Digital markets adopt different personalities as they evolve, shaped not just by the availability of connected devices but also by the attitudes towards them.

And that means marketers need to look beyond internet penetration statistics when planning their connection strategies. Understand the intersection of access and attitudes, and you have the key to turning fragmenting media into precise communication.

The goal of most advertising is to acquire new customers. Unfortunately, that’s not what most advertising actually does. In this feature, we explain how many apparently successful ads only deliver significant engagement amongst consumers who would most likely have bought the brand anyway. And we reveal the characteristics that enable advertising to do more than simply sell to the converted: How the pre-existence of affective memories exerts huge influence over the effectiveness of advertising

Giant companies from rapid-growth economies are transforming the make-up of global business.

They are doing so through decisive corporate cultures, in-depth market understanding and a precision approach to identifying and acting upon opportunities.

In this feature, we look at the six key characteristics that give emerging giants their competitive edge – and ask how they can keep that edge sharp as they expand their reach to new markets:

Predicting, managing and profiting from new technologies is one of the most important challenges that business leaders face.

It requires them to integrate a hugely diverse range of perspectives in a meaningful way: they must balance the insights of technology specialists with those of consumer experts, they must understand the related technologies that will determine a new launch’s success, and they must predict the moves and motivations of all of the players behind those technologies.

The world has many popular brands but only a select few have the magnetic power of irresistibility. Using NeedScope, TNS has now revealed what it takes to become an irresistible brand – and why it is so important to do so.

Brand equity may provide a clear, single-number measure of how brands are doing, but it is situational equity that often holds the key to helping them do better.

If brand equity is the marketing equivalent of Robert Brown’s famous pollen grain, then situation equity is the thousands of tiny movements in water molecules that cause the grain to move. It represents the drivers of brands’ ‘Brownian’ motion and holds the key to understanding what is really going on in any particular market context.