3 charts for you today:
House prices are surging.
Demand for homes with more space, supply restrictions and record-low mortgage rates have all contributed to driving US house prices up almost 15% in the last 12 months. That's the fastest 12-month rise in house prices in at least the last 3 decades according to data from the S&P Case-Shiller national home price index.
It's not just 'Merica
House price data in the UK, released yesterday, shows UK house prices are also up 13% year-on-year. Prices are also rising in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries around the world.
Winners and losers
If you're a homeowner in any of the countries experiencing a house price surge then you have our congratulations — you're probably a reasonable amount wealthier on paper than you were 12 months ago. If however you're a prospective home owner, you're probably a lot less excited by this news — particularly if your career has gone sideways, or into reverse, since the pandemic started.
Just do it, direct
Nike's direct-to-consumer strategy is starting to pay off — big time.
This week Nike reported that its total Nike brand revenues for the 12 months ending in May topped $42bn for the first time. A whopping $16.4bn, or almost 40% of that total, came from direct sales to consumers. That's up from 35% last year when we charted this data.
The Nike marketing machine
Going direct to consumers sounds like a no-brainer. You cut out the middlemen (retailers) and get to keep a higher profit margin. But it also means you have to do a lot more. Customer service, managing returns and refunds, shipping and, most important of all, getting in front of your potential customers.
Nike continues to spend more than $3bn a year on what it calls "demand creation expense" (we'd call it marketing), keeping its association with the best athletes and stars across a wide variety of sports. That's a big number, but it's actually only around 7% of Nike brand revenue.
In reality, Nike is reaping the rewards of years of investment into its brand, even becoming Gen-Z's favourite clothing brand.
It's one thing for Nike, which is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, to start cutting out retailers and going direct. But if nobody's heard of your brand, it's not quite that easy — and you'll probably have to spend a lot more than 7% of your revenue on marketing, demand creation expense, or whatever you want to call it.
Cable news, both left-leaning and right-leaning, is finding something to talk about other than who is sat in the White House.
Data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, which uses AI to track and detect different faces in TV footage, reveals that so far during his presidency Joe Biden has averaged around 31 hours a month of screen time on cable TV. That's well below the 55 hours a month that Donald Trump averaged when he was sitting in the Oval Office.
The "Trump bump" fades
This data is consistent with what Axios has found in a recent study — that partisan and strongly ideological media companies have been struggling for readership in 2021. According to Axios, both right-leaning and left-leaning outlets have seen anything from 15-40% drops in monthly traffic.
The well-documented "Trump bump" that media companies enjoyed for much of the last few years is officially fading.
1) Flying cars might not be a thing of the future but a thing of the present. A hybrid car-aircraft has made a 35 minute flight between airports in Slovakia.
2) Facebook has joined the $1 trillion market cap club, just a few days after Microsoft joined the $2 trillion club — which we charted about here.
3) Interesting chart from Statista on how the US has lost its interest in the Tour de France ever since Lance Armstrong's departure from the sport.
4) Over 2,000 businesses around the world rely on Sisense for game-changing business insights. Find out why they trust Sisense to go beyond business intelligence to infuse analytics everywhere.**
5) Temperatures are soaring across Northwest Canada and the US. In Lytton, British Columbia, temperatures hit 49.5°C — smashing the high temperature record for the third day in a row.
6) 100% of Chartr employees surveyed expect England to win the 2020 Euros after their 2-0 win over Germany.
**This is a sponsored snack.
