Digital Transformation

Gov.uk: the government’s website is “better than yours”

Russell Davies is the director of strategy at the Government Digital Service (GDS). He is a man from the government. He has some advice about the future of your organisation and its website.

Why should you take his advice? Because the website his team created for the government, Gov.uk, is “better than yours”

Yes that includes ours.

Russell Davies gave the final keynote talk at our Festival of Marketing last week and as difficult it is to remain journalistically detached from these sorts of things, I found his speech genuinely inspiring.

I’ll do my best to convey some of the insight from Davies’s talk here…

How a new focus on digital and customer experience is boosting Ryanair’s profits

For many years Ryanair revelled in its reputation for being a brash, almost antagonistic airline.

However it is currently undergoing a major rebranding exercise as it seeks to refocus on the customer experience and adopt a friendlier image.

At the Festival of Marketing this morning Ryanair CMO Kenny Jacobs gave an outline of what the process had so far entailed and how it had already impacted the business.

Rebranding campaigns of this scale often take place when a business is on its last legs, so Ryanair is somewhat unique in that it is pivoting from a position of power.

As Europe’s largest airline, Ryanair flies more than 1,600 routes to 30 countries. 

Four key trends from our Digital Transformation in the Media Sector report

Digital technologies have caused a revolution in the way that businesses operate, and no industry has seen a bigger impact than media and entertainment.

From the outside it’s easy to see how the internet and streaming has caused a massive shift in the way that media companies sell their products, but a new report from Econsultancy and Adobe investigates the internal marketing and strategic challenges created by digital technology.

The vast majority (97%) of media companies surveyed acknowledge that digital has disrupted their sector, with around two in five (44%) seeing themselves as very much part of this disruption and leading the way. 

This compares to an average of less than 20% across all sectors, as revealed by separate Econsultancy research.

The report, entitled Impact of Digital Transformation in the Media and Entertainment Sector, is based on a global survey of nearly 200 media and entertainment executives based mainly in North America and EMEA.

Here’s a summary of four key trends identified in the report:

Marketers, politicians and pop stars: eight compelling reasons to attend the Festival of Marketing

The Festival of Marketing is approaching, there’s not long left to buy tickets, just enough time to check out this awesome list detailing why we need you to be there.

Where else can you listen to Tulisa, Facebook and The Government Digital Service? Where else can you meet Grandmaster Flash and Alastair Campbell? Where else can you improve your digital strategy and drink champagne?

Check out the Festival website and read on for more.

ms-tablet

How is Marks and Spencer using in-store tablets for shopping?

Previously on the Econsultancy blog we’ve reviewed the Marks & Spencer multichannel experience after its site redesign.

And while the market is still out on the new website, we think moving towards an improved digital offering is of critical importance to the company’s longer term success.

Keeping my eye on the retail landscape, one area that has been spoken about is the use of interactive tablets and displays in-store,  and a recent DigitasLBi survey revealed that 43% of internet-shopping consumers had used multimedia shopping aids of this kind

On my wanderings about Oxford Street, I noticed that M&S had quite a few of these dotted around. I thought I would test it out and see what it was like.

2017 Measurement and Analytics Report

Nine takeaways from Digital Cream Sydney

My circadian rhythms are still lost somewhere off the coast of California, but the rest of me is back in New York after a fantastic week in Australia, where I attended Digital Cream Sydney and visited with marketers around the city.

It was a pleasure and inspiration to meet so many smart, creative people and to hear what they’re excited about (and frustrated by) in digital marketing.

Digital transformation: a war of attrition at Shell

Digital transformation is a bit of a headache to read or write about.

That’s because discussion of organisational change often strays into the abstract, which, as anyone who has ever looked at twenty Kandinskys in a row can attest, is pretty boring.

That’s why I find Shell really interesting. At a recent event at the IAB, Shell’s global media manager spoke about the transformation of the company, but he did so in refreshingly simple terms.

Americo Sanchez Silva outlined some things Shell has done in digital recently that it hasn’t done before. This encouraged me to think of digital transformation as a war of attrition.

You need to know where your company can improve and then go ahead and do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I still understand that discussions about management, processes, skills, the board, culture etc. are all important, especially for such a large multinational company under one brand as Shell. However, sometimes it’s good to look at the wood, as well as the trees.

How time tracking can improve productivity and morale

Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.

But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?

If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks? 

This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.

And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.

digital-divide

How to cut across the CMO-CIO divide in four steps

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) traditionally work in silos, but digital disruption is giving rise to an increased need for alignment and collaboration to gain a competitive advantage in today’s marketplace.

This C-suite relationship is improving to meet the needs of today’s digital consumer, but there are still many obstacles yet to overcome to create an effective team that will drive value for the consumer and new revenue for the business.  

The secret sauce: 12 essential traits for a successful agency

All agencies operate in a competitive landscape, where despite key strengths and differentiation points, everyone broadly does the same job.

We offer similar services to clients, we have common skillsets, etc – so what makes an agency successful?

We asked The Agency Collective to speak to 12 agency owners, founders and directors about what essential traits an agency must have in order to be successful and build long and mutually beneficial relationships with their clients.