Today’s teens are more wired than ever
Do you think total tech immersion does more to help or hurt teenagers?
CEO, 118id
Do you think total tech immersion does more to help or hurt teenagers?
Well, I've been thinking about how consumers are constantly on the go and as we all know smartphone-toting consumers are embracing a world in which they can find out about (if not buy) almost anything they encounter out in the real world, anytime. My advice to all of you small to mid-level companies, learn from the brands already capitalizing on this trend, then get going! Now, that consumers crave information is nothing new. Information and knowledge give consumers power, control and certainty (or at least the illusion thereof). Therefore they will forever be in demand by consumers searching for the best of the best. Equally important, the discovery aspect of information adds a fun factor too.
After a decade of near-obsessive Googling, instant access to information with the right (textual) input is nowexpected, a way of life. The next frontier is visual info-gratification: consumers accessing information about objects encountered in the real world, in more natural ways and while on-the-go, simply by pointing their smartphones at anything interesting.
And just as ‘going online’ is no longer limited to sitting in front of a computer (at a desk!), discovery will no longer be tied to text search. People will be able to immediately find out about (and potentially buy) anythingthey see or hear, even if they don’t know what it is or can’t describe it in words. Think about QR codes, after trying hard for years, QR codes are finally breaking into mainstream consumer consciousness, although they are in danger of being superseded by the newer, often more natural technologies below.
Then Augmented Reality hit the scene and with the addition or overlaying of digital content onto the physical world (as seen through a screen). To date, most augmented reality (AR) apps (such as Wikitude) have relied on a phone’s GPS and compass sensors to ‘guess’ what a user is looking at, but newer and more powerful visual search AR technologies are beginning to appear (as below). Now Tagging, we see a host of applications that are now available that can pick up on invisible markers in objects or sounds in order to trigger information or actions. Check out Blippar’s or Aurasma’s interactive magazine covers to get an idea of where this is heading.
And the latest technology making its tracks is Visual Search. Rather than trying to determine where a user is, ‘smart’ image recognition technologies (like Google Goggles or Layar Vision) attempt to identify the actual object in the viewfinder in order to search or deliver additional content. So pointing one’s camera at an image of the Eiffel Tower will have the same result as pointing it at the real thing.
Thank you to my friends at www.trendwatching.com for always doing an amazing job of bringing forward the most accurate marketing trends from across the world.
Hello. Happy Holidays from 118id, we know it’s a really busy time of year for you but when you have a minute I would like to invite you to see a quick online demo of our Connecting the DOTS™ technology.
The marketing executives that we have talked to are frustrated because they already have several marketing and sales management tools and applications in place across multiple vendors, and already receive marketing and sales data in fragmented pieces. Every day, they are forced to make expensive decisions based on this data. Unfortunately, this type of decision making often leads to wasted money and disappointing results.
We would like to share what our company is doing to help businesses from around the world.
Let us know when would be best for a 10 minute online demo?
Happy Holidays from the team at 118id!
Many of you reading this know me well and because of that you also know that I'm all about accountable marketing. I started my company because there's a much needed change in our industry that is long over due. Be gone the day of hiding behind "scope" or "protecting numbers" or "protecting your domain". Ok, so let me help you see through this maddness and shine some facts upon you.
Today, marketers must work with many disparate applications to analyze, plan, execute, and measure their activities. Communication channels and devices are expanding at exponential rates annually. With each new channel or device, marketers are told they need to participate in them in order to stay competitive. Each new channel entrance for a firm represents three new organizational requirements: a content/creative expert, a technology expert, and a subject matter or domain expert. All of whose activities must be aggregated and aligned to the other active channels and overall marketing mix.
Additionally, each of these channels have their own set of native reporting tools, all of which have varying degrees of capabilities, from session level data (online web analytics); to summary reports of impressions (broadcast tv and radio); to discrete analytics (social channel clicks, visits, impressions); to location based data (mobile) just as examples.
