Category: trends
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The Unreasonable Consumer
A couple of years ago I saw Adam Morgan talk at the APG conference about 'Strategy in the Age of the Unreasonable Consumer', a keynote in which he described how rapidly consumer expectations are shifting for digital-based services. As soon as we're spoilt by a seamlessly intuitive, smartly designed, on-demand customer experience like Amazon one-click,…
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Google Firestarters 20: Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Intelligence Augmentation (IA)? – The Event
Last week 300 planners were packed into Google HQ in London to talk all things AI, robotics and machine learning. This whole area, despite being with us for a long time, has suddenly become a huge area of focus for the industry not least because of the huge shifts in behaviour, advantage and opportunity that…
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Evolutionary Policymaking
In an age of increasing economic and political uncertainty, should we take a more deliberately evolutionary view of policy development? Eric Beinhocker (Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford) thinks so. In his introduction to his 'new economics' research programme he argues that traditional approaches to economics,…
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WIREWAX 360 Video
This is cool. I met again recently with Steve and Dan, the founders of one of my favourite startups, WIREWAX who have pioneered dynamic clickable interactive video formats. They've done some nice implementations of their technology recently including a shoppable video for Ted Baker (which apparently resulted in £75K worth of click through sales), and one for…
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‘Dark MarTech’
I liked the phrase 'dark martech' (not least because, like 'dark social' it is suggestive of things that are in reality quite notable but less talked about) that Seth Ulinkski, an analyst at tech research business TBR, uses over on Scott Brinker's blog to describe the mass of home-grown marketing technology that companies build themselves internally.…
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Generative Design
Sometimes the whole people and technology debate can seem somewhat polarising, particularly when they're represented as mutually exclusive opposing forces when of-course the most interesting scenarios to work through are how one can augment the other. IA rather than AI. Intelligence Augmentation rather than Artificial Intelligence. With machines beginning to demonstrate not only an increasing ability to…
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The State of Marketing Technology
Every year (friend of ODF) Scott Brinker, who also has a new book out, does a personal survey of the marketing technology landscape to map out the number and array of martech vendors. It's remarkable that his latest survey shows around 3,500 vendors, representing a growth of 87% year-on-year (represented by that horrendously complex visual…
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Reinforcement Learning
Deepmind's amazing victories against Go world champion Lee Se-dol have led many to acclaim a new era in AI. As the FT said, the achievement was in a different class to previous machine/human clashes (like IBM Deep Blue/Chess and Watson/Jeopardy): 'Unlike chess, Go permits too many possible moves for a computer to calculate. As a result,…
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Google Firestarters 19 – Consultants, Customer Experience and Convergence
Our next Google Firestarters London is upon us and we've got a great theme and speakers lined up for this one. We will be taking as our subject 'Consultancies, Customer Experience and Convergence', looking at how the big consultancies are increasingly clashing with the most forward thinking agencies, most notably around the area of customer experience.…
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Burberry Show How You Embrace Disruption
It was really interesting to read about Burberry's new strategy to combine its men’s and women’s collections together into one unified 'seasonless' collection to be shown at two annual runway events with the clothes available to buy straight after the shows. This is a big departure from decades of tradition. The established fashion calendar positioned…