IE Master in Digital Marketing

From the Blended Programs team, we are very proud, not only of our Alumni but our current students as well!

Pierre Gaulis, who will be graduating this 2012 from the Master in Digital Marketing, has been invited among 100 leaders at the St Gallen Symposium as a “Leader of Tomorrow“.

This year, Pierre will address his particular input about “Risk Facing” as a member of the world-renowned “knowledge pool” of the Symposium.

Our talented student is currently a successful swiss entrepreneur in Asia, and he will share  at the Sypmposium his interesting point of view on what it takes to build new ventures and manage risk especially in new markets and under different cultural and operational conditions.

Based in Japan, Pierre is also a member of the organizing committee of the Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) Tokyo.

More exciting news from our  Master in Digital Marketing graduates!

We are very proud of our alumni Kashif Khan, as he has achieved, not only a great career success after the program but he will become the father of his second child pretty soon!

Balancing career and personal life is one of the key aspects of Blended Education at IE and we are very happy to share Kashif ´s insight with all of you…

“I joined YAHOO International MENA HQ as a Client Servicing Manager in June 2011. I have applied at Yahoo in May 2011 after completing my course and they immediately offered me a job based on my degree and experience.  Thanks to IE business school for this new role.

At Yahoo, I am looking after top tier Yahoo agencies and client portfolio which is complex in nature but constitutes major revenue for the company. Important accounts includes Initiative, MPG, MindShare and Unilever.  The role is more or less like a digital consultants to the clients, help them to achieve their digital marketing objectives by offering them Yahoo customize solution.

Once we got the campaigns, then we have to handle day to day operations and working internally with cross-functional departments including Sales, Ad operations, creative etc to successfully run the projects.  

 On the personal end, we are expecting our second child and my wife is in Pakistan for delivery. I will be travelling there to stay  till 10^th March but I will be available for any request or help throughout the period.”

Best regards,

Kashif Khan  

February 2012: The future of communications planning

Yes this is Robbie Burns but not as you know him. This references a Burns night debate about the impact of the internet and social media on research where I was delighted to join Roy Langmaid, Sheila Keegan and Paul Hutchings to argue that far from ruining research, the internet offers us a golden age since we have so many new ways to learn about people by getting much closer to them. While we are on the subject of the future Admap magazine are offering a prize for the best essay on the future of planning. The closing date is Feb 20^th. As part of the set up I was startled to find that that to get people started, Admap referenced an article I had written back in 2008. Too good a publicity opportunity to miss! So I have been blogging about the 6 main communications territories. So far I have covered messaging, reputation, and interactivity. The most recent post went out this morning on the topic of media channels and social networks.  With audiences and content to conclude the series next week.

 

Ginni Badge of Courage award for bravery in the field of market research

This is the second month I have mentioned this but we need nominations before the end of February. If you know of someone who has displayedstickability, persuasion or just raw guts seeing a research project through, then send your nominations. Visit the RLF website to find out more.  We have a distinguished panel we shall be announcing next week who will do the judging. This award celebrates the courage of all researchers whether they work clientside or as suppliers so please mail those nominations in. There is a special night to celebrate Ginni’s life next Tuesday at the RSA. But we intend to hand out the award at a special event on March 20^th alongside the naational research conference.  

Idea of the month: learning about the whole from a part..
One of the emerging ideas billed as the next big thing in research is the idea of a community panel, an online resource so vast that it contains potentially the whole customer base and fuses together many different data sources. It has got me thinking about one of the strengths of research – which is that we don’t try to look at everything but take ourselves a manageable sample and understand that. To help us make sense of everything else. William Blake talked about seeing eternity in a grain of sand. He should have been a researcher! Marketing is tending towards grand all encompassing solutions at the moment and I’m not convinced. If you have any thoughts on this one I would love to hear from you. I have to chair a session on the topic at the MRS national conference in March. 

