I don't know alot about Steve but I do like his flat tax filled out on the back of a post card. Russia implemented a 13% flat tax and receipts went through the roof and the economy boomed (oil didnt hurt) but hey...let's try it...20% flat tax for the USA. Steve Forbes for President.
NEW YORK; Jan. 23, 2008 - Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has acquired Memetrics Holdings Pty Limited and has agreed to acquire the business of Maxamine Inc., expanding its digital marketing sciences services capabilities. Memetrics and Maxamine are privately held companies that provide testing and optimization services to help companies improve the marketing effectiveness and financial returns from their websites and other digital marketing investments. Terms of the agreements were not disclosed.
Maxamine, founded in 1997, scans websites to identify implementation problems which undermine online marketing performance. Its services provide guidance to help clients improve website optimization, enhance customer experience, and decrease privacy-related and other risks.
Memetrics, founded in 1999, helps companies improve the impact of their online marketing campaigns through dynamic optimization of content presented to customers. Memetrics' proprietary testing technology analyzes thousands of variations of Web pages to determine what page format and context will deliver the best performance to each targeted customer set, allowing marketers to present more-targeted messaging to high-value customers on their websites.
Both companies have headquarters in California and operations in Australia and the United Kingdom."These acquisitions uniquely position Accenture as a world leader in supplying digital optimization services for clients as they continue to increase their investments in online marketing and websites," said Jeffrey Merrihue, CEO of Accenture Marketing Sciences. "We will now be able to help marketers measure and optimize their overall marketing investments across traditional and digital channels in a way that profitably enhances the overall customer experience."
Maxamine and Memetrics employees will be offered positions with Accenture's Marketing Sciences practice. Additionally, top executives of Memetrics and Maxamine will be offered positions as senior executives within Accenture's Marketing Sciences practice.
The Memetrics acquisition closed Dec. 31, 2007. The Maxamine acquisition is subject to customary approvals and closing conditions and is expected to close within 30 days.
"Memetrics and Accenture share a vision to deliver more strategic marketing based on data-driven decision-making," said Hikaru Phillips, Memetrics founder. "Working together, we will now have the scale, technology and people to truly transform the marketing function."
Stephen Kirkby, Ph.D., a founder of Maxamine, said, "The solutions that Maxamine developed will be advantageous to Accenture Marketing Sciences clients as they seek to strengthen their online marketing efforts. We look forward to seamlessly integrating our capabilities with Accenture."
Accenture Marketing Sciences, a specialized practice within Accenture, provides marketing measurement and optimization services for media, marketing, retail and digital channels to increase the return on their marketing and media investments. Accenture Marketing Sciences has more than 400 clients across Europe, the United States, Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, including more than half of the top 100 global advertisers.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world?s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With more than 175,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$19.70 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2007. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
2nd life might flame out but Facebook will become part of the fabric of our society. The one to many functionality could actually lower the amount of e-mail you get. Plus..it's social...so it funnels off non-urgent e-mail from your business e-mail and allows you to look at your convenience.
Who cares if someone writes something stupid on Facebook! I am even trying to decide if I should move this much visited blog (14 people per day) to Facebook! There is a very clever principle at work here and I predict it will outstrip MySpace and flourish.
When someone congratulated Murdoch for buying MySpace, he snapped back, it should be growing as fast as Facebook. Yahoo offered the 23 yr old founder a billion and he said no. Check out the new face of social networking. It will organize your social life into shared interests. Just make sure it's no more than 30 minutes a day or you will become anti-social.
Jimmy Carr (renowned comedian and Interweb specialist) helped us launch the new web tracking service from Accenture Marketing Sciences. Nike/Ipod occupies the top spot while Twix chocolate is in last place. More to come on this exciting service as we review the best and the worst that the web has to offer.
Accenture is now concluding a study about Marketer web sites where the average rating is decidedly mediocre. While there are moments of brilliance like Ford’s virtual showroom, or Heinekin’s global country sorting, the average site is just average. Microsites do better like Volvo’s cool C30 site or Bar.com from Diageo but once you visit there is little reason to go back. The king has to be Nike / Ipod where runners download there statistics every week and track progress vs friends or stars like Lance Armstrong!
Rumour has it that Maria Sharapova threatened to kick LeBron James ass in an on-line marathon. That’s a sticky web site.
Therse sites were great specialist sites that are now under the shadow (of) giant corporations - Fox and Google. Already..a huge slice of pirated video has been pulled off of YouTube dropping it's value significantly. Corporate sponsors are invading MySpace...wanna be friends with the Burger King?
