We don’t talk about the other P’s enough
In an alarming number of businesses, marketing has been shunted to the kids’ table and has been maligned as glorified advertising or comms. But a return to basic principles could help to shake that misconception and put marketing back where it ought to be: at the heart of business decision-making. Three missing Ps In 1960, […]
AI: A performance enhancing drug for ecommerce
Everyone is getting excited about the potential impact of AI in ecommerce, and rightly so. Those who take the necessary steps to accurately capture data and use it strategically will unleash its power to Augment Innovation. But in the race to implement AI, many businesses will fail to put these foundations in place, and will […]
Does AI spell the end for Strategists?
It’s almost two years since the launch of ChatGPT and the proliferation of AI tools in marketing has accelerated since, to the point that there are genuine questions as to whether automation can outright replace human roles in the near future. This is a potentially provocative, and even uncomfortable, question for strategists like myself, but […]
One man’s sh*t is another man’s fertiliser
I’m on a crusade to rehabilitate ‘wastage’, a term which I think is both unfair and short-sighted. Now on the face of it, that probably sounds slightly mad – after all, isn’t one of the main benefits of digital marketing our ability to target our audience more precisely and make sure that every penny is […]
Synthetic data: the future of audience research?
With the rise of LLMs, there has been a corresponding increase in the use of synthetic data. Triangulation studies have found that the outputs are generally within around 10% of real-world data, with some researchers even suggesting that synthetic data is better in certain areas such as privacy preservation and augmenting small sample sizes. We […]
Being ‘data-led’ isn’t just impossible, it’s not even desirable!
Marketers describing themselves as ‘data-led’ or ‘data-driven’ is now so common as to almost be a cliche, and is just one of a myriad examples of the industry co-opting the vocabulary of the sciences (A/B testing, big data, regression analysis…). I’m not certain what underpins this shift, and in the spirit of pushing against it […]
What does ‘Strategy’ even mean?
Strategy would be simpler…if only we spoke the same language Strategy is a meaningless word. Actually, it’s worse than that – strategy is a word with too much meaning. “Too many definitions, too many interpretations, by too many people. It’s out of control” – Alex M H Smith, ‘No Bullsh*t Strategy’ I really like Alex […]
Setting Better KPIs: Four Simple Rules
On the face of it, KPIs are incredibly simple and yet so many marketers seem to over-complicate matters. As a result, they either have a mess of conflicting KPIs or, in more extreme cases, they fail to define any at all. There may be a number of good reasons for this, and often there are […]
My New Year’s Resolution: Fewer Cookies
It’s been eight years since I wrote about the promise of attribution in moving us towards truly omni-channel campaigns. Now that I’m older and, hopefully, wiser, I’ve begun to wonder if I was wrong about one fundamental aspect of the whole thing in the first place: do we really need to be able to assign […]
Farewell to a Beloved Ranking Factor: In Memory of Backlinks?
At a very basic level, we’ve generally viewed backlinks as digital ‘votes’, pretty much an indicator to search engines that others view the content or site positively. Way back in the depths of time (well, in pre-Penguin days anyway), everything was therefore fairly straightforward when it came to links: the more links pointed at a […]
Keyword research in the Helpful Content era
Now that the dust has settled on the latest Helpful Content Update, albeit only into more dust kicked up by the October Core and Spam Updates, it’s probably a good time to think about what’s changed and what this means for our approach to search marketing. What is the helpful content system? In Google’s own […]
Strategists Anonymous: The Maintenance Steps
This is the third in a three-part series detailing a twelve-step programme of digital strategy. If you want to remind yourself of the earlier steps, you can find Steps 1-3 here and Steps 4-9 here. Once you have established a clear strategy and tactics in each of your existing plans, all that remains is to […]