Coming up

January has been a particularly busy month and just to make it more interesting we have just moved to a bigger office – literally round the corner by taking over the rest of the floor. Our new research product Moments for researching customers in context is coming on with 2 studies commissioned. If you want to discuss an idea for research and you’re not quite sure how to tackle it then do give me a call.

 *Article by Rainey Reitman and published at Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb, 1st 2012)

 It Shouldn’t Take a Letter from Congress for Google to Give Straight Answers About Privacy Policy Changes

 Last week, Google announced a new, simplified privacy policy. They did a great job of informing users that the privacy policy had been changed through emails and notifications, and several experts have praised the shift toward a simpler, more unified policy. Unfortunately, while the policy might be easier to understand, Google did a less impressive job of publicly explaining what in the policy had actually been changed.  

In fact, it took a letter from eight Representatives to persuade them to provide straightforward answers to the public about their new policy.   

Here’s what you need to know about the substantive changes in the new policy:

1. Up until March 1, 2012, the data Google collected on you when you used YouTube was carefully cabined away from your other Google products. So, in effect, Google could use data they collected on YouTube to improve and customize the users’ YouTube experience, but couldn’t use the data to customize and improve user experience on, say, Google+.
2. The same siloing took place for your search history. Previously, Google search data was kept separate from other products. Even when users were logged in, Google promised not to share the information they gathered about you from your Google search history when customizing their other products. Considering how uniquely sensitive user search history can be (indicating vital facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and much more), this was an important privacy protection. 

The new privacy policy removes the separation between YouTube, Google search, and other Google products. By describing the change as “treat[ing] you as a single user,” Google intends to remove the privacy-protective separations from YouTube and Google search

Unfortunately, Google’s original explanation left much to be desired.  The policy’s overview page said nothing about the substantive changes that were occurring in the policy, and the FAQ was equally vague:

What’s different about the new Privacy Policy?

First, we’ve rewritten the main Google Privacy Policy from top to bottom to be simpler and more readable. The new policy replaces more than 60 existing product-specific privacy documents. This all should make it easier for you to learn about what data we collect and how we use it.

Second, the new policy reflects our efforts to create one beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google. It makes clear that, if you have a Google Account and are signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we can treat you as a single user across all our products.

“Beautifully simple” and the ability to “treat you as a single user” don’t actually get at the kernel of what changed: that they are specifically enacting a change to how they treat data they collect through YouTube and search history. To be clear, they aren’t collecting more information, but they are sharing that information in a new way.

We were heartened to see the letter and Q&A Google published yesterday in response to the questions from Congress in which they gave straight answers about their new policy. They stated:

Specifically, our policies meant that we couldn’t combine data from YouTube and search history with other Google products and services to make them better. So if a user who likes to cook searches for recipes on Google, we are not able to recommend cooking videos when that user visits YouTube, even though he is signed in to the same Google Account when using both.

This is a great deal clearer than their original notification, so we applaud that. It’s unfortunate that it took a letter from Congress to get them to give the public straightforward explanations.

For individuals who would like to continue using Google products, but want to create some type of silo between Google search, YouTube, and other products, there is an option to set up multiple Google accounts. Users can set up two or more accounts as long as they have different Gmail addresses; however, individuals using this strategy to protect their privacy should be careful not to commingle-consider using separate browsers for each of your Google accounts. To be extra careful, users might want to use the Data Liberation tool to grab a copy of all of their data from a particular Google product, delete the data from the original account, and then upload that data onto the new account. For example, an individual might set up a secondary Google account for browsing and sharing YouTube videos. She could then download all of her existing YouTube videos to her computer, delete them from her primary Google profile, and then use a separate browser to upload them to a new secondary Google account. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat laborious process. To help users who wish to keep separate accounts, Google should make the process simpler and easier.

Anna Znamenskaya – a student of Master in Digital Marketing program @IE Business School has recently launched a start-up aimed at making the life of women with both families and careers easier.

