On Tuesday, MMW was briefed by the team at Verve — an industry leader in location-powered mobile marketing — about their launch of a new mobile video offering, expanding its suite of mobile advertising solutions.
The ability to overlay high-quality, first-party location data places Verve in a unique position to help brands “elevate their mobile strategy by enabling them to reach intended audiences with greater efficiency and relevance.”
As video viewership continues to migrate from fixed to mobile screens, it’s no surprise that brands have followed eyeballs with increased spend. The IAB recently reported in its 2016 Full Year Report that mobile video revenue increased 145 percent over the prior year to nearly $4.2 billion, demonstrating brands’ enthusiasm about the prospects of employing mobile video to engage consumers and drive business results.
“What we’re launching is in direct response to what we’re hearing from our clients and where consumer attention is going,” said Kevin Arrix, Chief Revenue Officer at Verve. “We see tremendous value in helping brands unlock the distinctive power of location data for mobile video, not only in terms of finding consumers in real-time but, more meaningfully, by targeting the most relevant audiences based on their historical movement patterns.”
Renault has teamed up with media agency Manning Gottlieb OMD and xAD, a location-based marketing company, to deliver a mobile campaign featuring 360 video.
The campaign, which is aimed at increasing the number of people choosing Renault for their company cars, sees boundaries placed around offices in the UK. Professionals in, and near, these offices are served Renault media experiences including ‘dynamic distance creative media units, standard video and 360 video’.
“Location targeting is increasingly becoming a strategic priority in our communication plans,” said Tom Hobbs, digital marketing manager at Renault. “Therefore, we were delighted to partner with MGOMD and xAd to accurately target the notoriously hard to reach professional audience of business consumers with an engaging 360 video experience that showcases the product in an innovative and exciting way, to drive real engagement and ultimately increase consideration.”
Renault’s campaign utilises xAD’s Blueprints technology to establish boundaries round offices, while also using the marketing company’s Geoblocks technology – which ‘uncovers the affinity between one type of location to another’.
“Choosing a car is not an overnight decision, so for manufacturers, having the insight as to whether prospective customers are in the market to consider their models is extremely valuable,” said Theo Theodorou, GM EMEA at xAD. “Previously brands were mainly limited to using niche professional media, but with location technology they are able to target business audiences in consumer environments and beyond, with relevant local experiences.”
Disruption to airspace in the Gulf began on Tuesday morning local time. Doha, Qatar’s capital, is a major hub for international flight connections.
Airlines affected by the airspace restrictions include Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways and Emirates.
When avoiding Saudi Arabia, their massive – and only – neighbour, Qatar’s planes are having to take more indirect routes, leading to longer flight times.
On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia revoked Qatar Airways’ licence and ordered the company’s Saudi offices to shut within 48 hours.
In a country reliant on imported food, residents have started to stockpile.
« People have stormed into the supermarket hoarding food, especially imported ones, » one Doha resident, Eva Tobaji, told Reuters. « It’s chaos – I’ve never seen anything like this before. »
How the economy may be hit: Andrew Walker, BBC News
Image copyright AFP
Image caption
Residents were stockpiling water on Monday
A substantial amount of Qatar’s food is transported across the border from Saudi Arabia, which is being closed. That is also an important route for construction materials – needed for the energy industry and for the preparations for the 2022 football world cup.
Qatar’s exports are dominated by oil and gas. They are mostly seaborne, so should not be immediately hit, but the general economic disruption could have an impact if the dispute drags on.
That possibility pushed the price of crude oil higher, but only briefly. Qatar is a member of the exporters’ group Opec and the dispute could yet undermine the organisation’s efforts to raise prices by restricting production.
While the severing of ties was sudden, it has not come out of the blue, as tensions have been building for years, and particularly in recent weeks.
Broadly, two key factors drove Monday’s decision: Qatar’s ties to Islamist groups, and to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.
Wealthy individuals in Qatar are believed to have made donations and the government has given money and weapons to hardline Islamist groups in Syria – Qatar says this is not the case.
The Financial Times also reports that Gulf allies were angry that Qatar paid a $1bn (£773m) ransom to jihadists and Iranian security officials after Qatari nationals were kidnapped in Iraq and Syria.
