tv Bloomberg West Bloomberg September 29, 2014 11:00pm-12:01am EDT
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>> live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to "bloomberg west." i am cory johnson in for emily chang. a check of your bloomberg top headlines. pimco software is going private. they will be acquired by vista equity partners for $4.3 billion. that is the biggest u.s. tech buyout of the year. dreamworks animation may be acquired by softbank. the japanese company just bought sprint. the two sides are said to be in talk although a person with
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knowledge of the matter says an actual chance of an acquisition going through is low. dreamworks is also said to be open to other offers. and two judges in ohio say the rideshare companies uber and lyft do not have to reveal personal information about their drivers. but first, facebook launching a new ad platform today, one that will stretch beyond its own mobile and desktop sites. they call it atlas. it will allow marketers to use facebook data to target users to buy ads on non-facebook websites and apps. google has also announced a new mobile ad tool today, plans to automatically resize advertising
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spots for desktop computers and to fit mobile devices. they are calling it an anchor that will remain at the bottom of a mobile device screen. even as viewers scroll down on the page. let me start with you, sarah. it is interesting to me that this has become the event where these big marketers are showing off their wares. them a facebook has been moving in this direction for a long time. earlier this see a they allowed mobile developers to target people on their own applications . they have allowed shopping, tracking across the web.
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they have been moving in this direction but this is not a new announcement for them. this ad a server did not exist for them before. it is going to make a difference in the industry because you are tracking people by their facebook identity, not cookies, as they have in the past. >> you work with facebook a lot, this seems like a huge deal to be able to take their ad platform beyond facebook. >> it is really exciting. facebook is laying the groundwork for the next generation of adept technology. it is a lot like a stock trader. this is the technology that allows them to run and manage their campaigns. it also allows them to measure their campaigns. if you own the tool that allows a marketers measure what they
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are doing it is important. >> it is not about where the ads are going. it is about their ability to monitor? , it's about figuring out where to show the ads and measuring the impact. facebook is taking that to the next level. >> how big is facebook outside of facebook? >> i think facebook, because it covers most of the world population at this point, it covers the whole internet. there is nowhere you can't go on the internets that is not touched by facebook in some way. >> what about you, is there a notion that facebook -- instagram is a separate app and it may be they are looking at the web as a universe of different sites and different apps that facebook ads will appear on all of them. >> this is the beginning of a big move. the future of facebook is not just in facebook itself. we see that in terms of their acquisitions.
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they acquired oculus. they are splitting up their apps but they are also splitting up their advertising into the wider web. >> is google the company they are after here? >> if you can think what google did for many years -- they spent billions of dollars and thousands of engineers working on these products. facebook says we are going to compete. >> is there a fundamental difference in the way a marketer -- i always say advertiser -- that an advertiser has where facebook is completely different than google in what way? >> facebook has a tremendous
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asset in the data they store about their users. it is people centric marketing. advertising for people, not for machines that for actual individuals. >> that's part of my conversation. i think of advertising in terms of how old somebody is or how wealthy they are. is google also that smart? >> you certainly don't look 1000 years old. google and facebook are incredibly smart about this. it is going to be a horse race. >> facebook's isn't the only company vying for the advertising business. amazon.com has a massive ad business. we will talk to the person running the business next on "bloomberg west."
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up in its competition over google for ad dollars. could amazon's investment in its own ad platform reduce reliance on google search? we are joined now by lisa schneider from new york. i am so fascinated by all things amazon. is it about driving sales to the amazon platform or is there a brand thing that happens? >> thank you for having me on. it is a combination of both. it helps them with their shopping experience and work with marketers on branded campaigns.
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>> the business you run is doing $750 million to $2 billion of revenue this year. is that correct? >> we will continue to grow and connect with customers wherever they are across multiple devices. >> my jaw was on the floor with some of the things you guys have learned about what works in advertising on the web. share with me what makes an ad more effective.
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>> we continue to innovate e-commerce ads. a good example of that is dynamic optimization. when you take the shopping feature in functionality, you embed them right in the ads. customer ratings and reviews, and now we are starting to check dynamic optimization where we can watch the performance of the ad and change real-time. we can include things like a buy now button. if we are seeing a higher roi in performance. >> that is wild. when you write the ad, when you create the images for the ad, do you do different options available and sub those into see which works? >> i know you love your football
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analogy. our focus of our advertising program is to make the customer shopping experience more relevant. one way of doing that is ensuring that the messaging of the ads, the call to action within the ad, whether it is by now, embedding a coupon, embedding video, so that the marketer can tell a branded story of the call to action, we can increase and improve performance as the campaign is running real-time. >> that changes the role of the creator of those ads. i had a job once at american express where i was designing the gold card application. they were literally having me create different sized boxes for the check marks and focus groups were testing those to see which ones would get the most check marks and the most clicks.
