#022: Wearables, Measurement, and Monetization, Oh My! with David McBride

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:03.71 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:26.55 [Michael Helbling]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 22. Well, today I’m excited. We’re having a little bit of a tangential conversation about the thing that you’re probably wearing on your right or left wrist that measures all your steps, your heart rate, and your bank account. That’s right. Don’t adjust your Fitbit. Don’t check for your steps. We’re talking about one aspect of the IoT Internet of Things. It’s about wearable technology. wearables, measurement, and monetization. Oh my. And of course, to help us cover a topic this broad and dense and awesome, we’re bringing in a guest to help us with the conversation. But first, let me bring in my two co-hosts, hailing from Columbus, Ohio, in the green trunks, to buck 50. Tim Wilson senior partner at web analytics or analytics demystified. Hello Tim.

00:01:31.06 [Tim Wilson]: Hey Michael

00:01:31.88 [Michael Helbling]: And of course, Jim Cain. He started napkin. He started Babbage. He’s the CEO squared up in Ottawa, Canada. Welcome.

00:01:40.59 [Jim Cain]: Tim’s a buck 50. I’m like, what, 35 pounds?

00:01:44.58 [Michael Helbling]: He was kilograms, but yes. Nice.

00:01:47.93 [Tim Wilson]: No. It’s kidding. Great. Now I got to look up.

00:01:49.46 [Michael Helbling]: Okay, but like I said, we have a guest and I want to introduce him, David McBride. Moest of you know him from the Always Awesome Unsummit conference that happens right before Adobe Summit each year in March. But by day, he is the marketing director of data and cloud services at Intel Corporation. And in that role, he takes on the challenge of figuring out how to measure wearable technology. Welcome, David.

00:02:17.51 [Tim Wilson]: Thanks. Good to be here, guys. Actually, you said Intel? Intel?

00:02:23.12 [Michael Helbling]: That’s a little fast growth startup.

00:02:26.44 [Tim Wilson]: They’ve been around for a couple of years. They’ve been around a little for a little while.

00:02:30.37 [David McBride]: Yeah, Santa Clara. Yeah, they tend to lay claim to Moeore’s Paw and little things like that.

00:02:36.62 [Michael Helbling]: All right, Tim, Jim, David, let’s jump into this. The wearable space covers a lot of ground. So where do we want to start? I don’t know where you guys want to start let’s start with the question of what is what constitutes a wearable like what would be a wearable device obviously like a Fitbit or an Apple watch with those both be wearables those are wearables definitely awesome we’re on the right track what about an earring that has GPS location absolutely is that even a thing I don’t know but I was thinking about it tonight and I thought that would be a really great thing to invent I think you can buy them in the NSA store

00:03:15.51 [Tim Wilson]: What was the, there was some little, one of the articles that was kind of scanning and prep had the little, the little tattoo, like the temporary tattoo type wearable. And I’m not blanking on what it did.

00:03:26.86 [David McBride]: Yeah, I’ve heard of that. I can’t remember. So there’s all kinds of really interesting things. So a lot of the development in wearables right now is coming out of Kickstarter because democratize the access to, to funding. And so you’re getting things like temperature patches, needles that are really, they don’t go all the way into your skin, but They can sense bodily fluid levels and then transmit them over Bluetooth to your phone. You’ve got.

00:03:53.91 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, as you say, you say Kickstarter, is that because really, but kind of by definition, it has to be something small, relatively simple and compact. And it’s kind of who comes up with the combination of sensor, sensors plus processor plus application. And there’s just kind of an infinite range as things get smaller and smaller. Like, like why, why is Kickstarter kind of the, the place where they’re cropping up?

00:04:20.91 [David McBride]: I can make sure entirely. Go ahead.

00:04:23.95 [Jim Cain]: It’s because, um, so many of the wearables are so very, very niche use that you couldn’t mass audience them. So you can use Kickstarter to go to your core stakeholder audience. You know, like if you were to take most wearables are so, so specific in terms, they could single use single group. Um, I was shown one, uh, month or so ago that’s designed for people with poor posture and it has an iPhone app that helps you correct your posture. And it’s really, really neat, but you’re not, I own one.

00:04:49.00 [David McBride]: It’s great.

00:04:49.63 [Jim Cain]: It’s really, really, I have. brutal posture. I’m looking at one right now, but it’s a very, very specific audience for that kind of product. Kickstarter is great at going after a niche. That’s why I think a lot of those wearable tools are coming up there. I don’t know if you, David, think I’m nuts on that or not.

00:05:05.56 [David McBride]: No, I think that’s good. I think that’s right. I think there’s also potentially the concept that a lot of these devices are coming out of people who are sort of tinkerers or makers and it’s just, you know, they might not have access to capital. They or they think they want more control or, you know, that’s a good way to start or to get sort of a pre funding round, go to go to Kickstarter, you can move pretty quickly, you can test the quality of your idea really quickly. I think it’s probably a combination of of these things. But there’s some really interesting and innovative ideas, not just on Kickstarter, but, you know, from a variety of corners.

00:05:40.04 [Michael Helbling]: That’s interesting. And also, obviously, wearables are in the world of technology, kind of that next frontier. You know, we’re really, as a society, starting to really grow in the adoption of them as well. So it’s not just in Silicon Valley. I mean, there’s some that are famously kind of, you know, weren’t successful like the Google Google Glass, but you know Fitbit and other sports related ones you know a lot a lot of people are using now.