Saudi Arabia, too, has been accused of funding IS, either directly or by failing to prevent private donors from sending money to the group – allegations it denies.
Analysts also say the timing of the diplomatic withdrawal, two weeks after a visit to Riyadh by US President Donald Trump, is crucial.
Mr Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia, in which he blamed Iran for instability in the Middle East and urged Muslim countries to take the lead in combating radicalisation, is likely to have emboldened Gulf allies to act against Qatar.
In the same week as Mr Trump’s speech, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE blocked Qatari news sites, including Al Jazeera. Comments purportedly by Qatar’s Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, criticising Saudi Arabia had appeared on Qatari state media.
The government in Doha dismissed the comments as fake, attributing the report to a « shameful cybercrime ».
The latest reaction
Media captionUS Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urges Gulf states to « address differences »
In the interview with Al Jazeera, Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said Qatar would not retaliate but was unhappy with regional rivals « trying to impose their will on Qatar or intervene in its internal affairs »
He said Qatar’s emir, at the request of his Kuwaiti counterpart, had cancelled a speech scheduled later for Tuesday, to allow negotiations to proceed calmly
The Philippines, which has an estimated 200,000 residents in Qatar, said it had stopped the deployment of workers to the Gulf state
Philippines labour official Silvestre Bello told a new conference he feared Filipinos in Qatar would « be the first victims » in the event of riots over food shortages.
Are you due to fly to or from Qatar? Will you be affected by the disruption? Let us know by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk
[Breaking: British police identify third London Bridge attacker as Italian with Moroccan family ties]
LONDON — Police on Tuesday were facing questions over how one of the London Bridge attackers slipped through the net as the British Prime Minister Theresa May continued to come under attack over police funding cuts.
At least one of the attackers — Khuram Shazad Butt — who killed seven people during a rampage through central London had been been on the radar of security services.
On Tuesday, Italian media named the third attacker as Moroccan-Italian Youssef Zaghba. According to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Zaghba was stopped in Italy last year trying to go to Syria. London police have not confirmed the name. British police later confirmed the report.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, said that the police and security services will have questions to answer about why Butt was not stopped.
“People are going to look at the front pages today and they’re going to say ‘how on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net? What happened?” he told Sky News.
The admission that at least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to authorities has fueled a security debate already underway in Britain as the country counts down to an unpredictable election on Thursday.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan criticized the cuts to the police under the Conservative-led government and argued that London could lose frontline police officers if May’s Conservative Party triumphs in the election.
The Labour mayor told the BBC that the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with the attackers but said said that “there’s no doubt that fewer police officers means we are in more danger.”
When asked if the U.K. should rescind the offer of a state visit to President Trump following Trump’s recent criticisms of Khan, the London mayor told BBC that he had not changed his view that a state visit was inappropriate.
In a separate appearance on ITV, Khan also accused President Trump of making “ignorant comments about Muslims,” but he insisted he did not want to engage in a war of words with Trump.
“We are not kids in playground. He’s the president of the United States. I’m too busy to respond to his tweets. Isn’t he busy?”
At 11 a.m., the nation held a minute’s silence to remember all of those affected by the terror attack.
The two main candidates for prime minister — the incumbent, May, and the challenger, Jeremy Corbyn — traded barbs Monday over how security services can better protect the public after three mass-casualty attacks in as many months.
May, a Conservative, said that authorities will need greater powers to crack down on extremism and that Corbyn had blocked such efforts. Corbyn, the far-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, accused May of starving police and other security services of personnel and funds.
Both agreed that the country will have to make changes as security services — which for years successfully thwarted attacks on British soil — struggle to confront a threat that is growing in scale and tempo.
The agencies say they have disrupted 18 plots since 2013, including five in recent months.
The identities of the two attackers announced Monday fit a pattern. Much like the assailants in the two earlier attacks, these men had British roots and were peripheral to the focus of security agencies.
London’s Metropolitan Police identified the assailants as 27-year-old Butt, a British citizen who was born in Pakistan, and 30-year-old Rachid Redouane, who had claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan.
Both lived in the Barking area of east London, only a half-hour’s drive from London Bridge and Borough Market — the adjacent areas where victims were targeted Saturday night.
