Stories by Brad Howarth

Picture a Venn diagram containing the words ‘fast’, ‘cheap’ and ‘good’ in three separate circles. Conventional wisdom suggests the best any organisation can hope to achieve when designing a product or service is two out of three. If you want something fast and cheap, it won’t be good, or if you want something good and fast, it won’t be cheap, and so on.

Australian consumers are known for their love of sport. But for any new team that wants to build an audience, establishing a brand among so much competing noise can be a difficult challenge.

The science of psychology has long and deep associations with marketing, but it also offers a lot to marketers as leaders within their organisations.

The desire to take brands into new territories can be hard to resist for marketers, especially when the reasons for doing so are compelling. But it is also possible to extend a brand faster than customers can adapt.

Today’s marketing teams are filled with specialists in fields such as data analytics or the use of specific tools, and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening to increase the need for dedicated professionals. But perhaps AI might also be the tool that finally lets marketers get back to doing marketing?

The digital era has heralded a golden age for video content creators, enabling them to reach audiences in ways that were unheard of only two decades ago.

Imitation might be the greatest form of flattery, but for business entrepreneur, David Freeman, it is also vindication of his plan and a reassuring reminder the issues that matter so much to him are becoming more mainstream.

The measurability of digital platforms has enabled some unlocked capabilities for testing and optimisation. But in the race to measure and optimise performance, should we even be trying to optimise the process in the first place?

One of the great benefits of digital advertising has been its inherent measurability. But while digital advertisers have a far easier time of understanding how many eyeballs are witnessing their messages, there is another conundrum that digital technology has yet to prove so adept at solving – causality.

‘Buy-now/pay-later’ has been the breakthrough new service category of the Australian payments industry, with Roy Morgan research estimating more than 1.5 million Australians used one of the many services in 2018.

Each year, dozens of new social platforms are launched with the hope of becoming the next Snapchat, Pinterest or YouTube. The latest platform to reach that tipping point is the TikTok, an app for sharing short form video which promotes itself as a platform for capturing the world's creativity, knowledge and moments that matter.

With technology now underpinning most functions within business, it’s not surprising to see functional leaders taking an interest in their organisation’s technology purchases.

While much of the talk around robotic process automation (RPA) has centred on its potential to replace human beings in marketing roles, for Berlin-born software maker, Signavio, the opposite appears to be the case.

If Zara Cobb was ever going to take a CMO role, there was a good chance it would be at a data-driven organisation.

There are some products and services consumers can’t help but shout about from the rooftops. Then there are plenty of others which many people wouldn’t be caught dead discussing in public.