Return on Exposure
How do you calculate the value of an investment in social media? Any investment attracts the need to try to quantify the returns, both to measure the success of the investment when it is too late to do much about it apart from ensuring the same mistake is not made...
Worlds best digital marketing campaigns
Marketing on line is no longer the "next new thing" it was just a few short years ago, it is mainstream, a major consumer of marketing resources, and source of huge marketing value when done well. As with all new things, you get better with practice, and we are just...
5 Strategy development tips
Strategy is abiut creativity and choice. Which imagined scanario makes the best argument?
Lists a’plenty
The internet is choked with lists, 10 ways to do this, 5 best ways to handle that, bloggers put them in because a list is a proven driver of blog traffic. People seem to want the core of an idea to be trimmed down to a set of bullet points, perhaps it is just more...
Volume is not the measure of value.
The digital world has taken over, but the emergence of social media tools that host a lot of pretty low grade stuff sometimes overshadows the huge impact the tools of the web can have, sometimes life-changing and even saving, impacts. Just look at the role played...
What are we assuming?
Assumptions are the backbone of all strategic initiatives, indeed, most day to day activity. Often these assumptions are implicit, they make sense, we do not even question the assumption, by default they become as good as a fact. Really good strategic and design...
Common sense it often not common.
The case for employing intelligent people, and letting them get on with their jobs exercising common sense has been made again and again. In this lovely example of the hubris of rules, Safeway in Honolulu ensured they stuffed up by following a voluminous rule book,...
Rent or buy media.
Since I was a kid in this industry, the standard terminology has been to "buy media" meaning stick an ad somewhere, and hope somebody you want to reach sees it, and takes action as a result. However, the reality is that we have just rented an audience from a...
The parallels of Europe and Billy Bloggs & Co.
The chaos in the European monetary system, and the appearance of a lack of the required backbone to address the issues has parallels in every commercial change situation I have ever seen, irrespective of the size of the oranisation: It takes a while to stuff up a...
Setting the marketing budget
This process has many forms, I have probably seen most of them over the years. Percentage of sales, opposition activity, what the P&L can bear, what was spent last year, what seems like a nice round number, what the new CEO says, the last and "balancing" item in...