Tag Archives: content

Google’s moral advertising flaw

The problem with censorship is XXXXXXXX via Flickr

The news about Google will stop allowing cryptocurrency companies to buy advertising demonstrates how we still haven’t cracked content censorship on the Internet.

Has Google become a content provider that can ban certain types of advertising? Until now, Google was purely a search engine selling pixels on user’s search results. They weren’t responsible for any of the signposted or copyrighted content.

(The same applies to Facebook and pretty much any other advertising funded content platform).

Note that my issue isn’t with the cryptocurrency companies. My issue is that Google and Facebook have shattered the professional journalism industry, only to then lay down their own moral advertising code of conduct when they are among the last remaining mass publishers.

Continue reading Google’s moral advertising flaw

The future of digital advertising

Shipping and sea routes - see the big data example belowI was kindly invited to an event today called “The Ad Apocalypse And The Rise Of Interactive Brand Experiences”, hosted by wayin. Wayin runs a content management system for brands to run interactive campaigns in their digital advertising.

Although the event proved how wayin was the answer to several of life’s challenges, there were a few interesting thought leadership pieces at the event which I’ve tried to capture below.

My apologies for brevity in the notes format and any spelling mistakes.

Wayin introduction, Richard Jones (Wayin CEO)

Richard started by describing how Mondelez has pulled £100M from their advertising recently due to the lack of impact that their digital advertising spending is having. They’ve never pulled ad spend before the holiday season. Continue reading The future of digital advertising

The Guardian newspaper Supporter Membership model

The Guardian supporter membership model
The Guardian supporter membership model

This is a neat idea from the Guardian with some clever language – instead of pushing more traditional subscription models, they are offering “Guardian supporter membership” for £5/ month.

Whilst competitors are pushing many more adverts over their well designed pages, or moving to a pure subscription model, the Guardian have sharpened their copywriting pencils (err, keyboards?) and produced a more enticing product offering – as shown here https://membership.theguardian.com/about/supporter?INTCMP=MEMBERSHIP_BANNER_TEST_A

Continue reading The Guardian newspaper Supporter Membership model

Happy 5th Birthday!

A fifth birthday!
A fifth birthday!

It’s true… as you get older, time seems to accelerate. It feels like only a few weeks ago I was writing last year’s Happy Birthday post.

I started this blog because I found myself telling several people the same piece of news and opinion. I took their advice and created this blog.

Last year I said that there had been “a step change in traffic, with pretty much double the level of traffic as two years’ ago”. This year, traffic almost doubled again, with almost 20,000 sessions on the site over the last year.

Continue reading Happy 5th Birthday!

Book Review: Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint by Christopher Witt

Wean yourself off the PowerPoint addiction with Witt
Wean yourself off the PowerPoint addiction with Witt

Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint is a great book which will help wean you off PowerPoint and help you to present more effectively.

About a year ago I stopped using PowerPoint during my presentations of the latest Digital Services offering from Endava. I had presented it dozens of times before, and knew the details of the offering. Once I stopped taking my laptop to presentations, colleagues in the room began commenting about the increased passion and asked me to present more, often to a more senior audience. Continue reading Book Review: Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint by Christopher Witt

11 lessons about innovation from the New York Times

The BBC Newsroom. Currently peaceful. And sometimes less peaceful.

Whilst doing some research at work on innovation within the Publishing industry, a colleague of mine found a leaked report from the New York Times from March this year (the full article is at the end of this page).

At 94 pages, it’s a must-read for anyone within Publishing. I took 11 key points from the document:

  1. (page 16) Hallmarks of disruptors… number 4: “Initially inferior to existing products.” This is so true. Almost every time we work on a new innovative project, there will always be someone criticising that product A does things better, or product B is more comprehensive. The answer is twofold – firstly, you can have something more superior, but it will take a lot longer and cost a lost more money; and secondly, it’s part and parcel of developing something new. Remember Twitter’s outages? Remember how basic Facebook looked?
  2. Only a third of NYT readers visit the homepage. Just think of the effort in designing the homepage! Google is great at providing users links directly into articles, and users share articles not homepages. This is the proof. Continue reading 11 lessons about innovation from the New York Times

The cross selling and upselling business model

This is the ninth part of the series on how companies can make money from high traffic websites. In this post we’ll discuss cross-selling and upselling. As we’ll demonstrate, cross selling doesn’t need high traffic to sell more products.

At Endava we work with companies who are capturing data about their visitors and attempting to personalise the experience, usually with a goal of providing superior service, or selling more goods.

It’s all about the customer (and CRM is key)

At the heart of this solution is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. CRM has become synonymous with large, expensive and difficult IT programmes.

Continue reading The cross selling and upselling business model

The licensing business model

This is the eighth part of the monetisation series. We started discussing advertising and marketing monetisation techniques, and now we’ve moved on to other areas. This post deals with licensing.

Licensing is a specialist area and requires a particularly strong brand. In the past I’ve used football teams as good case studies of licensing, but nowadays I use Angry Birds. Continue reading The licensing business model