TED Prize winner Charmian Gooch has worked for years to end anonymous shell companies. At TED2014, she gave the audience a look at how anonymity feeds corruption. Yesterday’s release of the Panama Papers illustrates her message, with 11.5 million documents that paint a picture of a global network of anonymous dealings. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED

A trail of $2 billion in offshore deals that traces to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. The Prime Minister of Iceland, accused of hiding millions of dollars in investments. The Prime Minister of Pakistan’s family, linked to six luxury real estate deals in London.

The Panama Papers, revealed yesterday, represent the largest data leak in history – a total of 11.5 million files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which among other services incorporates companies in offshore jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and the Seychelles. The contents of the leak point to the offshore holdings of 140 politicians and public officials from more than 50 countries, as well as to numerous celebrities and members of the global elite. The revelations in the papers have jaws dropping all around the world. But they’re not a huge surprise to Charmian Gooch, winner of the 2014 TED Prize. “It’s really exciting, isn’t it, that this secretive world is being opened up to global public scrutiny,” she said over email.

Gooch and her organization Global Witness have been calling attention for years to the issue of anonymous companies and how they enable corruption. In her talk at TED2014, Gooch wished to create a public registry of who owns companies, to make the anonymous ownership a thing of the past. To the team at Global Witness, the Panama Papers prove the importance of this mission.

“This investigation shows how secretly owned companies … can act as getaway cars for terrorists, dictators, money launderers and tax evaders all over the world,” says Robert Palmer of Global Witness. “The time has clearly come to take away the keys.”

Watch BBC One’s Panorama tonight for Global Witness’ take on The Panama Papers, and what can be done to end anonymous companies and open up tax havens. For a crystal-clear explanation of why anonymous companies are problematic, watch the TED-Ed animation below and check out Charmian Gooch’s TED Prize talk.

And for more on the issue of global corruption:

• Watch a playlist of TED Talks on the depths of corruption
• Read how loopholes make dirty money far too easy to hide
• Think about the difference between corporate privacy and secrecy

Forbes magazine just published its latest ranking of the World’s Most Valuable Brands.  The results weren’t all that surprising — Apple remains the far-and-away leader at $154.1 billion — and writer Kurt Badenhausen’s summary provides a good topline analysis of the ranking.  But there are always interesting data points in these kinds of reports that don’t make the headlines, so I thought I’d share with you three noteworthy, if not well-publicized, facts about the world’s most valuable brands.

1. Brands matter in B2B. Sixteen of the top 100 most valuable brands — and 2 of the top 10 — are B2B companies. GE tops the B2B brand list with $36.7 billion of value attributed directly to its brand.  For reference, the amount equals IKEA’s total revenues.  Also of note, that amount represents 40% of the company’s total revenue.  So it’s safe to declare GE’s brand is critically valuable to the corporation.

When I’m speaking about brand-building, I’m often challenged by people who think that brands don’t matter in B2B — that somehow purchase decisions are too rational, products are too functional, and competitive advantage is too technical in B2B companies for their brands to have any substantive impact.  But the Forbes ranking suggests otherwise.  And adding credence to these numbers is the introduction to GE’s last annual report, which stated, “Every GE business feeds off enterprise strength in technology, brand, globalization and services.” [emphasis mine]

2. Many companies are leaving brand value on the table. It’s not surprising that some companies generate revenues well above their brand value.  But Forbes calculates that 34 of the top 100 brands are more valuable than their companies’ revenues.  For example, Facebook’s company revenues are reported at $17.4 billion while its brand value is $52.6 billion.  In some cases, the differential is likely mostly due to corporate structure, e.g., the $14 billion that Google’s brand is valued over the company’s revenues probably contributes to Alphabet, its parent company’s revenue.  But for many brands, I’m at a loss to explain why companies would not be able to capture more of their brand value.  Perhaps they need to work harder at monetizing their brand equity?

3. Exact brand value is difficult to calculate. The differences between brand valuation rankings illustrates this point best.  For example, as noted above, Forbes reports Apple’s brand value at $154.1 billion.  But last year, Interbrand’s Best Global Brands ranking published by BusinessWeek estimated that value at $170.3 billion.  Some of the difference could be explained by Apple’s declining performance during the time gap, but a loss of $16.2 billion in such a short timeframe seems unlikely.  And the discrepancies do not result from Forbes consistently over-valuing brands — it puts Coke’s brand value at $58.5 billion, while BusinessWeek reports it at $78.4 billion.  The differences are most likely due to the differences in valuation methodologies as well as the subjectivity involved in the calculations.  I’ve written before about the shortcomings of brand valuation techniques, so I will simply reiterate here that these calculations are best used for comparative, not absolute use.

What do you find interesting, surprising, challenging, or helpful about the world’s most valuable brands?  Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

related posts:

• the financial value of brands continues to rise
• the problem with brand value and brand valuation
• best brands and companies lists

The post three things they didn’t tell you about the world’s most valuable brands appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week:

The bare necessities of life.  In a paper published on March 25, Craig Venter revealed that he and his team have created a minimalist microbe containing only the genes essential for its survival. The ultimate goal is to create new synthetic life forms, but the results reveal a pretty big catch: Of 473 total genes, the functions of 149 are completely unknown, roughly 30% of the total, underscoring how much we have left to learn about life. Read more about the results in an Atlantic article by fellow TED speaker Ed Yong. (Watch Craig’s TED Talk and Ed’s TED Talk.)

Vikings in North America. Despite their description in ancient sagas, Viking settlements in the New World have eluded discovery — with only one confirmed site on the tip of Newfoundland.  But further south, TED Prize winner and space archaeologist Sarah Parcak’s latest discovery, a stone hearth used for working iron thought to be built by Vikings, could upend our limited knowledge of Viking history in North America.  Read more about the discovery in National Geographic or on the latest Nova, and stay tuned for the release later this year of Global Xplorer, a citizen science-based game developed by Parcak, so you can try your own hand at space archaeology.  (Watch Sarah’s TED Talk.)

Roadblocks to economic stability. In a Bloomberg’s “The First Word” podcast interview last week, economist Dambisa Moyo weighed in on remarks by Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, in which he called on global financial leaders to rethink current systems to prepare for the next financial crisis. Noting the good intentions behind this call-to-action, Moyo nonetheless acknowledges the difficulties: “ We see a lot of differences and a schism across many countries across the world, partly driven by the weakness in the underlying real economy.” Considering the differences between, for example, how European and American institutions bank and trade, having one cohesive approach for all countries will be difficult. But is universality the key when tackling a new economic crisis? (Watch Dambisa’s TED Talk.)

A puzzling TV show. David Kwong has a puzzling profession, literally; he creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times and and sometimes, for TV shows like NBC’s Blindspot, a show whose protagonist has tattoos that are linked to a large criminal conspiracy. In the April 4 episode, the character Patterson starts a puzzle that was created by Kwong. In an interview, Kwong asks Martin Gero, the show’s creator, about his inspiration: “I’ve wanted to do a puzzle/treasure hunt show for years … but could never quite crack it. Finally I had this image of a giant puzzle map tattooed on a person’s body and I thought: yeah, this might be something people would watch.” (Watch David’s TED Talk.)

North Korean defectors in China.  At TED2013, Hyeonseo Lee described her harrowing escape from North Korea to China, where she lived in hiding for 10 years before receiving asylum in South Korea. China considers North Korean refugees illegal immigrants and pays people who report them. On March 26 and 27, in a rare public speech made as a North Korean defector in China, she returned to speak at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival because, as she told the New York Times, she wanted “to at least change some of the information they’ve been given.”  (Watch Hyeonseo’s TED Talk.)

How humans spread epidemics. While humans may feel powerless in the face of new epidemics, it turns out that epidemics rely on human actions like urbanization and factory farming to get started and to spread, says investigative science journalist Sonia Shah in an interview with World Policy Journal. The interview, and her new book Pandemic, explore how these interactions give rise to epidemics … and the steps we can take to prevent them. (Watch Sonia’s TED Talk.)

High demand for an electric car. Since public registration opened on March 31, advance orders for the new Model 3 Tesla car have skyrocketed. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, estimated that by 10pm PST on Day One, Tesla received 140,000 orders. A cheaper and more energy-efficient edition, the Model 3 could help more people access an electric car. (Watch Elon’s TED Talk.)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

In its first-ever advertising, PrivatizeMe LLC, Durham, N.C., targets seven disparate social sectors with little in common… other than a preference not to be targeted at all. They are: gun enthusiasts; porn consumers; college-or-higher-educated African Americans; people with STDs; people with personal hygiene issues; survivalists; and the LGBT. Ads for an eighth target market, the overweight, were rejected and did not run. PrivatizeMe is a browser add-on that removes cookies, making the attention-averse and their web histories invisible to and unreachable by the sites they visit.