Butt had been investigated in 2015, was known by neighbors to be an extremist and was featured last year in a documentary on Britain’s Channel 4 called “The Jihadis Next Door.”
But police said that they had no warning of a plot and that their investigation of Butt had been shelved.
Redouane had not been known to the security agencies.
Police say they have 500 ongoing terrorism investigations and are keeping tabs on 3,000 individuals suspected of extremism. Investigations involving known plots, authorities say, take up the bulk of the security services’ resources.
The Islamic State claimed Sunday to have been behind the attack. But experts have cast doubt, noting that the group did not provide any details to prove its involvement. Similar claims in the past have been shown to be unreliable.
All three assailants in Saturday’s attack were fatally shot by police within eight minutes of the first emergency calls.
Saturday night’s attack injured dozens, including four police officers. Eighteen people remain in critical condition.
Christine Archibald, 30, a Canadian from the western province of British Columbia, was the first victim of the attack to be named. The 30-year-old had worked at a homeless shelter in Calgary before moving to Europe to live with her fiance.
“Please honor her by making your community a better place. Volunteer your time and labor or donate to a homeless shelter. Tell them Chrissy sent you,” her family said in a statement.
Criminal investigations into national security leaks tend to be long, complicated and delicate affairs. Sources generally cover their tracks, especially in an era when even the most innocuous computer activity leaves an electronic trail. Leaks are common, but prosecutions aren’t.
Edward Snowden took extraordinary precautions when he leaked troves of classified information on surveillance activity by the National Security Agency to journalists, and was charged only after he publicly revealed himself to be the source. Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive, wasn’t indicted for several years after he passed on details about fraud and waste at the agency to the Baltimore Sun. Originally accused of felony espionage, Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of exceeding authorized use of a computer.
In the case of Reality Leigh Winner, an NSA contractor accused of sending a top-secret document to a news outlet, federal authorities brought charges less than a week after being tipped off to the leak.
Winner, 25, was charged Monday with gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, as The Washington Post reported. Court documents did not identify the document that was leaked or the news outlet that received it, but the criminal complaint against Winner was unveiled shortly after the national security site the Intercept published a story containing an NSA report on Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.
The Post has reported that the charges are related to the Intercept’s story, which describes how Russian military intelligence used hacking techniques against a U.S. voting software supplier and more than 100 local election officials in the days before voters went to the polls. The Intercept called the classified document the “most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light,” saying it indicated that Russian hacking may have gone deeper than previously known.
A search warrant affidavit filed in federal court in Georgia reveals how it took just a few days for investigators to single out Winner as the alleged source of the leak.
It started on May 30, when the news outlet showed authorities the printed materials and asked them to comment, according to the affidavit.
“The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased,” the affidavit reads, “suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”
An internal audit showed that six people had printed out the top-secret materials after they were published at the beginning of the month. One of them was Winner, who worked for Pluribus International at a facility in Georgia, the affidavit says.
Investigators said they searched Winner’s work computer and found that she had emailed the news outlet in March from a personal account. In her message, they said, she appeared to ask for transcripts of a podcast. In response, the news outlet “confirmed Winner’s subscription to the service,” according to the affidavit.
The review of Winner’s computer history also showed that on May 9 she searched the agency’s classified system using search terms that led her to the report, the affidavit says. That day, it says, she printed the document.
The agency told the FBI about the leak on June 1. The same day, the affidavit says, an unidentified government contractor contacted the agency to say he had been in touch with a reporter from the news outlet, who had texted pictures of the document to verify their authenticity. The reporter told the contractor that the documents came through the mail and were postmarked “Augusta, Georgia,” according to the affidavit.
“The Contractor informed the Reporter that he thought that the documents were fake,” the affidavit reads. “Nevertheless, the Contractor contacted the U.S. Government Agency on or about June 1, 2017, to inform the U.S. Government Agency of his interaction with the reporter.”
The following day, FBI agents staked out Winner’s one-story red brick house near downtown Augusta, Ga., where they saw her driving a light-colored Nissan Cube, according to the affidavit.
Winner was arrested Saturday. When FBI agents questioned her at her home, she admitted “removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet,” court documents read. She remains in jail pending a detention hearing. Her lawyer declined to comment on the charges.
