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Unmatched in its dual role of footballing holy grail and financial black hole, the Panini Sticker Book helps to connect fans to the World Cup, attracting thousands of fans around the world each year. In order curb my sticker collecting obsession - I am only 50 stickers away from completing the book - I wanted to utilise my excitement in more interesting way. Enter Fred Maude, Performance Manager at NMPI and the genius behind previous efforts of Machine Learning. He has been busy hoarding reems of player data to apply to…

Last month would have been the 60th birthday of Prince, the late American pop star who achieved world fame with his iconic music, flamboyant style, and onstage flair. But aside from his music, Prince is also remembered for renaming himself multiple times. Prince’s first name change, to ‘The Love Symbol’ came after a contractual dispute with his record label. But while he used a different title for 6 years, his iconic personal brand left consumers in no doubt as to who he was, and what he could offer. In the world of…

When those social posts from friends you like and respect in the ad world start rolling in from the Cannes Lions Festival, it’s hard not to get at least a mild case of FOMO.  Everyone somehow looks impossibly insightful and fabulous at the same time. And those backdrops! But I went to Vidcon (now, like WHOSAY, a Viacom Company) instead this year, and I’m glad I did. Here are 7 reasons why: (1). Diversity. Where else can you see a twelve year old creator, sounding like a Harvard MBA, asking detailed questions about his…

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) announced the 2018 CODiE winners at their annual award ceremony in San Francisco, CA. The organization recognized innovative business solutions in 51 categories. Award shows are interesting because they point to trends across categories. It’s always good to take a step back, see where a company fits in its immediate category, and where niche categories fit within larger tech trends. One overarching theme from the 2018 CODiEs is that the ecosystem of business…

Unless you sell industrial air conditioners, there’s a good chance that summer is looked at as a sleepy sales season in your B2B industry. Summer is downtime. Summer is vacation. Summer is employees with kids struggling with childcare arrangements in the gap left between school and camp. Do your business customers really have the head to be focused on making major product or service purchases? But let’s take a look at two major reasons as to why summertime often stays an active time for B2B. Then we’ll discuss strategy…

Marketing Automation has been used by large corporations ever since its existence. This trend made its mark on the marketing technology in a number of ways. Early solutions were (and most still are) robust, feature rich and consequently complex and expensive. All these made it hard for smaller companies to implement marketing automation. Even if a small business can afford marketing automation software, they have a hard time getting the true value out of it. This phenomenon bothered me because small businesses with…

We live in an era in which consumers control the show. This is especially true when it comes to the media & entertainment sector, where the explosion of digital content and the rise of the Netflix distribution model have made business operations more complicated than ever before. From managing content rights and availabilities to royalty and intellectual property, the digital age has required companies to adapt at warp speed to keep pace. Fortunately, cloud solutions offer an attractive resolution to this dilemma as…

In April all the media was on air with the Facebook data breach and the consequent third-party data crisis. Facebook's biggest sin is, in fact, the case of Cambridge Analytica. What is it for the ad tech world? The financial success of the most famous social network is advertising. That’s how Facebook made $16 billion in profit on revenues of $40.7 billion in 2017. And that’s how the whole digital advertising ecosystem works; it’s a $330 billion market worldwide. Zuckerberg explains that Facebook doesn't sell user…

When it comes to conversions, there is a lot going on below the fold. New data from Nativo underscores the importance of the viewable CPM Now that viewability measurement has become ubiquitous across the digital space, advertisers are looking deeper into the meaning of this metric and how it translates to success. Agencies have dozens of publishers across several channels to oversee, and finding the proverbial silver bullet at the beginning of the consumer journey (awareness) to support conversion can be difficult. For…

We have been having the same conversation for nearly 20 years, sales and marketing alignment is critical for B2B companies. Today, the discussion around alignment has changed drastically, as a result of shifts in business strategy needed to drive growth and ROI. With the rise of ABM, a partnership between sales and marketing trusted marketing attribution and a new phased approach to sales and marketing planning, cross-team alignment has become a critical component for revenue generation for B2B companies. The Rise of ABM…

