The most innovative marketers routinely pick up new things, try them out, and succeed or fail. When email became popular in the late 1990s, innovative marketers latched onto it. When websites and SEO surged in popularity in the early 2000s, marketers were there. When social media picked up in the mid-2000s, marketers cranked out the…
I’ve never been a fan of sweet flavors for breakfast (except for coffee). It’s just not my thing. I’ve especially never been a fan of sweetening hot cereals like oatmeal and farina. No matter what my mother or grandmother did, adding more sugar or honey didn’t make the experience less unpleasant. As I got older,…
Disruption rarely occurs because a new technology magically makes everything better. Few creators of software and algorithms build solely for the purpose of disrupting anything. Many creators of companies build to solve a problem they’ve had and they don’t see anyone else trying to solve, or entrenched interests block. Imagine an industry so bad that…
When it comes to analytics, measurements, and metrics, we marketers have vigorous debates about what tools or software we should be using. Vendors, too, participate loudly in such debates, working to convince us that their solution will be better than what we have now. However, a consequence of changing out our measurement tools is that…
One of the most difficult tasks that marketers face when dealing with a new technology, new circumstance, or even a new job/industry is how to get up to speed quickly. How do we learn the landscape of a field, the basics of a topic, in such a way that allows us to begin operating efficiently…
My friend Chris Brogan enjoys making the joke, “It’d be like grilling rice”, a way of suggesting that an effort is futile or highly impractical. Conceptually, grilling rice does seem absurd. Why would you ever attempt something like grilling rice? If you’ve ever been to a hibachi grill, you’ve likely had the fried rice made…
Traditional economic wisdom about solving problems and incentives says: We get what we pay for. As a logical corollary, we don’t get what we don’t pay for. This is known as opportunity cost. We focus on what we want, and leave behind the things we judge less important. At a small level, this is an…
Consider these four recent announcements by Google. Tensorflow Lite: AI on every (Android) smartphone. Google Lens real-world camera search. Google AdWords in-store sales attribution. YouTube location-based extensions. Do you see the connection, the thread that links these announcements together? The Digital Real World Today, our world is largely analog. While the smartphone has undeniably made…
One of the most pressing concerns facing marketers is whether we’ll even have jobs in a few years as machine learning and artificial intelligence become more powerful. I spent the last week as IBM’s guest at their Vision 2017 conference and saw what some of the cutting edge technologies have to offer. Are we going…
