Stories by Brad Howarth

At first glance, comedy and the road toll may seem like an odd pairing. But through an innovative partnership with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Victorian Government’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) is delivering a message that might actually save lives.

Few sports let you get just meters from Olympic athletes while standing with sand between your toes. So when surfing makes its Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo games, it will be an important milestone for a sport that has steadfastly refused to bend to the kind of corporatisation that has beset many others.

It’s been said Formula 1 racing is not something a spectator watches, but something that they feel, as 1000 horsepower thunders past them at more than 350 Kmph.

When Google first demonstrated its Duplex service in mid-2018, it stunned the world by making relatively complex bookings over the telephone using a system that sounded very close to how a human might sound. It also breathed new interest into a technology that has become both increasingly prevalent in consumer devices, and an increasing source of frustration – the voice-based user interface.

There is no shortage of marketplaces to satisfy the appetites of the most data-hungry organisations. But for some, their efforts might be better directed at utilising the data they already have right under their noses.

Utter the phrase ‘world record attempt’ in anything other than a sporting contest and the immediate connection is to Guinness World Records and the eponymous book that records them.

We live in a golden era of data-driven driven marketing. Data now helps with everything from discovering and enriching audiences to surfacing high-value targets and nursing them along their buyer’s journey.

For many organisations, the emergence of digital channels necessitated creation of an entirely new business function to support them. A key question then is where to house that function – within marketing, IT, operations, customer, or someplace else?

Tea, cheese and tapioca are three ingredients not normally associated in the standard western palate – and certainly not mixed into a beverage. But they are also three of the key ingredients behind a rapidly-emerging force in Australia’s quick-service food and beverage category.

When it comes to the digital transformation of your organisation, who would you rather trust – an organisation that has helped others to transform, or one that has also transformed itself?

Providing exceptional customer service is often spoken of in a consumer context, but it is wise to remember business customers are people too.

In the era of audience fragmentation, marketers should be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to reaching their intended targets. And it turns out one of the most effective social marketing tools could actually be hiding in plain sight.

In an era where making things easy for the customer has become paramount, it is not surprising to see many brands turning to chatbots to resolve customer queries quickly.

Attracting prospects to your website should be a simple matter of buying the right search terms and waiting for the traffic to roll in.

It wasn’t long after the iPhone’s launch that every brand decided it needed an app. But how many of those apps have made a meaningful difference in the lives of consumers – or for the brands that created them?