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wristwatchjournal · 5 years ago

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What We Can Learn From Watch Enthusiast Humor On Instagram

Instagram for watch enthusiasts, collectors, and lovers of horology can provide many things — including humor. For some watch lovers, Instagram is a place to share their latest acquisitions, or what they chose to wear on any particular day, with friends. For others, it is a place to judge what pieces tend to be popular with other collectors. For many, it is a place to gauge, with various levels of accuracy, what other timepiece enthusiasts and collectors feel about hot issues of the day. Satire and comedy is a time-honored approach to discussing challenging or deeply political issues — a practice that appears to be flourishing on wristwatch social media feeds. Let’s take a look at a sampling of what watch collector humor looks like on Instagram these days. First, a bit of a macro-conversation about consumer sentiment on social media, in general.

Watch brands are already keenly studying consumer sentiment on Instagram, though many are guilty of taking statements too personally. Brand managers are known to react harshly to what are, in reality, private conversations among groups of collectors. Stories of money being pulled from media, brands being pulled from retailers, and jobs summarily terminated, all stemming from the publication of sentiment or opinion are unfortunately all too common. This has compelled many of the most prolific critics of watch industry practices on social media to be protectively anonymous about their identities.

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A post shared by Horological Dicktionary (@horological_dicktionary) on Sep 16, 2019 at 7:52am PDT

While transparency in media is preferred, society tends to offer an exception to those standing up for ethical discussions when real and present dangers exist if their actual identity is made known. So is the power of large corporate-owned watch brands that — under threat of draconian bosses — seek to quash all “negativity” online, no matter its appropriateness. In this regard, watch enthusiast humorists have a special heroic status among the community, given their openness to discussing tough issues or calling someone out.

At its worst, Instagram watch collector humor is crude and mean-spirited. Much published watch humor focuses on attacking brands and product models whose designs and prices are not personally to the liking of the poster. This can have the effect of shaming people into purchasing “safe,” albeit unoriginal, watches and preventing more expressive and individualistic choices that help make the watch collecting hobby well-rounded for a global assortment of tastes and lifestyles.

At its best, Instagram watch collector humor is poignant and meaningfully activist in nature. The traditionally closed doors of watch brand boardrooms and the lack of open discussions about real-world consumer problems are exposed and even celebrated by the watch collector community on social media. Instagram appears to currently be the platform of choice for mostly anonymous satirists who poke fun at the watch world while, at the same time, slyly suggesting where improvements can be made. In my opinion, the real value of watch collector humor on Instagram is that it does the very necessary job of helping consumers to not only question propagandist content unwittingly presented to them but also to ask watch consumers to question their own collecting and purchasing behavior.

With watch brand managers already having made it clear they will not self-police when it comes to unsustainable business practices, only market forces (consumer behavior) will lead to system and policy change within the industry that produces the products so many people admire.

I’ve also come to the interesting conclusion that Instagram might be a very poor place for novices to learn about watch collecting and enthusiasm. During a recent speech and in some interviews, I made the statement that people just getting into timepieces might want to avoid looking at watches on Instagram for the first three to five years of their journey as a collector. Only after that might they be well-equipped enough with knowledge and experience to navigate the world of opinions and pictures on the popular Facebook-owned social media platform.

Why, exactly? At first, my recommendation against using Instagram for novices might seem counterintuitive. Isn’t Instagram valuable as a discovery engine, allowing fresh collectors to become exposed to the larger world of wristwatch brands and model choices? While Instagram may have been useful as a watch product discovery tool in the past, in more recent years, the changing content-display algorithms on Instagram have almost entirely eroded away at the platform’s ability to truly expose consumers to the larger variety of watches out there.

Studying the Instagram platform today reveals that users whom the platform deems to be interested in the topic of timepieces tend to be shown posts about the same watch brands, and the same watch models, over and over again. This leads consumers to believe there is a much smaller assortment of choices or that there is a much smaller assortment of watches that interest enthusiasts. A number of watch collectors I polled seem to be experiencing this, and it falls in line with Instagram’s own interests to show what it deems to be popular content to users so that they stay on the platform for as long as possible. Users perceive Instagram as automatically introducing them to content they might like but don’t know to search for. The reality is that Instagram — when browsed as a watch lover — tends to repeat a few key models from about five to six watch brands, as opposed to opening up the larger universe of timepiece appreciation and variety to the user.

The reality is that if you are in search of new watches to be interested in, Instagram appears to be a relatively poor choice today. Of course, I can advocate for the human-curated selection of watches on editorial publications such as aBlogtoWatch (and others), as well as simply browsing large multi-brand retail platforms online ranging from eBay to brand-authorized dealers, as a way to discover new brands and models.

It is probably for the better that only mature watch lovers (after they have purchased a number of watches over a three- to five-year period of time) participate in the watch collecting community on Instagram because much of the best humor and satire on the platform is very “inside baseball,” insofar that most novices would not get the joke. After looking at a cross-section of watch enthusiast comedy posts on social media, certain trends emerge that describe what is on the minds of watch enthusiasts and what they are frustrated about.

The social commentary (comedy or otherwise) about watch collecting on Instagram falls into three main categories. First is commentary about watch industry or brand practices. This involves product and brand marketing, sentiment about retail and buying watches, as well as the experience of owning and servicing watches. Much of this commentary is similar to how people might poke fun at politicians, local government, and dealing with government officials. Thus, there is a particular focus on pointing out unfairness, greed, hypocrisy, social scandals, ignorance and irony, and generally obnoxious behavior or pretentiousness. Anyone interested in political humor on the Internet (classy or crude) will find this entertaining.

The second area of discussion relates to commentary about particular watches — often about the five or six primary brands that Instagram tends to display in Instagram feeds. Sentiment ranges from poking fun at watch designs to their prices and functionality. A particular area of focus seems to be comparing watches to other memes, visual objects, or people. The community seems to have particular brands that appear to get undue negative commentary that at times seems unfair. This isn’t surprising, however, because in all enthusiast communities I’ve been exposed to, a few select brands or products always appear to be the preferred butt of jokes.

That said, when you see a timepiece you personally dislike visually, it can bring a guilty sense of glee to giggle at someone else publicly insulting it. The opposite can be true when a product or brand you personally enjoy seems to be unfairly harpooned. Seasoned collectors tend to have more confidence and such behavior probably doesn’t affect their sentiments much, but I do worry about newer watch enthusiasts being shamed away from taking interest in brands that the community appears at first glance to joke around about. What particularly bothers me about this practice isn’t that it is very funny and correct, at times, but rather that if you look at the watches that are insulted most, they are those with more modern, original designs. Contrast that with the watches that appear to be made fun of less, or others venerated…. which tend to be extremely conservative in their design. It would be a shame for fresh timepiece enthusiasts to dampen their appetite for more open-minded products simply because people they have never met choose those watches as easy targets for anonymous jokes on social media.

New watch lovers who participate on social media engage in the practice of posting a picture of a watch they recently purchased on social media and then requesting feedback on it, such as, “Hey guys, what do you think about my new watch?” This request for social validation might be appropriate among a close circle of friends, but when posing such a question on a large, open forum such as Instagram, really nasty comments can be lobbed in ways that I would characterize as irresponsible. This is one of the major reasons I recommend that novice watch lovers avoid platforms such as Instagram until they have more experience and confidence in their timepiece tastes and choices. Only then is a person in a better position to ignore or laugh off negative commentary about their watch from strangers.

The final and probably most endearing area of watch humor on Instagram are remarks on the behavior of being a watch lover and collector. This area of comedy is probably what helps bring watch collectors together the most because someone is publicly sharing the sentiment that many people feel privately. To realize that you aren’t the only one to feel a particular way about collecting or obsessing over timepieces helps not only to validate the experience of being a watch lover but also makes it less of a lonely pursuit. Indeed, one of the primary reasons most watch enthusiasts go online in the first place (aside from wishing to learn about new watches) is because they lack a strong social group in the real world within which to share their passion for watches.

The volume and veracity of watch enthusiast humor and satire on Instagram is a marked demonstration of how emotional this hobby is. It is also a good indicator of what collectors are currently concerned about. Finally, I will discuss a few trends I have seen in the watch industry and consumer humor on Instagram these days. First and foremost is product pricing and availability. These are two separate but albeit related concepts that go to the heart of the experience of buying a watch. A large number of popular watches are called out for being too expensive, and the experience of not being able to find or buy a watch you want is also mentioned quite frequently.

People also like to poke fun at overzealous watch retailers and sales personalities on social media. There are a number of would-be salespeople who disguise themselves as thought leaders or media personalities. The intelligence of the watch enthusiast community typically sees through manipulative practices and likes to poke fun at it. Similar areas of discussion occur as enthusiasts poke fun at poor watch brand marketing and communication that they see as akin to propaganda. In general, watch enthusiasts appear to reject market manipulation and being lied to — which seems to happen on quite a regular basis.

A major area of humor relates to pointing out how otherwise “innovative” brands tend to copy one another both in marketing communication and design. Copycats are called out and sometimes viciously lampooned with jokes, and there’s also general humor about designs that the community feels are unattractive, lazy, unoriginal, or generally uninspired are a common theme on Instagram.

This is a good opportunity to draw parallels between this observational study of social media watch enthusiast sentiment and data I recently collected in an aBlogtoWatch audience survey. First, I am going to make the assumption that the watch enthusiast on aBlogtoWatch is very similar (if not in many instances the same people) as those who frequent Instagram. What strengthens this supposition is that aBlogtoWatch audience members tend to be more mature and experienced watch lovers, and the ones who have the information and understanding necessary to make fun of topics related to watch collecting on Instagram are also experienced enthusiasts.

In the study on aBlogtoWatch, we found that around 80% of watch enthusiasts felt that the marketing, advertising, and communication they received from the watch industry did not have them (as a target audience) in mind and was generally ineffective as good marketing. When people who enjoy watches feel that the companies they are interested in are not speaking to them or are missing the mark when speaking to them, it tends to suggest a high probability of dissatisfaction by the consumer toward the companies that produce the products they want to like. Thus, I can suggest with some confidence that the generalized negative sentiment toward major parts of the watch industry by watch enthusiasts on social media may be an outcome of a generalized marketing and advertising failure by the watch industry toward the watch enthusiast audience. This would be yet another signal that the watch industry (if the negative sentiment concerns them) could improve timepiece collector sentiment by creating communication and marketing messages that actually have them in mind.

In terms of being a watch collector, the community likes to joke that timepiece enthusiasts are both obsessive and spend far too much time viewing watches online, and also how the experience of buying watches can be ruinously expensive (if unchecked). It is very likely that social media peer pressure can incite people to purchase products they cannot easily afford in order to be “part of the club.” This is also unfortunate and deleterious to the experience of a new watch collector because rather than be shamed for what they cannot afford, they should be encouraged to buy the best at the price level they can afford — another reason why Instagram is probably not a wise tool for those just getting into the watch collecting hobby.

Thank you to Jason Sarkoyan for assistance in selecting Instagram posts for this article. For seasoned collectors, the Instagram community can provide companionship, information, and good times. It can be worth sorting through much of the irrelevant stuff to discover the gold. Happy surfing, fellow online watch lovers — and be sure to “like” the best of Instagram watch humor.

The post What We Can Learn From Watch Enthusiast Humor On Instagram appeared first on Wristwatch Journal.

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xtruss · 5 years ago

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US Elections 2020

The age of the elderly candidate: how two septuagenarians (a person who is from 70 to 79 years old) came to be running for president

Biden and Trump have been eager to prove their virility, calling into question what effect old age has on the leader of the US

— The Guardian USA | David Smith in Washington | Thursday, 29 October 2020

Donald Trump, 74, is fighting an lection against an even older Joe Biden, 78. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

“I woke up and I felt good,” Donald Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Arizona, slamming the side of his lectern as he described hospitalisation with the coronavirus. “I said, ‘Get me out of here’. Boom! Superman!”

As the US president mimed Clark Kent ripping up open his shirt to reveal the Man of Steel’s “S” logo, the crowd chanted: “Superman! Superman! Superman!” The rally ended with loudspeakers booming Y.M.C.A by Village People: “Young man, there’s no need to feel down …”

Seventy-four years old and clinically obese, Trump appears eager to prove his virility. He is fighting an election against a man who is even older – Joe Biden turns 78 next month. If Biden wins, he will eclipse Trump’s own record as the oldest person to be sworn in as president.

The statistics are counterintuitive in a society that can often seem obsessed with youth. Voters’ thirst for change did not prevent this election being contested by two septuagenarian white men. But it has fuelled debate over whether the mental and physical toll of old age could impair the decision-making of the person with the nuclear codes.

