News, Articles & Knowledge

The coronavirus outbreak is the biggest single market disruption that the global economy has seen in decades. Even in a more localised or sector-based context, events such as the recession at the end of the 80s, the oil crisis of the 70s, and the 2008 financial crisis impacted fewer areas of the economy and more slowly than the current COVID19 outbreak. The great depression of the 1920s and the impact of the two World Wars are looking like the benchmarks for the economic disruption that could be witnessed.

But in all of the 24 hours news and social media cycle of doom, business people need to keep their heads, create a plan and work their way out of the situation that they find themselves in.

Acquiring customers is the key to any business that wants to grow; with software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses the rush to scale to cashflow neutral puts a lot of attention on how this is achieved. Two of the industry’s leading CMOs, Tom Klein from MailChimp and Janine Pelosi from Zoom discussed the considerations at WebSummit 2019. This is what we learnt from this talk and some of our opinions, on the considerations and impacts of changing emphasis between what you may consider sales vs marketing activities in acquiring customers.

In a further development of Apple looking to take the high ground in protecting consumer privacy in the face of the actions of other tech companies, it seems to have blocked Google's developer license over Screenwise Meter. This has meant that not only early versions of some apps like Gmail and Hangouts have stopped working, but also Google's employee apps such as for travel and on-site catering no longer function.

It is interesting that sometimes I still come across people in marketing that don’t think that either voice technology and / or artificial intelligence will impact them and their approach to digital marketing in any meaningful way. While we can carry on telling people what we think and the progress being made, there is nothing more powerful than people seeing it for themselves. Below are videos showing just two uses of this technology as examples of just how powerful it is becoming.