Would you pay $1.5 billion dollars for a brand and pour it down the drain?

By the turn of the millennium, Rosemount was one of the most recognisable wine brands in Australia. It was the country’s fifth biggest wine company, and it was profitable. It made large volumes of cheap and cheerful Chardonnay under its diamond label, along with premium wines such as Roxburgh Chardonnay and Balmoral Syrah.  Read more

Big Data or Big Brother?

Big Data is one of those terms that suddenly appeared on everyone’s lips. Did you miss that crucial moment when you could still ask what it meant without people giving you strange looks? We’re here to help, because the Big Data industry does a lousy job explaining what Big Data is and what the fuss is about.  Read more

Have you been stalked by a pair of shoes lately?

If you’ve looked at products on a website, you may find ads for these things following around. ‘It’s weird to have a pair of shoes I looked at on a brand’s website follow me around the web for days or even weeks,’ writes Doug Kessler at Velocity Partners. I had the same experience after I downloaded a PDF on lead generation from a site: now the banners follow me everywhere I go.  Read more

What about a goal?

I was gob-smacked the other day when a new client CEO asked us to focus the meeting on strategy. He then  proceeded to detail tactics for the next hour. I didn’t want embarrass him in front of his team, but it wasn’t just the strategy-tactics confusion; he hadn’t shared the big picture with them, but had with us. We knew the end game and the agreed strategies to get there, but they didn’t, so strategy wasn’t going to be blinding anyone that day.  Read more

Yet we see these mistakes every day. 

You can come up with the smartest headlines and subheads; you can craft terrific content and polish it with the skills of a master wordsmith; you can target the distribution of your content with exquisite specificity … you can do all of this but you’ll fail to reach your audience if you haven’t taken care of the 3 biggest turn-offs.  Read more

The Deluge is already here. 

You’ve read about the flood of mediocre content coming your way, created by people who used to do SEO and link building and more, and now claim to be content marketers.   Read more

The Yacks are Back. 

‘Could you put your yacks on the job?’ a client asked once. Thinking of hairy, horned, Himalayan bovines, I was puzzled, until it clicked that those ones have no ‘c’. He was talking about ‘the ones who yack’ – my telemarketers – and five years later we’re still using them - but very differently.  Read more

…and not be left by the roadside. 

You wouldn’t jump into the car and head North with no destination, map or GPS, so how is heading into the unknown of content creation and distribution any different?  Read more

…without being a Master Chef. 

You know that your content (blog, White Papers, web content etc) could make or break your business in 2013 but how do you create it? How do you create enough of it? How do get enough time?  Read more

Great content is like great cooking. 

We all know that content is all that matters and content marketing is the only way to market. Its a bit like MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules: they're novel ways to make cooking popular, but how different are the basics? You still have to create a great meal: you just have to do it in limited time in a highly competitive environment. Isn't that just like marketing? We'll show you how to create content quickly - and make it good enough to win over the toughest judges.  Read more