Kelly Dedman on martech and adtech: “Marketing technology and email marketing developed around known addressable customer data — the house file. Email marketing was a logical internet-age successor to direct mail and, combined with e-commerce, created an efficient and measurable direct response mechanism. Email marketers inherited the disciplines and practices of their direct mail maternal ancestors and focused on core tenets required to build, maintain, and optimize the value of their house file – registering subscribers, collecting email addresses, building out progressive profiles, collecting survey data, aggregating data from disparate sources, creating a unified view of the customer, learning how to use past customer transactions to predict future behavior, and calculating customer value through analytical models. Advertising technology emerged to contend with new challenges of targeting vast anonymous online audiences, along with how to attribute response, optimize and measure campaign effectiveness. Much like the pre-Internet form of advertising, digital advertisers were still unable to directly address known, individual consumers due to regulations around the use of third-party data, which was the only way to build targetable audiences at scale.”
Rita McGrath: “Here is the definition I find helpful, following a classical definition of strategy created by Don Hambrick and James Frederickson. It defines strategy as the “central, integrated, concept of how you plan to meet your objectives.”…Strategies are not about iron-clad unchanging five year plans. They are about making the best hypotheses with imperfect information, providing clarity to people and founding an environment in which people up and down the organization are at liberty to make smart choices.”
Brian Caplan: “Free markets are awesome because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad. Governments are awful because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good.”
