Ever heard of cookie pop-ups? It’s true that it’s hard to escape them. Following the 2011 Cookie Directive, sites have finally complied. But rather than deleting cookies, they have installed cookie pop-ups, which throw annoying messages at you and prevent you from surfing the web. They’re useless, mostly because they don’t really improve data confidentiality. Their main purpose is for sites that track your data for advertising purposes to cover their tracks and pretend they’ve become...

Is GenAI content marketing-friendly? Adobe organised a round-table discussion during their Experience Makers conference in Paris at the end of last year. The debate brought together a few digital experts. During this debate, I mentioned that there were limitations associated with GenAI image production and that they weren’t technical. Others contended that it was just a matter of prompt engineering. In my opinion, proper prompting may be recommended, but the limitations of GenAI image...

The state of influencer marketing in Europe 2024 is a survey conducted by Kolsquare, a leading European influencer marketing agency. It provides a particularly interesting perspective on influencer marketing budgets, how influencer marketing is handled and its future trends. Besides, its comparison of Europe’s main markets for IM is clearly enlightening. It’s one of the first if not the first of its kind and it sheds light on the way that businesses are conducting marketing with Key Opinion...

The Cyber threat landscape in Europe is quite worrying. A recent survey by Cloudflare was conducted amongst 4,261 IT executives responsible for cybersecurity in Europe. 24% of the sample is made from small enterprises (150–999 employees), 24% from medium-sized businesses (1,000–2,500 employees) and 52% from large organisations (above 2,500 employees). All major European countries were surveyed by Cloudflare in their study entitled Shielding the future: Europe’s cyber threat landscape. The...

Content creation with artificial intelligence is already old hat as it’s been going on for a few years and, unfortunately, slop is now populating the Internet at an increasing pace. Yet, when I received this message from a good friend of mine last week regarding Google’s new app entitled NotebookLM, I was shellshocked. I tried it and tested it and felt immediately overwhelmed. Having slept over it for a few days, I’m just recovering, so here are my impressions.  NotebookLM by Google:...

Whereas Ed Zitron is castigating the major Tech players responsible for the peak of inflated expectations surrounding AI, many tech pundits are still touting that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is within reach. To find out if AGI is a myth or a reality, I interviewed J.G. Ganascia, a long-time AI researcher and philosopher. In the course of our discussion, I gathered that the singularity and AGI weren’t the same thing. This interview set a lot of the record straight, particularly...

Our reporters attended the Paris Retail Week 2024 event, a trade show of which we are media partners, to take stock of fraud and the role of AI. We collected a lot of valuable feedback on threats (both in-store and e-commerce) and the countermeasures proposed by artificial intelligence. To do so, we interviewed Gilles Bijaoui, head of CX at Fujitsu (Customer Experience being the name of the retail division chosen by the Japanese company). During this discussion,  which took place at the...

What is the likely impact of AI and GenAI in particular on jobs, especially in Europe? Two recent reports on the topic, one in the UK and another one in France shed light on this question. According to the French report, such impact could amount to 5%. Yet another case for precision vs accuracy. That figure seems counter-intuitive when so many self-proclaimed AI gurus, especially on LinkedIn, are hailing the GenAI “revolution“. Besides, the authors of the UK report don’t agree at all with...

Whether it’s music and AI, or innovation in the broad sense of the term, at Visionary Marketing we like to look back in time. A few days ago, while doing the housekeeping of some of our 3,000 articles, we rediscovered this post by Mia Tawile written in July 2016. Eight years is the equivalent of 8 dog years on the Internet, to use that hackneyed motto from the early days of the Web. That is to say, 64 years and 3 months. And at a time when Suno is sending shivers down the spines of every...

Thomas Deneux is the founder of Learning Robots whose aim is to help pupils, students and businesses to learn AI, with the help of home-made self-driving gizmos. These little machines on two wheels are more serious than you’d think. They are all about the teaching of advanced computing. Thomas described his philosophy to me during this interview conducted at the heart of the Neuroscience Institute of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). In essence, a no-nonsense approach...

Walking down the roads of strategic thinking for professional networking or business building, most of us would agree to name LinkedIn as a well-built pathway to tread on. What’s better than understanding the dynamics of LinkedIn as a professional networking platform from someone who trains consultants and is an expert regarding that platform. Daniel Alfon from Tel Aviv wrote the book entitled, “How to Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success“. For most of us in the B2B marketing or...

What are the most outstanding new features of LinkedIn in 2024? Reid Hoffmann’s professional network was created almost 21 years ago (in May 2003) and acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Visionary Marketing invited Bruno Fridlansky to talk about this platform, of which he is an expert. Together we were able to answer a few basic questions about using the tool and review some of its latest features. It’s worth noting that Bruno isn’t ecstatic about most of them. The New Features of LinkedIn Under...

