The Internet of Things has a long way to go before it makes most people’s Christmas stocking
Category Archives: Digital
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
October
26
Ganging up on gangs in the coffee business
posted by Mike O'Brien
Go ahead make my day Kenco I’ve been looking for a campaign to support last November’s post; The World belongs to Creative Thinkers: an article inspired by Philip Kotler’s book, Marketing 3.0 in which he urges us to make marketing a force for long-term good and not just short-term sales. For me, the approach that […]
July
18
Oculus Rift my online experience
posted by Mike O'Brien
Mark Zuckerberg made a very interesting statement about the company Facebook has recently acquired for $2 billion. “They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about […]
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
10
Angry Birds meets Mad Men – in a polymathic nutshell of useful agile responsivness
posted by Mike O'Brien
Angry Birds meets Mad Men – it’s the new me but a lot more useful than I used to be. After 34 years in brand, direct and digital marketing I am unashamedly addicted to all things digital, demonstrably media-neutral, obsessively customer-centric, passionate about lecturing and ready with a collection of brand agency stories that would […]
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
07
Why did Google dig deep into its pockets to buy DeepMind?
posted by Mike O'Brien
Will DeepMind terminate poor display advertising? The merger of digital and physical worlds appears to have drawn a little closer when Google bought into the the UK start-up DeepMind, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence company founded by 37-year-old neuroscientist Demis Hassabis and fellow scientists, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. DeepMind was founded to combine the best techniques from machine […]
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
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
07
Cutting the Big Data house of cards down to size
posted by Mike O'Brien
The Big Data equals big capital expenditure lobby has had marketing journalists reaching for ever more hyperbolic factoids about data. A couple of my favourite examples are: “90% of the data in the world was produced in the last two years” (OMG!) and, “More than 2 billion videos were watched online in the last 24 […]
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
30
It’s time for Digital to become the marketing thought leader
posted by Mike O'Brien
Digital is beginning to take centre stage in the advertising and marketing process. Where brand advertising creates awareness, digital shapes preference and conversion. Where direct marketing builds customer relationships, digital expedites the process in real time. Resistance from the vested interests of channel-focused silos will soon be swept away by customer preference for the sheer utility […]
December
22
From one way traffic to interpersonal traffic with VW
posted by Mike O'Brien
I love this linear commercial for VW. It’s called 30 years in the making and it shows the changing life of the manufacturers working on the car’s design and production over the lifespan of the car. It’s a perfect example of linear communication. The brand speaks. Tells us a brand-centric story about it’s own narrative […]
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 […]
December
05
Digital Marketing redefined
posted by Mike O'Brien
In search of a definition I have been working on a Module for an online course which had me scrabbling around for a succinct one-liner describing digital marketing. First time of note is that finding anything outside of Wiki’s version is nigh on impossible. The next issue is the fact that those who bother to […]
December
04
Google+ adds up by helping reduce your social footprint
posted by Mike O'Brien
Can less really be more? Reduce your social footprint? How counter-intuitive is that to the current zeitgeist? Well to borrow from creative guru John Hegarty and his Levis campaigns of 1982: “When the world zigs, zag.” Perhaps we need to reconsider our obsession with numbers and consider meaningful relationships. This notion is at the heart […]
November
29
Too young to write briefs for an ageing population
posted by Mike O'Brien
A new twist on an old problem. When I see client and agency teams struggling to get a brief together or push work out the door that is actually irrelevant to the target audience, I am reminded that I too was once young. While a lack of audience segmentation is often at the root of poor […]
November
26
Why market when you can UnMarket?
posted by Mike O'Brien
Calling time on the old rule book. Scott Stratten is President of UnMarketing and is, demonstrably, an expert in social engagement. What constitutes the title “Expert in the field?” His client’s viral marketing videos have been viewed over 60 million times. More importantly, his book, Unmarketing – Stop Marketing. Start Engaging (Revised and updated edition), […]
November
15
Out of the comfort zone and into the event horizon
posted by Mike O'Brien
Feel the fear and read it anyway There are many points of fear and enlightenment on the road to gaining an academic qualification in digital marketing. As a lead tutor on the IDM’s world class Diploma in Digital course, I watch professionals with considerable experience leafing through Dave Chaffey and Fiona Ellis-Chadwick’s brilliant reference work, […]
