Why Gaming Brands Are the Proving Ground for Tomorrow’s CMOs

Note: a version of this article previously appeared in Adweek. At first blush, the National Football League’s recent hire of Activision Blizzard’s Tim Ellis as CMO looks like a beleaguered brand’s attempt at leveraging fresh marketing insight to recapture a young male demographic abandoning traditional sports for esports. But at a deeper level, the move says a lot …

Winning with CX, Part 1: How Top Brands Improve Convenience

There’s no such thing as “convenient enough.” As fast as we learn to swipe instead of type, or tap to pay, we’re already looking for a faster, shinier option — or complaining about why it doesn’t exist yet. Who could possibly keep up with this unending demand for faster, more hassle-free customer experiences? Guess we …

How to Turn The Economics of Programmatic on Its Head

Spending on programmatic will continue its meteoric rise to over $20 billion annually by 2016[1]. But the open question remains: is this trend a good thing for a publisher’s bottom line? Programmatic, at its core, is workflow automation software. And as such it has offered publishers and advertisers significant value by squeezing out inefficiency and …

What People-Based Marketing Means for Digital Publishers

Earlier this month, Signal teamed up with Econsultancy to publish a report, “Digital Publishing: Increasing Advertiser Value Through Data and Identity,” based on findings from a survey administered to more than 125 digital publishers. The survey asked a number of important questions at a time when publishers are challenged by diminishing CPMs, shrinking margins, fierce …

“Mickey to Mickey”: Marketing Lessons from Disney World

I recently took a family trip to Disney World, and my experience as an adult was very different from what my nine-year-old self remembers from my first visit there. And it wasn’t just different because I was seeing the park through adult eyes. It was different because of one element that persisted during our visit: …