Stories by Brad Howarth

Amazon.com is an ecommerce behemoth that has put technology innovation and customer data at the heart of business development.

While the boundaries around the roles and responsibilities of CIOs and CMOs at large organisations continue to shift and morph, an interesting trend is emerging across Australia’s technology-based start-ups.

Programmatic ad buying was supposed to bring clarity and efficiency to the process of planning and booking online display ad campaigns. So where did it all go wrong?

Football fans are used to putting up with a lot – poor weather, poor umpiring and for some teams, poor performances. But in an era where competition for fans – and their money – is fierce, football codes need to begin thinking of them more like customers than hardcore loyalists.

The benefits of Facebook as a platform for communication between organisations and their fans or followers is well established. But Australia’s largest private distance education provider is taking that one step further by using Facebook as a primary platform for supporting students.

The term ‘big data’ conjures ideas of big data sets and even bigger budgets. But as one ecommerce entrepreneur has discovered, those same concepts can deliver big results even for a small business.

In the late 1940s French beauty company, L’Oreal, revolutionised advertising by staging live radio shows. Now it is establishing a position at the forefront of the latest media for branded content – online.

Ever since smartphone makers began incorporating GPS receivers into their handsets, marketers have dreamed about making use of the technology. Their goal has been to use location to target consumers with messages based on not just who they are, but where they are.

Strong demand for data analytics skills is pushing up wages for qualified professionals and turning big data into a big pay for data analysts.

Music is one of the most engaging forms of entertainment available today, so it is little wonder advertisers are increasingly turning to it as a means of holding consumers’ attention.

The rush for many businesses to get online inevitably leads to a heavy focus on technology and marketing. But for WA’s Yahava KoffeeWorks, something else remains just as important – the brand.

With more than 14.5 million active users spread across 80 different sites, Mi9 has a lot of data to work with. But even in this data-rich environment, the human touch still applies.

In the realm of marketing, data is definitely the new black. But to hear it spoken of at conferences, you might also assume it is the new black magic, capable of doing everything from enabling accountability of every marketing dollar spent through to predicting customer behaviour. Either concept would be considered fantastical, were they also not increasingly becoming true.

Companies love touting stories of when their customer service staff have gone above and beyond the call of duty to delight a customer in resolving what might have otherwise been a negative situation.

In the past two decades, marketing has established itself as one of the lynchpins of modern business, essential to the support of sales and business strategy. But with the role of the CMO rising accordingly, an obvious question emerges as to why more CMOs have not stepped up into the top job, or beyond.