Digital marketing | EPFL Graph Search

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly used digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provi

Digital model-making and the encoding of design intent

Nathaniel Zuelzke

Across many generations, including the digitally naïve and savvy, digital technologies introduce something other to the design process. This other quality ranges from inaccessibility to facile but opaque production of complexity, yet in all cases has obscured the recognition of authorial control. Fundamentally, my research interrogates this loss of control, or confusion of agency. Using the architectural model as a site of inquiry, I seek out sources of authorial control in digital design and ultimately speculate productive forms of digital agency for architecture. Digital models should be understood as continuing the legacy of architectural models rather than as a novel product of technology. As a mediator of communication, all models represent in increasing levels of abstraction. Understood literally, models mediate as images. In the formalization of underlying structure, models mediate as diagrams. Formulating structure as abstract logic, models mediate as mathematics. Digital models continue to mediate in these manners, but the nature of digital media places a new emphasis on the precise, computable definition of all of these roles. The digital process allows an author to construct a creative dialogue with a model. In this way, models are tools which operate on patterns of thought by creating feedback loops in the model- author dialogue. Formalized as the return of output back to a process as input, feedback is a mechanism which may structure both architectural form and the design decision-making process itself. In complex natural systems, feedback explains the formation of organizational patterns. In cybernetics, feedback explains the auto-regulation of an organized system. All forms of feedback can be understood as the cyclical communication of information. As such, processes of transmission and translation play a crucial role in the conveyance of information from source to receiver and back. Applied to digital model-making, feedback becomes an active decision-making mechanism, allowing an author to construct an apparatus to aid evaluation of work-in-progress and definition of increasingly specific intents. Appropriating the techno-industrial concept of design intent and citing the computational mathematical basis of digital models, I speculate the existence of a non-metaphorical solution space which can be instrumentalized by digital designers. The formalized yet iteratively changing set of possible solutions to an interpreted design problem is termed “intention space.” Computational codification of design intent makes mathematical descriptions of a digital model accessible and affords the possibility for a directed search thorough the model’s highly-structured intention space. Intention space demystifies the digital design process enabling architects to directly manipulate digital media both intuitively and deliberately. The idea of intention space is explicitly contrasted with two prevailing theories of control in digital methods: authorless design and split agency. Unlike these assertions, the encoding of design intent through mechanisms of constructed feedback and visualized as intention space proffers digital technologies as uniquely enabling instruments within the creative process.

EPFL2012

Managing competing technology standards in the digital economy

Arnaud Varé

Over the last decades, battles for technological dominance between competing and incompatible technologies have had a significant impact on competition within many high-tech industries. In this dissertation, we are concerned with the management of such standards wars. We recognize that many changes have occurred in the technology environment since the beginning of the digital economy (and especially the commercialization of the Internet). We acknowledge, in particular, that an alleged winner of a standards war can rarely "take all" in the current technology environment, whereas this was possible in the past. Therefore, using a qualitative literature survey supported by three case studies, we investigate how the fast-moving technology environment influences the tactical choices of companies trying to establish their products as de facto standards. We analyze the evolution of standards wars by determining the changes in influence factors and emerging technology trends. These changes increase the pressures on timing and the competition exposure in standards competitions. We develop the portfolio of tactics that competing companies should apply in the management of emerging standards wars, composed both of traditional and new deployment tactics. Borrowing from significant change factors and new deployment tactics in standards war, we specifically study a relevant dimension of current standards wars – conversion technologies. Technology digitalization simplifies and speeds up the development of converters allowing companies to overcome technology incompatibility. We differentiate between incumbent-provided and third-party converters. When converters are incumbent-provided, we develop mathematical models to analyze the effects of their introduction on the adoption process of competing, incompatible technologies in the presence of network externalities. Converter introduction may accelerate, extend or reverse the technology lock-in process. We determine which conversion options are profitable for weak, as well as for dominant, incumbents, depending upon the timing of converter introduction and the degrees of conversion. We find that the optimal strategy for weak incumbents is to introduce full one-way converters early on. For dominant incumbents, the optimal conversion option is the provision of two-way converters with partial compatibility for the users of the competing network at a later point in time. In a following piece, we extend our modeling framework by investigating the provision of third-party converters. We develop a mathematical model to analyze the effects of third-party converter introduction on the adoption process of incumbents' base technologies. We determine under what circumstances third parties may maximize their profit. We show that the optimal converter introduction time depends on a trade-off between conversion option and consumers' memory effect. The preferred conversion option is mostly two-way conversion. As a result, the lock-in process of base technologies gets accelerated due to third-party converter provision. From incumbents' perspective, we discuss how they can anticipate and react to third-party converter introduction. By keeping their network closed, creating an installed base early, developing a built-in converter and/or influencing consumers' converter perception, incumbents reduce third parties' incentive to introduce converters.

EPFL2008

Digital model-making and the encoding of design intent

Nathaniel Zuelzke

EPFL2012

Managing competing technology standards in the digital economy

Arnaud Varé

EPFL2008