Headlight will be closed for maintenance the 31st of July 6:30-7PM GMT+1.

If you experience any problems after this please notify us.

1. Don’t be surprised if your appointment arrives on a bike - try to do the same.
2. The Danes are a straightforward bunch, they call a spade a spade.
3. Time on your hands at lunch? Grab a towel and go for a swim in the Øresund with the rest of the city.
4. Flying visit? Kastrup airport has excellent meeting facilities.
5. Our favourite Danish word is hygge. There’s no direct translation but the closest is “cosy”. Find your hygge place in CPH.
6. Forget taxis, the only way to explore Copenhagen is by bike.
7. For a real slice of Danish culture, we recommend you visit Christiana during the day.
8. Like Swedes and Norwegians, the Danish are very practical and like their Flemish neighbours they are refreshingly open-minded.
9. Forget air kissing, a firm handshake will suffice for him or for her.
10. Ida Davidsen serves the best open sandwiches in Scandinavia, and if you’re lucky, Ida herself will stop for a chat. Order the “Finn Ziegler”.

From Monocle

Population: 503,699.

Crime: murders, nine; domestic break-ins, 3,475.

Education: Copenhagen has a textbook network of state schools and universities.

Medical care: healthcare provision is universal - appropriately for a country with one of the highest cancer rates in Europe.

Sunshine: annual average, 1,670 hours.

Temperature: January average temperature 0C, July average 17C.

Wired: 147 public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Tolerance: Denmark legalised same-sex unions in 1989. Attempts to evict residents from the alternative enclave of Christiania have raised hackles. Let’s not forget relations with the Muslim community.

Drinking and shopping: alcohol laws are liberal, with bars staying open as late as their patrons demand. Shops adhere to a more rigid regime; most open around 11.00 and close dead on 18.00, while nearly all close on Sundays.

Public transport: the first phase of a metro system opened in 2003, with another two phases ready for this year and 2012 respectively. From April to December, the City Bike season allows you to release one of 2,000 bikes provided across the city for €2.70 - it can then be returned at any rack.

From the International Herald Tribune

Due to a work on our servers Headlight will not be accessible in the time frame 7-9AM (GMT+1) on July 31st.

If you experience any problems after 9AM please let us know.

Looking across my shoulder
I have come quite a long way since I joined TraceWorks in the middle of March. One of the things I spent a lot of time on in the beginning was reading other providers’ benchmarking reports. All seemed very focuses on technical or at least very specific information with wide disregard to the report as a whole or the message a report is meant to deliver. I imagined being a business executive or an online marketing manager when reading through them and although I had many “ah!” moments, they all left me feeling like a tropical saltwater fish in a freshwater tank.

I simply had to ask myself if it described what I needed and delivered the ability to focus my attention exactly where it was needed to get my ship back on course.

Captain’s overview
Where exactly is the important information. It does seem like much of the information available to companies are reports put together in a hurry and without any focus on readability or purpose. Either the focus areas is too wide or the information within the reports are simply not complementary to each other and leaves your business leader with a “so what?” look on his face while trying to decide if he needs to change his heading. Finding the exact areas that differentiate your boat from the race competition is exactly what you need from a benchmark and you do not want to spend 2 weeks doing it.

Plotting your course
If one is able to find any useful statistic in reports, then usually it is either not segmented towards the market space you operate in and leaves you with no clue on how you should adjust your own operation to meet the industry standard. It is simply not made for your type of boat, size of boat or it is made to cross the Atlantic ocean when you are merely interested in navigating the Bodensee in Switzerland.

We are all ships, we just use different crew and sails
The way I see it, organizations are dynamic entities acting within static environments and rules. All organizations have a structure with leadership and communication standards as well as routines when it comes to repeatable work assignments. Also organizations adhere to using tools and reports to collect data about their performance and capability. They usually compete with other organizations within a well defined market space using standard means of communication channels and selling identical product types. The organization/customer interaction all adheres to general economic laws and marketing models and thus the strategy set by organizations has a similar vantage point.

In short it is the unifying traits that interest me and how these are handled within each organization. We know what our ship is capable of, we simply want to know where the wind is coming from and how the currents are flowing so we can set our sails accordingly.

Navigating the information ocean
Thus I set sail to construct an easily negotiable map of online marketing divided into manageable categories that would each refer to specific static and unifying traits in organizations to display how different they are handled in comparison to their peer industry. This would give business leaders as well as individual marketing managers a well founded idea of exactly where they need to trim their vessel to reach the big red X of marketing excellence.

I am the weather forecast
What I have done is to construct a virtual corporate e-marketing identity profile for your company that you can compare to any industry or segment you wish. Over time this should hopefully become a dynamic trend display tool as well as a focus area identification tool. By updating data within the model over time as well as expanding the circumference of the data set, TraceWorks aim to deliver a trendsetting online benchmarking service that will allow you not only compare your performance in online marketing to your own goals and results, but to any industry segment you might desire.

Your compass & barometer
For each of the areas a comparison between your company and the industry is made and by clicking the corresponding area in the model, you will navigate to the report part that matters to your business management. The model and structure of our report will not only provide information that matters to your organization but also deliver an easy and useful tool to navigate the information ocean for any captain.

Benchmarking is thus as it should be. Helping you compare to whatever segment you want to and identify exactly how you are different. It is then not only possible to set your sails in accordance to your own strategy and plan compared to your competition, but also to identify exactly how the weather is going to look within the near future.

Due to a certification test Headlight will not be accessible in the time frame 8-12PM (GMT+1) on July 30th.

Due to an upgrade on our Google integration, Headlight will be closed the 30th of July 7-9AM GMT+1.

Just browsed my iPhone Google Reader news feeds this morning in search for news on the current Laguna Seca MotoGP.

Then this little Dell Ad pops up on my iPhone:

Question is: would I buy a DELL laptop?

Answer: NO WAY! Google wake up…If you want to plaster my news feeds with display ads, please do make it relevant (besides showing the ad in my local language)

Unfortunately I forgot to tab the banner ad to see if Dell actually created a specific iPhone landing page with full BUY now functionalities. More to follow when I see the next ad in my feeds…

UPDATE - July 20th:
Clicked the Dell ad on my iPhone. Unfortunately they did not deliver a great iPhone ready site and experience. The site loaded really slow and offered quite small images and text description. Yes yes I know I can zoom and so on, just hoped to see the first generation Dell iPhone optimized site from ad to check out. But I am sure I can expect to see this in the near future.

On July 17th, between 7-8 p.m. GMT AdTech will perform a maintenance measure with the following effects:

- Campaigns cannot be pushed
- The amount of impressions shown in the front end will not updated

The banner delivery will not be affected.

We would like to inform you that Headlight will be closed down for one hour Thursday 10th of July in the time frame 7-8AM GMT+1.

If you encounter ANY problems after this update, please notify us asap!