The Twitter campaign was created by advertising agency The Republik, Durham, and media, in the form of paid Tweets, is managed by the client. The ads are in two formats, both of which are intended to address the viewer with discomforting directness. The first, “You forgot…,” is in the form of a digital shopping cart with some typically private item for purchase. The second, “You fit…,” is a stark, all-type summation of the viewer’s profile.

Starting this year, the client initiated serial ad buys for target audiences considered likely to value privacy, and then refocused on those audiences with higher response rates. Gun enthusiasts, for which the campaign has run both profile- and shopping cart-format ads, have had the highest response rate of any group. Porn consumers (shopping cart) have been second highest. The most recent ad, the profile-format “You have E.D.,” broke this month.

Creative credits go to The Republik creative director Robert West; associate creative director Matt Shapiro; and art director/copywriter George Lauinger. Additional design work was done by London-based Robert Burke.

Creative Credits:
AD AGENCY: The Republik, Durham, N.C.
CD: Robert Shaw West
ACD: Matt Shapiro
AD/CW: George Lauinger

In keeping with its identity as “the Show-Me State,” Missouri had visitors document their own experiences for its latest tourism campaign.

As we have discussed (see here and here), two trends currently dominate the US labor market: The tightening of the labor market, leading to higher turnover and faster compensation growth, and Significant slowdown in labor productivity growth. Looking forward, we believe labor productivity growth is unlikely to bounce back to the rates seen 10-20 years […]

Teenagers. They’re not exactly known for their listening skills. But over Thanksgiving weekend of 2015, high school students across the United States sat down with elders and asked them deep, meaningful questions about their lives. More than 50,000 people — most in their teens — took part in the Great Thanksgiving Listen and recorded an interview using the StoryCorps app. A 14-year-old in Georgia heard what it was like for her grandmother to go to bed hungry; students in Colorado heard one man’s experience of enlisting during the Vietnam War; and a teen in Louisiana found out that her grandparents got engaged at a drive-in movie.

The StoryCorps app launched in March 2015, when StoryCorps founder Dave Isay won the TED Prize. But Isay says that the app’s first real test came in November during the Great Thanksgiving Listen. The event proved to him that the app — which lets anyone record an interview, and upload it to the Library of Congress — could exponentially increase the number of voices in StoryCorps’ archive. The 50,000 interviews recorded over Thanksgiving weekend doubled the number of interviews the organization recorded in its first 10 years combined.

“A year ago, I stood on this stage with a dream: to see if we could use technology to scale the incredibly intimate StoryCorps interview experience,” says Isay in the talk above, given as an update at the TED2016 conference. He shared the app’s stats — that it has now been downloaded 602,000 times, and used to record more than 81,000 interviews. But the real triumph is in quality. Isay notes that these interviews have the same depth and intensity of those recorded in StoryCorps booths; the difference is that interviews recorded with the app are “more informal” and “spontaneous.” These interviews, says Isay, take place “in basements and bedrooms, in kitchens and classrooms and cars.”

Andrew Goldberg works at StoryCorps, and is listening to interviews recorded with the app. In Great Thanksgiving Listen recordings, he’s noticed a few themes: the fight for civil rights, immigration to the United States, the hardships of military service. Another theme surprised him: September 11. “High school seniors were only about 3 years old when it occurred,” he said. “They want to know where their interview partner was at the time, how they learned about it, and if they felt scared.”

In general, both Goldberg and Isay — who listens to app interviews every Sunday evening — notice universals running through these interviews. There’s almost always discussion of love, and advice for what really matters in life. In a large number of recordings, the person being interviewed says either, “I have never told you this before,” or “I always wanted to share this with you.”

Over the past year, StoryCorps has worked with organizations to find creative ways to document voices typically excluded from media. At the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, participants interviewed each other about life in the rural West. At the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, attendees spoke to find the connective tissue between women’s experiences in different parts of the world, be they a Syrian journalist or an Iranian lawyer.

Still, only a small percentage of app interviews have been recorded outside of the US — which offers a big growth opportunity. “We’re still a couple of years away from truly going international,” says Isay. “One thing we’ll be doing this year is making it easy for the app to be translated into other languages.”

Also in the plans for the next year: a redesign that will make the app a hub for listening to StoryCorps content. Other improvements will make the interview recording process more seamless, as Isay thinks what’s been recorded so far is “the tip of the iceberg.” In the next year, Isay hopes to double the number of interviews recorded with the app in its first year.

The Great Thanksgiving Listen will take place again in 2016, and StoryCorps is working to strengthen its relationships with schools and educational organizations with an eye toward making interviews a standard part of the high school curriculum. Interviews give a first-person look at history, but they also teach students how to listen, says Isay. It’s something he fears could become a lost art.

