With ASOS citing IT as a key factor in its profit slump in recent days, should fast growth retail companies be looking to the cloud?
According to ASOS’ CEO, Nick Beighton, the last financial year was a “pivotal period” for the former fashion sector darling, which saw...
Today’s marketers have oceans of data at their disposal that they can use to track a nearly endless array of metrics to measure performance. Being able to eliminate assumptions and objectively evaluate campaigns is something marketers have always wanted. If they’re going to use data effectively, however, they need to acknowledge that not all metrics are created equal.
Vanity metrics are...
You’ve heard of the concept of ‘impostor syndrome’ – but does that feeling still pervade when you get to the highest echelons of your profession?
According to a new study from Deloitte, CMOs periodically suffer from a crisis of confidence – although the good news is that the C-suite has plenty of faith in their abilities.
The report, which surveyed 575 C-suite...
Programmatic is now mainstream – expected to account for almost 90% of digital display ad spend in the UK next year – so brands naturally want to understand it better and gain more control over how their advertising budgets are spent.
To achieve this greater level of...
Once upon a time, the world of the marketer was very simple: acquire people’s attention and then shout the loudest. This approach worked well with fewer channels and longer attention spans. Today, however, we are assailed with literally hundreds if not thousands of messages every day, with algorithms that predict exactly what to serve our audiences and when.
The business of marketing is now fiendishly complex to master. One wrong step and brands that have taken years to build can suffer catastrophic...
In the last month, JustEat announced more than 100 layoffs as the result of increased competition from Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Meanwhile, Uber just suffered its worst ever financial quarter, losing a staggering £4bn in just three months – even though its share price remained unaffected.
Given the uncertainty surrounding these businesses, predicting the future of the food delivery...
According to reports, senior figures in the Trump administration held a meeting last month to consider whether to pursue legislation outlawing end-to-end encryption on US-made messaging apps.
While the ultimate outcome of the meeting is yet to be seen, it brings to light a serious question that we all - governments, consumers and businesses - need to ask ourselves: what do we lose when private messaging is truly private?
On the one hand, end-to-end encryption means that...
In a 2014 New York Times article, Sam Tanenhaus argued that millennials were ‘Generation Nice’. He pointed to shopping habits (millennials prefer chemical-free goods and ‘disposable’ clothing) and food choices (vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free eating has become increasingly popular). He concluded that ‘these habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. Its highest value isn’t self-promotion, but empathy.’
When the Cambridge Analytica story broke last year, it represented a real turning point. All across the country, Facebook users downloaded their data files and expressed shock at the information collected - especially considering these details could have been used by the consultancy firm to influence their voting behaviour.
However, I – and many other marketers – were not surprised by the contents of our
Data mining is undoubtedly transforming marketing as we know it. Artificial intelligence (AI) is not only automating some of the most mundane and time-consuming processes, but it’s also solving the once unsolvable issue of how to turn terabytes of consumer-generated interactions into personalised experiences for each individual. AI does this at a scale beyond a marketer’s wildest dreams.