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are your mad men having to create lots and lots of different options? is there whole practice -- the whole practice of creating ads changing to dynamic optimization? >> we create them all internally. we are constantly testing and learning and evolving and innovating on behalf of our customer. we are learning things like what the call to action is, the color of the ad, the font size, the image, all of that really matters, with the goal of improving the customer's overall shopping experience. >> is that secret sauce only done by amazon? or are your advertisers like procter & gamble, like random house privy to that new process of creating this type of dynamic ad? >> all of the marketers we work
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with we share standard reporting on the performance of the ads. with marketers who are selling product, it really matters to them the performance of the ad and the roi that they are seeing to hit their marketing goals. >> in the history of advertising on the web, which now extends quite a long time, we have seen the rate at which advertisers pay come down from off-line advertising to tv advertising, to more on the web. you would think that it would have measured that it would be greater not less. are you seeing a reversal of that trend? >> my comment to that is that we are growing our ad business, it is healthy, and are marketers are seized with the developments over the years. we are focused on improving
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customer experience. we're seeing healthy growth globally. >> is the metric you give to advertisers efficacy and clicking through? >> yes. we report on industry standard reporting, things like impressions and clicks through and engagement. everything we do in our advertising program is with an eye on scale and scaling globally and creating parity across every country where we exist. >> do you think that the change, facebook and google announcing
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new platforms today, where are we in terms of the evolution of technology and advertising? are we starting to arrive in industry-standard tools? >> i cannot comment on what google or facebook are doing, what i can comment on is given the adoption of mobile devices with our customers and the type of e-commerce growth we're seeing on mobile just last holiday season. 50% of ark restaurants shop to be a mobile device. that is going to change the way we are thinking about marketing and marketing cross-platform and connecting with customers. >> vice president of global advertising, thank you so much. softbank may have its eye on a new acquisition, dreamworks animation. why the telecom giant is interested. ♪
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>> welcome back to "bloomberg west." softbank is looking to buy the studio dreamworks. softbank's is currently in talks to buy the tech driven film studio according to people familiar with the metal. dreamworks animation has struggled to grow beyond film. why would the telecom giant go after the company behind how to train your dragon? alex sherman has that answer in following the story.
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he knows i prefer my kung fu panda's at third base. this is an adjusting deal. this is buying a very different kind of asset for softbank. >> a drop in the bucket compared to t-mobile and some of the other potential acquisitions that they have been rumored to be looking at recently including american spinoffs. softbank is actually looking at several u.s. media companies and one source described them as being on second base for several different u.s. media assets that could be larger than this one. but the acquisition would give them content they could payor with around the globe. is that integration of content and distribution that all sorts of telecom companies have been looking at recently. comcast was buying nbc. i know we are having the ceo
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full-screen on later. that is the play here, putting together content and distribution. here's the content company that probably needs to get a buyer because the standalone business of the film driven company like dreamworks animation is very up and down. if you look at the shares over the past year or two years they have struggled, and that is because of investors looking at this company and saying it does not have enough and needs more scale. >> i was surprised when i looked the financials this morning, that for three years now the majority of the revenue has come from overseas sales, not in the u.s. i was surprised it was not a lot less or a lot more. how to train your dragon, other animated hits, you would think they would do quite well in multiple markets.
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>> it does play fairly well in asia, a decent resentment of that 54% is in asia, and that is part of the play force-out rank -- play for softbank. and also, softbank is looking at wireless assets around the world. if you start to build some of these content plays you can potentially push them to more regions of the country and maybe the international movement goes up. >> under dreamworks, because the distribution would be compulsory to the consumers of softbank and consumers on wireless, they would have a bigger market, be seen by more people, and have greater value. >> potentially. i think that is the larger play. what what you're going to see are a lot of u.s. wireless companies and cable complete check the about verizon, at&t, sprint, they're looking closer and closer at content plays to try to bring together content
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and distribution which is the exact opposite of what we saw five or seven years ago when these larger companies like cablevision and time warner cable started to break apart and spin away their content plays. we are seeing the reverse as these companies make this content push. >> alex sherman warming the heart as always. walmart is going social by adding instagram's cofounder to its board. we will talk about what that means next on bloomberg west. ♪ them a time now for bloomberg television "on the markets." let's get you caught up with where stocks are trading on the day.
