It may be a popular buzz-phrase but how many marketers have really got their heads around the role – and components – of a savvy customer journey, and what’s the answer to getting up and running if they’re a little behind?

‘Customer experience’ (CX) is without a doubt the most important phrase for anyone responsible for an organisation's service levels. And in the world of marketing, the phrase 'customer journey' should be just as pivotal.

A mechanism to ensure...

Twenty years ago Joseph Pine and James Gilmore welcomed us all to the “Experience Economy” in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). They claimed that ‘services’ alone were not enough to satisfy experience-hungry consumers, and that “staging experiences” would generate more value. Although the examples they used were more physical experiences (aka Niketown) than digital experiences, they had rightly identified a pivotal moment in history.

One month after the HBR article was...

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...