For nearly 25 years, I was a partner in an ad agency that had a great roster of national and international clients including the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the Chilean Image Campaign, celebrating Chile’s return to democracy, and domestically, companies like L.L.Bean, Sebago and many food and beverage companies in Europe and the […]
Now that the holidays have passed, we can confront the present and future of AI. The future is bright. The present, for some uses, is dismal. You may choose to disagree and, like me, you probably received dozens of prediction emails for 2024 announcing that if 2023 was the year we discovered AI, 2024 will […]
Last week, Knowledge at Wharton (their business school’s newsletter) sent out a promotion for a book titled “The Customer Base Audit” by three esteemed college professors. The authors believe an audit is “the first step on the journey to customer centricity”. I can’t argue with that or many of the other points they make about how […]
This is the year to invest in and revise your digital marketing plan. Why? Two big changes are coming in 2022: These two changes will revolutionize how we interact with consumers over email, text and on the Internet. If you didn’t know, first take a breath. Then, download this excellent article and overview of the changes from McKinsey […]
Ten years ago, there were dozens of marketing automation platforms that claimed they helped you engage with your customers. Five years ago, there were hundreds. Today, there are thousands and they make some pretty fantastic claims. Here’s what some of the biggies have to say: Okay, they all have great tech tools and make things […]
Over the past five years, the amount of data being acquired by marketers has risen steadily but here are three key questions: If you’re like most companies, you’ve acquired information on where your customers live, their gender, age and transactional history with your company. If you’re using a email marketing platform, you may also know […]
In many ways, an election is no different than a marketing campaign and while this election looks and was close, there was a clear winner. In the popular vote, Biden won by five million votes and the counting continues. It looks like he’ll win the electoral vote by the same tally that Trump won four […]
There is real pressure to invest in big data to stay competitive, but businesses often end up collecting as much data as possible without deriving valuable insights. Huge databases aren’t practical or cost-effective. Instead, you can benefit from rethinking your approach to big data and focusing on qualitative data. There is a real push to […]
Algorithms, the core formula behind Big Data, are not objective facts. They are opinions embedded in math, In the words of US data scientist Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016). Watch this brief entertaining video to better understand how algorithms work as well as the potential mistakes we make in relying too […]
(When I meet with business executives, I usually ask “what’s your strategy for growth?” At a trade show I attended a few weeks ago, that question was often met with silence or a list of tactical programs that had no overall direction other than selling. I wrote a similar blog post to this years ago and received […]