Former president Jimmy Carter, 96, is the longest-lived US president in history. Photograph: John Amis/AP

“I hope there’s an age limit,” Jimmy Carter, who at 96 is the longest-lived US president in history, told an audience in Atlanta last year. “If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president. You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way.”

Carter was 56 when he was beaten by Ronald Reagan, who at 69 was then the oldest person elected to the presidency. Reagan endured a gentle decline over two terms and was sometimes mocked for memory lapses and self-contradictions. Five years after leaving office he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Ronald Reagan, at 69, was the oldest person elected to the presidency in 1980. Photograph: Chuck Robinson/AP

Aware of the concerns, Biden’s campaign released a medical report last December saying he is a “healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”. Trump, meanwhile, “remains healthy” according to the results of his latest physical exam, which the White House made public in June.

But the president has sought to weaponise the issue. As the election draws near and he barnstorms the country at campaign rallies, he is making baseless claims that “Sleepy Joe” is suffering cognitive decline, senility or even dementia. “He’s mentally gone,” Trump told Fox News. He also tweeted a meme that said “Biden for resident”, picturing the Democrat in a wheelchair seated among elderly people in a nursing home.

Biden responded in kind during an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes programme last Sunday. “Hey, the same guy who thought that the 911 attack was a 7-Eleven attack,” he said. “He’s talking about dementia? All I can say to the American people is watch me, is see what I’ve done, is see what I’m going to do. Look at me. Compare our physical and mental acuity. I’m happy to have that comparison.”

Critics have suggested that Trump’s crude tactics could be seen as insulting by elderly voters and backfire. They also point to examples when the president slurs or uses the wrong word, and an incident when he walked gingerly down a ramp after speaking to West Point military cadets.

Donald Trump works in a conference room while receiving treatment for coronavirus. Photograph: Joyce N Boghosia/The White House/EPA

Trump’s age came under further scrutiny earlier this month when he was infected with the coronavirus, which severely affects the elderly. He made a speedy recovery but then said in a confusing video message: “We’re taking care of our seniors. You’re not vulnerable but they like to say you’re vulnerable. You’re the least vulnerable but for this one thing, you are vulnerable. So am I.”

It is Biden, however, who is more historically unusual. The last five Democratic presidents were John F Kennedy (aged 43 on taking office), Lyndon Johnson (55), Carter (52), Bill Clinton (46) and Barack Obama (47). For Republicans, Trump fits a more familiar pattern.

Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “He was by no means the first ‘older’ nominee from the GOP [Grand Old Party]; Reagan was 69, John McCain was 71 and Mitt Romney was 65. The Democratic candidates have trended younger as far back as JFK in 1960, and they have only been successful at winning the presidency after 1964 with candidates under the age of 55.

“The party presidential nominating system tends to produce nominees who are older because of the type of electoral political experience typically required of successful nominees and the networking that is involved with state party activists over time to win state primaries.”

The nominees’ seniority in years raised the stakes in the recent vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence, 61, and Kamala Harris, who has since turned 56. Both candidates were asked whether they had discussed with their respective nominees the question of presidential incapacity; both avoided giving a direct answer.

Schiller added: “Americans are living longer than ever, and in better shape, so Joe Biden at 77 may very well be in better shape than Ronald Reagan was at 69. Donald Trump has proven to be a vigorous campaigner out on the road at the age of 74.

Joe Biden bounds up the steps of a plane in Delaware. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“However, I do think that in Biden’s case, as it was with John McCain, the VP choice carries more weight than it would if he were younger because voters are taking into account the fact that the VP could step in to serve as president.”

Trump and Biden are old politicians in American terms but not in global terms. Winston Churchill was 76 when he was re-elected as British prime minister in 1951 and the Queen is the world’s oldest head of state at 94. She is followed by Raúl Castro of Cuba at 89, Colville Young of Belize at 87, the Cameroonian president, Paul Biya, at 87 and the Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, at 85, according to Wikipedia. US supreme court justices continue to sit on the highest court until death.

Drexel Heard, the youngest Black executive director of the Los Angeles county Democratic party, said: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87 and I think that people still respected her legal mind and everything she stood for. She still had a few more years left on her and nobody questioned her fitness for the supreme court.”

Heard, 34, added: “I don’t think that age has been a big factor in this election but, in down-ballot races, we are seeing more and more younger candidates across the country run for office. That’s the silver lining to a lot of that question, which is, what happens next?

“Joe Biden has always said he’s essentially a transitional president and he knows what’s coming up next. That’s part of the reason why he chose Senator Harris as his running mate and certainly why he continues to endorse candidates up and down the ballot at a younger age.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, 79, showed that age is no barrier to campaigning. Photograph: Nicole Hester/AP

During the past two Democratic primary cycles Senator Bernie Sanders, now 79, showed that age is no barrier to campaigning hard or exciting young voters. There are still questions over whether Biden can prove similarly inspiring but, among those in the demographic who do vote, there is little doubt he will crush Trump.

Coby Owens, 25, a civil rights activist from Biden’s home city of Wilmington, Delaware, said: “It was a difference between ideology when it came to the young people excited about Bernie and the young people who are excited about a Biden campaign. But I think, at the end of the day, you’re seeing all the youth-led organisations coming together and coalition-building for Biden.

“One of the things that we know is that, regardless of where he stands on a policy right now, we have a better chance of getting what we want and what we need for our future with a President Biden and Vice-President Harris rather than a President Trump and Vice-President Pence.”

A more surprising shift is taking place at the other end of the age spectrum. Republicans have led among the elderly by around 10 percentage points in the past four presidential elections. But Covid-19 has hit this group especially hard – about four in five of the Americans killed by the virus are above 65 – and appears to have dragged down Trump’s popularity.

The president trails among elderly voters by more than 20 points, according to recent CNN and Wall Street Journal/ NBC News polls. This swing could prove critical in states such as Arizona and Florida, which have a high number of retirees. Both campaigns are making huge investments in ads targeting older voters.

On a recent visit to The Villages retirement community in Florida, Trump claimed: “Biden’s plan would mean America’s seniors have no air conditioning during the summer, no heat during the winter and no electricity during peak hours. It’s true.” It is not true.

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ncmagroup · 6 years ago

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posted by Ted Bauer

Apologies for this because it may sound a bit buzzwordy upfront, but the entire mobile marketing ecosystem runs on user trust.

You probably knew that, but let’s explore a little bit further. Here’s a good place to start: individuals report spending 25% or more of their time on mobile, yet at most organizations, mobile advertising is around a 10-12% spend. That seems to be a disconnect: mobile is where 1 in every 4 minutes are being spent, but only getting a dime of every ad spends a dollar?

The main reason for the firm/organization side seems to be: “Well, mobile is not a direct revenue channel. It doesn’t immediately trigger a purchase.” For the time being, we can gloss over the fallacies of that assumption. Mobile is actually close to a $3 trillion industry overall. But let’s pass Go and come back to that.

If you think mobile advertising isn’t effective, one of the core problems is user trust. Even though we live in a data-connected world, the effectiveness of that data is sometimes questionable. As a result, mobile messages are sent to customers with little to no relevance or context for the customer. At that point, the message is simply an interruption to their mobile experience. User trust has dropped.

Personalized user experiences require trust

People spend a lot of time on their phones (see above). They want that time, and those experiences, to be relevant to them. Have you ever been on Instagram, not had a cat, and gotten ads targeted to people with cats? This happens to me more frequently than you’d think. Do you think I’m feeling high sensations of user trust at that moment? No. I’m thinking someone at that cat toy company doesn’t know how to target ads.

Impersonal marketing leads to distrustful, unengaged users. (And former users.)

AdAge even mentioned this last year: “Marketers are failing to create trust, the value in mobile marketing.” This part stood out:

Mary Clark, chief marketing officer at Syniverse, said her company recently conducted a study of consumers in eight countries and discovered that half of those polled trust their mobile operators and brands less than they did three years ago. The three biggest concerns, she said, were security, transparency, and control. In other words, people don’t think their information on mobile is very secure and they don’t trust how it is being used. “It’s the biggest gap we’ve got to cross to have successful mobile engagement,” she said.

We know mobile users want–we can even say demand–personalized experiences. But they won’t sacrifice their sense of trust to have them. They’ll find a brand who can give them both instead.

Trust and security

Security is definitely a concern for mobile; it’s one of the reasons why mobile payment adoption has been slower than expected, for example. 60 Minutes even did a feature last year on how easy it is for strangers to hack into your phone.

Jerry Seinfeld has a joke that goes something like this: “If your phone battery dies, and your phone is dead, are you even alive?” (Gong sound.) While maybe little much, many people do equate their phone with their life — and that means personal context, i.e. bank information and intimate text/photos, is on there. People, in general, want to make sure that’s secure. On their end, trust is an expectation.

But if a mobile marketing strategy involves unwanted emailing, out-of-context ads, and irrelevant push notifications, user trust is not there.

How can mobile marketers build trust?

A good place to start is the research of Paul Zak, who focuses often on the neuroscience of trust. Some of his work is summarized in a recent article on the science of trust in the workplace, and this part applies to mobile marketing (even though it’s not about mobile on face):

The best precursor to communication is to give people autonomy over their work. It sounds counterintuitive, but it shows employees that their managers trust them, and this sign of trust in the workplace also helps to keep people happy at work.

While that quote is about employee retention, the top part — “give people autonomy over their work” — is crucial to mobile marketing strategy.

You need to engender user trust by transparently explaining to your users:

What’s happening with their data

What you’re going to serve (and why)

How they can change their options/preferences.

Trust is closely associated with the idea of reputation, and reputation is often built by consistent behaviors and openness/transparency. Mobile marketing should be no different. Yes, ultimately you’re trying to sell something to someone. We all understand the end game. That’s why your app onboarding is a huge opportunity for mobile marketers.

It’s your chance to build trust with your newest app users, and help them understand how your app uses their data–and why that’s ultimately good for them.

The Bottom Line

If you want your mobile marketing strategy to succeed, it’s not really about spreadsheets and road maps and launch dates. Those are important, but they’re not the bedrock.

The bedrock is making sure you establish user trust around security, how you communicate, where their data goes, and your overall end game. Be transparent and respectful of them even if some announcements are scary or less-than-stellar. This is how you build relationships and thus trust.

What else would you add about user trust in mobile marketing?

Go to our website: www.ncmalliance.com

Do Your Users Trust You? Your Mobile Marketing Depends On It. posted by Ted Bauer Apologies for this because it may sound a bit buzzwordy upfront, but the entire mobile marketing ecosystem runs on user trust.

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michaelfallcon · 5 years ago

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Survey Results: How Has Coffee Consumption Been Impacted By COVID-19?

It’s safe to say we all drink coffee. If you’re reading this right now and you don’t drink coffee, chances are you meant to type Drudge, not Sprudge. But with the global shutdown caused by the outbreak of COVID-19, doing much of anything these days requires intentionality. There’s no more popping out for a quick coffee at moment’s notice (or for anything for that matter); going out requires planning.

So we here at Sprudge wanted to know: how has Coronavirus affected your coffee consumption habits? Have restrictions on movement caused you to drink less coffee? Or are you stuck at home with nothing better to do than drink another cup? To find out, we created a poll a few weeks back to hear from the coffee consuming public. And with some 500 responses on the books form around the world, we can offer some concrete conclusions today with some confidence.

First: coffee consumption is going away due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the total 471 replies we received, only three stated they are no longer drinking coffee during the pandemic. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be looking at the other 468.

What we’re seeing is, coffee consumption has gone up since shelter in place orders have gone into place around the world. Before coronavirus folks were consuming on average 2.45 cups of coffee a day. That number has since gone up to 2.77 cups, roughly a third cup extra a day representing an over 13% increase. Over half the responses state their coffee consumption has stayed the same, but for folks who did change their drinking habits, their cup count overwhelmingly went up as opposed to down, by a ratio of 2.2:1. On average, those who cut down on their consumption did so by 56%, whereas those who increased consumption did so at a rate of 112%.

And no doubt in some part due to social distancing and sheltering in place, the majority of coffee respondents are purchasing is coming via delivery. 47% of folks state they are ordering their coffee online, with another nearly 12% receiving their via subscription. Grocery stores and coffee shops, ever in that eternal struggle, are duking it out for the remaining purchasers, at 14% and 18%, respectively. Most of these folks, three out of every four, said they are making coffee with some sort of manual brew method. 92% of the remaining individuals opted for a coffee maker. Some just like instant.

We also asked folks: are you willing to try out a new roaster or purchase a new brewer right now? In a seemingly counterintuitive pair of responses, folks were generally about as willing to try a brand new roaster as they were unwilling to purchase a new brew method. 62% of folks stated they were very willing to try a new roaster whereas a little over 52% state they had no intention of buying a new brewing method while sheltering in place. Drilling down further, though, a larger pattern begins to emerge that hints at the non-arbitrary relationship between the responses to these two questions.