Anna with her WorkingMama.Ru has already won the Best Start-Up award at MITEF (mitef.ru) and is invited to the Silicon Valley to present the project to the potential investors. Speaking about the role of IE’s Master in Digital Marketing role, Mrs. Znamenskaya says that IE helped her crystallize the idea and launch the site.

Anna is the former top manager of different big Russian Internet companies. She has a daughter of 6 years and she from her own experience the issues that modern women face. Her project will share different success stories, provide tips and real tools to successfully combine demanding jobs with even more demanding careers of happy mothers. For women with traveling needs there are parts of the website dedicated to different destinations. Anna is looking for the contributors who would be able to add valuable information about Russian and foreign cities that they know well.

Place and a time for everything – even Google?

One of the highlights of November was a trip to San Francisco to teach a class of MBA students online research. This included a trip to the Google campus no less and the euphoria of going there went to the heads of the faculty as much as the students. Google is very self consciously trying to be different from other companies. Hence the T Rex sculpture being attacked by inflatable flamingos and the Google bicycles left around for casual users.  We got the creds presentation to Silicon Valley which seemed very grounded in the here and now. At one point we were shown a slide showing the number of deals taking place in Silicon Valley compared with elsewhere in the world. Their conclusion – if you want to build a business of any scale then eventually you will have to come to Silicon Valley to find the engineers, the academics and the venture capitalists. A curious powerplay from a company which has done more than most to destroy a sense of time and place – wanna known anything? Google it from wherever you are. We heard from the product manager for mobile advertising who warned us that 80% of websites were not mobile enabled and this represented a threat to our businesses. Heady stuff from a company which is barely a teenager.  But interesting that newfangled digital talk sounds a lot like old style imperialism. I asked if all this money chasing a few halfway decent ideas wasn’t going to become inflationary. Probably was the laconic reply. But when you’re on top of the world what does it matter paying a few extra millions. Plan your exit we were told. So we did.

Second that emotion

For much of the autumn I have been discussing and reading up that slippery topic emotion. Now believed to be the source of so much behaviour but defining it is problematic because the scientists can’t agree what emotion is. The first challenge is to get people to tell you how they are feeling without thinking about it too much. Because that changes the emotion. The second challenge is to distinguish emotions from mood.  Mood being a vast porridge with all sorts of emotions blended into it.  The point of this project is to explore context – how place and time and other people affect us and the decisions we make; specifically those to do with buying and consuming. I can’t give away much at the moment but expect to see an announcement in the new year about how to measure the effect of context on consumption. And where brands fit. If you’re curious or have a point of view – then call me to chat about it.   This is hard but worthwhile and wide open for marketing.

Idea of the month: making the most of meetings..
I found myself in Brussels last week taking a roomful of young planners through the principles of running workshops. One of the most exciting aspects of this kind of session is when the penny drops that you can apply the thinking to any meeting you run resulting in an immediate improvement.  The fundamental difference between a workshop and other meetings is that you pay primary attention to inputs and the energy levels of the participants and trust the output to them. A lot of meetings ARE output focussed. But the reason why so many are so unsatisfactory is that no one has thought about outputs or inputs and which is more important. So they become working sessions without clear waypoints. So the top tip if you want something new then focus on making the inputs different and the process exciting. But one way or another plan that meeting!!

 

2011 what a year!

Yes what a year it has been – I’ve been working for Spring Research since May so much of the year has been spent in transition as I have fulfilled prior commitments. Sometimes it has felt as if I am pedalling two different bicycles at the same time. The pressure has been considerable but I look forward to 2012 and a renewed focus on tackling new research challenges and developing innovative research products. Next month I can tell you if Joanna and I won the award for best workshop or will have to be content with a nomination!  Have a great Christmas – I look forward to catching up with you in the new year. Don’t we live in interesting times?

