Funnel Reboot

Throughout  our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector. 

Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they w...

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology. 

Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and  pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several european ecom...

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hyb...

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value. 

Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his  backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him. 

It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics. 

This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the Marketin...

When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do you do it that way?" 

If you want to  communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there.

My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turned his tal...

Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them. 

It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent the...

The theme of these next few episodes are channels for getting our content out there. 

The concept of marketing through a podcast is familiar to a high percentage of marketers (for those listening to my show, it's 100%), but it has some quirks that other channels don't. 

A key issue for those thinking about podcasting is the volume of shows that already exist. There are  arguably over a million...

What traits do humans have that distinguish us most from other species? 

There are a few answers, but one I like is from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said it was our ability to form Society. In fact, he saw it as critical adaptation that ensures our survival:  
“...the only way in which [men] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, ...

Video is the most persuasive medium there is. That's why Many of us are building our marketing programs around it.

Inevitably, the wildcard that crops up when we have an idea for a video is what will it take to produce it? The answers to this are all over the map. 

How much production value it takes is - as much as is nee...

As my eldest son has been in university, he's worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store - as you can probably guess - it's shoes.

Need to admit that I'm not that into shoes. 

I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They al...

For several years running, noted marketing expert David Meerman Scott would access all the corporate press releases captured by major wire services. These covered product launches, major client signings and other moments when companies would talk about what distinguished them from their competitors. He posted his analysis of all this data and, without fail, almost all of them chose the same words to describe ...