There appears to be an inverse correlation between the two. That is to say, looking at the new brewer finding in terms of new roaster willingness and vice versa, the willingness to unwillingness to try a new roasters maps pretty directly onto the unwillingness to willingness to buy a new brew method.

This, I believe, can be explained by three things: necessity, price point, and availability. Coffee is seen more as a necessity than a new brew method is. (Unless you don’t have any brew method at all. In which case, a brewer would be necessary.) And trying a new roaster for a week would most likely mean not buying coffee from your usual source, so you would be replacing dollars spent on Roaster X with dollars spent on Roaster Y for a mostly net-zero dollar output.

The last consideration is simple availability; there just aren’t as many novel-to-you brew methods as there are roasters. There are, for instance, over 2,500 roasters worldwide on our #StillRoasting map. It’s safe to say that even the most adventurous coffee drinker still has 2,000 new roasters on that map alone that they could try. There are not 2,000 new brew methods out there (unless you count every new “reimagining” of the French press out there on Kickstarter, which I most certainly do not).

In summation, if you feel like you’ve been drinking more coffee recently, you’re not alone. We’ve found that coffee consumption during COVID-19 is trending upward and moving online. Folks are generally interested in trying new things, though only in fiscally conservative ways. So drink more coffee, and enjoy the ritual of it all. The world may be a little uncertain right now, but brewing up a nice cup of coffee offers a little escape for those who can afford it, even only ever so briefly.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Survey Results: How Has Coffee Consumption Been Impacted By COVID-19? published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

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shebreathesslowly · 5 years ago

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Survey Results: How Has Coffee Consumption Been Impacted By COVID-19?

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

from Sprudge https://ift.tt/3bjT0Yg

#Sprudge

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thrashermaxey · 7 years ago

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Ramblings: Skills Competition, Fantasy Lessons Learned From the Peter Chiarelli Era (Jan 26)

If you missed the NHL skills competition, the highlight of the event was US women’s hockey player Kendall Coyne Schofield becoming the first woman to compete in the skills competition. She did not disappoint at all in the Fastest Skater competition, clocking a time of 14.346 seconds. That is an incredibly fast speed.

Turn on the jets and make history, @KendallCoyne.

The @WhitecapsHockey forward clocked a time of 14.346 in the Fastest Skater event to finish ahead of Clayton Keller (14.526). #NHLAllStar pic.twitter.com/1bF1D8p3zh

— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) January 26, 2019

Not surprisingly, Connor McDavid won this event for the third year in a row with a time of 13.378 seconds.

Channelling his inner Al Iafrate, John Carlson won the Hardest Shot competition.

102.8 mph of straight @JohnCarlson74 . #NHLAllStar pic.twitter.com/dz3i70lvXV

— NHL (@NHL) January 26, 2019

I was especially impressed with the skills shown in the Premier Passer event, which was won by Leon Draisaitl. Trying to shoot over those barriers and into those tiny little nets? Goodness gracious. I think this would take me all night!

Draisaitl was dishing out some ferocious sauce in this absurdly hard event

( @EdmontonOilers) pic.twitter.com/rNiIG6z2Nr

— Yahoo Sports Canada (@YahooCASports) January 26, 2019

David Pastrnak was your Accuracy Shooting winner, looking like Brock Boeser at last season’s event (the flow isn’t bad, either).

David Pastrnak can snipe. A blistering 11.309 to take the accuracy shooting competition title. pic.twitter.com/z0rzxTmOmv

— Dylan Nadwodny (@dnadders) January 26, 2019

And here’s Auston Matthews making friends with the fans in San Jose with his jersey tribute to Patrick Marleau.

A little tribute to a @SanJoseSharks legend. #NHLAllStar pic.twitter.com/x0lEVer3Q2

— NHL (@NHL) January 26, 2019

The other big news of the day was the NHL's deployment of Puck and Player Tracking starting next season. You can weigh in on the topic and answer the poll question of whether you are excited about it over at the Forum. One of my initial thoughts: If you are in the stands and you catch a puck with the sensor inside, do you still get to keep it?

At the time, the Peter Chiarelli hiring seemed like the right move for the Oilers. Bringing in a general manager with no previous ties to the organization – particularly one with a proven track record – was long overdue for an Oilers’ team that had been in a rebuild for nearly a decade.

Four years later, it appears that the Oilers have actually fallen backwards. Now they are left looking for a new GM when it became plain to see for even their top management that Chiarelli could no longer be trusted. You’re probably aware by now of the overall damage done to the Oilers’ organization during that time. If you haven’t or you need a refresher, here’s a complete list of the 10 best and the 10 worst moves. In the spirit of balanced journalism, yes, there were positives.

Cam has written an amazing, humorous, dramatic, sensitive, and descriptive piece breaking down the fantasy impact on the Chiarelli firing. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll focus on the lessons learned from the Chiarelli era for fantasy owners. I’m writing this in the spirit of the old Contrarian article that Demetri Fragopoulos used to write here. In other words, some of my lessons might sound like counterintuitive takes. Then again, some of Chiarelli’s moves might have seemed like a good idea at the time (at least to some).

Don’t trade purely to fill a positional need

Trade is one for one: Adam Larsson for Taylor Hall.

— Bob McKenzie (@TSNBobMcKenzie) June 29, 2016

So your fantasy team is stacked at forward but thin on defense. In the hopes of achieving a balanced roster, you are able to find a willing trade partner who in understanding your desire to acquire that blueliner, is able to snag a forward with far superior value from you. You immediately experience buyer’s remorse. That’s similar to what the Oilers must be feeling in shipping away eventual Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall just to acquire Adam Larsson.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a trade with another owner though. The waiver wire is always a willing participant in a deal (more on that in a bit), but even it can’t stop you from exchanging a forward on pace for 75 points for a defenseman on pace for 25 points. Yes, you have other categories to fill, which could be any of plus/minus, penalty minutes, hits, or blocked shots. So maybe a trade is a better option here. But that’s something that can’t be rushed; otherwise, you’ll run into the same problem mentioned in the earlier paragraph.

This will all depend on scoring and settings, but your team might be collecting enough points every week even with a clear deficiency at a particular position or two. Trust me, I’ve read articles and listened to podcasts from fantasy experts in other sports that swear by not worrying much about balancing your team position-wise. Don’t overthink things. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just pick up the damn points. Which leads me to my next lesson…

More frequent trading may not improve your team

Time to reintroduce my analogy that Chiarelli started with a house and is trying to end up with a paperclip. https://t.co/MCyZHUP670

— Justin Morissette (@JustinMoris) November 16, 2018

If you haven’t read the story about the guy who started with a paperclip and made various trades to land a house, here it is. Essentially Chiarelli did the opposite of that when he traded Jordan Eberle for Ryan Strome, then Strome for Ryan Spooner, then placed Spooner on waivers (Spooner is now in Bakersfield of the AHL). Chiarelli took a bad trade, and instead of just eating it, he made things even worse.

I’ve seen this firsthand in fantasy hockey leagues. Several years ago, I had someone join one of my fantasy hockey leagues, and he was very ambitious to win right away (as many new participants are). Once he was handed the keys to his keeper team, he made trade after trade after trade in an effort to keep improving his team, which he never seemed to be satisfied with. The other owners must have sensed that he was unfamiliar with the unique scoring system in this league because of all the trades they agreed to. His result for all his work? He finished dead last that season. Not only that, but in one of his trades he parted with his first-round pick. That pick would have landed him Auston Matthews.

Full disclosure: I generally don’t make many trades, and I very seldom make blockbuster trades (the huge ones literally make my head hurt). Maybe I don't trade much because I'm already confident in the team I've drafted. This season I’ve made two trades in one of my leagues, and none in my other two leagues. In one of those two leagues, which is a league of various fantasy hockey writers, there hasn’t been a trade made in a few seasons. I believe that waiver-wire transactions are a better way to improve your team. I’ll explain why.

Let’s say you have your eye on Player X. You offer your Player Y to another owner, who rejects the offer and requests Player Z (who has higher value than Player Y) in return for Player X. Since you desire Player X so much, you agree to trade Player Z in return. You finally own Player X, but you had to give up Player Z in return. Maybe it's a decent trade for you, but you also may have given up too much.

Now switch that to the waiver wire. We might be talking about lesser players here, but the waiver wire doesn’t pick and choose which player you need to part with. You decide that. You get to pick what you believe is the best player (or one that fits your specific need) for what you believe is your worst player. No counteroffers, no back and forth. Sure, there’s higher potential reward with a trade, but multiply that transaction by the number of add/drops you make in a season and the net gain should be higher.

Let the other owner win the bidding war

Welcome to #OilCountry, Milan Lucic! The #Oilers have officially signed the forward to a seven-year contract. pic.twitter.com/arwp4VjU1H

— Edmonton Oilers (@EdmontonOilers) July 1, 2016

$6 million per season sure doesn’t buy what it used to, does it?

Call this losing the battle to win the war. This section refers mainly to auction leagues, although you could also apply it to at what round you draft a player in a non-auction draft. Now I’m fortunate that I’m in a league where I have 72 hours to decide whether to bid on a player. Other real-time auction league drafts give something like 10 or 15 seconds for a bid to stand, which isn’t a lot of time to formulate a decision as to whether that player is worth a higher bid.

Teams that lost out in the Milan Lucic derby have to be thanking their lucky stars that they were unsuccessful in signing him, provided that they didn’t sign their own white elephant contracts that summer (Loui Eriksson, Troy Brouwer, David Backes, and Andrew Ladd all come to mind, and there could certainly be others). This is where auction drafts can be tricky, because you’ll end up paying too much for at least one player and end up trying to stretch your dollar on the rest.

It’s important that with any player, you set a maximum price that you’re willing to spend. Don’t exceed that price. If someone else is willing to go higher, let them pay that price. They’ll have to patch up the resulting holes in their roster afterward. In a salary cap world, value wins the day.

If you have your own lessons that you believe should apply to the Oilers’ current state, feel free to share below.

Enjoy the All-Star Game.

You have no idea how hard it was to get this picture organized… #NHLAllStar #29NHLMascots pic.twitter.com/UooNK07PpE

— LouieSTLBlues (@LouieSTLBlues) January 25, 2019

For more fantasy hockey information, you can follow me on Twitter @Ian_Gooding.

from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-skills-competition-fantasy-lessons-learned-from-the-peter-chiarelli-era-jan-26/

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

Link

President Donald Trump’s closing argument for the 2018 midterm elections represents a dangerous escalation of demagogic rhetoric. If it works, things are only going to get worse.

During his presidential campaign, Trump shocked the media and half of the country by declaring Mexicans rapists and outlining an isolationist vision for America. He also covertly sent an “us versus them” message cloaked in the rhetoric of jobs and the economy.

“It used to be the cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the damn water in Flint. What the hell!” Trump yelled at the crowd during his final rally in the early morning hours of Election Day 2016.

It was a promise to his white supporters that he would put them ahead of other groups, like racial and religious minorities and immigrants — the very definition of a demagogue politics.

This year, Trump doesn’t bother with fig leaves. He smears minority groups, particularly immigrants, with impunity. This week alone he made comments, sent tweets, and unveiled policies (some real and some fake) all designed to further dehumanize and demonize his scapegoats.

It looked erratic or even desperate, an irrational response to the reality that Republicans continue to trail in the generic ballot days before the election. It might be desperate, but it’s not irrational. Trump has a good reason to act as he has. It’s his most effective political strategy. And it’s a strategy that demagogues know has to keep ratcheting up to work. And if he’s not stopped now, he’ll only get worse.

“Every demagogue acts voluntarily and through choices, they are not how they are painted, they are not creatures of their own appetite, irrational and out of control,” said Michael Signer, a professor at the University of Virginia who has written extensively on demagogues.

“They tend to be extremely opportunistic and shameless and ruthless political actors.”

Trump’s nonplussed response to recent episodes of violence baffled the media, from the murder of a Washington Post reporter in Turkey to a spate of politically motivated mail bombings to a rampage at a synagogue. The press desperately hoped to hear him apologize. His supporters didn’t.

As Patricia Roberts-Miller explains in her book, Democracy and Demagoguery:

It may be counterintuitive, but the charismatic leadership relationship is strengthened by the leader behaving erratically, making what might appear to be irrational arguments, judging situations quickly without much information (especially without expert advice), and making hyperbolic claims (especially about his or her own achievements and, oddly enough, health). Followers don’t expect leaders to be responsible for what they say…their irresponsible behavior is part of their power. Their use of hyperbole and tendency to be unfiltered in speech are taken to signify their passionate commitment to the in-group.

