Amid congressional hearings and FBI investigations in the US about whether and how Russia interfered with the US Presidential Elections, discussions continue about the efficacy and ethics of micro-targeting voters. In our latest and 10th edition of the SmallDataForum podcast, Neville, Sam and Thomas reflect on the outcome of the recent general elections in the UK. This episode’s show notes were written by Thomas Stoeckle. We agree that, unlike last time, Labour did better than the Conservatives digitally at this …
Category: Business
In the July installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Shel and I talked about these topics: A 15-year-old participating in a work experience program took over the Twitter account of the beleaguered Southern Rail in the UK. The response to #AskEddie was undoubtedly a welcome break for Southern Rail’s social media team, but what did it ultimately accomplish? The online publication Quartz experiments with display-type ads in the text of stories that let users ask an artificial intelligence-based chatbot …
One of the hurdles along the road of seeing an end to the “advertising value equivalence” (AVE) measurement metric that’s decried by many in the PR and measurement communities is persuading organisations to stop using it. The issue with AVE is well summarised in a white paper published by The Institute for Public Relations in 2003, in which this succinct text appears: We urge you to move away as quickly as possible from statements of the nature, “Our news coverage …
We Baby Boomers are benefiting significantly from the gig economy, says author, speaker and optimist Tim Drake. Not just as consumers by it providing lower prices and more convenience, but as participants too. It’s an important bolt-on to something bigger, he says, enabling new ways of doing business to emerge, and a fresh outlook on what ‘work’ is. But is it something we should think about taking a much more active role in? Baby Boomers fit into what I call …
In the latest episode 9 of The Small Data Forum podcast, hosted by Thomas Stoeckle in conversation with regulars Sam Knowles and me, we enjoyed a wide-ranging, lively conversation over the course of 45 minutes on topics as diverse as the 2017 general election campaign (what went wrong for Theresa May and the Conservatives with a clear focus on the politics) and the latest global communications report from the Annenberg School of Communications (we focused especially on PR and AVE). …
We said we’d do one episode together of the For Immediate Release podcast as a ‘limited return engagement,’ emulating The Hobson and Holtz Report that Shel and I did for ten years. We did do that with episode 84 in April. We enjoyed it so much we decided to do another one, and so we recorded episode 92 yesterday. In keeping with our ‘hefty but good’ slogan, Shel and I enjoyed a conversation over an hour and forty minutes that …
The 2017 edition of venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report was published last week. As with previous editions, the 2017 report offers credible insights into some of the significant trends that are shaping, evolving and defining the internet and our use of it. This year, there’s a strong focus on online advertising, interactive games, healthcare, and much more. Weighing in at 355 slides, the presentation deck PDF is a hefty opus with much to glean and digest. I’ve …
It’s hard to know what to fully make of the dreadful mess in which British Airways finds itself today. It follows over three full days of massive disruption to the airline’s business that has resulted in wide scale flight cancellations around the world, huge queues at terminals at the UK’s major airports and many in other countries, and a severe hit on reputation and trust that could cost BA dearly. According to BA, a computer systems failure led to all …
In the latest episode 8 of The Small Data Forum podcast, hosted by Thomas Stoeckle in conversation with regulars Neville Hobson and Sam Knowles, we explore whether following the ‘interesting times’ of 2016, we are seeing some sort of ‘regression to the mean’, with a right wing populist not succeeding in general elections in the Netherlands, with Emmanuel Macron becoming president of France, and with Chelsea FC winning the Premier League (following Leicester City’s surprise success last year). And such …