After the charges were announced Monday, some cybersecurity experts remarked on the apparent ease with which investigators were able to trace the leak back to Winner. Some went so far as to say the Intercept had “outed” her by posting copies of the document online. The Intercept said the materials were submitted anonymously.
According to Rob Graham, who writes for the blog Errata Security, the Intercept’s scanned images of the intelligence report contained tracking dots — small, barely visible yellow dots that show “exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.” Nearly all modern color printers feature such tracking markers, which are used to identify a printer’s serial number and the date and time a page was printed.
“Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document,” Graham wrote Monday.
Graham’s post gave a step-by-step demonstration of how investigators could have easily done just that. Using a tracking dot decoding tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he said he determined that he document “was from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218″ and printed on May 9, 2017, at 6:20 a.m.
“The NSA almost certainly has a record of who used the printer at that time,” Graham wrote.
Others picked up on the same point.
“Just a reminder, colour printers spy on you,” tweeted data analyst Tim Bennett. “This one embedded the exact time a U.S. government employee printed a subsequently leaked doc.”
Many see mobile as the top channel for video, but over-the-top (OTT) is looking like a strong challenger
Video is one of the most exciting and effective marketing channels today, and it’s only getting better as new technology and platforms emerge.
In the marketing world, much of the video conversation has focused on mobile, and for good reason.
“Consumers are spending more and more time on their mobile devices so there will always be a time and place for mobile,” says Tal Chalozin, CTO and co-founder of Innovid. “Mobile will always be a critical component to the customer journey ]and] marketers have no shortage of options when it comes to touch points and vehicles for message delivery, and mobile is a legitimate option.”
On mobile, due to the size of screen and data costs, shorter is better. So what can brands and content creators with bigger stories to tell do to get their messages to consumers?
Enter Over-the-top (OTT) platforms. These platforms—Apple TV, Roku, Sony’s Playstation 4, and Microsoft’s Xbox One—are ushering in the new, digital phase of premium TV.
“We are seeing that consumers prefer to watch long-form content on their television, particularly via an OTT device where they can watch the content they prefer on their own time,” Chalozin says. “Mobile video needs to be brief given shorter attention spans and retention levels. It’s two completely different experiences; with two completely different solutions. One is snackable and on-the-go and one is focused on more premium, long-form content.”
Longer videos lend themselves to longer breaks for advertising. In many ways, this is as close as marketers can get to recapturing the heyday of TV marketing. Indeed. The rise of OTT is a clear indicator that the death of TV-sized video has been greatly exaggerated.
“The future of television is television. While consumers are slowly decreasing the amount of time they spend watching linear television, it’s much more accurate to say TV consumption is evolving than it is to say it’s dying,” Chalozin says.
The OTT flavor of TV is doing more than simply evolving the format; OTT is growing, both for marketers and for consumers alike.
“We are seeing a boom in [OTT] devices and experiences, [as] 20% of all ads we deliver are placed via OTT devices. This represents a 300% year-over-year growth, and we don’t see this trend slowing down anytime soon,” Chalozin says.
Chalozin sites four trends in OTT that are driving video forward: the consolidation of small niche services into larger bundles; the near certainty that these bundles will start replacing cable TV subscriptions; the already substantial spend TV advertising already commands; and the wealth of meaningful data OTT devices can provide.
As digital streaming services proliferate, there’s a growing market for consolidation services that give consumers access to all of the various services they subscribe to in a single interface. Although Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon combined come out to less per month than even a basic cable TV subscription (with much better content and control to boot), searching for a show or a film through each of these platforms isn’t the best experience.
There are already a number of apps in the market that attempt to address this need, but big movers like Amazon are getting out in front of the issue as well. The natural progression from there is a revamped, more a la carte model that will either encompass or eclipse cable subscriptions in the near future.
With this comes a shift in the allocation of TV ad spend.
“Right now, marketers are spending more than $70 billion on television advertising annually, and that’s just in the United States. As television content moves toward digital channels, the pot will grow bigger,” Chalozin says.
Of course, the strongest pull of OTT is the data; just as is the case with all digital media. Guess work, estimates, and samples cannot drive TV metrics in a world where TVs, and the devices connected to them, are powered by the web.
