Having spent some splendig days in the region of Milano - at the river banks of the beautiful Ticino, one simple question bothered me all along.
At one of the keynote presentation at the Marketing Efficiency Congress, Michael Moon stated: there are only two ways to create value - innovation and marketing. ...more

The marketing efficiency congress, as a pre-event to the OMD exhibition and fair was great. Fascinating and insightful keynotes, a good variety of solution providers, combined with a concentrated mass of interested people from all disciplines of marketing, strategy, execution and services. ...more

Tomorrow, we will be exhibiting at the Marketing Efficiency Congress in Düsseldorf. ...more

As money makes the world go around, it's always coming up as a pivot point for decision makers.
When you try to sell your software solution to a (potential) customer, you need to come up with some hard facts in this area as well.
But where are the strong points of Media Asset Management? Is cutting costs more important than creating value? ...more

Ok, the title is highly misleading but when I heard a talk from Prof. Peter Kenning at Dortmund KREATIV, it was one of my first thoughts. ...more

Serial Numbers Marketing writes marketing guru Seth Godin in his recent blog post. With a everything smiles strategy, even this tiny number matters in your communication. ...more

Most FMCG companies try to streamline their brands to get rid of the shelf warmers.
Shopkeepers are not only wasting precious space, they are dead capital for the manufacturer as well as the dealer. ...more

The philosophy of sharing, rating, and recommending content is key to the social network we enjoy. Chatting and gossiping is a natural way of putting or digital selves into context, to define our ethnographic identity. ...more

SONY has a touch for compelling advertising with unusual setups. This here is just another example. Of course, it provoces fantasies about dropping a bottle of soap into the next fountain.
But even more interesting is the fact, that SONY is one of the very few companies, using the spirit of Web 2.0 - sharing what you like - for its own advantage.
On this site SONY encourages you to share. Not by proxying via Youtube, no, you can use a first-hand ressource.
Has the time come for major brands to understand the power they can get, by encouraging its passionate friends and lovers to talk about the brand? To release some control, but gain a community build on loyality and passion?
In this comment on the MAINFRAME101 blog, I wrote about an opposite experience I made with LEGO.
I guess, SONY will get more media coverage for their bucks.
What a coincidence: Branding Strategy Insider touches the current state of the term media in its blog.

The quest for a semantic web has been around for years now and a lot of standards are the result of this quest.

Dublin Core and RDF are methods to assign semantic meta information onto documents. Computers can use these meta information to assign relationships between documents, authors, locations, time-frames, languages and intentions.

In february, Reuters launched a web service called Calais, that reads an unstructured document and returns semantic meta information after a thorough text and concept analysis.

An interesting question is, of course, why bother? What's the benefit to the internet world?

Information on the internet is usually published with a purpose. Most of the information, I suppose, are published to be read. The information is seeking attention. Your attention.

And there's the catch: as a large percentage of published information has a clear economic motivation (read: advertising), the battle for our attention has become more difficult.

Our prefererence for unhealthy foods (salty, fat, and sugared stuff), that are the result of millenia of starvation and the concept of survival of the fittest have an informational equivalent: a preference for easy and archetypical important information: who's the boss, with whom can I breed and who and where is the enemy.
That's information that appeals to our oldest brain parts. The universality of yellow press, which exists in every culture, continent and form reflects on the internet too.

See google zeitgeist's top ten in searchwords.
The semantic web however could be the digital equivalent to the now mandatory nutrition information on industrially processed food.

A search engine could filter the retrieved information for the sort of information you really are looking for. If you want sex, crime, and gossip, you'll get exactly that. That's not really different from google today. But if you need scientific, educational or quotable information, you could get those too.

Internet technology will stay exciting, as will there be new challenges for advertisers, marketers and publishers with these new technologies. Just stay focused.