00:06:07.05 [David McBride]: And those are the consumer applications there’s also a lot of potential in enterprise markets so you can imagine a warehouse worker being aided by whether it be a head worn wearable like Google Glass or directional indicator on their wrist or something like that so they can find something on a shelf that has applications in the medical field as well where nurses might not know exactly where to pick up something but you know they can be directed to a certain closet where they can find the the bandage that they need to find or whatever and that’s that’s kind of exciting you can think about enterprise applications in accessing a building like authentication. There’s a bunch of a wide range of applications, not just in the consumer space.

00:06:46.75 [Jim Cain]: I’ll bet you a shiny new American, Nickel, that in the next couple of years, there’s going to be a health insurance plan tied to a wearable.

00:06:53.28 [Tim Wilson]: Well, there are. I mean, there are.

00:06:54.74 [Jim Cain]: How about you take care of yourself?

00:06:56.12 [Tim Wilson]: There already are. I mean, I believe, Michael DeHen, you found one that was talking about the wellness programs, kind of you get your break on your insurance if you’re

00:07:04.85 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, as part of the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies now can use wellness programs as a way to dictate whose rates will be a certain point, and wearables are very much a point of that. So my insurance happens to be through Humana, and I can take my Fitbit and integrate it into that wellness plan. And so every time I get my steps in, it goes in and gives me points in that plan, which takes me to a certain level of wellness, which then changes my rates on insurance potentially. over time. So yeah, absolutely.

00:07:36.42 [Tim Wilson]: I feel like I was thinking of wearables as the base level, the Fitbits and all those derivatives are heavily collecting data of you or your immediate environment. But David, you mentioned like the factory worker. It seems like some of those are, there’s very little about the immediate location and A lot of the data is actually coming the other direction that you may have a process that is the central is actually pushing data to the user as opposed to recording data about the user is that a fair distinction.

00:08:11.80 [David McBride]: Yeah, I think that’s. A distinction, but I think that in many cases what we’ll see is feature evolution accommodating both of those paths in the same, either in the same device or on the same person. So if you imagine one of my favorite wearables or augmented reality kinds of environments is Jarvis from Iron Man. Jarvis provides information to Tony Stark, but I think he’s also able to take in the surrounding information and and store it and Stark can obviously that’s not an exciting part about the movie, but it could go back and provide a platform for analysis later on as well.

00:08:51.46 [Tim Wilson]: So I guess that Jarvis is really kind of just a logical extension of Siri, right? So if instead of your phone, your phone was a little bit more wearable. It was in your ear or on your head, and it was a little faster and a little smarter and a little better. I think even though it’s been out now for a month or so, we’ll see if iOS 9, where the jury really lands on whether the Siri improvements there or what they are. But I guess that’s kind of your once you achieve the singularity, the computer, the robots will be able to control us by through wearables.

00:09:24.42 [Jim Cain]: And you for one will welcome them, correct? I already have. I’ve seen Terminator, man. I’m not welcoming anybody.

00:09:32.56 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and that’s, I mean, that’s actually kind of a whole other area, which is sort of the data that wearables generate to whose benefit, for whose benefit will it be generated and who gets it and are there emerging standards in terms of the way that data gets collected and things like that. So, I mean, one example is Google Analytics, Universal Analytics Protocol. is a good platform to potentially capture data for any of these kinds of things. However, is that what wearables technology companies are doing? Are they building proprietary models? Is there any emergence of any semblance of order in that space? Have you seen anything like that?

00:10:13.07 [David McBride]: We talked about the variety of different sensors and companies on the wrist, on the head, hanging from your ear, could be in your handbag. There’s also a variety of business models that are coming into play, and we kind of touched on a few of those. We’re seeing a variety of architectures, of mechanisms for collecting, and storing, and retrieving, and querying, and visualizing all this whole stream of data that, for those of us who have spent time in the digital marketing ecosystem, we’re kind of used to JavaScript, software as a service, login, There’s obviously innovation and there’s exciting things happening in data processing and more and more people are using a variety of query tools. But I think we’re in a more, I guess a less mature space on the wearable side of things. It’s sort of backed up several years where it feels like we’re, or maybe back in the log file days a little bit in the sense that there’s just a ton of different ways that one can collect data and store it for it. And it really depends on the needs and can be driven by the business model of the device or the hardware, the functional characteristics of the device. Google Analytics could potentially be a place to store that, but you could just put it up in one of the many data warehouse tools available on Amazon. Maybe you have a device that has its own cell phone contract, or maybe you require the device to be tethered to a smartphone that can then through SDK send the data out to AWS or any other cloud kind of system. So. It’s pretty open right now. Um, I don’t know that right at this point, we could say that there’s one model that’s going to win.

00:11:46.35 [Tim Wilson]: There’s going to be some innovation, I think, but it sounds like you’re actually thinking of it, that it’s the business model is very interrelated with the decisions on the collection transport aggregation storage. Like you, and maybe this goes back to where you said, we’re in, if it’s not particularly mature and it’s kind of the tinkerers, there are a lot of people throwing a lot of, models at the model kind of capital M that is business model and technical model like it’s not just the data model is how how am I what’s the model for this entire thing to work and it does seem like those two have to be very much in alignment or you know the thing probably collapses if you don’t have a method for getting money with connecting to users, consumers or enterprise that makes sense, but then also overlays with whatever kind of supporting infrastructure you need to layer on the collection storage and use of that data. For something that seems like it’s it’s awareable, it’s small and simple, then it’s actually really complex to figure out how all the conceptual pieces fit together to build that.