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when you took this phone on with a new challenge to bend it. what did you find in terms of physical durability at large? >> we found that a lot of phones actually bend. it is really just how much force is applied. in our testing we found that it takes around 70 pounds of force to bend the iphone 6 to where you can measure it. we put a measuring device right underneath it, it is a fulcrum that comes down and imparts force in a very precise way.
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it took 70 pounds of force for the six and 90 pounds of force for the six plus. >> that is interesting that the six plus is stronger. both of them are bendable. you took some heat on line. people calling you a fraud. people looking at the video. some people see that we show the bent phone, and has -- it has an earlier time frame stamp. can you explain that? >> the reason that i published another video after it was to put that to rest of the truth is that i bend multiple phones. i did not want to just bend one phone and then publish a video that would look conclusive. the results that you're seeing in the first video actually two separate bends.
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the first one was slightly overexposed. it was a question of editing the video together in picking a different take. but the results are identical. i have bent three now, each one bending in the same place. >> our test is in no way implying that his test was fabricated. what we found was that the human hand can import quite a bit of force. these phones do in fact bend. we did not put the force directly on the bottom switch, but you see that our phones and in the same -- bend in the same space. in>> after i'm done with these
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things, i have a phone that is chopped in half. it is the end of a titanium reinforcement, and you are left with a sheet of aluminum at that point. it takes very little pressure at that point to impart that bend. every single image that i received from a user has shown their device bending in that same location, without even bend testing them. if they are wearing tight enough pants, that portion there can sometimes end up right with the -- right where the hip meets the thigh. >> this is not all for giggles. the notion that you can bend a phone, who cares. but the notion that a 70 pound butt can bend a phone you might want have wanted to keep, there are those.
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is this a concern for the functionality of all of the phones that have been tested? is this one more fragile than other phones? >> as a relative measure, the iphone 6 and six plus were not as robust as some of the other phones we tested, and we do not test every phone we bring into our lab. we were trying to put some data behind what was really becoming a big issue online for we wanted to actually set a very precise machine and find out what the data was. what we came to was yes these phones are as a relative measure a little weaker than some phones from samsung, like the galaxy note three that sprung back to form until we reached 150 pounds
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of force and then completely shattered. and the iphone 5. if you think what 70 pounds of force means in our test, that is like a small child standing with his heel exactly on the center of the phone and balancing it on top of two bricks. i think that is an unreasonable expectation in modern-day use. >> you must have daughters not sons. [laughter] this was when i thought it was a real story. we showed the video, but then apple put out this nondenial denial. apple said iphone 6 and six plus need and or exceed all of our high quality standards through our first six days of sale. a total of nine
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customers have contacted apple with a bent iphone 6 plus. no mention whatsoever the iphone 6. we know the iphone 6 sold more, so why would they not give that number? that nondenial did out with that sketchy answer may be think there was more to it. did you notice a similar bending issue in the iphone 6? >> i've been told that my test is actually a four-point bend test. the extra surface area on the six plus is the reason it is easier to bend on the six itself. the six held up a little bit better. it might have something to do with the area around the volume button having more
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reinforcement, or potentially the aluminum is not quite as bendable. i originally started this experiment based on them getting in touch with me on his own. most pockets barely fit the six plus, whereas the six will go into your pocket a little more nicely and it probably will encounter far less force from your hip. >> you should be wearing a
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sport coat every day. and we should not sit on our iphones. and we should read the non-denials a little bit closer. thank you both. will would you pay $5,000 to record your favorite tv show for three years? tivo think so. the new mega dvr box. you can watch a streaming on your smart phone, on your tablet or on apple tv. ♪
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but is bigger better? the ceo of tivo joins us. talk to me about the imagined use for something like this, 4000 hours of recorded video. >> we started the whole notion of on-demand viewing, being able to watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it. many people, with typical satellite or cable dvr runs into the issue of the record something and it knocks something else out that they have not watched yet but wanted to say. we solve for that issue completely. we have many uses for this. on tivo we have collections, collections of the best 100 films of all time. with one click of a button you can record the best 100 films of
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all time, and have them there. imagine having friends over to say you can pick any one of them. we decided to take a to the hole -- big to the next level with tivo mega. this is 12 times bigger than any other dvr, cable or satellite has on the market -- any other dvr cable or satellite has on the market. it really gives the viewer the ability to have all choice anytime they ever want. >> you have some new partnerships with so many of the cable providers across the world. i wonder, some speculation on market, with the cord cutting play this gets very interesting to people who have their content will want to keep their content, and not have so many netflix and so on because they can just do what you are looking at. is this a threat to netflix and amazon prime?
