If you've spent time Google searching and window shopping online, say, on an outdoor retailer's website, dreaming about a $400 graphite fly fishing rod, maybe even putting the fly rod in a shopping cart to keep the fantasy going only to click away when reality bites, you might see the fly rod following you around the Interwebs, your Facebook feed or a banner ad.
The road to Contently Summit is lined with the homeless who live in the shadow of City Hall's towering dome. Along Market Street, the sour stench of urine and feces and unwashed bodies closes in. I turn west on Mission Street making sure to avoid eye contact with the forsaken outliers cursing at the world. Two giant, yellow construction cranes stain the skyline, and I feel a sense of dread at tech gentrification's Second Coming. Skirting iron-barred liquor stores and smoke shops, I finally arrive at Contently Summit, which I recognize by the "private party" sign out front. It is like an island resort serving free drinks and selling timeshares in the midst of a polluted, roiling sea of poverty.
Among marketers, the drum beat to "personalize" messages and offers to customers is growing louder and faster. Personalization sounds nice, but truth is, it's really a long ways off.
People not in the branding business don't see much difference between advertising and marketing. As new-age advertising technology, or adtech, and marketing technology, or martech, logically merge, what's the problem? For advertising agencies, which have been on the frontline of branding since the late 18th century, a lot is at stake.
The word "innovation" gets bandied about at virtually every tech event. It's the magic key to unlocking great competitive advantage and disrupting entire markets. CIOs are supposed to be masters of innovation.
Arms flailing in an ocean of customer data, panicky marketers need the CIO to throw them a life line. That is, they need to know what to do with the data.
James Gordon plans to hike a hundred miles in the backcountry with a few friends. They'll be relying on an old-fashioned compass and their wits to survive. If someone breaks a leg or a wild animal causes injury, they'll have to carry the victim out or send a party to find help, because nobody will be packing a satellite phone.
As marketers ride the digital wave to higher salaries, greater roles and bigger budgets, will it all come crashing down? Do marketers really understand the technology that has upended their profession? If they don't improve their digital IQ in a hurry, they're risking a wipeout.
The pendulum is in full swing toward employees empowered to make tech choices at work and away from traditional IT departments. A new survey found that workers are seeking self-service IT, driven in large part by cool consumer tech, "freemium" cloud services and an autocratic IT department whose slow, conservative ways aren't able to keep up with the urgent demand of business technology.
Hold on to your hats, spending on marketing tech is about to take off -- $120 billion over the next decade, up from $1.2 billion today. At least that's what Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, sees when he gazes into his crystal ball.
Signs point to marketers opening up their wallets for emerging digital technologies, placing bets on measurable channels such as email, search and social media, shifting resources toward consumer-facing technology, and spending wads of cash on content creation and aggregation.
With startups pouring into the emerging marketing technology market, the simple fact is that not everyone -- not every category -- is going to be a winner. Now Forrester has come up with a startling finding that one of the first marketing technologies to come along and help define this segment is failing to deliver results.
Stipends, reimbursements, credits - there's nothing like money to ignite emotions. Employees want to be paid for using their personal phones and tablets for work, yet companies don't want to subsidize personal use. The question of who pays has made Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) so divisive.
Screen after screen, folder after folder, app after app, the iPhone has become the new enabler for the mobile hoarder. For the New Year, though, many iPhone addicts have vowed to break or at least temper this fixation. If you’re looking for a fresh start, you can begin by deleting these 10 apps.
Do you know the name of the marketing associate handling targeted email campaigns with Marketo? How about the name of the human resources assistant with the Workday account?