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How Connected TV Finally Brings Digital Precision to Broadcast Before Jimmy Fallon or even Johnny Carson, there was Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre, which in 1950 captured vast numbers of TV viewers. OK - it was the only thing on. In fact, on any given Tuesday it reached 9% of the US population. Back then, black-and-white TVs ran about $300, while their color counterparts cost $1,000 -- respectively $3,070 and $10,240 in today’s dollars! Additionally, only those located in urban areas could get a signal. Thanks to…

The Philadelphia Eagles may still be reveling in their victory over the New England Patriots in Sunday’s historic Super Bowl win, but many game-day advertisers won’t be quite as happy in the aftermath. After the vast creative (and financial!) input to running a prized Super Bowl ad, it should have been a time for businesses to reap the rewards of a guaranteed increase in traffic. Unfortunately, we identified several websites that went down during this peak time, undoing so much hard work with each second of poor performance.…

Great conversations. That’s what differentiates your top sales reps from everyone else on the team. Sceptical? Let’s take a look at exactly what happened during one million sales conversations to see how top performers behaved differently. Don’t worry … my team at Gong already did the heavy lifting on this one. That’s how many recorded conversations we’ve picked apart using artificial intelligence. (True story.) So it’s not surprising that we’ve reached a few conclusions. I’ll talk about specifics below, but…

One of the biggest challenges for both publishers and brands today is capturing the attention of users without disrupting their online experience. And while most consumers ignore ads, there’s actually an effective method that can help capture their attention: contextual advertising. At its core, contextual advertising is an efficient way to deliver advertisements that are directly correlated with the content the consumer is enjoying. Contextual advertising is more personalized than traditional display, since the…

B2B trading is a well-known model, especially for people working in the field of business and marketing. However, as time passes by, effective methods for business-to-business trading and marketing will also need to progress accordingly. Also, adapting well to what is trending in the current industry, that you belong to, is one primary key to creating a new deal. The deals are about ongoing B2B partners that a company may have. Also Read: How Marketers Can Optimize $682 Billion in Expected Spend in 2018 Five Mistakes…

The enthusiasm for data-driven marketing technologies like predictive, AI, ABM, marketing automation, and personalization tools is driving interest in a new category of technologies – Data Orchestration Solutions. These solutions automate critical marketing processes including things like onboarding data, cleansing and enriching that data, unifying field values across different systems, and delivering to key partners. Now that sounds bland and theoretical, and marketers tend to like things that are shiny. So why are…

Recently, there have been a number of public discussions about the future of TV (both linear and VOD) and addressability and measurement in the OTT space. A key component of these discussions is that cross-device addressability within OTT is easy to do and essentially a solved issue and that what the industry is really lacking is consensus and standards. The truth is, cross-device addressability, which is core to OTT measurement, is not solved. Not even close. OTT addressability which is tied directly to cross-device…

Marketers will continue to embrace use cases for location data beyond proximity-based push alerts and advertising. Location will be used to enhance more aspects of the shopping journey, including in-store augmented experiences, simplified mobile checkout, product reviews and tutorials, and in-store navigation. Machine learning will be applied to location data audiences. Up to this point, audiences have been largely defined by devices that have been to a location. We’ll start to see predictive modeling used to find devices…

Would You Like To Understand What Customers Really Want And How To Give It To Them? Then Start Conversations! Conversational Marketing Is The Latest Buzzword In Marketing Conversational marketing is a unique and emerging marketing methodology through which brands use one-to-one conversations that are personalized in order to learn and remember customer interests through automated technology. In short, conversational marketing is a distinctive interaction of ‘You tell me and I’ll listen’ instead of I’ll tell you and you…

A decade ago, vendors didn’t sell public support forums because they assumed only an insane entrepreneur would want one. They were afraid prospective customers see the complaints and then run away. In my experience, public support forums are one of the most underrated “growth hacking” tools – if you use them wisely. When I launched JotForm in 2006, we built our own public support system. During August 2017 alone, the forum had over 150,000 unique visitors. In this article, I’ll discuss how to create and manage this…

