WARC, the global authority on advertising and media effectiveness, just released its Effective Content Strategy Report 2018, outlining key content marketing themes from the world's most effective campaigns. Drawn from the winners of the Effective Content Strategy category of this year's international WARC Awards, the report identifies common themes from branded editorial-style content that can demonstrate a business outcome.

As many reports reveal, the festive e-commerce market in Southeast Asia is worth billions of dollars, rewarding those brands willing to digitally reinvent themselves constantly and matching consumer demands and expectations steadily. Or as Meltwater describes it in one of their recent reports, “the common thread between the winning brands – whether that is Lazada, Amazon or Shopee – lies in their understanding of consumers and willingness to provide the best experience through price, value, quality and service.”

A year ago, MediaMath Founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki and IBM Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord partnered and laid out their vision of how to help unlocking the full potential of brand engagement to deliver marketing that customers would truly love. Both companies were committed to join forces to reshape the advertising industry by connecting paid and owned media into a single view of the end-to-end customer journey using AI-powered marketing technology and they just presented the result – the IBM Media Optimizer, powered by MediaMath.

There is hardly an online shop that has not fallen for at least one of the fancy tricks of a cheater’s line and suffered consequently financial loss. One way to reliably detect fraud is classic identification. This helps online shops to distinguish real people with honest buying and paying intentions from fraudsters.

Indi, the digital word of mouth engagement and monetization platform, has been selected by Jakarta-based online marketplace Tokopedia to enhance customer engagement and user experience.

As you can imagine, the digital disruption in sales stirs up existential fears, even among long-established distributors, since intelligent sales support in the form of software, apps and artificial intelligence are often not in place. The traditional methods of conducting sales negotiations need a fresh push as well this year, considering that analogue and digital communication will at best converge to a 360-degree dialogue competence. So, expect the winners of disruption in distribution to be companies and vendors that recognize this development potential and acquire new strategies.

Google and Temasek just released the e-Conomy SEA 2018 report, highlighting Southeast Asia’s accelerating Internet economy.

Pegasystems Inc., a provider of strategic software solutions for sales, marketing, service and operations, points out the stumbling blocks the customer journey is facing commonplace in practice:

We are surfing, chatting, posting and commenting virtually on a regular basis: in fact, the amount of time users spend daily on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Co. is growing faster than the rest of online usage. Around 60% of people visit social media every day, one third of them even 5 times a day, proving that social media marketing can achieve a high reach. But what do social media channels really accomplish for marketing?

2018 was a significant year filled with events that marked a sign of changing times, Google unveils with its annual ‘Year in Search’ 2018 report. Through the exploration of the over one trillion search queries the company receives each year, the top trending topics could be identified, including people, events and places that captured the attention of users worldwide who turned to Google Search for answers.

The immense reach, the widely propagated ease of ad booking, and the ability to accurately define target audiences are just a few of the factors that persuade many advertisers to bet their marketing budgets on social media.

The problem with this is that big names, such as Facebook and Google, are quickly entrusted with the dissemination of ads without much reflection and thus with the integrity of brand safety. They benefit from the fact that the online advertising ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex and advertisers use the strong fragmentation and confusion as an excuse to snatch simpler social media advertising or playing out Google AdSense.

Adobe unveiled its vision and strategy to make every experience shoppable by integrating Magento Commerce Cloud into Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling enterprise companies to create highly engaging, personalized shopping experiences.

Some social media key performance indicators (KPIs) only relate to individual social media platforms while others have overall significance. Therefore, as with almost any social media target, the question arises how marketers can measure success - or failure.

Cyber criminals are busy at work, especially during the end-of-year online shopping events, the security expert firm Symantec proves by detecting a major increase in attacks on online retailers and blocking almost a quarter of a million instances of attempted formjacking in the past three months.