One of the most difficult tasks for marketers is a personalized customer approach and that’s exactly where AI can help.

When was the last time you really offended someone at work? If you are a leader and your answer was ‘never’, you may want to rethink your job title. After all, American statesman and retired four-star general in the US Army Colin Powell had a point when he said, “being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”

As every year, IDC started to announce its top predictions for Asia Pacific at IDC FutureScapes 2018, one of ICT’s most anticipated annual events, held at the Mandarin Orchard Singapore. On its 10th year of tracking 3rd platform technologies, IDC reveals that at least 60% of the Asia Pacific GDP will be digitalized, with growth in every industry driven by digitally-enhanced offerings, operations, and relationships over the next three years. Furthermore, IDC expects that by 2020, investors will use platform/ecosystem, data value, and customer engagement metrics as valuation factors for all enterprises. This tipping point in the DX economy is described by IDC as becoming “Digital Native Enterprises.”

Tableau Software, the leader in visual analytics, announced the roll out of Hyper, the new data engine technology included within Tableau 10.5. With Hyper's ability to slice and dice massive volumes of data in seconds, customers will see up to 5X faster query speed and up to 3X faster extract creation speed, providing faster insights for even larger data sets and giving organizations the ability to scale their analysis to more people.

Do you know the story of the three blind men who meet up with an elephant? Each man feels a single part of the elephant—the trunk, the side or the tail—and as a result has only a partial idea of what the animal is. Marketing today is in a similar situation. Each group understands their part of the elephant, but few have a holistic view. Many also lack a “single source of truth” for their marketing performance. This makes it nearly impossible to understand which marketing and advertising initiatives drive desired business outcomes. Even worse, when marketers can’t get an accurate and holistic view of customers and prospects traversing multiple channels, devices and touchpoints, they can’t accurately measure the value of each experience, or how well they are directing their consumers toward a desired action.

The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is clearly a game changer that impacts and transforms our daily live in all ranks, since with its emergence a myriad of user data is getting collected and analyzed in a matter of seconds. Naturally, this raises privacy and security concerns globally.

Although the AI development is still in its infancy, it’s clear by now that customer satisfaction can be achieved faster than ever with its help. However, like with any new technology, the typical principles apply: First, AI remained a marginal phenomenon and only experts dealt with it, but after it got some media attention it became the talk of the town. Then, with the first success stories, a hype develops that unfortunately attracts charlatans as well. High user expectations often result in disappointing practice experience, though.

According to Vodafone’s newly released  IoT Barometer 2017/18, Asia's businesses are leading the world in Internet of Things (IoT) adoption, with the number of companies embracing connected devices, soaring 200% from 2013 to stand at 36% now.

Anne M. Schüller and Alex T. Steffen just released their book “Fit for die Next Economy: Sustainable with the Digital Natives”, which is currently only available in German, but got my whole attention, since it made me understand the so-called “digital natives” a bit  better.

When talking about technology, a lot has changed in the marketing industry in recent years, but structures and teams have largely remained the same. Hence, it is believed that 2018 is the year in which the internal organization gets adapted to external technologies, simply because a renewed disruption is necessary this year, so that the potential of new advertising technologies can be exploited.

In the advertising world, 2017 can be seen as a transitional year for publishers and platforms.

Bot-powered commerce is on a tipping point in Singapore according to the new SAP Hybris Singapore Christmas Shopper Survey 2017.

Fourfold growth of QR codes to deliver coupons and discount offers will increase substantially, as in-built QR functionality on mobile devices drives usage.

Mobile has come to stay and has already moved past the desktop in many areas. This development will for sure continue in the next few years, which is why digital marketers need to find new ways to attract mobile users.