Personalisation in the advertising industry probably began 60 years ago when Lester Wunderman first invented the idea of direct mail and the concept of targeting messaging to individual consumers.

It took the rest of the industry a few years to catch up but catch up it did and so began half century of mailboxes piled high with “personal offers” addressed to you, or similar(ish) to you, or someone who lived in your house three moves ago.

While it was understood that the more personalised the...

Consumers like to feel a human connection to the brands they love. Whether it’s through empowering athlete endorsements like Nike or connection to an inspiring founder like Virgin, humanity is a critical element in successful marketing. That’s why it’s somewhat ironic that while a human touch in brands is more important than ever, the behind-the-scenes technology that makes marketing scalable has also exploded in recent years.

According to a prediction made in 2016 by

Stop me if you are still in helplessly in love with the culture and practices of 80s adland, but there’s an inherent decadence in the agency sector these days, as technology surges on and humans lag behind. And it’s not helping anyone.

You can see it on the media side, where so many seem to switch on the tech and go to lunch, not worrying about the detail, because it’s all clever stuff and if it doesn’t get the job done, the offline media probably will. That’s the seductive peril...

New York-based native ad firm Outbrain has acquired AdNgin, a UI (user interface) optimisation specialist built to enhance the reader experience.

The buyout - made for an undisclosed fee - marks the sixth for Outbrain since its founding in 2006, including the more recent purchases of content discovery platforms Zemanta and Revee as part of the company’s aggressive growth efforts and continued leadership in the native advertising sector. 

According to the announcement, Outbrain was attracted to...

As consumers, do we look to the experience or do we look to the result when dealing with brands?

An enjoyable interaction with a brand counts for nothing if we don’t end up with what we want, no matter how charming the sales person was. However, the same can be said if we end up with the thing we want but only after a charmless, cold and unenjoyable experience to get to that point.

Being able to balance the two has always been the ultimate goal of most brands, especially within key consumer led...

Marketing automation, as an industry, is growing phenomenally. In fact, the inaugural Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 to 2023 (Global), produced by Forrester at the end of April, predicts that annual spend on such martech will reach $25bn in five years’ time.

The reason for this is – in a large part – due to the fact that many brands are yet to adopt automation...

Voice user interface (VUI) development has been opened up to brands, people and developers vying for a share of voice in this new, noisy marketplace by both Amazon and Google who have created free ‘skill’ or ‘action’ building platforms for their market-leading personal voice assistants. Although this accessible technology is exciting, it is still in the early stages of adoption and presents a steep learning curve - for both brands and customers. In this world, everyone’s a...

“Romanticising the loss of jobs to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labour from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights.

“What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of human knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don’t work with our hands...

While there is no doubt that improving customer service quite rightly lies at the top of the page of every business mandate, stopping the problem in the first place – prevention rather than cure – surely must have a place on the list; and investment in that option must be considered as a nearer term strategy?

Understanding the changing landscape of our customers and being able to adapt to their needs requires a different approach to more traditional sales interactions – and means creating...

Can you tell whether your website users are engaged? Frustrated? Bored? Your customers’ emotions and mindsets are valuable information for personalising service. In brick-and-mortar stores, this information is readily available through body language.

The digitalisation of retail removes body language from the equation, and makes online service personalisation that bit harder. Ecommerce brands can’t rely on tell-tale hand gestures or eye flickers to gauge customer mindset. But ecommerce...