Category: trends
-
The Role for Hyper-personalisation
I don't usually like pre-fixes like 'hyper' as they rarely add much meaning (personalisation is just personalisation, right?) but I think the extent to which Netflix uses sophisticated content personalisation is sufficiently distinctive to justify the hyperbole. In a recent post on the Netflix technology team blog they describe, for example, how they use data…
-
The Reality of How Marketing is Changing
Each year Scott Brinker's amazing work tracking and mapping the changing marketing technology landscape reminds us of just how much the discipline and function of marketing is changing. Last year's survey mapped more than 5,000 separate martech solutions and you would have been forgiven for believing then that the market must surely have reached its…
-
The Rise of Zero-Based Budgeting
Zero-based budgeting feels like one of those trends that is potentially pretty significant but which few people are talking about. I seem to be coming across it more and more. It's no doubt sprung from the increasing pressure that marketers are under to demonstrate the value of their investments, and the increasing accountability that comes from…
-
Agile Resourcing at ING
In the book I talk a lot about how agile thinking and principles (and not just Agile doing) can be applied in the service of supporting fundamental change in the organisation. To enable a far more responsive, customer-centric way of working. To enable a shift away from the entrenched processes and practices that are holding…
-
Blockchain and the Perez Technological Surge Cycle
In amongst all the Bitcoin hype there was a thought-provoking question posed in a well-shared post published just before Christmas by Kai Stinchcombe, founder of a Silicon Valley financial services startup, about whether there was actually any legitimate use at all for Blockchain technology: ‘Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going…
-
Democratising AI Capability
I don't claim to be an expert on AI but as someone who works in the 'digital industry' (whatever that means now) I think its important to keep track of notable shifts in an area that has become fast-moving and of huge potential significance. AI is surely one of the most important S-curves around, and…
-
Google Firestarters – Change and Complexity – The Event
For our recent Google Firestarters (our 26th!), we revisited a successful format that we first did two years ago. In 2015, in one of our most successful Firestarters ever, seven of the best minds in the industry gave a ten minute perspective in answer to a single question: what's the best thing that you've learned in…
-
Frozen Accidents, and Predicting The Future
I rather liked the idea of ‘frozen accidents’, expounded here by Shane Parrish. He quotes from physicist Murray Gell-Man who believed that the things we observe in the world are the result of both a set of fundamental laws, but also random accidents – the unforeseen occurrences which create the opportunity for new possibilities but…
-
Platform Economics (3) – Scaling and Growth
As part of disappearing down the rabbit hole of platform business economics, I'm writing up the second of Chris Smith's excellent summations of the key dynamics of platform models. I'm doing this mostly for my own benefit but, as always, you are welcome to tag along and it's worth reading the original. So far I've…
-
What Real Disruption Looks Like: Lemonade Insurance
Disruption is an overused word but I find the breadth as well as the depth of disruption right now to be endlessly fascinating. Logical I guess, given how horizontal the impact of digital is, and how the different ways of re-wiring markets can come from such diverse forms of innovation. Digital may change the economics of…