3 Things: Cybersecurity Labor Gap, Grin for B2B, Cookiepocalypse Co-op
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently and associated business opportunities. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Cybersecurity Labor Gap
Grin for B2B
Cookiepocalypse Co-op
1. Cybersecurity Labor Gap
There are few sectors growing faster than cybersecurity. Between 2020 and 2021, the amount of VC dollars that poured into the industry more than doubled from $7.8B to over $20B. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, there was over $6B invested across infrastructure, cloud, application, network, data, and IoT security. And for good reason — there is expected to be $10.5 trillion of annual cybercrime damage by 2025, which is greater than all destruction caused by natural disasters globally and accounts for more money than the entire illicit drug trade. Between 2020 and 2021, the US added 270k cyber jobs but still is facing a gap of many hundreds of thousands. The national average salary for a cybersecurity professional is a whopping $96k so poses a huge opportunity for many individuals who would pick a different trade or maybe are college educated but in a less lucrative (or desirable) field.
The Biden administration recently created an initiative to help bring more women and underrepresented minorities into the sector and train them to help fill the 700k job gap, since they see this as one of the biggest threats to both the public and private sectors. There are already plenty of certifications, trade associations, and bootcamps for the security industry such as the ISACA, but I see an opportunity to create a tech-focused training program, certifications, and placement marketplace. I’d get the top 100ish tech CISOs and CIOs, give them equity in the company, and create an “advisory board” to help co-brand the curriculum and advise on what they’d want to see in the training and credentialing. Other industry professionals look to their peers so it could quickly become the go-to place for a stamp of approval and to find qualified talent for open roles. The training programs can map to the largest skills gaps within the member companies and shift over time to adjust to changing demands. Companies would pay a membership to be a part of the network and get to post jobs, find candidates, and even leverage training materials for their internal employees.
2. Grin for B2B
Influencer marketing has been a popular channel for many direct-to-consumer companies for a while. In fact, modern influencer marketing significantly predates the internet and social media. Some famous examples include Coca Cola using Santa as an “influencer” for their print ad campaigns in the 1930s, the Marlboro Man beginning in the 1950s, and the Quaker Oats’ “Mikey Likes It” campaign in the ‘70s. Prior to the social media age, it was primarily celebrity spokesperson driven, but as the ability to create content, grow an audience, and connect with global users across a variety of platforms emerged, the nature of influencers shifted as well. “Regular” people who had passion for a certain sector could build a following and influence purchasing decisions. Brands saw this nascent behavior and immediately started to take advantage by providing free product and paying these new influencers to endorse their items. Eventually, these experiments turned into full-blown marketing channels.
In the early 2010s, companies like Grin, Traackr, CreatorIQ, and many more popped up to help brands find creators and manage their influencer marketing programs. As the concept of micro-influencers started taking off, it became difficult to recruit armies of brand ambassadors and manage collaboration, communications, and measurement. Today, almost 100% of consumer brands engage in some kind of influencer marketing initiatives, yet very few B2B companies use this as a channel. There has long been the concept of affiliate marketing where people with an audience (blogger, newsletter author, etc) earn money for sending traffic that converts, and other forms of referral programs. Currently, the number of people who have content related to business has grown, business channels have skewed more social (like LinkedIn), and more social channels like TikTok and Instagram now have a significant amount of business-related creators. As more B2B companies start using influencer marketing as a channel, they will need tools to manage these programs. Given the nuances of B2B vs B2C including the difference in other GTM tools that teams will use, it would make sense to have new platforms that specifically cater to these businesses.
3. Cookiepocalypse Co-op
The impending “cookiepocalypse” has been on the minds of most Marketers since Google first announced the phasing out of 3rd party cookies in Chrome back in 2020. While they have delayed the changes until 2023, companies have been scrambling to understand the impacts on their businesses and how to prepare and counteract any negative effects. Cookies were introduced back in 1994 by Lou Montulli (a programmer at Netscape) as a way to allow early e-commerce shoppers to store items in their virtual carts. When people realized that cookies could be shared across a range of websites, savvy advertisers started seeing the application in tracking users around the web with their ads. Throughout the early 2000s, the use of cookies, mostly for advertising purposes, started to explode — which also brought about consumer and regulatory concern around privacy and the early attempts at regulation.
Recently, the tide has turned when it comes to online privacy. Google announced removing support for 3rd party cookies, Apple launched the “Do Not Track” feature in iOS 14 where you can opt out of apps tracking you, and more and more regulation is being proposed and enforced. With the “cookiepocalypse” announcement, many martech companies have popped up to help companies do more with 1st part data; from capturing it, tracking anonymous users, determining intent, enabling better website personalization and much more. While these products can probably move the needle a bit for brands, it’s unlikely to make up for the lack of 3rd party cookies. I think there is an opportunity to take a FBN (Farmers Business Network) approach of pooling data to help the whole network. You could enable non-competitive companies with similar target demographics to share 1st party data in a give-to-get co-op. With enough scale, you could piece together enough information to better target and convert users. You could offer the data co-op for free initially and monetize on software and tooling to leverage the data and drive Marketing results. Over time you can charge a subscription fee to be a part of the network.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, reply here or find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine