• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, March 3, 2017

The big news of the week is obviously the 40% instant rise in the value of Snap on float against a starting price that still valued the company at around $20bn. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a company that lost half a billion dollars last year on revenue of around $400m. That's right -- a company that hasn't made a dime and managed to burn through nearly a billion dollars in a year, meaning that even earning $400m didn't see it move into the black. Snap has been supported as selling investors "the future" -- not the "now."

There is a point with Millennials, however, where you get two huge problems. Their reaction to advertising is revealed by them being the biggest users of ad blockers and they are very fickle in this fragmented media landscape they've grown up in. OK -- ad blocking isn't the issue here, but higher rates (one in three male Millennials block, according to the IAB) gives a fair indication of what will happen when Snapchat tries to "do a Facebook" and turn attention in to serious dollar. Still, nice work, Mr Spiegel. You're dating a supermodel, and you're now worth $5bn.

Then we have the darling of digital marketing, Burberry. It has always held up as the brand that gets how luxury can be digital, and that iPads are what's needed when you're selling coats for a few hundred quid a pop. Those brands that didn't get digital just had to look at Burberry and they would see what they were missing. Well, the main thing they've been missing for the past couple of years is financial turmoil. Its share price has just managed to climb back up to where it was a couple of years ago, mainly thanks to a week pound giving its rich foreign customer base a 20% discount.

So all along the darling of digital media was struggling, until it ushered in GBP100m worth of cuts and Brexit gave its richest clients a discount. How much digital marketing do you think was involved in this turnaround? But do you think they will be held up any less as the brand that proves luxury and digital marketing go hand in hand. I very much doubt it. 

With regard to this, Mike Ashley is so thick-skinned that he reckons it's a good idea to take his position as the most loathed entrepreneur on the high street to turn around Agent Provocateur. Mention the guy's name and everyone will instantly conjure up the Sports Direct furore of staff being paid less than the minimum wage and accusations of terrible working conditions in his warehouse. MPs had to swoop on his offices to carry out a spot check, only to find that he had got the lady operating the tea trolly to secretly film them. Even Agent Provocateur's previous owners and managers are questioning whether a man with this background can seriously turn around the fortunes of a top-notch, luxury underwear retailer. 

Then we have the smallest violin in the world playing for BT and its complaints over sports rights. The company that kicked off a bidding war with Sky over football rights, by winning a limited amount of Premier League fixtures but all European ties, is now complaining that sports rights are becoming expensive. No wonder they've had to put up their telephone and broadband prices -- and that's for everyone, not just football fans.

You would have thought simple economics would have told BT that squaring up against Murdoch and co for the one piece of content Sky values above any other would always lead to an emptying of coffers and footballers moving into ever bigger mansions.

It gets more ridiculous. IBM has been forced to publicly say it will not seek to make money from the patent it recently received for 'out of office' emails. The guys at Watson had, I kid you not, filed a patent application and won. Who knew that thing we've been doing for twenty years was an IBM invention in the making?

Speaking of email, and becoming more ridiculous, Gmail has bowed to pressure by allowing people to receive 50mb files -- that's twice as big as before. The trouble is, it hasn't increased the size of the files they can send -- in an attempt to keep people using Google Drive, perhaps? One hand gives, while the other flips you the bird.

Which brings us on to Yahoo Mail. I got a big response on Twitter after reacting to their patronising list of helpful hints with the question of whether they have anything to offer customers who have been hacked or are still suffering from hackers trying to guess their password, forcing them to have to be frozen until they set a new password. Yahoo's response? Go ask BT Internet, they're your email providers. Well, actually, no -- Yahoo is, but let's not split hairs when your own ineptitude has seen millions written off your value.

So, that was the week that was, as an old tv show in the UK used to say. Proof indeed that it's not just tweeting accountants who can get things so very wrong.