June 25

Security Researchers Uncover The Tools Governments Use To Spy On Our Phones

Don’t say I didn’t warn you… banking on your mobile phone, not for me

shedding light on the customer journey March 14

Optimise every moment – shedding light on the customer journey

It’s getting more difficult to defend yourself form the competition As we move deeper into the age of the constantly connected customer, mapping the customer journey against the tried and tested buyer behaviour model has become increasingly desirable and difficult in equal measure. As the number of touchpoints expands, so too does the degree of […]

artificial-intelligence marketing automation March 09

Shift attacks Salesforce, Adobe with ‘open marketing cloud,’ an app store for digital marketing tools

If this works, it is going to be huge

the dark lord of agency wars March 08

Tsar Wars – big agency v plucky client

The battle for control between agencies and clients draws near In a galaxy not far, far away: Brand Activation, Content Marketing, Automation, Accountability and Client Training are about to do battle on an epic scale for control of the marketing and communication industry. The shape of the relationship between clients and agencies is about to undergo […]

TNT viral drama ad February 10

A viral campaign that really pushes my button

You are walking down the street when you spot a big red button sitting in the middle of the square where nothing ever happens. You walk over and in a fit of idle curiosity you push the button. What follows is nothing short of mind-blowing… What this viral ad proves is that the TV station […]

Mob-facebook-angry-birds-meets-madmen-square February 10

Angry Birds meets Mad Men – in a polymathic nutshell of useful agile responsivness

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 […]

robot in art gallery February 07

Remote Controlled Robots To Roam Tate Britain Gallery After Hours So Web Users Can Peek At The Art

Can they do it in the National Portrait Gallery – seeing the faces in a new light will be amazing

Doritos ad February 07

Oooh nasty Doritos crowdsourcing ideas and laughs

deep mind machine intelligence February 07

Why did Google dig deep into its pockets to buy DeepMind?

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 06

Google digs deep into its pockets to buy DeepMind

Crowd sourcing visual February 06

Hands up all those who think the age of crowdsourcing is at hand?

Tapping up the endless funding resource E pluribus Unum (from the many, one) is the motto of the United States of America. How appropriate then that a couple of American editors for Wired Magazine, Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, should be the first to conjure up the now familiar phrase ‘crowdsourcing’ way back in 2005. […]

angrybirdsmain gaming mobile February 03

Rightware delivers benchmark tool to identify the fastest smartphones and tablets

Like all good ideas – Basemark X is focused on being useful to customers

self-confidence January 29

It’s time to take sides in the fight against wasted digital spend.

It’s hard to be confident when you are not sure what you are doing A recent survey by Adobe highlighted the fact that only 48% of the professionals working in marketing had any confidence in their ability to: A. Reach the right audience – too many options? B. Reach the audience efficiently – too much […]

insight infoholic January 22

Hi my name is Mike and I am an insight infoholic.

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

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 […]

contact lens ar January 13

Looking for the constantly lost and found consumer

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 […]

Experian-Building January 11

Latest insights from the leading global information services company

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.

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 […]

comScore info at your fingertips January 09

comScore Digital Whitepaper archive

comScore Digital Whitepaper archive Free information at your fingertips. comScore measures what people do as they navigate the digital world – and turns that information into insights and actions for their clients to maximize the value of their digital investments. Trust me, the insights they churn out are incredible. comScore captures over 1.5 Trillion interactions every […]

January 08

Even the longest journey starts with a single leap into the unknown

Falling for brand advertising. I started out over 30 years ago in brand advertising creating  TV, press, poster and radio campaigns in the age of mass marketing, when the madmen of Madison Avenue arrived in London. (The concept was everything and the needs, wants and desires of the target audience were of little consequence.) Relating […]

January 07

Cutting the Big Data house of cards down to size

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 […]

Start anything you want with an RFID chip January 06

Strongbow has the bottle to use an RFID chip

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

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 […]

VW logo December 22

From one way traffic to interpersonal traffic with VW

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

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 18

It’s briefing Jim but not as we know it

In search of a little mojo I was recently tasked with the job of helping a major mobile phone company rediscover their briefing mojo.  The core of this kind of mission is not to underestimate, berate or patronise the group you are working with. Most clients and agencies still work on the basis of … “If […]

December 05

Digital Marketing redefined

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

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

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?

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 23

The future is faster than one click

I am deep in the thought-provoking book, One~Click – Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon.com. by Richard L. Brandt. It is an engaging read that goes behind the scenes on how a business like Amazon comes into being. This is not a story of a single brainstorming moment of conception. At its heart, the narrative surrounds  an entrepreneur with the […]

November 15

Out of the comfort zone and into the event horizon

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, […]

November 15

The 3.0 world belongs to creative thinkers

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 […]