Craziness huh? So, if you actually begin by making the decision to seriously understand that you need to go beyond a dashboard solution and make the necessary changes by centralizing your applications to include all of the inputs from their existing channels, as well as legacy systems (i.e. home-grown CRM, Sales, Invoicing systems, marketing), as well as new channels in such a way to gain a holistic perspective of your consumers and how they interact with the your brands it will enable you to execute faster, smarter, and relevant decissions. Only then will you'll begin to experience the ROCKSTAR status of accountable marketing.
What does this really mean? Good question, it means that you will probably get a raise, definately secure that future retirement plan, and the bossman along with the top dog executive teams will now say hello to you.
Go ahead, give it a try today and find out for yourself what being an accountable marketer REALLY feels like.
When I started my company it was like any other small agency, we developed websites, came up with strategies, and created, implemented, and executed marketing campaigns for our clients. After three years of doing this type of work I began to realize that we were no different than any of our analytic or agency competitors. All of us were contributing to the main problem marketers have to this day…an abundance of data.
I noticed that information has gone from scarce to superabundant, the good news is that most companies have an abundance of data. The bad news is that most companies have an abundance of data. I realized that marketers struggle keeping pace with the demand to act upon this avalanche of information so I set out to change this.
Four and half years ago I identified a gap in the marketing intelligence industry and set out to confirm if that gap was real. After two years of research and interviewing several C-levels I learned that not only was the gap real but a much needed solution and no one was solving for it. In fact, I asked all of the C-levels I met if they believed that their companies and their marketing teams were using their data in the right way? They all answered no. I couldn’t believe this but quickly learned it was because their marketers weren’t getting “actionable” insights around their data.
Data without actionable insights causes marketers to focus too much on the creative, “arty” and “fluffy” side of marketing and not enough on its business science, and rely too much on their ad agencies to come up with the next big idea. Well, that “next big idea” doesn’t mean anything if you’re not looking across your marketing channels in a holistic way to understand what channels are the most effective and which ones are ineffective. For the ineffective channels you need to be able to make them better.
My research uncovered that 73% of CEOs that I interviewed think Marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be, they are still too far from being able to demonstrate how the cross-channel marketing strategies and campaigns they deploy grow their organizations’ top line in terms of more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, more conversions or more market share.
The top issues with the C-levels that I spoke with were their marketers keep on talking about their brand, brand values, brand equity and other similar parameters however top management has great difficulties linking back to results that really matter: revenue, sales, EBIT or even market valuation.
Think about this before you invest more of your marketing budget into “that perfect well thought out” marketing campaign. If you focus on today’s results, do the same thing that always worked, then expect to get passed by aggressive competition. If you focus too much on long-term innovation, then you miss today’s results. If you try some big innovations that fail, then you stand to lose your credibility. I see and hear too many marketing managers focusing too much on the latest marketing trends such as social media, because they believe they represent the new marketing frontiers – but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help them generate more business for the company.
Every day, marketers make expensive decisions based on data gathered from disconnected sources. Unfortunately, this type of decision making often leads to wasted money and disappointing results.
Marketing leaders are under relentless pressure to deliver real business results. But their teams are struggling to manage more marketing channels, more marketing interactions (touchpoints), more performance data, and more complexity than ever.
I hear too many marketing managers say that they know data so well, they'll override expert data opinion and data facts on which key performance indicators to track, possibly forcing campaigns the wrong way as a result.
Let me put things in historical context. Fifteen years ago, everyone in an organization had their place. The numbers guy lived close to the ground, and the strategy guy worked at 30,000 feet. But times are changing. Gone are the days when IT folks having to use multiple “tools” to find the right data, create reports, dashboards, and then sharing those with users across organizations. But now? "Many more end users are beginning to realize that they need to get more hands-on with their marketing data. Data isn't just for data nerds anymore.