“We live at this moment when our means of communication are advancing so quickly, while at the same time we don’t seem to be able to hear each other anymore,” he says in the talk above. “I heard someone say recently that hate is louder than love, and there’s some truth to that. We’re going to keep working with every cell in our bodies to turn up the volume on love.”

The StoryCorps app was launched with the 2015 TED Prize. In its first year, more than 81,000 interviews have been recorded using it. It has more than doubled StoryCorps’ archive of voices. Photo: Courtesy of StoryCorps

Programmatic buying and data-driven creative can help drive more effective digital advertising campaigns. But connecting the dots between the data and the creative can be a challenge. In this session, Google shared their latest research based on three brand experiments they ran with L’Oreal, Gilt.com, and RBC Royal Bank that outlines a creative process for programmatic to help drive more effective digital campaigns.

Just 173,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in August, according to the latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out Friday morning. That’s well below market expectations as well as the 12-month average. However, with the unemployment rate coming in at its lowest level since April 2008, seemingly for the right reasons, and solid revisions to prior months’ payroll count the situation may not be as lackluster as the August figure suggests.

The count for June was revised up to plus 245,000 from the latest reading of plus 231,000 jobs. July’s figure was also revised up to plus 245,000 from an initial reading of 215,000. Net total employment gains in June and July were therefore 44,000 higher than BLS previously reported and in line with the 12-month average of 247,000 monthly jobs added.

“Look past the August payroll number at the upward revisions in June and July to get a true sense of this report,” advises Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at financial data site Bankrate.com.

PNC Chief Economist Stuart Hoffman wrote in a note, “The August preliminary payroll jobs number is notorious for understating the final revised data by a huge average of 78,000 jobs in the past three years so there will be upward revisions to the 173,000 gain in the next two months.”

The sectors that added the most jobs were: health care and social assistance (56,000), professional and business services (33,000) and food services and drinking place (26,000). Conversely, manufacturing and mining lost jobs (17,000 and 9,000 respectively).

At 5.1% the unemployment rate, which is drawn from a different survey, was down from 5.3% in June and July. Up for debate, however, is whether people are leaving by choice or because they have determined opportunities do not exist for them.

Currently 8 million Americans are unemployed, down 1.5 million year-over-year, about half of the reduction from the long term unemployed. In August there were 624,000 discouraged workers — i.e. people not currently looking for work because they don’t believe jobs are available for them and therefore are not considered unemployed — which is down by 151,000 from a year ago and down by more than 40,000 from last month.

The labor force participation rate was also steady at 62.6% for the third month in a row, remaining at its lowest level in almost four decades. Previously the rate has been remained in a narrow 62.7% to 62.9% range. The U-6 rate, which measures under-employment, came in at 10.3% in August versus 10.4% in July and down from 12% a year earlier. The employment-population ratio was little changed at 59.4%.

Average hourly earnings rose by 8 cents to $25.09 last month. The 12-month wage growth rate is therefore 2.2%. Pre-recession normal year-over-year wage gains were between 3% and 4%.

McBride points to the steady participation rate and employment population ration combined with the revisions to conclude the unemployment rate is lower because more people are getting back to work.

“We have been saying for months that we want to see more people coming back into the labor market, but at this point it looks like they may stay on the sidelines,” notes Tara Sinclair, chief economist at job search site Indeed. ”If this is the new normal we need to start getting comfortable with it.”

Equity markets futures were in the red Friday, with the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite all down about 1% in the first 20 minutes following the release. The question on investors’ minds is what this all means for the Federal Reserve, which has indicated it would like to nudge interest rates from near zero if economic conditions allow.

“There is nothing in there that would deter the Fed from raising rates this month. The decision is ultimately going to come to what shape financial markets are in mid September,” says McBride.  Markets have been suffering a bout of drama in recent weeks the Vix volatility index soaring and the Dow declining close to 9% for the year. “The Fed wants to raise rates or at least get the process started. They need to restock the cupboard in order to having something to serve up” next time the economy gets into trouble.

“With the unemployment rate falling to within the range the Fed has said is consistent with full employment, and labor force participation showing no sign of picking up, it may finally be time for the Fed to call this economic recovery stable and raise rates,” says Sinclair. “Wages are rising, and inflation is nowhere to be seen, so although we would hope for stronger numbers there is an argument for a September rate hike.”

This article was written by Samantha Sharf from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Florida Recruiters and California Recruiters.

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%