00:12:50.79 [David McBride]: Yeah, I’d say that there’s so much that can change. There’s a bit of a paradox of choice in terms of what should things look like. But that’s also that gives the developers of the hardware, the software, a good amount of freedom. I’d like to say that that means that everybody’s approaching the creation of these devices, much like everyone always creates their websites by thinking about the purpose first before, oh, we’re going to build a new landing page because nobody ever builds landing pages without thinking of the purpose of building the landing page, right?

00:13:18.38 [Tim Wilson]: Or websites, entire websites. That’s good.

00:13:22.78 [David McBride]: Digital marketing is so much more mature than… So maybe wearables can learn from all of those lessons that digital marketing has figured out. No, but it’s not at all uncommon for us in the product development world in the wearable space to encounter the same kinds of challenges that we’re all familiar with from a website or a mobile app development perspective, where sometimes we put the cart for the horse in terms of what should we be building first. We should be thinking about how are we going to make money from this thing. And sometimes we don’t actually do that to the extent that we should.

00:13:53.51 [Jim Cain]: David, can I call you David? Absolutely. Lovely, thank you. So the thing I was thinking per the Kickstarter conversation earlier is that unlike a lot of large businesses that have a website and they’re treated as kind of corner of the marketing department, most wearable companies are smaller shops and therefore they’re chasing money and therefore they do nothing but talk about monetization. you know, I would wonder if, if they’ve got almost too near a cast of focus on how much money do we make this month and not enough of a focus on how can we leverage this data for, again, product management metrics, you know, we added a new feature. Did anyone use it? Did it lead to longer usage? Did it lead to more frequent usage? That kind of stuff. Is that what you’re seeing? Is it just how, how many more of these jimmy jams did we sell and not enough on how many people are deriving ongoing value?

00:14:42.99 [David McBride]: Here’s the initial conversation tends to be around the hardware and how many can we sell on what should the price point be? And then you start to get into conversations around, and the hardware includes the software in that particular piece of it, because you can’t operate the hardware without the software. And so those development efforts are kind of lumped together. The data often becomes, and the metrics and the analysis of that data is a bit of an afterthought. In many cases, I’m not saying this is the case everywhere, because like you said, there’s a bunch of companies out there, some of them very large, and then maybe they don’t do it like this. My sense is that you have then, after you’ve talked about price points, you’ve got and how many you’re going to sell, then you start to think about, okay, well, how are we going to improve this thing? And you start to think about metrics that are almost like a heat map for a website, like how much does this button get pushed or how much does this feature used or what’s the repeat usage frequency. But so far in my limited exposure, I haven’t really seen a lot of those conversations upfront. It’s more about the device and what new and interesting things can we do with the device. And one more thing I’ll add there, you mentioned in the comment that there’s a lot of companies out there, wearables companies. And I guess if you looked at each one of them, It’s probably a long tail in terms of volume. And so in that case, there are a lot of them. I would guess that the head is pretty big in terms of Fitbit, Apple, Java, and Google through the Android Wear platform. And so there’s still these very large entities at the head of this wearables tail.

00:16:05.61 [Michael Helbling]: You know, another thing that sort of always crosses my mind is obviously not every company is going to get us all to wear their device. So let’s say I have a lot of brand loyalty to four companies. Do each of those companies need to establish their own wearable for me? And how many could we be reasonably expected to? It’s sort of like how many brands do you keep as apps on your phone in the same way? And besides watches, which sort of are following the application model of phones, Do you see wearables actually crossing over brands more or they all stand alone platforms for the most part? And are people talking about being more universally useful? Does that make sense? I don’t know if that question.

00:16:47.80 [David McBride]: Yeah, so I think it makes sense. I think every time I go to a conference or anyone talks about either internet of things or wearables, there’s always a graph that’s up into the right. And there’s numbers like 20 billion or 50 billion or 100 billion devices by 2021 or whatever. And that means that In the future, right after we get our flying cars, there’s going to be lots of devices and we’re not going to get them from a single manufacturer. That’s if it’s going to work, if we actually are going to see that many devices come into play for us personally, there’s going to have to be some mixing and matching from maybe from an actual kind of a, they’re going to have to fit next to each other in your wrist or they’re going to have to not overdo the way they talk to your phone. Maybe they’re gonna, we’ll see standardization or just common ways of setting them up or extracting data into a common platform. We’re not there yet. We’re right now we’re at a place where there are a bunch of wearables and you can certainly fill up your rest, but people, they’re mostly duplicative in their application. And so people only have one or maybe sometimes you run into somebody that has one on each rest. But I think over time, we’re going to see innovation in sensors. We’re going to see innovation in the types of information that can be collected from a variety of different devices. And that’s going to mean that there will be multiple devices per user. So you’ve got unique visitor type. identification kinds of issues. Unfortunately, unlike cookies, you probably are going to have an account with many of these. But even that could be cumbersome. But anyway, there’s some form of authentication so you can establish who are those users.

00:18:13.65 [Tim Wilson]: So what are the likely candidates for to be the W3C? Not that that has been fantastic for the web and marketing, but is there likely are there already, I’m sure there are multiple mobile associations, is there kind of a clear emerging when it comes to standards for data storage, mobile, collection, sensor, interoperability? Is that still a three, five, seven years down the road or is that kind of right on the immediate horizon?

