Branding & Advertising

La Rentrée

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every September in France, summer-weary parents pack their children off to school for la rentrée (‘the return’) and return to work after the idleness of August. The break from the métro, boulot, dodo routine of daily life enables both students and their parents to throw themselves back into their work and studies with renewed vigor. … Read more

AI and The Electrification of Marketing

Reading Time: 5 minutes

At the end of the nineteenth century, electricity was starting to have a profound effect on the world. As dramatized in the excellent novel The Last Days of Night, Thomas Edison battled with George Westinghouse (the latter aided by Croatian genius/madman Nikola Tesla) for control over the burgeoning market for electricity generation and supply. The popular symbol of the electrical revolution is of course Edison’s famous light bulb, but almost more important was the humble electric motor.

Read moreAI and The Electrification of Marketing

Is Digital Marketing having its ‘Deep Blue’ moment?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Garry Kasparov will forever be remembered as perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, dominating the game for almost twenty years until his retirement in 2005. But ironically he may be best remembered for the match he failed to win twenty years ago in 1997 against IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer. That watershed moment – marking the point at which computers effectively surpassed humans in chess-playing ability – prompted much speculation and hand-wringing about the coming obsolescence of the human brain, now that a mere computer had been able to beat the best chess grandmaster in the world.

Read moreIs Digital Marketing having its ‘Deep Blue’ moment?

6 steps to building your Marketing Data Strategy

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Your company has a Marketing Strategy, right? It’s that set of 102 slides presented by the CMO at the offsite last quarter, immediately after lunch on the second day, the session you may have nodded off in (it’s ok, nobody noticed. Probably). It was the one that talked about customer personas and brand positioning and … Read more

Does Display help Search? Or does Search help Display?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

One of the topics that we didn’t get quite enough time to cover in detail in my face-off with Avinash Kaushik at last week’s eMetrics Summit (of which more in another post) was the thorny issue of conversion attribution. When I asked Avinash about it, he made the sensible point that trying to correctly “attribute” … Read more

Self-serve outdoor advertising: Signposter

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Outdoor advertising has not exactly been at the cutting edge of innovation in recent years, at least not in terms of broadening access to smaller advertisers. Whilst radio, TV and print advertising has been becoming easier to get into on a limited budget, getting your ad on a 96-sheet on the Cromwell Road has been … Read more

Is Google (or Microsoft) making you stupid?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There’s a very interesting article in The Atlantic from Nicholas Carr in which he argues that the information delivery model of the web (and, in particular, the search engine model) is robbing us of our ability to read and digest information, and consequently affecting the very way we think. Whether this turns out to be … Read more

Online Advertising Business 101, Part I – The Online Advertising Value Chain

Reading Time: 7 minutes

When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it’s easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, … Read more