Re-Wired Radio: Ranee Chung of Mercury Media: “Apps Are the New Advertising”

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In Hong Kong, the rapid pace and the hyper dense population can mean a wonderland of split testing and data analysis for mobile apps developers.

Ranee Chung, CEO of Mercury Media, is a former advertising executive who was born in Hong Kong and has worked in the United States for years. She has returned from a stint in the United States to launch Mercury Media. She talks about how apps are the new advertising — instead of straight from the brand messaging, apps enable brands to build a culture and community around the app and the brand.

She and her partner Julien Hauss sat with me at a local Starbucks in Central, Hong Kong to talk about the launch of their new app, OpenBar.

You can listen to the radio show here.

An Airline Commercial That Is About What We Think About

We talk a bit at the Re-Wired Group about how the airlines could pander to our sensibilities better. We talk about it, not because we think we are more amazing than you or anyone else. We talk about it because it seems that airlines try to sell us on features.

But Delta Airlines has done something a little bit different. They have a new video advertising their Delta Airlines app, and it panders not to our wish that we could always sit in first class. It answers a question we have had before: what happens when our bag leaves our possession and travels on our flight to the next destination?

Now we know.

Your Luggage2019s Journey Through The Airport – Watch MoreFunny Videos

Missing Link Discovered Between Brands and Consumers?

An MIT scientist Dr. Deb Roy was charting the “word births” of his first child as he learned to speak. After filming about 90,000 hours of video in each room of his house, Dr. Roy then took the data and funneled it through a whole mess of semantic engines and analytsis tools.

He happened upon an interesting discovery that has prompted him to start a venture capital firm and use his language birth methodology in the advertising industry. The discovery could shape new ways of looking at how people engage in social media, a territory that feels ripe for disruption in how consumers and brands interact. But first, the kid learning how to speak.

The discovery has to do with how both the teacher of the new word and the leaner of the new word change their frequency of speaking as one learns the word being delivered.

First, the video that shows his son learning to speak the word ‘ball’:

The video shows:

“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.

Dr. Roy thinks something about this process can be deployed in research about consumers, and how people engage with content on TV.

Roy is now taking the amazing research capability and team he’s developed and applying it to commerce. He’s on leave from MIT and has founded a VC-backed company calledBluefin Labs that applies these same high-powered analytics to relate, not the speech of a child to that of a father, but events broadcast on TV to conversations taking place in social media, the better to chart “engagement” with the State of the Union Address or Jersey Shore or a car commercial.

The article doesn’t say exactly what the parallel is between engagement in media and learning how to speak, but there is something there with how the programs Roy used to whittle down thousands of hours to the points of most importance.

Maybe brand managers can utilize this technology to figure out when consumers finally click with a brand. Does it really take constant exposure, and constant interaction, the way a child needs a trainer to take on a new word?  Or is branding more about a single moment, or a blending of word, action and emotional energy?