It’s no news that marketers are often guilty of Shiny Object Syndrome — i.e., being mesmerized by the latest technology at the expense of business objectives. QR codes, scannable two dimensional bar codes, appear to be the latest shiny object for digital marketers.  In NYC, it is difficult to travel more than a few blocks before you encounter a QR code — on billboards, on a store window, in a cab, on a bus shelter or in a subway car.

But the ubiquity doesn’t mean that QR codes are effective.  A recent Twitter exchange with Uwe Hook (@uwehook), co-founder of … Read more

This past summer I had the great fortune of meeting Mike Schneider, SVP, Digital Incubator at Allen & Gerritsen.  We co-authored this piece which first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog as well as a white paper “Loyalty in 4-D: How Brands and Consumers Can Win at Location-Based Services” that you can download here.

Thanks to the emergence of location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Facebook Places, millions of users are recording their daily adventures and broadcasting digital breadcrumbs to their social graph. However, the brand value of a check-in on a location-based … Read more

This was originally written for, and posted on, MediaPost: Engage: Boomers.

Last week, scheduling a dinner meeting, I tried to recall the name of a restaurant where I had recently eaten a phenomenal cacio e pepe dish.  I could see the restaurant in my mind and even the approximate location but for the life of me I couldn’t remember its name.  I could have googled it or just described the location to my dinner guest had it not dawned on me: I could just log into … Read more