Stories by Brad Howarth

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.

While customer segmentation has become something of a mantra for data-driven marketers, few would suspect it’s also possible to take segmentation one step too far.

As a small wine marketer in Australia since 2010, Virgin Wines has been heavily reliant on digital marketing to build its brand position and sales.

Gillian Franklin has built the Heat Group into one of Australia’s most successful cosmetics companies off the back of a career in marketing. But it was never her original intention to forge such a path.

Marketers are continuing to struggle to make greater use of data within their function, according to the new Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013.

If you want to make your way to the top in business, it pays to play to your strengths. That has certainly been the plan for Intel’s MD and former marketer, Kate Burleigh, although the starting point for her journey up the executive ladder was an unusual one.

Marketing automation is reaching a tipping point that will see it become more readily adopted across organisations, according to new research from Ovum’s Digital Marketing and Connected Customer practice.

An early focus on customer experience with the help of his grandfather has helped Matt Ball immensely as he transitioned through a series of marketing roles to MD of BlackBerry A/NZ.

There are some organisations that pay lip service to data analysis, and there are others that live by it. Australia and New Zealand employment site SEEK, is definitely the latter.