Until Marketers start speaking the P&L language of their CEOs and stakeholders, and until they start tracking the business effectiveness of all their strategies and campaigns to prove they generate incremental customer demand, they will continue to lack credibility in the eyes of their CEOs and will continue to be seen more as a cost center than an asset.
The job of an Ad Campaign is to grow the business by generating: more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, more conversion and/or more market share. The Problem: 68% of the Ad Campaigns tracked at post-launch level failed to deliver the expected results. Why? Because they did not generate an effective creative impact on the Target Audience.
In conclusion you spend money communicating across multiple media channels to acquire as many (quality) prospects as possible.
The challenge to achieving a truly integrated dialog with customers is now driven by channel explosion and device proliferation. Back in the day there were three channels – television, radio, and print. The introduction of the online channel and the subsequent rapid growth of consumer touch points have created more and more silos within marketing organizations.
You may already have several marketing & sales management tools and applications in place across multiple vendors, and may already receive marketing & sales data in dribs and drabs.
But before you launch that next campaign, get a holistic view into how consumers react to your brand at every touch point, you will have a clearer picture of which campaigns and channels offer the greatest ROI.
By taking a holistic view of all your marketing channels can improve organizational alignment, strategic prioritization, budgeting decisions, and individual and collective accountability.
In this unpredictable economy, challenges to achieve growth are a problem that many marketers and executives face every day. Their ability to identify strategies and tactics to achieve the desired growth is impeded, in that, they are inundated with an abundance of data. So getting behind the “WHY” is critical.
Marketers must strive to integrate their messaging across an ever-expanding array of channels. They must work to integrate functions within marketing itself. And, they must reach out across traditional boundaries to collaborate with other departments within the enterprise.
We continue to work with our clients and their marketing groups to help them understand that they need to continue shifting investments from mass-marketed, one-channel, one-way, company-driven campaigns to multichannel, measurable, interaction-driven campaigns that delivers results-based decision-making. In addition, marketers will need to enhance their customer databases with information that is much deeper than the demographic and history profile data typically gleaned from social networks.
Marketers will also need to track psychographic behavior (attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles) to prepare for the next wave of innovation in campaign management.
By gathering a more holistic view of their customers' behaviors, marketers may be able to reduce the perception that their messages are "interrupting" their customers. Instead, savvy marketers would be able to reach prospects in a much more relevant, contextual way — at the precise moment when the customer is evaluating and making decisions about purchasing a product or solution.
At the end of the day, it's not about automating reporting, or bringing the disparate data stores into one dash-boarding platform. For 118id our unique value proposition is Smart Business. Simplified. Our Connecting the DOTS™ insight engine provides marketers with recommendations and actionable insights that help marketers and executives execute smarter, faster, and relevant business decisions.
If you're interested in getting started click here.
The challenge to achieving a truly integrated dialog with customers is now driven by channel explosion and device proliferation. The introduction of the online channel and the subsequent rapid growth of consumer touch points have created more and more silos within marketing organizations. Why? We live in a time-starved, productivity-oriented, multitasking, technology-enabled, information-driven world. Needless to say, things are a bit different today.
To compete and sustain your business success in today’s rapidly evolving, global, ultra-high-tech environment a confluence of marketplace issues that you cannot influence or control, you must focus all your human and financial resources on the single most important component of your customer offering one that you can completely control: your customers’ purchasing experience. If you continue to make expensive decisions based on data gathered from disconnected sources you risk getting passed by aggressive competition.
Marketing leaders are under relentless pressure to deliver real business results. But their teams are struggling to manage more marketing channels, more marketing interactions (touchpoints), more performance data, and more complexity than ever.
By taking a holistic view of all your marketing channels can improve organizational alignment, strategic prioritization, budgeting decisions, and individual and collective accountability.
