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The Australian bushfires have become a global conversation, with celebrities and brands voicing their concern everywhere from social media to the Golden Globes. The sheer scale of this disaster and the climate change-driven dryness of this season, along with parallels to other natural disasters such as California’s string of wildfires, make it likely that we will continue to talk about this issue well into the coming months.With such a huge impact, it’s natural that many businesses would see this as a time to share their expertise and knowledge – about what’s happening, what it means for business, and what to expect in the future. But there is a right way and a wrong way to offer expertise during a disaster. You should think carefully before wading into these conversations. If done incorrectly, you can come off as callous and insensitive, or even worse, manipulative.To participate in natural disaster conversations in a manner that is helpful and supportive, there are a few things to k…

In a recent survey of 200 marketers, 86% told Merkle they have budgets defined for personalized messaging initiatives and 82% had martech solutions in place to implement personalization. Further, 89% claimed to have the “organizational structure” needed to execute personalized multi-channel marketing plans.It would appear marketers are prepared to deliver on consumer expectations. There is also evidence that suggests businesses that excel at personalization have a competitive edge. For example, retailers using advanced personalization messaging tactics drove 17% higher revenue than retailers relying on “more basic” efforts, according to Merkle’s findings.And yet, Gartner predicts, in the next five years, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will drop their personalization efforts.The problem with personalizationGartner’s findings are based on marketers either seeing a lack of return on investment or experiencing too many obstacles when trying to manage the customer da…

AMP technology can help you boost your content strategy for 2020. Here’s how to get started today.It was back in 2016 when Google announced the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The rise of mobile consumption made it imperative to aim for a seamless user experience through smartphones and AMP seemed like a great solution to it.According to an early study, Google AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times fewer data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.The idea was to provide an open-source framework that can make the mobile experience better and faster. Several publishers started implementing AMP but not all of them were initially able to measure the success of their efforts.The state of AMP by the end of 2019There were several interesting announcements around AMP in 2019 to keep an eye on.On July 25, Google Images announced:“Google Images made a series of changes to help people explore, learn and do more through visual search. An important element of visual searc…

It’s a new decade — and time for a new approach to the marketing technology landscape.Contribute a new or updated martech vendor here.Report an acquired or defunct martech vendor here.Download the 2019 Excel spreadsheet here.Those are the TL;DR links above. Here’s the story of what we’re doing and where it’s headed…When I started that exercise back in 2011, it was a bit of work to research and catalog ~150 martech companies. Oh, man, I had no idea the beast that project was going to become. It didn’t just double, or triple, or even quadruple in size.It grew more than 4,500%, within only 8 years.I’ve spilled a ton of digital ink on the industry dynamics of that phenomenon over the years. (Most recently: Is martech headed for its dot-com moment in 2020?) But I’ve always believed that the empirical data itself speaks the loudest and clearest. We can argue why the landscape is the way it is, or endlessly pontificate on predictions of where it will go from here. (And I do.) But the data it…

This month, performance marketing agency Merkle launched New Stream Media, a service aimed at helping retailers develop and support media programs to monetize their customer data and sell advertising on and off of their own websites.The need. The offering stemmed from the “consistent conversations around data” that Merkle found it was having with its retail clients, which account for roughly a quarter of the agency’s client roster. “We saw a need to help retailers understand the value of their data and have consideration of the consumer along the way,” Emily Kramer, VP of New Stream Media. “We don’t want retailers to be providing data without context or consideration for their own business.”Co-op and cross-channel media programs. “From a retailer perspective, you have relationships with your merchants largely as a result of shopper dollars committed to the retailer,” Kramer said, but New Stream Media also considers brands’ promotional media efforts. For example, when a brand wants to …