 |  | Brandon GutmanPartner, FOCi Group
Brandon is a Founding Partner of FOCi Group, a strategic Digital Brand Management™ consultancy that helps define digital excellence and drive innovation for the Fortune 500 community. Through a combination of consumer insight, proven technologies and leading industry talent, FOCi Group powers and empowers organizations in the areas of digital competency, online listening and analysis, corporate education and strategic cross-platform digital programming.
Brandon is an expert connector and seasoned business development professional. At FOCi Group, he finds the right talent, resources and technologies to help clients succeed in the digital marketplace. Brandon is a prolific, highly respected writer serving as a weekly columnist for digiday:DAILY and contributing to such outlets as About Online Advertising, iMedia Connection and TheLadders.com.
Brandon also serves as a panelist for AlwaysOn’s OnMedia 100 and AO 250, selecting companies for inclusion within the global technology industry’s exclusive lists of top private companies. Prior to FOCi Group, Brandon’s hidden hand placed online-savvy executives at dozens of the world’s leading brands.
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| Wednesday, February 10, 2010 Digital technology companies need to be smarter about the companies they pitch. The result will be more business for everyone involved and a better customer experience. Marketing
Read more | Comments (0) | | Tuesday, January 26, 2010 It seems a new advertising technology emerges every day, with marketers and agencies rushing to jump on the bandwagon while trends evolve. As exciting as all that innovation is, unless it’s integrated properly, new technology cannot fulfill its highest potential and, in fact, it can amount to a colossal waste of marketers’ funds and energy. With technologies and consumer behavior literally evolving every day, is there any way for brand marketers to keep ahead of the curve?
New technology is not only out there, it’s swarming around brand marketers. [...] Marketing, Social
Read more | Comments (0) | | Tuesday, January 12, 2010 As we settle into the second official week of the New Year, and everyone is back cranking on projects big and small, it’s hard not to wonder what’s ahead in 2010. There’s more hope in the air than there was this time last year; a sense that things are turning up in the industry, that the economy is finally showing signs of life. With that in mind, what will be the biggest story in technology in 2010? What will be the most unexpected surprise? And from where I sit, a twist on that question: what should brands be paying attention to as they shape their digital strategy for the coming year? In a constantly shifting space, what will matter and what will just amount to chatter?
While the tech headlines buzz with recent M&A shakeups, I think it’s worth noting that there’s just as much happening—if not more—in companies with fewer zeros behind them. [...] Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Wednesday, December 23, 2009 We tend to assume that because masses of people are flocking to the Internet, it is, therefore, a mass medium. It is not. In a mass medium, you have an audience that is assembled either because you control air-time (like TV) or because you control space (like a magazine or an amphitheatre). On the Internet you control neither.
Like a crowded street in Times Square, lots of people are spinning through the Internet from different places for different reasons and they control their own time and space. [...] Marketing, Media, Metrics, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (2) | | Friday, December 4, 2009 Digital Brand Management is becoming the critical new discipline for marketing in the digital age. Digital can no longer be looked upon as a “post-strategic’ channel or as a simple one-off, add-on or after-thought. It reflects the new paradigm of this transforming world of ours; that digital must be at the core of a brand’s strategic platform. Marketing companies that continue to think of digital only as a series of tactical channels or platforms will do so to their long-term detriment.
The discipline of Digital Brand Management applies the techniques of traditional brand management: analysis, planning, implementation and measurement, but with a much more rigorous, robust approach. [...] Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, November 6, 2009 Today the lines have blurred between publishers and brands living in the digital world. Brands are no longer content to merely rent access to their consumers from publishers. Instead they are creating their own slick digital hubs that include entertainment, information, communities and more-- offering an experience where they control and ultimately own the links to their customers.
How will brands and publishers collide and coexist in pursuit of a profitable relationship with consumers? FOCi Group assembled and moderated a panel at DPAC4 to address this topic. [...] Marketing, Media, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, October 30, 2009 Today the lines have blurred between publishers and brands living in the digital world. Brands are no longer content to merely rent access to their consumers from publishers. Instead they are creating their own slick digital hubs that include entertainment, information, communities and more-- offering an experience where they control and ultimately own the links to their customers. How will brands and publishers collide and coexist in pursuit of a profitable relationship with consumers? FOCi Group assembled and moderated a panel at DPAC4 to address this topic. [...] Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, October 23, 2009 You’re not alone. Most marketers are trying to figure out the process of building and managing their brands for the digital age. Even the most sophisticated organizations can fill buckets with what they don’t know about digital and its constantly increasing potential. In this article, FOCi Group defines Digital Brand Management, provides a four step process for DBM and suggests why brands need to own digital.