Trump has zigzagged across the country in recent weeks, whipping up crowds by calling immigration a “crisis” (it’s not) and a caravan of asylum seekers thousands of miles from the border planning an impending “invasion” (they’re not).

From the West Wing on Thursday, he spouted old racist tropes about immigrants and foreigners. They bring “big medical problems before they get here.” There are “young men, strong men,” who are joining caravans of asylum seeks. Women should fear them.

Trump’s perhaps lowest point was when he released a campaign video so racist that it’s been called worse than Willie Horton by political historians.

Trump’s message is growing increasingly extreme. Like all demagogues, he has no choice but to continue to ratchet up his worst words and worst behavior. While the media and other political observers struggle to see anything but a meltdown, his supporters see exactly what they want to see. They don’t support him in spite of his behavior. They support him because of it.

Trump’s approval numbers nationally are underwater. But among Republicans, 89 percent approved of the job he’s doing, according to Gallup’s most recent poll.

Meanwhile, his supporters say they believe his line that he’s not responsible for extreme rhetoric in politics or a sense of division in American life. A new Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 80 percent of Republicans agree with Trump’s recent claim that is the national media that has done more to divide than unite the country since Trump took office.

Trump himself has refused to take any responsibility for his language, particularly at rallies where crowds jeer immigrants, Democrats, and other Trump dissenters. “Well, I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up,” Trump said during the week that prominent Democrats Trump had attacked were being sent bombs in the mail. The day FBI agents arrested a suspect, one of Trump’s crowds chanted “Lock her up” in response to a reference to Hillary Clinton.

In a moment of presumably accidental candor, Trump did concede he often says what he wants, whether or not it’s true. “Well, I try. I do try … and I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth,” Trump said.

“The president’s rhetoric has helped to shift discourse norms in our country such that it is more acceptable among more people to denigrate and attack other groups of human beings,” Susan Benesch, the director of Dangerous Speech Project, told the Washington Post. “People feel emboldened to chant those things publicly, which is a specific example of a shift in public discourse in the country.”

The challenge for demagogues is they don’t have much room to reposition themselves. They can’t start capitulating to the media, apologizing for, say, inspiring someone to mail bombs to his political enemies. They can’t start trying to work on policy with experts and release reasonable plans that take many interests into account — that’s the very opposite of why he’s supported. Demagogues draw a line between themselves and supporters and their enemies. There is no ground for compromise.

That leaves them to yell more loudly and with more malice.

“Sometimes it can be an act of desperation, and sometimes it can be an act of pure entrepreneurship,” said Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor and co-author of How Democracies Die. “In the US it’s closer to an act of desperation. Trump has argued pretty consistently that Republicans, as constituted, know that they’re in a fair amount of electoral trouble in the medium term. They’re playing dirty because they’re trying to grab what they can now.”

A sustained resistance has challenged Trump since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women led marches in opposition. Activists kept up the fight, challenging a travel ban with public assembly and challenging Congress on a health care repeal effort. They did not win every battle, but they showed it is possible to use the rights guaranteed by our system of government to hold leaders accountable.

The question is, which force will win on Tuesday?

“There’s a similar wave of activism among rank-and-file Americans who are repulsed by what they’re seeing,” Signer said. “Trump is seeing that and it does alarm him, and he has responded by doing more of what he came into office doing, which is more of the demagogue stuff. You really do have two tsunamis colliding into one another.”

“This is one of, if not the greatest, tests constitutional democracy has been through.”

Original Source -> The desperate demagogue

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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jeroldlockettus · 8 years ago

Text

Nurses to the Rescue!

More nurse practitioners are graduating each year than MDs, but will they be prevented from treating patients? (Photo: COD Newsroom/flicker)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Nurses to the Rescue!” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

They are the most-trusted profession in America (and with good reason). They are critical to patient outcomes (especially in primary care). Could the growing army of nurse practitioners be an answer to the doctor shortage? The data say yes but — big surprise — doctors’ associations say no.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before we start today’s episode, let me ask you a quick question. Why do you listen to Freakonomics Radio? I’m guessing it’s for the same reasons that we make it. Because it seems like a good idea to challenge the conventional wisdom now and again; to dig in and take stuff apart and see how the world really works; also: to explore counterintuitive ideas. Here’s one counterintuitive idea: there’s no way you can give away content like Freakonomics Radio and then expect people to pay for it. Who would voluntarily pay for something you can get free?

But you know what, they do! Not just for Freakonomics Radio, but millions of people do it all the time. Voluntary contributions at museums and other cultural sites; pay-what-you-want meals, and yoga classes. Frankly, this model strikes me as a bit nuts. It makes no sense — and yet, often, it works. And it’s completely Freakonomical. Every week, we give away Freakonomics Radio but we also think it’s worth your support.

The show gets more than 8 million listens every month, so we know a lot of people like it. But: only a very small percentage of listeners make a donation. So: listening — very popular. Giving support to the thing you consume? Not so much.

What’s that about? Maybe the rewards aren’t set up right. But consider this. There’s the short-term reward — a burst of dopamine that makes you feel good right now when you support Freakonomics Radio. Then there’s the long-term reward — keeping something you like healthy and vital for the future — by investing today. Knowing that each week you’re listening to something that you helped make possible. I imagine some of you would be persuaded by that notion. It’s something our friend Richard Thaler, a recent Nobel Laureate, should weigh in on:

Richard THALER: Right, because why should I donate because I can listen for free? So there was a famous paper written by Paul Samuelson defining what’s called the public good problem in economics and proving that for goods like public radio that anyone can consume without paying that no one will pay for it. And what we know is thankfully some people do contribute. And so the real world is a mixture. There are free riders, and there are cooperators.

So what are you — a free rider or a cooperator? Only you can decide. As for us, here we are, just a podcast standing in front of its audience, asking for money with our transparent, truthful nudge. And we’re going to make it easy.

You can invest in the future of Freakonomics Radio, in future episodes, when you text the word “nudge” to 701-01. You can also go to Freakonomics.com/donate and make your donation. Why not, right? After all, you’ve probably been accepting hundreds of nudges for all sorts of things that don’t necessarily make your life better. Twitter notifications on your phone. Those Amazon ads that follow you all the way to your inbox. If you’re working in a big corporate office, your so-called perks — the ping-pong tables and free food — are nudging you to work longer hours, for no extra pay.

Here at Freakonomics Radio, we’re trying to be 100% transparent with our nudges. This show is worth something to you. Otherwise you wouldn’t be listening right now. And we are going to build on the value by making more shows, telling more stories that highlight the amazing connections between economics and human behavior. That’s where your money goes — to making the show. Super simple.

What does that mean? Well, on average, at least five people work on any given episode. Sometimes, it’s as many as eight. Really talented producers who spend their days wrangling the data, lining up the evidence, and tracking down experts that make this show unique. And there are other costs beyond staff — studio time, office space, equipment, engineering and mixing, editing and sound-design software, distribution. And those costs really add up.

So if you want more of this show, more episodes, more exploration of our world through the lens of Freakonomics, now is the time to chip in. Sign up to become a sustaining member, maybe an $8-a-month donation, and you will be joining the other very smart people who already figured out how they want to support a podcast that has been in their lives for years. Join the Freakonomics Radio team, become a member. Text the word “nudge” to 701-01 now or head to Freakonomics.com/donate and make your commitment. Thanks so much.

And now on to today’s episode.

* * *

If I asked you to name the most-trusted profession in America, what would you guess?

MAN: Uhh, most trusted?

MAN: Ohhh. That’s a challenging question. Uhh …

WOMAN: Wow. I’m too old to trust anybody. Uhh …

WOMAN: Maybe something in like the arts?

No, it’s not something in the arts.

MAN: Hmmm. The most trusted profession in America today?

WOMAN: Not politicians! (Laughs)

MAN: Certainly not politicians.

Right. It’s not politicians. In fact, they’re the least-trusted.

WOMAN: The most trusted profession? I can’t quite answer that.

MAN: This morning we had breakfast at the hotel. And the lady who served the breakfast, she looked very, very sweet and kind. So I would say that lady.

No, it’s not that lady.

MAN: Maybe a coach?

WOMAN: Okay, I’m thinking.

MAN: Umm, so many jobs.

MAN: Construction worker.

MAN: Pilots.

MAN: Barbers.

MAN: Uhh… librarians.

WOMAN: I would have to say a teacher.

“Teacher” is a pretty good guess. But not the answer we’re looking for.

MAN: The most trusted profession in America? Uhh … maybe a doctor?

You’re getting warmer …

WOMAN: The most-trusted profession, I would say… nurses. I would say nurses.

Correct! Nurses. For 15 years straight, nurses have topped the Gallup Poll list of professions that Americans say are most honest and ethical. Last year, nurses got an 84 percent approval rating. The next closest: pharmacists, with 67 percent, and then doctors, with 65. Followed by engineers, police officers, and so on, all the way down to journalists (at 23 percent), lawyers (at 18 percent) and, yes, members of Congress (at eight percent).

So why are nurses ranked so high? For one thing, there’s a good chance you’ve directly interacted with one. There are more than 3.5 million nurses in the U.S.; it’s far and away the most popular medical profession, and one of the most popular occupations overall. So wouldn’t it be nice to be able to measure the effect that nurses have on patient outcomes? Today on Freakonomics Radio: we’ll give it a shot:

Martin HACKMANN: So one key advantage of this study is that we can compare the effect of nurses on patient health.

We’ll hear about a huge boom in one subset of nursing:

Kelly BOOTH: I’m really excited to be a nurse practitioner because I want to make the health care system less broken.

We’ll hear about a national movement that’s reimagining the role of nurses:

Janet CURRIE: The evidence seems to be that increasing accessibility of care in this way is actually getting better outcomes.

But: how this movement is running into a political and regulatory system that’s hard to change.

Uwe REINHARDT: It’s just almost insane. It’s like putting the Mafia in charge of the New York Police Department.

* * *

One reason there are so many nurses in the world is that nurses perform so many functions.

Benjamin FRIEDRICH: They have direct patient contact, they provide medication, they monitor the patients, provide counseling …

And yet, despite their prominent role …

FRIEDRICH: Despite their prominent role it’s, you know, their effect on patient health is not fully understood. And so that’s where our paper comes in.

That’s the economist Benjamin Friedrich.

FRIEDRICH: Yes, I’m an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The paper Friedrich mentioned is called “The Returns to Nursing: Evidence from a Parental-Leave Program.” His co-author is Martin Hackmann.

HACKMANN: Yeah, so I’m an assistant professor of economics at UCLA.

Hackmann and Friedrich make clever use of what might be called an accidental experiment.

FRIEDRICH: So we’re in Denmark in the mid-90s. And basically the economy’s not doing so well; relatively high unemployment.

HACKMANN: And the idea at the time was to bring in some public programs that would rotate the workforce and give opportunities for people that are currently unemployed.

FRIEDRICH: And what the government decides to do is expand their existing parental-leave program and offer up to one year of additional leave of absence to every parent with a child age eight or younger.

One year of extra paid leave, that is.

FRIEDRICH: So parents will receive typically 70 percent of their previous income, and with job security to return to their previous position.

So Denmark was offering a rather generous parental-leave program, including a guaranteed return to your old job.

HACKMANN: So any parent could take advantage.

FRIEDRICH: Yeah, so the point is this reform was not targeted at the health sector at all, right?

HACKMANN: Statistically, though, it’s heavily women that took advantage of it.

FRIEDRICH: So it hits health-care providers completely by surprise.

HACKMANN: And that’s one reason why we see these large effects in the nurse occupation, because 97 percent of nurses are female and that’s one main reason why that occupation was particularly affected by the program.

So the new Danish parental-leave program appealed especially to women, and the nursing sector is almost exclusively female, which meant a lot of nurses took leave. But then — here’s the really important part:

HACKMANN: But then there were no unemployed licensed nurses that could replace them.

That’s right: even though this leave program was designed to ease unemployment, it turns out there weren’t that many unemployed nurses. Certainly not enough to replace all the ones who took a leave.

HACKMANN: And that overall led to an average a reduction in nurse employment of about 12 percent.

So an unintended consequence of this parental-leave program was that the nursing workforce suddenly shrank by 12 percent. The doctor workforce, meanwhile, being mostly male, barely shrank at all. This sudden shortage of nursing care turned out to be exactly the kind of shock to the system that a researcher can exploit to measure cause and effect. In this case, Hackmann and Friedrich wanted to see how the nursing shortage affected health outcomes. They had something else going for them: Denmark, like the rest of Scandinavia, is a bit obsessive about record-keeping, and it collects all sorts of personal data on just about every citizen.

