Understanding the principles of engagement marketing to build sustainable relationships with customers requires a truly robust personalised and automated strategy.

When it comes to achieving greatness, marketers need to embrace more than just the five pillars of digital marketing transformation – participation, proximity, prediction, play and purpose. They need to embrace automation.

The sheer volume of data generated by online consumers has proven both a bonanza and a curse for marketers: a bonanza in terms of providing a rich source of information for finding and targeting consumers, and a curse in terms of sorting and making use of it.

The migration of consumers to online channels is providing B2C companies with ample opportunity to gather and analyse data. But what do you do when you are a B2B company that sells mostly through partners, and are a long way from having a regular online interaction with your eventual consumers?

Maryfran Johnson is impressed with the CIOs who take on additional business functions, but wonders how they they do it all without having a nervous breakdown. The answer: great teams, trusted deputies.

Businesses worldwide are overestimating their ability to flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test and launch new applications, leaving the poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats.

Many sports get their start from participants practicing their abilities to outperform each other. But digging into the origins of NASCAR racing in the late 1940s reveals a sport born not just from the technical and driving capabilities of participants in outrunning each other, but also in evading the local law enforcement as well.

Analytics vendors are keen to describe how they can divine insights from the world’s vast troves of data. But in the eyes of BAT head marketing intelligent and deployment, Paul Ormonde-James, even the smallest slice of the wrong data can through all predictions out of kilter.

Facebook announced that Stephen Scheeler, currently Head of Retail and Automotive at Facebook, is the new Managing Director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand.

In its second year of partnership, IBM and the City of Melbourne will use IBM’s technology to better understand customer needs, build awareness and engagement around the activities taking place across the city, and connect consumers with designers and retailers as part of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week 2015.

Despite perceptions consumers are battling loyalty program fatigue, a recent study found 59 per cent of members are active in all of their programs, a 31 per cent increase from 2013.

Experts on a panel discussion at the IAB Summit in Sydney, agree the pressure is on brands to better utilise consumer data technology to support advertising and marketing functions in order to increase viewability.

In a fast-evolving technological landscape, the pressure is on brands to maintain a relevant and timely digital marketing strategy. Speaking at IAB’s Summit in Sydney, LinkedIn’s Asia Pacific senior director of marketing, Olivier Legrand, said the key to leveraging engagement is to harness the ‘relevancy imperative’.

During her time as Dan Murphy's CDO, Faye Ilhan has helped drive a number of innovations, including being the first retailer to launch click-and-collect across all outlets, and introducing Dan Murphy’s ShipSmart, which enables customers to receive unlimited deliveries.

Plenty of brands talk about improving customer experiences, and social media management vendor, Hootsuite, is no different to the rest. But as actions speak louder than words, the business has introduced customer happiness into the remuneration structure of every employee.

Myer appointed Mark Cripsey into the newly created role of chief digital and data officer, as part of the retail giant's focus on omni-channel retailing and customer data.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce announced the airline will be making further investments in order to leverage record levels of customer engagement.

AdRoll announced an integration with cloud-based commerce platform Shopify to provide e-commerce merchants the ability to retarget customers across devices within the Shopify platform.

Oracle announced it has signed an agreement to acquire cloud-based software provider Maxymiser, in order strengthen Oracle Marketing Cloud's solution to manage marketing programs across all digital channels and across the customer life-cycle.

Yahoo7 announced the commercial launch of Tumblr in Australia and New Zealand, with Woolworths, Telstra, Monash University and Studio Canal already on board as launch partners.