A quick note: this site has now officially moved over to www.serialmarketer.net. Thanks for your readership here over the years. Please update your feeds, bookmarks, etc, and please join me on the new journey. David Continue reading

A slightly abridged version of this column was originally published in Ad Age. After trying to make my own existence obsolete by creating a bot, I’ve discovered that I must continue on in my corporeal being, as bots still have a few kinks. But this attempt at bot creation offered a good taste of what bots can do, what they can’t, and what marketers will need to overcome in the short-term. The bot, which connects... Continue reading

Next week, I'm going to head up to Boston to sit down with the folks at Vivoom to give a talk on mobile marketing best practices and what it means for the future of mobile. The good news is that the talk will be broadcast online, so go to vivoom.co/webinar to sign up for it, and then tune in August 4 at 1pm EST for the event. For my part, I've crafted some new material... Continue reading

After I penned my Ad Age column about Pokemon Go, I decided to try my hand at a Pokemon tweetstorm. #PokemonGO marketing #tweetstorm coming. Watch this space… (1/15) — David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) July 12, 2016 I couldn't figure out how to embed the whole thing (please give me any pointers if you know how). However, I did have drafts of the tweets saved before, and I only had minor edits, mostly for character length. #PokemonGO... Continue reading

Instead of just reposting the Ad Age article that I ran this week at the outset of the Pokemon Go craze, I'm sharing a substantially different version below. After several rounds of edits, my Ad Age piece, "A Marketer's Guide to Pokemon Go," is about 50% shorter. That probably makes it a better read, so I recommend you read it there, and share it there, and comment there about how it's one of the 50... Continue reading

originally published in Ad Age A Sniff Test for the Internet of Things My air freshener is connected to the internet. Now I know what the internet of things smells like: floral notes covering up overpriced hardware and overcomplicated software that provide a marginal benefit. When the Febreze Home internet-connected plug-in air freshener arrived in the mail this month, I opened the box and beheld yet another questionable impulse buy. I ordered it during this... Continue reading

In CMO.com, Matthew Schwartz just published a story on paid, owned, and earned media. I shared a few thoughts: “One of the big reasons for the confusion with PEO is you often have one component in ascendance and another decreasing,” said David Berkowitz, who was most recently CMO of MRY, part of Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). “Right now ‘PEO’ is more like uppercase ‘P,’ lowercase ‘e,’ and lowercase ‘o.” [PEO is] increasingly driven... Continue reading

This post originally ran in Ad Age. The image above is the rate card from QQTube. How to Make a Bad Impression When it comes to digital marketing, you always get a second chance to make an impression. Impressions are cheap, and way too many buyers and sellers still rely on them as currency. While this has been an issue for decades, marketers can’t stop their impression addiction. This is partly because impressions (and equivalent... Continue reading

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining a ridiculously sharp group talking about evaluating marketing technologies. MediaPost covers the highlights (ignore that they call it OMMA Programmatic instead of OMMA Marketing Tech); I've included some excerpts below. Thanks Jess Joines for moderating a stellar session. Excerpts: “Vetting the Vendors” at OMMA Programmatic on Wednesday addressed these issues with a panel led by Jessica Joines, co-founder & partner at Industry Index, a firm that ranks... Continue reading

In November 2005, ten and a half years ago, I launched the MarketersStudio.com blog. The name was inspired by Inside the Actors Studio. The original idea was to build on the interviews I published at eMarketer from 2001-2004. I probably should have done a lot more of that. Now, some change is coming. I will still keep up writing and blogging, but as I've started to do some consulting during this break from my agency... Continue reading

Those who have a keen eye for spotting title changes may notice something a little different in my bio line, so let's all get that out in the open. Yes, I am ditching the use of "former agency CMO" so I can focus on what's ahead, not in the past. Serial Marketer is the name I'm using for my proprietorship, and I'll have a lot more to say about how that came about shortly. Consider... Continue reading

The New York Times ran an important story on gender bias in the ad industry. The timing was interesting for me. I was sharing an UberPool with someone en route to iMedia's Agency Summit yesterday, and the topic came up with the other passenger. She's an aspiring fashion designer who was in town for a few months from Chicago, and when I brought up my industry, she referenced "Mad Men." I noted how some issues... Continue reading

