Kendall Allen
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Kendall Allen

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About Kendall Allen

Kendall Allen serves numerous media and data technology clients for WIT Strategy as a Senior Associate in corporate affairs and media relations, as her primary engagement. She also runs collaborative pursuits through her company, Influence Collective, LLC. -- advising and supporting media and tech entrepreneurs in cooperation with other trusted partners and firm principals.

Kendall Allen's latest articles

Marketing operations (MOps)

Is Our Industry Finally Maturing? Thoughts From Internet Week NY

For many a year at many a major seasonal conference, seasoned attendees would look around and see no end to the hype. While legitimate, long-standing business themes — integrated marketing, leveraging your media mix, standards, attribution and allocation and, of course, ecosystem “complexity” — always get their airtime… we often see sort of a hazy […]

Performance marketing

Choosing A Media Agency: Look Inside & Hold Up The Mirror

In our industry, we are constantly evaluating the way we choose our vendors and agencies. Increasingly, we are applying the same scrutiny, inspection and even introspection to how we choose our clients. Matches made in heaven are rare and certainly not static. The landscape around us is constantly changing, so keeping the evaluation ongoing and […]

Marketing management

A Simple Commitment To “Experience” May Just Ease Marketer Distress

This week, I spent some time with Adobe’s recent report, Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night? [PDF]. It was an online study of 1,000 marketers, including both digital marketers and marketing generalists, ranging from marketing staff to high-level decision-makers. As one might anticipate, this report chronicles and quantifies marketers’ anxieties about their profession. The […]

Marketing management

The Shortcomings We Tolerate

In our business — media, marketing, publishing, ad tech or whichever combination with which you self-identify — on our most effusive days, we marvel at our own progress. It’s a point of pride to have participated in the evolution, regardless of when you dipped in your toe and joined it: 80s, 90s, later or even […]

Performance marketing

The Great Exaggeration: Optimization

One of the so-called standard operating procedures we digital marketers espouse most vehemently is “optimization.” We believe we’ve got this practice nailed. Search practitioners coined the term and drove the movement from the earliest days — wielding a love for data, crude original campaign management systems, Excel-based testing matrices and a belief that optimization was […]

Performance marketing

What Has Become Of The SEO Guru?

While the term “guru” has been adopted by many an opportunist in a variety of industries, perhaps nowhere did it take such an inflated hold as in the early to middle years of the search segment of our industry. There was a time when the guru strode rampant across stages, board rooms, book tours and […]

Customer experience

Identifying Talent For The New Performance Marketing Culture

On the list of things we discuss in this industry, talent is one of the most persistent. Our expectations for our businesses transcend financial objectives and translate to high and sometimes restless standards for the talent we seek. In today’s performance marketing culture, the ideal talent profile is complicated and ever-changing. It’s not as straightforward […]

Performance marketing

Getting Ready For A Post-Search World

Search is no longer just one thing. At minimum, it’s two things: organic and paid. But, as the marketplace that holds it has evolved, search is so much more. It’s a composite of methods; it’s an ingredient; it’s a mechanic; it’s a mindset. While it’s not yet unrecognizable, even marketers who once deemed it a silver […]

Performance marketing

Holy Consumer: Keeping Demand in Check

Like most fellow zealots, my original love affair with search was all about the glories of being served up “consumer demand” — and being able to market and optimize to that demand. Expressed demand right at your fingertips was a beautiful thing. Following the ghostly spending period of 2001-2002, it made it much more palatable […]

Customer experience

Content Marketing Today: An All-Hands Enterprise

It used to be that adept optimization of your one or two platforms or environments – your .com and perhaps your blog — and the content and assets inhabiting those places — was enough of a day’s work to call yourself a Content Marketer. Properly tending to your SEO made you feel on top of […]

Performance marketing

It’s Complicated: The Awkward Socialization Of Search

All hail the vision of truly socialized search — where results and experience are personalized, drawing on social graphs, browsing history and reams of  input data to deliver on the concept. Our expectations for absolute interconnectivity of environments and extensive personalization have us drooling over this concept of search at a glance. But, taking the […]

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