00:18:45.07 [David McBride]: Yeah, I think it’s down the road a bit. It’ll probably evolve with some industries in mind, like healthcare. You might see some standards emerge there and there is an organization. I can’t remember the name offhand that is sort of encouraging the development of a common framework from a data perspective specifically for healthcare, kind of in line with the patients should own their data. They should have access to their charts. I was at a conference not too long ago and a wearable tech conference. There are conferences besides digital marketing conferences. I was shocked to find out. And so I decided to go to one and they, they, they have lobby bars too. And somebody was saying, they were talking about how important it is to have sort of devices that can fit together. And I thought they meant sort of fit in terms of sort of use cases and they actually meant like fabrics, like sometimes you’re going to have to make it so the connectors are following a common standard. So I thought that was interesting. So I asked the question, well, is there anybody out there who’s sort of espousing standards and whether they be for physical connectors or for data export? And they didn’t know where I worked. And they said, you know what, I’m not aware of anyone doing that, but you should talk to somebody at Intel because they’re really good about standards.

00:19:57.66 [Tim Wilson]: And you’ve been wandering the halls for the last six months now, trying to find that person, trying to find somebody who the standards are. You’re going to find out it’s you.

00:20:09.33 [David McBride]: Apparently. So, you know, I don’t know if Intel is going to actually be at the center of this, but I think one thing that Intel has done well in other parts of its business over the course of its history is to get groups together and create standards so that development can be fostered in other areas. And so maybe we’ll end up playing a role here.

00:20:25.39 [Michael Helbling]: Now I’m intrigued by the concept of, yeah, being able to wear my one device, but choosing the brands that it interacts with. So if I walk into a retail store with my Fitbit on, there can be sort of a back and forth of data that can be shared at that particular moment in time. Anyways, just interesting. That’s really interesting to me.

00:20:44.14 [Tim Wilson]: But that one seems like you look at Apple and Google is kind of the two that have said we’ve had and I think David, you were saying, oh, it’s like the phone model. When you’ve got this app world and brands can try to say, oh, they’ve got the hardware in their hands. I’m going to try to be a brand and provide an app on this. This is kind of it requires sort of an openness on the front of the wearable physical hardware and software to some degree maker and a brand where I struggle is I work with a lot of digital market marketers and there seems to be kind of a lack a risk aversion combined with the lack of vision to say we’re going to jump on that up wagon or that Fitbit wagon or that insert wearable and we’re probably going to have to throw a few different things at the wall to see what sticks but how like how does product management of we’re developing a product that does X and we’re at one company developing that and trying to monetize it meet up with marketers at a brand that say we can interact with that. It just seems like it winds up with people having ideas that they connect and then make happen across multiple companies. It seems hard to imagine pulling off.

00:22:02.00 [David McBride]: Yeah, I think I think that’s right. I think if it’s going to happen, it might have something to do with the device itself and maybe some well factor around a device where someone who’s a product manager might be wearing a wearable device and then they’re working on a marketing related project and realize that their buddy over in marketing has a similar device or they have a conversation around it. Maybe that unlocks some interaction. I think that I’ve observed over the course of my career, people who are not data people per se. They’re not analysts or into analytics. Maybe they’re more on the product side. They just want to build really good products and they know that data can help them do that better. So they form good relationships with people on the analytics team and so they become very data astute. And conversely, there are data and analytical oriented people who realize that working in the product field is pretty fun. And so there’s this cross-pollination over time. I think that if one side is going to drive it, I think revenue for the company might be a great motivator. So you might see a device being not necessarily a channel in the sense that it’s another screen, but you’ve got information about consumer behavior so that it becomes a bit of a channel. Maybe it feeds into the CRM system, and you can tell how frequently or how long ago someone wore your product or interacted with your store if it’s not even a product that that brand made. And then you can market them appropriately because that information is captured in the CRM system.

00:23:24.75 [Jim Cain]: That’s a very sophisticated view. I mean, I’ve been trying to close a wearables company for a couple of years and I haven’t had access to the five companies in the front, so I’ve been talking to the long tail. But two things that I’ve learned about wearables companies is the first one is that most of them don’t use their product as a platform. They use it as a product. So Tim’s example earlier about, you know, what if, you know, Nike decided to push something through your Fitbit whenever you went into a shoe store. That’s like back to the future, too, compared to what most companies think of. They go, no, no, we build a product that helps your posture. And that’s what we do. It’s not a platform, it’s a product. The other thing is that, David, you’ve got to be at some of these conferences feeling like you showed up at a master’s class full of five-year-olds when you talk about data, because most wearables companies are in the pre-web trends area from a measurement perspective. So you got servers full of data. Yes, why do you have it? Product availability. Did you know that you could make a shitload more money and get a competitive edge with it? Hadn’t thought about it. And literally, these are the conversations that I’ve been having with some of these companies. Because with the measurement protocol, like Michael was talking about earlier in Google, you could actually take an online acquisition and carry it right from cradle to grave through usage with the product. And I brought that up with a few companies before, and it wasn’t even like, wow, that’s cool. It was like, why would I want to do that? So I don’t know if you find… I guess I just wanted to talk for a while. I really have a point.