Knock-offs have long been the bane of the fashion industry. One need only visit Canal Street in Manhattan to see “solid gold watches” peddled on the sidewalk, and Versace imitation purses hawked on the cheap. No brand wants to see a copy of their designer label sold on the black market. And no buyer wants to discover that their Rolex is really a faux-lex. Unfortunately, knock-offs aren’t confined to the fashion industry. The reselling of long-tail inventory under fraudulent terms has become common practice in the…

Is your brand ready for #GivingTuesday? Celebrated on the day after Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving. And with all the attention it generates, it’s a great way to build awareness, not to mention bring in much-needed donations. While many nonprofits focus primarily on social campaigns for the big event, it’s important for email audiences to get involved in the action too in order to get the word out and reach even more potential donors.…

Today’s businesses no longer compete on product, price and advertising space alone. The experience they provide to customers has become a leading differentiator, and deterrent, in purchase decisions. Poor customer experiences cost U.S. businesses $62 billion in 2016, up $20 billion from 2013. In an effort to reduce lost revenue, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of product investment projects in 2018 will be redirected to customer experience innovations. Now that business is often conducted online, optimizing websites…

According to Business Insider, $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise was abandoned in carts in 2016 alone. This has led to an uptick in the number of retailers who send shopping cart abandonment messages, as well as a renewed concentration on using those items left unpurchased to retarget customers, creating another consumer touchpoint. But, while it’s all well and good to use digital data to capture revenue that might have been otherwise lost, what about all of those real-life shopping carts that have been left to languish in…

For a time, the world’s most populated zip code (according to data entered online) was 90210. Not because of the actual number of people living in the small and exclusive enclave of the rich and famous, but instead because large numbers of people outside of the US, when asked to enter their zip code to access content or complete a form, simply entered the zip code referenced on hit 90’s tv show, ‘Beverly Hills 90210’. Now, why would this small snippet of pop culture have anything to do with CRM? The answer is because…

Tech giants are doubling down on machine translation. Here’s how other internationally-minded companies can use recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine translation to their own advantage What do Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon all have in common? For starters, they have big, global customer bases and do business in many different languages. Their websites easily change from one language or dialect to another, allowing customers to instantly find the information they seek and make purchasing…

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Support Your Business Today Artificial Intelligence (AI) has for decades been the subject of science fiction and fantasy films. But we’ve come a long way since ‘Skynet’. Only a few months ago, Facebook deactivated a chatbot project, as the bots had developed their own language to communicate with each other, making them redundant to the human employees ‘in charge’. This is an extreme example though. There are many practical A.I. applications that can support the day-to-day running of…

What does it mean to run a marketing campaign on “premium publishers” in a mobile world? How are you defining what it means to be premium? Industry veterans now fervently agree that activating a mobile strategy solely on marquee—desktop-based—publishers such as The Wall Street Journal or CNN no longer matter as much. While they may have sizeable followership, higher CPMs driven by impression scarcity make them less accessible to advertisers focused on more cost effective scale. Instead, reaching the right…

Your website is the culmination of years of experiments trying to maximize web visitor engagement. It has been optimized for design, messaging, positioning, layout, imagery and yet there is one fundamental flaw preventing you from a giant leap in engagement: relevance Webster’s dictionary defines relevance as the ability to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user Unless your website content dynamically changes based on the user/visitor, you are missing out on true relevance. SiriusDecisions cites…

Two basic principles of running an effective business include efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things). This is the secret sauce that marketing operations bring to the business of marketing that enables marketing to meet financial goals such as ROI, pipeline, and revenue. In the technology-rich environment of martech today, it’s easy to get sidetracked by all the bright and shiny toys available. This article looks at how marketing operations injects a new sense of purpose and perspective…