Why Mophie is an awesome company, and why I am telling this to you

NOTE: not a sponsored blog post!

On November 16 at 8:41 in the morning I discovered that my trusted life (battery) saver Mophie for iPhone had died. Mophie’s are awesome as they easily double the lifespan of your iPhone battery, even at the “always on” intense use I put my phone through in a day.

Sidebar 1: Apple should be ashamed that my phone battery dies after lunch with the way I use the 4S. I am sure I am a heavy, but not an atypical user, jockeying between email, calendar, internet, iTunes, calls, Instagram, WhatsApp, maps, the occasional game and the like. If you build technology capable of doing all that, the battery should be able to follow. Otherwise it would be like building an electric car that needs 24 hours to re-charge when you deplete the battery. You don’t always have time on a journey to park your car for 24 hours when en route from A to B, right? I am just saying…

Anyway, Mophie allowed me to go through the day without charging once, so I decided I needed to break the piggybank and buy a new one. And I posted a picture of the dead Mophie and my piggybank to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Why 80% of CEO's should be fired

The good news is that the average tenure of a CMO has increased from 23.2 months in 2006 to 42 months in 2012. The bad news? Their most senior leader views “CMOs as being outside of their internal circle of key business decision-makers (such as CFO, COO and CIO).”

This is according to a study that has been published by English (self proclaimed) “Marketing Performance” firm Fournaise MarketingGroup. According to this study, among more than 1,200 CEOs of large corporations and small and medium-sized businesses based in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, 80% of CEO’s are “not very impressed” with their marketing teams.

The era of mobile, and why advertisers aren't buying

On November 7, I led three sessions at Ad:Tech NY on mobile. You can find two of three presentations I delivered on my Slideshare account here. Because I received so much feedback on these, I decided to share with you the “narrative” that goes with the first presentation. The slides are fine, but obviously miss the context of me talking to them.

Until last month I had the pleasure of being VP, Global Connections at Anheuser Busch InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer. I oversaw all consumer touch points, meaning media, digital, sports & entertainment marketing, CRM, licensed merchandise and the like. This meant that a day could involve negotiations with the world’s soccer governing body FIFA about our World Cup contract, discussions with measurement partners like Syncapse or Marketing Evolution, negotiations with ESPN or Facebook about our global presence, etc.

And yes, somewhere in there we also talked about mobile. With over 1 billion smart phones worldwide, and with countries like Brazil having more phones than people, we can truly say that the phone is now a personal mass medium.

(Photo courtesy of MorgueFile)

What Obama, Romney and SuperPacs teach us about ROI

Disclaimer: this is NOT a partisan blog post. Heck, even though I pay my taxes now for a number of years here in the US , I do not have the privilege (yet) of influencing where this money is being spent as a person with a vote.

Like everyone else, my airwaves were flooded during the election with political advertising. Candidates, PACS, SuperPacs, unions, issue groups, everyone was trying to outshout everyone.

It was the election with the biggest media price tag in history. An estimated $ 6 billion was spent on candidates across these United States of America. The non-partisan OpenSecrets.org reported all of this spending in a number of excellent and eye opening overviews, which can be found here on outside spending and here on the infamous SuperPacs. Here is what I summise after the dust is now settling:

The value of delayed TV viewing: networks vs. advertisers

Today I read two articles on the excellent MediaPost about why the big US networks want to expand the "C3" ratings to something called "C7". And some are of the opinion that even "C7" is not enough.

OK, for the none initiated, "C3" refers to Nielsen ratings and today, Nielsen considers a "rating" for a TV show any viewing that occurs within a three day time-frame, so a combination of live viewing when the show airs, plus any viewing via DVR within 3 days of the actual broadcast. 

The networks have now discovered that "C3" actually does not cover all of the viewing that occurs for the more successful shows that have a loyal TV audience. Research now shows that 90% of viewing is accomplished after 7 days, not 3.