In a meeting with our digital heads last week speculation was rife on this issue.  It boils down I think ultimately to functionality, though fashion clearly has a role in establishing who wins this next zeitgeist battle. As far as Google Glasses are concerned the media is torn between fear of a loss of privacy…

Spring seems finally to have arrived.  There’s blossom everywhere as I write (I am aware it could be snowing again by the time you read this!) and there is smile on the face of Londoners who have been braced against the cold for too long so far this year. Some things do take a little…

Media research may be improving in accuracy in silos but overall we are building the Tower of Babel. According to the book of Genesis, the whole world once had a single language.  And because they had a single language they really began to get somewhere.  The people of the the city of Babel said: “Come,…

It is impossible not to warm instantly to Katie Kempner.  She is head of global communications for ad agency CP+B but also the creator and host of an online show called “Perspectives with Katie Kempner” (www.katiekempner-perspectives.com). The show’s mission is to inspire and empower working women.  She asked me to be one of a series…

A year ago my co-author Jonathan Salem Baskin told  Economist Summit delegates that the job of marketing was to represent consumer truth within the organisation.  Not to make ads that spin the truth, not in fact only just to make ads at all, but to influence all aspects of marcomms that the consumer encounters, whether…

I’ve recently been chatting to one of the all-time gurus of media strategy about the state of planning in the industry.  He worries that good consumer insight is being overshadowed by big data, that the exciting developments in this field will lead to real deep human insight being of less value to marketers and overlooked. …

This seemed like a theme that speakers came back to again and again during the Warc MAP conference this month.  (By the way, I don’t know whether to put “siloed” or “silo’d”.  I’m drawn to the apostrophe but decided against it because I know some people get very annoyed by its misuse.) The two days…

I spent some of this morning in the inspiring company of Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council .  (If you’re going to be Chief Design Officer anywhere it can’t get better than that job can it ?) We were sharing a panel at a local government digital summit, compered by the wonderful…

Did you have a romantic Valentine’s Day?  Did it go to plan or were all your dreams and hopes crushed ? My love life is perfectly intact but my plans didn’t exactly pan out.  I don’t like going out for Valentine’s Day but I had planned a nice home cooked dinner (Spag Bol but with…

I went to my first “Disrupterthon” last week.  When I told one colleague that this was where I was going, she said that that was how she considered every meeting that I was in.  (I’m sure that’s flattering if you think very positively about it).   This was a TV Disrupterthon run by the British…

Q: When is a unique visitor not a unique visitor ?  A: Most of the time. Which as my mother would put it is a bit like saying that you are a bit pregnant. Unique visitors to websites remains a metric that is commonly used to understand the flow of audience and the success of…

Your natural search ranking may be poised to replace advertising awareness and consideration tracking as a key indicator of how a communications strategy has truly influenced the minds of the target audience and therefore the most reliable indicator (alongside sales of course) of the success of a campaign.   Google search is striving to become more…