Digital Brand Management Defined
Digital Brand Management is no longer a subset of marketing. [...] Marketing, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, October 16, 2009 Hearing what your customers have to say – whether they like or dislike your products or services and ultimately whether they are advocates, evangelists or detractors is the critical first step in laying the groundwork for an effective digital and social media strategy. To be successful today, brands need to understand what consumers are saying, why they're saying it and how their dialogue has the potential to impact business. Here are four steps that FOCi Group follows to help marketers capture, interpret and apply online chatter into actionable and measurable results. [...] Marketing, Media, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, October 9, 2009 There is a primary reason why most brands are not yet taking advantage of the full benefits from digital and social media. It is because senior leadership does not completely understand the value proposition. In this article we’re going to illustrate how a marketer from a major organization packaged and positioned a digital marketing proposal to their leadership team. Not only did it cause a significant budget shift to digital, the digital marketing plan generated results that satisfied the entire organization. [...] Marketing, Media, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Friday, October 2, 2009 Social media is the hottest trend in digital marketing at the moment and brands are quickly recognizing that they need a presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to better interact with consumers. However, most are struggling with how to measure and communicate the impact of programs on these social networking platforms. What's the value of a tweet by someone with 100,000 followers? Does your brand's 45,000 Facebook friends translate into anything meaningful? How many of the people watching a promotional YouTube video will actually purchase the product? [...] Marketing, Media, Metrics, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (1) | | Thursday, September 24, 2009 Last week John Gaffney wrote about the sheer amount of people on the panels and the amount of ideas flowing through the rooms during digiday:MOBILE/SOCIAL. It was especially interesting when John shared how a social media expert emailed him during the event to say, “my head is spinning.” Some of the panels and presentations during the Ad Week festivities might not have been as advanced as the content from digiday last week; however, it seems to take a lot less to spin the heads of most marketers. [...] Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Thursday, September 17, 2009 Social media represents the bulk of next week’s content for Advertising Week. In fact, the theme at OMMA is actually “The New Socialism.” The basis is that many industry watchers believe the answer to online advertising’s oldest problem lies inside social media’s walled gardens: that is, how to bring the estimated $500 billion spent annually on offline brand advertising to the Web. However, it doesn’t appear that most marketers share that belief…yet.
It’s time for marketers to understand that consumers have more control of their brand online than they do. [...] Marketing, Media, Social
Read more | Comments (0) | | Thursday, September 10, 2009 Many large brands have begun questioning the ability of their agencies of record to handle the rampant emergence of technology and new media resources. This reaction is causing huge concern with marketers about what type of relationship they should have with their agencies going forward in the digital age. Marketers are realizing that digital is a technologically driven sector and they need an alternative support group to help them achieve success in this new world.
Advertising agencies and marketing services companies provide critical roles from generating the next big ideas, developing creative and executing across traditional programming areas. [...] Marketing, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (1) | Friday, September 4, 2009Marketing, Social, Technology
Read more | Comments (0) | | Thursday, August 27, 2009 Last week I shared how collaborating with Brand Builders, Digital Strategists and Technologists is a key ingredient in building digital strategies that are guaranteed to deliver. Now let’s discuss how an integration unit can lead this trio of talent to execute the plan towards greater levels of success.
Masters of Integration
Once the plan is complete it is imperative to utilize a core account service team consisting of business and marketing strategists fluent in all advertising and marketing service programming areas. [...] Marketing, Media, Technology
Read more | Comments (2) | | Wednesday, August 19, 2009 What marketers don't know about building a successful digital strategy will rock their world! The critical first step in building a winning plan is to define success and establish realistic goals. This might sound obvious; however, our group has found that even the most sophisticated organizations don’t have a clear understanding of what success in digital looks like for them.
How can marketers (and their agencies) follow a plan that doesn’t let them know if they’re winning or losing? I’m going to give up some of our secret sauce by illustrating how using three groups of talent can help set benchmarks and also deliver against them!
Work with Brand Builders
Clients have tagged our group as “a digital McKinsey with the depth and experience to execute. [...] Marketing, Media, Technology
Read more | Comments (2) | | Tuesday, August 11, 2009 A huge factor of marketing life today is how social media is changing the game for brands and consumers alike. Online crowds now have more to say about your brand than all the world’s ad agencies combined – yet digital marketing is still a sideshow at most companies.
Recently, I witnessed a CEO ask their CMO “what are we doing with digital media?” The CMO answered: “We’re testing some things…it’s hard to get ahead of the curve when technologies and consumer behavior are evolving so quickly. [...] Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social, Technology
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