Digital Shift, a quarterly service from Econsultancy, is intended as a guide to support strategic thinking.

Focused tightly on digital technologies, marketing and ecommerce, it’s about delivering actionable insight on trends that will be significant in the short to mid-term, and which can be used to generate new ideas, improve business performance and stay ahead of the competition.

The latest report in this series, also available as a presentation and webinar recording (see below), looks at the following:

  • The Future of Search: To mark their 20th anniversary, Google posted some thoughts on the future of search, indicating where their likely development focus will be. We take a look at their three fundamental shifts and what this could mean for SEO practice and product discovery.
  • The Future of Marketing Ops: Shift regular and marketing technologist Scott Brinker has defined the key dynamics that will be shaping the future growth of marketing operations. We consider each of these dynamics, and how marketers can achieve the right balance to optimise capability.
  • Hyping the Hype Cycle: We explore the key underlying trends in Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle, and we also look at the challenge of describing the far-off future.
  • Levels of Automation: We take a closer look at how the process of automation shapes the end result of technology adoption and the different levels of automation that we are likely to move through.
  • Data, Retail and Social Innovation: With a seemingly never-ending stream of innovations emerging in the social and commerce spaces, we capture some of the most interesting developments including new ways to create seamless purchase journeys driven by social apps and the biggest social app that you have probably never heard of.
  • The Rise of DNVBs: With the FMCG/CPG sector being disrupted at pace we take a look at the rise of so-called ‘digitally-native-vertical-brands’, what we can learn from them, and how incumbent businesses are responding.
  • Using AI creatively: A brilliant campaign that uses AI to unsilence a well-known voice