Alison Lohse says, “The famous quote frequently attributed to Peter Drucker goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Marketers agree. They want to make data-driven decisions based on cohesive marketing measurement. Accurate measurement needs good data — or else it’s garbage in, garbage out. While the importance of data is undisputed, data governance is often last on the priorities list, giving way to more exciting martech tools. Yet, lack of data governance translates to poor decisions and ironically, challenges to onboarding any new tool or technology in the martech... [...]

Alex Bornyakov says, “The latest ad fraud scandal to hit the digital advertising world has been exposed, and its name is Methbot. A Russia-based botnet with data centers in the Netherlands and the United States, this digital-age criminal network deploys sophisticated tricks to defraud advertisers, brands and media companies. Now that security firm White Ops has penetrated the operation and made its methods public, measures can be taken to prevent Methbot quietly siphoning off advertising dollars. But how did the fraudulent operation become so profitable, and what does its discovery mean for... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Today at the National Retail Federation (NRF) show in New York City, Adobe announced several new initiatives to improve the digitization of brick-and-mortar retailing. The tech company says that $7.50 of every $10 spent through the top 500 U.S. retailers is spent through its Marketing Cloud, largely though the retailers’ online selves. That’s the hottest arena for online sales, according to Marketing Cloud’s Director of Industry Strategy Michael Klein. He told me that e-commerce for brick-and-mortar retailers “is growing faster than pureplay e-commerce.” A key... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Launched in the fall of 2015, Google’s AMP initiative has raised the performance standard for mobile content by accomplishing what the initials promise: accelerated mobile pages. But publishers’ content in AMP format can mostly be called only from a few places, such as Google’s search engine, Twitter, Bing News and Pinterest. These sources summon the AMP content from Google’s cache, via a sufficiently speedy connection. This week, Google and San Francisco-based performance and security firm Cloudflare made announcements to help broaden AMP’s availability. Google... [...]

Russell Glass says, “I’ve been a marketer and entrepreneur for more than 20 years, and each year seems to bring a new whirlwind of change. In 2016, social media grew even more powerful, dictating the news and shaping our public discourse. Chatbots and artificial intelligence started to gain traction and are opening entirely new avenues for brands to reach customers. And the shift to mobile continued to gain steam, with everything from ordering dinner to booking a vacation now done on smartphones and tablets. Marketers are racing to keep up, and 2017 is about to bring more changes. Here... [...]

Joshua Reynolds says, “January 2017 is a pivotal moment in time for the marketing discipline. According to a recent Gartner study, 2017 marks the third consecutive year of increased budgets for CMOs for the majority of those surveyed, with digital advertising, marketing technology and analytics among the areas most likely to see an increase in spending. In fact, Gartner has long predicted that by the end of this year, CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs. This is a huge tipping point. It’s also a huge double-edged sword, as CIOs can well attest, because with increased budgets come... [...]

Mike Sands says, “2016 was a whirlwind year for marketers. The battle for consumer share-of-wallet intensified as Amazon continued to capture spend, reporting a record-setting Prime Day and its most successful holiday season to date. Innovations like artificial intelligence and virtual reality made their way from science fiction into the real world, opening new doors for customer engagement. And the technology that advertisers and marketers use to do their jobs evolved, with players like Verizon entering the space as consolidation continued. As I reflect on last year’s trends, I see the... [...]

Phil Schraeder says, ““The right consumer at the right time at the right place.” That familiar mantra is exactly what marketers should be aiming for… right? Yes, of course, in a broad sense. But in an ever-evolving advertising landscape increasingly dominated by programmatic, the “three rights” are overly simplistic. Arguably dangerously simplistic, particularly in a mobile-first advertising environment. Let’s break it down: Who’s the right consumer? Consider how marketers are reaching — or not reaching — “the right consumer” circa 2016. What was, in the cookie-centric... [...]

Justin Dunham says, “Come back with me to the year 2000, when the Y2K bug was a recent memory, and the phrase “rockstar developer” was still being used without irony. Joel Spolsky, a software engineer who would go on to found Trello and Stack Overflow, published a 12-step test to help determine the quality of a software engineering team. Though The Joel Test is almost 20 years old, it’s still known among software developers due to its continued relevance and usefulness. It’s a short checklist, with a series of simple “yes” or “no” questions, that can give us a sense of whether... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Enterprise local marketing platform SweetIQ says it’s taking a smarter approach to local listings distribution. The company is “emphasizing smart, perfect data on channels that matter, over the traditional bigger is better approach to listings.” The company’s recent “Next Gen Listings Network” release takes aim at category leader Yext but equally other players in the enterprise local SEO segment. SweetIQ CEO Mohannad El-Barachi says that most companies in the local listings business indiscriminately distribute content to the same set of directories, which... [...]