Congrats to Roger Federer on winning the Wimbledon men’s singles crown on Sunday. That this is his 15th Grand Slam title is a remarkable achievement. I swear the man is a tennis machine. And he’s only 27! Quite astounding.
Of course conspicuously absent from Federer’s epic final against the über-cool Andy Roddick was that other Andy – as in Murray. Just prior to Andy M’s semi-final loss on Friday, the amusingly banal Andy Murray-o-Meter (tracking the burning issue ‘Is Andy Murray a Brit or a Scot?’), had peaked at a ‘yes’ vote of 86%. I checked this morning and see it’s down to 77%. My bet’s on a further slide south over coming days. We Brits are an unforgiving lot, no?
Yet again, after all the acres of press coverage and gargantuan hype, Mr Murray failed to deliver a Grand Slam victory for Team GB. Not his fault – the guy did his best but was beaten on the day by a better player (Roddick). So is Andy Murray the nation’s next planet-conquering sporting brand in the making? I think not. As the always insightful Mark Ritson observed in Marketing recently, ‘the harsh reality is that Murray is a fine tennis player, but a hopeless prospect as the next Beckham, no matter how advanced the brand strategy applied to his future career.’
So best of British – and Scottish! – to you, Andy Murray. But to paraphrase Monty Python in The Life of Brian, I suggest we all remember that you’re not a sports brand messiah, you’re just a very moody and petulant boy who does a fine job swinging a tennis racquet.
Oh, and the day after Michael Jackson’s three-ring circus send off (sorry, Memorial Service), in Los Angeles, this exclusive report just in: He’s still dead, folks. I just love our ‘sleb-obsessed culture, don’t you?
10.7.09
6.7.09
Deliver us from SPAM evil
Dan Leahul’s article discussing Forrester Research’s Annual E-mail Marketing Forecast caught my eye the other day. The Forecast is predicting email spend to "balloon" to $2bn (£1.2bn) by 2014, a nearly 11% compound annual growth rate, and that the average UK in-box will be inundated by over 9,000 e-mails annually over the same period. The latter stat is actually rather conservative, I believe, given that our American cousins are already being inundated with over 12,000 e-missives per anum, according to US DMA figures.
I like digital and social media, but I’m also highly suspicious of them – at least in their current guise. We’ve seen various e-pundits bang on and on about the ‘magic bullet’ potential of the likes of Twitter and e-mail in recent months, only to see some marketing professionals SPAM-ing the crap out of the entire populus and/or boring followers senseless with banal tweets.
I’m big on data hygene and security, but with the rise in the use of the digital channel, surely validity and better channel integration is where the marketing rubber is really going to hit the response road over the months ahead. Add online lead generation (OLG) into the mix and the customer data- and transactional insight that’s going to be required of savvy marketers is going to be as enormous as it will need to be sophisticated. ‘One-offer-for-all’-type marketeers need to exit onto new career paths now, I’m afraid.
I’ve been discussing these issues with my colleague Dawn Orr a lot of late. As marketers transition from volume- to value-based campaign models, we believe the new ‘holy trinity’ of customer data is quality, price and validity. Specific to online, whether your data capture is via bespoke landing pages or the likes of online games, surveys, quizzes or social networking sites, the ‘stickier’ and more response-geared these are, the more detailed (and valuable), the leads – and sales - generated.
We’re certainly seeing some exciting new DM trends unfold. Let’s just hope we’re collectively smart enough to fully exploit their potential and not just perpetrate the ‘junk mail’ stigma of yore into online.
I like digital and social media, but I’m also highly suspicious of them – at least in their current guise. We’ve seen various e-pundits bang on and on about the ‘magic bullet’ potential of the likes of Twitter and e-mail in recent months, only to see some marketing professionals SPAM-ing the crap out of the entire populus and/or boring followers senseless with banal tweets.
I’m big on data hygene and security, but with the rise in the use of the digital channel, surely validity and better channel integration is where the marketing rubber is really going to hit the response road over the months ahead. Add online lead generation (OLG) into the mix and the customer data- and transactional insight that’s going to be required of savvy marketers is going to be as enormous as it will need to be sophisticated. ‘One-offer-for-all’-type marketeers need to exit onto new career paths now, I’m afraid.
I’ve been discussing these issues with my colleague Dawn Orr a lot of late. As marketers transition from volume- to value-based campaign models, we believe the new ‘holy trinity’ of customer data is quality, price and validity. Specific to online, whether your data capture is via bespoke landing pages or the likes of online games, surveys, quizzes or social networking sites, the ‘stickier’ and more response-geared these are, the more detailed (and valuable), the leads – and sales - generated.
We’re certainly seeing some exciting new DM trends unfold. Let’s just hope we’re collectively smart enough to fully exploit their potential and not just perpetrate the ‘junk mail’ stigma of yore into online.
24.6.09
Bravo BS 10012!
Almost one in five UK businesses have breached the Data Protection Act at least once – so found a BSI survey of 500 SME’s recently. That’s worrying news indeed, given that there’s around 5 million small-to-medium sized businesses in GB dealing in all manner of sensitive personal information, ranging from credit card numbers and addresses to ethnic origin and criminal records, on a daily basis.
So great to see BSI Group launching the first British Standard designed specifically to promote data management best practice – BS 10012. The Data Protection Act (DPA) is certainly very detailed and a rather intimidating document to the uninitiated, but given BSI’s finding that 65 per cent of SME’s provide nothing in the way of data protection training for their staff, this is a data management ‘best practice’ Everest we’d surely all do well to climb and conquer as quickly and effectively as possible.
If you’re interested (and I hope those of you who don’t have adequate data handling policies/strategies in place will be!), BSI is running a conference entitled Information Governance & Data Protection Standards, Guidance and Best Practice from June 30 – July 1. For details, visit www.bsigroup.com/conferences.
So great to see BSI Group launching the first British Standard designed specifically to promote data management best practice – BS 10012. The Data Protection Act (DPA) is certainly very detailed and a rather intimidating document to the uninitiated, but given BSI’s finding that 65 per cent of SME’s provide nothing in the way of data protection training for their staff, this is a data management ‘best practice’ Everest we’d surely all do well to climb and conquer as quickly and effectively as possible.
If you’re interested (and I hope those of you who don’t have adequate data handling policies/strategies in place will be!), BSI is running a conference entitled Information Governance & Data Protection Standards, Guidance and Best Practice from June 30 – July 1. For details, visit www.bsigroup.com/conferences.
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