The digital age has seen many pioneering businesses fall by the wayside due to their structural inability to adapt, reluctance to adapt or slowness to adapt. Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster immediately spring to mind. But in today’s connected economy where trust is the most important...
The way we define a media owner is changing rapidly and so too is the way we define an audience. Customers, we would argue, are a more valuable audience than “viewers” or “listeners” or “readers” of typical paid media channels. This is because customers are...
It may surprise you, but the fastest growing division in Amazon is not its e-commerce sales, or its services like Prime, but their media sales division. Revenues have more than doubled from $1.8B in 2017 to $4.6B in 2018. And if you think that’s impressive,...
Retail innovation is finding a better way to do something in a retail business which improves on how it was done before, adding value. Innovation is too often mistaken for invention. The true definition of innovation is finding a better way to do something that improves...
This is one of the pivotal questions being posed at the SXSW festival which is on now in Austin, Texas. For the uninitiated, the South by Southwest Festival and Conference has evolved over the last 32 years from a humble music festival with 700 attendees,...
Twenty years in media buying agencies taught me a few things. Chief among these is that businesses tend to overvalue the consumer attention they buy through paid media, whilst squander the attention they command with their customers. Consider the money and time and resource and emotional...
It’s easy to get carried away with defining things – be it problems, technologies, behaviours, marketing strategies, media etc. Definitions can quickly become a distraction, one that chews up mental energy, time and therefore money, without adding anything substantive. Worse still, over thinking definitions can...
Like them or loathe them, cockroaches are well known for their longevity. The cockroach is estimated to be at least 200 million years old. And since there are cockroach fossils dating back as far as 350 million years, they actually pre-date some dinosaurs! So it was...
Recently walking past a coffee shop in Melbourne I saw this sign: Coffee $5 Coffee please $4 The first thing it reminded me of was my mother nagging me as a child of the importance of always saying please when you ask for something. The second, a much...
Packaging is a valuable owned media asset; however, it only has positive value if its social cost is lower than the value it creates. If your brands packaging is harming the environment, regardless of the media value, it is simply a cost to society. A...