insights

When can a Mountain Dew make you smarter than a glass of a nice Pinot Noir? Well, beyond the short-term cognitive boost from the caffeine-rich soft drink, being seen holding a glass of wine can reduce your intelligence – not in real terms, but in the eyes of others. As I posted on Forbes.com the other day in Proof: Alcohol Makes You (Look) Dumb, even a stone-cold sober person holding a glass of wine suffers an apparent IQ drop.

For all the talk over the past few years about consumers no longer believing what brands tell them, the shift in content and control away from marketers, and the prevailing power of social interaction as the mechanism for disseminating and using information…isn’t it odd that the only way social technology platforms think they can reliably make money is through advertising?

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 5 of 5

In this post I wish to respond to the assertions made by Sampson Lee in Customer-Centricity Is Not The Solution; Its The Problem. If I understand it Sampson is asserting that pursuing the path of customer-centricity is the road to ruin and his logic is as follows:

After years of hearing about the Social Media Revolution, many of the rebellious, counter-culture figures are starting to disappear to the sidelines as the big money Wall Street investors and traditional media guys take over. The companies that we thought were going to completely topple traditional media are starting to look a lot like the companies they once scorned as they embrace new strategies that emphasize the value of the almighty advertising dollar.

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 4 of 5

What do you think the ratio for the implementation of social media campaign should be in the entire media budget of the company? How was this situation at Orange?