00:24:48.84 [Tim Wilson]: But you’re it seems like you’re doing so well platform versus product I mean we looked at when social media came out and we looked at and still do say Twitter and Facebook and Google are all sitting just in there in their core search or social media function Everybody says they are sitting on a massive amount of data that if they mine that data there is value in the data itself and And I think Jim, earlier you were saying, well, you’re looking at as a product, how do I monetize that? How do I sell more of my physical wearable that comes with some sort of software and have a business model that fits on top of that? Are there companies out there saying, we can give away the wearable because if we get enough mass adoption, the data that our wearable is collecting, it’s adding value for the consumer, and we’re collecting anonymized data and now we’ve got this rich data set of what types of people of what types of blood pressure or physical activity or dietary intake or clothing preferences are doing when and where and that data source we could become you know the next Nielsen or what Facebook or Twitter could be that people are kind of somehow terrified that they could be is there a model out there or are there companies right now and it may be you guys are gonna say oh yes duh there are these three companies that are trying to do exactly that which is the wearable is just an investment to collect the data that’s delivering enough value that people will say sure I’ll take this for free or next to nothing and And in return, it’s back to that whole, what’s the value of my personal data? And that’s, that’s the transaction. And now you’ve built that, that data repository.

00:26:28.81 [Jim Cain]: In my two senses, I’ve seen a few companies like that, but you really need to think of the wearables market and David, feel free to call bullshit on me. But it seems to me like the wearables market is where digital marketing was.

00:26:39.61 [Tim Wilson]: Can I call bullshit on you? Can I call bullshit on you? Just do it. Give her. Don’t even let me finish. Just call me. I’m just saying, okay, just in general, just a blanket for everything you’ve said in the first 22 episodes. Sorry.

00:26:48.52 [Jim Cain]: Actually. Now that you mention it, I have a wearable that gets me unlimited free health care. It’s called the Canadian passport. Zinger! So what I was saying… Can I finish? Can I finish?

00:27:05.11 [Michael Helbling]: Can I finish? It really fights me, but yeah, go ahead.

00:27:08.67 [Jim Cain]: Okay, I’m finished. What I was going to say is that the majority of Internet of Things companies, the Internet piece is where the app lives. That’s the user interface piece. But really, most of the wearables companies that at least I’ve talked to are the equivalent of digital marketing organizations in 1997. And that’s not to say they’re like ass backwards or anything. They’re just not in a place organizationally where they want to even try and take advantage of the data. Five years from now, everything Tim said is going to start to be how people think, but I haven’t seen it. David, I don’t know if you agree.

00:27:39.77 [David McBride]: So I think that people are very data astute now. And so the concept of us being in the late 90s kind of era relative to digital marketing is, I think, accurate except for the fact that people now know that there is value in them, their data hills. They don’t know what it is, but there is a bit of a data land grab going on. And so they’re looking at a variety of business models, and maybe they haven’t brought anything to market yet. Maybe they haven’t been able to execute on the concepts, but I guarantee there are whiteboard conversations going on all over the place saying, you know what, if we gave away the device, and we harvested the data, we could, and we do it in a transparent way, we could provide value point X, Y, and Z, and the customer benefits, the consumer benefits, we benefit. I think that’s like you say, that’s a forward looking kind of thing. And maybe that’s a vision that will never come into fruition. But I think that given the variety of devices and sensors and software and business models means that eventually we’re going to see that I’m not aware of any that are fully executing on that scale right now. I agree with your assessment that the primary focus is initially on the product and the hardware and selling the units and getting the costs down as low as possible so that you can compete getting as many features into the device or into the software so that you can You’ve got a differentiable offering, but I don’t think we’re that far away from these sorts of data oriented business model innovations.

00:29:01.01 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. In a certain sense, you know, you can get a quote unquote free wearable for your car because the insurance company gets a lot of really great data that helps them understand your rate, how your rate should be structured for insurance. So I mean, that’s one example where there are quote unquote free products out there for your car.

00:29:19.84 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:29:20.72 [Michael Helbling]: Progressive will send you A little thing that measures all of your driving, you just plug it into your ODBC2 connector in your car or whatever it’s called. I think that’s what it’s called. I don’t remember what it’s called. That might be wrong. But there’s a data connector in your car that if you plug it in, then Progressive gets all this data about how you drive, how fast you go, how fast you stop, how fast you start, and they use that to generate your rate. And you can just go and say, hey, I’d like one of those and they’ll mail it to you. The question also becomes, as soon as we find out that there’s a a public good available how soon before some sort of wearable is almost mandatory.

00:29:56.98 [Tim Wilson]: You know, that’s cell phones right there. Well, it’s not technically wearable, right? That’s not considered a wearable.

00:30:05.63 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s too big because you can put it down. Got it. No, I mean, it’s just interesting because of the way, you know, the way that it trends it. If it’s really good for you, then we’ll give it away for free. But then if you still don’t want to wear one, maybe you should wear one anyway, or at least your kid has to wear it while they’re in school or something like that.

00:30:22.66 [Jim Cain]: To try to bring it back to data though, about the one of the original things Tim said is the danger to abuse the PII in wearables data capture. Like we generate some PII as or personally identifiable information for some of you listening in, but we get a little bit of it as data analysts or web data analysts, but we don’t have access to tons and tons of it. At the wearable level, it’s the opposite. In a lot of cases, it’s all deeply personal information. Like I just found it, Maybe you guys already know this, but you can actually go to Google if you have an Android phone, and it’ll tell you a map of everywhere you’ve been as your phone’s been on.

00:30:56.84 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, yeah. I remember that. That’s, uh, of course, I’m not allowed to have an Android phone because I work for analytics to mystify it, and I’d be, I wouldn’t be able to get any work done because I’d be getting mercilessly ridiculed for six hours a day. I think it’s better to do that aggressively over paper hardware.