“Nielsen ratings only take into account the viewing habits of about a million households,” Chalozin says. “OTT services will be able to gauge how many people watched a given show and identify which qualities make for a hit.”
This gives OTT-favored services like Netflix much more negotiation power, and gives marketers a stronger sense of what audiences are actually watching—not because the content airs during a specific time slot, but because people are actually watching it.
“Ultimately, OTT will look a lot like traditional television but all related elements, such as the user interface, ad experience, content discovery and measurement, will be significantly improved,” Chalozin says.
BOSTON — In the US, spending on digital advertising in 2017 is on track to surpass spending on television advertising. Globally, certain markets devote more than 40% of their media advertising budget to digital marketing, according to media company Magna. We are rapidly reaching the point when companies will spend more on social, search, online video, and display advertising than they will on traditional platforms.
But supersizing the digital-marketing budget is not enough, according to The Digital Marketing Revolution Has Only Just Begun, a report issued recently by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Facebook. The most successful companies are leveraging data to radically personalize the consumer experience.
“Most traditional marketing techniques that marketers were trained to use, like broad segmentation of customers and marketing funnels, have no place in digital marketing,” said Marc Schuuring, a BCG partner and coauthor of the report. “These methods may have served marketers well ten or more years ago, but today’s marketers need to be much more data driven.”
Consumers are increasingly impatient with traditional marketing methods. More than 25% of all smartphone users have installed ad blockers, according to eMarketer, and that figure is climbing rapidly. When selecting new products and services, consumers rely more than ever on advocacy from people they know and trust. As consumers are becoming more digitally savvy and increasingly impatient with intrusive or irrelevant marketing messages, personalization is a key differentiator.
New advertising technologies in the marketplace are also allowing for much more personalized and targeted advertising. Ad properties that allow for video insertion are rapidly replacing flat display ads. Data and analytics encourage test-and-learn experimentation and ad purchasing through automated platforms and auctions. All told, personalized advertising could constitute 80% of digital marketing budgets within three to five years (and will increasingly penetrate traditional media as well).
The most advanced digital marketers are analyzing abundant consumer data—media data, customer relationship management data, app usage data, and more—to better understand where individual consumers are in their journey, what they’re looking at, when they’re looking, where they’re located, and how they’re responding to specific advertising messages.
To gauge the transformative potential of digital marketing, BCG and Facebook worked with leading consumer goods companies to apply cutting-edge marketing techniques to specific business challenges. These companies capitalized on three forces that have fundamentally changed the way marketing can be done:
• Access to abundant, real-time data to inform their campaigns
• Ability to engage in long-term, omnichannel relationships with consumers (as opposed to one-way, scattershot interactions)
• Flexibility to deploy multiple concepts and gather real-time feedback from customers
The companies all posted extremely impressive results. “For the initial pilots we conducted, companies reported a variety of positive results, including a 30% increase in marketing ROI, a dramatic reduction in acquisition costs, and quantifiable gains in app usage and customer engagement,” said Diederik Vismans, a BCG principal and coauthor of the report. “When done right, digital marketing can be a game-changer in powering business growth.” — SG
University of South Queensland (USQ) is on a mission to enhance digital engagement with customers across multiple touchpoints in real-time, and boost personalisation interaction across all channels.
That’s the message from USQ executive director, marketing and student attraction, Helen Nolan, who said the university needed to find new and innovative ways to better engage with students.
“At the moment, customer experience is really top of mind for me. The university is a complex service environment. It’s a complex buyer’s journey. There’s a lot of focus on user experience and a reasonable amount on customer service excellence. But the whole customer experience is important to me. I am driving conversations in that space.”
In that vein, the university recently used the Communicate platform from Pitney Bowes in order to increase its engagement and enrolment of students who apply through the tertiary admissions centre.
Built around the EngageOne line of customer engagement solutions, the Communicate solution features a set of digital self-service capabilities that enable organisations to better communicate with customers and deliver more relevant and engaging interactions– every time they interact with a brand.
“It was about increasing interest and enrolments, but also reinforcing their decision to consider USQ, and then ultimately convert to enrolment,” Nolan said, explaining the success of USQ’s recent engagement and enrolment campaign.