I'm here at iMedia's Agency Summit in Lost Pines, TX on a panel (details below) about the nature of the agency and client relationships. It's only slightly ironic, as this is the first time in more than ten years that I'm not actually with an agency, and it's probably the only time (anytime soon) I will use "former" as my official title (more on that soon). If you happen to be out here in Texas,... Continue reading

originally published in Advertising Age To understand what happened at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year, pick up a physics textbook. Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion can be considered the primary law of the festival, and of the entire advertising industry: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." The law can explain practically every cultural phenomenon. It predicts how the rise of gyms and low-calorie foods coincided with the spike... Continue reading

Will you be attending any of the events below? Let me know, as it would be great to connect around them. First, this Thursday, March 24, I return to MediaPost for Marketing:Automotive for a session where I'll draw from the research MRY put out a bit ago at the intersection of mobility and cars. Here are the details of this session at 2:30pm: Panel: Technology and Younger Buyers: Sea Change Ahead? General Motors’ recent partnership... Continue reading

Ahead of the session on the future of storytelling that I'm doing with German Haus at SXSW (see details here), I'm using ReplyAll to chat with host Irmela Schwab about themes from the session. This post will be continually updated as we have the conversation, and you can follow along right here. Continue reading

SXSW 2016 is fast upon us, so continuing what can now be considered something of a tradition, here is this year's #DamnSXSW preview deck, with a convenient preview of SXSW and a template you can fill out for your own recap decks after. SXSW 2016 Preview: #DamnSXSW, back at it again with the Obamas! from David Berkowitz Continue reading

We're going all German, all the time here at Marketers Studio. Following up on the previous news that I will be joining an illustrious roster at German Haus at SXSW, Thanks to my new friends at SMG Germany (shoutout to Johannes Lenz), they asked me some pretty interesting questions about marketing in general and my role in particular. I hope my answers remotely lived up to the questions. Here's an excerpt: Johannes If you would... Continue reading

Are you going to SXSW 2016? Do you like tech startups? Do you love Germans? Are you a Rebecca Lieb groupie? Any of these are good reasons to stop by German Haus. As if you needed a reason to stop by German Haus! And better still, you get to see me not once, not thrice, but twice! On March 12, at 9:30am, you can catch me on this session: INTERNATIONAL BREAKFAST: DIGITAL STORYTELLING - HOW... Continue reading

In what feels overdue, I'm finally making it to Mobile World Congress for the first time this year. I'll be speaking at Mobile Media Summit on the session detailed below. You can also find a slew of updates on Twitter from my colleagues at Starcom Mediavest Group by checking out the hashtag #SMGatMWC. You can also check out SMG's full speaker roster, featuring Laura Desmond, Lisa Donohue, and other luminaries. If you are out at... Continue reading

originally published in Ad Age Members of the Alpha Generation, on the heels of Generation Z, are only 0 to 2 years old today. They account for absolutely no purchasing power. But they will soon take over the world -- because that's what subsequent generations supposedly do. I have spent thousands of hours observing one member of the Alpha Generation, and I have done meticulous ethnographic research on her peers in playdates, at family gatherings,... Continue reading

It's an annual tradition - getting the CES recap deck up before CES is even over. This year, I've altered the flow somewhat, focusing more on overarching trends and themes, and leaving the tech highlights for dessert. But it's all there. And as per usual, there are tons of links cited throughout the deck, and a grand recap of many more at the end, so you may just want to skip ahead and read it... Continue reading

With my friends at Riddle, I've got a fun CES quiz for you. I learned a few things along the way. Take the quiz and let me know how well you did. <div style="display: none;" data-mce-style="display: none;"><section><h2>How well do you know the biggest tech flops of the past 10 years?</h2><div>Some came with massive hype, others just fizzled out from humble beginnings. Let's see how well you remember these mega tech flops!</div></section><section><h3>Microsoft made plenty of noise... Continue reading

As part of my preview of this year's Consumer Electronics Show (embedded below), I included a slide at the end, updated a number of times, with some of the best coverage previewing the show. To make it even easier, here's the list: CES 2016 Innovation Awards (CES) CES 2016 Sneak Peek: 9 Cool Gadgets (InformationWeek) Top Technology Trend to Watch 2016-2018 (Forrester) Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016 (Forbes) Marketers: 5 Technologies You... Continue reading

Attending CES for ten years means traveling a total of 50,000 miles (from New York), navigating about 20 million square feet of exhibit space, mingling with some subset of more than 1.5 million attendees, and creating at least 1,000 slides for recap decks. I also know that one’s status as a rookie or veteran is determined by others; my familiarity with the Consumer Electronics Show is dwarfed by those who have been attending for decades.... Continue reading