Looking at the Swiss full-service digital agency Namics’ predictions, we feel that we are on the right track with many of the trends we forecasted to gain momentum in 2019, including the following:

Prof. Dr. Peter Gentsch, a German management consultant and serial entrepreneur specialized in digital management and data science, is dealing intensively with the topics of personalization and bots in his interesting article "Chatbots for personalized dialogues”, where he pointed out in many places that these topics aren’t actually new.

Navigating a business successfully through the ever-changing digital marketing world is a huge challenge for many decision makers, especially when resources are tight. Co-operations with experienced and competent digital partners are indispensable and the selection of the optimal service provider is crucial for further growth and positioning in the market. A wrong decision can not only quickly blow up the budget, but also damage the brand image. That’s why you should be aware of the most important parameters for a selection.

It is a predicament: consumers' expectations towards businesses are higher than ever, as they demand an experience when buying a product, not just the feeling of a mere necessity. Hence, personalization is the keyword here, so that offers, product recommendations and discounts are available on the right channel at the right time and in line with the customer's current expectations and needs. All this is possible and only needs as prerequisites data-based 360-degree customer views, but that's exactly where the problems start. For fear of abuse, consumers are more reluctant in giving their data to businesses.

Telcos are scrambling to offset loss in revenue from traditional communication services and are aggressively pursuing opportunities in online video. They have yet to recognize that where audiences go, advertisement dollars will follow, and are backing the wrong horse…

Hootsuite, the leader in social media management, released in collaboration with We Are Social, the eighth annual report, Digital 2019, which examines digital trends and social media use across 230 countries and territories, uncovered that more than one million new people go online every day, and that 45% of the world— nearly 3.5 billion people annually—are logging in to their favorite social platforms. That’s a near 9% released increase year-over-year despite growing concerns of fake news, fake followers and data privacy in 2018.

Qualtrics, the leader in experience management (XM), revealed the extent to which Singaporean businesses are responding to customer feedback and the subsequent impact on business outcomes.

For marketing projects, customers or prospects are typically segmented into groups, such as by gender or geographic region, and automated routes are built from those segments. A really personalized approach, however, isn’t possible that way, only recommendations, offers or purchase proposals based on a cluster. Well, not only does this practice have high waste circulation, it regularly upsets customers when, for example, they are offered things they have long since bought.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. In a nutshell, NLP gives machines the ability to read and understand human language. A sufficiently powerful natural language processing system manages to enable natural-language user interfaces and the acquisition of knowledge directly from human-written sources, such as newswire texts. Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval, text mining, question answering and machine translation. 

Broadband Forum has launched a new project – Broadband Quality Experience Delivered (Broadband QED) – which will be led by Vodafone and Predictable Network Solutions (PNSol).

Jeff Bullas, who has been named by Forbes one of the world's top social marketing talents, has published a helpful article for all those who want to find out how social technologies add value to their daily life.

When it comes to customer-centricity, Customer Journeys are the melting pot of all disciplines and perspectives. Evidently, the enterprise around the customer journey in the daily business routine is initiated and managed by individual departments, such as marketing, sales, IT or service. As a result, despite considerable initial success, the creation of positive customer experiences, or winning of more new customers, often falter due to insufficient internal support of such projects. So, how can that be prevented?

2019 will be the break through year of what has been predicted for years but hasn’t yet materialized to any significant extent: big brands, advertising agencies, retailers, and leading media will disappear into insignificance, creating space for new things and better solutions besides new social- and value systems. The trend towards something new and the challenges in digital marketing will simply increase even more: it continues to be all about personalization, voice and the increasing dominance of Instagram; Amazon will go head to head with Google and Facebook in online advertising market share; and collaboration within agencies and agile brand management will keep on being important.

Qualtrics, the leader in experience management, announced the launch of ExpertReviewTM – Response Quality. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), this new solution empowers market researchers and insights professionals to weed out poor quality feedback, allowing organisations to make critical business decisions with more accurate data.