: Verizon's rivals have also invested in giant media companies, but those deals have borne more fruit in the streaming era. – Sara Fischer, Axios
Using AI to track how customers feel — in real time
It’s easy to see why quantitative surveys became popular: They’re a way to ask a huge number of customers how they felt. Qualitative approaches, like focus groups or manually reading and analyzing customer feedback, were too labor intensive to scale. Now, technology has changed what’s possible, and tactics need to catch up.
The first and most significant change firms should make is to flip where they’re investing in their analysis of customer sentiments. They should start with the qualitative comments, and then turn to the results of their quantitative surveys. If they have the right tools to analyze the qualitative data (e.g., customer relationship management systems, social media, customer reviews, emails, call centre notes, chatbots, etc.), firms could even consider ditching quantitative surveys altogether, as these make it possible to hear what customers are thinking and feeling across multiple touchpoints in real-time. – Mohamed Zaki, Janet R. McColl-Kennedy & Andy Neely, Harvard Business Review
America's new confederacy of dunces
According to the US census, millennials became the largest living generation in 2019. By 2050, according to the Pew Research Center, there will be about 25M more millennials than any predecessor generation. Millennials already account for 35 percent of the US labour force; By 2029, they are projected to account for as much as 75 percent and much the same dynamic applies to consumers. Millennial consumers spend close to $400B every year, Some of the strongest characteristics of millennials are that they tend to be more racially diverse, more convinced of racial discrimination and more inclined to back Democrats. – Financial Times