00:31:10.29 [Jim Cain]: Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve seen the one for Google, but that’s just an example. Imagine if it was something that captured your heart rate and your sleep habits and your diet habits. That just seems deeply, deeply personal, and almost none of it is stuff that we would be able to do analysis on, at least the ways we do right now. That’s one of the things I think is interesting about wearables. We get a little PII, but then a lot of more like marketer information. Like we have a much better understanding of intent than a wearable analyst would, whereas a wearable analyst could literally say, how well do people sleep? What are their heart rates? I mean, it doesn’t get more personal than that, you know?

00:31:46.18 [Tim Wilson]: But we have, we have mechanisms for, you know, you put in your credit card and that gets, I don’t, what is it? It gets hashed or one of you more technical people. Like we, it seems like there’s technology has been around for a long time. that has said we can take the stuff that could be really dangerous but that’s historically been your social security number and in the states or your credit card information and there’s a way to shove that into the database where you can make it reasonably open to your internal analysts to munch that however they want and they’re not going to get to the to the looking up what their next-door neighbors you know bought on Amazon last week. Where is that going to be the model? I mean, it’s going to be, we’re going to get old and die. And our level of, hey, we’re analysts, so we’re kind of cool with data collection. I’ll give up mine, because I think it’s cool what we can do with other people’s. But you take our kids and the people, the kids between our kids and us, and there’s more and more comfort with saying, you know what, there’s more upside than downside. And it’s just kind of a waiting game before that becomes less of an issue.

00:32:54.74 [Jim Cain]: I mean, a creepy factor notwithstanding, and I do think it’s deeply creepy, I’m currently sitting inside a Faraday cage writing a manifesto on Birchbark. But because Canadian, I think it’s creepy, but whether or not you’re comfortable giving up your PII, the type of analysis that you can do as someone that’s doing Internet of Things data versus the type of analysis you can do on someone who’s got website data. To me, it’s literally two ends of the spectrum. One is looking at everyone in the store, and the other one is looking at one person up really, really close. And you can do things in aggregate, but the real value is at the personal level. I think, I don’t know, what do you guys think?

00:33:37.16 [David McBride]: This reminds me a little bit of a session that I went to at Adobe Summit. In fact, I think it might have been the only session I actually went to at the last Adobe Summit that was around the topic of privacy. And they had a stellar panel of people from government. a few couple lawyers and one of the first slides they put up there was that when as it relates to your privacy policy, the transparency is very important that you need to state what you will do and then you need to do what you say you will do or not do what you say you won’t do and I can’t remember if this was on there or not but the other component that came to mind was be clear in your definitions and so all of those principles are going to apply here probably even more so because of the sensitive personal nature of the data.

00:34:25.02 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, totally. And I almost wonder now that we’re talking about it, if one of the big next steps in Internet of Things data will be less around letting people like us do analysis and more about just plugging all that data into something like an X plus one or an individual level personalization engine. Like instead of analyzing everything, I see everything you do individually. We’re gonna just use it as an upsell, cross-sell engine in the app experience. Because why do analysis? We’ve got all your crap. Let’s point a robot at it.

00:34:53.76 [Michael Helbling]: I for one welcome our robot over to work. Yeah. No, I this topic, I think we could go on for quite a while only because there’s so much and so many directions this technology and the measurement can take. So one quick question. And I think we probably should wrap up, but where are some resources or what are some resources where people could learn more or understand better kind of what’s going on or what’s on the cutting edge of this? I don’t know, David, if you have any. off the top of your head that you could mention for our listeners.

00:35:25.27 [David McBride]: There are a few people on Twitter who blog or tweet frequently. about wearable devices and you see some interesting comments about wearable innovation. I’ll scroll through my feed here and invariably one of them will come up. And you know, I go back to the maker thing. It’s fun to look at Kickstarter. I think it’s not at all difficult to find some interesting sensors. And if this, then that is interesting to look at from a sort of a software component of aggregating this sort of thing. And Maker fares are interesting. You know, you’re going to find things that aren’t terribly professional a lot of times, but sometimes you will. It’s also pretty common to see companies like Intel be pretty vocal about what they’re doing in the space. So Intel, ARM, Qualcomm, they’re all pretty active here. In addition to the obvious candidates like following Google and Apple and Fitbit and Jawbone and those guys.

00:36:23.89 [Tim Wilson]: The MIT Media Lab.

00:36:25.24 [David McBride]: MIT Media Lab is great, really interesting. I mean, the interesting thing about the MIT Media Lab is that they’ve been doing this kind of stuff forever. We’re all kind of Johnny come lately here compared to how long they’ve been at it.

00:36:34.25 [Michael Helbling]: Way to plug your alma mater there.

00:36:35.81 [David McBride]: I walked past that building a lot.

00:36:38.52 [Tim Wilson]: They looked at me with scorn.

00:36:40.34 [David McBride]: Oh, the guy who I see a lot of tweets coming across is Tom Emmerat. T-O-M-E-M-R-I-C-H. What’s his, what’s he do? I met him at one of these conferences. He’s kind of a wearable tech advocate and advisor. He’s founded an entity called We Are Wearables and he’s Canadian. What? Or at least he lives in Canada.

00:37:03.75 [Tim Wilson]: What is the… Like him already. What is kind of the super high, obviously not trying to get anything proprietary, but kind of what’s Intel’s role in where is it the providing the small enough with enough functionality hardware to enable other wearables? Is it actually building wearables on their own? Is it both? Is it standards?

