Melissa Parrish says, “The second the story broke about Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, everybody you can think of who has any kind of an opinion about either company, social media, business productivity, enterprise software, the stock market, data and mergers & acquisitions in general has weighed in on the deal’s implications for their areas of expertise. Ordinarily this would inspire some serious eye-rolling in me, but in this case it’s warranted because Microsoft has its hands in so many businesses and enterprise applications, and LinkedIn has so much consumer... [...]

Steven Wright says, “In Isaiah Berlin’s most popular essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” the famous Latvian-British social and political theorist quoted a fragment of ancient Greek: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Since its publication in 1953, this concept has become an intellectual parlor game (something Berlin said himself) that those with a binary view of the universe have used to divide writers, politicians (Kennedy: fox; Nixon: hedgehog), and executives into two neat categories. What’s forgotten is that Berlin used this ancient aphorism... [...]

Sarah Sikowitz says, “In collaboration with Susan Bidel, Richard Joyce and Jim Nail. Yesterday, the ANA released the findings from an eight month research study into the issue of transparency within the media agency industry. The findings are damning, but not surprising for those who have been following this issue. The phrase in the report that caught my eye was this: “evidence of a fundamental disconnect in the advertising industry regarding the basic nature of the advertiser-agency relationship.” In other words, it’s the advertising-agency relationship that stinks. Look past the... [...]

Peter O’Neill says, “Lead-to-revenue management automation player Marketo has certainly been in the news recently. First, in May, it held its annual Marketing Nation Summit in Las Vegas and announced plans to provide a marketing automation system, powered by a new architecture, which will enable marketers to engineer a great customer experience across the entire customer life cycle. Clearly, this was a financially ambitious plan, reviving age-old speculation about a potential acquisition of the vendor. Candidate Marketo suitors included SAP, which has a glaring marketing automation... [...]

Rowan Curran says, “Business decision-makers take note: location-based context is critical for the future of application experiences and customer engagement. Understanding the location of customers and assets lets companies get closer to their customers and assets to drive better decisions (just to name a few: choosing the a site for a brick-and-mortar location, picking what offer to send to a customer, guiding passengers through airports, deciding where to focus your next marketing campaign, or pushing a greeting and sign-in to a patient as soon as she enters a hospital). The flood of spatial... [...]

Melissa Parrish says, “As the IT agenda gives way to the Business Technology agenda, marketers and technologists are working together more closely and more often than ever before, but many of them don’t feel like those collaborations are going smoothly yet. In fact, lack of communication is the No. 1 reason cited for a very poor relationship between developers and other parts of the company, according to our data. One of the reasons for this miscommunication is that marketers and technologists often use very common words differently. We experienced this ourselves a few months ago at a... [...]

Jessica Liu says, “Bloomberg recently reported that Snapchat surpassed Twitter in daily active users. Kudos to Snapchat, which is only half as old as Twitter, but why do we keep comparing Snapchat to Twitter? Or to Instagram? The industry is desperate to neatly categorize Snapchat under social media, but I would argue that Snapchat is equal parts messaging app and social network, putting it in a class of its own. Let’s break it down: – Messaging apps are built on the premise of private conversation: 1 to 1 (yes, group chat exists, but it’s contained). You send specific messages... [...]

John M. Wargo says, “I attended a software-related conference recently; I’m not going to say which one as this is about something I observed at the conference, not about the conference itself. Being a software conference, the conference organizers did a lot of the expected digital stuff: registration, reminder emails and conference check-in. Up to the end of the registration process, everything I did with respect to the conference was handled electronically. The first time I went analog was after I picked up my geek badge (conference credentials) from the printer and went over to a human... [...]

JP Gownder says, “Moonlighting as a contributor to our CMO role’s research, I’ve just published a major new report about how virtual reality will affect marketers, collaborating with Forrester’s lead on digital disruption, James McQuivey, PhD. CMOs and other marketers have four choices when it comes to virtual reality (VR). Most of you should wait and see, because there’s no business imperative to invest scarce time and resources in VR this year. But there are three other choices available to digital predators – that is, CMOs at companies that want to shape trends, not follow... [...]

Rusty Warner says, “I am pleased to announce TWO new Forrester Wave™ reports for B2C marketers. Today we published the Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q2 2016 and the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q2 2016. The former will help you compare the 15 leading campaign management vendors, while the latter will help you evaluate 9 vendors that have assembled broader enterprise marketing technology portfolios. Cross-Channel Campaign Management (CCCM) Three of the four leading vendors – Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle – base their CCCM solutions... [...]