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“We have to appeal on a personal level.” We hear this with increasing frequency from today’s modern marketer, who is placing customer centricity and personalisation at the heart of their programmes in a time-poor, competition-heavy, digital environment.

In response to these demands, marketing software developers have handed marketers the keys, creating tools and solutions that generate a wealth of data waiting to be tapped into. But how do you know which piece of the data puzzle is the...

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2014 felt like the movie Groundhog Day. Wake up to the sounds of the song, I Got You Babe (or, in this case, Pharrell’s just-as-incessant ‘Happy’), then open your news provider of choice to read about yet another social network launching a ‘Buy’ button.

Pinterest in January, Facebook in July, Twitter in September - frankly, it was a surprise not to see WhatsApp reinvented as a social assistant that reads your texts, hacks your bank details, then buys...

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Search company Google has announced that it will soon be rolling out AdWords improvements to better measure in-store visits in the Estimated Total Conversions (ETC) tool.

In an effort to assist marketers with targeting the increasingly complex paths to purchase that consumers take, Google is letting advertisers link AdWords with My Business to get more insights on search campaigns.

When announcing the new AdWords feature on its blog, Google explained how brick and mortar still had a...

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2014 has been a huge year for marketing technology, with offline promotional targeting in retail innovating faster than online.

We are seeing a shift in consumer behaviour – the fear of data sharing is diminishing as the awareness of its benefits increase. Our research found that more than half of Britons (58%) say they are not concerned about the amount of data they share with brands, and fewer than a quarter (23%) of 18-24 year olds believing data sharing will be viewed...

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In 2014 online retail sales in the UK rose by 15.8% in 2014 (fetching a healthy £45 billion ). In 2015 this figure is expected to grow even further, increasing a burgeoning part of the UK’s economic recovery.

This rise in sales is not just due to global economic factors technology advances in data-driven marketing, mobile and in-store technology have truly transformed online storefronts and the local high-street.

2014 was certainly the year when multi-channel,...

Advertisers can now tap into the growing market for wearable technology using FitAd, a recently launched wearable advertising platform for fitness and health-oriented brands and publishers.

Engagement on mobile health software is higher than almost all other categories of apps, making it a market ripe for advertisers. Nielsen’s own evidence points to 46 million users of apps averaging 16 uses each month for a period totalling one hour per engagement.

New...

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Full viewability measurement of digital advertising is not yet possible according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The claim comes only a couple of weeks after analysis from Google’s tracking metric for viewable ads showed that more than half of all served ads are not measured viewable.

The IAB has published a new positioning paper that makes the claim called the State of Viewability Transaction in 2015, which aims to offer guidance to the digital media and...

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There are ways to ensure marketers are not fumbling in the dark when it comes to getting the most out of using emotion in their marketing campaigns. From billboards and adverts to their company website, my research shows that emotions such as shame and guilt can be used to create a favourable response from consumers.

The key point is that, though both are negative emotions, the effects they have are different. Consumers who feel ashamed are best targeted by campaigns which offer a...

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Search engine Yandex is giving enterprise businesses the chance to use its machine-learning technologies to transform unstructured data into valuable insights.

With Yandex Data Factory, enterprise companies can manipulate big data to boost sales, make their business more cost efficient, predict product demand and overhaul any audience targeting technology they currently use.

Yandex Data Factory is based on MatrixNet, the firm’s machine-learning technology, which deciphers...

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Having already tested the new service on a number of brands, the technology is basically Twitter's version of retargeting based on the previous behaviour consumers. 

Tailored audiences from mobile apps follows the general launch of the tailored audiences ad product this time last year. Tailored audiences allowed advertisers to reach audiences that had shown interest in a brand or category. It benefited advertisers by working outside of Twitter.

With this new addition,...