Humanity generates as much data every two weeks as was generated from the dawn of civilization to 2003, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt. Whether his estimate is exact or as some argue exaggerated, we do know that two weeks will fall to two minutes then two seconds as use of data begets more data. Understandably, companies have had an increasingly hard time getting past all this noise. In response, marketers initially shifted advertising dollars from traditional media (TV, print and radio) to digital advertising’s banner ads and more recently to Facebook’s, Twitter’s and Google’s personalized ads, many of them location dependent. But “smarter” marketing – as personalization is called – isn’t the solution according to Mark Fidelman, Fortune columnist, author of Socialized! and CEO of marketing consultancy Evolve! In his view, we increasingly tune out to digital ads just as we learned to…
Are your business model strategy and marketing communications aligned?
A dangerous canyon often arises between business model strategy and marketing. Separate roles, meetings, deliverables, timetables, personalities and consultancies exist on each side of the divide. When business strategy and marketing execution move forward independently – as they often do – spin, distrust, poor customer experiences and commoditization result. A classic case of this problem was the latest branding of Plymouth as “Not your father’s Plymouth,” when the new model was in fact just like the dated car. Needless to say, the brand now belongs to history books. Ty Montague offers a needed bridge across this canyon in True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. Montague is co-founder of co:collective, a consultancy that helps its clients develop their strategy and brand story using the principles of Storydoing™. Montague’s premise – and it is a terrific one – is…
Has the drive for efficiency through cost cutting gone too far?
The drive for efficiency has gone too far in my estimation. “But efficiency is always good,” you might protest. True, productivity gains increase incremental profits all else equal. But “all else equal” rarely holds true in practice. Therefore, like all good things pushed too far, gains from incremental efficiency initiatives may not be worth the price paid to secure them. Why is the Efficiency Goddess who brought us big box miracles like Staples, online retailing and record corporate cash balances failing us? Efficiency initiatives usually pay attention only to readily measurable costs, ignoring unintended consequences and opportunity costs. Why do CIOs limit support to only PC-computers? Why do CFOs reduce support staff, forcing administrative work onto revenue-generating managers? Such is the thinking of modern corporate managers: They are brilliant at measuring costs and lousy at measuring professional productivity. Shortsighted trade-offs are magnified as…
Politics makes our basic research ecosystem increasingly fragile
Government funded basic research gives birth to new industries and jobs. Shortchanging it is akin to not eating while you are pregnant to save money for the baby’s future. Nevertheless, our nation’s growing (and repeated) budget crisis is short changing research and its long term economic cost is perhaps nowhere so clear as is it in research advancing health. The Atlantic Meets The Pacific, an annual event of The Atlantic Magazine and University of California San Diego (UCSD), gave testimony to the high return to innovation and the urgent need for more of the same. Sadly, many speakers coupled their comments about discoveries with growing fear that the lack of reliable funding will harm our ability to push the boundaries of medicine forward. One medical frontier is cancer, a disease that will afflict one in four of us and poses a demographic time…