What if hiring luxury venues during the 2024 Olympics were a good opportunity for brands, even small ones?  The Olympic Games are only six months away from now and I was wondering how much of an opportunity it was for brands and which ones. To find out I invited Tanya Bencheva, the CEO and founder of Native Spaces, to share her reflections on that subject. Little did I imagine, when I first contacted Tanya, that there were so many options for smaller brands. It’s certainly up for grabs and...

Just like the Trojan war, the AI “revolution” will not take place*. Today’s topic is the inevitable generative AI. This is the perfect opportunity for us to discuss what a technological revolution is or isn’t. Here are our thoughts, and we might as well warn you that we are putting our trotters in the trough in a very counter-intuitive way. Admittedly, we’re taking a bit of a risk here, but keeping up with the Joneses isn’t a valid option for Visionary Marketers. As we know the subject well...

How can a responsible marketer survive when the world around us is crumbling? Or at least when experts are telling you that it is. Three years to the day, the French association of marketers Adetem asked Visionary Marketing to join its CSR responsible marketing initiative, and naturally we welcomed the opportunity. That almost seemed natural to us. However, things aren’t that simple and many questions remain. Here are our thoughts on the subject even though there are more questions than...

Will marketers survive the content shock in the age of AI? The Omnes Education Group launched a cross-organisational programme in English called “Content creation in the age of AI” to help its students better understand GenAI. Close to 1,000 students will be certified in this program by early February 2024. As part of the program, Visionary Marketing interviewed Mark Schaefer, one of the world’s most renowned marketing bloggers, to gain insights on how marketers should approach the new...

According to a recent Forrester report (How Generative AI Will Transform CRM), GenAI may have significant and beneficial impacts on Customer Relationship Management systems and practices. The real question is, however, how effective GenAI could be when it comes to handling various customer-facing tasks? And how easily could it adapt to specific CX applications? Forrester’s analysts surmise that using massive bodies of data and large language models (LLMs), one could achieve better...

What are the applications of geographic information systems? Following our discussion with Catherine Crook, we asked Floyd Bull to answer that question for us. Geographic information systems and their applications How did you get started with GIS? During college, I saw geographic information systems as an opportunity that would lead to jobs after my studies. Throughout the first years, I began seeing all the applications that can be used and fell in love with GIS.  My favorite part as a...

Visionary Marketing spoke with Catherine Crook ­– senior GIS program manager for Hexvarium – to discuss the use of geographic information systems or GIS and its impact on communication networks and the world. We touch on her day-to-day obligations as a senior gas program manager. The software is used for tracking systems, the issue of climate change, and more. Catherine provides a very insightful view on the emerging GIS that is becoming an autonomous type of tracking space. However, there is...

Product Information Management (PIM) systems are a driving force behind a good customer experience. A 2023 survey entitled “Elevating customer experiences with product experiences”, sheds light on how product information can greatly enhance CX. Virginie Blot, Product Experience Management evangelist at Akeneo, gave us her point of view and analysis on that survey. Place a Product Information Management System at the heart of your Customer Experience Web-rooming/Showrooming: What are the...

A recent study on behavioral targeting demonstrates the evolution of consumer behavior and its impact on segmentation in consumer marketing. While criticisms of profile-based segmentations are nothing new, the study in question provides a quantified demonstration of the extent of change in this area. It also provides figures and details on the various so-called “Behavioral situation-based” targeting in the UK. However, despite marketers’ awareness of the weakness of profile-based targeting,...

The green market revolution (impacts, how to adapt and change retail business models and organisations) was the title of Forrester‘s Thomas Husson’s Keynote at the Paris Retail Week 2023 Trade Show. A topic of vital interest to our readers and ourselves. We interviewed Thomas to better understand how urgent the situation is, and how consumers and retailers are reacting. Thomas named a few best practices in this area. Not everything is perfect in that unfolding “green market revolution”, of...

The learning curve that governs qualitative marketing studies is pivotal if you want to avoid ending up with mountains of useless data. What’s more, the kind of data produced by marketing studies is unstructured and complex. Gathering too much of it will also inevitably lead to soaring costs. Our simple methodology based on the experience curve of qualitative studies is a good starting point for making the most of these studies. What’s more, it’s a good means of improving effectiveness. The...

AI may be fun to play with but its implementation within businesses is a tad more complex. Visionary Marketing attended a round table discussion on the impact of generative AI on businesses and the future of work at Big Data AI Paris in September 2023. AI and IT experts from different backgrounds were able to shed some light on the dos and don’ts of the integration of artificial intelligence within enterprises. In a nutshell, there are four main areas one should never overlook:...