Jon Baron

About Jon Baron

WhatsApp: a calculated target for Facebook

Towards the end of last month, Facebook boldly made mobile messaging service WhatsApp an offer they couldn’t refuse, and a few hours later that $19bn dollar offer was announced to the world.

Technologists, social media experts and analysts scrambled to make their thoughts and predictions heard.

Marketers across the world sat up and paid attention to what could be termed as the biggest big data acquisition we’ve witnessed in the era of the internet.

This is particularly so because WhatsApp’s data is now another spring of information, along with Instagram and Paper, that Facebook can analyse and use to its marketing advantage. 

The BRC and IPA Bellwether reports point towards digital effectiveness

On January 10, the British Retail Consortium released official figures reporting a 19.2% year on year growth in online purchases between December 2012 and 2013.  

Online trading in general represented 18.6% of total non-food sales for the final month of 2013, a substantial increase from 16.5% a year earlier.

During busy shopping periods, British consumers have embraced the opportunity to purchase online, having enjoyed Black Friday sales just as much as their US counterparts and effectively created a buzz around Cyber Monday- where unprecedented consumer and sales figures made it the busiest online shopping day of the season.

Figures from eBay showed that mobile visits increased nearly 116% on Cyber Monday, with mobile orders increasing by almost 98% over the Thanksgiving weekend.

From analysing our own data management platform, we have found that since September 2013, 30% of online traffic now originates from mobiles.

Marketing agility: do you measure up?

Philip Gladman, Diageo’s white spirits director for Western Europe, once commented that because of digital marketing and consumer empowerment, marketers had to become multi-faceted like ‘Swiss army knives’.

What Gladman was describing is what I like to call marketing agility. It’s a topic that has garnered interest with most if not all marketers confronted with the fast-changing digital media landscape (Chris Lake recently covered the topic).

IMW 2013 Econsultancy Hangout: Measurement, analytics, and attribution: part two

On Tuesday, I posted a first half summary of the Econsultancy Hangout I participated in with Jim Sterne and Tom Cunniff (moderated by Econsultancy’s Stefan Tornquist) on Measurement, Analytics, and Attribution.

Rather than summarize the entire second half of the Hangout, I wanted to focus part two on a great discussion we had on changing incentive structures to create an organizational culture of integrated digital marketing and attribution.

IMW 2013 Econsultancy Hangout: Measurement, analytics, and attribution: part one

Last Wednesday, Stefan Tornquist (VP Research, US at Econsultancy) moderated a lively discussion on Measurement, Analytics, and Attribution that quickly maxed out the attendance capacity of the Hangout. 

I was joined by digital analytics gurus Jim Sterne (founder of eMetrics Summit & Digital Analytics Association) and Tom Cunniff (founder of Cunniff Consulting) to discuss what marketers need to do beyond gathering information, and how to apply measurement and analytics to strategy across the business.

A lot of important points on the current state of attribution and what’s in store for the future were discussed during the first half of the hangout, which are summarized here…

Big Data: key takeaways from Digital Cream London 2013

Whilst the discussion was ripe with technical tongue twisters, the overall message was clear. Big Data, and its implications on Big Marketing, remains a mystery for many.

There is an endless stream of Big Data platform providers clamouring to prove that only they provide the most verifiable and cleanest solutions.

What is vital here is to not become fixated by promises but instead challenge the vendors’ capabilities to provide specific, applicable data which allows you to achieve the true purpose of engaging with data.

This purpose is to make more informed, Big Marketing decisions.

Five ways to become a big marketer and drive big results

In a world of buzzwords, perhaps the most over-used and under-explained term that marketers will be coming up against this year is “Big Data”.

Big data, as we’ve learned from actually working with the stuff is realistically only the first part of the jigsaw when it comes to upping your game and marketing in a more agile manner that’s responsive to the market you’re serving.

We believe that it takes Big Marketers to unlock big data. People who are willing and able to look beyond the now bygone era of a “campaign” that has a start and end point and realise that digital marketing has become about responding to the fast pace of the internet itself, with equally fast and relevant decision-making.

In this piece, we discuss the kind of attributes a marketer needs to take themselves to the next level and employ a big marketing strategy that will not only set them apart from their peers, but help them to build knowledgeof how to take the rough diamond that is rawdata, and transform it to work best for your brand.