Floor 9

It’s the end of the decade! Floor 9 hosts Scott and Adam sat down with Christina and Richard from the strategy team to review some of the hottest trends that happened over 2019 while prognosticating a little on what may come in 2020. A big thank you to all our listeners! We’ll be back with a CES episode, live from Vegas, in January. Happy holidays! What We Covered: The biggest surprise in media an...

Welcome back to Floor 9. This week hosts Scott and Adam are joined by Ben and Ryan, two gaming experts on the Lab team, to talk all about the latest developments in the gaming space, as well as what they say about the future of gaming. From the new cloud-based gaming services like Google Stadia to the shifting landscape of game streaming and esports, the Lab team went deep into dissecting the vari...

Welcome back to Floor 9. This week, hosts Scott and Adam are joined by Chad Stoller, the Global Chief Innovation Officer at UM, to talk all about the intensifying streaming wars. Recorded on the day of the U.S. launch of Disney+, we start with our first impressions on Disney+ and how it stacks up to existing competitors, before moving on to discuss how we think the U.S. streaming landscape will pl...

Welcome to our big Hawaii Five-O episode, where we take a deep dive into the future of social media and what they will mean for brands. Joined by Christina, co-hosts Scott and Adam discussed everything from the rise of TikTok to the new connected communities that are forming online as social media is slowly being unbundled into new platforms and niche communities, social media advertising will nee...

Facebook’s recent Oculus announcements left us wondering, what is the social network company trying to get out VR. In this week's episode, Scott and Adam discuss the state of virtual reality technology and why VR adoption has stalled. Then, Christina joins the group to talk about a potential future “metaverse” where people will create, socialize, and even do business in, as well as dissecting the...

Following Amazon’s big announcements from its packed Echo event last week, we had the pleasure of chatting with Eric Turkington, vice president of strategic partnerships at Rain, a creative agency that specializes in voice and conversational interfaces, about Amazon’s voice strategy, the status quo of voice tech adoption, the challenges and efforts in finding better use cases for voice, and the br...

Apple hosted its annual iPhone unveiling event on Tuesday and the Lab team assembled once again to talk about the highlights and key takeaways from this year’s keynote. While many may regard this year’s event as quite unmemorable and perhaps even boring, we actually think what Apple unveiled (but not necessarily talked about on stage) lays a solid foundation for what is shaping up to be an excitin...

In this episode, we sit down with Oscar Ortega, VP of Talent at the UM Studios team, and Adam Simon, executive director of strategy at the Lab, to discuss the status quo and the future of influencer economy. Starting with the very definition of “influencer,” the dominant social and live-streaming platforms on which they depend, and the increasing fraud found in today’s influencer economy, we disse...

In this episode, we sit down with Vicent and Michelle from the Magna Global team to talk about the latest in podcasting. Starting with the new podcasting report that Magna recently released, which found that ⅓ of US consumers are now listening to podcasts, we talked about how podcasting is growing as an advertising medium, how it still has plenty of room for further growth, and the hurdles it will...

In this episode, we start in the future with a short story about a world dominated by Facebook’s Libra after it took over as the global currency. Then we come back to the present where Scott chats with Adam and Christina from our strategy team on just how likely that Libra-dominated future could be. We also get to hear from two members of our global team, Felipe Kopaitic from our LatAm team and Ka...

In this week’s episode, Scott sits down with the Lab’s head of strategy, Adam Simon, to talk about everything noteworthy from Apple’s WWDC event last week. From new AR tools to new privacy features, Apple is dedicated to position data privacy as a key selling point of its ecosystem while also making a considerable effort to ensure the consistency of its user experience across different devices. Ha...

In this week’s episode, we are joined by Kenton Langstroth from Intersection, a smart cities technology and out-of-home advertising company based in NYC. And Terri Rockovich, a direct-to-consumer marketing veteran and founder of D2C pet food brand Jinx. The last few years have seen substantial growth of D2C brands, leveraging social media and lifestyle content to directly connect with key demograp...

