About the Author Smarayda Christoforou Follow me on:

Recent Posts

How Channel 4 made data sharing fun for me – no really!

An email I got from Channel 4 the other day got me thinking about data privacy from a consumer’s perspective. I recently registered on 4oD so that I could watch stuff from the archive, which meant sharing some personal data. Like most people, I don’t do small print and always click on the ‘I agree’ button to avoid wading through pages of legalese, or what I like to call ‘porridge’.… Read more

“All marketing is direct” says Harper Reed

Marketers need to create genuine communities if they are going to talk with people one to one in a very real way, Harper Reed, chief technology officer of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, told delegates at the DMA Technology Summit on 30 April 2013.

Harper sees community as our number one asset and yet we underestimate it. Businesses looking to facilitate community could learn a lot from the Obama for America campaign, which used technology, intelligence and targeting to create genuine conversations and give people the best user experience.… Read more

Yes we can… innovate out of recession

As the DMA gears up for Fear, faith and fortune, its first ever innovation summit, I caught up with its curator Debi Bester.

Debi is founder of FMLY and The Reinvention Works, innovation coach to agency execs, guest lecturer at several universities and has judged at the Cannes Lions and DMA Awards among others.
But Debi’s reputation for innovation goes back to when the word meant little more than ‘new product development’ to the rest of us.… Read more

Goodbye QR codes, hello digital watermarks

Fans of digital watermarks will tell you that they offer everything a QR code does without the clunkiness. Because a digital watermark is invisible it won’t spoil the design of a beautiful magazine cover. And, you can also store lots more data than you can in a QR code.

But if a digital watermark is invisible, how do people know it’s there?… Read more