One week after the second Face-to-Face period in Silicon Valley of the Master in Digital Marketing, we are receiving loads of materials the students sharing their stories from “inside perspective”.

See for yourself through the picture gallery and feel free to share more pictures or comments from the experience!

The Master in Digital Marketing  has reached one step further!

The Face-to-face period, held for the first time in San Francisco, California has been an amazing success.

Our 2011 MDMKT intake and a group of students representing the Global MBA ,  had the unique opportunity to attend lectures from prestigious professors of Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley , combined with relevant visits to New Tech big firms such as Google, Electronic Arts or Zynga.

Moreover, the group had networking meetings  with brilliant entrepreneurs from start-ups and incubators  in the Silicon Valley area.

Do you want to know more about their agenda and insights?

Check our Master in Digital Marketing playlist  by clicking the image below and stay tuned to “The Silicon Valley Experience.

More videos and interviews will be added shortly!

Mind The Bridge Venture Camp Milano  is one of the fastes-growing european Entrepreneurship event.  And this year, world-renowned authorities in Entrepreneurship have taken this congress one step further.

Entrepreneurship professors Tom Byers from Stanford University and Paris de L´Etraz, Phd from IE Business School addressed the key topic of “Linking Business and Academia” in one of the main panels.

The main mission and purposes of Mind The Bridge are:

 TO LEARN about the most successful bridges between the Silicon Valley and Italy.

 TO HEAR examples of Italian and European entrepreneurial success.

 TO MEET the Mind the Bridge 2011 Business plan competition finalists and hear their business pitches.

TO BUILD A STRONG NETWORK with other budding entrepreneurs, potential investors and mentors.

* written by Gonzalo de la Mata and Alberto Benbunan

Did you remember the phrase? The only thing cooler than a million dollars is, well, a billion dollars.

One of the things 2011 will be remembered as, is the year of Social Gaming, already a of billion dollar industry today. Have you ever heard about Social Gaming before? Who are the players? Have you ever bought Facebook Credits? Social Gaming is here and, it’s here to stay.  There are many news/indicators in the industry that support this statement, Zynga is working on it for its IPO, Google launched Google+ with an eye on social gaming, and the adoption of Facebook credits as a virtual currency has been well adopted by the audience, that it is means Social gaming is becoming a land of opportunities for marketers and advertisers.

Some figures of US trends to help the argument

 

Picking up from Jeremy Liew post there are three key factors to explain this rapid ascent over the last years on Social Games. Development-Distribution-Discovery

• Fast Development: Social games can be launched in three to six months with total development time. Furthermore developers can launch a game in beta and if the game finds an audience it will earn further investment for development.
• Easy Distribution: Facebook is the most popular social platform, it’s users engage easily and at no cost (most of the time) with the games. There is virtually no friction in the distribution of social games.
• Mass Discovery: One of the core elements of Social Games is their viral growth, Facebook feed post, notifications and fortunately the discovery is free for publishers.

 

The Economics of Social Gaming   clearly states the rapid ascent of this new advertising channel. Facebook has reshaped the landscape for advertising, before audiences were predominantly male and teen, and the most popular games consisted of sports and action tittle today marketers have a richer array of choices than ever before, and are the women in their 30’s one of the largest audiences for social gaming. The key question is how brands reach their target audience.

• Targeting-Segmentation. Although the demographics of the Social Gaming audience have become increasingly complex the key for marketers is to look beyond demographics and factors in psychographics (online habits-tastes etc…)
• Innovation. Marketers are attaching brands to games in new and sophisticated ways as experimenting serving videos engage ads in social networks in exchange for virtual currency
• Rewarding. Virtual Currency is a viable incentive to get gamers to watch branded videos with this new way to serve advertisers. This practice is likely to grow as marketers, agencies and gaming companies refine the use of video to enhance the game experience while engaging customers in brand interactions.

 

What is next? Mobile is the next stop for marketers looking to reach audience through gaming.