Digital transformation - or the adoption of digital technologies to deliver increased value to customers - is a core focus for most of today’s savvy businesses. But, making this ambition a reality can be a real struggle given the constant expansion and adoption of new technologies. One of the primary technologies driving this growth is SaaS applications. While SaaS apps such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk and hundreds more deliver powerful functionality for customers, the reality is they traditionally work alone in a silo,…

For many consumers, the thought of live video automatically invokes social media experiences. And while plenty of companies are using social media to create and share live video content, it’s actually internal use cases, that would never make sense to appear on social media that are driving rapid adoption for many businesses. We can refer to these experiences as off-social, or Not-For-Social-Media live video experiences. According to Brandlive and IBM’s recent Live Video Benchmark Report, departments throughout many…

Transparency – this one word has given rise to multiple concerns for brands who are simply looking to develop and launch campaigns that resonate with consumers. Brands need to be more clear with consumers about utilization of data for a greater customer experience but transparency also helps to ensure data veracity surrounding campaign reach and spend,  which helps mitigate ad fraud. To overcome data transparency and veracity concerns, brands are taking a new approach to digital marketing by leveraging incentivized social…

In the highly competitive mobile apps market, growth is largely driven by continually acquiring a steady stream of new users to your app, and you must continue achieving profitable user acquisition in order to survive. However, mobile advertising is a constantly changing landscape. What is working for you today may not be working for you tomorrow. Further, 95% of your direct response advertising creative fails to outperform the best-performing assets in your portfolio, so you're constantly working to find that 5 % of…

After several years of development and heightened industry expectations, the MTA bubble is bursting before our eyes. With the sun-setting of Convertro by Oath, the internalization of Adometry by Google 360, and the recent purchase (and likely absorption) of Visual IQ by Nielsen, the once big three of MTA have now all but disappeared. Why? On the surface, these large media networks saw a chance to bring in-house a technology to enhance and optimize ad-spend within their own programmatic platforms, but the truth is that MTA…

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the European legislation that passed last month, represents not only sweeping protections for consumers but also a sea change for how companies conduct business. Putting the onus more squarely on brands and publishers goes a long way toward rectifying below-board practices that led to ad fraud and brand safety issues, but it also puts many companies in the uncomfortable position of pivoting their consumer targeting, effectively compelling them to re-learn how to do business.…

Almost two in three marketers have expanded their responsibilities beyond marketing to include managing the customer experience but the same proportion still struggle to meet basic brand governance expectations, new research from Simple and the Australian Marketing Institute has found. A significant majority (59%) of marketers report responsibility for managing the customer experience now rests with the chief marketing officer or marketing team at their organization, according to the study, Marketing Resource Management…

It is no secret that today’s workforce is increasingly hard to satisfy. The modern worker is no longer settling for a decent salary – they want good benefits, above-liveable pay, and especially moral and ethical standards that foster a safe and engaging work environment. These are not unreasonable demands, in fact, businesses should be supplying all the above. However, some companies still lag in pleasing their workforce, and in many cases, this is a result of not understanding the impact employees have on their bottom line.…

Google Analytics is the tool most businesses use to monitor their websites. Google keeps improving the platform and they’ve released some great features recently; custom dashboards to name just one. But remember that the platform is always being enhanced, so it’s important to stay up to speed with all the different ways it can work for you. Many of the latest updates are related to customization. That’s no surprise because every website and company is different, so ‘one size fits all’ approaches to platforms and their…

Digital advertising offers a lot of promise. It promises scale on a level few other advertising mediums can possibly imagine. If you want to run an ad campaign targeting Indian teenagers, and a simultaneous campaign targeting Australian grandmothers, you can do this far, far more easily digitally than with other ad formats. It promises accountability that is unparalleled: Advertisers can and do track their ad spend—and the reach this spend generates—down to the very last cent. Advertisers can attribute and measure a return…