One small change in expression is one major difference in execution. Consider these two notions: "out of the box" vs. "outside the box". In this week's edition of Tuesdays With Tukaiz Vice President and Managing Director Dan Defino talks about BOXES in a whole new way.

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Last week on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we covered how recent acquisitions of data-focused companies by enterprise technology organizations are giving us a glimpse at the future of data-driven marketing. While the aforementioned acquisitions have been telling, similar events in other areas of marketing also give us insight into the strategic thinking of companies that are pushing marketing forward on many fronts. Beyond just the interest in data analytics, organizations are buying up smaller companies in various types of mobile advertising firms, social media specialties, and more to quickly strengthen their arsenal and expertise.

If you’re in the marketing or advertising business, it’s becoming increasingly important to remain viable and relevant by keeping up with new and upcoming trends in the industry. This exercise ensures that your business is prepared for what’s coming down the pipeline in terms of possible new channels, tools, and methodologies to utilize. While it’s great to learn the inner workings of the latest campaign or conversation management platform, taking a step back and considering the broader activities occurring in the industry can provide a more complete perspective on what’s just around the corner. One way to do this is to keep an eye on the acquisitions within the marketing and advertising technology space. We often reference acquisitions as they relate to specific topics that we cover on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, such as mobile marketing. By looking at a number of recent acquisitions related to the marketing space, we can see that the next generation of marketing will be increasingly targeted and tracked, largely driven by data intelligence.

In real life, reputation and trustworthiness can go a long way. For citizens, these factors are at the core of our relationships with one another. For businesses, these factors can make or break how a company is perceived by the eyes of its existing and potential customers… and this can have a positive or adverse impact on the bottom line. In many ways, these same factors play similar roles in peoples’ Web-connected, online lives. Building relationships between people online, especially on social networks, often involves a layer of trust. For example, suppose you’re connecting with a friend from college on Facebook or connecting with someone on LinkedIn that you just met at a conference. These online connections have some influence on your overall reputation, and they need to be maintained accordingly. Individuals need to maintain their online reputations, and companies need to do the same. For businesses, the process of maintaining a reputation is certainly important but sometimes unwieldy.

You may have seen them, or possibly heard about them being popular in Japan. They’re showing up on posters in movie theatres, on packages in supermarkets, and on some floor displays. They’re in the magazines we read, and they’re even showing up on billboards and in store windows in the city. We’re talking about mobile barcodes, and they’re showing up more often in everyday life in the United States. While we’ve discussed various forms of mobile marketing on Tuesdays with Tukaiz (such as text messaging and mobile applications), mobile barcodes are quickly becoming another option that marketers and advertisers can use in their mobile arsenals to generate responses and results.

As the mobile population continues to grow, the level of user sophistication with mobile technology will also increase. Mobile device makers continue to pack more functionality into a technology that fits in your pocket or the palm of your hand. Developers continue to create mobile applications that harness that power. Users are adapting to this technological evolution as they upgrade their phones and experiment with the next generation of apps. One feature that’s increasingly finding its way onto smartphones and other mobile devices (including cameras and tablets) is GPS.

7 million hearty souls have learned to live with it. The unpredictable Chicago climate. There's no in between. We go from icicles in our nostrils to 24 hours of spring. The day after that it is 110 in the shade. Then fall is over in the time it takes to carve a pumpkin. So that prompted us to walk the Tukaiz campus and ask what's so sweet about our home, Chicago?

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Renewable energy is the source of our power for the future. Energy options such as solar, wind, geothermal, and even wave energy have the potential to give society a way to dramatically reduce its dependence on fossil fuel energy. Growing plans to create different types of renewable energy power plants have helped to drive the discussion. Many of the options that are currently available can help a business to convey its sustainability intentions to customers. As we discussed last week, Park & Co. has already taken multiple steps to help curb and control its carbon footprint. Marketing and advertising firms have a wealth of options that can help businesses show their customers that they care about the effects of pollution. Many of these firms offer solutions that can stop or even reverse these effects.