Doug Kessler

About Doug Kessler

One-vendor supershows: content marketing value or ego candy?

When the internet was new, a lot of people predicted it would kill the trade show. Why spend all that time traveling and walking the aisles when you could stay at home Googling?

Not only did that not happen, live events are bigger than ever before – especially in B2B, where they’re eating up budgets and absorbing entire marketing teams for months on end.

Events like the Festival of Marketing just go from strength to strength, proving that people still want to hang out with and learn from other people.

But today, a different kind of B2B event has emerged and is dominating the genre: the single-vendor supershow.

The worst content marketer in the world?

Everyone thinks content marketing is the only way to win a market.

Here’s a little story that might disprove that.

I hate naming names, but there’s a company out there which just doesn’t get content marketing.

It’s a big tech company with excellent products. But it hasn’t yet figured out that people really don’t care about products.

Content marketers: let’s bring back those nasty barriers

Everyone celebrates the magic of the internet because it removed the obstacles between any of us and all of us. 

For the first time, someone with zero resources could reach an audience of billions and change the world. 

But every sliver lining has its cloud and content marketers are experiencing the unintended consequences of a barrier-less world…

A plea to all data geeks: speak human

An innumerate marketer begs the new species of click-sniffer to make a bit of an effort and translate your undisputed brilliance into some language other than Klingon or Ithkuil.

If you believe the bloggers (and who doesn’t?), marketing departments all over the world are clearing out the desks of their PR, advertising and ‘corporate communications’ dinosaurs to make room for the new breed of data geek.

On the whole, that’s good, but data is only useful if the lessons it provides can be communicated in terms that people can understand.