In this podcast Antonin Facatier, Editorial Director for Western Europe at YPulse, discusses how young consumers in Western Europe are distinct from their North American counterparts.

Topics include:

• The coherence of Western European youth culture.
• What Western European youth consumers are looking forward to doing in 2023.
• The importance of diversity to young consumers in Western Europe.

In today’s podcast Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates, discusses innovation, business empathy and how leaders can build the skills to ‘meet the moment’ in a time when change is not only constant, but accelerating.

Topics include:

• The things you can do to train yourself to be more future focused.
• Why it’s important to pay attention to fringe behavior.
• How business empathy is distinct from a customer centric strategy – and why it matters.

There has been a lot of buzz around distributed ledger technologies, like blockchain, and how they could revolutionize the way people market their businesses.  

Today we’re speaking with professor Mingyu (Max) Joo about how distributed ledger technology could help improve brand safety, consumer privacy and transparency in digital advertising. 

Topics include:

• The current digital advertising ecosystem and where the disconnects between advertisers, digital publishers and consumers currently exist.
• The four properties associated with distributed ledger technology that underly their promise, but also make their adoption challenging.
• Four recommendations for how distributed ledger technology can address these issues and improve the digital advertising ecosystem.

Today we’re speaking with Renji Bijoy, founder of Immersed, a company that is removing the constraints of physical offices and empowering users around the world to access portable, distraction-free virtual workspaces.

The conversation centers around the evolution of VR technology and what it means for both individual users and businesses.

Topics include:

• How VR technology has evolved the user experience.
• What users experience when they work in a virtual space.
• The expanding number applications for shared virtual environments - from business, to education, to live entertainment, the metaverse and more.
• Why Apple’s new VR headset is likely to be game changing.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses the impact of diversity and inclusion for GenZ & Millennial consumers.

Topics include:

• The preferred terms that young consumers like to use when describing their own multiracial & multicultural identities.

• Why YPulse had decided to retire the BIPOC label.

• How young consumers feel about the current state of representation in media, entertainment and gaming.

• The impact of authentic inclusion and representation on brand affinity.

Attention is at the heart of today’s economy. It may start with stopping the scroll, but success requires sustained engagement and holding attention beyond the first click. 

In today’s conversation David Schweidel discusses the research he and his colleagues have recently conducted into what drives sustained attention.  

Topics include:

• Why the news that people share on social media isn’t the same the news articles that they actually read.
• Why the language you use, the actual words and syntax, changes whether or not you sustain reader interest.
• Which types of emotions generate more engagement and how not all emotions are created equal.

Young consumers learn about all things cultural, political or commercial through social media. Anyone who wants to engage audiences, be they consumer products companies, lifestyle influencers or political movements, meet their audiences on social platforms. Like with everything else in our constantly changing world, social platforms themselves are evolving. TikTok is the latest social juggernaut disrupting the social media ecosystem.

Today we’re speaking with Michael Haenlein about not only where people are engaging, but how engagement on social platforms has been changing and what it means for everyone who uses them.

Topics include:

• How social media’s relationship with people’s real world lives has evolved.
• The ways in which TikTok is unique.
• Why anyone who wants to use TikTok for marketing should first set up their own account and start exploring.

Change in how marketers think about engaging with consumers is a constant and the rate of change is accelerating. 

NFTs are part of the new marketing landscape. What they are and what they mean to consumers is still being explored as is how they might function for marketers.

Today we’re speaking with Anatoli Colicev for a deep dive into NFTs and how they can bring value to brands.

Topics include:

• What NFTs are.
• How NFTs can expand the ways marketers engage with consumers.
• Why NFTs shouldn’t be treated like a one-off product release, but rather an ongoing marketing campaign.

”Our everyday micro decisions set the table for the macro decisions that we know full well have the potential to change everything.”  

–Wise Decisions 

In today’s podcast Jim Loehr discusses Wise Decisions, the book he recently co-authored with Sheila Ohlsson, about how to make better decisions.

Topics include:

• Decision Fatigue: What it is, why it happens and what to do about it.
• Why writing your thoughts out longhand can be so helpful in training your own inner voice to be a more effective coach.
• Why stress is the stuff of life.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses Gen Alpha, the generation right behind GenZ.

Topics include:

• When Gen Alpha was born, how old they are today and why you should start getting to know them.
• Who is raising Gen Alpha and the way parenting is changing.
• How family values are being redefined and what it means for Gen Alpha (and everyone else).

Our Emotional Intelligence – our ability to be smarter with our feelings and to be able to leverage this understanding to help us make better decisions – correlates with success factors like effectiveness, relationships, well-being, and quality of life. In other words: It’s important.

Today we’re speaking with Joshua Freedman, cofounder and CEO and founder of Six Seconds about generational differences in Emotional Intelligence and what this means for leaders at work and society at large.

Topics include:

• The surprising difference in empathy scores between men and women.
• The importance of collaboration, connection, and sense of community to emotional well-being and what it means in a hybrid work environment.
• If it’s possible to have a successful, perpetual, super hard-core work environment.

Despite Coinbase’s recent 100M settlement with New York regulators, Blockchain technology is here to stay, and it is going to have profound game changing consequences for how the internet works and business operates.

Today we’re speaking with David Schweidel about the opportunities and risks blockchain presents for marketers.

Topics include:

• Why a ‘distributed’ ledger is so revolutionary and how it works.
• How smart contracts work and why, if they had been in place, the Taylor Swift ticketing debacle might not have happened.
• How blockchain relates to the attention economy and how it could revolutionize digital advertising.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses about how young people are redefining commitment to their partners, friends, and with themselves.

