Author Archives: admin

In this roundtable discussion with five top marketers, including Alfredo Martel, CMO of Caribou Coffee, the participants tackle topics such as the value of data versus gut instincts, social media and the recession.
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In this post by blogger Blake Masters, he covers Marc Andreessen’s talk at a Stanford class taught by Peter Thiel. In the talk, Andreessen pinpoints why O/G shares his views that retailers must put the customer at the center of their strategic roadmap as the critical first step in re-architecting their retail organization for the future.
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Media consultant Stijn Debrouwere, of the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette and KCRG-TV, summarizes in this post why consumers increasingly ignore media interrupted with advertising as their choice to get informed and alerted to products and services to buy. He gives examples of e-commerce sites that are blending content normally reserved for media companies, and media sites that are adding marketplaces to make money with services other than display advertising: Continue reading

This spring, Ovative/Group selected three groups of college students to conduct research and marketing planning for our firm and selected innovation clients. At the University of Minnesota, MBA students in the Carlson School conducted research on trends and leaders in retail and e-commerce. At the Missouri School of Journalism, two Strategic Communications student-run agencies tackled semester-long projects using new social, mobile and data aggregation technology to tackle two pressing issues among college students. Continue reading

This news release by IMS Research reports on the firm’s forecast that by 2016 80% of new TVs will ship with with Wi-Fi and 30% will ship with advanced human-machine interfaces such as voice and gestural controls. We anticipate other interface innovations such as facial recognition to show preferred ‘playlists’ to different individuals.
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In this TechCrunch guest column Bloomreach’s CEO, Raj De Datta writes about emerging enterprise big data apps (BDAs) from LinkedIn, Salesforce and Bazaarvoice. He says BDAs are inherently better than their SaaS equivalents because they have all the delivery model benefits of SaaS, plus a network effect in the data being collected. In explaining his company, he says: Continue reading

We followed the P&G Signals conference in March with great interest because, like O/G, the company positioned the event as “bringing Silicon Valley to the Midwest”. Now, the blog Digiday reports that that P&G is following through with the vision expressed by CMO Marc Pritchard at the conference. Continue reading

By Kim Garretson This post reflects on recent posts about judging the digital business models at Mizzou’s Reynolds Institute created by journalism and business students and professors around entrepreneurs’ concepts.

All five presentations suffered from a huge miss: The customer. Continue reading

Our client Linkable Networks recently posted to its blog The Death of the Loyalty Card. Reasons given: loyalty overload; customers aren’t engaged; rewards are too complicated and disloyalty is rewarded. Continue reading

Scott Brinker, who blogs at Chief Marketing Technologist writes about the tech talent time bomb in marketing surfaced in recent research from Econsultancy, Adobe and McKinsey. We were particularly struck by his comment on understanding the consumer and technology. Continue reading