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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. 

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.

Let’s be honest: You have no idea what’s going to happen to your industry. That’s why you build your organization into an engine of possibility.

Management theorist Henry Mintzberg makes a distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy. Deliberate strategy relies on senior leaders to set goals and develop plans and strategies to achieve them. Emergent strategy is a strategy that emerges from all over the company, over time, as the environment changes and the organization shifts and adapts to apply its strengths to a changing reality.

Emergent strategy is an organic approach to growth that lets companies learn and continually develop new strategies over time based on an ongoing culture of hypothesis and experimentation.

Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts.

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom.

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. How’s that for a bottom line?

But spare a thought for the poor admen. Their industry is going through a particularly difficult time. Not only are they confronting a proliferation of new “channels” through which to pump their messages; they are also having to puzzle out how to craft them in an age of mass scepticism. Consumers are bombarded with brands wherever they look—the average Westerner sees a logo (sometimes the same one repeatedly) perhaps 3,000 times each day—and thus are becoming jaded. They are also increasingly familiar with the tricks of the marketing trade and determined to cut through the clutter to get a bargain. Scepticism and sophistication are especially pronounced among those born since the early 1980s.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 46% of American “millennials” use their smartphones to check prices and online comments when they visit a shop.

Many companies want to go further and bypass conventional ad campaigns altogether. It has long been known that “earned media”—word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family and news articles—are highly trusted. Nielsen’s studies show that strangers’ comments on social media and online forums are also now seen as credible sources, rivalling traditional “paid media”.

App prices - a few pennies more wouldn't hurt Annette Ehrhardt, 03 December 2012, 8:30am Be the first to comment   With the app market continuing to boom heading into 2013 it's high time to focus on the users, writes Annette Ehrhardt, senior director, Simon-Kucher & Partners.

But to stride in jauntily they will have to change the way they work. Gartner, a consultancy, has predicted that by 2017 they will spend more on technology than their companies’ chief information officers. Already 70% of big American firms employ a “chief marketing technologist”, says Gartner. With the shift in emphasis from set-piece campaigns to rapid responses, CMOs need more people working directly for them. This is putting into reverse a 20-year trend of favouring “working spend” (what consumers see) over “non-working spend” (overheads), says Dominic Field of the Boston Consulting Group.

Still, a gap yawns between what CMOs could do and what they actually do. The left-brained bent that the job now demands “is not part of where their experience has been”, says McKinsey’s Mr Edelman. But CMOs are learning. Mindshare installed an “adaptive lab” in its London headquarters to educate them. DigitasLBi teaches its clients that not every utterance about a brand needs to be vetted by lawyers.

Morrisons has appointed Nick Collard to the newly created group marketing and customer director position following the departure of commercial director Richard Hodgson.

The Year Ahead For...Social media

Social media is antifragile. It is thriving in a world of increasing technological development, complexity and uncertainty.

In 2013, social media will

Apple’s share of mobile market now over 33%; RIM drops under 10%

RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry, dropped 2.1% from the previous 3-month period to a new low of 9.5%.

Strategic Consultancies Invade Marketing Agency Space

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.