Stories by Brad Howarth

It should be no surprise that Anneke van den Broek would run a pet care company someday. At the age of eight, she had made her first foray into the industry by breeding mice and selling them to the local pet store.

When your product is sales training, the last thing you want to admit to is problems with managing your own pipeline.

It’s taken just a decade for mobile advertising to rise from relative obscurity to represent a billion dollars of ad expenditure in Australia (according to the IAB), and account for 62 per cent of general digital display spending.

​It’s well over 100 years since American merchant, John Wanamaker, once opined his ignorance regarding which half of his marketing budget was wasted.

Few startups take on a marketing executive at inception. The focus on product development and driving immediate sales revenue tends to soak up whatever cash the founders have got their hands on.

Brand owners often talk about their brand having a personality. Some are sassy, others are authoritative, and a few are cheeky. But when it comes to bringing the brand to life through a chatbot interface, focusing in on the personality might be the last thing you want to do.

Brands can be built on many different foundations – personality, quality, luxury, locality – the list is endless. But what should a brand do when that foundation is taken away?

Want to reach someone who wants to buy a car, rather than just kick the tyres? Or pick up some home and garden equipment, rather than just seek inspiration? Maybe you should be looking up a tree.

HG Wells’ 1910 novel The Sleeper Awakes tells the story of a man who falls asleep for 203 years and awakens to a strange and unfamiliar world. While the experience for Lynne Capozzi has not been quite so extreme, stepping back into the chief marketing role at Boston-based technology company, Acquia, after an eight-year absence has thrown up some notable changes.

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.