Larry Smith

Rather than chasing the unicorn, established business should reassess their value creation and capabilities using Business Architecture and other techniques. Failure to leverage “moat” advantages like brand, pricing, distribution, and logistics will undermine other improvements in customer interactions and experience.

At issue here is that Executives everywhere know how to run their business, create value, and make money — they do it every day. But 99% of what they do is process, looking for productivity gains or accretive revenue from acquisitions.

The conflict between technology and brands
Technology is literal. Coding is explicit. Algorithms are exacting. In digital media, there is no nuance of meaning, there are no connotative concepts. It is a box built for precision.
Branding is fuzzy. It pulls on emotions. It romances people with memorable imagery to create desire and affinity. It is connotative by design. Branding does not lend itself to structure and materiality like the products it supervenes upon.
From the earliest days of the...

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a way to provide real-time measurement of performance in fulling strategic goals and objectives. They are a perfect starting point for any discussion about digital transformation because they cut to the heart of the strategic initiative and they provide a way to dynamically monitor the effectiveness of the strategy.

DATA AND MARKETING IN THE AGE OF AUTONOMY
Automation has gone wild: artificial intelligence stealing jobs, millions of robots building billions of devices, self-driving cars, and killer drones. The ability to make smart machines run without people is here. What does this mean for marketing and data programs today and in the near future? Will a bot run your next campaign? Digital transformation expert Larry Smith will elucidate, with key takeaways including:
The current state of automation on ...

More than a cash register.

“When you think about innovation in e-commerce, where would you focus if money or time were not an issue?” Just under half (44%) chose new payment options, such as one-click choices that streamline the shopping experience according to a research study by Oracle and Bronto Software.

It is easy to see why given the explosion of new payment options from new and established providers. According to BloombergBusinessweek, the share of merchants accepting mobile wallets (a...

Data is like lettuce.
Businesses, particularly in retail and digital advertising, view data as an asset. They set cookies and pixels to collect and track millions of people in their journey around the web in hopes of selling something.
But most of this data is just like lettuce, it wilts quickly, often before you can capture any value.
What’s more, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in effect in the European Union (EU), much of the data is tainted and carries a huge risk if us...

Unique Digital Goods & Blockchain
The existence of blockchain has enabled the monetization of unique digital goods. For the first time, a digital version of a material item — like a photographic print, CD/LP album, a DVD video or game — can retain a digital contract of ownership and rights.
In addition to proof of ownership, the blockchain attests to uniqueness, materiality, and provenance with a level of certainty and persistence now possible with blockchain encryption.
This unique identity ...

When the ancient Egyptians and Romans marked their livestock, it was to imprint ownership. Many centuries later, cowboys and ranchers in the USA formalized “branding” by registering their unique branding iron logo and creating a specialized language for “calling a brand” using symbols such as Crazy R, Lazy left, Double D, or Rising Sun.
Today, “calling a brand” means asking Siri or Google where the nearest Starbucks is to your location. In the background a natural language processing (NLP) al...

Most advertising is temporary. It exists for a moment, then disappears. Does it exist?

In other words, advertising is not indexed or fixed in place, it lacks permanence and persistence, therefore its existence is that moment in time where it targets you.?

You are what you eat; aka, GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

The implications are profound for at least 2 reasons:
- In the near future, anyone can make an AI and many will; most will have an agenda or a skewed view of “good” data.
- Few, if any, will know what data was eaten; the black box just gives you an “authoritative” answer.

With apologies to Forrest Gump, “stupid is what stupid eats.” And the data is the artificial ingredient.

The Best Zoo in NYC
Officially, there are 6 Zoos and Aquariums in New York City though I think there are 7:
The Bronx Zoo, New York City’s main zoo is in the Bronx, and houses over 4,000 animals representing more than 650 species.
Central Park Zoo, in Manhattan, New York
The Queens Zoo, located in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York
The Prospect Park Zoo is located in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York
The New York Aquarium located in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York
The Staten Isla...

Welcome to the Big Apple, home to 8.6 million people in 5 boroughs, each borough larger than most American cities. Even the smallest — Staten Island at 479,458 people — is bigger than Kansas City #35 or Miami #44 while Brooklyn at 2,648,771 would be the 4th largest city in the USA (data).
Roughly half of the NYC population speaks a language other than English at home. With over 800 languages spoken by a significant portion of the population, New York City is the most linguisti...