Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 99
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
Welcome back to another edition of my newsletter! Edition 99! Thank you for forwarding, sharing, liking in advance!
🔙Back to the 60’s, 70’s 80’s? PR where it is heading and why it is more and more important
I have written about it many times in this podcast, the search & discovery landscape is so rapidly changing, and maybe going back to where it was before. That’s why I share this digital PR podcast, which is a real good one. It all makes sense if you understand how LLM”s work. Listen to this pod and it gives you for sure direction towards your search & discovery strategy. Also use it to stay ahead of the curve!
Don’t stare on links. Most important ranking factor is user and usage data, so if you are on “CNN” and people navigate to your website after it’s highly valuable
Why do companies write “AI powered” it’s like 1996 with “We use computers”
Currently SEO linkspam in LLM’s is done a lot, the field needs to find an answer to that
Attribution is no longer a reasonable way to measure organic traffic, we have to invest in marketing in a different way
100 day sprints big PR investments and see what happens in lift, are we above or below the trend
How do I get this YouTuber or This Subredditor to talk about my client?
SEO will become: search everywhere optimization
🇰🇷 Incheon app: very poor for an international airport and global audience!





There is so much to do for international oriented (digital) marketers and product managers, I think.
While I am writing this, I am at Incheon airport, considered one of the best airports in the world. They actively promote downloading their app on landside, and they claim it has AI in it, so I gave it a try.
Got stuck at the very first screen, all Korean language, second screen, all Korean language! Nowhere I could find the language switch. I had to ask an employee of the airport to find it for me and it took even him a few minutes before he found it.
After that, I got totally stuck with the Google Signin. I could not create an account by email, was forced to use google, but instead of using a smooth in-app web view or native SDK, the app launched an external browser, that’s where it goes wrong, I could not go back to the app unless I restart the device (I don’t want to empty cache because then I lose the English language setting).
It’s not that these complaints are not known, I checked the app reviews and many people complain about it.
I think with a more international view of the product managers, a really good passenger/incheon experience can be made especially with the innovative Korean mindset, now it’s really low quality and they have to see that in their data!
I gave up, never was able to try the AI part, gave up after I couldn’t sign in.
🇰🇷Airporter: fun little robot, will we see this more in other retail environments as well?



I found this little robot at Incheon airport, tried it! Works really well. It carriees your bags to the gate. It even tries to make some money, by guiding you to shops (optional)! Will these devices also help you at supermarkets in the future by bringing your bags to your car?
🌩️Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: content creators be warned
I spotted this “trend” or “innovation” or “warning” earlier, in edition 58 already. Now Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince dives deeper upon this topic.
Basically he warns that content creation could collapse due to LLM’s/AI in the way it is currently setup.
This could endager the whole internet ecosystem. I think he has a valid point, although I also think, interactive content can’t be summarized, so there is an opportunity in that as well.
But this talk is about large and small content creators and the discoverability of that content, and they are not in a favorable position at the moment. CloudFlare is actively working on creating a solution for that and it seems very promising!
People trust the AI more over the last 6 months, less people read orginal content
Future of the web is that people read summaries of your content
Things change very very fast
10 years ago: Google crawled 2 pages per visitor you got
6 months ago: Google 6:1, OpenAI 250:1, Anthropic 6,000:1
Now: Google 18:1, OpenAI 1,500:1, Anthropic 60,000:1
At the very end of the video this stood out: creativity can make money! He talked to Spotify and at Spotify they publish a list of search queries that go into Spotify that they do not have good result for, they show this list to content creators.
Now with that list, there is a guy who makes 40 million dollar a year based on these “more or less” 0 results queries where he then creates songs for.
Very nice example and exactly this CloudFlare wants to do at scale, paying creators for valuable content at scale.
Update: more details are known now: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
🇭🇰Hong Kong MTR personal ads or SME ads made easy

Hong Kong’s MTR is great! One of The best transportation company in the world! While I was walking in an MTR station, the other day, I saw this option to advertise as a small company right within the subway station. If you want it more personal, you can also broadcast a personal greeting. This station alone attracts about 100.000 commuters daily.
Checkout also this post where I wrote about something similar but slightly different in mainland China. Hope to see this concept more in the advertising ecosystem(s) around the world beause it boosts creativity and it helps smaller organisations.
🛎️Tip: this video on the MTR corporation and history:
MTR part II : a problem solved, increases the passenger experience
And while we are at the MTR, I share also this picture I made. That’s solving a problem with digital means: see in which car(s) it is less busy, ➡️eat that Dutch Railways! ⬅️
🇨🇭Gruezi Switzerland, Global Tech Hub in Europe
I am a big fan of Switzerland and one of the reasons is their innovation capability Compare that to the EU where they only talk, Switzerland is non EU and actually does things. This article is on how Switzerland is moving to a global tech leader.
Swiss deep tech companies have now collectively created more than $100 billion worth of enterprise value. Switzerland now ranks first in Europe and third worldwide in terms of venture capital funding per capita, the report points out.
There is more to come, argues Alex Stöckl, the founding partner of Founderful. “The trajectory of the past five years suggests we’re going to see even more growth over the next five years,” Stöckl says. “What is to come is crazy: we’re now tracking 200 super-early deep tech companies in an ecosystem that is set to grow exponentially.”
🔍How to optimize for international SEO
This article describes various strageties for international SEO with examples from global companies. Learn from these best practices as there are different ways to setup international SEO. It’s pretty complete and even mentions (partly unfortunately) local engines like Naver, Baidu, Yandex). Because I think excelling in those search engines requires some additional best practices and knowledge.
https://searchengineland.com/guide/international-seo
That’s it for this more edition. Thank you so much for reading, liking and subscribing!
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Greetings, connect via: Alex Baar