At Google’s annual developer conference on Tuesday, CEO Sundar Pachi kicked off the opening keynote address with a new mission statement: “building a more helpful Google for everyone”. Throughout the keynote, Google touted the many benefits that Google’s services and products, powered by its collection of personal data, provide for everyday consumers and help improve their lives. In this episode,...

Where is Facebook going, and what does that mean for brands that advertise on its platforms? This week, your host Scott sits down with Adam and Christina from the strategy team to discuss the latest announcements from Facebook’s annual developer event this week and what they mean for the social network. As Facebook starts to work on transforming itself into “a privacy-focused social network built...

Joined by special guest Lin Liu, Chief Strategy Officer of UM China, Scott and Richard have a fun chat about how the trends in our 2019 annual Outlook report are playing out in China, the similarities we see in the unbundling of search and the rise of lifestyle brands, and the divergence in regards to tech regulations as well as attitudes towards data privacy and automation between the West and th...

In this week’s special episode, Scott sits down with Adam and Christina from our Strategy team to talk about the trends we laid out in our annual Outlook report this year. Starting with the overarching trend of the unintended consequences of technology and the souring consumer sentiment, we discussed how social and search is being unbundled into smaller communities and platforms, how the rise of s...

It was “ Show Time ” indeed in sunny California at the March Apple event on Monday. Oprah, J.J. Abrams, a sleepy Chris Evans, and other A-list Hollywood talent were all in attendance to help roll out Apple's new Apple TV+ service, which will house all of Apple's original programming that is in development. Additionally, Apple announced some other new service offerings including Apple News+, Apple...

Welcome back to Floor 9. This week, we are delighted to chat with Damian Bradfield, President and CMO of WeTransfer, about how WeTransfer aligns their services with the creative community, how their unique ad products differ from the display ads commonly seen on the likes of Facebook and Google, and what today’s companies must do to navigate the online and offline world simultaneously. Plus, we al...

In this episode recorded on Valentine’s Day, we talk about Spotify’s intensifying love affair with podcasts. Joined by Adam and Christina from the strategy team, we talked through what Spotify’s recent acquisitions of Gimlet Media and Anchor means for the company, for the other podcast players (mainly Apple), and for the future of the entire podcast industry. Adam also reveals his long-winded pers...

In this week’s special episode, we are proud to present a live recording of a Retail Innovation Week panel discussion that we recently put together in collaboration with PSFK. Our Strategist, Christina Adranly, led an esteemed panel with executives from social platforms Reddit and Snapchat and brands Johnson & Johnson and Floyd to talk in depth about the role of social media in brand building,...

Welcome back to Floor 9! Once again, the Lab team is starting the new year strong to bring you our insider take on the 2019 CES. As the biggest consumer tech convention on earth, CES showcases the latest trends in innovation and sets the tone for the rest of the year. The Lab team (Scott, Angel, Adam, and Christina) recap what we saw from the show floor and summarize the trends, which includes: 5G...

Live from the Acast holiday party it is a Floor 9 holiday special! Scott is joined by a number guests within the audio space covering a range topics all about audio. Creative best practices, the power of audio, challenges the space will face in 2019 and more are discussed in this episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As we wind down 2018 Scott, Adam and Christina reflect on the past year and discuss the predictions that were made in our 2018 Outlook. What We Covered: Will world governments regulate any of the major tech platforms? What verticals will Amazon tackle next? Does Facebook enter the home? Will Apple turn Siri into a true platform? How will the use cases and business models for AR develop? How much m...

This week, we had a tri-coastal conversation with special guest Tom Donaldson, VP Creative Play Lab at Lego Group, and Adam Simon, our head of strategy, about how technology is changing the future of play. The tri-coastal trio tackles a range of topics including AR & VR, voice-enabled devices, the role of education and end with a conversation about the growing concerns around screen time. What...

This week, we sit down with two special guests — Nick Johnston, Editor-in-chief from Axios, and Joshua Lowcock, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer / Global Brand Safety Officer of UM Worldwide — to talk about the current landscape of news consumption and where the future of news may be going. Social media has no doubt forever changed the way we keep up with the news, for better and, perhaps mo...