Tag Archive: marketing

When Big Data meets Personal Data

Some interesting sessions at the DataIQ conference this week. My talk was on the theme ‘Where Personal Data Meets Big Data’. One meeting point takes the form of a clash: the requirements of Big Data and of personal data protection...

Is more data always better?

One of the pushbacks we get when talking to marketers about VPI (Volunteered Personal Information) goes like this: “Oh no! You are talking about yet another source of data. I’m already awash with data! In fact I’ve got so much...

The penny begins to drop

It’s lonely sometimes when something seems blindingly obvious to you but other people just don’t seem to get what you are talking about. Over the last ten years, I’ve felt like that quite often when talking about personal data empowerment....

Exciting times – a new tipping point

Many of you familiar with our work will have heard us use the phrase “tipping point”; and one of these may well have emerged with Facebook Gestures – as one commentator put it Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion. Well, we...

May newsletter

The May newsletter covers the Government’s mydata, a Europe wide assessment of consumer empowerment, a market round-up and to plug your chance to meet the Control Shift team next week. The Government’s mydata initiative – covered in our last newsletter...

Innovation happening in health

Attended an excellent event at Nesta this morning. Four great speakers all revealing how new services designed around the user are making real savings for the NHS and other parts of the NHS. The introductory remark was that if 1%...

Two sides of the control shift

There are two sides to the control shift. 1) The first is organisations realising that the quest for control over customers is futile and counterproductive. 2) The second is actual shifts in control, due to (for example) changes in the...

Tracking the control shift

We’re about to start our longest ever project – one that we think will take us to 2020 and maybe beyond. And we need your help. We’re setting out on a simple task: to track the change in control from...

Marketing’s future

Interesting little debate between myself (Alan Mitchell) and marketing profs Mark Ritson and Tim Ambler within the pages of the marketing press. They’ve taken offence that I’ve said we need to reinvent marketing. At the heart of it lies what...

The buyer-centric revolution

Sometimes something is so obvious you don’t need to give it a second thought. It’s obvious for example that the sun orbits the earth and it’s obvious that the marketing is something that’s done by marketers who are employed by...

Global opt outs don’t work

It’s our job here at Ctrl-Shift HQ to track what marketing and customer service departments are up to but sometimes that does cross over into our personal lives. So this brief post (well rant) is a result of stuff I’ve...

Marketing’s metrics impasse

For marketers facing tightly constrained budgets, demonstrating marketing ‘accountability’ and proving ROI has never been more important. Yet, despite years of debate and research into this issue, we seem to have made little progress. I think there are three reasons...

The New Alchemy

The alchemists believed (or pretended to believe) they could turn lead into gold. In pursuit of this quest, they poured stupendous amounts of time, money and energy down the drain. Modern marketing promises to turn customers into corporate gold –...