FRIEDRICH: So that means we can observe every individual and whether they take advantage of this leave program.

HACKMANN: So that gives us rich information on employment. And then we have very rich health data.

FRIEDRICH: And we can analyze information about patients in hospitals and nursing homes, so we’ll know hospital admissions, we’ll know diagnoses and treatments.

HACKMANN: We see detailed diagnosis codes, so that allows us to zoom into different hospitals sub-populations. We can compare heart-attack patients. We look at people that have pneumonia. Newborns at risk.

FRIEDRICH: And we’ll know from the death register, for example, the mortality rates of different patient groups. And so we can very specifically say which patients were most affected by the reduction in nurse employment at these different providers.

Okay, so that’s a lot of data on nurses, patients, nursing homes, and hospitals. What’d they find? Let’s start with hospitals:

HACKMANN: We do find negative effects on hospitals.

FRIEDRICH: Yes. So the way we measured it was to look at the 30-day readmission rates.

Readmission rate is a standard measure of hospital care — the idea being that if you have to go back to the hospital after you’re discharged, the original diagnosis and care weren’t so great. On this measure, the economists found the nursing shortage led to a 21 percent increase in readmission for adults and children, and a 45 percent increase for newborns. So nurses would seem to be quite important to overall health outcomes. But if you think that effect is large, consider the data from nursing homes, where nurses play an even more prominent role than in hospitals.

HACKMANN: We see that this reduction in nurses leads to a 13 percent increase in mortality among people aged 85 and older.

FRIEDRICH: Yes. So what we find is that in particular circulatory and respiratory deaths in nursing homes significantly increase.

HACKMANN: Just to put this roughly into perspective, right? So the parental-leave program reduced the number of nurses by 1,200 in nursing homes persistently and that increased the number of moralities by about 1,700 per year when you consider the 65-year-olds and older, or about 900 people if you look at people aged 85 and older. So these effects are what we think quite large.

Quite large indeed. Which suggests that the returns to nursing are quite high. So, if nothing else, this evidence would seem to justify the fact that nurses consistently win the most-trusted profession competition. But what else should we make of this finding? Imagine you’re a policymaker. You’d think you’d look at this finding and say — well, since nurses are plentiful, and effective, and relatively much cheaper than doctors, perhaps we should think about reassessing and maybe expanding the role nurses play in our health-care system.

Okay, let’s do think about that. For this part of the story, we’ll bring in Freakonomics Radio producer Greg Rosalsky.

ROSALSKY: The story I’m about to tell goes to the heart of the American healthcare system.

Christy Ford CHAPIN: This very expensive, inefficient model.

ROSALSKY: It’s a story about how political pressures can lead to distorted economics.

REINHARDT: So you should not be surprised that your health spending is double what it is in other countries.

ROSALSKY: And yeah, it’s a story about nurses. But before I start, I should tell you something about myself and nursing. My mom’s a nurse (hi, Mom). My aunt’s a nurse. My sister’s mother-in-law is a nurse. As if all that weren’t enough to make me pro-nurse, then there’s my younger sister.

Alexandra HOBSON: So my name’s Alexandra Hobson. I’m your sister. I’m a Registered Nurse that’s about to graduate from Nurse Practitioner school and I’m excited about the graduation that’s coming up soon. It’s a doctorate in nursing practice.

ROSALSKY: Alex is getting her nurse-practitioner doctorate from the University of San Francisco, where she also got her bachelor’s degree in nursing.

HOBSON: So I’ve been a nurse now for six years and I’ve been mainly focused in primary care, because it’s an area that I am passionate about.

ROSALSKY: Primary care — including things like annual checkups and vaccinations — is usually our first line of defense against chronic health problems. Public-health experts say it’s incredibly important, and the medical literature points to a strong relationship between access to primary care and good health outcomes. Studies also show that in many cases, it can save money, since good primary care means catching and treating ailments before they become chronic, and costly. My sister grew passionate about primary care during nursing school.

HOBSON: Because after doing my rotations in the hospital I saw a lot of complications and advanced chronic diseases that I know could be prevented if provided the right preventative services. Without primary-care services, patients usually wait until they have complex illnesses and they end up in the emergency room.

ROSALSKY: Despite the importance of primary care, America suffers from a shortage of doctors who actually provide it. Of the roughly 600,000 practicing physicians in the U.S., only about a third of them work in primary care. This shortage is getting worse, as baby-boomer doctors retire, and since fewer than a quarter of newly minted doctors go into primary care. By 2030, the Association of Medical Colleges projects a potential shortage of more than 40,000 primary-care doctors.

REINHARDT: I think we underpay primary-care physicians and that’s one reason young people don’t go into it.

ROSALSKY: That’s Uwe Reinhardt.

REINHARDT: I teach health economics, regular economics, and finance at Princeton.

ROSALSKY: Reinhardt says medical students are drawn to higher-paying specialities like plastic surgery and cardiology at the expense of pediatrics, general practice, and other primary-care concentrations. The average specialist earns about 46 percent more than the average primary-care physician. But financial incentives aren’t the only driver.

REINHARDT: It’s an issue of prestige. The culture of the medical school is such that students sort of automatically look up to the specialists and that somehow primary care is kind of viewed as a stepchild.

ROSALSKY: The primary-care gap is increasingly being filled by nurses, like my sister. She worked in a clinic serving Bay Area veterans. While working nearly full-time, she went on to get her masters in public health, and now her doctorate.

HOBSON: Yep, I’m a doctor nurse and proud of it!

ROSALSKY: The nurse practitioner degree, which can be a doctorate or a master’s, requires a lot of training and exams. It leads to a sort of hybrid position, that combines the patient-centered focus of nursing with skills historically reserved for doctors. Like physicians, nurse practitioners, or NP’s, make diagnoses, prescribe medications, order tests and x-rays, and refer patients to specialists. One key difference is the focus and rigor of their training. NPs are required to do hundreds of hours of supervised clinical work and, like my sister, they often spend years in the workforce as a registered nurse before getting their NP degree. But they aren’t required to do a residency, which for doctors is a minimum of three years, typically in a hospital; once in the workforce, their responsibilities vary. For example, in fields involving complex surgeries, NPs assist physicians. But when it comes to primary care, NPs are increasingly taking a leading role.

Surani Hayre KWAN: There are not enough providers to take care of all the patients in the country today.

ROSALSKY: That’s Surani Hayre Kwan, the former president of the California Association of Nurse Practitioners, and an NP herself.

KWAN: And everyone is scrambling to figure out how to fix that problem.

ROSALSKY: Between aging baby boomers and the Affordable Care Act, there’s been a huge spike in demand for healthcare services, especially primary care. But the supply of healthcare isn’t keeping up. It was a similar imbalance, in the mid-1960’s, that led to the creation of the nurse practitioner profession. The federal government had just created Medicare and Medicaid, which provides healthcare coverage to the elderly and the poor. The sudden, massive demand for services was not met with a commensurate explosion in supply. Prices skyrocketed and people found it difficult to get care.

KWAN: So nurse practitioners first became a role in 1965 .

ROSALSKY: The first NP program was created at the University of Colorado by a pediatric nurse named Loretta Ford and a pediatrician named Harry Silver. The original idea was that NPs would provide healthcare to kids from low-income families. But the role soon expanded.

KWAN: The use of nurse practitioners has spread like wildfire to literally every aspect of healthcare. You name it, a nurse practitioner probably works in that field.

ROSALSKY: Over the past decade, the number of NPs in the U.S. has more than doubled, to over 200,000. And more NPs are now graduating each year than MDs.

ROSALSKY: In the spring of 2017, my little sister was becoming one of those NP graduates and I flew home to California to watch the ceremony.

ROSALSKY: Did you hear us screaming your name?

HOBSON: No.

ROSALSKY: Here, give me a hug. I’m really proud of you.

HOBSON: Thank you. Thank you.

ROSALSKY: I also met a lot of my sister’s classmates, and I asked them why they were becoming NPs.

Erin FLYNN: I’m Erin Flynn. I am an LGBT nurse and I’m really excited to be a nurse practitioner because it is a really underserved population that really needs more primary care focused on helping them.

Christian EKLON: Name, Christian Eklon, coming from Daly City, California. Why I’m excited to be a nurse practitioner? I’m just ready to change the lives of my patients.

Kelly BOOTH: My name is Kelly Booth. I am from Phoenix, Arizona, originally and I’m really excited to be a nurse practitioner because I want to make the healthcare system less broken.

ROSALSKY: But as the profession grows, it’s facing legal and political challenges from state governments. In most states, NPs have had to fight to obtain a license that would give them what’s known as “full-practice authority,” letting them provide all the services they’ve been trained and certified to deliver. In California, for instance, they’ve been on the losing end of this fight. Surani Hayre Kwan again:

KWAN: We’ve now had three full-practice authority bills that have all failed.

ROSALSKY: So what’s the problem? To figure it out, I decided to drive up to the state capitol, in Sacramento.

ROSALSKY: After passing through metal detectors and security, I made it to the office of Senator Ed Hernandez.

Ed HERNANDEZ: Hey.

ROSALSKY: Hey, how’s it going?

ROSALSKY: Hernandez represents the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles.

HERNANDEZ: So, by profession, I’m an optometrist. Been one for 30 years, been involved in politics pretty much my whole life. Became an activist, was concerned about health care in the state. How individuals didn’t have access. Decided to run in ’06; got elected. Now I’m in the Senate and been chair of the health committee and I’ve been honored to be a public servant.

ROSALSKY: One of the first big things Hernandez did after getting elected was to form a select committee that analyzed the medical workforce of the state.

HERNANDEZ: We found out there was a huge shortage of primary-care providers but not only was there a workforce shortage, but there was a huge distribution problem of where primary-care providers go to.

ROSALSKY: Where they didn’t go to was California’s rural areas — a trend that holds true in many other states as well. The National Rural Health Association says that a quarter of the U.S. population lives in rural regions, but only 10 percent of physicians actually practice there. There’s a similar shortage in low-income urban communities. In both cases, doctors are reluctant to accept the low reimbursement rates of government-funded health programs. Hernandez wanted to do something about these primary-care shortages. One option would be to get more doctors into the system. But it turns out that’s really difficult. For one thing, Hernandez says, there’s limited capacity at U.S. med schools. Of the 53,000 students who applied for admission in 2016, 32,000 were rejected from all the schools they applied to. That’s sixty percent of all applicants.

HERNANDEZ: So we have a finite number of medical schools, whether it’s in California or across the country. And they’re not growing in leaps and bounds. The biggest hurdle is obviously the costs.

ROSALSKY: There’s also the time and money it takes to become a doctor: four years of undergrad, four years of med school, and then a residency of three to seven more years.

HERNANDEZ: There’s at least 12 years before they’re out in the work force.

ROSALSKY: An even bigger issue is the limited number of residency slots. Since 1965, the federal government has provided most of the funding for residencies through the Medicare program. But the number of Medicare-funded residencies was capped by Congress in 1997; and other sources of funding have been slow to make up the difference. There’s an ongoing debate about the residency system.

One side argues we should remove the funding cap and increase the number of subsidized residencies. Another side would like to see more fundamental reforms. They believe a redesigned system could work without the $15 billion Washington spends on residencies every year. It’s a big, complicated subject and I won’t take you down that rabbit hole now.

The important part is both sides agree the current policy is a key issue behind the shortage of doctors — and why, each year, thousands of med-school grads can’t find a residency. So between the residency bottleneck, and the med-school bottleneck, and the very high cost of tuition, you can see why so few new doctors are heading into the relatively low-paying field of primary care. So Hernandez had an idea. What if, instead of trying to break all those bottlenecks that constrict the supply of doctors, he could encourage a different supply of primary-care providers?

HERNANDEZ: Nurse practitioners — they’re not only less expensive to train; they’re more cost-effective because there’s less overhead for them. They have lower student debt and therefore they’re willing to possibly even take a lower reimbursement. They truly could could fill in the gap when it comes to primary care.

ROSALSKY: But as we heard earlier, California law doesn’t give NPs full-practice authority. Instead, they have to work under the supervision of physicians, who are each limited to overseeing only four NPs. And that supervision can cost a lot of money. Hernandez believes this requirement severely limits the impact NPs can have on closing the primary-care gap. So he began a fight for a bill to free NPs from these constraints.

HERNANDEZ: So what they can do under this bill is exactly what they’re allowed to do under the law right now. The only difference is they can do it independently without physician supervision.

