Friday Five — Big Data Edition
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Big Data Rewrites the CMO’s Role | Marketing Week
With the mass of customer insight available to brands adding another weapon to a chief marketer’s arsenal, Marketing Week asks whether their job titles should reflect this. If you believe the surveys, the pressure to improve the return on the money invested in campaigns has combined with an explosion of data to squeeze creativity from the role of chief marketing officer and turn it into “chief data and marketing officer.”
Source: Forbes.com
For Social Companies, a Battle to Own Photography | The New York Times
Many brands, marketers and industry pundits contend that the great battle in social media is over mobile. The chant from tech giants, New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton writes, is “mobile, mobile, mobile.” But there’s a greater evolutionary force at play: photos. From Facebook’s revamped Newsfeed that places an emphasis on photos to Twitter now commandeering users’ photo sharing via its own proprietary photo app, the battle isn’t just for the mobile Internet. The real battle is for photos on the entire Internet.
Mobile Payments: Not Yet Ready for Primetime | MediaWhiz Blog
Despite their hype, mobile payments aren’t yet ready for mainstream consumer adoption says MediaWhiz’s Daryl Colwell. Brands and marketers love to tout mobile payments as “the next big thing. But the reality is that the “digital wallet” has yet to gain mainstream adoption for a simple reason: it’s often clunky to use. The hype of a consumer being able to effortlessly flash their smartphone in front of a checkout scanner is met by the reality of usability issues that are inherent in any new technology. To fully realize the massive potential of mobile payments, marketers must cut through the hype and fix two glaring problems: ease of use and the value proposition to consumers.
Why Ford’s CMO Has Content on His Mind | Digiday
Ford CMO Jim Farley says that over the last three years, it has learned that the role of marketer has changed, according to Digiday. Long about TV spots and informational content that tried to sell a consumer on some value, a marketer’s role is now about sparking conversations in social media that help build a brand’s affinity and value over the long term.
Twitter Tweaks Profile Page Layout to Permit More Customization | Advertising Age
Love it, hate it or just don’t care, the changes Twitter made this week to its profile pages undoubtedly presents new branding opportunities to marketers. Most prominent among those changes is the ability to let users — including brands — upload large “header” images and make their photos more prominent. As Altimeter Group Analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted, the new Twitter header means free “branding, advertising and marketing” opportunities that didn’t exist before. But how long until Twitter takes a revenue-generation step like Facebook and starts companies for marketing efforts that used to be free?
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