Category mobile marketing

Bastions Of Mobile Resistance

The success of Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and many others has created a massive incentive for entrepreneurs to leverage mobile devices and computing horsepower from the cloud to remove friction from many industries. That’s why it’s so surprising to find products and services that still have not adapted to a mobile-first paradigm. These five hold-outs illustrate […]

Mary Meeker And The (Non) Death Of Industries

Over the last 25 years, governments all over the world have banned or severely restricted the production and use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Once the refrigerant of choice for air conditioners, CFCs were discovered to threaten the planet’s protective ozone layer. Less damaging hydrochlorofluorocarbons soon replaced CFCs in nearly every use case. Production of CFCs ended, […]

Nokia Phones Redux: An Ultra-Safe Return

Nokia is a shape-shifter of a company that has transformed itself many times in its 151-year history. It has been in forestry, lumber and pulp production; rubber, cable, radio, and electronics. It made mobile phones from 1982 to 2014, and while that’s a lifetime in the tech world, it accounts for just 21 percent of the […]

Facebook vs. Alphabet After 15 Quarters As Publicly-Traded Companies: Neck And Neck

Advertising on Facebook is big business. Look no further than its Q1 2016 earnings announcement, which blew past analyst expectations. Facebook’s results were even more striking amid disappointing reports from Alphabet/Google, Apple and Microsoft. Alphabet’s Google and Facebook are widely regarded as the two most valuable digital advertising businesses in the world. Comparing the revenues […]

‘Saturday Night Live’ And Google Show How Digital Publishers Can Confront The Challenge Of Ad Blocking

I’ll venture a guess that this is the only place that shows what Saturday Night Live and Google advertising suddenly have in common and, more importantly, how they’re demonstrating a way for digital advertisers to increase revenues in the face of wide spread ad blocking. Broadly speaking, publishers can increase prices of their ad inventory […]

My First Encounter With A Facebook Messenger Chat Bot Has Me Convinced: It’s The Next Big Thing

Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference took place last week, and of all the headlines the event created, none has generated more buzz than its push to encourage marketers to embrace Facebook Messenger. As I predicted about a year ago, it’s time for businesses to embrace this platform. With over 900 million users, the scale is […]

Avoiding The Career Obsolescence Trap

Four years ago, I had a conversation about career obsolescence I’ll never forget. I was catching up with a friend and former colleague who had left her job at an advertising agency around 2008 to be a stay-at-home mom. This woman is the best account director I’ve ever known. She is tough, comfortable defending her […]

This Headline Badly Distorted An Important Message To Marketers

“Facebook, Twitter and Instagram massively over-rated by marketers, says Prof Mark Ritson.” So wrote The Syndey Morning Herald last week. Aside from the fact that source material for this “news” is in fact over four months old, the headline writer managed to distill a nuanced and critical message all marketers need to hear into a […]

Why Effective Mobile Marketing Requires An ROI Orientation

After last week’s post on mobile strategy 101, I was asked, “But what about mobile marketing? Facebook is dominant on mobile, but it’s so expensive.” I understand why many marketers have that question. If you’re a brand marketer and have a good feel for TV, traditional display, radio, and print prices, Facebook may seem high, […]

iOS Or Android? App Or Mobile Website? A Primer To Build Your First Mobile Strategy

Sports journalists love to hypothesize about the best athlete around which a new franchise could be built to win. Let’s indulge a version of this exercise in business: if you were starting a company and needed a winning mobile strategy, what would it look like? Would you prioritize building an app or a mobile website […]