ROSALSKY: The main argument against allowing NPs to practice independently is that they have less training than physicians. But there’s a mountain of empirical evidence from randomized trials, case studies, systematic reviews, and analyses of malpractice claims in states where similar legislation has already passed that all points to the same thing: when it comes to primary care, NPs are just as safe and effective as doctors. Uwe Reinhardt again:

REINHARDT: I am not aware of any literature that said care given by nurse practitioners is of inferior quality or causes safety issues and so on and so forth.

ROSALSKY: Some studies also find patients prefer NPs to doctors, perhaps because they report NPs, on average, spend more time with patients. So their training is less expensive, they get similar or better outcomes. And, by the way, they typically make about half as much as primary care physicians. All this makes NPs good candidates to provide primary care to underserved populations. So you can see why health economists like Reinhardt support giving NPs full-practice authority.

REINHARDT: Well, first of all, I think it would make healthcare more accessible to patients because for many things you don’t really need an M.D., right? But you need somebody who knows how to stitch a wound, who knows if something is going around like the flu and they would know initially what you should do. And secondly it would make it cheaper and more efficient.

ROSALSKY: It’s an idea that has support from a wide range of organizations, including The National Governors Association, the Federal Trade Commission, and the AARP.

HERNANDEZ: businesses, business groups. You know, there was a large coalition.

ROSALSKY: Hernandez, a Democrat, also had support from Republicans, like Senator Jeff Stone, who represents portions of Riverside County.

Jeff STONE: I applaud Senator Hernandez’s efforts. I believe that nurse practitioners could provide healthcare in some of the more rural regions in the state of California that presently are highly underserved. And it’s unfortunate that we have some people that may even lose their lives because they’re not getting the attention, the medical attention that a nurse practitioner can appropriately deliver.

ROSALSKY: With so much support for this bill, and so much evidence in favor, you might think it was a no-brainer for it to become law.

HERNANDEZ: Of course, it’s a no-brainer. It’s the right thing to do. Why it didn’t get through?

Yeah, why didn’t it get through? Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: Greg Rosalsky’s reporting continues, and we hear why:

REINHARDT: They are a regular interest group that wants to shovel money into the pockets of their members.

Also, please consider making a donation to support this kind of Freakonomics Radio episode. You can go to Freakonomics.com/donate or text the word “nudge” to 701-01. We’ll be right back.

* * *

I’m Stephen Dubner; this is Freakonomics Radio; and our producer Greg Rosalsky has been reporting from California about a legislative fight to allow nurse practitioners more authority to practice medicine.

ROSALSKY: Right. Thanks, Stephen. So Democratic State Senator Ed Hernandez was telling us about this bill he sponsored, which had all kinds of support.

HERNANDEZ: Of course, it’s a no-brainer. It’s the right thing to do. Why it didn’t get through? It’s the California Medical Association. It’s the political clout that they have here in the Capitol.

ROSALSKY: The California Medical Association, or C.M.A., is the state affiliate of the American Medical Association, or A.M.A. It’s an organization that combines the non-controversial work of advancing medicine with the controversial work of lobbying the government for its interests. The Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt again:

REINHARDT: In other words, they are a regular interest group that wants to shovel money into the pockets of their members, which is what these associations do.

ROSALSKY: That, of course, is not how the A.M.A. sees itself. “Our mission,” the organization says, “is to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” Reinhardt believes the A.M.A. does, in fact, make legitimate contributions to medicine. It’s their contributions to economics and politics that he objects to. As do many other critics.

CHAPIN: The traditional story about the American Medical Association is just how politically powerful they have been.

ROSALSKY: That’s the University of Maryland historian Christy Chapin.

CHAPIN: I am author of the book Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of The Private Health Care System.

ROSALSKY: As Chapin documents in her book, the A.M.A. has played a central role in the development of the U.S. healthcare system. In the 1940’s, for instance, they helped sink President Harry Truman’s push for universal health care.

CHAPIN: It arguably was the largest campaign ever conducted against one piece of legislation.

ROSALSKY: The A.M.A. has also had a strong hand in shaping the medical marketplace, much to the chagrin of free-market advocates. The economist Milton Friedman, for instance, spent much of his career blasting the A.M.A. for using its political and economic power to stifle competition and drive up prices. This was especially the case when it came to the A.M.A.’s control over medical licensing.

Milton FRIEDMAN: And the control over that licensure procedure is what has enabled the American Medical Association to exercise its monopoly power for these many decades.

ROSALSKY: Friedman argued that the A.M.A. exerted undue control over every step in licensing doctors. The rules governing how to get licensed, the people who sit on licensing boards — even which approved schools students had to graduate from in order to practice.

FRIEDMAN: And by some strange accident, the list of approved schools in every state is identical with the list of schools approved by the American Medical Association.

ROSALSKY: This control, Friedman said, put an artificial limit on the number of people who could become doctors. Not only that, he said, licensing prevented perfectly capable medical professionals —who aren’t doctors — from playing a bigger role in providing care.

FRIEDMAN: You and I know and many of us know that there are many medical practices which can perfectly well be carried out by people who do not have the full training.

ROSALSKY: The net effect of licensing, he believed, was to raise the incomes of doctors and raise health care prices. Friedman wasn’t a fan of any sort of licensing. He saw it as a way that professions seize power and exploit consumers.

FRIEDMAN: And if you really want to know the real function of licensure, of licensing, all you have to do is go and see who goes down to the state legislature to lobby in favor of licensing. Now if the real, true function of licensing is to protect consumers, you’d expect consumers to be lobbying for licensure. But there isn’t an occupation you can name, which hasn’t been down at the state house trying to get licensure.

ROSALSKY: At the California Statehouse, a lot of lobbying in recent years has been aimed at protecting the medical licensure that already exists. Since 2013, when Senator Ed Hernandez introduced the first of his two nurse-practitioner bills, the California Medical Association has spent $9 million on lobbying activities, and another $4 million on campaign contributions through their PAC. It currently employs 10 registered lobbyists. These dollar figures are not attached to specific legislation, but it’s been very clear that nurse-practitioner bills have been an intense focus of the C.M.A.

During that same time period, the California Association of Nurse Practitioners spent less than $500,000 on lobbying activities and only $150,000 on campaign contributions through their PAC. It currently employs only one registered lobbyist. This is a typical story: the C.M.A. can outspend anyone looking to expand their scope of practice. For Hernandez, who trained as an optometrist, the issue is personal.

HERNANDEZ: So when I graduated in 1986, California had one of the weakest scope-of-practice laws in the profession of optometry. We still do and over the years I’ve seen how powerful the C.M.A. is.

ROSALSKY: The same is true for his Republican ally Jeff Stone, who trained as a pharmacist.

STONE: Many will tell you that pharmacists are some of the most-educated but under-utilized health care professionals on the planet. And I tend to agree with those. So you know we’ve we’ve seen these struggles to expand our scope and share those frustrations with our nursing counterparts.

ROSALSKY: When I first began reporting this story, Senator Stone had picked up where Senator Hernandez left off, introducing new legislation to give nurse practitioners full-practice authority in underserved areas. But by the time I got to California, it had been almost completely neutered. It has since become law, but it only allows NPs to independently prescribe one specific drug meant to fight opioid abuse. So what happened?

STONE: Well, unfortunately we have political realities up here. You know I’d like to say that it’s the citizens of this state that really govern this institution. But I’m going to be a first to tell you that it’s not.

ROSALSKY: If the citizens aren’t governing, who is?

STONE: Well, the California Medical Association is a very active political organization up here, as a member of what we call “the third house” and and they do their job; is to make sure that their physicians are able to practice without giving up the scope of their practice to any other entities under just about any circumstances. So they’re a powerhouse to deal with.

REINHARDT: So you have this system where basically the rules have been written by the hospitals, by the doctor[s], by the pharma industry, and so on.

ROSALSKY: Uwe Reinhardt again.

REINHARDT: So you should not be surprised that your health spending is double what it is in other countries, where the supply side isn’t given nearly the power to write legislation, to structure the health system as they will please.

ROSALSKY: It’s a system that the American Medical Association continues to strongly influence, although it’s not as powerful as it once was. The historian Christy Chapin argues it’s lost legitimacy with a lot of doctors.

CHAPIN: As I did very careful research on the association, what I found is that oftentimes the leaders were out of step with what the rank and file wanted.

ROSALSKY: This was especially the case when the A.M.A. fought the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Before then, as many as 75 percent of the nation’s doctors were A.M.A. members.

CHAPIN: Today, their membership is down to about oh I think 20 percent.

ROSALSKY: But, Chapin argues, we’re still living with the healthcare system the A.M.A. fought to create — a system that economists like Reinhardt have long criticized for its inefficiency and for its fee-for-service incentives that drive up costs.

REINHARDT: It’s really something of a shame, but there’s no question the A.M.A. left its stamp on the system that we have.

ROSALSKY: It’s a stamp seen in many places. For instance: the A.M.A. has been deeply influential in setting the rates that the government and insurance companies pay for services. These payment rates are lower for NPs than for MDs, and much higher for doctors with a specialty. Critics say this is a big incentive for specialization, at the expense of primary care. The A.M.A. was also a key player influencing Congress to cap the number of Medicare-funded residencies in the mid-1990s. Again, many argue, this has been a key factor limiting the supply of doctors. Although they and the C.M.A. have since come out in support of more residency funding as a means of addressing the doctor shortage. However, they remain opposed to more fundamental reforms.

I asked the C.M.A. for their position on using nurse practitioners to fill the primary care gap. They replied, quote, “California must take immediate steps to train and retain more physicians” and, quote, “Doing away with physician-led, team-based care is not a viable option for patients.” Uwe Reinhardt is not opposed to team-based care. It’s the physician-led requirement he takes issue with:

REINHARDT: Rather than saying, “Oh yeah it’s great to have nurse practitioners, but they should be under the control of a physician.” I don’t like that arrangement. I’m an economist. I like competition.

ROSALSKY: Going one step further, the economist Dean Baker recently declared that U.S. doctors’ associations, by limiting competition, are essentially acting like a cartel. This, he argued, is a key reason why doctors earn twice as much in the U.S. as in other rich countries. Whether through the A.M.A. or other institutions, doctors remain deeply influential in health policy including, in some states, by sitting on licensing boards for nurses.

REINHARDT: Our our medical boards, the licensing boards, reek of conflicts of interest. I mean it’s just almost insane. It’s like putting the Mafia in charge of the New York Police Department. I mean you just don’t do that. You know I mean why would you have physicians dominating the licensing boards for nurses? So I would have a system where the licensing boards would be much less dominated by practicing physicians and be as clean as can be of conflicts of interest for starters.

ROSALSKY: But in the case we’ve been talking about today — the full-practice authority of nurse practitioners — there’s been a big shift. A growing number of states, facing provider shortages and accelerating costs, have gone ahead and granted this authority: earlier this year, South Dakota became the 22nd state to give the nod.

The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs recently did the same — over objections from the A.M.A. Which means that nurse practitioners have full-practice authority in V.A. facilities even in states that withhold that authority. As for states like California? Well, even there, Reinhardt says, the time will come.

REINHARDT: And I will tell my friends in the C.M.A. in California, you will be defeated. You will eventually lose this battle.

That was Greg Rosalsky, reporting on the push to upgrade the nurse-practitioner model of medicine. The economics of it, at least, are pretty straightforward: a more efficient allocation of resources would lower costs while maintaining or maybe even improving outcomes. Which, I think we’d all agree, the U.S. healthcare system could really use. Remember, we rank No. 1 in the world in healthcare expenditure at 17 percent of GDP. On medical access and outcomes, meanwhile? We are nowhere near the top. So there’s a lot of room for improvement. Making better use of nurse practitioners seems like one good option. Any other good ideas out there?

CURRIE: So retail clinics seemed to me to be a an example of something that could increase competition.

That’s the economist Janet Currie.

CURRIE: I’m the Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

For years, Currie’s research was focused on the wellbeing of kids in particular. Lately, she got interested in the idea of competition within healthcare.

CURRIE: We hear about this a lot — that having more competition in healthcare markets might improve the way that they function. Or conversely, that one of the big problems with healthcare markets is a lack of competition. You know, lots of places that have only one hospital or one hospital consortium, health insurers that are very concentrated, and so on.

For an economist, it’s a bedrock belief: competition helps increase quality and drive down costs. But for competition to be optimal, certain conditions must be met.

CURRIE: And in the case of health care, almost none of the conditions are met for competition to be optimal.

Consider a basic one: price transparency.

CURRIE: So one of the things that’s really the most messed up about the healthcare market is you just don’t know how much anything is going to cost. You go to the hospital. You’ve no idea how much you’re going to have to pay for it. It’s impossible to make rational decisions. It’s really like we’re all groping around in the dark if we don’t know how much anything costs.

There is, however, one healthcare market where prices are posted. They’re called retail clinics.