“University recruitment is going to get much more competitive than it currently is. So we’ve got to be doing everything to make sure that we make strong decisions that are based on evidence, but not be so hard that we don’t connect with that emotion of our prospective students and their influences.”
Within preference campaigns, she said applicants have the ability to choose up to six university preferences. “In Queensland, we want the applicants to put USQ higher up the ladder so it was about elevating them as well.”
Video love
Nolan said the university chose the Communicate platform in large part because it offers the ability to deliver personalised and interactive video capability. Nolan said USQ is using video technology to digitally engage and stay connected with its students.
“Video was important to us because you only have to look at the phenomenal success of YouTube, and the phenomenal success of videos within all forms of social media. We knew video was a platform that a diverse cohort were interested in and that we would get some engagement.”
Additionally, the personalisation factor – and offering personalised videos – is crucial for the university moving forward, Nolan said, explaining the Communicate solution combines video with user data to deliver interactive, personalised video.
“Personalisation is a major factor of modern marketing, and consumers are demanding a more personalised experience than ever before. It is becoming imperative for organisations to deliver marketing material tailored to their target audience’s interests, behaviours and desires. The higher education sector is no different.”
Nolan said USQ’s personalised video email campaign was delivered to 4,660 applicants. During the course of the project, USQ found that eDM Unique Open Rates (73.20 per cent vs 37.36 per cent) and Unique Click Through Rates (40.93 per cent vs. 7.04 per cent) performed considerably higher than industry benchmarks.
“We saw the project as a new way for USQ to approach a traditional campaign. The modern consumer demands a highly personalised experience in any media they consume, and in order to influence their purchasing behaviour, the personalised video, tailored to the individual based off university data, was seen as a great option for USQ and aligned perfectly with the university’s brand.”
But she acknowledged she has her work cut out for her as she deals with all manner of challenges in the higher education space – particularly fighting for student eyeballs.
“There’s so much competition for students, not only in terms of where we might study, but also competition on time. They say, ‘We want a short-term fix. I want the big money today. I don’t really want to study for three or four years.” It is getting those emotional hooks to connect with people in a very engaging way.”
Digital strides
Asked her thoughts on digital, Nolan said the university has already proven key performance metrics, and sees digital as the necessary lifeblood of the organisation.
“One of my mantras for many many years now has been evidence-based decision making – and it’s so much easier to deal with that within digital. We’re about to work on a project to refresh our website. It is to a certain standard, and we are happy with it, but we need to take it to another level and look at human-centric design. We need to make sure whatever facelift we do with our website, that it takes a student journey to a whole other level.”
And while USQ has about 29,000 students, she said 75 per cent of them study online. “That is an important difference. We pioneered online study in about 1991 here in Australia. Our median age is 29,” she said explaining some of the key reasons why digital is so powerful.
“In regional Australia, digital has to be front and centre. We can’t expect all our students to be here on campus so we have to be able to deliver an online and digital fluency, a powerful digital connectivity and user experience. Our brand has to be up there in their faces the whole time.”
Nolan said USQ also has its sights on future technologies. “We haven’t signed any dotted lines yet, but we are looking at machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). You just have to. AI is definitely on my radar. It would help the students with their decision-making in terms of coming to study at USQ, but also their retention and completion rates.”
Meanwhile, her technology wish list also includes a deeper integration of its marketing automation technology.
“We’ve got it there, but we need to integrate it with all of our systems. Our technology stack, like any organisation, is quite complex, and we need to make sure that it delivers for our student experience, right from the awareness and discovery, right through to insights and analytics and retention. So we’re very keen to get that integrated further within our organisation.”
But she acknowledged it’s very challenging adopting an agile approach in higher education.
“I want a very agile approach to what we do and when you’re in a complex service environment there are sometimes some challenges there. But I have to push on ahead until someone tells me. ‘No way.’ It’s a bit like our campaign tagline of being fearless. You just keep going and empowering our students and empowering our staff.
“At USQ, our brand is about making sure we connect with students digitally, but also making sure they can see the big picture – that it’s a career conscious world out there and we want to help them become the professionals of the future.”
If you want to get an idea of just how high tensions are running in Portland, where rival protest groups have clashed repeatedly in recent months, you could start by looking at the caches of weapons seized by police at a demonstration over the weekend in the city’s downtown.