Topics include:

• The way young consumers are redefining commitment.
• Explaining what a “situationship” is and why a lot of traditional ideas about relationships have gone out the window.
• How young consumers prioritize themselves, their friends and their relationships – and what it means for brands.

”It doesn’t matter what you do; you’re never going to eliminate pressure, insecurity, doubt, fear or anger, but you no longer need to let those feelings control you. Through preparation and changing the way you choose to show up every day, you can be better equipped to weather the next storm, whenever it may arrive.” 

- Bill Murphy, Thriving in the Storm

In today’s podcast Bill Murphy discusses his new book, Thriving in the Storm, and the principles that anyone can tap into in order to help them overcome any adversity.

Topics include:

• How to strengthen your mindset.
• What it means to ‘build your stress muscle’ and how to do it.
• How to stop yourself from anxiety cycling.

”Nothing compares to the thrill of innovating.”  Jump First, Think Fast

In today’s podcast Frank O’Connell discusses his new memoir, Jump First, Think Fast, and how his experiences have informed his approach to business.

Topics include:

• The relationship between marketing and product development.
• How to truly operationalize 'knowing your customer.'
• Why mindset can beat skill set.

Gamification is a hot topic with marketers, but not all gamification efforts will be successful.

Today we’re speaking with Magdalena Bekk. She and her colleagues have done research into when gamification works, when it doesn’t and why.

Topics include:

• How humans process information and what it means for gamification effectiveness.
• The way people determine what is relevant to them and how it’s linked to emotion.
• When gamification works and what this means for marketers.

Influencers are very important to marketers, but how to assess the pros and cons of different follower counts is a topic of great discussion. What is the optimal number of followers for an influencer to have?

Today we’re speaking with Simone Wies, Alexander Bleier and Alexander Edeling.  Our conversation discusses their research and explores the answers to this question and more.

Topics include:

• The optimal number of followers for an influencer, if you’re working with them for an Instagram post or story.
• Which operational choices might change this ‘goldilocks’ inflection point - and influence marketers’ ROI.
• If it is possible to extrapolate these results to other platforms.

Today we’re speaking with Matthew Leising a book author and reporter who has been covering crypto since 2015. Last year founded DeCential to highlight the stories of the people creating the new blockchain fueled internet and financial system.

Our conversation explores blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs and Web 3.0.

Topics include:

• Why blockchain is important.
• Why many blockchains take a tremendous amount of energy to run and why ‘proof of stake’ could change this.
• Why NFTs have value.
• Why there’s scarcity of digital real estate in Web 3.0.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses the different diagnostics they use to assess a brand’s performance with young consumer audiences.

Topics include:

• The different factors that they measure when assessing brand love.
• Why being cool is different from being hot – and why it matters.
• Why a wholistic approach, across diagnostics, is necessary to achieve peak brand performance.

Gaming has been smashing Hollywood’s earnings and in 2021 the global ‘games market’ posted $180 billion in revenue – which is more than Hollywood and music combined.

Suffice it to say:  Gaming is huge.

Today we’re speaking with Jamin Warren, CEO and founder of Twofivesix, about how brands can engage with audiences in the world of gaming.

Topics include:

• Why understanding your audience's gaming affinity, activity and identity is core to success.
• The questions businesses need to ask if they’re engaging a company to create a campaign that targets gamers.
• Why brands don’t necessarily have to be in a game to effectively reach gamers.

Marketing is the business of understanding marketplace competitors as well as defining, positioning, and promoting products to target customers. Marketers are tasked with developing the strategy to boost sales and revenue, and one of the ways they can do this is through customer base analysis.

Today we’re speaking with Jan Valendin. 

Our conversation explores how he and his colleagues have used recurrent neural networks to innovate the process of customer base analysis.

Topics include:

• How their deep learning model leverages observed behavior and auto feature extraction to predict future behavior.
• Why having a large starting data set and at least a thousand customers is necessary to take advantage of the promise of this approach.
• How using this approach can help marketers ranging from charities to streaming entertainment providers proactively manage their customer base.

In this podcast MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, shares their recent research into the way young consumers feel about TikTok and the impact that TikTok has had on the larger social media context.

Topics include:

• How young consumers feel about TikTok vis-à-vis other social platforms and media companies.
• How young consumers’ experience on TikTok is influencing their expectations about other platforms.
• What young consumers expect from brands if they want to engage with them on TikTok.

In today’s podcast Alyssa Gelbard discusses how the recruiting process and your employees’ communication behaviors impact your brand.

Topics include:

• How what you post on LinkedIn impacts your company’s brand.
• The ways in which you can (and can’t) leverage your teams’ LinkedIn profiles and posts.
• Why the experience of all job candidates (and not just the people you end up hiring) matters to your brand.

Brands are increasingly leaning into influencer marketing. As with most things, digital regulations lag real world scenarios and the guidelines around advertising content disclosure vary.    

Today we’re speaking with Alexander Edeling and Zeynep Karagür about their research in to how, why and when ad disclosure matters for influencer marketing.

Topics include:

• How ad disclosure impacts consumer engagement with branded content.
• The factors that marketing practitioners should consider when selecting one influencer over another.
• What the data means for how marketing practitioners work with influencers.

In today’s podcast Nick Zeckets, founder, and CEO of Air Traffic Control, discusses how machine learning has allowed his business to mine qualitative information from a businesses’ first party data and power true personalization.

Topics include:

• The difference between personalization and hyper segmentation.
• How AI and natural language processing is powering a 1:1 connection between marketers & their audiences.
• Why first party data is still a largely untapped resource … and the future of marketing.