CURRIE: So what is a retail clinic? It’s a clinic like you might imagine in a drugstore where you can just walk in — you don’t usually need to have an appointment. They have a limited number of services. They have the price posted for the service, and the person that you see is usually a nurse practitioner. There’s not usually any doctor there.

The modern retail-clinic movement got started in 2000, at a Cub Foods grocery store in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where a company called Quickmedx set up shop. Quickmedx is now known as MinuteClinic, and it’s owned by the CVS Pharmacy chain. Other pharmacy chains and retailers like WalMart have followed suit: there are now more than 2,000 retail clinics in the U.S.

CURRIE: They do a lot of immunizations — so things like flu shots are really big. They also do diabetes screenings. So people who have diabetes have to regularly get checked, and so they’ll do those kinds of diabetes checks. They do some asthma type of check. So the kind of thing where if somebody has a chronic condition and it needs to be checked periodically — you can go to the drugstore, get it checked, probably buy your supplies that you need at the same time, and go home.

The nurse practitioners at retail clinics treat a lot of minor ailments like pink eye, urinary tract infections, and earaches. Also: cuts, burns, sprains, and so on.

CURRIE: So you can go online, you know, wherever you are. Look at their posted price list, and you know exactly what it’s going to cost you to go to CVS and get your shot or get whatever it is that you need to do. And so if retail clinics and other types of non-conventional providers created enough pressure that other, more traditional providers also had to be transparent about prices, I think that would have an enormously positive impact on healthcare, healthcare access, and debates about health policy.

Services at retail clinics are significantly cheaper than elsewhere. There’s also the convenience factor.

CURRIE: You don’t need an appointment. You can just walk in and walk out without having to kind of disrupt your day at all. And I think that’s actually really important. They are usually open on weekends. They’re open after school. They’re open in the evening. So I’ve used them frequently. For example, if I had to get a form signed for my child’s school and you know I could just get it done and not have to make an appointment and wait two weeks and then get the form signed.

That convenience, however, could have a downside — as Janet Currie encountered when she read some earlier studies on retail clinics.

CURRIE: Those studies argued that you saw basically people getting more care. So if you make it cheaper and you make it easier, then people go more frequently. And they argued that on net it was more expensive, and not less expensive.

Now, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if more spending leads to better health outcomes. But more to the point, when Currie examined these studies, she saw they didn’t fully consider a huge potential source of saving. In the form of healthcare spending that retail clinics might prevent.

CURRIE: There’s a lot of emergency room visits for things which in some sense are not really emergencies. You know, so your child has pinkeye and can’t go to school tomorrow unless you get it treated. And the doctor’s closed. So you end up — so you go to the E.R. So there’s a group of the E.R. visits that you might think could directly go to a retail clinic instead. And there are also E.R. visits because of simple things that didn’t happen. So if somebody has diabetes and they don’t take care of it, they could end up in a diabetic coma and have to go to the E.R. And so something that was a matter for primary care becomes an emergency.

So Currie decided to run a robust study on the economics of retail clinics. She partnered with fellow economists Diane Alexander and Molly Schnell.

CURRIE: So what we did was we looked at all of the retail clinics in New Jersey.

They compared geographic areas that had retail clinics nearby with those that didn’t, and then analyzed emergency-room use in those different areas. They focused on three categories of medical conditions. The first: minor things like earaches and pink eye, which had been the subject of the previous studies that found clinics increased spending.

CURRIE: But then, we were also interested in conditions like flu and diabetes that send a lot of people to hospital but are preventable through good care. So that’s the second category.

And the third category were conditions that would seem to be obviously outside the scope of a retail clinic.

CURRIE: And so in that category would be things like fractures, poisonings, and childbirth. You’re not going to go to CVS to have your baby. You’re going to go straight to the hospital.

So Currie, Alexander, and Schnell ran the numbers to measure how retail clinics affected E.R. visits in these three categories.

CURRIE: So what we found was that there was a reduction in E.R. visits for the minor things, and that’s kind of consistent with what other people had found.

Okay, no surprise there.

CURRIE: But the new finding really was that there was also a reduction in visits for the preventable-care conditions like diabetes, in particular, and flu.

So access to primary care at clinics does seem to decrease hospital use. And what about the third category of conditions — were people having their babies at CVS?

CURRIE: And then in the third category — where we didn’t expect to see any effect — we didn’t see any effect. So that was reassuring.

They also computed the costs of healthcare spending in places with and without clinics. Contra the earlier studies, they found, on net, big savings for consumers and the taxpayers who fund government healthcare spending.

CURRIE: Yeah, so our estimate was that it was about $70 million a year in New Jersey. So the savings were coming from people getting their minor condition treated in a retail clinic instead of an E.R. And then the second source of saving was actually preventing people from getting sick by getting them flu shots and getting them timely diabetes screenings.

Currie thinks that $70 million in savings in one year in one state could actually be a lot more. That’s because the state they happened to study, New Jersey, is not one of the 22 states where nurse practitioners have full-practice authority.

CURRIE: Well, in New Jersey the nurse practitioners are operating under the authority of a doctor so they don’t really have full-practice authority. And so if they did, then for one thing, it might make it more attractive for nurse practitioners to take these and secondly, they might have a little bit more discretion in what they were able to do.

For instance, nurse practitioners in New Jersey are required to, “collaborate with a physician for prescriptive authority privileges.”

CURRIE: So I think one of the most important things for promoting retail clinics would be to change scope-of-practice laws to make it easier for nurse practitioners to staff them.

Currie identified another problem with New Jersey retail health clinics: they aren’t allowed to accept Medicaid.

CURRIE: Yeah, that’s actually remarkable. So one of the nurse practitioners that we talked to told us that people would come in and say that they were on Medicaid and they’re not allowed to treat people who are on Medicaid and then the same person would come back and say, “Well, I’ll pay cash.” You know, they really didn’t want to go to the E.R. for some reason. So it seemed kind of crazy that something that the patients really wanted and would be cheaper for Medicaid was not available to them.

Currie has come to believe that retail health clinics are generally a good, cost-effective idea and could be improved by accepting Medicaid and giving nurse practitioners more authority. She also believes that clinics might pose enough competition to force traditional healthcare providers to improve their business practices. So much of the recent healthcare debate has been about the demand side — especially the rise in people with insurance coverage. Currie argues that sure, that’s important, but it would also be wise to focus on improving the supply side of healthcare.

CURRIE: And that side always seems to get ignored in the public-policy debate. And it may be because there are very powerful groups, like the American Medical Association, and so perhaps the government fears to do anything that might impact the supply-side.

The A.M.A., as you might imagine, is not the biggest fan of retail health clinics — especially when they’re not supervised by a physician. When we asked the A.M.A. for a direct comment on clinics and nurse practitioners, they replied, “The A.M.A. encourages physician-led health care teams that utilize the unique knowledge and valuable contributions of all clinicians to enhance patient outcomes.” They also expressed concern that clinics without a supervising doctor may, quote, “further compartmentalize and fragment healthcare delivery.” The A.M.A. argues the importance of “continuity of care,” meaning access to a doctor that you’ll see regularly.

CURRIE: Now, to the concern about continuity of care — I think that’s a really big concern and it is a legitimate concern with people going to clinics that they’re not going to be seeing the same person all the time. I think the problem is we’re sort of comparing the care from retail clinics to some sort of idealized care which doesn’t really exist for most people now. We all move around a lot, doctors go, you know, in and out of practice, doctors move around a lot, and you end up seeing different doctors all the time anyway.

Uwe Reinhardt, Currie’s fellow Princeton healthcare economist, is less generous toward the medical associations.

REINHARDT: And while, on the one hand, you don’t accept Medicaid patients. On the other hand, you worry that a Medicaid patient might not get the best quality if they go to a nurse practitioner. So the argument seems to be “for the poor, nothing but the best. And since we don’t want to pay for the best, the poor get nothing.” I find that a very cynical posture.

Worse yet, Reinhardt argues, the influence of associations like the A.M.A. and C.M.A. is still grotesquely outsized.

REINHARDT: We don’t really have a democracy in the way we teach that in high school. It’s more a plutocracy really. A thing run by interest groups. What the average American patient dreams about or wants is completely irrelevant. As I always put it, what 10 million Americans might want to aspire to is nothing compared to what one K Street lobbyist thinks about in the morning in the shower.

That was, once again, the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt. Some very sad news to share with you: just before releasing this episode, we learned that Reinhardt had died. He was 80 years old. Reinhardt was one of the great minds on health-care economics, always thinking about how to improve the system. He was also a friend of this program, and we feel privileged to have interviewed him several times. Our condolences to his family, and our thanks to Uwe for all that he taught us.

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: This past election day, the state of Texas passed a referendum that’ll allow banks to offer a prize-linked savings plan, what’s sometimes called a “no-lose lottery.” It’s a smart policy idea, a great alternative to the high-risk, low-return state lottery. And you want to know how that Texas law came to pass? It started with one person who happened to listen to one episodes of Freakonomics Radio about the no-lose lottery.

Melissa KEARNEY: So a lot of Americans think the lottery is their only chance at winning big sums of money — why don’t we take that appetite for gambling, for a product like this, and attach it to a savings vehicle that offers some positive return? It’s Reinhardta win-win situation.

So next week, we’ll revisit our episode “Is America Ready for a No-Lose Lottery?” and we’ll hear from the guy who got the ball rolling in Texas. Sometimes our show can actually help get something done — and that’s in large part thanks to your generosity. So please consider joining all the other people who support this show by making a donation. Go to freakonomics.com/donate or text the word “nudge” to 701-01. And thanks.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins and Brian Gutierrez; the music throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Christy Ford Chapin, University of Maryland historian.

Janet Currie, director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

Benjamin Friedrich, assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Martin Hackmann, assistant professor of economics at University of California, Los Angeles.

Ed Hernandez, California state senator.

Alexandra Hobson, registered nurse and family nurse practitioner.

Surani Hayre Kwan, health practice chair for the California Association of Nurse Practitioners.

Uwe Reinhardt, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University.

Jeff Stone, California state senator.

RESOURCES

“Americans Rate Healthcare Providers High on Honesty, Ethics” Inc, Gallup (December 7, 2011).

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (University Of Chicago Press, November 15, 2002).

“Does Preventive Care Save Money? Health Economics and the Presidential Candidates.”, Joshua T. Cohen, Peter J. Neumann, and Milton C. Weinstein, New England Journal of Medicine (February 14, 2008).

Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of The Private Health Care System by Christy Ford Chapin (Cambridge University Press July 20, 2017).

“The Returns to Nursing: Evidence from a Parental Leave Program” Benjamin U. Friedrich, and Martin B. Hackmann, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research (February 2017).

“Shortening Medical Training by 30%” Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Victor R. Fuchs, JAMA (March 21, 2012).

“Toward Graduate Medical Education (GME) Accountability: Measuring the Outcomes of GME Institutions” Candice Chen, Stephen Petterson, Robert Phillips, Fitzhugh Mullan, Andrew Bazemore, Sarah O’Donnell, Academic Medicine (September 2013).

EXTRA

“How Do We Know What Really Works in Healthcare?” Freakonomics Radio (April 2, 2015).

“Why Doesn’t Everyone Get the Flu Vaccine?” Freakonomics Radio (January 8, 2015).

The post Nurses to the Rescue! appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/nurses-to-the-rescue/

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martechadvisor-blog · 8 years ago

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How Webinars can Become a Crucial Tool in your Strategy – by Joe Hyland, CMO ON24

Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24 holds an interesting conversation on how webinars fit into content marketing today. According to him, webinars are a form of data play and an engaging way to disseminate information to increase retention and boost customer experience. Joe’s a proud father to Zealand, his 95-lb Labradoodle and was a collegiate D1 distance runner and still feels that he does his best thinking on a run

Ginger Conlon:

Hello and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s Executive Interview Series. I'm Ginger Conlon, a Contributing Editor to MarTech Advisor and joining us today is Joe Hyland who is CMO of ON24. Welcome Joe!

Joe Hyland:

Ginger, it’s great to be here.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So glad you’re here with us today. We are going to talk about opportunities with webinars as part of your content marketing and also related trends, so, excited about that, it's such a great topic. But, before we jump in, let's just briefly introduce ON24, tell us a little bit about ON24 and what makes it unique.

A- Joe Hyland:

So, ON24 has been around for just about 20 years. We invented webcasting, so, we were really the first webcasting or webinar provider and back then we had a couple of 100 customers and it was a full-service experience. So, we would do everything from soup to nuts for an online event, an online seminar, hence the name webinar. Over the last four or five years we've scaled that and made it a SAAS platform so marketers can run their own events and they don't have to call us up to help schedule them. So, now we run over 100,000 events a year, we have about 2000 customers and really helping marketers scale their digital marketing.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. So, let's talk about that and how webinars fit into content marketing today. So, if you think about webinars popularity, you really see it, especially in the B2B side, using webinars is part of their content marketing mix. Where, in terms of B2B, do you see marketers using it in the funnel, where in the funnel are you seeing it most?