00:37:27.68 [David McBride]: So our strategy right now is twofold. On one hand, we’re creating custom devices for top-notch high-end brands. We created a device last year with a fashion boutique called Opening Ceremony. And it was a wrist-worn bracelet that had its own cell phone contract. But instead of being technically oriented, it was very fashion-oriented in its design. And on the underside of it was a curved screen that was touch-sensitive where you could see your Gmail and get updates on Yelp and a variety of other things. So that we’ve announced deals with Tag Heuer together with Google for a watch. We’ve got a deal announced with Lexotica with their Oakley division. So these are Oh, and fossil is a big one.

00:38:15.88 [Tim Wilson]: And so you can imagine it’s traditional, traditional wearable, non non wearable wearables partnering needing the tech to actually introduce kind of the wearable technology aspect.

00:38:27.91 [David McBride]: Moere broadly, sort of advocate for what’s possible, not just with a technically minded audience, but with one that’s interested in fashion and how it looks, because these devices are so personal, they fit on your body, they should look, they should be an expression of who you are in your fashion sense. So then that’s one part. The other part of the world is embodied in a small system on a chip that we’ve codenamed Curie that our CEO showed to the world at CES last January and we continue to talk about. So that’s a very small chip with a processor and a pattern recognition engine on it. and a radio for communication out to a companion device, a battery, and you can envision that going into a variety of small products. And so the strategy there is to get that into as many devices as possible.

00:39:12.62 [Tim Wilson]: So just to be that potentially, that’s going to have a price point of… that you’re helping shows up in a bunch of Kickstarter projects where people say this is the underlying shell but we’re hooking in these sensors and those sensors is that well we haven’t disclosed pricing on that yet so you know obviously your example was just hypothetical but the concept could be could be for Kickstarter markets but it also could be for very large companies who are interested in building advice but you’re saying just like a rich component I mean yeah I wasn’t I literally have no idea

00:39:48.31 [Michael Helbling]: It’s like it would be like the Raspberry Pi of wearables, right?

00:39:52.26 [David McBride]: The Raspberry Pi is so for that part more kind of focused on the maker world. But this would be more like what Intel has traditionally done with OEMs like Lenovo or Dell. And so our technology has been inside of these products that can then once they’re assembled can go off and do really exciting things.

00:40:13.22 [Michael Helbling]: All right, well, hey, this has been a really great conversation. I’d like to go around really quick and maybe get everybody to tell the audience listening what your favorite wearable is and maybe some of the things you took away from the conversation today. Maybe we’ll start with you, Jim.

00:40:28.85 [Jim Cain]: I wish we’d covered more today and maybe we can get talking about it on the Facebook page and Twitter and measure Slack, which I log into once a month, whether I need to or not, is, again, the overlap, which we didn’t really touch on today between what digital analysts do and how it extends into what wearable technology does. I was hoping we’d cover a little bit more around, again, how product managers are and want to use the data that they’re already generating, and how we can find some of the direct connections between, you know, again, someone who buys online and then uses a product. Like, to that full cradle degree to me is very, very interesting. And that’s something I think about. It’s something, you know, again, as measured, mentioned with the measurement protocol in GA is totally doable. And I’d love to see some examples of it. So if anybody had any, that’s my wrap up.

00:41:16.31 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll go a different route and something I meant to mention at the very beginning, and it’s a little bit of a question, and it’s a little bit of a testament to my age and early onset dementia. Was a Fitbit one of the giveaways at Unsummit this year?

00:41:30.06 [David McBride]: I don’t think we did that this year. Last year, or the year before, 2013, I’m pretty sure we gave away a Fitbit.

00:41:36.64 [Tim Wilson]: Okay. I was at a conference. Maybe I just attend too many conferences. I definitely scored a badass little remote helicopter with an HD camera at unsummit right before heading to a spring break in Florida with my kids. So that was fantastic. But at some conferences year, I wound up with a Fitbit, which my 13 year old wore for about two weeks and hit like 12,000 steps every day and I’m like I’ve been now wearing it for three months and I’m about to hit 12,000 steps total but so it goes. Now I enjoyed this. I feel like we we talked sports which is a little off the beaten path not necessarily core on our last episode and we’re talking you know wearables which is also a little off the beaten path. you know off the core and I fantastically enjoyed both conversations and it’s kind of interesting trying to wrap my head around all of the moving parts for something that on the one hand seems kind of simple but it’s actually not and I think to me going back to what David said early on about the business model meeting the product, the hardware and the software. Those are kind of inherently bundled tightly, tightly together is kind of most intriguing thing to me. And then kind of to Jim, to your point, the how that matched, how that meets up with marketing, where does, where does marketing meet product in a deeper way in this space is going to be really interesting to watch.

00:43:04.20 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I concur. I think all of us in the digital analytics space will find more and more intersections with this as time goes on. I think we’re just getting started. So, yeah, I’m excited to see what happens. I certainly think we, you know, both the products, the platforms and the measurement capabilities, we’re just starting to scratch the surface. So, yeah, very future bright. What about you, David?