And now new specialist sites are targetting their users including Facebook chasing MySpace students and major networks like CBS leveraging their own content on InnerTube (nice name rip off!)...The founders pictured above Chris (Velocityhead)MySpace and the ChillTube from YouTube are both great...but in person..you get the sense they are riding out their earn out clauses.
Either way, a new chapter in user generated content has been written and will change the world forever.
Let me start by staying that despite working for Accenture, I have always liked McKinsey and I am an avid reader of the McKinsey Quarterly. McKinsey has issued a new doom and gloom report about how zipped, zapped TV with distracted consumers will deliver less 40% less impact soon. So while appreciating McKinsey work in general….this piece is really crap. First the science: There are no facts or analysis to back up their gloomy claims which our research shows to be radically over-stated. Since this is a blog, I do not need to include any facts either, but our reports are packed with facts that show that because TV is declining from a very high level, TV will remain the most important way to market mass goods for the foreseeable future despite this decline (although the formats will morph on to all kinds of devices). In some ways fragmentation is good for TV as it kills off bad ads, clutter and excess frequency!
Now the conclusion: McKinsey finishes the doom and gloom study by saying that the solution is…wait for it…the CMO! Huh? Well, they have their annual CMO conference about now so they might as well pander. I would therefore like to offer my services for free to present at the McKinsey conference explaining why the 30 second spot is alive and well and how to deal with the device morphing that is occurring.
The death of the 30 second spot has been greatly exagerated. I predict here, based on our work, that in 50 years time, the most powerful form of advertising will be...drum roll... the 30 second spot. What will change? Well it will sponsor free music and tv shows on your mobile phone and it will subsidise on line downloads and other on-line content. They will be better targetted, permission based (and come in different lengths). They will be time shifted and shared peer to peer.
Please return to this blog in 2056 to see that I was right.
Exhibit A: An off-the-record drink with a TV sales chief. He tells me he's putting together multi-media packages for several major marketers. Those packages include spots, online video ads, magazine ads, a custom-publishing play, complex event sponsorships and wireless phone deals -- including a revenue sharing arrangement on a TV show call-in. I ask him how he gets those kinds of deals on a marketer's media plan. His answer: You "have to go direct to the client," because a TV planner or buyer -- the types with whom he typically dealt -- just can't "get it done."
Exhibit B: An off-the-record coffee with a magazine publisher. The conversation turns to the packages she's building for marketers looking to bombard/build a relationship with -- delete depending on your level of cynicism -- her core readership demographic. She's trying to deliver that connection for those advertisers via a multi-media package: Again, events, wireless, e-mail and Web properties play a part as well as the magazine. Just a couple of hitches, she says. Firstly, she can't monetize many of the add-ons, and secondly, she has trouble selling them to the print media directors with whom she's dealt historically.
There are plenty more examples where those came from. But, by now, you probably get the point: Media agencies, potentially the best and most important partners a marketer can have in today's increasingly complex media world, are in danger of becoming an obstacle to the right deals rather than an enabler.
Media owners are slowly but surely recreating their channel-defined media properties and turning them into platform-neutral brands that connect with a certain type of audience. Brands like This Old House and ESPN are the most frequently quoted leaders in the field, but almost every media owner today is attempting some form of multi-platform connection with its audience. And it's no longer a trend restricted to those cablers or interest-focused magazines with an obviously defined demographic or psychographic. Fox, for example, is going into the TV upfront pitching "Generation Fox," a cross-media ad package designed to enable marketers to connect with 12-to-24-year-olds.
The way such media owners are restructuring reflects the way their audiences consume media, which is a lot less about the channel and a lot more about the brand promise. By putting the consumer at the center of their models, they are also, of course, trying to give marketers what most would say they're looking for -- a relationship with a particular type of consumer, or, even, the chance to be part of a community of their consumers.
Yet many ad agencies, media agencies and even marketing departments are structured by medium. In Matt Creamer's recent story, "Don't Call it TV: Rebuilding for The Video Age," he reported on MediaVest's restructuring of its TV-buying teams into video investment and activation units, which he called a "bellwether" for the shift away from the box of the 30-second spot. He's right, but most of the other agencies are yet to follow MediaVest's lead.
It is bordering on derogation of duty for a marketer today to commit to a campaign that isn't integrated, particularly in terms of the way it marries offline components with the use of Web tools such as search and even online retail, yet many still start their years by parceling out budgets into media-by-media silos, sometimes even competing agencies, that often don't communicate, much less collaborate.
Those walls are going to have to be come down, and the planners and buyers who focus on one platform are going to have to broaden their expertise. It's spring and it's time for some renovation.
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