Marketing & Innovation - marketing, strategy, innovation & social media

How Tom Tom achieved its digital transformation with Big Data – #bigdataparis

18/03/201918/03/2019Yann Gourvennec

Big data is more than ever on the agenda of those marketers who are on the warpath of data-driven marketing. It’s the 6th year I’ve been active (from a content marketing perspective) in this area and I find it always more exciting, year after year. On March 12, I attended the Big Data Paris 2019 keynote entitled “How Tom Tom has evolved from a navigation company to a big data company”.

Tom Tom lives and breathes Big Data

The speaker was Alain de Taeye, Founder of TeleAtlas, Member of the Management Board, Tom Tom. For those who wouldn’t know, Tom Tom is a Dutch company. His pitch was instrumental in my understanding how Big Data moved from a technical topic into a full fledged transformational toolbox reshaping entire industries and businesses.

Such was the promise of Big Data six years ago or more, but few are able to show such impressive results as Tom Tom. Here is how they turned from a B2C company selling navigation devices into a B2B data-driven money machine.

Tom Tom Big Data — Alain de Taeye is right: we do live in a world driven by Big Data and Tom Tom is leading the show.

The Big data revolution was the subtitle of de Taeye’s presentation and God knows this was a revolution! Tom Tom has changed radically. Here is his account thanks to my notes taken during his presentation.

Making navigation easier with Big Data

“At this moment in Paris we are collecting data from users and this is used to make navigation easier” Mr de Taeye said as an introduction to his speech. Tom Tom is well known for its maps and rapidly evolved into a technology company. “The company’s maps aren’t ‘ordinary maps’” however, Mr de Taeye went on. Read more →

Influencer Marketing: How Should Brands Tackle Malpractices

13/12/201813/12/2018Ahmad Zamir

Influencers are trusted people with a substantial number of people following them. Therefore, brands partner with them so that their products get marketed through personalities who are recognized by and looked up to by many.

Lately, companies have been increasingly going after influencer marketing and it’s expected that this trend will continue in the future. It’s quite amazing to look at some statistics that depict the growth in influencer marketing.

The malpractices of influencer marketing

People often buy followers to get themselves into the list of influencers. An influencer is somebody who people trust, talk about, and hence follow. Buying followers can only increase some numbers, but never endow anyone with influence.

Data-driven Marketing: norm among pundits and enigma among marketers

06/12/201810/12/2018Ahmad Zamir

It has become a common parlance amongst marketers lately; there’s hardly any marketing without data. Data lays down the bed-rock for successful marketing campaigns, and it has become a discipline within itself. In simple terms, I would like to present an overview of how to approach data-driven marketing.

To know your customer is fundamental, and to do that, there’s a multitude of questions that marketers must know the answers to. The data from these answers, collected from various primary and secondary sources, guides the marketing strategy of firms. The analyses derived from this precious real-time customer data can, therefore, determine the success of marketing campaigns.

There must be a proper methodology that caters to the requirements of marketers when it comes to data-driven marketing. Let’s try and dissect this topic to gain some insights into the world of data and how marketers can unveil its benefits for executing their marketing campaigns.

What data do we really need?

All the collected data isn’t really useful for marketers. It’s therefore paramount that marketers know what data they should collect, segregate and work on. Keeping unnecessary data will only help increase the complexity of analysis.

But, what’s really useful? Useful data is one that attends to the marketing functions of understanding your customer better: knowing when, where and through what channels to reach him/her at the minimum possible cost.

Digital Me Up: Updates after two and a half years

04/12/2018Yann Gourvennec

It has been two and half years since I, as the Program Director of the Advanced Master’s in Digital Business Strategy, implemented an innovative pedagogy- the Digital Me Up blog– to teach content marketing to the students of the program. The idea was to ensure that the students learn by doing. The blog is fully managed by the students who are responsible for creating a publication schedule and writing articles on a variety of topics such as Digital Transformation, Digital Strategy, Social Media, Content Marketing, etc., giving more visibility to themselves and to the advanced master’s.

The students have been managing the blog quite well, as is evident by the nearly 7000 views the blog had in the month of October this year. More than 300 articles have been published till date on the blog. Hereunder, we present to you a selection of the most recent articles from some of our students:

Digital Me Up is more than a blog, it’s a full fledged blended learning platform – Yann Gourvennec -photo by http://harryduns.com

Wish: from shopping for a need to shopping as a leisure

by Catherine Chourpa (2018-19)

Today, shopping is installing itself as a growing activity during our spare time. It is commonly linked to window shopping in malls, but more and more we observe this behavior through e-commerce.

An Overview of GDPR implementation in France and insights regarding forthcoming ePrivacy in Europe

29/11/2018Yann Gourvennec

“You are certainly a little tired of hearing about the GDPR,” announced Armand Heslot of the French national data privacy commission (CNIL), during the opening of his keynote on GDPR at the Paris Data Marketing Exhibition on November 20, 2018. It’s pretty much true, but that does not mean everything about it has been conveyed. He said these words just before giving us an overview of the implementation of the said rules. Since the implementation of the European Data Privacy Regulation in May 2018, there has been a flurry of content poured on professionals which has made them dizzy.The Paris data marketing keynote has been very useful in this regard to take stock of this new law. Though the conclusion is not very clear and the remedy against the malaise of professionals is not completely convincing. Rest assured, with ePrivacy, everything will become even more complicated and hypothetical.

GDPR and ePrivacy — Armand Heslot (right) presented a quantitative analysis of the implementation of the GDPR

Organized on November 20^th, the Paris Data Marketing Fair was a must-attend event for professionals in our domain of work. It gave us an opportunity to present our views on a subject that has been on the nerves of many marketers in recent months: the famous GDPR.

The GDPR in Cologne in June 2018: Warten and Sehen Wir (Wait and See)

This reminded me of another conference that I attended and participated in as a speaker in the framework of the eZ Systems 2018 convention and under the auspices of a German association in Cologne in June this year. The GDPR was all freshly launched then. The room was filled with sceptical and lost marketers, including those from Germany and Denmark even, who asked us questions concerning the actual implementation of the GDPR. None of the participants was able to give a satisfactory answer, including the representative of one of the largest German publishing houses. It is therefore interesting to assess this subject a few months later and understand the implementation of this famous regulation to see if we have made any progress in the field, beyond the speeches.