Ashley Friedlein
I started out working in digital TV and multimedia production. I then worked at the Financial Times on arguably the first commercial application of Video on Demand (1996) before getting involved with FT.com as a Producer / Project Manager.
In 1997 I moved to digital communications agency Wheel as the third person in the then 'internet team'. I went through the dotcom boom, seeing Wheel grow from 30 people to 450 in just 3 years, and was involved in launching sites for M&S, Abbey National, IPC Magazines, Autoglass, Channel 5, AMP etc.
Following the dotcom crash (which saw Wheel shrink back to a more modest 90 or so staff) I left and spent a very pleasant sabbatical year writing my second book in the South of France. I then returned to the UK and from June 2002 I have been running Econsultancy full time.
Read more
As you are no
doubt aware, the newspaper industry, and the publishing industry more broadly,
are scratching their collective heads about how to transition their business models
to the web. How to avoid offline pounds evaporating into online pennies. How to
charge for content.
And, if you’ve
ever had anything to do with measurement and analytics, you’ll also know how
hard it is to measure marketing effectiveness across multiple channels in order
to optimise the mix and maximise effectiveness of spend.
But don’t fear. I
have two ideas….
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
15 July 2009 18:05pm
2 comments
I'd be interested to hear what free tools and services people use to gauge levels of traffic and the nature of the audience to any website?
Obviously this information is useful for competitive intelligence, media planning and buying, search optimisiation, online PR, affiliate marketing etc.
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
01 May 2009 11:00am
8 comments
On 14 December 2008
we relaunched the Econsultancy.com site. This involved a subtle name change (“E-consultancy”
became “Econsultancy”), a new logo, a completely new look site with a new
directory structure, a new URL, on servers in a different country. We had to
migrate 10,000s of pages, deleted a load of old ones, and created 10,000s of
new ones.
The background to all this is explained in my interview
about the new Econsultancy site – and question 9, about the SEO impact of
this large change, is the subject of this post. What has happened to our
previously excellent search rankings since the changeover?
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
04 February 2009 14:31pm
52 comments
Are publishers using outdated metrics? How should they be innovating and reinventing their business models?
Understandably there has been much debate of late around publishing business models. The rise of the internet, compounded by the global economic woes, are making it increasingly hard to see where the money is in publishing and media going forwards.
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
04 February 2009 10:00am
6 comments
I recently attended an event in Amsterdam which gathered together senior etailers from across Europe (kindly sponsored by Fredhopper – I owe them at least that plug…).
For me the most fascinating talk was by the VP Merchandising & Buying at a major European multi-channel retailer. It reminded me just how much we still have to learn about how online selling works, and how much we can apply from offline.
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
10 June 2008 12:23pm
2 comments
Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
The genius of this statement is that it sounds quite innocuous, indeed philanthropic, despite its obvious grand ambition, but actually allows pretty much anything within its scope.
It is interesting to see just how much of the online customer journey (from search, to research, to purchase) Google is taking hold of. Will we all end up as "wholesalers" to Google's customers?
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
15 March 2008 21:19pm
6 comments
We know that offline marketing and advertising drives demand that can be captured, and monetised, online. The correlation between TV advertising and paid search performance, for example, has been much discussed; and direct mail, or catalogues, drive online sales.
But do you know of any examples where the cost of offline marketing or advertising has been more than offset by the savings in the online marketing?
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
15 March 2008 20:07pm
1 comment
Have you heard of FatttPipe the ultra-reliable, ultra-fast new broadband?
Not FatPipe (that's already a networks company) and not FattPipe (because someone already owns Fattpipe.com) but with three 't's in the spelling - FatttPipe because it's at least 3X faster.
You haven't heard of FatttPipe? That's probably because it doesn't exist. But I need to repeat FatttPipe to get my keyword density up.
You see this is really a post about search marketing and brands...
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
16 January 2008 16:29pm
2 comments
I was one of the speakers and attendees at the inaugural eTail UK conference this year in the UK. I scribbled down lots of notes intending to do a series of blog posts based on what I heard and learned.
That was over 2 months ago now… But I thought I’d at least capture a few snippets of interest that I still remember.
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
17 August 2007 10:45am
2 comments
Quite rightly there is increasing amounts of talk about 'social media' online. The jury is still out on the real value of some areas of social media and networks, but one area where the value is currently most apparent is using network analysis to help optimise your natural search engine rankings (SEO), largely by identifying suitable sites to get inbound links from.
But what with the internet being so big, and growing so fast, it has been hard to make any practical sense of all the network data available. Recently I came across a tool which showed me the potential power of visualising these relationships...
Read more...
by Ashley Friedlein
06 August 2007 12:09pm
3 comments
