Business

Last week, more than 188,000 tech enthusiasts descended upon Las Vegas for CES to get a glimpse of the latest and greatest gadgets from around the world. As far as dazzle, the show didn’t disappoint. Hundreds of products were on display, including eye-popping 8K TVs, super-fast computers, dancing robots, self-driving cars and higher-tech drones.

Connected intelligence is leading the way in transforming media, and we asked some of our global experts across Kantar to create 12 lively predictions for 2019. They are intended to be useful and practical, not grand airy-fairy concepts. We want to help marketers and agencies tackle their media and effectiveness challenges head on.

Fortune 500 board representation of women and minorities saw an all-time high at 34 percent (1,929 board seats), compared to 30.8 percent in 2016 (1,677 board seats). Total minority representation increased to 16.1 percent (912 board seats) from 12.8 percent in 2010, the first year Fortune 500 data was captured. Report findings point to the increase being driven by the Fortune 100 companies, which have 25 percent women and 38.6 percent women and minorities.

Deloitte Global forecasts smart speakers will be worth US$7 billion in 2019, becoming the fastest-growing connected device category. This is according to Deloitte’s 18th edition of Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions.

Chapter Two:  Hispanic Americans – There have been Hispanics living in the present-day United States since the Spanish started roaming around Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth. But it was the 1980 Census that led some white Americans to wonder whether the country was “browning.” The Census made headlines when it proclaimed that there were 14.6 million Hispanics living in the U.S., an increase of over 50 percent from 1970. By 1990, the number, largely driven by immigration, had increased to 22.4 million. Headlines were made again, big time, when the 2000 Census showed that there were 35.3 million, meaning that Hispanics had surpassed African Americans as the largest minority in the country. In 2018, that number was more than 60 million, over 18 percent of the U.S. population. The number of Hispanics in the U.S. is expected to grow to 106 million by 2050, at which time Hispanics will make up nearly 30 percent of the population.  By David Morse / New America Dimensions

Consumer confidence among Hispanics in the U.S. improved in the fourth quarter of 2018 as optimism continued to grow about their financial situation as well as the economic outlook for the U.S., according to a new national consumer sentiment index conducted by the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative (FAU BEPI) in FAU’s College of Business.

It’s CES week, meaning that all that’s happening will stay in Vegas. Yes, you are attending a ton of meetings and presentations, and perhaps even find time to walk the floor and get dazzled with all the latest shiny objects.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• If you are a government official vulnerable to blackmail because, say, a foreign power has a “kompromat” in its possession (eg; a salacious video of your naked self canoodling with a sex worker in a hotel room), it is not a privacy issue, it is a matter of integrity.
• “Never do or say anything you wouldn’t do or say in front of your kids.”
• Or in front of your constituents.
• Or your significant other.

Twenty-seven million Americans are starting or running new businesses, based on data reported in the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United States Report: National Entrepreneurial Assessment for the United States of America released by Babson College.    

No longer a futurist’s daydream, artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting significant investment and growing quickly. According to a December 2018 estimate from tech research firm Tractica, the direct and indirect application of AI software generated $5.4 billion in worldwide revenues in 2017, and is forecast to produce a whopping $105.8 billion by 2025.

The future of real estate will be significantly influenced by women, millennials and Hispanics, according to realtor.com’s analysis of first names on 2018 home sales deeds.

TurboTax, from Intuit Inc, announced that its TurboTax Blog will now be available in both Spanish and English, making it one of the most comprehensive free tax information resources available to U.S. Spanish-speaking audiences.

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The advertising industry lost a pioneer and friend on January 1, when Cynthia-Perkins Roberts passed away. Cynthia was VP of diversity marketing and business development at our sister industry trade association, the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB).

Chapter One:  Melting Pots, Multiculturalism, and Marketing to the New America  Early in his 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Republican candidate and billionaire real estate mogul, Donald Trump, won popular support promising to build a wall along the Mexican border, throw the Mexicans back, and ban Muslim immigration.  In support of Trump, self-described “race realists” popped up on conservative talk radio, television, and internet decrying blacks for “playing the race card” and accusing President Barack Obama of policies favoring blacks to the detriment of whites.  Said one Long Island housewife in a New York Times interview, “Everyone’s sticking together in their groups, so white people have to, too.”  By David Morse / New America Dimensions

The TV and OTT landscapes continues to shift and slide as consumers adopt digital video and streaming options, and the companies producing long-form content make bets on where audiences will spend their time. Here are eight digital video market predictions for 2019.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Imagine if you knew exactly how much your boss makes.
• Imagine if you knew exactly how much the dealer and the manufacturer are profiting on that new car you want to buy.
• Apply this to every transaction: from groceries to taxes, from healthcare to education.
• We’d do away with most of the drama of everyday life.

In this video, Keith Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus, DDB, states, “We over-appreciate data and under-appreciate data”, and he is right. We tend to over-appreciate the data which tells us what people do, and under-appreciate the data that tells us why they do it.  by Nigel Hollis

In 1979, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter launched his Five Forces framework with a powerful statement: “The essence of strategy formulation is coping with competition, yet it is easy to view competition too narrowly and too pessimistically.”

The US health industry has often lagged other industries when it comes to modernizing. Once thought to operate outside the greater US economy, the industry—with its byzantine payment system, complicated regulatory barriers and reliance on face-to-face interactions—is being disrupted.