As we have all witnessed, people in enormous numbers, are crowding into the city centers of numerous nations around the world to demand a more promising personal future and an improved experience. Their empowerment has been facilitated by newer, faster, more powerful, and more agile technology. Smart phones, email, and social media have enabled their connectivity with other like minded people and similar ambitions in other countries. In a similar context, customers in the marketplaces of every developed nation have been empowered and facilitated by rapid innovation in an ever-broader variety of technologies. These buying publics are demanding an improved purchasing experience from vendors and marketers of products and services in every segment of commerce. The profound transformation of customer purchasing behavior is irreversible because it is driven by the high velocity of technologic development. Moreover, this universal behavioral change is accelerating because technologic innovation is intensifying, as illustrated by the contacting timeline of key technical introductions below:
To sustain your business success in today’s rapidly evolving, global, ultra-high-tech environment — a confluence of marketplace issues that you cannot influence or control, you must focus all your human and financial resources on the single most important component of your customer offering — one that you can completely control: your customers’ purchasing experience.
In my daily search for innovative technology and ideas I ran across blippar. Is the end nigh for the QR code? I've noticed companies implementing QR codes into their campaigns and putting them to good use in countless innovative projects over the years, but just recently I've noticed a shift towards technology that can produce similar results without the codes.
Blippar launched in August this year and has already secured partnerships in the UK with Tesco’s, Cadburys and the Metro newspaper. I've been watching Tesco and I'm really interested in how Philip Clarke Tesco's new Group Executive Officer is bringing new innovations designed to make the chore of grocery shopping less painful for consumers. Earlier this year Tesco launched a series of virtual stores on subway platforms, enabling customers to make purchases using their smartphones while they wait for a train. The virtual stores, constructed from large backlit billboards, displayed images of all the items one would expect to find in a standard Home plus shop. Now, this concept used QR codes but I can see with their new partnership with blippar this changing. Any idea that saves people time and effort however, is ripe for adaptation anywhere.
Check out their video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNp7ZHX7pI&feature=player_embedded
No matter what country I travel to on business, what size of company or Executive I meet with I keep hearing the same message over and over. "We need help socializing the concept of cross-channel measurement throughout our organization." So, I ask them. What if I could help identify roadblocks, eliminate redundancies, optimize resources, and operationalize global teams to work in a collaborative model? The look on their face is truly priceless - almost like the duh factor. LOL!
The best part of owning a startup marketing Technology Company is that I get to truly help companies of all sizes become accountable marketers by helping them to rethink, shift, and embrace getting behind the "WHY".
You hear and see companies in the analytic industry talk about delivering actionable insights for their clients. My take on this is that if they were then their clients wouldn’t be suffering from the data dose dive ride.
For many companies, gathering insights is a manual process that requires several high-value personnel to aggregate, sort, combine, and analyze data. This increases opportunities for bias, dated opinions, and untimely responses. The result is often missed opportunities and/or costly outcomes.
The challenge to achieving a truly integrated dialog with customers is now driven by channel explosion and device proliferation. Back in the day there were three channels – television, radio, and print. The introduction of the online channel and the subsequent rapid growth of consumer touch points have created more and more silos within marketing organizations.
Now you have channel experts, content experts, and technology experts for each touch point, resulting in consumers receiving your message not as a single campaign, but as a multitude of mini-messages, some of which you cannot control (i.e. social commentary). More than ever, marketers need to align their organizations and outlook to address the condition we call consumer fragmentation.
I would like to get your thoughts on this, please comment and let’s open up a dialog.
I’m serial entrepreneur, an astute and visionary thinker. As the founder and CEO of 118id, I have over 20 years of experience focused on building and delivering high-tech/innovative solutions that deliver measurable and accountable ROIs.
My entrepreneurial spirit and attention to detail are unsurpassed, and I’ve been told that I inspire clients and employees alike to move beyond traditional expectations. I bring a unique approach to solving the needs of global clients by following a proven blueprint to ensure organizational readiness across three areas: data, technology, and business culture.