00:43:27.97 [David McBride]: So you guys declined to mention your favorite wearable, so I’ll put one out there. And I’m going to bleed Intel Blue here and cite a product that we launched earlier this year, early last year, done by SMS Audio. And it’s a set of headphones that actually through the ear, through the part that fits in your ear, can measure your heartbeat, your heart rate, and then that feeds into your phone. It’s pretty cool, right? SMS audio. So I like that one. As far as takeaways, you know, it’s really interesting for me because I swim in the sea day in and day out and to have a conversation with with you guys to hear you kind of hit on some of the key issues that we wrestle with is really sort of validating for some of my pain, where I wonder after a day of little progress, now I know why, because it’s There’s so many issues for us to reconcile and figure out, and it’s just kind of a wide open playing field, whether it be in the business model or in sort of the relationships between data people and product people. I think that one thing we didn’t touch on too much, but that is a common theme is the fact that these devices, unless there’s a reason for the consumer to continue to use them, they end up in the top drawer of the nightstand after a little while, because I think largely because once you get used to your heart rate, you kind of, you know, the range that it’s in, or maybe you don’t want to know the information. For those of us in the business, it’s incumbent upon us to come up with a product feature ecosystem, whether that be from data or recommendations or something else that keeps it fresh and exciting and new and keeps it out of the top drawer.

00:45:04.61 [Tim Wilson]: That actually reminds me of Michelle Kiss had her had a comment. So there’s some stat of like 50% of your fitness wearables are pretty much put in the drawer after within six months or within three months. And the, okay, you’ve confirmed that I’m fat and lazy. Thank you very much. You know, do you need to, do you need to give me alerts on my phone, you know, three times a day re, reaffirming that I’m still, still fat and lazy?

00:45:27.89 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and that’s, it’s a challenge. I mean, there’s ways to create communities around Fitbit and things like that. So I think the, to the extent that people do that, the more likely they are to kind of stick with it maybe. Anyway, what about you, the listener? What do you think? We’d love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on Twitter or on the measure slack. Uh, drop us a line, hit David McBride up on Twitter, which now of course, as soon as I say that, I can’t remember what his Twitter handle is, but I think it’s trans class. Yep. At trans class. Yes. And so check him out, follow him on Twitter. David, I mentioned at the top of the show the unsummit, but anything else going on that you’d want our listeners to know about that’s happening in your world event-wise or analytics-wise?

00:46:16.72 [David McBride]: This is kind of like when Stephen Colbert had Joe Biden on the other night and tried to get him to declare his candidacy for president.

00:46:22.83 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, nice try, Colbert.

00:46:25.36 [David McBride]: but i’m actually going to declare my candidacy president are you going to get emotional about that that’s it wow so i am excited to say that even though adobe is moving to las vegas they can’t shake on summit we’re following them to las vegas and we are gonna have the unsummit there um still mailing down a venue and time and date and all that stuff as it has always been in the past the past what we’ve done it five years now we are likely to do it the day of the first, uh, of kind of the welcoming session. Uh, I think that’s actually scheduled for a Tuesday. So look for that on summits, a great opportunity to get to know people and network with them, kind of create a smaller cohort of people before you go to the, the bigness of the, of the Adobe summit. So, um, there’ll be more information there at, uh, at our webpage and, you know, on my Twitter handle and stuff like that.

00:47:15.58 [Jim Cain]: Is there a bar there? We could do a live recording.

00:47:18.34 [David McBride]: Oh, that would be awesome. For you, we will make one.

00:47:20.65 [Jim Cain]: Make a mark.

00:47:20.93 [Michael Helbling]: Does this mean you’re going to come to your first Adobe marketing summit, Jim Cain? If that’s what it takes.

00:47:26.53 [Tim Wilson]: That’s what I wanted to hear. Unsummit. Unsummit focuses on short, you know, pithy, succinct, concise sessions. So I think we might be entirely disqualified.

00:47:36.22 [Jim Cain]: We could do the un-unsummit in the Barnex door.

00:47:39.47 [Tim Wilson]: For three days leading up to try to edit down the 20 minute session.

00:47:43.35 [David McBride]: I think both Michael and Tim presented it as past years on Summit. So that was a A big coup. So, Jim, if we could get you there this year, that would be the trifecta.

00:47:51.88 [Jim Cain]: It was a coup for us. That would be great. The trifecta. Well, there’s nothing like following Tim Wilson to make me look awesome at a conference.

00:47:59.51 [Tim Wilson]: Wait, who won? Who won the thing at E-metrics? What was it called when they threw out a random topic and random slides and you had to talk?

00:48:08.04 [Jim Cain]: I won that. Yes. But handily. Which presenter would I rather have? I was filed somewhere underneath the guy that said lunch is served.

00:48:17.23 [Michael Helbling]: and we’ll cut all that all right well great well hey thanks everyone it’s been a pleasure David thank you so much for taking the time and talking to us I think this is a really interesting topic to Tim’s point our last episode being about analytics and sports and this episode being about wearables and analytics we’re definitely you know taking on some of the fringes of the space, but I still think very interesting for all of our listeners.

00:48:44.83 [Announcer]: But again, thank you, thanks Tim and Jim, and for all of our listeners out there, keep analyzing. And I’m like, who are these people?

00:49:16.91 [David McBride]: It’s going to get a little weird tonight. No, there was something really on the tip of my tongue that was really sharp.

00:49:22.52 [Michael Helbling]: He proactively reached out and said, hey, I’ve been listening to the podcast. Why do you guys sound so terrible?

00:49:29.40 [Jim Cain]: Immersal was already killed for six hours a day. We will neither confirm nor deny. When does it get serious again? We don’t even like doing this. The haunted, smelly scene. There’s only so much Nickelback I can listen to on the way to work. Oh my. Because I love hearing the sound of my voice. I would rather be waterboarded in urine. I hope it’s the intermission music from Holy Grail. That’s, like, back to the future, too.

00:50:01.38 [Tim Wilson]: Rock flag and wearables.

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