Early Bird Registration Now Open

FutureM, the annual event showcasing the future of Marketing, unveiled its first round of sessions for the 2013 national gathering of brand innovators, business leaders, investors and influencers. This year’s theme, “Innovation at Intersections,” will explore how digital technology and media are colliding with new industries and ideas to reshape the modern marketing landscape. Early bird registration for FutureM, taking place in Boston October 16-18, 2013 at the Hynes Convention Center, is now open at: FutureM.org.

Our May Mobile guest blog series continues with George White, Principal Consultant, Technical Architect at Cantina. George gives some great insight into the many contexts in which we need to look at mobile and the many factors which now come into play as the technology develops. If you are interested in being a guest blogger please contact me at taylor [at] mitx [dot] org.

George set out to be a zoologist and now he is a fifteen year veteran with broad experience in software development and architecture. He has worked in many domains, including Web applications, mobile platforms, content management, internet-connected desktop applications, multimedia, video, networking and systems architecture. George developed a strong understanding of the technology needs of publishing companies during his time at McGraw-Hill and Thomson and consulting with Elsevier and Jones & Bartlett. George is proud of the fact that systems he designed and developed ten years ago are still going strong. Twitter handle: @stonehippo

It’s Not Mobile, Its a Sequential Connected Experience
Engagement requires balancing optimization and parity while considering contexts

It is becoming hard to talk about mobile as something separate from other digital experiences, and the numbers bear this out.

Continuing on with our mobile guest blog series for this month we had a great post from Tim Dunn, Director of Mobile, at Roundarch Isobar. Tim takes a look into the past and future and provides great insight into where mobile is headed. If you are interested in being a guest blogger please contact me at taylor [at] mitx [dot] org.

Tim Dunn is the Director of Mobile at Roundarch Isobar. Roundarch Isobar, ranked the 15th largest digital agency in the world by AdAge, creates applications and digitally-centered marketing campaigns for the web, mobile devices and social media. With a focus on experience design, Roundarch Isobar conceives, designs and develops marketing campaigns as well as digital solutions like wearable computing, data visualization and mobile applications. Clients include adidas, General Motors and Coca-Cola.  While Tim has specialized in mobile for over 13 years, he now works across broad digital marketing strategy, and is interested in interactions, UX, media and marketing theory and innovation of almost any description. Twitter handles: @timmcdunn, @roundarchisobar

A few years ago, I was commissioned by the UK Government to write an extensive paper on the ‘Future of Mobile’. The piece was targeted at three areas of e-Government – NHS Choices, Directgov and Business Link, each of whom had at that point begun to progress services to mobile users.

Kicking off our May guest blog series, we have a great post from Isaac Mosquera, the Director of Mobile at ShareThis. Isaac talks about what makes an app successful and that download numbers aren't always the most important metric. Big thank you again to ShareThis for sponsoring yesterday's Mobile Summit!

Isaac is currently the Director of Mobile at ShareThis, Inc. ShareThis powers the social web, touching the lives of 95% of U.S. Internet users across more than 2.3 million publisher sites and 120+ social media channels. Most recently, Isaac was the co-founder of Socialize, Inc which was acquired by ShareThis in March 2013. Prior to Socialize, Isaac co-founded PointAbout, a mobile development consultancy which built apps for companies like Disney, Cars.com and Washington Post. PointAbout was acquired in May 2011. Previously he lead efforts to bring XM Radio's satellite content to the web.

We all know it but choose to ignore it.  App downloads are a bad way to measure success of a mobile app. In the recent past as brands scramble to put together a mobile strategy they had no other way to measure their own success and downloads was the easiest metric to understand and communicate. But only measuring downloads is unsustainable.

We wrap up our April guest blog series on Big Data with a great post from John Stauffer, CTO of True Fit. John discusses the great point of how to properly use big data to target customers but not spook them with the data collected about them. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

John is a pragmatic software development leader with a 20+ year track record of developing successful product and architecture strategies and leading teams to execute on them. Prior to True Fit, John was Chief Architect at 170 Systems where he led the transformation of the company’s existing product architecture to a modern, scalable, and maintainable java-based architecture, leading to an acquisition by Kofax. Prior to 170 Systems, John was Chief Architect for Oracle’s Retail Business Unit after its acquisition of ProfitLogic. As Chief Architect for ProfitLogic, John was responsible for the creation of products for Retail Markdown, Pre-season Planning, Allocation and Promotion Forecasting and Optimization that are used by the world’s largest retailers.

The catalog sitting on my counter was the single creepiest piece of mail I had ever received. It was full of dog-oriented chotskies aimed at overzealous dog owners. 

As the owner of a pair of English Bulldogs filling out our nearly-empty nest, my wife and I are certainly the target market. I have a Bulldog statue proudly sitting on my desk, and I've given up the fight against the Halloween costumes that my wife insists on buying each year for our bulldogs (Knight and Princess last year, Greaser and Poodle Skirt before that).

