Most of the marketing tasks that once took highly-skilled teams weeks to accomplished can now be actioned in minutes by an individual with a smartphone. Even the most complex programmatic campaigns are triggered, delivered and dynamically optimised in milliseconds. But speed isn’t everything. While marketers make every effort to optimise business and human productivity, […]
Category Archives: Customer Experience
December
13
All we want for Christmas is an IoT party
posted by Mike O'Brien
The Internet of Things has a long way to go before it makes most people’s Christmas stocking
December
03
The 12 A’s of Christmas
posted by Mike O'Brien
Santa has been busy thinking about what you want for Christmas My early Christmas gift to one and all readers is my definitive A-Z list (with a twist ) of marketing in the digital age… the twist is that they all begin with the letter A. There’s optimisation for you. Analysis Keeping in touch with the […]
November
03
Winter is coming Don Draper
posted by Mike O'Brien
Are clients cooling their interest in agencies? In July 2006, Unilever started giving the cold shoulder (sorry) to the agency world when it cut its UK marketing and digital agency roster from 20 to 7 shops. At the same time, Unilver quietly announced a review of its global digital roster. Among those agencies who survived the cull were: Agency […]
October
03
The ABC of OVP (Online Value Proposition)
posted by Mike O'Brien
As Leonardo DaVinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” So my as-simple-as-it-gets take on developing a powerful OVP (Online Value Proposition) is… “Be more useful than useless.” The process is as follows: A. Assess what customers find most useful B. Be especially mindful of things that remain useful over time C. Commit to remaining demonstrably more useful than […]
May
23
The agency model is breaking bad
posted by Mike O'Brien
All good things come to an end Advertising, direct marketing and digital agencies have played a pivotal role in turning marketing into a $600 billion a year industry. The memorable ads, mailshots and digital campaigns have done more than simply help advertisers to create brands, sell products and develop ongoing relationships with customers, they have […]
April
16
Get agile or get left behind
posted by Mike O'Brien
On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen software developers got together to, as they put it: “Talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground.” What they produced and signed up to was The Agile Manifesto: a 12-point commitment to optimising the development of software […]
March
27
Marketing automation prepare to be out-thought
posted by Mike O'Brien
Tempus fugit for the mortal marketer Time, the most precious commodity ever conceived by man, marches relentlessly towards the future without so much as a passing thought for marketer or consumer. It is an unavoidably finite resource that needs to become the central focal point for every product or service hoping to survive in an age of […]
February
03
The RISE of the micro marketing machine
posted by Mike O'Brien
The past makes me confused about the future of marketing The Bellwether report for January 2015, found that the “fragile nature of the economy has knocked the confidence of marketers and forced many to adopt “cost-efficient” online strategies to reign in their advertising spend.” It then went on to state that, “Despite the slowdown in advertising spend in […]
July
17
Nest on its way to your home and beyond
posted by Mike O'Brien
Big Brother’s toe in the door or the start of bringing Amazon-style customer service into our everyday lives? I am firmly in Nest’s corner on this one. The idea of my home and many of the objects in it anticipating my every need, want and desire is going to be good for our lives and […]
July
15
Time for direct marketing to get in touch with reality
posted by Mike O'Brien
Sensory marketing makes sense There is one thing that direct mail can do that no other channel can: activate all five of your senses. Touch. Taste. Smell. Vision. Hearing. All can be stimulated at the same time. Clients with the right kinds of products (exotic perfumes, confections and holidays for example), need to invest more in creating greater […]
July
14
Wherever you go, there you are – together with contextual marketing.
posted by Mike O'Brien
Time for marketing to stop living in the past… and the future for that matter. Living in the present moment is essential to a happy life according to Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness. It helps us to eliminate ego-centric concerns about the past and speculative fretting about the future from our lives. In the present moment, we can create […]
February
07
Remote Controlled Robots To Roam Tate Britain Gallery After Hours So Web Users Can Peek At The Art
posted by Mike O'Brien
Can they do it in the National Portrait Gallery – seeing the faces in a new light will be amazing
February
03
Rightware delivers benchmark tool to identify the fastest smartphones and tablets
posted by Mike O'Brien
Like all good ideas – Basemark X is focused on being useful to customers
January
22
Hi my name is Mike and I am an insight infoholic.
posted by Mike O'Brien
How well do you know your customers? Developing deep, actionable insight into the world of customers is fraught with difficulty for small businesses. Those huge databases chock full of accurate, well classified and richly segmented collations of relevant data sets will forever be in our hearts but not within reach of our budgets. So do […]
January
17
Great creative meets customer service meets content meets shock and awesome
posted by Mike O'Brien
It’s a minor miracle. Mind blowing creativity that took the whole business and a plane load of customers to deliver the big idea. Right up there with Avis We try Harder in my books. I read a covering article in which the marketing pundit asked, “It’s all very well, but will it sell seats?” You […]
January
13
Looking for the constantly lost and found consumer
posted by Mike O'Brien
They’re out there somewhere. Whatever the consumer journey, there are only two points of easily understood significance: the moment they first register on our radar and the moment they actually take action to close the deal. The interval between can be measured in Nano-seconds or take years. (I have a client that works on prospects […]
January
11
Latest insights from the leading global information services company
posted by Mike O'Brien
Latest insights from the leading global information services company Yet more free information. Their consumer database holds information on 45 million UK customers. They hold marketing lifestyle data on 49.7 million individuals in the UK, including 33 million email address and 20 million mobiles. They already know what you would love to know about your customers.
January
10
Semi-sentient avatars and my optimised digital marketing fantasy.
posted by Mike O'Brien
Life will never be the same. I miss the visionary novels of the one and only Ian M Banks. His mind-blowing Culture novels make me feel pessimistic and optimistic in equal measure. While artificial intelligence seems to have peaked at robot soccer tournaments; data, search, social and mobile stand on the verge of morphing into […]
January
06
Strongbow has the bottle to use an RFID chip
posted by Mike O'Brien
In think Strongbow’s Earn it Campaign is great – I wish I had the bottle for the Stand Up Challenge – but this idea to use the bottle cap to trigger events in their new “Starter’ campaign that is rolling out across Europe is a great example of the way the physical and digital worlds […]
December
18
It’s the experience not the budget or the channel that counts
posted by Mike O'Brien
Thinking outside the silo As the age of blow it all on TV marketing driven by the silo-centric interests of mega agency networks sputters in and out of temporal existence, I notice a worrying trend: rumour has it that mobile advertising is set to reap the budgetary fallout. Didn’t we go through this a few years back when TV […]
November
15
The 3.0 world belongs to creative thinkers
posted by Mike O'Brien
Make the world a better place – with marketing – seriously? In 2010, the marketing legend Philip Kotler, together with Herman Kartajaya and Iwan Sitiawan collaborated on the publication of Marketing 3.0. This thought-provoking book explores the transition of marketing from product-based (1.0) through the current consumer-based focus (2.0) and into an age of collaborative […]
