A few years ago, if you wanted the best chicken soup recipe, you typed it into Google. You’d hit enter and brace yourself. First, you’d scroll past ads. Then you’d land on a blog post about someone’s grandmother. You’d dodge pop-ups, wait for autoplay videos to stop, skim through 1,500 words of meandering storytelling, and eventually, if you were lucky, find the actual recipe. That was the era of browsing. We didn’t like it, but we played along. Publishers optimized…
I didn’t time-travel this morning. But my brain did. One second I’m scrolling news, inboxes, calendars, social media. The next, I’m a kid again, sitting on the carpet, cereal in hand, watching Saturday morning cartoons like nothing else in the world mattered. I can’t wait to meet my friends in the park and play some basketball and wiffle ball.. That wasn’t just nostalgia. That was my nervous system crying out, “Please, make things simple again.” We’re overwhelmed because we’re off-script.…
NRF 2017 kicked off with a keynote titled “Building Tomorrow’s Workforce: How Retailers Are Attracting and Retaining Talent.” The CEOs of Macy’s, HSNi, Walmart, and Ashley Stewart talked about the value of great people in retail. No one would argue that retail is a people business. I have always found one the best parts of the NRF shows are the people I have met. However, I think we need to start framing this discussion differently, and if the trade-show floor…
Birth of the Shopping Cart The first rolling shopping cart was created by a Piggly Wiggly owner in Oklahoma City. Once a regular basket got too heavy, customers headed straight for the check-out line. This robbed stores of incremental sales. So in 1936, that store owner introduced a rolling cart to make shopping easier. In CRO terms, he reduced the friction of shopping to increase average order size. The design went mainstream in the 50s. It has remained a retail “best practice”…
It was a great honor to present at the inaugural ClickZ Live in New York this week. I was asked to share some of what I presented. For years we have paid careful attention to Amazon, and I shared a few secrets we have discovered about what makes them so incredibly successful. Say what you will about them, but they are a formidable competitor to every business out there. However, what we most admire about Jeff Bezos’ approach to business…
It sounds like IT, not marketing! Data breach, identity protection, customer security – these are terms that never concerned marketers much. The breaches that retailers Target, Neiman Marcus, Zappos, and other brands like Evernote, Living Social, LinkedIn, and Adobe suffered have impacted the way consumers are interacting with brands. Security is now also a chief marketing officer’s (CMO) challenge – it is no longer only a worry for the chief information officer (CIO) or chief technology officer (CTO). The challenge…
In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it’s months away, not years. Today is the start of IBM’s SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the event. Last night, I spent some time chatting with Sandra Zoratti, author of Precision Marketing, Stratigent‘s Bill Bruno and Triberr‘s Dino Dogan. I shared with…
When I studied the data and made an intuitive prediction that 80 percent of PPC professionals would be replaced by an algorithm in the next three years, my brother Jeffrey and I expected some resistance. We were extremely surprised at the misunderstandings that arose. We wholeheartedly agree that good marketers add value to the online advertising equation. As fellow ClickZ columnist Andrew Goodman responded: It’s certainly true that many “PPC pros” who work like (much inferior to the real thing) robots…