You are probably familiar with the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. On the surface this folksy phrase seems to encompass wisdom gained by experience. One can envision the wise elder in her rocker holding forth to the young’uns on how to live an effective life. The problem is, this is wrong. And […]
CFOs and Marketers have not always seen eye-to-eye. Traditional marketing and advertising costs have always been viewed with suspicion. With no visible connection between financial investment and the return it creates ad spend can only be viewed as a cost. All that has changed. The explosive growth of digital and data-driven marketing has created the […]
We’re in the Era of Privacy where the protection and security of personal information is in the forefront of the news. Privacy issues and concerns about the protection and use of personal information, particularly in marketing, are at an all-time high. At the center of these concerns are personal data collected by companies that are […]
Marketing managers and the C-Suite love their marketing channels. Wrapping up channel performance in tidy columns displayed on the wall in a digital dashboard feels very measured and certain. But there are two columns on the digital channel chart that require a deeper dive because they are not channels at all. These two “channels” make […]
Over the last two years we have increasingly moved to in-house management of programmatic platforms and are firmly biased in favor of DSPs (programmatic Demand-Side Platforms) that we can run ourselves. There has been a lot of debate over outsourced programmatic vs. in-house and I want to be clear on the difference. Yes, we are […]
As a paid digital optimization firm we saw 2018 as a year of innovation in the industry. The rapid pace of change with both new and existing players is setting the stage for 2019 to be exciting, dynamic, and fast-paced. There is a lot of change in the air, but here are five big trends […]
Recently we encountered a strange situation. One of our clients had a top of the funnel KPI that looked like it was going sideways with regards to efficiency, but their revenues were going gangbusters. We use this metric for optimization and it is the core number by which everyone from their Board of Directors on […]
Last month, Fortune reported that Amazon is rapidly becoming one of the world’s largest ad networks, with over $2 billion USD in advertising revenues in Q2 2018 alone. Their rapid appearance on the world advertising stage is only one of the reasons that we’ve been putting our sights on Amazon for some time now. Here […]
In the winter of 1928-29 a Belgian painter living in Paris painted what looked like an advertisement for pipe tobacco. The painter, René Magritte, painted a caption below the large pipe stating “This is not a pipe” creating confusion for viewers and a bit of a stir in the Paris art scene at the time. […]
Ah, the smell of the end of the Fiscal Year! Budget Planning for Marketing is in the air and the smell of burning remaining budgets lingers, backed by the sound of inter-departmental standoffs. It doesn’t have to be like that. Annual Budgeting is a time-honored process, but I’d argue that in today’s world annual budgets […]