Brand marketing
How AI voice technology could disrupt your brand’s personality
After a decade of brands being tried and tested by social media, another new medium is set to challenge brand integrity: AI-powered voice technology. This new voice-controlled world will not only test brand differentiation, but also how enduring a brand’s relationship is with its consumers. Tone of voice has long been an essential component of […]
Will AI help make your brand part of someone’s daily routine?
Could artificial intelligence powered digital assistants, such as Alexa, take de facto control of your daily routine? And, if so, how much influence could they wield over your brand choices? Much is being made of Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition technology and the voice platform’s ability to recognise speech and respond to voice requests. Early adopters of […]
To brands that have lost their voice: speak up!
In our new world of audience analysis, consumer behaviour statistics, sentiment research and trend watching, it’s easy to focus too much on analysing and not enough on actually communicating. Even the best marketing insights are wasted knowledge if a brand’s communications are simply too weak to make much difference anyway. Our marketing environment is now […]
Happy birthday @spotonpr
It’s five years ago tomorrow that Spot On PR joined Twitter! We haven’t bought a birthday cake or anything and we’re not asking for any presents either, but it does give us some pause for thought. A lot has happened in those five years. Barack Obama had just become a presidential nominee five years ago. […]
Time to revisit your brand positioning?
Positioning development exercises have been part of our tool-set for many years and we’ve often found them to be voyages of discovery for both us and the brand in question. More often than not, the brief is to review quite minor adjustments to the brand’s messaging and, nine times out of ten, the process ends […]
A wake-up call for aspiring citizen journalists in the UAE (and lessons for Middle East marketers)
The story is now well known and has received media coverage around the world. An incident of road rage in Dubai captured on video by a bystander and posted online inadvertently breaches United Arab Emirates laws, resulting in the arrest of the citizen journalist a couple of days later, even though he removed the video […]
Ooredoo or just plain redo?
In the age of 24/7 online news and social media, what reaction should brands expect to receive from a major global announcement? Many marketers would expect the answer, and the preparation required to harness the benefit of such a reaction, to be second nature to most global brands. However, it seems that this is not […]
How ‘social’ was GITEX 2012?
The Middle East’s largest technology trade show, GITEX, took place at Dubai World Trade Centre last week, bringing an estimated 3,500 exhibitors from around the world together with more than 100,000 businessmen and IT professionals (estimates vary). That’s equivalent to about 20,000 visitors per day, plus more than 10,000 company representatives on stands each of […]
#StopTimeOutDubai rings alarm bells
It’s today’s marketer’s nightmare. You’re alerted to an outburst of negative sentiment towards your brand on social networks. Worse, it has some legitimacy. You don’t know how big it’s going to get, you don’t know how long it’s going to continue and it’s impossible to forecast the impact on your business. Yesterday’s UAE Twitter campaign targeting […]
Communication first, technology second
As usual, Phil Lynagh’s column in the latest issue of Campaign Middle East magazine is bang on the money and this month he’s touched on a particular bug-bear of mine in ‘This social media bubble needs to pop‘. Having been more than a little prone to geekiness in my time, I am reminded of my […]