There are axes and crowbars, dozens of sticks and makeshift clubs, canisters of mace, knives, hammers, batons and even a set of brass knuckles. Together, they offer an unsettling glimpse of the violence that has seeped into Portland’s protests as the city has drawn extremists on the left and right in increasing numbers, becoming something of a proxy for the country’s ideological battles.
On Sunday, thousands of protesters and counterprotesters converged in the heart of Portland’s business and government district for a pro-Trump free-speech rally. Once again, throngs of black-clad antifascist or “antifa” activists faced off with right-wing demonstrators in Americana garb.
Police formed barriers between the groups — and indeed many people in the crowd demonstrated peacefully — but the day was disrupted by flareups. After some antifa counterprotesters began throwing objects at police, officers in riot gear responded with a volley of flash grenades and pepper balls, according to local media.
Fourteen people were arrested over the course of several hours, two of them on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.
Throughout the afternoon, police posted Twitter pictures of items they confiscated from the demonstrators. It’s not clear who they came from, but police and local media said some weapons were taken as officers cleared Chapman Square, a park where antifa activists had gathered.
There were lots of bricks, which police said protesters were lobbing at officers from a plaza near the main rally.
Unidentified suspects on roof of Chapman Square bathroom. Bag of bricks located, possibly taken from building. pic.twitter.com/WtMeIxUXW6
Police also seized dozens of sticks, poles and batons. Objects like these were banned from recent demonstrations in Berkeley, Calif., after groups used them to beat each other during political standoffs there earlier this year.
As the demonstrations dwindled and people started to leave the area, police displayed a number of more menacing weapons, including numerous hunting knives, folding knives, crowbars and clubs. One picture also shows a hatchet, multiple hammers, a chain and what appear to be several cans of mace.
While some protesters were ostensibly prepared to fight, others came ready to defend themselves. Numerous demonstrators on both sides carried shields and wore helmets and gas masks. Some, including self-appointed security for the free-speech rally, even donned bulletproof vests.
Pro-Trump rally has hired its own private security for the event. They’re all wearing flack jackets, sunglass, etc. pic.twitter.com/DORAamzAL8
Emotions are raw in Portland, where late last month 35-year-old Jeremy Christian allegedly stabbed two men to death and seriously injured a third amid what witnesses called an anti-Muslim tirade on a commuter train. Christian had given Nazi salutes and screamed racial slurs at a right-wing rally in the city in April, as The Washington Post has reported.
Since President Trump’s election in November, Portland has struggled to quell mounting violence at political rallies from fringe groups, some of which have been so disruptive that the city has had to cancel public gatherings in recent weeks.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler called on the federal government to revoke the permit for Sunday’s rally, saying that the city needed more time to mourn and accusing organizers of promoting hate speech. “The timing and subject of these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situation,” Wheeler wrote in a Facebook post last week.
The rally was allowed to move forward, and organizers called on followers to remain peaceful.
“Find it in yourself to make this day positive, with no hate and no violence,” Joey Gibson of the conservative group Patriot Prayer told the crowd on Sunday. “We have to understand Portland is legitimately shaken up right now.”
“Prove them wrong,” he said. “Hatred is a disease. We need to start spreading love to get rid of this hate.”
But some, it seems, came with their own agenda.
“I am definitely willing to use violence to make sure my family is safe and my patriot family is safe,” Pat “Based Spartan” Washington, a well known far-right activist and Internet personality, told the Guardian Sunday. “But do I want it? Not necessarily. Until antifa learns not to use violence … God, I hate them. I look over there and I just want to smash.”
Ahead of Sunday’s demonstrations, Portland police said they had seen threatening messages on social media. They were mobilizing accordingly, a spokesman told the New York Times.
“It’s almost like a street fight,” Sgt. Pete Simpson said, “like a rumble, the way it’s being advertised.”
DUBAI Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain severed their ties with Qatar on Monday, accusing it of supporting terrorism and opening up the worst rift in years among some of the most powerful states in the Arab world.
Iran — long at odds with Saudi Arabia and a behind-the-scenes target of the move — immediately blamed U.S. President Donald Trump for setting the stage during his recent trip to Riyadh.