A- Joe Hyland:

I think that's a really good question because I started off answering about ON24 going back 20 years and I think, historically, many marketers think too much in terms of a funnel, which is fair, I have slides that talk about moving people through the funnel, but it's not like when someone's buying they think what stage in the funnel am I in, webinars have historically been at the top of the funnel. If I want to get someone engaged, see if they’re interested at all and then from there I’ll use different tactics. So, what we're seeing from our customers and our own marketing as well is marketers using webinars across the spectrum for all their marketing.

So, absolutely, they are a thought leadership series which I think we would perhaps categorize as top of the funnel, many B2B companies are using that, we also have B2B companies showcasing their product, SAP is a good example, they have a webinar series with SAP HANA, their ultrafast online computing, that they've driven over a billion dollars in pipeline with but they're highlighting the product, so, it's more bottom of the funnel versus just broad education. Then we have B2C customers like Match.com who give relationship advice over webinars. So,

I look at a webinar as a tactic that you can use anywhere in your marketing mix, but it really has to do with how you want to engage folks versus a one size fits all approach

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, marketers tend to use webinars for that, hey, here's who we are and here is some advice related to that thought leadership aspect. What's an opportunity for using webinars that maybe marketers are overlooking but could have the potential for a significant positive impact?

A- Joe Hyland:

I think that's a great point. There are literally running through dozens of examples in my head, there's a lot of different ways. So, if you think demand gen marketing and historically top of the funnel, that's changed, as I just talked about, but we're even seeing companies use it as a way to engage with existing customers. So, we ourselves do four customer spotlights every month, it's not about getting new business, for us this is creating a community of customers and having them share their experiences, so, it's an engaging way to disseminate information. So, what used to be a one-way dissemination of an email or a white paper or a static webinar, we're now asking companies to think differently about that.

How about a customer advisory board, that's expensive, and I’ve gone through this where you fly in 10 or 15 customers to one city, have a two-day event, it costs 50 or 100,000 dollars, nothing wrong with that if it’s strategic and it makes sense but we have a lot of our customers who are getting product ideas through webcasts. So, they're putting out their product release and then they're saying, what do you want? So, you have polls, Q&A, and they're gathering feedback from their customers, rather than just getting 10 or 15 opinions, some of our customers are getting thousands of opinions and then that dictates what they put back in the product. So, again,

I think of the medium as a way to disseminate information but have it be bi-directional and that's a different way of viewing webcasting and webinars from say 5 or 10 years ago

Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, part of that could be, like you were just talking about polls, I know one piece of advice that you tend to give is to make those webcasts as interactive as possible and use polls and take advantage of that two way conversation ability that they have now.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, absolutely right. I think the days of throwing up a static video, a static presentation and talking at people, if a marketer is expecting to get good results with that, I don't really know what to say to them, it obviously won't work and if you're doing that it is not working. This is a way to engage with folks. Again, I said we were at 100,000 events a year, so, we have a lot of data going across our network and the data is pretty surprising, I think it's a little counterintuitive. So, last year the average attendee stayed on for 52 minutes, let that sink in, and when you think about snackable content or click bait, that's counterintuitive to people spending basically an hour in an event, but, why do they spend an hour? It's about the content and how you engage with them.

So, if it's just a static presentation, good luck, people are going to leave quickly, but, if you make it bi-directional, you allow your audience to participate, our belief is that people multitask, like it or not. So, let them multitask with information you want them to consume. So, say you're doing a webinar on product launch, putting information on pricing or how they buy the product or related pieces of content and then track all of that. So,

I think webinars or any online event have moved from a way to just share information to a way to engage with folks and then measure the heck out of it because at the end of the day it's actually a data play, it's not just a way to present

Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, that's such a great point. I think that some marketers probably don't realize the value of the data that they can collect through webcasting, that's such a great point.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, we have customers who are moving away from traditional surveys and doing them during a big event. So, you want to get a large enough sample size, ask the same question or the same series of questions over the course of a given month or a quarter, depends on audience size, you get thousands of data points and again, you're engaging with someone in the moment versus sending over a static survey or if you want to have a more sophisticated nurture path, so, in my last company, depending upon which ERP system our customers or prospects were running, we had a completely different offer. So, if they were running SAP versus Oracle at work we had a different offering.

So, in every webinar or webcast we would put in a poll, that felt very natural versus putting it in a registration form and say, hey, curious about market trends, who's using what technology, so, they would have choices, we would then capture that data, feed it back into, we ran off of Marketo and SalesForce but you could do it off of any CRM or marketing automation system, get it back in and then we categorized the companies accordingly and had completely different nurture paths.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Awesome. So, let's talk a little bit about getting attendees, pulling them in in the first place because there are so many webcast choices, webinar choices out there. What's your advice for creating webinars that really stand out among those offered?

A- Joe Hyland:

I think it's great marketing. So, I get a lot of questions on specific tactics, even our own sales reps will say, what is the one subject line that's going to make you open your email and I say, you're looking at this the wrong way. Think about my, if you're marketing to me, my critical business issues, literally what keeps me up at night, what am I screwed on if I don't fix or address and there are certainly many things, but, distill it. So, just like I would answer what's a great email subject line, I’d say the same thing on presenting on a webcast or a physical event strategy.

You need to strike at the core of what your audience most needs and provide content that is real

So, most of our best webinars or most engaging webinars, we measure everything, we have a proprietary algorithm to measure activity engagement during the event and we go back and then correlate topics and content to see what produced the best results, and it comes down to having real content and thought leaders. People want to hear from experts. So, if you give a webinar and you present your pitch deck, good luck, you're not going to have great results, but, if you're in financial services, I'm presenting at an event next week in Boston to financial services CMOs, and let's say your audience is financial advisors or wealth managers, if you have an expert present who's going to add value, will people stay on for an hour? Heck yeah they will. But if you present click bait, if your subject isn't real, if it doesn't allow people to have engagement or interactivity during the event, you might put on a 30 or 45 minute webinar but you’ll see people turning off 5 or 10 minutes in.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, that's so true. So, that's one challenge, what’s another challenge that you see that's a little bit too common and some advice that you could provide to help overcome it?

A- Joe Hyland:

Again, I would say this for any tactic, but, in this case, thinking of a webinar as a one size fits all tool or solution or tactic. So, I’ll only run something at top of the funnel or I do a monthly webinar series and that's it. So, that's the first, is, be creative. Most people think I need to run webinars in a certain format, like I need 25 slides or 30 slides, it needs to be X amount of minutes. Get creative, you don't need slides at all, just get Q&A from your audience. Something changes in your market, you send out an event for two days later, you don’t need to have two or three weeks to promote an event.

Something happens over a weekend or on a Monday and you say, we're going to have a town hall with industry experts, XYZ industry, and it's two days from now, no slides, send in your questions in advance or we’ll take them live. Think out of the box, so, that's the first thing. Then the second thing is harness the data. I can't tell you how many marketers I talk to, everyone talks about being a data driven marketer and I think most people can't spell it, they just don't know what to do, so much data.

So,

simplify things, make sure, again, it depends on your use case, but, if you're running an event to generate interest or demand and you’re trying to send things to your sales team or that's the goal, find one or two pieces of information that you want to send along with the attendee information and capture that

That way the sales force can extend a conversation versus saying, hi Ginger, I saw you attended an event, because I wouldn’t like to be marketed to that way, no one would.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, what are two or three of the most common questions that you get about either running a webinar or promoting a webinar and what are the answers?

A- Joe Hyland:

Again, I'll go back to being creative. So,

first one and probably the most significant area for improvement for most marketers is recreating or reusing great content

So, I was just at Fitbit, a customer of ours, and we had a creative session, I was meeting with their Head of Marketing and their Demand Gen Leader, and we were talking about how they're going to promote things going forward and I said, what's your biggest challenge? They said, it's generating interest in our products. Well, that's most companies and my next question was, how about content? Do you have a dearth of content or are you in a good position with your content? And their answer fits my answer and fits most marketers answer which is, we have more content than we know what to do with and we kind of have a hard time finding a needle in the haystack, using our best pieces over and over.

So, ultimately where most marketers struggle, my opinion, is, we run a great event or you have a great white paper or you have a great campaign and it feels like drive by marketing, like it's one and done and you don't know how to leverage that again. So,

having a sophisticated on-demand strategy specific to webinars really helps marketers get better results

So, say you run an event, it was one of your best events of the year, great, why not go back into your database, segment it out, anyone who did not attend, promote that event again, have that available on your website for on demand consumption.

We ran an event a few months ago, it was quite successful as a live event and we changed our on-demand strategy and promoted it aggressively and in the two months following we have had a 400% increase in consumption and attendees. So, use your best content over and over and you can with marketing automation pretty easily segment out those people who have already consumed it.

Ginger Conlon:

Right. I think especially there is some content or some topics that are really evergreen. So, if you've already done the production, just have –

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think most heads of demand gen will say it drives content marketers crazy, I need five pieces of great content or I need seven pieces of great content and I think most content marketing is set up to create a 100, they want to create a sea of content, that's fine, that works for inbound, I think for a targeted outbound strategy you need to be a little more focused.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Yeah. So, let's talk about customer experience a little bit because it's such a hot topic and I feel when you deliver a really thoughtful webinar it can improve that customer experience or even so for a prospective customer. So, what advice do you have in terms of making sure that your webcasts or webinars are enhancing the customer experience?

A- Joe Hyland:

I think this is a really important point. Again, I think the one takeaway for marketers is avoid drive by marketing.

You should have a holistic, end to end marketing strategy versus a whole bunch of tactics and it's really easy to slide down that slippery slope of doing tactics

For example, your webinar or any piece of content that you create and disseminate should be on brand and so many people will put up a console or will have a webinar that is a departure from their brand. You would never have a landing page or a page on your website that wasn't consistent with your brand and your visual look and feel or you wouldn’t just put out a whitepaper or a brochure that's completely off brand and uses a template from five years ago.

But, why is it that a lot of marketers will have an online event and they'll have a departure from their brand and again, oftentimes webinars are great top of the funnel tactic, not always, so, if this is the first experience someone is having with you, it sure as heck better be on brand. So, that's my first point,

it should look and feel like who you are and should be a visual representation of your brand

The second area is, I’ll also put customer service in the same category, scaling is what keeps us up at night. If you're marketing and selling to and supporting 50 customers or a TAM of 50 companies, perhaps it's different, but I know almost no industry that that's the case. So, for me, when I get pressed by our board or I think of where we're heading to next, I think how can I scale and I think customer service departments or customer success departments are now thinking the same way.

So, LinkedIn is a customer of ours, they run almost all of their customer service events or customer support events or customer success events on webinars because they scale. When you're supporting thousands or in some cases with large companies hundreds of thousands of customers, while you’ll love to have the one on one interaction, it doesn't necessarily scale from a cost perspective. So, thinking differently about how you scale but keep a one to one feeling or an engaging experience, that's paramount.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, let's wrap up with a look forward. What's coming up that you're excited about in two areas, one, any trend or tool that's on your radar and two, any new features or upgrades within ON24 that we should keep an eye out on?

A- Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I'll have a theme here, it's about scaling. So, what I love has nothing to do with webinars, the webinars get into this, I love ways for marketers to engage and do it at scale. Again, I feel like the days of the one on one, in person interactions, well, while I love them, I think they're behind many marketers. So, if you look at digital transformation, how do you not have a massive departure from engagement as you scale and I think most marketers feel like they're failing here.

So, we flipped a switch on scale, it’s called marketing automation and with a click of a button you can reach millions of people. But have you lost something along the way? So, I'm a big fan of all things account based marketing, personalizing as much of an experience as possible and scaling it. So, those are the types of technologies that interest me and we're taking our product even further in that direction. So,

giving marketers the ability to have an engaging experience but do it with thousands of people and capture data on the back end so you can make smarter decisions

Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. Joe, thanks so much for all the great advice today, what a terrific discussion, I appreciate you being here.

Joe Hyland:

Thanks Ginger, I love talking about this, so, any time.

Ginger Conlon:

I want to thank everyone who joined us on the video and say, Joe and I also had a great conversation about the skills it takes to succeed in marketing today, so, be sure to check out that video as well and be sure to visit MarTech Advisor’s channel on YouTube for other executive interviews and thanks again for being here.

Joe Hyland:

Thanks Ginger.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

#martech #marketing #technology #business #cmo

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