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Once upon a time, the hush-hush plans and special-access security clearance would have been about some cutting-edge sneaker technology: the discovery of a new kind of foam-blown polyurethane, say, or some other breakthrough in cushioning science. But the employees in this lab aren't making shoes or clothes. They're quietly engineering a revolution in marketing.

Nike Digital Sport, a new division the company launched in 2010.

On one level, it aims to develop devices and technologies that allow users to track their personal statistics in any sport in which they participate. Its best-known product is the Nike+ running sensor, the blockbuster performance-tracking tool developed with Apple (AAPL). Some 5 million runners now log on to Nike (NKE) to check their performance. Last month Digital Sport released its first major follow-up product, a wristband that tracks energy output called the FuelBand.

Highest rise in marketing spend in six years

  The latest IPA Bellwether survey published last week shows a sharp upward revision in marketing budgets in Q2 2013. The rise is the highest in almost six years.

"These are very positive and welcome figures indeed. It is no surprise to see internet spend comprising the lion’s share of the increases - a trend that is only set to continue. Digital no longer represents a tick–the–box exercise for companies; it is clearly an essential revenue driver and fertiliser for the green shoots of economic recovery.”

Our product strategy for ITV News was simple, bold and probably as obvious in hindsight as any good idea should be. We set out to create a digitally native news service, something made for the web and mobile that left behind the Guttenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation’, ‘liveblogging’ and ‘galleries’. 

We wanted to make a news service that answered the question: “What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?”.   

video - would be a massive culture shock. There was nervousness, especially about time and resources, offset by enthusiasm for change and a leadership determined to exploit the potential of real-time news delivered across multiple devices. We also had a strong conviction that opening up the news gathering process - rather than adding new work - would give us the content we needed for the stream. 

Your company is likely to face an extinction event in the next 10 years. And while you may see it coming, you may not have enough time to save your company.

While 74% of business executives say their company has a digital strategy, only 15% believe that their company has the skills and capabilities to execute on that strategy (see figure). These are just some of the findings from our latest research (Forrester clients click here).

Dynamic Ecosystems Of Value Consumers are already adapting digital tools to their lives, both for personal use and for business use. These tools — apps for smartphones and tablets — allow device owners to create a collection of tools that satisfy a need or want. 

Commit personally: Senior executives need to understand what they want from digital and social. Fortunately, the highest-level goals are generally quite clear. Companies have unprecedented opportunities to build steadily strengthening connections to customers, prospects, and partners. As a result, they can achieve higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and lower customer churn, thereby raising customer lifetime value. Clearly laying out these expectations is a great way to start.

6 Senior-Level Steps To Digital Marketing Success

Understand customers.

This is a very appealing metaphor, because it largely absolves anyone who was involved in the media from any blame for failing to see the writing on the wall or failing to move quickly enough to change their behavior or their corporate culture.

But is this true? Disruption guru Clay Christensen, also associated with Harvard, has written about how industries — including the car-manufacturing business and the steel industry — have failed to adapt because they didn’t appreciate just how disruptive new entrants or new technologies would be. And it’s arguable that the media industry in the 1990s and early 2000s also failed to appreciate just how disruptive the web would be to their business and to journalism in general. Should we blame them for that? I think we should blame them a little, and here’s why: because there were senior people in the industry who saw the disruption coming — saw it clearly, appreciated the implications, and talked about the potential damage. These weren’t voices crying in the wilderness, but fairly powerful players. To take just one example, there was Knight Ridder excecutive Kathy Yates, who ran the company’s digital unit, and eventually grew frustrated with the industry and moved on to Women.com and then CBSMarketwatch.

B2B Tech Marketers Ahead Of The Content Marketing Curve

For B2B technology marketers, original content is becoming a more critical tool to create continuous conversations with customers as they balance a complex mix of formats delivered both digitally and through live events.

So marketers have to provide a "curriculum" of materials that educate prospective buyers throughout the purchasing pro

57% - that's how far the average B2B buyer is through the purchase decision before engaging a supplier sales rep.

Digital Integration: You can't process your way out of a structural problem. Your silos are holding you back. Process changes won't fix it.

The Most Exciting Digital Marketing Opportunity of 2014

he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.