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>> i do not think so. we are looking to serve all television viewers. i am a cable tv guy. having all of those channels to me is critical to the best experience. we are able to put that all with netflix and hulu. the ability to get everything the way the iphone can in the mobile phone device. what we're looking for with the mega is people will have huge storage needs. it is not for everybody, but it gives people who like to record a lot and have tons of choice to always have something waiting for them. for people who do not want cable or satellite, but still want a dvr, you used to be able to have that with aereo. but they got struck down by the
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supreme court, so we are the legal way to have it. you can have it put together in a fully integrated way. we know that there are many different ways for people to watch television, many different needs they have in terms of the choice they want to have. and we are after satisfying all of that. >> we were talking during the break. i have been a tivo user for a long time. i also have issues with my comcast relationship with tivo. there has been a slight delay on the sound and video. i wonder in terms of those partnerships with comcast in particular, you are now in every comcast market up from 12 last august. does that provide more growth with some of your partnerships?
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>> we have a unique relationship with comcast. we are the key provider of advanced television to more cable operators in the united states than anybody else. we now serve 19 of the top 25 operators with some element of television where the youth -- they use us as their core piece of how they generate better ui experience. with comcast, they say we want to have the xfinity content and that proprietary video library they have developed available fully integrated as part of tivo. somebody can have all the comcast channels, vod, and tv everywhere. the streaming services of had -- netflix and hulu and web video all-in-one. we believe our retail offering gives us some interesting growth
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prospects. we enter into a deal with comcast to get to that's next generation of security, how you make sure the programming is secure? that means no cable card in the future. that is an unusual situation and not one you should be having. comcast is giving us a path to a whole new generation opportunity. >> everyone go for the bloomberg west season pass. consoles has been made legal in china after a 14 year ban. that story is next on bloomberg west.
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e-commerce committee. david is the managing director at montgomery scott. i don't care about the price tag, i care about how this company works, why would they go to the instagram dude to be on their board? >> they are trying to understand the internet. they were behind for a number of years, they made some pretty big moves, hired some people in silicon valley to make sure they understand it from the grassroots what is going on. they have the ability and the balance sheet to hire people. there is a lot of attractiveness to be involved with walmart, they are so big. >> marissa mayer is on that board as well. i can understand, kevin is a smart guy. other specific issues that there
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-- there that is behind this specific acquisition? >> i think on some level they are trying to understand video, merchandising. instagram is about photos and pictures. they are trying to learn as much as they can from a lot of different people. i don't know what strengths he brings. maybe they will learn what the newest music is out there on a regular basis. he is far younger than anyone else on the board. >> i can't talk about walmart and conversation without -- what is someone from silicon valley going to speak to that important issue where walmart is making decisions about how to pay some of their employees? >> that is probably not going to be his expertise on the board.
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him coming in was probably not to do with dealing with labor relations. their argument is they will pay -- they will be competitive. there are a lot more job applications than there are openings. they promote people. doug mcmillan, the ceo, started out in a store. >> there is only one guy who will do that, the rest of them won't. thank you very much. the bwest byte is where we focus on one number that tells us a whole lot. and attainment reporter joins me right now. i like a surprise. >> it is 100,000, that is how much people are thinking that xbox is going to sell this year in china. in units.
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that is way less than they do in america. it is a lot more expensive in china. it will sell about $600 to $700 compared to $400 here. they only have about 10 games that are available. >> the list of games is kind of pathetic. there are no first-person shooters. there was a great headline from reuters calling it bland fest auto. >> yes, it is not available. halo is not available. they are trying to do that. what they are trying to do, instead of putting zombies and games because zombies do not sell in china, they will try to fill it with something else. >> thank you. always the latest headlines on
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