Innovation is too often mistaken for invention. The true definition of innovation is finding a better way to do something that improves on how it was done previously, that adds value to the user. An organisation’s innovation department often ties themselves in knots trying to...
The way we define a media owner is changing rapidly and so too is the way we define an audience. Customers, we would argue, are a more valuable audience than “viewers” or “listeners” or “readers” of typical paid media channels. This is because customers are...
The digital age has seen many pioneering businesses fall by the wayside due to their structural inability to adapt, reluctance to adapt or slowness to adapt. Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster immediately spring to mind. But in today’s connected economy where trust is the most important...
This week we celebrate one of America’s and P&G’s most iconic brands, Tide, reaching 10 years in the dry-cleaning business. What began as an innovative brand extension into a complex, competitive industry, has become a highly successful business as well as an impressive owned media...
This is one of the pivotal questions being posed at the SXSW festival which is on now in Austin, Texas. For the uninitiated, the South by Southwest Festival and Conference has evolved over the last 32 years from a humble music festival with 700 attendees,...
Twenty years in media buying agencies taught me a few things. Chief among these is that businesses tend to overvalue the consumer attention they buy through paid media, whilst squander the attention they command with their customers. Consider the money and time and resource and emotional...
Like a line from a coming-of-age teen movie, the phrase ‘she just gets me’ comes to mind when talking about the impact a good algorithm can have on the relationship between a business and their customers. Don’t worry, this is not a post about the...
Like them or loathe them, cockroaches are well known for their longevity. The cockroach is estimated to be at least 200 million years old. And since there are cockroach fossils dating back as far as 350 million years, they actually pre-date some dinosaurs! So it was...
Recently walking past a coffee shop in Melbourne I saw this sign: Coffee $5 Coffee please $4 The first thing it reminded me of was my mother nagging me as a child of the importance of always saying please when you ask for something. The second, a much...
Many retailers talk the talk when it comes to effectively using their data to drive marketing solutions. Few have demonstrated evidence of actually doing so and achieving incremental sales. UK supermarket Sainsbury's stand out for doing exactly that. The granularity of loyalty programme data has long...