Gulf Arab states and Egypt have already long resented Qatar’s support for Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood which they regard as a dangerous political enemy.
The coordinated move, with Yemen and Libya’s eastern-based government joining in later, created a dramatic rift among the Arab nations, many of which are in OPEC.
Announcing the closure of transport ties with Qatar, the three Gulf states gave Qatari visitors and residents two weeks to leave. Qatar was also expelled from the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.
Oil giant Saudi Arabia accused Qatar of backing militant groups — some backed by regional arch-rival Iran — and broadcasting their ideology, an apparent reference to Qatar’s influential state-owned satellite channel al Jazeera.
« (Qatar) embraces multiple terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at disturbing stability in the region, including the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS (Islamic State) and al-Qaeda, and promotes the message and schemes of these groups through their media constantly, » Saudi state news agency SPA said.
It accused Qatar of supporting what it described as Iranian-backed militants in its restive and largely Shi’ite Muslim-populated Eastern region of Qatif and in Bahrain.
Qatar said it was facing a campaign aimed at weakening it, denying it was interfering in the affairs of other countries.
« The campaign of incitement is based on lies that had reached the level of complete fabrications, » the Qatari foreign ministry said in a statement.
Iran saw America pulling the strings.
« What is happening is the preliminary result of the sword dance, » Hamid Aboutalebi, deputy chief of staff of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, tweeted in a reference to Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
Trump and other U.S. officials participated in a traditional sword dance during the trip in which he called on Muslim countries to stand united against Islamist extremists and singled out Iran as a key source of funding and support for militant groups.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters in Sydney on Monday that the spat would not effect the fight against Islamist militants and that Washington has encouraged its Gulf allies to resolve their differences.
A split between Doha and its closest allies can have repercussions around the Middle East, where Gulf states have used their financial and political power to influence events in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
(For a graphic on trade balance between Qatar and its diplomatic critics, click reut.rs/2rsbaTi)
FALLOUT
The economic fallout loomed immediately, as Abu Dhabi’s state-owned Ethihad Airways, Dubai’s Emirates Airline and budget carrier Flydubai said they would suspend all flights to and from Doha from Tuesday morning until further notice.
Qatar Airways said on its official website it had suspended all flights to Saudi Arabia.
Qatar’s stock market index sank 7.5 percent with some of the market’s top blue chips hardest hit.
The measures are more severe than during a previous eight-month rift in 2014, when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE withdrew their ambassadors from Doha, again alleging Qatari support for militant groups. At that time, travel links were maintained and Qataris were not expelled.
The diplomatic broadside threatens the international prestige of Qatar, which hosts a large U.S. military base and is set to host the 2022 World Cup. It has for years presented itself as a mediator and power broker for the region’s many disputes.
Kristian Ulrichsen, a Gulf expert at the U.S-based Baker Institute, said if Qatar’s land borders and air space were closed for any length of time « it would wreak havoc on the timeline and delivery » of the World Cup.
« It seems that the Saudis and Emiratis feel emboldened by the alignment of their regional interests – toward Iran and Islamism – with the Trump administration, » Ulrichsen said. « (They) have decided to deal with Qatar’s alternative approach on the assumption that they will have the (Trump) administration’s backing. »
Qatar used its media and political clout to support long-repressed Islamists during the 2011 pro-democracy « Arab Spring » uprisings in several Arab countries.
Muslim Brotherhood groups allied to Doha are now mostly on the backfoot in the region, especially after a 2013 military takeover in Egypt ousted the elected Islamist president.
The former army chief and now president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, along with the new government’s allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, blacklist the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, said on its state news agency that Qatar’s policy « threatens Arab national security and sows the seeds of strife and division within Arab societies according to a deliberate plan aimed at the unity and interests of the Arab nation. »
Oil prices rose after the moves against Qatar, which is the biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and a major seller of condensate – a low-density liquid fuel and refining product derived from natural gas.
(Additional reporting by William Maclean, Mohammed el-Sherif, Sylvia Westall, Tom Finn and Amina Ismail; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
On Tuesday, MMW was briefed by the team at Verve — an industry leader in location-powered mobile marketing — about their launch of a new mobile video offering, expanding its suite of mobile advertising solutions.