As April is coming to an end we are starting to wrap up our Big Data theme, but we still have a little more awesome content to share. Beth Logan PhD, Director of Optimization at DataXu writes a great post about the benefits of sharing big data and how it has been beneficial in other industries. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

Beth Logan holds a PhD in Speech Recognition from the University of Cambridge, UK.  She has worked in many fields including speech, music indexing, computational biology, medical informatics and activity monitoring, and has over 30 publications and 11 issued patents.  Since joining DataXu (http://www.dataxu.com/) in 2009 she has turned her talents to online advertising, relishing the vast amounts of data available and the many interesting problems to be solved.

I started working in "Big Data" before it had a name.  My roots are in speech recognition where at the time - and likely still - it was hard to publish at a respectable conference unless you could demonstrate a significant improvement on a large dataset. “Large” meant 100s of hours of speech, which took many hours to process on a cluster.  Fortunately, the community was quite mature and many such large datasets were readily available with excellent labels and tools to get started (e.g. see http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/).

The availability of such public datasets combined with cheap and powerful computing resources was the breakthrough speech recognition needed to become ubiquitous.  These datasets allowed accurate benchmarking of results across teams, facilitating innovation.  However, they cost tens of thousands of dollars for non-academic institutions, reflecting the high cost and labor intensity of labeling.  Yet the value generated by commercial speech recognition algorithms no doubt outweighs this cost.  This raises the obvious question of what other communities would benefit from large, shared datasets.

Continuing on with our April Big Data guest blogging series we have a great post from Chris Sheehan, COO of TrueLens. Chris gives great insight into how companies can take advantage of Big Data to create meaningful customer experiences and improve consumer-brand relationships. As a reminder, our next guest blog series starts in May and the topic is Mobile, if you are interested in contributing please e-mail me at taylor [at] MITX [dot] org.

Chris Sheehan is the COO of TrueLens, a customer intelligence company that sources deep insights from social data.  Prior to joining TrueLens, he was venture capitalist at CommonAngels Funds actively investing in marketing and advertising companies including OwnerIQ, Offerpop, Yieldbot, Linkable Networks, Promoboxx, and Xconomy.

Last week I signed up for a flash sale website. The registration process was effortless. I entered my email address and was instantly browsing sales on the site. After ten minutes, I decided not to purchase anything and left. Since signing up, I’ve received a daily email with a selection of products that don’t interest me, and I’m starting to find these emails annoying.

Sound familiar? It should. Millions of consumers provide their email addresses to businesses of all kinds: retailers, hotels, entertainment brands, restaurants and airlines—to name just a few. As a result, marketers at those businesses face important questions such as “How do I start a conversation to build a long term relationship?” or “How do I provide immediate value?”

Monday's events touched the entire city of Boston but our MITX community as well. Today we received the below note from Jeff Freedman of Small Army sharing the news with us of a fellow MITX member. We wanted to pass it along to the rest of the community so we could join together in support. Please share your well wishes on the blog as Christian and Caroline move forward in their recovery. You may also donate to their recovery fund here. Together we are all #BostonStrong.

We are very excited to have Jason Kodish of Digitas as our second guest blogger for our Big Data series this month. Jason provides some great insight in to where Big Data is going and the importance of value exchange. Enjoy the post and be sure to keep an eye out for more guest blog posts from the series later this week!

As SVP/North American Lead for Strategy and Analysis at Digitas, Jason Kodish leads a group of over 250 analytics professionals across the country - the largest S&A group of any agency nationwide. With more than 15 years of industry experience, Kodish has worked across a wide range of client industries including financial services, automotive, consumer packaged goods, travel, and more.

Where is Big Data going? The answer lies in Disney World
Why quid pro quo is becoming increasingly important to the world of big data

While researching our impending trip to Disney World, my son Holden came across an interesting new piece of technology from Disney called the MagicBand. The MagicBand embeds a family’s identification, payment mechanism, park tickets, and other information into a simple, disposable bracelet. These bracelets eliminate the need to carry a wallet and minimize the risk of losing important documents. Now, all Holden cares about is that he can wear a bracelet instead of lugging around his embarrassing father around the park and still pay for lunch. But as a marketer, the first thing that came to my mind is the incredible volume and value of the data that can be generated through this new piece of customer service. 

Not only does MagicBand provide great transparency into the full transactional data aggregated into one profile, but hypothetically, it should also be able to understand other customer behaviors – the path you take around the park, time spent in certain areas, shows attended, etc.  And it’s easy to envision Disney* using this data to create in-stay offers through mobile devices or email, post-stay communication, life-time value modeling, and customer segmentation for further marketing materials.  The strategic opportunities here are endless

We are officially kicking off our guest blogging series for the month of April with this exciting post from a great member. The theme this month is Big Data and there is some great content coming your way! Guest blogging is an opportunity we extend to our members and in the coming months we have some exciting topics, if you would like to contribute read our previous blog with all of the details.

Cesar Brea is the co-founder of Force Five Partners, LLC, which works with multi-channel marketers across several industries to build their analytic capabilities through hands-on support for marketing programs and campaigns. More: www.forcefivepartners.com

Big Data, as Alicia Keys might say, is “On fi-yah!”  As I walked through Logan airport this morning, I couldn’t take ten steps or turn my head more than fifteen degrees without seeing an ad claiming its solution as the best path to enlightenment and bigger profits. Google Trends confirms the zeitgeist: