Word has spread that in the increasingly digital world the importance of customers continues to grow explosively and there is general agreement on the importance of customer relations for the creation of value for a company’s success.

But why do customers then feel so little about all this and still not have the status they deserve?

WARC, the global authority on advertising and media effectiveness, just released its Effective Content Strategy Report 2018, outlining key content marketing themes from the world's most effective campaigns. Drawn from the winners of the Effective Content Strategy category of this year's international WARC Awards, the report identifies common themes from branded editorial-style content that can demonstrate a business outcome.

EU regulators just sentenced Google to pay a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine for Android antitrust violations, in their attempt to force the tech giant to stop the ‘illegal tying of Google’s search and browser apps”.

Hootsuite just released its Social Media Barometer Report 2018, a global survey on the importance and use of social media within small, medium and enterprise organizations across industries.

Cyber criminals are busy at work, especially during the end-of-year online shopping events, the security expert firm Symantec proves by detecting a major increase in attacks on online retailers and blocking almost a quarter of a million instances of attempted formjacking in the past three months.

A recent study by elaboratum, a German expert consultancy firm for digital business and cross-channel strategies, shows that optimizing your website for emotional and intuitive decision-making factors can significantly improve your conversion rate.

Mastercard announced a multi-year partnership with Riot Games to become the first global sponsor for League of Legends esports, the largest esport in the world. This first-of-its-kind global agreement signifies Mastercard’s support of the esports community and further diversifies the technology company’s world-class sports and entertainment portfolio.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) first appeared to web users in February 2016, when Google began to show the AMP versions of webpages in mobile search results: AMP pages are published on the open web and can be displayed in most current browsers. When a standard webpage has an AMP counterpart, a link to the AMP page is usually placed in an HTML tag in the source code of the standard page. Because most AMP pages are easily discoverable by web crawlers, third parties such as search engines and other referring websites can choose to link to the AMP version of a webpage instead of the standard version.

Every year, Kantar Millward Brown calculates the brand values of more than 2,000 international brands, which are listed in the global database BrandZ. A recent analysis shows that less than 10% of these brands increased their value between 2014 and 2017.

Appier a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, announced the launch of AIQUA, a proactive marketing automation platform that helps marketers harness the power of AI to preemptively understand and segment their audience, and to engage users with AI-based messages across channels.

Today, most shoppers are researching information on the internet - even in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Around 90% of all B2B purchases are already influenced by the website of the provider. In modern inbound marketing, B2B companies can significantly increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales through automated lead management, making it worthwhile to set up their own lead management for some simple reasons:

We just started to imagine what artificial intelligence (AI) can do to transform the experience for both marketers and consumers with its impressive versatility. Adobe just released its online shopping predictions for the 2018 holiday season, Retail Unwrapped, making use of its artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, to identify retail insights from trillions of data points that flow through Adobe Analytics and Magento Commerce Cloud, part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

Lazada, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with South Korea’s intellectual property regulator, Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency (KOIPA), to set up a framework that will safeguard the intellectual property rights of Korean brands, and curb illicit trading on the eCommerce platform.

Today, an individual and personal customer approach is essential, hence, Search Engine Advertising (SEA) started to influence its success with targeted and locally controlled customer communication. With fine-tuned local search ads, every customer response gains in importance, with advertised products and services getting seasonally adjusted and the advertising intensity increased or reduced according to the customer’s need.